Conference of the Birds for Sept. 24, 2026

I also gather with friends to listen to music and collaboratively create a playlist on a weekly basis. My friend Joe's project Conference of the Birds started in April 2020—another pandemic project!—and I started hanging out with the group that June. Some of the people involved were volunteers at WNUR-FM in Evanston, Ill., but not everyone. Regardless, we all love music and listen pretty widely. Everyone brings a different implicit favorite or go-to genre to the turntables: world music, jazz, hip-hop, electronica, and so on.

Here's what we listened to last week. If you'd like to listen to the playlist on Spotify, you can do so.

For the collaborative listening sessions, we use a service called Hangout FM. It offers its own music discovery tools, and you can import Spotify playlists to your queue. Once people step up as DJs, the service cycles through the DJs' queues, rotating through the DJs after each song. We rearrange our queues based on what the others are playing, doing our best to follow up on, build on, or totally disrupt the flow continued by the preceding song.

Hangout FM also offers a chat function during the sessions, so we all spend the two hours catching up on each other's lives, sharing information about the musicians and recordings we're playing, and making cornball quips. There are a lot of cornball quips.

The end result is a lot of fun. And the process getting there is even more fun.

File under: Social Music.

Cineclube Ersatz for Sept. 29, 2026

For I don't know how many years, a friend in Los Angeles and I have watched a movie together once a week. At first, it was in my home, enjoying each other's company and conversation throughout the selected feature. We alternate weeks picking the movie and tend to enjoy the same stuff: science fiction, horror, monster movies, gialli, spaghetti westerns, and other outre cinema. When the global pandemic hit, we took to each watching the same movie on a streaming service we both used, at the same time, texting throughout. It wasn't the same as hanging out, but it maintained the tradition. And when I moved overseas, we did the same, but watching movies that have been uploaded to YouTube, still texting throughout.

In recent months, I've started curating more of a complete program instead of just picking a feature. I choose trailers—new and old—cartoons, horror shorts, experimental shorts—just recently—as well as a feature, creating playlists for us to play and watch together while texting. That's been a really fun experience, and it's a practice I'll continue when it's my week to pick.

Here's what we watched this week:

• Trailer: Beyond the Black Rainbow—A 2010 Canadian psychedelic science fiction horror film
• Trailer: The Blood of a Poet—1932 avant-garde film directed by Jean Cocteau
• Trailer: The Colour of Pomegranates—a 1969 Soviet Armenian avant-garde film originally titled Sayat-Nova
• Short: Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque—1929 French film directed by Germaine Dulac
• Short: The Contraption—A 1977 short film by Richard O'Brien, writer and star of The Rocky Horror Picture Show
• Cartoon: Skeleton Frolic—1937 Technicolor animated short film directed by Ub Iwerks for Columbia Pictures' Color Rhapsodies series
• Feature: The Ship of Monsters—a 1960 Mexican science fiction comedy

File under: Social Movies.

Notícias de Pfandom #6 (Outubro de 2026)

The fifth issue of Notícias de Pfandom was distributed last weekend. It's available at https://tinyurl.com/Pfandom-6.

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A sexta edição do Notícias de Pfandom foi distribuída no início desta semana. Está disponível em https://tinyurl.com/Pfandom-6.