Corduroy Psychedelia: On Boards of Canada, Hauntology, and the PBS Unconscious
A Philosophy of Sick Days in the 1980s
Channel 8 for Infinity
In the early winter of 1983, I suffered a long bout of influenza which left me mostly bed-ridden. Brief moments of pseudo-convalescence had afforded me equally short reprisals against the peculiar anguish of missing out on whatever was happening in Mrs. Fatzinger’s first-grade class. I would amble dizzily between the tray of saltines and warm ginger ale left on the kitchen counter back to our tobacco-colored family couch, taking refuge in a well-known working class homeopathy. But before reclining again, I would summon enough strength to wrench the flip knob of our Sears-brand Zenith woodgrain television set, hoping to find something beyond the soap operas and game shows that colonized basic cable in those years.
Amid the mid-morning lull between morning cartoons and the much preferable after-school block, sick-at-home American schoolchildren of the late 20th century had one reliable standby to keep them company while their parents were at work: PBS, the United States’ Public Broadcasting Service. For us in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel, PBS was broadcast on channel eight—and the amber glow of an uprighted infinity symbol on the Zenith signaled the opening of a narrow passage: a reprieve from illness, from the cacophony of regular TV, and from the low static of domestic anxiety. What would become a personal, if not a faintly secretive, convalescent ritual, I would later discover was an experience quietly shared by many of us. It would take the music of Boards of Canada to make sense of what that fever had burned into me.
The Telephasic Workshop
For those of us abandoned to our sick beds, afternoon hours spent with the dial locked on PBS piled up: Sesame Street (which Boards of Canada would later mine for samples with uncanny effect), Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Electric Company, Vegetable Soup, 3-2-1 Contact, Reading Rainbow, stodgy imported BBC programming, reheated documentary series from the early 70s like Civilisation (1969) and The Ascent of Man (1973), campy prepubescent passion plays fit for school assemblies, and avant-garde short films repurposed as children’s entertainment. Among the latter, none better exemplifies the category than “Geometry of Circles” (1979)—animator Cathryn Aison’s hypnotic series of shifting, rainbow-colored geometric forms set to a pulsing minimalist score by Philip Glass, originally commissioned for Sesame Street as a vehicle for teaching spatial logic. The piece’s looping minimalist structures and predominantly hexagonal geometry feel, in retrospect, seemed like a direct predecessor of the Boards of Canada aesthetic. That a composer of Glass’s stature was producing work for children’s television speaks to the era’s genuine pedagogical ambition—and to the particular porousness between high modernism and the children’s programming block that characterized public broadcasting in those years. A more grandiose instance of this ambition arrived in Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Godfrey Reggio’s wordless meditation on the collision of nature and industrial civilization, scored again by Glass—a film that reached its widest audience when it aired on PBS’s Great Performances in 1985, and whose Hopi title, meaning “life out of balance,” quietly foreshadowed the apocalyptic undertow running beneath the era’s therapeutic utopianism. All of it melted together in our fevered brains until we were gently lulled into a psychic third space—a “telephasic workshop,” to borrow one of Boards of Canada’s mysterious coinages.
A particular sick day viewing experience stands out among all others, and perhaps best typifies the liminal quality of those flu-driven PBS marathons. A short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” still haunts me well into middle-age.1 For those unfamiliar with Bierce’s story: Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer and Alabama planter hanged by Union soldiers for attempting to sabotage a railroad bridge, hallucinates his escape in the moments before his death—the narrative’s twist being that his line of flight is ultimately revealed as a compensatory fiction conjured against imminent execution. The version I recall emanated the pallid cold of early professional video; its electronic pallor was a notch above the consumer-grade camcorder but still a world away from film. The low-budget visuals paired with the genuinely cinematic portrayal of Bierce’s story was neither Hollywood nor homegrown. Rather, the short film exuded an aesthetic mixture of run-and-gun style cinematography and the flat affect of civic realist filmmaking, caught in the uncanny interval between professional and amateur. Yet it was not only the liminal visuals of the PBS rendition that unsettled; the thematic strangeness of Bierce’s story felt all the more acute against the banal daytime backdrop of McHale’s Navy or I Dream of Jeannie reruns cycling on syndicated networks. Perhaps it was precisely the confluence of the hallucinated escape depicted in “Owl Creek Bridge” with a second or third dose of Dimetapp coursing through my bloodstream that constituted the exact alchemy of transcendence needed to temporarily flee the suburban spiritual imprisonment felt at the threshold of American deindustrialization.
Afternoons spent in febrile somnambulism turned the television set into an otherworldly gateway, opening onto a quasi-shamanic plane that broke the ordinary rhythm of my otherwise unglamorous childhood. A sick day’s ritual tryst with PBS involved inhabiting its unusual affective registers. I was seduced into public television’s subtle reproach of the frenetic pace and the shallow obscenity of normal TV. Everything from the ingenuous warmth of its children’s programming to the exploratory spirit of Nova and Nature stood at a curious distance from the familiar grid of commercialized media. This is to say nothing of the subtly psychedelic feeling that prolonged PBS exposure reliably produced—a slow dissolve of the ordinary, a quelling of pop culture’s ambient giddiness, the familiar rendered strange through sheer duration and repetition. Boards of Canada described a similar repetition-induced breakdown of our basal orientation when speaking of “Nlogax,” from their Hi Scores EP (1996): the tune “begins like an old electro or disco track but halfway through it suddenly becomes something nightmarish, like your brain is starting to malfunction in the middle of the tune.”
Corduroy Psychedelia
The atmosphere of PBS’s 70s and 80s heyday had its material correlate in corduroy’s contemporaneous rise. Worn soft with use and democratic in appeal—cutting across class, age, and social register without representing any of them—corduroy was the fabric of the reading rug, of fort building, puddle stomping, and world exploring. PBS offered a similarly unglamorous intimacy, an experience that sat close to the skin. It never traded that closeness for glamour, as denim had in its ascent to crass sexual appeal and strict class distinction with brands like Sassoon and Jordache. Corduroy’s fidelity to the communal and gregarious, however, concealed its deeper affinities: the intimate, the personal, the meditative.
What I am calling corduroy psychedelia—a term I owe partly to the music of Boards of Canada, whose analog warmth and hypnotic intimacy inhabit precisely this phenomenology—was never exclusively the province of sick days. PBS exuded this quality in its every transmission. It was available to anyone who found themselves on the right side of the channel dial on a slow afternoon (the effect was only further amplified by a 101-degree fever). For those of us trained on cartoons and primetime, programming that would ordinarily register as uninteresting or even painfully boring suddenly opened like a magic portal. Through the lens of illness, or simply lodged within an extended afternoon’s viewing, the sublime character of public broadcasting scintillated with an unexpected charge.
Can You Feel It
At the center of this era and its attendant mood was a new social and political wager: that the cultivated child might redeem what the adult world had broken. Corduroy psychedelia may have been a surface effect of the broader valorization of wonder, innocence, and affective reorientation promulgated through various American institutions during the post-Vietnam era, a sentiment that extended well beyond the television set. This historical conjuncture marks a pseudo-utopian shift from quotidian imperialism: a softer reclamation of the expansionist imaginary, wrested from the American war machine. Libidinal energies were redirected—at the level of sentiment if not of structure—toward civic-minded voluntarism, global consciousness raising, environmental protection initiatives, and the therapeutic turn’s faith in the properly nurtured child, a tendency Philip Rieff had diagnosed a decade earlier in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966). Beneath the camp and earnestness celebrated on Sesame Street and kindred programming, a particular affective apparatus was being assembled and installed: love of nature, exploratory joy, the desire to learn, the wish to transcend bigotry and violence, faith in human goodness—values worth having, but domesticated into dispositions, as though feeling them deeply enough might substitute for the structural shifts they actually required. In the decades before David Foster Wallace named it in “E Unibus Pluram” (1993), the iron rule of postmodern irony was already consolidating, and measures to insulate us from its effects were quietly being tried. Enter John Bradshaw’s concept of the inner child and our collective concern for it as a new vector of inward retreat and object of neurotic psychological investment. Consider as a possible anthem and visual spectacle for this shift the music video for The Jacksons’ “Can You Feel It” (1981), whose opening narration captures the mood, performing its naive innocence:
In the beginning, the land was pure. Even in the early morning light, you could see the beauty in the forms of nature. Soon men and women of every color and shape would be here too. And they would find it all too easy sometimes not to see the colors, and to ignore the beauty in each other.
To round out the aesthetic contours of this soft secular utopianism, we may borrow from the prelapsarian paradise often portrayed in pamphlets distributed by Jehovah’s Witnesses—only imagining it secularized and stripped of its attendant depictions of torment and hellfire. In these visions, all arrive in the new Eden consigned to the ethnically distinct clothing of their country or culture, the scene suffused with a jubilant energy detached from any collective political horizon and redirected toward the cultivation of the sensitive, wondering child-self.
But what about hell? Where is the analogous purgatory or Gehenna of therapeutic utopianism? Perhaps this is where the Jehovah’s Witnesses find unlikely confederates in Boards of Canada, united in what they have chosen not to elide. As we shall see, every cult of childlike wonder has its syzygy in an impending Satanic apocalypse—and Boards of Canada know this better than most.
Screen Memories Before Screen Time
That every cult of childlike wonder contains its syzygy in an impending Satanic apocalypse is perhaps the central intuition of hauntology—the lost future always shadowed by the catastrophe that foreclosed it. Corduroy psychedelia is, to be sure, a species of hauntology. Beyond the niches where hauntology is discussed, the specific experience identified in corduroy psychedelia—quietly shared by many GenXers and Millennials, it seems—remains, to my knowledge, almost entirely unexamined, or at least under-theorized. An Upworthy article from January 2026 gestures toward the sick-day television experience, though for 90s kids rather than the slightly earlier generation I’ve kept in view. Forums across the internet such as Television Obscurities feature users reaching for lost titles, particularly from PBS children’s programming, hoping to recover fragments that might reactivate foundational aesthetic experiences.
It is worth noting that corduroy psychedelia marks something historically bounded: the aleatory nature of media consumption prior to smartphones and on-demand platforms was itself a condition of possibility for the experience. One did not choose PBS so much as encounter it, stumbling into it with the dial locked and with few other stimulating avenues open for quick retreat. The late neoliberal reorganization of attention that followed, with its infinite scroll and algorithmic curation, foreclosed precisely the kind of passive, durational, unselected exposure that corduroy psychedelia required. The smartphone is perhaps its hard cutoff.
Corduroy psychedelia may also be a transatlantic phenomenon, despite perhaps analogous forms of nostalgia emerging contemporaneously elsewhere. As previously suggested, PBS regularly imported British programming from the BBC and Channel 4, while Canadian public broadcasting content crossed both borders. Together, North America and the UK produced a shared anglophone public broadcasting unconscious whose institutional register, civic realist and softly uncanny, was remarkably consistent on all three sides of the Atlantic. That Boards of Canada themselves embody this condition is not incidental: Scottish brothers who spent formative years in Alberta, drawing on the National Film Board of Canada while absorbing the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, they are perhaps the definitive artists of this shared sensibility. Despite their namesake, the confirmed American media sampled by the duo outstrips their Canadian and UK counterparts, with Sesame Street, produced by the Children's Television Workshop and a staple of PBS broadcasts, serving as their most reliable source.
Yet history and geography are not the only things at stake in this accounting. The risk implicit in forms of nostalgic recovery—for instance, for those forum users seeking out the missing pages of their memory’s scrapbooks—is neutralizing a picture whose power derives precisely from its gaps. These incomplete images are, in Freudian terms, a variety of screen memory, whose force lies not in what they preserve but in what they displace. Writing in The Wire, Kodwo Eshun intuited something similar when he observed that Boards of Canada had “tapped into a store of screen memories that electronica had collectively repressed”—their records, he noted, “supply you with fresh memories you never had before.” Where Eshun identifies the collective dimension of this repression, the experience I’ve been describing highlights what is more personally situated within a generational frame: corduroy psychedelia identifies the intense encounter with the psychical aperture through which images are transmitted or hallucinated alongside media—a distant signal that continues to carry residues of the past and the futures lost in its ruins.
Personally, I have long resisted, perhaps unconsciously, formulating my inchoate thoughts about these themes, even with the road cleared by the hauntology boom. Some nostalgic experiences (and perhaps even their explicit conceptualization) might only remain generative of their sublime energies when abandoned to the mute realm of inner life.
The Past Inside the Present
One of the risks of historicizing corduroy psychedelia, as I’ve done above, is draining the Proustian phenomenal richness of the imagination which its residues continue to nourish. Subjecting these remembrances to such intense scrutiny is tantamount to the dissection of a deep sea creature—we pivot from the intensity and effervescence of the images themselves toward politicizing interpretations that evacuate them of their sublimity. It is here where we must move carefully when we discuss the liberatory capacity of hauntology and the recovery of lost futures—indeed, some of these futures may not have guaranteed us a firewall against impending collapse or the forces they strove to contest. Granted, thinking along these lines often gets us talking about the right things and exposing the contradictions that undergird many of our collective fantasies.
From the gyre of forgotten fragments appear curious aleatory images, dreams, reveries, reflections, and infatuations which come to inhabit the present alongside us. They call for our attention and aestheticization, and for what James Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), calls “seeing through” the images. For Hillman, this is not an aesthete’s retreat from the political—it is its precondition. A culture that cannot see through its images, that literalizes and instrumentalizes them, has already surrendered the imaginative ground from which transformative political life grows. This immediate deepening of attention to worlds—developing a practice of going into images—has implications for a revolution I believe many of us desire: to live lives of shared aesthetic richness and genuine connectedness to the world that goes beyond our instrumentalized ways of engaging with it. For Hillman, attempts at literalizing images or dragging the imaginal into the real—repurposing it for explicit political projects—often end in disaster, a position Federico Campagna also echoes in Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons On Escaping History (2025). Walter Benjamin furthermore reminds us that the image is never purely aesthetic either: it carries within it a demand we cannot entirely aestheticize away. These tensions crystallize in the hauntological register. However, between Mark Fisher’s rendering of hauntology and his authoring of the later Acid Communism fragment, we see an ambivalence I find difficult to resolve—the former dwells with the ghost, attending to what capitalist realism has foreclosed; the latter risks conscripting that ghost into a political program, goading the image into prescribed service in which it may not abide.
Whatever the truly revolutionary perspective might be, the past remains inside the present with profound political import. Boards of Canada abides in this truth—the phrase “the past inside the present” loops throughout “Music Is Math,” from Geogaddi (2002), neither resolving nor releasing, simply recurring on the very album that slipped from the halcyon reflections of their early work, drawing closer to the imminent collapse that haunts their later work.
A Memory That Isn’t Yours
Boards of Canada has a way of seeking out the solitary corners of your memory, only to reveal it was never yours to possess nor were you ever alone. The inverse also obtains: in March 2026, a post made by the bocpages Instagram account featured a quote by Jose Adan in which he remarked that “Telephasic Workshop” invoked “a feeling of a memory that isn’t yours, yet somehow belongs to you.” This paradox of Boards of Canada’s music being both depersonalizing and deeply personal is widely reported among devotees of the duo’s discography—and it is precisely the paradox this essay has been circling.
At the heart of it all, Boards of Canada conjures a specter of community almost tribal in composition but uniquely diffuse—less like a collective and more like a communion of atmospheres suffusing the pores of space-time. Fantasies of bucolic flight and nomadic excursions into wilderness abound: a quasi-gorpcore romanticism edging toward an anarchist sensibility, a simultaneous pact with Nature and with Satan. The Dionysianism of The Wicker Man (1973) meets the diabolism of David Koresh—entwined in Bataillean sine waves of communal ecstasy and communal catastrophe. It is within this charged atmosphere that Boards of Canada’s cult of childhood takes root, the arcadian and the apocalyptic not as opposites but as twin expressions of the same restless desire to exit the administered world entirely.
The Cult of Childhood
Writing in Pitchfork, Simon Reynolds avers that the psychedelic character of Music Has the Right to Children springs from its devotion to a “cult of childhood.” The duo’s first major label release is marked by its spectral weave of sampled children’s voices and idyllic melodies unspooled from analog monosynths, typified in iconic selections like “Roygbiv” or the more austere “Kaini Industries.” Reynolds also notes that BoC described the title as “a statement of intention to affect the audience using sound”—the listener positioned as a child wrapped in its wistful haze. The playful inversion of subject and object in the title promises an elegiac involution of time and memory. The album artwork, moreover, depicts a faceless family frozen under bleached Kodachrome: childhood as both vivid and lost, evoking a past that belongs to everyone and no one. Music Has the Right elevates childhood not as a lost origin to recover but as a crystal through which experiences may enter to be replayed and reactivated—the temporal logic aeonic rather than chronic (philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s more precise rendering of BoC’s own “past inside the present”), memory not an object of retrieval but a circulation of fragments, the personal and the impersonal inhabiting the same frequency.
The cult of childhood lifted up by Boards of Canada is fraught with as many risks and pitfalls as it contains enlivening thresholds. The figure of the child often invites cheap sentiment, atavisms, regressions—and perhaps worse. In his “A Note on Cold Rationalism,” Mark Fisher writes: “Spinoza says children are abject because they do not know what causes their actions or desires. Like many adults, they confuse being free with ‘doing what they want,’ when freedom entails attuning your desires and emotions to your reason.” Such epistemic formlessness of youth finds its darkest mythical expression in the omnipotent child—the tyranny of desire made flesh in Anthony Fremont in “It’s a Good Life” from the film Twilight Zone (1983): desire without reason, will without limit. His family and neighbors have learned to suppress every authentic response—fear, grief, anger—behind a mask of cheerful compliance, lest a stray thought displease the child and consign them to “the cornfield”, Anthony’s name for the void into which he banishes whatever displeases him. That the only available reprieve is for a young woman named Ethel to follow Anthony into the cartoon world flickering on his television screen—dissolving into his omnipotent fantasy rather than contesting it—illuminates something essential about the cult of childhood at its most terrifying: the adult world does not contain the child’s sovereignty, it capitulates to it, falling into its abyss of desire.
Together with Ethel inside the television’s simulacrum, Anthony reveals his capacity to conjure idyllic beauty and invent florid worlds—the creative potency of the puer archetype disclosed on the very obverse of its horrors. For Nietzsche, this aspect of child is precisely the culminating point of spiritual maturation, a necessary threshold for vitality, creation, and the transfiguration of the past. Nietzsche’s valorization of the child continues and transforms in the work of Deleuze, whose concept of becoming-child describes not an injunction to imitate children but a vector through which sedimented identifications and crystallized subjectivities pass into zones of indiscernibility. To undergo a becoming-child does not demand rueful rumination on the past—if anything it demands the opposite: a radical openness to what has not yet been felt. Certain BoC tracks operate at the threshold where the anchor of memory and the current of new intensities converge, touching our deepest phantasmic investments and urging us to become-child. The poignancy of a diminutive track like “Olson” and its minimal melodic touchpoints unfold as a plaintive audio Rorschach—a melancholic music box that plays like a password to open a core memory and metamorphose its long-harbored yearnings. The childhood imagined in Music Has the Right skews arcadian, yet contains a kernel of the ominous, unbounded will that surfaces decades later in the apocalypticism of Tomorrow’s Harvest.
Geogaddi: A Sacred Conspiracy
The apocalyptic turn in BoC’s discography begins with Geogaddi (2002), the duo’s second major label release with Warp Records, touted for its asphyxiating minimalism and zoetropic nightmares and made infamous for its subliminal diabolism and extensive gestures to the occult. The album deepens BoC’s penchant for analog saturation with the tape-melting jouissance of a razorburn forgotten under a demon’s caress in tracks like “Sunshine Recorder.” Potent philosophical intimations sublimate from Geogaddi‘s surface atop its aberrant brew of sampled oddities: washed out documentaries, more Sesame Street, found news segments, cult horror films, and even vintage porn. The overall feel of Geogaddi is comparatively upfront and ominous against Music Has the Right. Those who listen closely and often to “Beware the Friendly Stranger” or “The Smallest Weird Number” are beckoned into Geogaddi‘s sacred conspiracy via their precarious melodies and the prophetic madness encrypted within them. Here the nostalgic turns from wistful reminiscence into a darker meditation on the cosmic forces that bind us, as well as the cruelty capitalism and modernity has visited upon the earth.
Geogaddi‘s “Dandelion” enthralls us in a hypnotic negation of our Promethean optimism, its attendant pedagogy, and the civic realist confidence (the postwar institutional faith that the world yields its meaning to patient rational inquiry and attendant civic engagement) that defined the post-Vietnam era. Within the track’s backward-flowing bed of analog synthesizers are narrated clips from Dive to the Edge of Creation (1980), a National Geographic documentary voiced by Leslie Nielsen—an incongruous departure from his absurd characterization in the Naked Gun film series—whose deadpan institutional timbre conveys the blunt optimism of scientific progress as it confronts our planet’s chthonic machinations:
“When lava pours out near the sea surface, tremendous volcanic explosions sometimes occur…in time, submarine sea-mounts or islands are formed…when lava flows underwater, it behaves differently…and a new contraption to capture a ‘dandelion’ in one piece has been put together by the crew…the preparation for a dive is always a tense time…”
The “dandelion” of the title refers to a colony of deep-sea zooids, a cluster of tiny organisms much like jellyfish, whose attempts at surface retrieval tend to end in disintegration—the pressure change destroying the very organism the documentary’s expedition sought to capture intact. This image ramifies philosophically in several directions, particularly in the irony of attempting to extract a singular entity from a world where it thrives as a multiplicity. Our propensity for mythic failure amid our ceaseless lust for extractivism is precisely what the vignette “Dandelion” detourns. Now living almost 25 years in the wake of Geogaddi‘s release—and nearly half a century since Dive to the Edge of Creation—we confront the climate-related consequences of our Promethean megalomania while left in the company of a gormless global commentariat vying for the most viral take on the crisis. Amid the record-breaking rise of sea surface temperatures at the time of writing these words, one reality remains certain: whether a dandelion can be taken intact or not, the lava is not going back in the volcano. The fire stolen by Prometheus now turns upon the thief himself.
Sonic Enantiodromia
The Campfire Headphase (2005) offers a partial reprieve—warmth, folk textures, the open road—before Tomorrow’s Harvest (2013) closes the arc with the sound of a world that has already ended. “Gemini” heralds the destruction as a pall descends over earth’s last petroglyphs and the final dominion of urban sprawl. “White Cyclosa” recoils from the imperial boomerang—black hawk helicopters glimpsed through the silhouette of a child’s slingshot. “Telepath” reprises BoC’s penchant for children counting, but the playground is now vacant, its echo replaced by the microwaved vocalization of a disembodied prophet pronouncing “This is (is) the end of the Earth… for now.” From BoC’s early sun-kissed reminiscences to survivors living in the ruins of brutalist utopias, their corpus is sonic enantiodromia—a reminder that every cult of childlike wonder contains its syzygy in an impending Satanic apocalypse. Corduroy psychedelia identifies the frequency on which all of this was first received—the child on the tobacco-colored couch, dial locked, fever running, receiving transmissions from a world that was already, without knowing it, saying goodbye.
Coda
Many have come to this essay on the promise of finding a philosophical theory of Boards of Canada—or perhaps I have sent it to you under precisely that promise. Some of the reasons for writing it have been announced or implied in the foregoing, but the more immediate occasion was a recent conversation with someone developing a project that sought to include my reflections on the work of Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison—reflections grounded, in part, in my Vintagia project, which was heavily shaped by BoC and the world their music has unfolded. It was an unexpected privilege to be counted among the other, more towering names connected to the currently secret endeavor, and this essay served in part to crystallize thoughts I have been exchanging with that project—a document where those ideas might live somewhat more tangibly.
Followers of the Split Infinities blog (the name itself a quiet tip of the hat to BoC) will already be familiar with the Acid Horizon and LEPHT HAND projects, which in their distinct ways broach the political and the psychedelic through theoretical intervention. My musical project SEREPTIE emerged within the atmosphere of BoC’s autochthonic energies—imagined as the eventual aftermath of Boards of Canada: a lo-fi ambient world both inebriated and asphyxiated by the detritus of the apocalypse BoC heralds.
Interspersed throughout this essay are images from Vintagia: I Ching Oracle for Psychogeography and Creative Discovery—an oracle deck I developed as a tool for navigating creative and spatial experience through the hexagrams of the I Ching. The deck is currently sold out, though a second run is forthcoming—and if a publisher willing to distribute it more broadly happens to be reading, so much the better! If you would like to be notified when the next run becomes available, follow this blog and leave a note in the comments.
And to Marcus and Michael: if you’d be up for it, Acid Horizon would love to have you for an interview.
A note on memory and its discontents: as is the case with hauntological investigations of this kind, recollection is often compromised, overdetermined by the numerous forces brought to bear on our hazy impressions.
A YouTube deep dive revealed that the film I encountered that day was almost certainly La Rivière du hibou (1961), directed by Robert Enrico—a French short film that won the Palme d’Or for short subject at Cannes in 1962 and the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 1963. Rod Serling, captivated by it at Cannes, purchased the rights for $25,000 and broadcast it as a Twilight Zone episode on February 28, 1964—the only time in the series’ history that an outside production was aired under its banner. True to what I said in the body of this essay: it is neither Hollywood nor homegrown, and more literally so than I realized—a French New Wave short film about the American Civil War, performed by French actors speaking accented English, repurposed as American television (making the American Civil War theme and its shocking daytime playback on PBS even stranger) .
Because the broadcast rights allowed only two airings, the episode was excluded from The Twilight Zone‘s syndication package—which raises the question of how I encountered it on PBS at all. Most likely I saw it as a standalone educational film; based on comments in various Internet forums, it seems that it was widely circulated in schools and classrooms throughout the 1970s and 80s. My recollection of its electronic pallor was almost certainly the result of a degraded 16mm or VHS transfer rather than any quality inherent to the original, which was shot on 35mm film with the precision of a festival entry. In earlier decades such transfers were considered aesthetically inferior—the pallor a mark of technical cheapness rather than artistic intention. With the rise of Y2K nostalgia and the broader rehabilitation of early digital media, that same pallor has acquired its own hauntological patina.
This is a wonderful articulation of the connection between BoC and the nostalgia of classic PBS. Please keep me up to date on Vintagia.
This is by far the best piece I've ever read on BoC in the 28 years of their music being in my life. This goes proper deep.