Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Art”

Episode 184: On David Lynch

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 10:30:00 -0500

David Lynch passed away on January 15th, 2025, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped the landscape of cinema and television. Few artists have delved as deeply into the strange, the beautiful, and the terrifying as Lynch, and few have had as profound an influence on Weird Studies. His films have long been a touchstone for JF and Phil's discussions on art, philosophy, and the nature of the weird. To honor his memory, they decided to devote an episode to Lynch's work as a whole, with special attention paid to Eraserhead—the nightmarish debut that announced his singular vision to the world. A study in dread, desire, and the uncanny, Eraserhead remains one of the most disturbing and mysterious works of American cinema. In this episode, we explore what makes it so powerful and how it connects to Lynch’s larger artistic project.

To enroll in JF's new Weirdosphere course, It's All Real: An Inquiry Into the Reality of the Supernatural, please visit www.weirdosphere.org. The course starts on Thursday, Feb 6, at 8 pm Eastern.

A video for the piece For David Lynch is available on Pierre-Yves Martel's YouTube channel.

REFERENCES

David Lynch, Eraserhead
David Lynch: The Art Life
Victorian Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Norman Mailer, An American Dream
Laura Adams, "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman Mailer”
George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal
Carl Jung, The Red Book
Jack Arnold (dir.), The Creature from the Black Lagoon
Noel Caroll, The Philosophy of Horror
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez”
David Foster Wallace, “David Lynch Keeps his Head” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again
Arthur Machen, The White People
William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Episode 178: Edge of Reality: On John Carpenter's 'In the Mouth of Madness'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Earlier this month, Phil and JF recorded a live episode at Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington following a screening of John Carpenter's film In the Mouth of Madness. Carpenter’s cult classic obliterates the boundary between reality and fiction, madness and revelation—an ideal subject for a Weird Studies conversation. In this episode, recorded before a live audience, the hosts explore the film’s Lovecraftian themes, the porous nature of storytelling, and how art can function as a conduit to unsettling truths.

Special thanks to Dr. Alicia Kozma and the IU Cinema team for hosting and recording the event.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES
John Carpenter, In the Mouth of Madness
John Carpenter, Prince of Darkness*
John Carpenter, The Thing
Joshua Clover, BFI Film Classics: The Matrix
Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint
David Cronenberg, Videodrome
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)"
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Nick Land, English philosopher
H. P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Jonathan Carroll, The Land of Laughs

Episode 177: Riddles in the Dark: On Fairy Tales, Interpretation, and 'Rapunzel'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Fairy tales are among the most familiar cultural objects, so familiar that we let our kids play with them unsupervised. At the same time, they are also the most mysterious of artifacts, their heimlich giving way to unheimlich as soon as we give them a closer look and ask ourselves what they are really about. Indeed, these imaginal nomads, which seem to evade all cultural and historical capture, existing in various forms in every time and place, can become so strange as to make us wonder if they are cultural at all, and not some unexplained force of nature — the dreaming of the world. In this episode, JF and Phil use "Rapunzel" as a case study to explore the weirdness of fairy tales, illustrating how they demand interpretation without ever allowing themselves to be explained.

Sign up for the upcoming course "Writing at the Wellspring" October 22-December 1 with Dr. Matt Cardin on Weirdosphere.org

SHOW NOTES

Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" in Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, ed.; Harryn Zohn, trans.).
Novalis, Philosophical Writings. (Margaret Mahony Stoljar, trans.).
Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable and Other Writings (Alex Andriesse, trans.)
William Irwin Thompson, Imaginary Landscape
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment
Marie-Louise von Franz,, Swiss Jungian psychologist
Sesame Street, “Rapunzel Rescue”
Disney’s Tangled
The Annotated Brothers Grimm
Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index
Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time
W. A. Mozart, The Magic Flute
Dante Alighieri, Il Convito
Panspermia hypothesis
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature
John Mitchell, Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist
Clint Eastwood (dir.) The Unforgiven

Episode 176: On Charles Burns' 'Black Hole' and the Medium of Comics

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Comics, like cinema, is an eminently modern medium. And as with cinema, looking closely at it can swiftly acquaint us with the profound weirdness of modernity. Do that in the context of a discussion on Charles Burns' comic masterpiece Black Hole, and you're guaranteed a memorable Weird Studies episode. Black Hole was serialized over ten years beginning in 1995, and first released as a single volume by Pantheon Books in 2005. Like all masterpieces, it shines both inside and out: it tells a captivating story, a "weirding" of the teenage romance genre, while also revealing something of the inner workings of comics as such. In this episode, Phil and JF explore the singular wonders of a medium that, thanks to artists like Burns, has rightfully ascended from the trash stratum to the coveted empyrean of artistic respectability—without losing its edge.

BIG NEWS:

• If you're planning to be in Bloomington, Indiana on October 9th, 2024, click here to purchase tickets to IU Cinema's screening of John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, featuring a live Weird Studies recording with JF and Phil.

• Go to Weirdosphere to sign up for Matt Cardin's upcoming course, MC101: Writing at the Wellspring, starting on 22 October 2024.

• Visit https://www.shannontaggart.com/events and follow the links to learn more about Shannon's (online) Fall Symposium at the Last Tuesday Society. Featured speakers include Steven Intermill & Toni Rotonda, Shannon Taggart, JF Martel, Charles and Penelope Emmons, Doug Skinner, Michael W. Homer, Maria Molteni, and Emily Hauver.

REFERENCES

Charles Burns, Black Hole
Clement Greenberg’s concept of “medium specificity”
Terry Gilliam (dir.), The Fisher King
Seth, comic artist
Chris Ware, Building Stories
“Graphic Novel Forms Today” in Critical Inquiry
Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity
Vilhelm Hammershoi, Danish painter
Ramsey Dukes, Words Made Flesh
G. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form
Dave Hickey, “Formalism”
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art
Chrysippus, Stoic philosopher
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

Mid-Break Bonus: The Quiet Earth

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon at the Listener's Tier get to enjoy a bonus episode. These episodes are different from the flagship show. Less formal and entirely improvised, they offer Phil and JF a different way of exploring the weird in art, philosophy and culture. To tide our listenership over until the next new episode drops on September 25th, 2024, here is a recent example of a Weird Studies audio extra, recorded as your hosts were finishing up their first Weirdosphere course, "The Beauty and the Horror." The conversation ended up centering on cultural works we experienced in childhood, and that are all the more magical for being only vaguely remembered.

To enroll in JF's upcoming Weirdosphere course, "Whirl Without End: Fairy Tales and the Weird," please visit www.weirdosphere.org.

Episode 170: Art is Another Word for Truth: On Orson Welles's 'F for Fake'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 29 May 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving (a talented faker in his own right), the film blurs the line between fact and fiction in an effort to explore art's weird entanglement with illusion, magic, and ultimately, the search for truth. This is a film unlike any other, and it is arguably Welles's most important contribution to the evolution and theory of film aesthetics.

Join the Weirdosphere online learning community by enrolling in Phil and J.F.'s inaugural course, [THE BEAUTY AND THE HORROR](www.weirdosphere.org), starting June 20th.

RERERENCES

Orson Welles, F for Fake
Gilles Deleuze Cinema 2
Elmyr de Hory, art forger
Clifford Irving, American writer
Howard Hughes, American aerospace engineer
David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Film
David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles
Pauline Kael, Raising Kane
“War of the Worlds” radio drama
The Farm Podcast, “Horror Hosts, Films & Other Strange Realities w/ David Metcalfe, Conspirinormal & Recluse”
Orson Welles - Interview with Michael Parkinson (BBC 1974)
Geoffrey Cornelius, Cornelius
Victoria Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Sokal affair, hoax
Werner Herzog, “Minnesota Declaration”

Episode 169: On Free Expression

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 15 May 2024 10:30:00 -0400

The ongoing crackdown on protests at many American universities prompts a discussion on the politics, ethics, and metaphysics of free expression.

REFERENCES

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
George Orwell, Inside the Whale
New York Times, “At Indiana University, Protests Only Add to a Full Year of Conflicts
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Indiana Daily Student, “Provost Addresses Controversy”
Official government page for the Proposed Bill to address Online Harms in Canada.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Daryl Davis, American musician and activist
DavidFoster Wallace, Just Asking

Episode 167: The Hand of Ithell, with Amy Hale

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 10:30:00 -0400

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was a British painter, poet, and occultist, long identified as a pioneer of the Surrealist movement in the UK. While her work is increasingly recognized for its mystical themes and innovative use of automatic techniques, deeply influenced by her esoteric studies, it also inspired extensive research on its broader cultural and spiritual contexts. Amy Hale, an anthropologist, folklorist, and author, has dedicated much of her career to exploring Cornwall, the fabled region of southwest England that became Colquhoun’s spiritual home. Hale’s book, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully, published by Strange Attractor Press, offers a profound biographical study of Colquhoun, examining the historical and spiritual forces that influenced her work. In this episode, she joins JF and Phil to discuss Colquhoun, Cornwall, and the transformative power of research and writing.

REFERENCES

Amy Hale, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully
Agnes Callard, I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is
Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

Special Guest: Amy Hale.

Episode 162: The Incarnation of Meaning: Greenwich Village After the War

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 10:30:00 -0500

In this second of two episodes on "scenes," Phil and JF set their sights on Greenwich Village in the wake of the Second World War. Focusing on two works on the era – Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage and John Cassavetes' Shadows – the conversation further develops the mystique of urban scenes and explores the weirdness of cities. The city, long considered the human artifact par excellence, comes to seem like something that comes from outside the ambit of humanity.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES
Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage
John Cassavetes, Shadows
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Phil Ford, Dig
Weird Studies, Episode 90 on “Owl in Daylight”
Kult, role-playing game
Tom Delong and Peter Lavenda, Secret Machines: Gods, Men, and War
Chandler Brossard, Who Walk in Darkness
Yukio Mishima, Japanese artist
Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of the Hipster”

Episode 153: Celestial Machine: On the Temperance Card in the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 10:30:00 -0400

Even learned commentators on the tarot are likely to point out at the fourteenth major arcana, Temperance, is a bit of a boring card. At least, it comes off as dull until you look at it closely, as JF and Phil do in this episode. What they find is that the Temperance card is actually a diagram, a kind of blueprint for a celestial machine that underlies human technology, beckoning us to restore even the most mechanical contraption to the raw weirdness at the source of everything.

Header image by Rolf Dietrich Brecher via Wikimedia Commons

It's not too late to join JF's Nura Learning course, ["Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."](www.nuralearning.com)

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

SHOW NOTES

Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Adrien Lyne, Jacob’s Ladder
Weeping Angels, Dr. Who creatures
Joel Schumacher, Flatliners
Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles
Gregory Bateson, Steps To an Ecology of Mind
Hesychasm, monastic practice
Yoav Ben-Dov, Tarot: the Open Reading
The Gnostic Tarot
Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible
Nagarjuna, Verses of the Middle Way

Episode 151: The Real and the Possible: Live at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, with Jacob G. Foster

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 09:00:00 -0400

In The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, the cultural historian William Irwin Thompson predicted the rise of a new form of knowledge building, a direly needed alternative to the Wissenshaft of standard science and scholarship. He called it Wissenskunst, "the play of knowledge in a world of serious data processors." Wissenskunst is pretty much what JF and Phil have been aspiring to do on Weird Studies since 2018, but in this episode they are joined by a master of the craft, the computational sociologist and physicist Jacob G. Foster of UCLA. Jacob is the co-founder of the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute (DISI), a gathering of scholars, scientists, and students that takes place each year at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. It was there that this conversation was recorded. The topic was the Possible, that dream-blurred vanishing point where art, philosophy, and science converge as imaginative and creative practices.

Click here or here for more information on Shannon Taggart's Science of Things Spiritual Symposium at Lily Dale NY, July 27-29 2023.

REFERENCES

Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute
"Deconstructing the Barrier of Meaning," a talk by Jacob G. Foster at the Santa Fe Institute
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture
Frederic Rzewski, “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation”
Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies
The accident of Bob in Twin Peaks
Carl Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry
August Kekule,, German chemist
Robert Dijkgraaf, “Contemplating the End of Physics”
Richard Baker, American zen teacher
Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Shoggoth, Lovecraftian entity

Special Guest: Jacob G. Foster.

Episode 139: Sex, Money, and Power are YOURS with our SECRET Art-Power Formula!

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 11:30:00 -0500

"YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE!"

Tired of failure and self-loathing? Want to be rich and famous while having a good time all the time? Wondering how to turn your banal opinions into Transcendent Truths? Look no further than this special, exclusive episode of Weird Studies, where we reveal, once and for all, the secrets of ART-POWER!

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

SHOW NOTES

Ramsey Dukes, BLAST Your Way to Megabuck$ with My SECRET Sex-Power Formula
James Raggi's statements on artistic freedom in tabletop roleplaying games: Proud to Commit Commercial Suicide 2023 and On Potential Inclusivity/Morality Clauses in RPG Licenses
David Cronenberg, "I Would Like to Make a Case for the Crime of Art"
Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey
Alfred Gell, The Art of Anthropology
Susanne Langer, “On the Cultural Importance of the Arts”
Weird Studies, Episodes 73 and 74 on Carl Jung’s Theory of Art
Kodo Sawaki, Japanese zen teacher
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence
Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams
John Dewey, Art as Experience
Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
Neil Gaiman, “Make Good Art”
Leon Wieseltier, “Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture”
Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus

Episode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 10:00:00 -0500

Victoria Nelson saw it first: Popular culture teems with occult ideas, vestiges of bygone belief, fragments of ancient magic disguised as common entertainment. Her 2001 work The Secret Life of Puppets is in many ways the ur-text of weird studies, so prescient and probing it is even more relevant now than it was when it first appeared. In episode 128, Phil and JF discussed Nelson's wonderful first novel Neighbor George (2021). In this episode, Nelson joins the hosts of Weird Studies to talk about the vision that drove her to write Secret Life along with its equally insightful follow-up, Gothicka.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

SHOW NOTES

Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets, Gothicka, Neighbor George

M. R. James, Collected Ghost Stories
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight series
William P. Young, The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity _
Against Everyone with Conner Habib, episodes 202 & 203
James R. Lewis, _The Gods Have Landed
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
Honoré de Balzac, "Séraphîta"
L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology

Special Guest: Victoria Nelson.

Episode 132: Art Is an Alien Technology: Live at the Supernormal Festival

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 10:30:00 -0400

With his 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog peeled away the veneer of familiarity on the Chauvet cave paintings, restoring them to their original eldritch sparkle. In this conversation, Phil and JF discuss a cinematic jewel that was wrought under tremendous pressure – and is all the more dazzling for it. The episode was recorded live at the Supernormal Festival in Oxfordshire, England, where your hosts were also subjected to unexpected pressure as the band Plastics started their set at the same time as the talk! Though we feel the musical accompaniment adds depth to the dialogue, listeners who find it distracting can skip to the end of the Plastics' set around 41:30. All listeners are urged to visit the band's Bandcamp page to sample some choice hardcore.

Weird Studies thanks Strange Attractor Press, the Supernormal Festival , and Plastics. JF Martel gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts in making this live recording possible.

Header image via Wikimedia Commons.

SHOW NOTES

Werner Herzog, “The Minnesota Declaration”
Tom Waits, “Step Right Up”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Weird Studies, Episode 76 on “Hellier”
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey
Paul Bahn, Images of the Ice Age
Weird Studies, Episode 101 on “In Praise of Shadows
Weird Studies, Episode 129 on “The Fall of the House of Usher”
Matthew Barney, The Cremaster Films
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining

Episode 113: Framing the Invisible, with Shannon Taggart

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 11:00:00 -0500

Shannon Taggart's book Seance is a landmark in art photography and the history of psychical research. Taggart spent years photographing practitioners of spiritualism in the U.S. and Europe in an effort to capture the mysteries of mediumship, ectoplasm, and spirit photography. In this episode, she joins JF and Phil for a conversation on the often-misunderstood tradition of spiritualism, the investigation of the paranormal, and the real magic of photography. If the technological medium is the message, then perhaps the spiritual medium is the messenger.

Support us on Patreon:
Find us on Discord
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack

**REFERENCES

*Shannon Taggart, Séance *
Read the introduction to the book here
Visual companion page for this episode

Shannon and her work are featured in Peter Bebergal's excellent book, Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story of the Technological Quest for the Supernatural

Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell
Lionel Snell, “The Charlatan and the Magus”
George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal
Diane Arbus, American photographer
Warner Herzog (dir.), Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Jeffrey Mishlove, Interview with James Tunney on Francis Bacon
Eva C, French medium
Andrew Jackson Davis, American spiritualist
Henry Alcott, American Theosophist

For further reading on women, spiritualism, and the art of the invisible:
Ann Braude, Radical Spirits
Guggenheim, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

Special Guest: Shannon Taggart.

Episode 112: Readings from the 'Book of Probes': The Mysticism of Marshall McLuhan

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 10:45:00 -0500

The Book of Probes contains a assortment of aphorisms and maxims from the work of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, each one set to evocative imagery by American graphic designer David Carson. McLuhan called the utterances collected in this book "probes," that is, pieces of conceptual gadgetry designed not to disclose facts about the world so much as blaze new pathways leading to the invisible background of our time. In this episode, Phil and JF use an online number generator to discuss a random yet uncannily cohesive selection of of McLuhanian probes.

REFERENCES

Marshall Mcluhan and David Carson, The Book of Probes

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Marshall Mcluhan, The Mechanical Bride
Aristotle, System of causation
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato
Weird Studies, Episode 71 on Marshall Mcluhan
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Christiaan Wouter Custers, A Philosophy of Madness
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense
Marshall Mcluhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Harry Partch, American composer
Marc Augé, Non-Places
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Denis Villeneuve (dir.), Arrival
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

Episode 88: On Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean's 'Mr Punch'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 09:45:00 -0500

Before Coraline, before American Gods, in the early days of the Sandman series, Neil Gaiman collaborated with Dave McKean on some truly groundbreaking graphic novels: Violent Cases (1987), Signal to Noise (1989), and the work discussed in this Weird Studies episode. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch (1994) is the story of a boy whose initiation into the dark realities of life, death, and family plays out in the shadow of the (in)famous Punch & Judy puppet show. Unlike some of Gaiman's more overtly marvellous offerings, Mr Punch is a subtle fantasy whose weirdness hides in the gaps and folds of lost time. It is in Dave McKean's brilliant art that the magic shines through, letting us know that the narrative is only part of a vaster, hidden thing. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the themes, ideas, and mysteries of an unparalleled piece of comics art.

REFERENCES

Watch Aaron Poole's 9-minute short film "Oracle"

Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, _The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch

"That's the Way to Do It! A History of Punch and Judy", Victoria Albert Museum
_

Ronald Briggs, Father Christmas
Clement Greenberg, American art critic
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics
J. F. Martel, Patreon Post on The Untimely
Weird Studies, Episodes 20 and 21 on the Trash Stratum
Weird Studies, Episode 72 on the Castrati
Samuel Pepys, English administrator and diarist
Nick Lowe, The Beast in Me

Episode 87: Glyphs, Rifts, and Ecstasy: On Arthur Machen's Vision of Art

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 10:30:00 -0500

It would be wrong to describe Arthur Machen's Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902) as a work of nonfiction, since the book features a narrative frame that is as moody and irreal as the best tales penned by this luminary of weird fiction. But if the eccentric recluse at the centre Hieroglyphics is a fictional philosopher, he is one who, in Phil and JF's opinion, rivals most aesthetic thinkers in the history of philosophy. The significance of this text lies in its willingness to disclose a function of art that few before Machen had dared to touch, namely its capacity to generate ecstasy by confronting us with the mystery that beats the heart of existence. In this episode, your hosts discuss a work which, in their opinion, comes as close to scripture as the nonexistent field of Weird Studies is likely to get.

REFERENCES

Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy in Literature

Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer
Weird Studies, Episode 3 on the White People
J.F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Weird Studies, Episode 63 on Colin Wilson’s 'The Occult'
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Indra’s Net, philosophical concept
James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880 – 1939
Weird Studies, Episode 5 on Lisa Ruddick's 'When Nothing is Cool'
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Rudolph Otto, German theologian

Episode 79: Love, Death, and the Dream Life

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 10:30:00 -0400

In this episode of Weird Studies, an improvised analysis of two pop songs -- Nina Simone's version of James Shelton's "Lilac Wine" and Ghostface Killah's visionary "Underwater" -- becomes the occasion for a deep dive to the weird wellspring of artistic creation. In trying to understand these songs and why they love them so much, your hosts touch on themes such as necromancy, decadence, liebestod, visionary experience, the Muslim image of paradise, the necessity of rifts, Norman Mailer's concept of "dream life," and the magical operation that is sampling.

Header image: Boris Kasimov, Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

James Shelton, "Lilac Wine"
Nina Simone, "Lilac Wine" from the album WIld is the Wind (1966)
Ghostface Killah, "Underwater, from the album Fishscale (2006)
MF Doom, "Orange Blossoms," from the album Special Herbs, Volume 4, 5 & 6
Richard Strauss, [Salome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome(opera))_
Weird Studies, episode 25: David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
C. G. Jung's practice of active imagination
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Paul Horn, Visions
Alexander Mackendrick (dir.), The Sweet Smell of Success
Les Baxter, American composer
Les Baxter, "Papagayo"
Debussy, [Nocturnes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes(Debussy))_
Rebecca Leydon, music scholar
Weird Studies episodes 73 and 74, on C. G. Jung's aesthetic vision
Alexander Courage, Theme from Star Trek ("Where No Man Has Gone Before")
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket"
James Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Episode 75: Our Old Friend the Monolith: On Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 13:30:00 -0400

"You don't find reality only in your own backyard, you know," Stanley Kubrick once told an interviewer. "In fact, sometimes that's the last place you'll find it." Oddly, this episode of Weird Studies begins with Phil Ford hatching the idea of putting a replica of the monolith from 2001 in his backyard. As the ensuing discussion suggests, this would amount to putting reality -- or the Real, as we like to call it -- in the place where it may be least apparent. Perhaps that is what Kubrick did when he planted his monolithic film in thousands of movie theatres back in 1968. Moviegoers went in expecting a Kubrickian twist on Buck Rogers; they came out changed by the experience, much like the hominids of great veld in the "Dawn of Man" sequence that opens the film. This is what all great art does, and if you look closely, maybe 2001 can tell you something about how it does it. Because in the end, the film is the monolith, and the monolith is all art.

REFERENCES

Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sentinel"
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)
Clement Greenberg, American art critic
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), The Shining
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory
Weird Studies episode 62: It's Like "The Shining," But With Nuns: On "Black Narcissus"
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology
Jay Weidner, Kubrick's Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick
Rob Ager's analysis of 2001 (Ager was criticized for not citing Loughlin above)
Eric Norton's Playboy interview with Stanley Kubrick
J. F. Martel, "The Kubrick Gaze" in Daniel Pinchbeck & Ken Jordan (eds.), Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age
J. F. Martel, "The Future is Immanent: Speculations on a Possible World"
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Sid Meier's Civilization V
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), A Clockwork Orange
Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"
Gilbert Ryle, "Improvisation"

Episode 74: A Luminous Parasite: Jung on Art, Part Two

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 27 May 2020 13:30:00 -0400

In this second part of their exploration of C. G. Jung's essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," JF and Phil try to discern the psychological and metaphysical implications of the great Swiss psychologist's theory of art. For one, this involves discussing what Jung meant by archetypes, and how these relate to the artists who bring them forth in artistic works. This in turn leads to a discussion of the emergent artwork as an "autonomous complex," that is, as a self-moving spirit that requires the artist merely as a conduit for its manifestation in human -- and cosmic -- history.

REFERENCES

Carl Gustav Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"
Arthur Machen, "Hieroglyphics: A Note Upon Ecstasy"
Rick Riordan, [Percy Jackson & the Olympians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Jackson%26_the_Olympians)_ series of novels
Robert Altman (director), Nashville
Homer, The Odyssey
Jacques Offenbach, The Tales of Hoffmann
E. T. A. Hoffmann, "The Sandman"
David Lynch, American filmmaker (the Dionysian!)
Stanley Kubrick, American filmmaker (the Apollonian!)
Richard Wagner's idea of Gesamtkunstwerk
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, and JF's analysis thereof
Lisa Ruddick, "When Nothing is Cool"
Weird Studies episode 5: Reading Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool"

Episode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 May 2020 11:30:00 -0400

This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," first delivered in a 1922 lecture. It was in this text that Jung most clearly distilled his thoughts on the power and function of art. In this first part, your hosts focus their energies on Jung's puralistic style, opposing it not just to Freud's monism (which Jung critiques in the paper) but also to the monism of those other two "masters of suspicion," Marx and Nietzsche. For Jung, art is not a branch of psychology, economics, philosophy, or science. It constitutes its own sphere, and non-artists who would investigate the nature of art would do well to respect the line that art has drawn in the sand. Weird Studies listenters will know this line as the boundary between the general and the specific, the common and the singular, the mundane and the mystical...

REFERENCES

C. G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry"
Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century
Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity
Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychologist
Kinka Usher (director), Mystery Men
Theodor Adorno, “Bach Defended Against his Devotees”
Aleister Crowley, English magician
C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus
Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung
Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in: Untimely Meditations
Weird Studies, episode 49: Nietzsche on History
Weird Studies, episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio
Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal
Paul Ricoeur, French philosopher
Rudolph Steiner, Austrian esotericist

Episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:00:00 -0400

James Curcio is an American multidisciplinary artist and nonfiction writer whose works include the novels Join My Cult, The Party at the World's End, and the upcoming Tales from When I Had a Face. Recently, Curcio edited Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice, an anthology of essays by various thinkers and artists on the complex interplay of fact and fiction, self and other, in the life of the modern creator of artistic works. David Bowie's career, from the early experimentations to the great working that was his final album Blackstar, provides the book's gravitational field. In his effort to better plumb the mysteries of the aesthetic universe, Curcio penned the anthology's opening essay, "Masks All the Way Down," and it is on that piece that this conversation focuses. Join James, Phil and JF as they discuss the terrifying and liberating idea of an aesthetic cosmos as seen from the vantage point of the artist who learns that with new each work comes a new face, an amalgam of symbols and forces drawn from a depth of surfaces, a paper-thin dream that goes ever so deep...

REFERENCES

James Curcio (editor), [Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice](www.intellectbooks/masks)
James Curcio's website: https://www.jamescurcio.com
James Curcio's new novel, [Tales from When I Had a Face](www.TalesFromWhenIHadAFace.com)

David Bowie, Blackstar
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
Poppy, American singer
Anatta, the Buddhist concept of no-self
Nagarjuna, Indian philosopher
Yukio Mishima, Japanese writer
Hunter S. Thompson, American writer
Lewis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought
Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in Untimely Meditations
Ornette Coleman, Change of the Century
Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu
Vladimir Nabokov, Russian novelist
Nicholas Roeg (director), The Man Who Fell to Earth
Raphael Bob-Waksberg (creator), BoJack Horseman
Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
Euripides, The Bacchae

Special Guest: James Curcio.

Episode 65: Touched by that Fire: On Visionary Literature, with B. W. Powe

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 10:30:00 -0500

B. W. Powe is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and professor at York University, in Toronto. His work, though it covers an immense range of topics from politics and poetics to magic and technology, proceeds from a mystical apprehension of the universe as the locus of magical operations, the site of experiments in cosmic becoming. In his various books and essays, Powe continues a uniquely Canadian form of the visionary tradition whose luminaries include his former teachers Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. In this episode, he joins JF and Phil for an exploration of the meaning, potency, and danger of the visionary in art and literature.

Header image: Detail of "Green Color" by Gausanchennai (Wikimedia Commons).

REFERENCES

B. W. Powe's website
B. W. Powe, The Charge in the Global Membrane
B. W. Powe, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye: Apocalypse and Alchemy

Frank Lentricchia, "Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic"
Lorca's concept of duende
Hildegard of Bingen's concept of viriditas
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Marshall McLuhan, "Notes on William Burroughs"
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
John Clellon Holmes, beatnik
Northrop Frye, Canadian literary critic
Hildegard von Bingen, Ordo Virtutum
Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"
Genesis 32, Jacob and the Angel
R. D. Laing, Scottish psychologist
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"
Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"
Jack Kerouac, American writer
Allen Ginsberg, American poet
Lionel Snell, British philosopher and magician

Special Guest: B. W. Powe.

Episode 58: What Do Critics Do?

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 13:00:00 -0400

What is the role of the critic in the world of art? For some, including lots of critics, the figure exudes an aura of authority: her task is to tell us what this or that work of art means, why it matters, and what we are supposed to think and feel in its presence. Cast in in this mold, the critic is an arbiter, not just of taste, but also of sense and meaning. The American art critic Dave Hickey categorically rejects this interpretation, which he says gives off a mild stench of fascism. For Hickey, the critic plays a weak role, and it's this weakness that makes it essential. In his essay "Air Guitar," published in 1997, Hickey argues that criticism can never really penetrate the mystery of any artwork. Criticism is rather a way to capture the "enigmatic whoosh" of art as one instance of the more pervasive "whoosh" of ordinary experience. So, no act of criticism can ever exhaust an artwork. The critic interprets a singular experience of art into words so that others might be encouraged to have their own, equally singular experiences. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss what criticism has to do with art, life, politics, and ordinary experience.

Header image: Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew (1599-1600)

REFERENCES

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
Plato, Republic
Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Dave Hickey, "Buying the World"
Clinton e-mails exhibition at the Venice Biennale
Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray

Episode 52: On Beauty

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 10:30:00 -0400

The idea that beauty might denote an actual quality of the world, something outside the human frame, is one of the great taboos of modern intellectual thought. Beauty, we are almost universally told, is a cultural contrivance rooted in politics and history, an illusion that exists only in human heads, for human reasons. On this view, a world without us would be a world without beauty. But in this episode Phil and JF explore two texts, by James Hillman and Peter Schjeldahl, that dare to challenge the modern orthodoxy. For Hillman and Schjeldahl, to experience the beautiful is precisely the break out of human bondage and touch the Outside. Beauty may even be one of the few truly objective experiences anyone could hope for.

Peter Schjeldahl, “Notes on Beauty,“ in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
James Hillman, “The Practice of Beauty,” in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
C.G. Jung's retreat, Bollingen Tower
Ugly public art in Palo Alto
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy
Deleuze and Guattari, “Of the Refrain,” from A Thousand Plateaus
Roger Scruton, Beauty
Weird Studies, Episode 36 -- On Hyperstition
Weird Studies, Episode 33 -- The Fine Art of Changing the Subject: On Duchamp's "Fountain"
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
Ingri D'Aulaires, D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time
Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light
God, Book of Job

Episode 35: Whirl Without End: On M.C. Richards' 'Centering'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 10:45:00 -0500

The first step in any pottery project is to center the clay on the potter's wheel. In her landmark essay Centering: In Pottery, Poetry and the Person (1964), the American poet M. C. Richards turns this simple action into a metaphor for all creative acts, including the act of living your life. The result is a penetrating and poetic reflection on the artistic process that values change, unknowing, and radical becoming, making Richards' text a guide to creativity that leaves other examples of that evergreen genre in the dust. Phil and JF get their hands dirty trying to understand what centering is, and what it entails for a life of creation and becoming. The discussion brings in a number of other thinkers and artists including Friedrich Nietzsche, Norman O. Brown, Carl Jung, Antonin Artaud, and Flannery O'Connor.

Header image: NASA

REFERENCES

M. C. Richards, Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person
J. S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier
American pianist David Tudor
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Weird Studies, Episode 33: "The Fine Art of Changing the Subject"
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double (translated by M. C. Richards)
Rudolf Steiner, Alchemy: The Evolution of the Mysteries
Norman O. Brown, author of Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Flannery O'Connor, "Novelist and Believer"

Episode 31: Scarcely Human at All: On Glenn Gould's 'Prospects of Recording'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 10:00:00 -0400

Most people know Glenn Gould as a brilliant pianist who forever changed how we receive and interpret the works of Europe's great composers: Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg... But Gould was also an aesthetic theorist who saw a new horizon for the arts in the age of recording technology. In the future, he said, the superstitious cult of history, performance, and authorship would disappear, and the arts would retrieve a "neo-medieval anonymity" that would allow us to see them for what they really are: scarcely human at all. This episode interprets Gould's prophecy with the help of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the Chinese Daoist sage Zhuang Zhou, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others.

SHOW NOTES

Glenn Gould, "The Prospects of Recording"
Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad of media effects
Ludwig van Beethoven, Concerto no. 3 in C minor
Glenn Gould, "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould"
Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin, dialogue on The Music of Man
Jean-Luc Godard, A Married Woman (A Married Woman)
Heidegger, Der Spiegel interview (1966)
Daoist sage Zhuang Zhou
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange
Marshall McLuhan, The Playboy interview
Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Douglas Rushkoff and Michael Avon Oeming, Aleister and Adolph
Joyce Hatto
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Kevin Bazzana, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work
Phil Ford, “Blogging and the Van Meegeren Syndrome”
David Thompson, Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films

Episode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 10:00:00 -0400

JF and Phil head for Interzone in an attempt to solve the enigma of Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg's 1991 screen adaptation of William S. Burroughs' infamous 1959 novel. A treatise on addiction, a diagnosis of modern ills, a lucid portrait of the artist as cosmic transgressor, and like the book, "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork," Naked Lunch is here framed in the light Cronenberg's recent speech making the case for the crime of art.

Image by Melancholie, Wikimedia Commons.

REFERENCES

David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," from Girl With Curious Hair
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, and "How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?" in A Thousand Plateaus
David Cronenberg (writer-director), Naked Lunch (the film)
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (the novel)
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium-Eater
Dale Pendell, Pharmako/Poeia: Power Plants, Poisons and Herbcraft
"David Cronenberg: I would like to make the case for the crime of art," Globe and Mail June 22 2018
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Derek Bailey (director), On the Edge: Improvisation in Music
Phil Ford, "Good Prose is Written By People Who Are Not Frightened"
Geroge Orwell, "Inside the Whale"

Episode 21: The Trash Stratum - Part 2

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 10:00:00 -0400

The writings of underground filmmaker Jack Smith serve as a starting point for Phil and JF's second tour of the trash stratum. In their wanderings, they will uncover such moldy jewels as the 1944 film Cobra Woman, the exploitation flick She-Devils on Wheels, and (wonder of wonders) Hitchcock's Vertigo. The emergent focus of the conversation is the dichotomy of passionate commitment and ironic perspective, attitudes that largely determine whether a given object will turn out to appear as a negligible piece of garbage... or the Holy Grail. By the end, our hosts realize that even their own personal trash strata may give off shimmers of the divine.

Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures
Robert Siodmak (director), Cobra Woman (1944)
Jack Smith, "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez"
Roger Scruton, English philosopher
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (TV series)
Kenneth Burke, American literary theorist
Alfred Hitchcock (director), Vertigo (1958)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Charles Ludlam's Theater of the Ridiculous
Mel Brooks (director), High Anxiety (1977)
"Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation", The Onion (1999)
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim"
Herschell Gordon Louis (director), She-Devils on Wheels
André Bazin, What is Cinema?
Erik Davis, "The Alchemy of Trash"
David Lynch, Mulholland Drive
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Phil Ford, "Birth of the Weird"

Episode 19: Intermezzo

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 11:00:00 -0400

After announcing that Weird Studies will be going to a bi-weekly release schedule for the summer, Phil and JF talk about how the podcast has gone so far and what's on the horizon (more guests!). Before long, they're digging deep into what makes each of them tick as weird speculators, locating the points at which their ideas differ and converge. The discussion touches on the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux, the theology of Tertullian, the Beatles, the Coke-Pepsi dichotomy, the art of religion, and more.

SHOUT OUTS
Mandala artist Betty Paz
Infinite Conversations
Michael Garfield, the Future Fossils podcast
Ramsey Dukes (Lionel Snell), “The Charlatan and the Magus”
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal and The Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency

REFERENCES
Patrick Harpur, The Secret Tradition of the Soul
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on Contingency
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
MC Escher, Drawing Hands
The works of Tertullian

Episode 1: Introduction to Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 08:00:00 -0500

Phil and J.F. share stories of sleep paralysis and talk about Charles Fort's sympathy for the damned, Jeff Kripal's phenomenological approach to Fortean weirdness, Dave Hickey's notion of beauty as democracy, and Timothy Morton's hyperobjects.