Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Culture”

Episode 166: Make Believe: On the Power of Pretentiousness

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0400

In culture and the arts, labeling something you don't like (or don't understand) "pretentious" is the easy way out. It's a conversation killer, implying that any dialogue is pointless, and those who disagree are merely duped by what you've cleverly discerned as a charade. It's akin to cynically revealing that a magic show is all smoke and mirrors—as if creative vision doesn't necessitate a leap of faith. In this episode, Phil and JF explore the nuances of pretentiousness, distinguishing between its fruitful and hollow forms. They argue that the real gamble, and inherent value, of daring to pretend lies in recognizing that imagination is an active contributor to, rather than a detractor from, reality.

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REFERENCES

Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices
Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why it Matters
Ramsay Dukes, How to See Fairies
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Weird Studies, Episode 49 on Nietzsche’s idea of “untimely”
Sokal Affair, scholarly hoax
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
Stanley Kubrick, “Notes on Film”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Abuses of History
Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak
Mary Shelley, “Introduction to Frankenstein”
Matt Cardin, A Course in Demonic Creativity
Playboy interview with Stanley Kubrick

Episode 110: Monks of the Cultural Apocalypse: 'The Glass Bead Game,' Part Two

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 11:00:00 -0500

In the current "attention economy," which has resulted in plummeting literacy rates and the almost wanton neglect of various cultural practices, what significance does culture even have? Why seek to preserve something our age has decided doesn't have to exist? Perhaps Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game can be read as an answer to those questions. The order of monastic scholars in the novel exists mainly to remember what others were happy to consign to oblivion. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Hesse's ideas on the order and its sacred game in terms of how they might help us meet the challenge facing anyone who believes the value of culture can't be expressed in dollars and cents.

REFERENCES

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Pope Benedict XVI, former head of the Catholic church
J.S. Bach, Well Tempered Clavier, Rosalyn Tureck interpretation and Glenn Gould interpretation
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Chauvet Cave
Peter Bebergal Strange Frequencies
Andy Goldsworthy, British artist
Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light

Episode 98: Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 12 May 2021 11:00:00 -0400

Exotica is a kind of music that was popular in the 1950s, when it was simply known as "mood music." Though somewhat obscure today, the sound of exotica remains immediately recognizable to contemporary ears. Its use of "tribal" beats, ethereal voices, flutes and gongs evoke a world that is no more at home in the modern West than it is anywhere else on earth. With its shameless stereotyping of non-Western cultures and its aestheticization of the other, exotica rightly deserves the criticism it has drawn over the years. But as we shall see in this episode, if you stop there, you just might miss the thing that makes exotica so difficult to expunge from Western culture, and also what makes it a prime example of how the "trash stratum" sometimes becomes the site of strange visions that transcend culture altogether.

REFERENCES

Phil Ford, “Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica”
Future Fossils, Episode 157
Weird Studies, Episode 21: The Trash Stratum
Weird Studies, Episode 79: Love, Death and the Dream Life
Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness Maria Montez”
Yma Sumac, Peruvian singer
Les Baxter, "The Oasis of Dakhla"
Steely Dan, "I Heard the News"
Stravinsky, Rite of Spring
Les Baxter, “Hong Kong Cable Car”
Jacques Riviere, review of The Rite of Spring
Nenao Sakaki, Japanese poet
Lew Welch, American Beat poet
JF Martel, “Stay with Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the truth of extinction”
Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics
Captain Beefheart, “Orange Claw Hammer”
Martin Buber, I and Thou