Episode 138: Yours and Yours Alone: On the Death Card in the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 10:30:00 -0500

What better way to ring in the New Year than with a freeranging discussion of the dreaded thirteenth arcanum of the tarot? Of all topics, surely death needs the least introduction. Or does it? To those of us who inhabit the castellated compounds of post-industrial privilege, it is perhaps too easy to forget the uninvited guest who skulks in the shadows, touching each of us in turn as he sidles past. "Nothing is certain except death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin once wrote. He was joking, of course. The truth is that death is the only certainty.

Click here for information about JF's upcoming talk at the Last Tuesday Society.

Header image: Detail from Harry Clarke's illustration for "The Masque of the Red Death," from the 1919 edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination.

SHOW NOTES

Brian George, Masks of Origin
Chris Leech, The Gnostic Tarot
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
Rachel Pollack, Tarot Wisdom
Rachel Pollack, 78 Degrees of Wisdom
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death”
Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia
Steven Spielberg (dir.), Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
Weird Studies, Episode 137 on Sunn O)))’s “Life Metal”
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
Thomas Browne, “Urn Burial”
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot
Sallie Nichols, Tarot and the Archetypal Journey
Clive Barker, Hellraiser
Weird Studies, Episode 116 on “Blade Runner”
George Gurdjieff, Armenian mystic
Body without organs, philosophical concept
Elizabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Weird Studies, Episode 126 with Matt Cardin

Episode 137: Brute Force: on Sunn O)))'s 'Life Metal'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

What Evil Dead 2 is to the Baroque, Sunn O))) is to Brutalism. Or more like: if the likening of Evil Dead 2 to the Baroque felt like a stretch in episode 136, the brutalist bona fides of Sunn O)))'s drone metal are incontestable. In this episode, their 2019 masterpiece Life Metal frames a conversation touching on 20th-century avant garde music, the tactility of sound, the metaphysics of the Kickass Riff, Aztec aesthetics, the virtues of impermanence, and of course, the sublime beauty of brutalist buildings.

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REFERENCES

Sunn O))), Life Metal
Theatre of Eternal Music, musical group
Daniel Albright, Panaesthetics
Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes
John Wray, “Heady Metal”
Nyarlathotep, Lovecraft character
Byung-Hul Chan, The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism
Fred Wilcox (dir.), Forbidden Planet
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Godfrey Reggio (dir.), [Koyaanisquatsi](imdb.com/title/tt0085809/)

Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Impermanence”

Episode 138: Yours and Yours Alone: On the Death Card in the Tarot

Episode 137: Brute Force: on Sunn O)))'s 'Life Metal'