Weird Studies

By SpectreVision RadioSociety & Culture Arts Philosophy

Favorites
146
Followers
Typical duration
80 min
per episode

Based on Podcast App listening data

Weird Studies episodes

November 07, 2018 Episode 33: The Fine Art of Changing the Subject: On Duchamp's 'Fountain'
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp trolled the New York art scene with Fountain, the famous urinal, whose significance has since swelled in the minds of art aficionados to become the prototype of all modern art. The conversation as to whether or not Fountain fulfills the conditions of a genuine work of art has been going on ever since. In this episode, JF and Phil weigh in with their own ideas, not just about what art is, but more importantly, about what art -- and only art -- can do. The result is a no-holds-barred assault on the very idea of conceptual art, a j'accuse aimed squarely at Duchamp and anyone else who would make the arts as scrutable, and as trivial, as the latest political attack ad or home insurance jingle.
REFERENCES
J. S. Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier
Roger Scruton, The Face of God
Philip Larkin, All What Jazz
Daniel Clowes, Art School Confidential
Banksy, Girl with Balloon
Bill Hicks, stand-up bit on marketers
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and Paul Klee, Angelus Novus
Arthur Danto, “The Art World”
Andy Warhol, Brillo Boxes
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Cornelius Cardew, “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism”
John Roderick, “Punk Rock is Bullshit”
Susan McClary, foreword to William Cheng, Just Vibrations
Deleuze, "What is the Creative Act?"
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Biggie Smalls, "Ready to Die"
Cave paintings at Chauvet
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel lecture
Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 1 min
October 31, 2018 Episode 32: Orbis Tertius: Borges on Magic, Conspiracy and Idealism
Jorge Luis Borges's story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a metaphysical detective story, an armchair conspiracy thriller, and a masterpiece of weird fiction. In this tale penned by a true literary magician, Phil and JF see an opportunity to talk about magic, hyperstition, non-linear time, and the power of metaphysics to reshape the world. When Phil questions his co-host's animus against idealist doctrines, the discussion turns to dreams, cybernetics, and information theory, before reaching common ground with the dumbfound appreciation of radical mystery.
Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in Ficciones
Weird Studies, Episode 29, "On Lovecraft"
George Berkley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
John Crowley, the Aegypt tetralogy
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia - Urn Burial
Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)
William James, A Pluralistic Universe
Karl Schroeder, "Degrees of Freedom"
Weird Studies, Episode 26, "Living in a Glass Age"
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Dogen, Genjokoan

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 12 min
October 24, 2018 Episode 31: Scarcely Human at All: On Glenn Gould's 'Prospects of Recording'
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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 17 min
October 14, 2018 Episode 30: On Stanley Kubrick's 'Eyes Wide Shut'
No dream is ever just a dream. Or so Tom Cruises tells Nicole Kidman at the end of Eyes Wide Shut. In this episode, Phil and JF expound some of the key themes of Kubrick's film, a masterpiece of cinematic chamber music that demonstrates, with painstaking attention to detail, Zen Master Dōgen's utterance that when one side of the world is illuminated, the other side is dark. Treading a winding path between wakefulness and dream, love and sex, life and art, your paranoid hosts make boldly for that secret spot where the rainbow ends, and the masks come off.
REFERENCES
Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story (Traumnovelle) -- Source of the EWS screenplay, sadly overlooked in the episode but well worth a read.
Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick
Bathysphere
Frank L. Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
David Icke's "reptilian" theory of the British Royal Family
Thomas A. Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze
Screenshot of newspaper article from Eyes Wide Shut
Rodney Ascher, Room 237
James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare
Gustave Moreau, L'Apparition
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony
William S. Burroughs, “On Coincidence,” in The Adding Machine
J.F. Martel, "The Kubrick Gaze"

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 7 min
October 09, 2018 Episode 29: On Lovecraft
Phil and JF indulge their autumnal mood in this discussion of Howard Phillips Lovecraft's work, specifically the essay "Notes on the Writing of Weird Fiction" and the prose piece "Nyarlathotep." Philip K. Dick, Algernon Blackwood, and David Foster Wallace make appearances as our fearsome hosts talk about how the weird story differs from conventional horror fiction, how Lovecraft gives voice to contemporary fears of physical, psychological and political infection, and how authors like Lovecraft and Dick can be seen as prophetic poets of the "great unbuffering of the Western self."
REFERENCES
H. P. Lovecraft, "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction"
H. P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"
1974 Rolling Stone feature on PKD
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Theodor Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition
Algernon Blackwood, "The Wendigo"
Algernon Blackwood, "The Willows"
Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Music of Erich Zann"
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
Weird Studies, Episode 2: Garmonbozia
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 16 min
October 02, 2018 Episode 28: Weird Music, Part Two
"Music is worth living for," Andrew W.K. sings in his latest rock anthem. In this second episode on the weirdness of music, JF and Phil focus on two works steeped in ambiguity and paradox: Bob Dylan's "Jokerman," from the landmark post-Christian album Infidels, and Franz Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz, No. 1: The Dance at the Village Inn," inspired by an episode in the Faust legend. If this conversation has a central theme, it may be music's power to unhinge every fixed binary, from God and the Devil to culture and nature. Music, as exemplified in these pieces, can put us in touch with the abiding mystery of the eternal in the historical, the unhuman in the human... The hills are alive!
REFERENCES
Bob Dylan, "Jokerman"
Franz Liszt, “Mephisto Waltz no. 1,” performed by Boris Berezovsky
Andrew WK, "Music is Worth Living For"
Leonard Cohen, “The Future”
C.G. Jung, Aion
Douglas Rushkoff, Testament
The Guardian, “Carthaginians sacrificed own children, archaeologists say”
Garry Wills, "Our Moloch"
Minoan snake goddess statues
Richard Wagner, Parsifal http://www.monsalvat.no/
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts
Beckett, Not I
Nikolaus Lenau, German Romantic poet
Wolgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, translated by David Luke
Weird Studies, Episode 3: Sin: "Ecstasy, and the White People"

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 5 min
September 26, 2018 Episode 27: Weird Music, Part One
In this first of two episodes devoted to the music of the weird, Phil and JF discuss two works that have bowled them over: the second movement of Ligeti's Musica Ricercata, used to powerful effect in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and the opening music to Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch, composed by Howard Shore and featuring the inimitable stylings of Ornette Coleman. After teasing out the intrinsic weirdness of music in general, the dialogue soars over a strange country rife with shadows, mad geniuses, and skittering insects. And to top it all off, Phil breaks out the grand piano.
Header image by Bandan, Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCES
Ligeti, Musica Ricercata, 2nd movement
Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman, opening music for David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"
Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut
Hitchcock, Psycho
Vulture, "The Evolution of the Movie Trailer" by Granger Willson
Official Trailer for The Shining_vs teaser for _2012
Jan Harlan (director), Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
David Cronenberg, Crash
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Gunther Schuller's interview with Ethan Iverson
Weird Studies, Episode 25: David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 19 min
September 19, 2018 Episode 26: Living in a Glass Age, with Michael Garfield
Stone, bronze, iron... glass? In his recent thought and writing, transdisciplinary artist and thinker Michael Garfield defines modernity as an age of glass, arguing that the entire ethos of our era inheres in the transformative enchantments of this amorphous solid. No one would deny that glass plays a central role in our lives, although glass does have a knack for disappearing into the background, at least until the beakers or screens crack and shatter. Glass is weird, and like a lot of weird things, it can serve as a lens (so to speak!) for observing our world from strange new angles. In this episode, Michael joins Phil and JF to talk through the origins, the significance, and the fate of the Glass Age.
Michael Garfield is a musician, live painter, and futurist. He is the host of the brilliant Future Fossils Podcast.
REFERENCES
Michael Garfield's website + Patreon + Medium + Bandcamp
Michael Garfield, "The Future is Indistinguishable from Magic" (This is the essay we discuss that was unpublished at the time of the recording)
Michael Garfield, "The Future Acts Like You"
Michael Garfield, "The Evolution of Surveillance Part 3: Living in the Belly of the Beast"
Artist David Titterington's Patreon page
Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences
Corning, "The Glass Age" (corporate video)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire
John David Ebert, "On Hypermodernity"
John C. Wright, The Golden Age
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects
Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, Who Built the Moon?
Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
Spinoza, Ethics
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity
Martine Rothblatt, Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality
John Crowley, Little, Big
Jose Arguelles, Dreamspell Calendar
William Irwin Thompson, Lindisfarne Tapes
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past
Karl Schroeder, “Degrees of Freedom,” in Heiroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future
Michael Garfield, “Being Every Drone”
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Special Guest: Michael Garfield.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 20 min
September 12, 2018 Episode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'
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"

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 21 min
August 28, 2018 Episode 24: The Charlatan and the Magus, with Lionel Snell
As Lionel Snell, also known as Ramsey Dukes, observes in his seminal esoteric essay, "The Charlatan and the Magus" (1984), the series of trumps in a tarot deck doesn't begin with the noble Emperor or august Hierophant, but with the lowly Fool, followed by the Juggler. Trickery or illusion, Snell suggests, may not be the dealbreaker we've thought it to be in parapsychological investigation. It may even be a feature, not a bug, of the magical process. In this episode of Weird Studies, JF and Phil talk to Lionel Snell about trickster magic, and all we miss out on when we make rational truth the only measure by which we know reality.
Ramsey Dukes [Lionel Snell], "The Charlatan and the Magus"
Darren Brown, Tricks of the Mind
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Phil Ford, “Birth of the Weird"
Ramsey Dukes [Lionel Snell], How to See Fairies: Discover Your Psychic Powers in Six Weeks
Ramsey Dukes [Lionel Snell], S.S.O.T..B.M.E.
John Keats, Negative Capability
Weird Studies, Episode 9: "On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick"
Special Guest: Lionel Snell [Ramsey Dukes].

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
59 min

About Weird Studies

From the publisher's feed

Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."