150 episodes
Weird Studies Phil Ford and J. F. Martel
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- Arts
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4.9 • 70 Ratings
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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."
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The Music of the Spheres: On Jóhann Jóhannsson's "Last and First Men"
Jóhann Jóhannsson was one of contemporary cinema's greatest score composers when he passed away in 2018 at the young age of 48. Last and First Men, his enigmatic directorial debut, was released shortly after in 2020. Based on a novel by the same name by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapleton, the film offers a sustained meditation on the prospect of extinction, the eventuality of humanity's disappearance from the comos. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the images and sounds of the film as they flicker and swell against the backdrop of nonbeing that envelops us all. The conversation touches on the idea of beauty, Brutalist architecture, modernism, and futurity.
Preorder Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue.
Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
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
REFERENCES
Jóhann Jóhannsson, Last and First Men
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, SNL character
Spomeniks, Yugoslavian monuments
Olaf Stapleton, The Last and First Men
Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters
The Last of Us, television show
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Speech
Weird Studies Episode 139 on Art Power
Numenius, Platonist philosopher
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Jia Tolentino, “The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa”
Weird Studies, Episode 110 on “The Glass Bead Game”
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover -
Actual Magic: On Ramsey Dukes' SSOTBME
Ramsey Dukes, also known by his real name of Lionel Snell, may be one of the most important thinkers on magic since Aleister Crowley. In the impishly-titled Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed (or SSOTBME for short), Dukes accomplishes something few writers on the topic have been able to do: he gives us magic without asking us to sacrifice anything that makes us sensible modern people. He makes magic seem like the most obvious thing in the world, and he does it without taking away any of its, well, magic. How he does it and what it means are questions that would take several episodes to unpack. In this one, Phil and JF begin the work by discussing how Dukes situates magic in an epistemic compass that also includes science, art, and religion. This set of tools is as essential to a holistic view of reality as the four suits in a deck of cards are essential to a proper poker game. In other words, when we lose magic, we lose a way of dealing with reality.
Sign up for JF's upcoming course on Macbeth
Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
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
REFERENCES
David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME
Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures
Weird Studies, Episode 139 on Art Power
Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy
“Virtual” and “Actual”, as developed by Bergson and Deleuze
Pragmatism, philosophical school
Jack Parsons, American rocket scientist
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return
William Shakespeare, Macbeth -
That Ain't Plot: On Hayao Miyazaki's 'Spirited Away'
Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is one of those rare films that is both super popular and super weird. Rife with cinematic non sequiturs, unforgettable imagery, and moments of horror, it is an outstanding example of a story form that goes all the way back to the myth of Psyche and Eros from Apuleius's Golden Ass, if not earlier. In this type of story, a girl on the cusp of maturity steps into a magical realm where people and things from waking life reappear, draped in the gossamer of dream and nightmare. Musicologist and WS assistant Meredith Michael joins JF and Phil to discuss a strange jewel of Japanese animated cinema.
Support us on Patreon and get early access to Phil Ford's new podcast series on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Sign up for JF's upcoming online course on Shakespeare's Macbeth on Nura Learning.
Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
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
REFERENCES
Hayao Miyazaki, Spirited Away
Kyle Gann, Robert Ashley
Robert Ashely, Perfect Lives
Apuleius, “Psyche and Eros” from The Golden Ass
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
Kentucky Route Zero, video game
Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, video game
Jean Sibelius, 5th Symphony
Quentin Tarantino, film maker
Mark Rothko, American painter
Giles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?”
GK Chesterton, Orthdoxy
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Andrew Osmond, BFI Guide to Spirited Away
Special Guest: Meredith Michael. -
Sex, Money, and Power are YOURS with our SECRET Art-Power Formula!
"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 -
Yours and Yours Alone: On the Death Card in the Tarot
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 -
The Weird Studies Christmas Special
We recorded this episode in early December for our Patreon subscribers, but as it's the closest thing to a Christmas special we're ever likely to make, we thought we'd slip it into everyone's stocking this year. In it, we discuss the Ford family's most recently acquired Christmas ornament (which Phil mistakenly calls a luminaria), gazing into the Christmas tree, the loneliness of little worlds, the mystery of incarnation, Colin Wilson's "Faculty X," and the utter weirdness of British Christmas specials.
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
REFERENCES
Erik Davis, A Brief History of the Phantasm
Colin Wilson, The Occult
The Dog House UK, TV series
The Christmas Lantern
Customer Reviews
Double whammy
The wedding episode is stunning and really made me look at my reactions to beautiful pieces of expression.
I had a double whammy. I saw Wender’s “Wings of Desire” and broke into sobs when Ganz is looking at the trapeze artist wearing wings and you realize he will give up his wings and become mortal. That just tore my up. A few evenings later I went to “Cirque du Soleil” and lo’ and behold there was a trapeze artist wearing wings high above the ground, I just broke down, I just couldn’t stop crying, it was both pain and joy (like a Ballardian world).
I had a similar response looking at an Anselm Kieffer piece.
Great work folks!
PS more about Deleuze’s Cinéma :-)
Brilliant and inspiring
I am hooked ! Ford and Martel are steeped ! I’m re-listening over and over….cancelled Netflix….hooked up on Patreon. It’s like sitting down with a couple of friends over a beer and having my mind blown !
MISSING PIECE - FOUND!
If you enjoy intellectual converstations about the weird - fringe topics - and the stranger avenues of pop culture - this is it. From Mothman, to Colin Wilson, to Kubrick, to Raiders of the Lost Ark - these guys are all over the place - and I love them for it. Disccussions run deep and dark and are frequently thought-provoking. I thought I was the only one who thought about this kind of stuff - but I never had anyone to talk to about it. Now I can listen to these guys and yell my two cents worth at the speakers! The missing piece of my life now found. Keep up the excellent work. Check it out.