Weird Studies

Occasionally, JF and Phil do a song swap. Each host chooses a song he loves and shares it with the other, and then they record an episode on it. This time, JF chose to discuss "Jesus, Etc." from Wilco's 2001 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Phil picked Judee Sill's ethereal "The Kiss," from Heart Food (1973). It was in the zone of Time, in all its strangeness, that the two songs began to resonate with one another. Sill's song is a fated grasping at the eternal that is present even when it eludes us, and "Jesus, Etc." is a leap across time that captures, in jagged shards and signal bursts, the events of the day on which Wilco's album was scheduled to drop: September 11, 2001. 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! REFERENCES Judee Sill, “The Kiss” Ja

David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks has been a touchstone of Weird Studies since the podcast's inception. Back in 2018, Phil and JF recorded Episode 1: Garmonbozia while still reeling from the series' third season, which aired on Showtime the year before. Now, in preparation for their upcoming course on Twin Peaks, they watched the third season again and recorded this episode. Their conversation touched on the virtues of late style in the arts, the divergence of knowing and understanding, the fate of Agent Dale Cooper, and the dream logic of the _Twin Peaks _universe. Last change to sign up for The Twin Peaks Mythos, a 4-week Weird Studies view-along starting June 8th, 2023. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle. 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! REFERENCES Symposium at Lily Dale

Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" ends on a note that has puzzled and inspired readers for more than a century: "For there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life." In this episode, JF and Phil search for the meaning of this ethico-aesthetic imperative that Rilke heard resounding from a fragment of Greek statuary. This episode is special because the hosts were able to record it in person while on a writing retreat in Western Quebec. Enroll in THE TWIN PEAKS MYTHOS, a 4-week Weird Studies view-along starting June 8th. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle. 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! REFERENCES Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life Michel Foucault, The Order of Things He Man, superhero

Of the twenty-two figures that make up the major arcana of the tarot, the Chariot is probably the most commonplace. While the tenth arcanum is a wheel, it's The Wheel of Fortune, not just any old wagon wheel. But arcanum VII is neither the Chariot of Fire or the Chariot of the Gods – just the plain old chariot. Usually, it is interpreted as a symbol of the will in its lower and higher aspects. In this episode, Phil notes that the Chariot can also symbolize something as ordinary as new car. Of course, here on Weird Studies, no car is just a car, and we like to think that Youngblood Priest, the protagonist of the 1972 film Super Fly, would agree. A car also a tool, a medium, a token of mastery, an atmospheric disturbance, a means of manifestation, a spaceship... Enroll in THE TWIN PEAKS MYTHOS, a 4-week Weird Studies view-along starting June 8th. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle. Download Pierre

In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Vanessa Onwuemezi's, "Dark Neighbourhood," a tale of scintillant darkness from her debut collection of the same name. This strangest of strange stories is set in a vast encampment of destitute yet hopeful people whose lives consist entirely of waiting for their turn to step through the iron gates of the Beyond. Living off the dregs of civilization, they seem the last of our kind. They are the ones who, having made it to the front of the line, have the dubious honour of contemplating directly the mystery that awaits us all. Unlike anything we've covered on the show, "Dark Neighbourhood" is a chilling and moving story that elicits interpretation as elegantly as it resists it. Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue drops on May 1st, 2023! 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

In the 1980s, Clive Barker burst onto the cultural scene with The Books of Blood, collections of unforgettable tales of horror, depravity, and decadence the likes of which had been seldom seen since the days of Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror and Huysmans' Là-Bas. In the decades that followed, he went on to create an astounding body of work in fantasy and horror as a writer, artist, and film director. In this episode, author, lecturer, and podcaster Conner Habib joins JF and Phil to discuss what is arguably Barker's best-known work, the 1987 horror classic Hellraiser, as well as the novella that inspired it, "The Hellbound Heart." 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

In the 1950s, Carl Jung expressed frustration at the impenetrability of the UFO mystery, the "strange, unknown, and indeed contradictory nature" of this "ostensibly physical phenomenon" with "an extremely important psychic component." Throughout his writings on the topic, he marvels at the impossibility of coming to even preliminary conclusions. Fastforward to 2023, after a series of astounding disclosures on the part of qualified government people, and we have as much reason to be baffled as we ever had. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the mercurial, tricksterish fact of ortherwordly things seen in the sky. Learn more about the Ohio UFO Heritage Conference on May 5-6, 2023. 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

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-shi

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 Sup

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 mug

"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 Anthr

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 t

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 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 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

"We are the things that were and shall be again." So a demonic flesh puppet tells Ash and his allies in a memorable scene from the classic splatstick flick Evil Dead II. In addition to being a rollicking piece of entertainment, Evil Dead II is an expertly crafted film whose director used every tool and technique to generate a cinematic experience that is – as the tagline went – "2 terrifying, 2 frightening ... 2 much!" In this episode, JF and Phil court the absurd by turning a fun 80s horror movie into a statement on the dread aspirations of matter and a shining example of the modern baroque. 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 Sam Raimi (dir.), The Evil Dead II Weird Studies, Episode 121 on Mandy and the Bandwagon Joe Bob Briggs, American movie critic Cha

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

In Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, the philosopher Federico Campagna argues that we moderns have exhausted the reality system we devised at the dawn of our age, a system he calls Technic. Technic has one goal: to reduce all things to language by naming, tagging, measuring, and quantifying them, by turning every parcel of the physical and psychic universe into a "unit" defined by its position in the system. The result has been an erasure of the mere "suchness" of things, the singularity of things simply existing as they are. To replace a worldview that is now revealing its endemic nihilism, Campagna proposes Magic, a way of seeing that reestablishes a balance between the measurable and the ineffable. JF and Phil discuss Campagna's magisterial performance in this episode. 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, c

With the term "weird studies" gaining currency inside and outside academia, Phil and JF thought it was time to discuss the philosophical method they've been developing on the podcast since 2018. Borrowing a term from Erik Davis, they call it weirding, and here set about trying to understand what it is, and what it means. David Lynch's fondness for crying, the practice of queering in cultural theory, the all-too-real phenomenon of "global weirding,"the spooky agency of artworks, and the tragic death of E.T. at the hands of Damien Hirst are just a few of the subjects touched on in the conversation. "Weirding" also happens to be the working title of the book your hosts are writing for Strange Attractor Press, as well as an eight-week series of lectures and discussions starting October 25th, 2022, on the Nura Learning platform. Header image: David Lynch, Mulholland Drive Link to the upcoming course: Weirding: An 8-Week Course With the Hosts of the Weird Studies Podcast SHOW NOTES Ludwig van Beethoven, 9th

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 ima

In this bonus episode, originally released for Listener's Tier Patreon supporters, a discussion of the books Phil and JF are reading leads to a debate about the place of plot, story, and worldbuilding in narrative art. The episode contains information on "Weirding," a new course that the hosts of Weird Studies will be teaching together at Nura Learning, starting in late October. Visit nuralearning.com for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices