Weird Studies

A wish-fulfilment fantasy for pubescent boys of all ages, or a subtle disquisition on the ethics of a sorcerous world? John Milius' Conan the Barbarian (1982) manages to be both, although one may be easy to overlook. In this episode, JF and Phil leave the heights of Hesse's The Glass Bead Game with a headlong dive to the trash stratum. Their wager: that Conan the Barbarian, a film without a hint of irony, is a spiritual statement that is equal parts empowering and disquieting, and a prime of example of how fantasy is sometimes the straightest way to the heart of reality. REFERENCES John Milus (dir.), Conan the Barbarian (1982) Richard Fleischer (dir.), Conan the Destroyer (1984) Robert E. Howard, American writer, author of the Conan stories Jack Smith, "On the Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez" Weird Studies #3: Ecstasy, Sin, and "The White People" H. P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" Fritz Leiber, American writer Weird Studies #95: Demon Seed: On Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child

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 Gol

JF and Phil have been talking about doing a show on The Glass Bead Game since Weird Studies' earliest beginnings. It is a science-fiction novel that alights on some of the key ideas that run through the podcast: the dichotomy of work and play, the limits and affordances of institutional life, the obscure boundary where certainty gives way to mystery... Throughout his literary career, Hesse wrote about people trying to square their inner and outer selves, their life in the spirit and their life in the world. The Glass Bead Game brings this central concern to a properly ambiguous and heartbreaking conclusion. But the novel is more than a brilliant work of philosophical or psychological literature. It is also an act of prophecy -- one that seems intended for us now. Header image by Liz West, via Wikimedia Commons. REFERENCES Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game Paul Hindemith, German composer Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture Alfred Korzybski, concept of Time Binding Christopher Nolan, Mem

Modern skeptics pride themselves on being immune to unreason. They present themselves as defenders of rationality, civilization, and good sense against what Freud famously called the "black mud-tide of occultism." But what if skepticism was more implicated in the phenomena it aims to banish than it might appear to be? What if no one could debunk anything without getting some of that black mud on their hands? In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the weird complicity of the skeptic and the believer in the light of George P. Hansen's masterpiece of meta-parapsychology, The Trickster and the Paranormal. REFERENCES George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal James Randi, stage magician and paranormal debunker Michael Shermer, American science writer CSICOP, Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, Publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer Rune Soup, Interview with George P. Hansen Weird Studies, Episode 24 with Lionel Snell Weird Studies, Episode 89 on Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo

Joy Williams' third novel, Breaking and Entering, is the story of lovers who break into strangers' homes and live their lives for a time before moving on. First published in 1988, it is a book impossible to describe, a work of singular vision and sensibilty that is as infectious in its weird effect as it is unforgettable for the quality of its prose. In this episode, the novelist, spiritual thinker, and acclaimed podcaster Conner Habib joins JF and Phil to explore how the novel's enchantments rest on the uniqueness of Williams' style, which is to say, her bold embrace of ways of seeing that are hers alone. Williams is an artist who refuses to work from within some predetermined philosophical or political idiom. As Habib tells your hosts, she goes her own way, and even the gods must follow. Discover Against Everyone with Conner Habib on Patreon Support Weird Studies on Patreon: Buy the soundtrack Find us on Discord Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studi

In this episode, Weird Studies turns meta, reflecting on the peculiar medium that is podcasting, and how it has shaped the Weird Studies project itself. JF and Phil provide a glimpse into what it feels like to create the show from the inside, where each recording session is like a journey into an unknown Zone. The conversation also occasions sojourns into the flow state, or experience of pure durée, its implications for our conception of free will, and surprising parallels between modern materialists’ adherence to nihilism and ancient religious ascetic practices. Ultimately, JF and Phil explore the archetypal image of the wanderer as representative of Weird Studies’s existence so far, and of the kind of impact and legacy this project can have. N.B. Weird Studies will be on a haitus for the month of September, and will return on September 29. In the meantime: Support us on Patreon: Find us on Discord Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Buy t

The Twin Peaks mythos has been with Weird Studies from the very beginning, and it is only fitting that it should have a return. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Tamler Sommers, co-host of the podcast Very Bad Wizards to discuss Fire Walk with Me, the prequel film to the original Twin Peaks series. Paradoxically, David Lynch’s work both necessitates and resists interpretation, and the pull of detailed interpretation is unusually strong in this episode. The three discuss how Fire Walk with Me, and the series as a whole, depicts two separate worlds that sometimes begin to intermingle, disrupting the perceived stability of time and space. Often this happens in moments of extreme fear or love. Through their love for Laura Palmer and for the film under consideration, JF, Phil, and Tamler enact their own interpretation, entering a rift where the world of Twin Peaks and the “real” world seem to merge, demonstrating how Twin Peaks just won’t leave this world alone, and can become a way for disenchanted moder

It is said that for several days after the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the spring of 1967, you could have driven from one U.S. coast to the other without ever going out of range of a local radio broadcast of the album. Sgt. Pepper was, in a sense, the first global musical event -- comparable to other sixties game-changers such as the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing. What's more, this event is as every bit as strange as the latter two; it is only custom and habit that blind us to the profound weirdness of Sgt. Pepper. In this episode, Phil and JF reimagine the Beatles' masterpiece as an egregore, a magical operation that changes future and past alike, and a spiritual machine for "turning us on" to the invisible background against which we strut and fret our hours on the stage. Support us on Patreon: Find us on Discord Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack REFERENCES Weird Stud

Continuing their series on the tarot, Phil and JF discuss the card nobody wants to see in a reading – The Tower. Featuring lightning bolts, plumes of ominous smoke, and figures plummeting from the windows, the Tower’s meaning at first glance seems clear: “pride comes before a fall,” as the old adage goes. But as JF and Phil delve into the details, they note not only the card’s connection to the Biblical tower of Babel and the fall of man, but also its relevance to the present era’s systems of control and communication breakdown. This discussion leads them to search for an antidote to the Tower's message of destruction. References Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of the Tarot Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Arnold Schoenberg, Austrian composer Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” Wilco, “Radio Cure” Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies George Cukor (dir.), A Star is Born Performativity, sociological concept Guy Debord, Society of t

"What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" With this question, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens her famous poem "A Musical Instrument," which explores nature's troubling embrace of savagery and beauty. It seems that Pan always raises questions: What is he doing? What does he want? Where will he appear next? Linked to instinct, compulsion, and the spontaneous event, Pan is without a doubt the least predictable of the Greek Gods. Small wonder that he alone in the Greek pantheon sports human and animal parts. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Gyrus, author of the marvellous North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos, to capture a deity who, though he has made more than one appearance on Weird Studies, remains decidedly elusive. Support us on Patreon: Find us on Discord Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop REFERENCES Gyrus, "Sketches of the Goat God in Albion" Gyrus, North James Hillman

In modern physics as in Western theology, darkness and shadows have a purely negative existence. They are merely the absence of light. In mythology and art, however, light and darkness are enjoy a kind of Manichaean equality. Each exists in its own right and lays claim to one half of the Real. In this episode, JF and Phil delve into the luxuriant gloom of the Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanazaki's classic meditation on the half-forgotten virtues of the dark. Get your Weird Studies MERCH! https://www.redbubble.com/people/Weird-Studies/shop?asc=u Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies Find us on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/Jw22CHfGwp Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/weirdstudies REFERENCES Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows Chiaroscuro, Renaissance art style John Carpenter (dir.), Escape from L.A. Weird Studies, Episode 13 on Heraclitus Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction Yasujiro Ozu (dir.), Late Spring Wa

Central to the tradition of cosmic horror is the suggestion that the ultimate truth about our universe is at once knowable and unthinkable, such that one learns it only at the cost of one's sanity and soul. John Carpenter is one of a handful of horror directors to have successfully ported this idea from literature to cinema. This episode is an attempt to unearth some of the eldritch symbols buried in a selection of Carpenter's apocalyptic works, including Escape from New York, The Thing, They Live,_ In the Mouth of Madness_, and the little known Cigarette Burns. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/weirdstudies Find us on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/Jw22CHfGwp Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/weirdstudies REFERENCES John Carpenter films discussed: The Thing Cigarette Burns In the Mouth of Madness Prince of Darkness Halloween They Live Escape from New York Escape from L.A. Big Trouble in Little China Other References: Pascal Laugier (dir.), Marty

In this never-before-released episode recorded in 2019, Phil and JF travel to rural Oregon through the Netflix docu-series, Wild Wild Country. The series, which details the establishment of a spiritual community founded by Bhagwan Rajneesh (later called Osho) and its religious and political conflicts with its Christian neighbors, provides a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of spirituality and religion. What emerges are surprising ties between the “spiritual, not religious” attitude and class, cultural commodification, and the culture of control that pervades modern society. But they also uncover the true “wild” card at the heart of existence that spiritual movements like that of Rajneesh can never fully control, no matter how hard they try. REFERENCES Chapman and Maclain Way (dirs), Wild Wild Country Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste Carl Wilson, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the

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

The question of art has been of central concern for JF and Phil since Weird Studies began in 2018. What is art? What can it do that other things can't do? How is it connected to religion, psyche, and our current historical moment? Is the endless torrent of advertisements, entertainment, memes, and porn in which seem hopelessly immersed a manifestation of art or of something else entirely? In this exploration of the main ideas in JF's book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, your hosts focus on these burning questions in hopes that the answers might shed light on our collective predicament and the paths that lead out of it. Photo by Petar Milošević via Wikimedia Commons REFERENCES JF's upcoming course on the nature and power of art, starting May 10th, 2021 JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice Weird Studies, Episode 84 on the Empress card Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Ody

Jean Cocteau's visionary rendition of Madame de Beaumont's fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast," itself the retelling of a story that may be several millennia old, is the topic of this Weird Studies episode, which proposes a journey down lunar paths to the crossroads where love and death intersect. Drawing on Surrealism, myth, and the occult, Cocteau's 1946 film transcends the limitations of media to become a living poem, a thing that is also a place, a place that is also a mind. This conversation touches on the genius of the child, the mysteries of Eros, the monstrosity of consciousness, and the sorcery of cinema. Photo by Ivan Jevtic on Unsplash Click here to register for JF's upcoming course on art. REFERENCES Jean Cocteau (dir.), La Belle et la Bête Jaques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry Sergei Diaghilev, Russian impresario Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (dir.), Beauty and the Beast David Thomson, Have You Seen? Bram Stoker, Dracula Johannes Vermeer, Dutch painter Philip Glass, L

Doris Lessing's uncategorizable oeuvre reached strange new heights in 1988 with the publication of her short novel The Fifth Child. The story couldn't be simpler. In the England of the 1970s, a couple determined to live out a dream that many of their generation have rejected -- the big family in the old house with the pretty garden -- conceive a child that may or may not be human. From that moment on, the boy, their fifth, becomes the alien force that will tear their dream to pieces. Profoundly ambiguous and unsettling, The Fifth Child is a weird novel that raises questions about parenthood, family, and the impenetrable depths of nature. Header Image: The Changeling by Henry Fuseli (1780) Additional music: "Fast Bossa Nova: Falling Stars" by Dee Yan-Key REFERENCES Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child Doris Lessing, Shikasta M. R. James, weird fiction author Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire Weird Studies, Episode 67 on “Hellier” Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets David Icke, conspiracy th

"Here is a weird, deceptive life." Thus does Aleister Crowley describe the meaning of one of the most sinister and spectral cards in the tarot. In this episode, Phil and JF continue their ongoing series on the twenty-two major trumps with a deep dive into the hopelessly enigmatic world of Arcanum XVIII: The Moon. After a brief chat about Voltron and professional wrestling, your hosts start on the lunar path beset by traps and illusions, in hopes that their half-blind perambulation will lead to startling insights. Image by Damien Deltenre via Wikimedia Commons. References Roland Barthes, Mythologies Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot Colin Wilson, The Occult Eliphas Levi,_ French esotericist Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo Weird Studies, [Episode 86 on The Sandman](weirdstudies.com/86) Plato, Republic Antoine Faivre, scholar of esoteric studies Wouter Hanegraaff, historian of philosophy Alastair Crowley, Book of Thoth Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis Peter Kings

In A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor tries to come to grips with the seismic development that transformed the world after the Renaissance, namely the secularization of the society and soul of Western humanity. What does it mean to live in an age where religion, once the very matrix of social existence, is relegated to the realm of private and personal choice? What defines secularity? Are modern people really as "irrelegious" as we make them out to be? In this episode, JF and Phil squarely train their sights on a question that continues to haunt them, with Taylor as their Virgil in what amounts to a descent into the ordinary inferno of modern unknowing. Header Image by Pahudson, via Wikimedia Commons REFERENCES Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page Charles Taylor, A Secular Age Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity Weird Studies, ep 71: The Medium is the Message Penn & Teller, Bullshit René Descartes, Meditations Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter-Culture Thomas Aquinas, Sum

With his latest film, a meditation on what it means to believe we live in a computer simulation, Rodney Ascher has once again placed himself among the most innovative and visionary filmmakers working in the documentary form today. While the "Simulation Hypothesis" has been a hot topic ever since The Matrix came out in 1997, it is Ascher's ability to suspend judgement, training his camera on the experience of believers rather than the value of their beliefs, that makes A Glitch in the Matrix such a unique and significant exploration, a strange work of "phantom phenomenology." Weird Studies listeners will recall that Phil and JF devoted an episode to Ascher's films -- most notably Room 237 and The Nightmare -- back in the early days of the podcast. In this episode, Rodney Ascher joins them to discuss his cinematic vision, his take on the weird, and his thoughts on what is real and why it matters. REFERENCES [Rodney Ascher](www.rodneyascher.com), American filmmaker -- [A Glitch in the Matrix](www.aglitchi