Episode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'

Episode 25: David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch'

Author: SpectreVision Radio September 12, 2018 Duration: 1:20:36
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

At the heart of Weird Studies, a podcast from SpectreVision Radio, you’ll find long-form conversations between Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel. Their discussions aren’t simple reviews or straightforward analyses; instead, they wander through the tangled undergrowth where art and philosophy meet, giving generous time to concepts that resist easy understanding and to creative works that fracture our ordinary sense of the world. This podcast deliberately lingers in that ambiguous space, treating the “weird” not as a genre but as a particular mode of experience-one that reveals the cracks in what we comfortably assume is real. Each episode feels like joining a deep, meandering dialogue between two friends who are both deeply knowledgeable and endlessly curious, covering a vast terrain that includes literature, film, music, and esoteric thought. It’s a show for anyone who suspects that the most profound truths are often found in the shadows, the anomalies, and the strangely beautiful. As part of the SpectreVision Radio network, which specializes in content that explores the uncanny edges of creativity, Weird Studies builds a unique community of listeners who are eager to think differently. You won’t find pat answers here, but you will encounter compelling questions and a shared sense of exploration that makes each installment a distinctive journey.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 230

Weird Studies
Podcast Episodes
Episode 141: Actual Magic: On Ramsey Dukes' SSOTBME [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:24:46
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 shor…
Episode 138: Yours and Yours Alone: On the Death Card in the Tarot [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:15:47
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 Weird Studies Christmas Special [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 38:24
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, w…
Episode 137: Brute Force: on Sunn O)))'s 'Life Metal' [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:15:30
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 incon…
Episode 135: On 'The Secret Life of Puppets,' with Victoria Nelson [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:05
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…
Episode 134: On Federico Campagna's 'Technic and Magic' [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:33:11
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 on…