Episode 27: Weird Music, Part One

Episode 27: Weird Music, Part One

Author: SpectreVision Radio September 26, 2018 Duration: 1:18:32
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

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
Bonus: The Duke of Ellington [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:30
When the quarantine began, professors around the world raced to put their classes online, and for the Jacobs School's big undergraduate music history course (M402 represent!) Phil created a series of solo podcasts, many…
Episode 74: A Luminous Parasite: Jung on Art, Part Two [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:11:53
In this second part of their exploration of C. G. Jung's essay "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," JF and Phil try to discern the psychological and metaphysical implications of the great Swiss psycholog…
Episode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:04:42
This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," first delivered in a 1922 lecture. It was in this text that Jung m…
Episode 72: Morning of the Mutants: On the Castrati [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:14:28
For over two centuries in early modern Italy, boys were selected for their singing talent castrated before the onset of puberty. The goal was to preserve the qualities of their voice even as they grew into manhood. The p…
Episode 71: The Medium is the Message [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:25:35
On the surface, the phrase "the medium is the message," prophetic as it may have been when Marshall McLuhan coined it, points a now-obvious fact of our wired world, namely that the content of any medium is less important…
Episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:17:19
James Curcio is an American multidisciplinary artist and nonfiction writer whose works include the novels Join My Cult, The Party at the World's End, and the upcoming Tales from When I Had a Face. Recently, Curcio edited…
Episode 69: Special Episode: On Some Mental Effects of the Pandemic [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 59:38
What is there to say about the COVID-19 virus that hasn't already been said, over and over again, all around the world, in quaratined houses and on TV and social media and countless Zoom chats ... what can we say that yo…
Episode 68: On James Hillman's 'The Dream and the Underworld' [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:15:44
In 1979, the American psychologist James Hillman published The Dream and the Underworld, a polemical meditation on the nature of dreams. Rejecting the orthodoxies of both Freud and Jung, Hillman argued that the the "nigh…