Episode 28: Weird Music, Part Two

Episode 28: Weird Music, Part Two

Author: SpectreVision Radio October 2, 2018 Duration: 1:04:59
"Music is worth living for," Andrew W.K. sings in his latest rock anthem. In this second episode on the weirdness of music, JF and Phil focus on two works steeped in ambiguity and paradox: Bob Dylan's "Jokerman," from the landmark post-Christian album Infidels, and Franz Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz, No. 1: The Dance at the Village Inn," inspired by an episode in the Faust legend. If this conversation has a central theme, it may be music's power to unhinge every fixed binary, from God and the Devil to culture and nature. Music, as exemplified in these pieces, can put us in touch with the abiding mystery of the eternal in the historical, the unhuman in the human... The hills are alive! REFERENCES Bob Dylan, "Jokerman" Franz Liszt, “Mephisto Waltz no. 1,” performed by Boris Berezovsky Andrew WK, "Music is Worth Living For" Leonard Cohen, “The Future” C.G. Jung, Aion Douglas Rushkoff, Testament The Guardian, “Carthaginians sacrificed own children, archaeologists say” Garry Wills, "Our Moloch" Minoan snake goddess statues Richard Wagner, Parsifal http://www.monsalvat.no/ T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts Beckett, Not I Nikolaus Lenau, German Romantic poet Wolgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, translated by David Luke Weird Studies, Episode 3: Sin: "Ecstasy, and the White People" 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…