Episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio

Episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio

Author: SpectreVision Radio April 1, 2020 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 Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice, an anthology of essays by various thinkers and artists on the complex interplay of fact and fiction, self and other, in the life of the modern creator of artistic works. David Bowie's career, from the early experimentations to the great working that was his final album Blackstar, provides the book's gravitational field. In his effort to better plumb the mysteries of the aesthetic universe, Curcio penned the anthology's opening essay, "Masks All the Way Down," and it is on that piece that this conversation focuses. Join James, Phil and JF as they discuss the terrifying and liberating idea of an aesthetic cosmos as seen from the vantage point of the artist who learns that with new each work comes a new face, an amalgam of symbols and forces drawn from a depth of surfaces, a paper-thin dream that goes ever so deep... REFERENCES James Curcio (editor), [Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice](www.intellectbooks/masks) James Curcio's website: https://www.jamescurcio.com James Curcio's new novel, [Tales from When I Had a Face](www.TalesFromWhenIHadAFace.com) David Bowie, Blackstar Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex Poppy, American singer Anatta, the Buddhist concept of no-self Nagarjuna, Indian philosopher Yukio Mishima, Japanese writer Hunter S. Thompson, American writer Lewis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in Untimely Meditations Ornette Coleman, Change of the Century Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu Vladimir Nabokov, Russian novelist Nicholas Roeg (director), The Man Who Fell to Earth Raphael Bob-Waksberg (creator), BoJack Horseman Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society Euripides, The Bacchae Special Guest: James Curcio. 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…