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PODCAST

Weird Studies

SpectreVision Radio

Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality." SpectreVision Radio is a bespoke podcast network at the intersection between the arts and the uncanny, featuring a tapestry of shows exploring creativity, the esoteric, and the unknown. We’re a community for creators and fans vibrating around common curiosities, shared interests and persistent

arts philosophy

All Episodes

1:43:19

Episode 23: On Presence

Weird Studies ·

2018/08/15

Phil stops by JF's Canadian homestead for a raucous IRL conversation on the idea of presence. The range of topics includes objects of power, the magic of books, the mystery of the event, modernity's knack for making myths immanent, genius loci, the mad wonder of Blue Velvet, and the iron fist of the virtual. REFERENCES Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Bot Be Televised" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGaoXAwl9kw) Louis CK on smart phones at the ballet recital

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1:09:07

Episode 22: Divining the World with Joshua Ramey

Weird Studies ·

2018/08/01

American philosopher Joshua Ramey, author of The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and the Spiritual Ordeal, and Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency, joins Phil and JF to discuss a philosophical project whose implications go deep and weird. In his books and articles, Joshua proffers the vision of a world where divination -- whether or not it is recognized as such -- isn't just possible, but necessary for advancing knowledge, creating art, and forming communities

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1:05:41

Episode 21: The Trash Stratum - Part 2

Weird Studies ·

2018/07/13

The writings of underground filmmaker Jack Smith serve as a starting point for Phil and JF's second tour of the trash stratum. In their wanderings, they will uncover such moldy jewels as the 1944 film Cobra Woman, the exploitation flick She-Devils on Wheels, and (wonder of wonders) Hitchcock's Vertigo. The emergent focus of the conversation is the dichotomy of passionate commitment and ironic perspective, attitudes that largely determine whether a given object will turn out to appear as a negligible

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1:15:12

Episode 20: The Trash Stratum - Part 1

Weird Studies ·

2018/07/04

Is the Holy Grail a crushed beer can in the gutter? JF and Phil consider the implications of Philip K. Dick's line, "the symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum." Gnosticism, Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot, Thomas Ligotti's "The Order of Illusion," Jack Smith's glorification of moldy glamour, saints' relics that look like beef jerky -- all this and more in the first of a two-part conversation. REFERENCES Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth

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1:08:58

Episode 19: Intermezzo

Weird Studies ·

2018/06/20

After announcing that Weird Studies will be going to a bi-weekly release schedule for the summer, Phil and JF talk about how the podcast has gone so far and what's on the horizon (more guests!). Before long, they're digging deep into what makes each of them tick as weird speculators, locating the points at which their ideas differ and converge. The discussion touches on the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux, the theology of Tertullian, the Beatles, the Coke-Pepsi dichotomy, the art of religion, and

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1:01:01

Episode 18: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part Two

Weird Studies ·

2018/06/13

JF and Phil finally get down to brass tacks with William James's essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" At the heart of this essay is the concept of what James calls "pure experience," the basic stuff of everything, only it isn't a stuff, but an irreducible multiplicity of everything that exists -- thoughts as well as things. We're used to thinking that thoughts and things belong to fundamentally different orders of being, but what if thoughts are things, too? For one thing, psychical phenomena (a great

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47:35

Episode 17: Does 'Consciousness' Exist? - Part One

Weird Studies ·

2018/06/06

In this first part of their discussion of William James' classic essay in radical empiricism, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?", Phil and JF talk about the various ways we use the slippery C-word in contemporary culture. The episode touches on the political charge of the concept of consciousness, the unholy marriage of materialism and idealism ("Kant is the ultimate hipster"), the role of consciousness in the workings of the weird -- basically, anything but the essay in question. That will come in part

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1:11:27

Episode 16: On Dogen Zenji's 'Genjokoan'

Weird Studies ·

2018/05/30

JF and Phil tackle Genjokoan, a profound and puzzling work of philosophy by Dogen Zenji. In it, the 13th-century Zen master ponders the question, "If everything is already enlightened, why practice Zen?" As a lapsed Zen practitioner ("a shit buddhist") with many hours of meditation under his belt, Phil draws on personal experience to dig into Dogen's strange and startling answers, while JF speaks from his perspective as a "decadent hedonist." "When one side is illumined," says Dogen, "the other is

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1:04:34

Episode 15: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part Two

Weird Studies ·

2018/05/23

In this second of a two-part conversation on Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, Phil and JF explore the film's prophetic dimension, relating it to Samuel R. Delany's classic science-fiction novel Dhalgren, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the affordances of despair, the spookiness of color, the transformation of noise into music, and the Chernobyl disaster. They even come up with a title for a novel Robert Ludlum never wrote but should have written: The Criterion Rendition! REFERENCES Andrei

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41:03

Episode 14: On Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' - Part One

Weird Studies ·

2018/05/16

Journey into the Zone to uncover some of the strange artifacts buried in Tarkovsky's cinematic masterpiece, Stalker (1979). In this first of a two-part conversation, Phil and JF discuss a poem by Tarkovsky's dad, compare the film with the sci-fi novel that inspired it, explore the ideological underpinnings of formulaic genre, delve into the meaning and affordances of the concept of zone, and affirm that in a sufficiently weird mindset, even a casual stroll in your hometown can become an excursion

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1:21:02

Episode 13: The Obscure: On the Philosophy of Heraclitus

Weird Studies ·

2018/05/09

Heraclitus of Ephesus was one of the great pre-Socratic thinkers. Called the Obscure and the Weeping Philosopher, he left behind a collection of fragments so mysterious and pregnant with meaning that they continue to puzzle scholars to this day. In this episode, Phil and JF use a random number generator to select a number of fragments and speculate about their content. By the end, they will also have disclosed the bizarre contents of JF's tenth-grade "hippie bag," outed Oscar Wilde as a Zen

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1:28:20

Episode 12: The Dark Eye: On the Films of Rodney Ascher

Weird Studies ·

2018/05/02

American filmmaker Rodney Ascher is a master of the weird documentary. Whether he be exploring wild interpretations of a classic horror film in Room 237, bracketing the phenomenon of sleep paralysis in The Nightmare, studying the uncanny power of the moving image in "Primal Screen," or considering the sinister power of a kitschy logo in "The S from Hell," Ascher confronts his viewers with realities that resist final explanations and facile reduction. In this episode, Phil and JF follow Ascher's

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1:15:55

Episode 11: Art is a Haunting Spirit

Weird Studies ·

2018/04/25

M. R. James' "The Mezzotint" is one of the most fascinating, and most chilling, examples of the classic ghost story. In this episode, Phil and JF discover what this tale of haunted images and buried secrets tells us about the reality of ideas, the singularity of events, the virtual power of the symbol, and the enduring magic of the art object in the age of mechanical reproduction. To accompany this episode, Phil recorded a full reading of the story. Listen to it here

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27:34

Weird Stories: M. R. James' "The Mezzotint"

Weird Studies ·

2018/04/23

M. R. James has been hailed as the unrivalled maser of the classic ghost tale, and his powers are at their zenith in "The Mezzotint," a story that first appeared in his 1904 collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. In it, James reimagines the Gothic trope of the haunted picture in a weird new light. The text, read here by co-host Phil Ford, serves as a springboard for Weird Studies episode 11, where we discuss the enduring power of the art object in the age of mechanical reproduction.

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1:23:43

Episode 10: Philip K. Dick: Adrift in the Multiverse

Weird Studies ·

2018/04/18

In 1977, Philip K. Dick read an essay in France entitled, "If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others." In it, he laid out one of the dominant tropes of his fictional oeuvre, the idea of parallel universes. It became clear in the course of the lecture that Dick didn't intend this to be a talk about science fiction, but about real life - indeed, about his life. In this episode, Phil and JF seriously consider the speculations which, depending on whom you ask, make PKD either a

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1:16:03

Episode 9: On Aleister Crowley and the Idea of Magick

Weird Studies ·

2018/04/11

The plan was to discuss the introduction to Aleister Crowley's classic work, Magick in Theory and Practice (1924), a powerful text on the nature and purpose of magical practice. JF and Phil stick to the plan for the first part of the show, and then veer off into a dialogue on the basic idea of magic. Along the way, they share some of the intriguing results of their own occult experiments. REFERENCES Photo (https://uploads.fireside.fm/images/e/e38b53e4-e148-4e2d-b301-0b3bb15779ff/fpTCS4XJ.jpg) of

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1:12:12

Episode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"

Weird Studies ·

2018/04/04

JF and Phil discuss Graham Harman's "The Third Table," a short and accessible introduction to "object-oriented ontology." Phil takes us on a tour of his closet, we discover that JF's kids are better at this weird studies stuff than their old man, and the conversation veers through Harman's Lovecraftian "weird realism," Zen's "just sit" meditation, panpsychism, Martin Buber's I and Thou, experimental filmmaking, and more. WORKS AND IDEAS CITED IN THIS EPISODE Graham Harman, "The Third Table

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1:05:47

Episode 7: The Unspeakable Mystery at the Heart of...

Weird Studies ·

2018/03/28

For as long as they've been pounding the crap out of each other for good reasons, humans have also been pounding the crap out of each other for fun. Everywhere, in ever age, elaborate systems, rituals, and traditions have arisen to ring in the practice of violence and thereby offer the rough beast that lurks in every soul a chance to come out for a stretch in the sun. In this episode, Phil and JF delve into one of the most scandalous affairs of all: the illicit dalliance of Aphrodite and Ares,

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1:18:32

Episode 6: Dungeons & Dragons, or the Reality of...

Weird Studies ·

2018/03/21

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was one of the first thinkers to define games as exercises in world-making. Every game, he wrote, occurs within a magic circle where the rules of ordinary life are suspended and new laws come into play. No game illustrates this better than Gary Gygax's tabletop RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. In this episode, Phil and JF use D&D as the focus of a conversation about the weird interdependence of reality and fantasy. Header image: Gaetan Bahl (Wikimedia Commons) WORKS CITED

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1:08:51

Episode 5: Reading Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool"

Weird Studies ·

2018/03/13

Phil and JF discuss Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool," an essay on the postmodern humanities and its allergy to essences -- especially that personal essence we call soul. Maybe the soul is a heap of miscellaneous notions and influences that I paint a face onto and then call "me." Or maybe there is something under that painted effigy of the self. If so, what? And if there's nothing under there, could it be a nothing that delivers? WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE Lisa Ruddick, "When Nothing is

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