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PODCAST

5 Star Tossers

Playful academic podcast that looks at movies and other cultural objects through the lens of 5 groovy themes: Pervs "R Us, Beast & Sovereign, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, Marx Grudge, and What Would Jesus Do?

arts

All Episodes

89:22

One Babel After Another: Walter Benjamin Finds Meme-ing

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/11/10

Dear, surviving, audient: how is it hanging? We\I sympathize. If you were looking to art as an answer, hoping for some revolutionary frameworks, or just plain ol' solace inside -- -- I'm afraid most of the pod's going to tell you to keep looking. In this one we watched 2 "political" movies released this year: Ari Aster's Eddington and Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. More generally, the 2 movies raised the question of what it means to ...

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82:43

Charlie Kirk: Can't We All Grieve Along

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/10/19

We wanted to talk about the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's assassination. We ended up returning to a question Sagi asked in the last episode (Bowser Bones): how do we talk to people who mean well but don't get more radical ideas? This question is so hard to answer, we meander on all sides of it. We speak about the violence of left and right, we speak about the performative insincerity of so many talking heads, and we think about a kind of psychotic manifest destiny that encourages so many people...

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113:24

Bowser Bones: The Fantasy of Biological Male Strength

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/09/21

Bowser bones is a phrase Andy and Jake came up with after playing way too much Mario Tennis. One afternoon, Jake chose to play as Bowser and easily defeated Andy, who was playing as Princess Peach. He accused Jake of cheating because Bowser's character has more power than Peach. This soon became a question about the assumption that man has more bone density than women. Andy pointed out what a gross fantasy it is whenever men assert this difference. Often times this assertion comes in the form...

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111:52

AI is still here: The Fragment on Machines, Progress,...

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/09/09

Well, we thought about AI again. This time Andy joined us. Jake, as promised, went Marx Grudge. He read from Marx's "Fragment on Machines," and listed the many lawsuits currently levied against "AI vendors." That said, he also couldn't help thinking about the future of porn. Sagi spoke about the metaphysical utilitarian progress underpinning AI, certain that the only real thing AI can do is solve the stupid analytic philosophy trolley problem. Oh, that and get a high score on an IQ test. Andy...

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101:36

Vats for Brains: AI and Automated Intelligence (Part I)

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/08/14

Hello there audient, How's life? So, for this summer of lovely weather and lovelier news the Tossers bring you the first of a two-part series of pods dealing with A.I. It'll be fun and light, much like this summer! This one was just me and Jake, as Andy and Jack are (surely) having the time of their lives elsewhere.. and we discuss so, so much. What is AI? Sagi argues it's not deserving of its name, giving a bad rap to intelligence, assuming we can indeed create it, that intelligence is withi...

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98:18

Pets: Our Imaginary Friends

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/07/19

As promised, our fun episode: pets! Did we end up keeping it G-rated and uncritical, no! Did we find a way to critique the adorable perfection of our feline and canine friends, yes! We also talked about sweet-16 Ponies, crazy cat ladies, imperialism, and Lacan's Imaginary.

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94:16

Fracking: A Priva(tiza)tion of Earth and Soul

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/06/21

Hello audient! (Jake says we have one more but I know it's still, as always, just you...) So we did an episode about fracking. Missing Jack on this one... We had a lot to say. But it was all pretty depressing. Still, as someone else had probably already said (#nocuck), if you don't open your eyes in the dark they could never get used to it (and see the little light that's left). Fracking is a technology meant to extract oil and gas, not from underground repositories or "pockets," but from roc...

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106:32

Tossers' Variety Show: Our Favorite Quotations

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/06/02

Today we shared 4 of our favorite quotations and discussed them on their own and in relation to each other. We quoted Dorothy Parker, Lex Luthor, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bob Dylan, Marvel Comics, Richard Rorty, Moby Dick, Ru Paul, Jacques Derrida, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka.

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116:58

The University, or Teaching Real Fucking Shit

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/05/18

Greetings, audient! This.. was... a long one. We each have our own scar tissue from university encounters, passionate moments of transformation and inspiration experienced alongside sad encounters with hopelessness, mediocrity and slave morality. So this one was more personal. The state of the University - as an institution, as a public good - has been in free fall for quite a while, well before contemporary dictators started slamming it down more forcefully (bullies invariably go for the wea...

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110:04

The Shit-Eating Grin: Defense Mechanism for a Modern...

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/04/19

Jake can't stop cursing in this episode. We discuss the terribly obnoxious, punch-deserving, smirk that refuses to listen to the Other. Though prevalent especially in the world of Maga punditry, whether it be Zionists smirking at the word genocide, or Michael Knowles donning smarm as his personality in general, the shit-eating grin is a weaponized rejection of thought. It also reveals the shame and guilt of the would be cocky grinner. Andy thinks about how despairing it is to see this contagi...

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86:31

Sherlock Holmes: Limited Bandwidth (Inc.)

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/03/31

Audient! This episode imposes upon us (well Jake mostly) the horrors of shoddy writing and bad aesthetics. And yet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation seems to be very much alive. How is that? Why? We get to touch on some long-neglected Star here, Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais, hearkening back to its post-structuralist origins. We go back down memory lane to when me and Jake were reading this exact critique of that exact attitude, that time between Analytic philosopher John Searle and...

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98:15

Nosferatu: Bringing the Finish Line Right To You

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/03/11

You gotta listen to it to believe it. Jake, Sagi, and Andy go Foucault, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lacan and Freud all over Nosferatu's Ass. There's demonic possessions, feminine jouissance, the Marquise de Sade shows up, Sagi defends masculine dignity, Andy introduces the Symbolic of Blood, Jake folds the text inside and out, Dracula is proclaimed the OG gooner, and we couldn't edit out all the laughter.

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96:20

The Hustler with an Unconscious of Gold: Homage to...

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/02/23

Greetings, audient! David Lynch passed away, and Sagi insisted on embarrassing his memory and us by making a tribute pod. Of course an oeuvre analysis is not Tossers style, but we found a nice angle in comparing his The Lost Highway with David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. Both movies deal in the impasses and monstrosities of masculine desire, a shared theme that reveals a deep, informative, difference between the two directors, each using the literary device of the double in his own film,...

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86:29

Revenge of the Nerds: Elon Musk, Silicon Valley,...

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/02/02

Welcome to a sad episode about the sad state of our world. If you thought the nerds taking over for the jocks was a sign of liberation, think again. The spiteful nature of the nerds knows no limits and certainly knows even less about care. Referring at times to the now canceled 1984 movie Revenge of the Nerds, we read this fantasy into the new conservative self-made man, the one who "does their own research," but never rereads. Are algorithims and social media inducing us all to live as socia...

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102:30

Late Stage NBA...

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/01/25

Hello, audient,We are discussing the NBA's crisis of viewership these days, how to analyze it, where to approach it from, who to blame...Jake takes the side of the NBA "worker"; a late-stage capitalism employee that has already fully adjusted to the true mentality of the sport - personal profit. He also raises the issue of homoerotoicism, which becomes particularly resonant with the fantasies of the white man towards the black man's body - othered, mystified and "supercharged." It's a fantasy...

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78:29

24: Jack Bauer's Beastly Christian Sovereignty in the...

5 Star Tossers ·

2025/01/11

Sagi and Jake take on the toxic political masculinity of Jack Bauer on their own. They speak about how the State of Emergency places Jack in a position outside the law, both beast (criminal) and sovereign. In this state Jack finds a Christian faith that ensures that every extra-legal decision he makes will save the lives of pure innocent and good Americans, specifically his erotic yet virginal daughter.

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96:12

Middle Age, and Middle Ages: The Tossers' 50th...

5 Star Tossers ·

2024/12/01

Dear, stubborn, listener,Are you still there?For our weirdly unlikely 50th Episode -- mine and Jake's Gold Anniversary or something(?) -- we went populist. Donald Trump's re-election is now fact, but the meaning of that fact remains to be articulated, engaged-with.We seem to be in agreement that more than Trump's winning the elections, the Democratic party lost it. Jake calls it 'libtardation;' we think it is a new socio-political category. Were they ever an alternative? Trump's campaign...

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93:43

Cultural Appropriation: The Terror and Promise of...

5 Star Tossers ·

2024/11/16

In this episode we discuss the absurdity of the taboo against cultural appropriation. Introducing specific examples like which Halloween costumes to wear, or which recipes you can and cannot cook, the Tossers argue that culture is itself appropriation, and thus the taboo attempts to inhibit something that can never be inhibited.To emphasize this universal necessity of cultural appropriation, we introduce theories of language.Jack introduces Wittgenstein's theory of language games and the impo...

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107:16

The Substance: The Capital and Narcissistic Horror of...

5 Star Tossers ·

2024/10/21

We all loved a movie, oh, actually Jack hated it.This is a perfect episode, you should listen to it. Aside from withering take downs of the myriad misreadings of Coralie Fargeat's new movie The Substance, we introduce you to the narcissistic split of the melancholic subject. Beginning with Freud and moving to Melanie Klein, we read this movie as a visceral portrayal of the infantile position that clamors for the good breast while being persecuted by the bad one. Andy discusses the metony...

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83:41

The Multiverse: Jesus, What a Racket!

5 Star Tossers ·

2024/10/06

With a healthy dose of disdain, we enter the multiverse via the Marvel movie Deadpool and Wolverine and the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere all at Once.Sagi talks about the hollow nostalgia of the cameo, and the way that the characters become something of a Heideggerian standing-reserve for more scenes, more plots, and more revenue. Is Sagi finally doing Marx Grudge?Andy wishes that the multiverse would remain solely a video game construct, ruing the day when Mickey Mouse and Wolver...

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66 results

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