There are artists who express the vision of a place, person, or thing so vividly and originally that it sets the bar for all future imaginings. With his four Mad Max films, this is what George Miller did with the image of the Wasteland. No one has been able to capture the stark, raw energy and chaotic beauty of a post-apocalyptic desert quite like Miller. His portrayal not only defines the aesthetic of a cinematic world but also prompts us to think about the meaning of civilization, technology, humanity, and how they intertwine. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss how Mad Max challenges our perception of civilization, and our conception of the human.

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Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
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REFERENCES

George Miller (dir.), Mad Max
George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: The Road Warrior
George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdrome
George Miller (dir.), Mad Max: Fury Road
Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk
Stanley Kubrick (dir.), A Clockwork Orange
Sam Raimi (dir), The Quick and the Dead
Joe Bob Briggs, movie critic
Phil Ford, “The Wanderer”
Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Nomadology
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot

Ithell Colquhoun (1906-1988) was a British painter, poet, and occultist, long identified as a pioneer of the Surrealist movement in the UK. While her work is increasingly recognized for its mystical themes and innovative use of automatic techniques, deeply influenced by her esoteric studies, it also inspired extensive research on its broader cultural and spiritual contexts. Amy Hale, an anthropologist, folklorist, and author, has dedicated much of her career to exploring Cornwall, the fabled region of southwest England that became Colquhoun’s spiritual home. Hale’s book, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully, published by Strange Attractor Press, offers a profound biographical study of Colquhoun, examining the historical and spiritual forces that influenced her work. In this episode, she joins JF and Phil to discuss Colquhoun, Cornwall, and the transformative power of research and writing.

REFERENCES

Amy Hale, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully
Agnes Callard, I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is
Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking

Special Guest: Amy Hale.

In culture and the arts, labeling something you don't like (or don't understand) "pretentious" is the easy way out. It's a conversation killer, implying that any dialogue is pointless, and those who disagree are merely duped by what you've cleverly discerned as a charade. It's akin to cynically revealing that a magic show is all smoke and mirrors—as if creative vision doesn't necessitate a leap of faith. In this episode, Phil and JF explore the nuances of pretentiousness, distinguishing between its fruitful and hollow forms. They argue that the real gamble, and inherent value, of daring to pretend lies in recognizing that imagination is an active contributor to, rather than a detractor from, reality.

Pierre-Yves Martel's EPHEMERA project

It isn't too late to join JF's upcoming course on the films of Stanley Kubrick, which goes until the end of April, 2024.
Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices
Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why it Matters
Ramsay Dukes, How to See Fairies
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Weird Studies, Episode 49 on Nietzsche’s idea of “untimely”
Sokal Affair, scholarly hoax
Weird Studies, Episode 75 on ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
Stanley Kubrick, “Notes on Film”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Abuses of History
Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak
Mary Shelley, “Introduction to Frankenstein”
Matt Cardin, A Course in Demonic Creativity
Playboy interview with Stanley Kubrick

"Let the red dawn surmise / What we shall do, / When the blue starlight dies / And all is through." This short poem, an epigraph to "The Yellow Sign," arguably the most memorable tale in Robert W. Chambers' 1895 collection The King in Yellow, encapsulates in four brief lines the affect that drives cosmic horror: the fearful sense of imminent annihilation. In the four stories JF and Phil discuss in this episode, this affect, which would inspire a thousand works of fiction in the twentieth century, emerges fully formed, dripping with the xanthous milk of Decadence. What’s more, it is here given a symbol, a face, and a home in the Yellow Sign, the Pallid Mask of the Yellow King, and the lost land of Carcosa. Come one, come all.

Join JF's upcoming course on the films of Stanley Kubrick, starting March 28, 2024.
Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow
Weird Studies, Episode 100 on John Carpenter films
Algernon Blackwood, “The Man Who Found Out”
Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Thought Forms
Weird Studies, Episode 140 on “Spirited Away”
Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
David Bentley Hart, “Angelic Monster”
M. R. James, Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad”
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

What is expressionism? A school? A movement? A philosophy? At the end of this episode, Phil and JF agree that it is, above all, a sensibility, one that surfaces periodically in history, punctuating it with occasional bursts of frenetic colour and eruptions of light and shadow. Whenever it appears, expressionism challenges our tendency to divide the world up into neat quadrants: mind and matter, subject and object lose their legitimacy as they start to bleed into one another. Prior to recording, your hosts agreed to focus on two pieces of writing: Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets and a recent Internet post on eighties and nineties American films entitled "Neo-Expressionism: The Forgotten Studio Style." Though focused on a number of films, the conversation includes forays into the world of the visual arts, literature, and music.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

comrade_yui, “neo-expressionism: the forgotten studio style”
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Francis Ford Coppola, Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Weird Studies, Episode 161 on ‘From Hell’
Bram Stoker, Dracula
E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art
Jean-Francois Millet, “Gleaners”
Kathe Kollwitz, “Need”
Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Arnold Schoneberg, Pierrot Lunaire
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1
Peter Yates (dir.), Krull
Wilhelm Worringer, German art historian
Weird Studies, Episode 136 on ‘The Evil Dead’
In Camera The Naive Visual Effects of Dracula
Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life
Weird Studies, Episode 121 ‘Mandwagon’

"The Devil's finest ruse," Baudelaire wrote, "is to persuade you that he doesn't exist." In this episode, JF and Phil peer through a buzzing haze of lies, illusions, and mirages, in hopes of catching a glimpse, however brief, of the figure standing at its center. With a focus on the fifteenth major arcanum of the tarot, they try to make sense of this archetype which feels, at once, remotely distant and uncomfortably close to us, all while heeding the warning from the anonymous author of Meditations on the Tarot that one ought not look too deeply into the nature of evil, which is "unknowable in its essence."

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES
Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot
The Gnostic Tarot
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, Part 1
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME
Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the Perverse
Aleister Crowley, Magic, Book 4
Leigh McCloskey, Tarot Re-Visioned
Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth
The Library of Esoterica, Tarot
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic

In this second of two episodes on "scenes," Phil and JF set their sights on Greenwich Village in the wake of the Second World War. Focusing on two works on the era – Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage and John Cassavetes' Shadows – the conversation further develops the mystique of urban scenes and explores the weirdness of cities. The city, long considered the human artifact par excellence, comes to seem like something that comes from outside the ambit of humanity.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES
Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage
John Cassavetes, Shadows
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Phil Ford, Dig
Weird Studies, Episode 90 on “Owl in Daylight”
Kult, role-playing game
Tom Delong and Peter Lavenda, Secret Machines: Gods, Men, and War
Chandler Brossard, Who Walk in Darkness
Yukio Mishima, Japanese artist
Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of the Hipster”

Listener discretion advised: This episode delves into the disturbing details of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and may not be suitable for all audiences.

Serialized from 1989 to 1996, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell was first released in a single volume in 1999, just as the world was groaning into the present century. This is an important detail, because according to the creators of this astounding work, the age then passing away could not be understood without reference to the gruesome murders, never solved, of five women in London's Whitechapel district, in the fall of 1888. In Alan Moore's occult imagination, the Ripper murders were more than another instance of human depravity: they constituted a magical operation intended to alter the course of history. The nature of this operation, and whether or not it was successful, is the focus of this episode, in which JF and Phil also explore the imaginal actuality of Victorian London and the strange nature of history and time.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

Daniel Silver, Terry Nichols Clark, and Clemente Jesus Navarro Yanez, “Scenes: Social Context in an Age of Contingency”
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell
Floating World, Edo Japanese concept
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
John Clellon Holmes recordings
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes Collection
Yacht Rock, web series
Stephen Knight, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution
Colin Wilson, Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict
Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
Weird Studies, Episode 89 on “Mumbo Jumbo”
Charles Howard Hinton, mathematician
J. G. Ballard, Preface to Crash
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

Every off-week, listeners who have chosen to support Weird Studies by joining our Patreon at the Listener's Tier get to enjoy a bonus episode. These episodes are different from the flagship show. Less formal and entirely improvised, they offer Phil and JF a different way of exploring the weird in art, philosophy and culture. To tide our listenership over until the next new episode drops on January 24th, here is a recent example of a Weird Studies audio extra, recorded as the holiday season was getting under way. Happy New Year.

As a horror movie, John Carpenter's The Thing seems to have it all: amazing practical effects, body horror, psychological drama, Kurt Russell ... Indeed, there is only one element this movie lacks, and that is anything at all corresponding to the titular villain. There is no thing in The Thing! What we have instead is a process, a pattern, a way for which the term "thing" is as good as any other. (What is a thing anyway?) In this episode, Phil and JF, having decided that Carpenter's film qualifies as a Christmas movie because there is snow (and a dog) in it, explore the metaphysical implications of a cult classic.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

John Carpenter, The Thing
Weird Studies, Episode 100 on Carpenter Films
Weird Studies, Episode 157 on Videodrome
Ridley Scott, Blade Runner
Ridley Scott Alien
Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence
Haecceity
Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Characters as a Medium for Poetry
Weird Studies, Episode 89 on ‘Mumbo Jumbo’
Weird Studies, Episode 127 on ‘The Impossibility of Automating Ambiguity’
Wikipedia, “Quiddity”
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Danish painter
Jez Conolly, The Thing
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Dylan Trigg, The Thing a Phenomenology of Horror
Plato, The Timaeus
Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things”
Clive Barker, The Great and Secret Show

Every once in a while, JF and Phil like to do a “song swap.” Each picks a song, and the ensuing conversation locates linkages and correspondences where none was previously thought to exist. In this episode, they are joined by the music scholar Meredith Michael – Weird Studies assistant, and co-host of Cosmophonia, a podcast about music and outer space – to discuss songs by Lili Boulanger, Vienna Teng, and Iron & Wine. Before long, this disparate assortment personal favourites occasions a weirdly focused dialogue on time, impermanence, control, (mis)recognition, and the affinity of art and synchronicity.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES
Iron and Wine, “Passing Afternoon”
Vienna Teng, “The Hymn of Acxiom”, (and here is the live version)
Lili Boulanger, Vieille Priére Bouddhique
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle Mozart’s Arrow
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable
Hector Berlioz, Fugue on “amen” from La Damnation du Faust
Slavoj Zizek, A Pervert’s Guide to Idiology
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Shepard Tone
Rudolf Steiner, The Influces of Lucifer and Ahriman

Special Guest: Meredith Michael.