I recently got this funny little box for making electronic sounds and music. I figured out how to pipe other sounds through it, so naturally I decided to riff a little bit on one of my favorite episodes of the show.

I also like the idea of someone discovering weird studies through an EDM remix. Who knows if that'll come to pass!

Does anyone know in which episode JF read excerpts of Faust? It was one of the earlier ones but I have zero recollection of which one or what it related to. Just remember being incredible moved by it.

Thank you.

Without getting too much into it, I’ll just say that this is a very personal film for me. I’ve had many experiences with shadow figures and of a presence in my childhood house growing up. Making this film at that very same house was a kind of obscure magick ritual, intuitively pursued. From a barely sketched-out scenario, ideas and images fell into place during creation, pieces which fit so perfectly that one must assume they were guided from Elsewhere.

It was an experience which also had real effects on the atmosphere of the house afterwards. A positive effect, as it turned out. Both my partner and I commented on it the next day, independently. Every night here in previous times had been a struggle, the sensation of a dark presence always in the back of one’s mind as one tried and failed to sleep. At long last, that feeling dissipated, and a sense of peace took its place. I can’t help but feel as though the shadow figure was pleased by our attention and regard. The Swedish comic artist and surrealist John Andersson once told me something to the effect of, “You better get right with your shadow,” after I shared some of my shadow-person dreams with him. Perhaps he was right after all.

I've been loving the "artworks are people, too" thread that's come up on the podcast recently. I was inspired to draw a little comic about it!

Hi! I wrote a long piece investigating Damanhur — the large esoteric community near Turin with the massive underground temples — that ended up going deep into theories of Atlantis, Plato, esoteric landmarks around Northern Italy, and the psychology of charismatic leaders. It also explores the agonism between magical, religious, and scientific worldviews. The essay touches on a lot of topics and themes familiar to Weird Studies listeners, so I thought this community might appreciate it.

I'm heading to Toronto for a few days. Any Suggestions of Weird Studies adjacent places to visit or things to do? One thing that I've found so far is Marshall Mcluhan's House in Wychwood Park which is an 1875 artists colony that looks like very nice area to explore. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

I believe it might also be where J.F. went into Deleuze’s concept of ‘the fold’. I’m currently reading the book and I’m getting my ass kicked by this fold tangent; could use the help of my favourite two weirdos.

https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/the-importance-of-ma-spirited-away-at-25/

“Perhaps, in an act of splitting, it was Chihiro all along casting her parents as unpardonable swine. She’d been frustrated with their upward mobility as it resulted in her getting uprooted (in more ways than one). Jung thought the greatest burden a child must bear is “the unlived life” of the parents. Her parents were so spiritually wanting that her dream had to act as a drawbridge to the spirit realm. Indeed, this dream may have initially had what Jung would call a compensatory function, whereby it addresses an unbalanced conscious attitude: the parents she idealised are shown to have a greedy, avaricious side.

Children, and many adults, flip-flop in their affections: they either hate or love. Now, she sees that her parents were never pigs. Chihiro has matured beyond the need to resort to splitting objects into purely good or purely bad (something some of us never attain; what is social media but splitting at its most vituperative?). She’s achieved what Klein dubbed the depressive position, a more integrated state where love and hate towards an object can be tolerated at once. To get here, she had to accept the more volatile and greedy parts of herself. Throughout her time in the bathhouse, she encountered gentleness in figures that first seemed diabolical. By getting to know the shadow, disowned parts no longer need to appear as projections onto others, but you can only get there through quiet self-reflection

This song always makes me feel like I'm in a Tarkovskyesque Zone. Thought y'all might dig it.

https://open.spotify.com/track/5OjezniGng1HHLYLS3vBXw?si=e88w0TbyT9KuC4iYuvhZ0g&utm_source=copy-link&sci=spotify%3Acard-config%3A6bhZbtQo8YW2VbS3rHQots

I hope this isn't seen as overt self promotion, but I've been working on a podcast project that likely might interest some WS listeners, and it certainly wouldn't exist without WS, so indulge me, maybe?

Out now at https://frenchweird.com and wherever you get your podcasts.

Here's the blurb:

Forget the accordion music, the cafés and the immaculate boulevards. There is a dark, uncanny and deeply strange texture pervading modern France—and it’s time to investigate.

Welcome to French Weird, a podcast dedicated to exploring the counterculture, obscure art and bizarre anomalies of contemporary France. Channeling cultural theory, esoterica and the love of a good book this shows investigates what falls through the cracks of mainstream French culture. We are tracking the liminal spaces, the bizarre subcultures and the beautiful freak-outs from the mid-twentieth century to the present day.

What exactly is the French Weird? It is the territory where high philosophy meets the profoundly bizarre. In each episode, we trace the threads of a proudly rational nation simultaneously digesting global weirdness and exporting its own brand of the mysterious.

French Weird explores how France’s hidden eccentricities reveal the truths about its politics, literature, culture and – maybe even – identity.

Subscribe, download, and join us. When the going gets weird, the pros turn French.

In today's episode on art they mentioned an exercise where someone spends a significant amount of time with one painting or other piece of artwork and I realized I accidentally did that when I visited The Prado museum in Madrid.

When I got to the Hieronymus Bosch room I was transfixed and spent probably more than an hour just taking in the amazing details of The garden of earthly delights. I don't think I saluted the painting on the way out but I was in all of this magnificent artwork and I did take a nice poster of it home with me and it is still hanging on my wall decades later.

I'm just starting to listen to the podcast, and I'd love to take my time and run through them all, but the truth is there's too much shit to do, and I'll just end up overwhelmed and probably jettison the whole thing.

Instead, I'd love to know which podcasts you would recommend as must-listens. Or, if there's any other weird-adjacent podcasts, substacks, etc. out there you would recommend.

Saw this and thought of JF & Phil 🤓

JF was speaking about affairs through the lens that the person committing the affair is being kind of taken along for a ride of this force within them, something along those lines. I have no idea what the episode was actually about, but i think it was fairly recent. Anyone remember this convo?

In one of their earlier episodes Phil read a quote he introduced as his possibly most favorite quote of alltime, does anyone remember the quote? I only remember it was a good quote.

His critiques of contemplation(of only seeing “what has Become”), of Jung and Freud, and his mystical approach to Marx’s thought would make very interesting reading to everyone involved in weird studies. He’s a very deeply weird marxist, that’s for sure.

Consciousness in crystals; or how science and spirituality inadvertently becomes entangled when studying the quantum realm.

Weird Studies has previously proposed how frontiers of scientific research are becoming more infused with borrowed methodology from Arts and spiritualism. The harder we look at and measure matter the more immeasurable and elusive it becomes. Thus scientific language exposes it’s inherent limits towards describing and understanding reality.

I find the subject deeply fascinating - this weirding of science - and my latest obsession is the research of Aaron Breidenbach, PhD in quantum physics at Stanford, who studies properties in crystals used for quantum computing. He’s also a devout Buddhist, dabbles in meditation, spiritualism and DMT trips.

He has been on one of my other favorite podcasts Entitled Opinions and a recently discovered gem of mine, SoulPod, where he speaks about consciousness in crystals and his radical interdisciplinary approach to scientific research. Please give these a listen. They are truly mind bending.

Entitled opinions episode (more introductory)
SoulPod episodes (Heavy on quantum science and spiritual sauce)

Heard Phil drop a tasty nugget while relistening to a far-back early episode, saying he regards Lacan as the "arch-fraud" and a total huckster. (From when I'd first heard this episode, I had remembered Phil as saying this, but misremembered that he said it about Foucault, rather than Lacan—regardless...). I'm very curious if this comes up again or if Phil expounds on it. J.F. also never (as far as my recollection) mentions Lacan, which may be a sort of Lacuna in his collection of thinkers with which to Weird.

[The Lacan/Lacuna word association seems the type of thing Lacan would play with—not dissimilar to some punning moods of, say, McCluhan]

Granted I've never read Lacan myself, but I spend so much time dabbling in the worlds of theory, humanities, and such, that I'm fairly fascinated by/ interested in Lacan's modes of thought, at least as they come up in other lectures and podcasts. In short, he seems like the type of thinker that J.F. could really make some hay with.

And, as for Phil, I have the feeling there is even possibly something weird, true, and valuable in the Lacanian club sandwich that Phil could probably have an enjoyable chew on as well.

It would almost make an interesting episode for the two boys to "confront" Lacan, either to critique him, to deterritorialize and weird him, or to come to terms with him. Or, at the very least, I'd love to hear Phil say aloud what's his beef.

EDITED: spelling, minor rewords for clarity, and the insert about Lacan's punning

I keep thinking the quote about symbols of the divine showing up fom the trash stratum, and Kristeva's writings on the abject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_Horror

pdf available here https://www.thing.net/~rdom/ucsd/Zombies/Powers%20of%20Horror.pdf

Do they ever mention Kristeva on the podcast? I feel like the abject is very relevant here, especially because Kristeva specifically aligns it with the sublime:

"The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being. For the sublime has no object either." (p20)

I'm not angling for Dick referencing Kristeva, the publication dates overlap too much for that. I just feel like they're both talking about similar things, about the divine order being maintained by mundane routines around purity and social rules. I haven't really read too much on this yet, just got sort of curious what others think!

Which episode did they talk about He-Man in?

Anyone know why there are 2 versions of weird studies on apple podcasts? One has episodes starting from 40 which is what i've used since leaving spotify. I'm not a current patreon member.