Weird Studies

The Hanged Man is arguably the most enigmatic card in the traditional tarot deck. Divested of any archetypal apparel – he is neither emperor nor fool, but just a man, who happens to be hanging – he ga...

26 Jun 20241h 20min

This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radica...

14 Jun 20241h 9min

Orson Welles made F for Fake in the early seventies, while still bobbing in the wake of a Pauline Kael essay accusing him of being cinema's greatest fraud. Ostensibly a documentary on the famous art f...

29 Mai 20241h 26min

The ongoing crackdown on protests at many American universities prompts a discussion on the politics, ethics, and metaphysics of free expression. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies soundt...

15 Mai 20241h 37min

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 ...

1 Mai 20241h 21min

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 t...

17 Apr 20241h 29min

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 d...

3 Apr 20241h 13min

"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. Cha...

20 Mar 20241h 27min