Specter Vision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to weirdstudies.com. So I'm Phil Ford, and I am a professor of musicology at Indiana University, Bloomington.

And I'm J.F. Martell. I'm an independent filmmaker in Canada. Just that. Just Canada.

An undisclosed location in Canada. Isn't Canada itself an undisclosed location?

Oh, you sound so Canadian when you say that.

It's like this Canadian thing to obsess about how nobody really knows much about Canada.

And you would know best, Phil, because you are yourself Canadian, correct?

It's true.

I am. I'm a Canadian who's lived in the United States for a long time,

long enough that when I come up to Canada, I don't feel very Canadian.

And when I come back to the United States, I don't feel very American.

That's such a Canadian way to feel, though.

So what are we doing here?

So we are starting a podcast called Weird Studies, and I confess that the name was my idea.

It was.

It came from a series of posts you wrote that were collectively titled Weird Studies. Can you explain why you wrote

those and what you mean by them? Yeah, so I've been blogging for a long time. And lately in recent years,

I've been writing more and more about subjects around magic and mysticism and how it relates it relates to music and art but you know just

sort of also just philosophically like ideas that are hard for educated moderns to think like for

example magic is almost the sort of i don't know it's the epistemic other of modernity. It's the, it's the thing that's

hardest to think. Like if I tell you, oh yeah, I'm a magician, people assume, if I just say that

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