Spectrevision Radio

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

For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weird Studies. This is Phil.

There's at least one thing that J.F. and I have in common with the

Beatles. We'd love to turn you on. And by turn you on, I don't mean get you high or

sacks you up. That would be a different kind of show. Now, we're more about freshening up

your thoughts, or even, on a good day, changing consciousness.

Now, changing thoughts and changing consciousness are two different things.

I can change my mind about whether I'll make chicken or hot dogs for dinner.

That would be a change in my thoughts.

A changing consciousness would be a change in the faculty by which such thoughts rise to the surface.

I could be struck with compassion for animals subjected to the cruelties of factory farming,

suddenly find myself revolted by the idea of eating flesh and never even consider eating meat again.

The movement from pondering which meat to cook to pondering whether

to cook meat at all is the movement from the foreground to the background. The 60s

counterculture was above all a mass scale operation to perform this shift from foreground to

background, from thoughts to consciousness, from changing your mind to blowing your mind.

As we discussed in episode 71, one of the great 60s gurus, Marshall McLuhan, was a philosopher of the background, asking us to shift our gaze from the contents of media, the message, to the medium itself, from considering Gilligan's Island to considering the fact

that in the 60s, almost every American home was equipped with a machine that would allow an

entire people to watch Gilligan's Island. So when John Lennon sings, I'd love to turn you on in

A Day in the Life, the final track of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club

band, he doesn't necessarily mean he wants you to drop acid, though that's what the BBC thought it

...