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 weirdst. This is J.F.

Time for another song swap, where Phil and I select songs containing a soupsone of the weird and record an episode on them.

We've done this a few times over the years, and it's always been a lot of fun.

For this episode, Phil chose Judy Sills The Kiss from her 1973 album Heart Food,

and I went with Jesus, etc. from Wilco's Yankee

Hotel Foxtrot released in 2001, but to be honest, my plan was to use the song as a

synectady for the record as a whole. It's on the subject of time that we found resonance

between these otherwise very different tracks. That makes some sense, because all music

does strange things to time, don't you think? I was hard at work preparing this intro when our

assistant Meredith posted something on our private server that perfectly encapsulated what I was

trying to say about music and its strange relationship to temporality. So, instead of rambling as I usually do, I'm going to read

what she wrote. In her post, Meredith is talking about the science fiction novel Last and First

Men, the screen adaptation of which was the focus of episode 142. When she mentions the third

men, she's referring to the Third in a litany of future civilizations

described in the novel.

Quote, I'm finally getting around to reading Last and First Men, and there's a part that

was very reminiscent of Phil's description of parochronic time.

It's an episode from the Third Men, where a religion of music is developed and then becomes a kind of crazy tyrannical state religion.

It starts with the observation, quote, it seemed to them that when men and women listen to great music, the barriers of their individuality were broken down, so that they became one soul through communion with the music, end quote.

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