Episode 162: The Incarnation of Meaning: Greenwich Village After the War

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2024

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this second of two episodes on "scenes," Phil and JF set their sights on Greenwich Village in the wake of the Second World War. Focusing on two works on the era – Anatole Broyard's Kafka Was the Rage and John Cassavetes' Shadows – the conversation further develops the mystique of urban scenes and explores the weirdness of cities. The city, long considered the human artifact par excellence, comes to seem like something that comes from outside the ambit of humanity. Support us on Patreon. Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page. Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia. Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Find us on Discord Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! REFERENCES Anatole Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage John Cassavetes, Shadows Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World Phil Ford, Dig Weird Studies, Episode 90 on “Owl in Daylight” Kult, role-playing game Tom Delong and Peter Lavenda, Secret Machines: Gods, Men, and War Chandler Brossard, Who Walk in Darkness Yukio Mishima, Japanese artist Anatole Broyard, “Portrait of the Hipster” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdst. This is J.F. Martell.
0:53.7	In science fiction, when you want to press a sense of
0:56.9	futurity on your reader, you give them a city, an expanse of skyscrapers draped in noir, a neon
1:03.7	metropolis, a city planet. And yet, curiously, there's nothing modern about cities.
1:10.4	Archaeologists continue to find ruins suggesting cities or proto-cities of incredible antiquity.
1:16.5	The Old Testament, of course, is replete with great cities scattered like beacons across
1:20.9	the arid wastes.
1:22.7	Jericho, the oldest still inhabited city in the world, is more than 10,000 years old. It seems that humans
1:29.8	started building cities as soon as the idea proved actionable, and I like to imagine our distant
1:35.4	paleolithic ancestors dreaming of city life long before the technology and know-how required
1:40.7	to build them existed. Could it be that the city, which in the current episode we
1:45.9	describe as a machine for personal transformation, isn't a human invention at all, but an attempt
1:51.9	on our part to give material form to something that has always existed in the imaginal world?
1:57.7	The city is special because it renders contingent what hitherto felt necessary and immutable.
2:04.1	The moment you step through the gates, your most cherished customs, beliefs, and values
2:08.3	are suddenly confronted with a thousand alternatives, brought there by others from distant
2:13.3	parts, who came here for the same reasons you did. Everything that seemed absolute betrays its
2:19.2	relativity. If you're going to persist in your old ways in the city, you will need to decide to do it.
2:25.8	You could just as easily leave it all behind and become someone new. This episode of Weird Studies,
	...

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