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6 episodes with oedipal
6 episodes with oedipal
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2 episodes with oedipal
2 episodes with oedipal
2 episodes with oedipal
Join our Patreon! Get the full discussion here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/jung-freud-and-122995561?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link Bob on Jung and Spinoza on LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/posts/jung-and-spinoza-118447298?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_fan&utm_content=web_shareJung and Spinoza: Pass age Through the Blessed Self: https://www.routledge.com/Jung-and-Spinoza-Passage-Through-The-Blessed-Self/Langan/p/book/9781032851853https://www.roberthlangan.com/In this session of the Anti-Oedipus Files, Dr. Bob Langan joins the reading group to explore Carl Jung's theory of libido, particularly as it appears in Symbols of Transformation, where Jung challenges Freud's strictly sexual definition of libido. The conversation examines how Jung's model of psychic energy may have influenced Deleuze and Guattari's reconceptualization of desire in Anti-Oedipus, particularly in the shift from a repressed, Oedipal unconscious to a dynamic model of desiring-production. Jung's tensions with Freud, his engagement with myth, and the role of archetypes as energetic processes rather than static typologies are central to the discussion, as is the way his work has been co-opted and misrepresented by figures like Jordan Peterson. The group also unpacks Jung's connections to Spinoza, his late-career interest in synchronicity, and how his Red Book offers a more radical and experiential engagement with the unconscious than his later, more systematized theories suggest. If you want access to the full discussion and more in-depth reading groups on thinkers like Foucault, Hegel, and the politics of friendship, head to our Patreon and support the show!Support the showSupport the podcast:https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/Linktree: https://linktr.ee/acidhorizonAcid Horizon on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcastJoin The Schizoanalysis Project: https://discord.gg/4WtaXG3QxnSubscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438Merch: http://www.crit-drip.comSubscribe to us on your favorite podcast: https://pod.link/1512615438 LEPHT HAND: https://www.patreon.com/LEPHTHANDHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog): https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.comRevolting Bodies (Will's Blog): https://revoltingbodies.comSplit Infinities (Craig's Substack): https://splitinfinities.substack.com/Music: https://sereptie.bandcamp.com/ and https://thecominginsurrection.bandcamp.com/
Ashe in America and Absolute1776 break down the high-stakes audit of Fort Knox that could expose a massive financial scandal...is the gold actually there, or has it been rehypothecated to oblivion? With Trump, Elon Musk, and Kash Patel all pushing for answers, the establishment is sweating over what this audit might reveal about the real state of U.S. gold reserves. Meanwhile, federal employees are losing their minds over an email asking them to list five things they did last week. Turns out, some can't, because they don't actually exist. Elon hints at a massive government payroll fraud scheme, with phantom employees cashing in on taxpayer dollars for years. With mass firings incoming, expect more bureaucratic tantrums. Also in this episode: The Pope's “bilateral pneumonia” mystery deepens, Macron's wife conspiracy takes an Oedipal twist, and the Maine governor's drag show history resurfaces...because nothing is real anymore.
It's Godzilla's final film of the Heisei Era and we cover all your burning questions about it. Such as, how do you pronounce Destoroyah? What gender is Destoroyah and where does it fit on the Oedipal triangle? Is Godzilla.... dialectic? And what happens when you put a bunch of frozen iguanas in your car? We have bonus episodes, behind the scenes notes, and post-recording wrap ups for just $1 a month on Patreon. Patreon.com/NoGodsPod Follow us on Twitter and Bluesky @nogodspod Email us at NoGodsPod@gmail.com
Let's hear it for the boys. The Black Casebook returns with a deep dive into The Black Mirror, an Oedipal tale of fathers and sons that pits Dick Grayson, now in the role of Batman, against James Gordon Jr., reimagined here as a twisted psychopath. While Dick tangles with new threats popping up across Gotham, James sets an insidious plan into motion that could permanently infect the city with his brand of sadism.Please consider supporting Palestinians through a gift to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, ANERA, Doctors Without Borders, or the charity of your choice.You can find The Black Casebook on Twitter @blackcasebook, on Bluesky @blackcasebook, and Instagram @blackcasebookpod, and you can write in to blackcasebookpod@gmail.com to share any Bat-thoughts you have. You can also support us on Patreon.Theme by Black Plastique. Intro music by MichiJung.
Unlocked Patreon episode. Support Ordinary Unhappiness on Patreon to get access to all the exclusive episodes. patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the first installment of our two-part Thanksgiving Special, we discuss the so-called “Holiday Syndrome” in general and with an eye towards the upcoming US holiday season in particular. We explore how holidays catalyze some of our most elemental anxieties and fantasies as embodied in the institution known as the family. We walk through Sandor Ferenczi's “Sunday Neurosis,” the social injunction to indulge in “recreation,” and how that demand psychically re-creates the scene of the family in all its traumas, disappointments, and contingencies. Big helpings of regression, bottomless oral need, and displaced Oedipal antagonism are served – plus a reading of the traditional Thanksgiving meal itself, which not coincidentally features a lot of food that resembles what we feed babies. Subscribe now for immediate access to Part II - on Freudian anthropology, the history behind Thanksgiving, and the libidinal structures of settler colonialism. Subscription also will give you access to our ever-growing backlog of Patreon-only content, including series like The Standard Edition (we're reading Freud's complete works thing together!) Wild Analysis (psychoanalysis goes to the movies), Gerontophallocracy 2024 (on the recent election and beyond), and much, much more!Articles referenced include:Cattell, J P. The Holiday Syndrome. The Psychoanalytic Review (1913-1957); New York Vol. 42, (Jan 1, 1955): 39, available here.Ferenczi, Sandor. Sunday Neuroses (1919) in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis. London, Karnac Books 1927.Sarah Mullooly Sattin. The Psychodynamics of the “Holiday Syndrome”: The Meaning and Therapeutic Use of Holidays in Group Therapy with Schizophrenic Patients. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care. Volume 13, Issue 4 (October 1975), Pages 156-162, available here.Rosenbaum, J. B. (1962) Holiday, Symptom and Dream. Psychoanalytic Review 49, 87-98, available here.Melanie Wallendorf, Eric J. Arnould, “We Gather Together”: Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 18, Issue 1, June 1991, Pages 13–31, available here. Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you've traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music
Sub to the PPM Patreon to access the entire 3 hour runtime of CULT OF CAGE PT. II: patreon.com/ParaPowerMapping (Full notes viewable via the link) An impromptu Halloween session w/ Orion St. Peter gave birth to this Nicolas Cage dbl feature—in which we discuss occult, cultic, & PTK themes in the loosely defined horror films "Longlegs" & "Mandy", tentpoles of the late Cage capitalism debt-induced “renaissance”. We dig deep into the interplay between the "Longlegs" narrative and director Oz Perkins's personal esoteric & intergenerational familial trauma history, sussing out the sources of inspiration in his own highly strange, quasi-aristocratic pedigree. For ex, his great-grandpa "Count" Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, a psychic detective cum spy in the mold of PPM usual suspects Aleister Crowley or Erik Jan Hanussen who was a member of the Theosophical Society, an avid spiritualist, and supposedly the medium who prophesied tabloid journo & anti sex trafficking crusader W.T. Stead's death on the Titanic... We discuss his Italian great-gma, world-conquering designer (aka Chanel's rival) Elsa Schiaparelli & her affiliations with Dadaists & Surrealists like Dalí and Man Ray, not to mention the fact the de Gaulle government suspected her of collaborating with the 3rd Reich. We unpack how psychic detective de Kerlor appeared on the scene in New Hampshire to "investigate" a murder that two BOI agents linked to German espionage in the Northeast during WWI, and we discuss how de Kerlor & Schiaparelli would be surveilled & interviewed, Wilhelm seemingly under suspicion of serving as a foreign agent. These fascinating, little known histories re Oz Perkins's ancestors are an obvious touchpoint for the clairvoyant FBI agent Lee Harker in the glam Satanic serial-killing-by-sympathetic-magick-or-mind-control flick "Longlegs". We also talk about how it's conceivably 9/11 as Mass Ritual pilled, seeing as Oz's mom Berry Berenson died on Flight 11 on 9/11, which gives one a headrushing vertiginous feeling indeed... Seeing as she's descended from this Theosophist spy. Her BDay is repeatedly woven into the sigilistic & algorithmic subtext of the film. And we also discuss how, on the patrilineal side of Oz's family, his Dad Anthony Perkins's confessed childhood Oedipal complex, the early wished-for death of his father, his lifelong closeted life, and his ultimate succumbing to AIDs... How all of this informed the emotionally-charged, cathartic film & its unspoken traumatic seeds... As we go, our analysis of the film begins to force us to confront a theory where a kind of unstated CSA blackhole is the source of the the Longlegs mystery's gravitational pull. We talk: Mandy dir. Cosmatos's father George Pan Cosmatos's final film “The Shadow Conspiracy” which concerns a pres assassination by drone; both Panos & his Dad having Pan in their names; the Mansonian failed songwriter vibes of both villains Jeremiah Sands & Longlegs; the Mandy scene where a planned ritualized orgy lubricated with “the chemist's best batch” & hallucinogenic wasp injections derails when Mandy openly clowns on the cult leader; Longlegs's character obvs nodding at glam Satanism, Marc Bolan, & David Bowie's infamous “Station to Station”, Dion Fortune-informed exorcism of his possessed indoor pool in what was once stripper & burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee's LA manse; Longlegs's cinematic influences - Fincher fare like Se7en, Zodiac, etc; Silence of the Lambs; Don't Look Now; Altman; Twin Peaks; The Omen; New French Extreme; Gaspar Noe; & Phantasm Many thanks to Orion for jumping on for this spooky dbl feature at such short notice. His death/doom outfit Ilsa are back in the studio as we speak—sound engineering doesn't come cheap. Help them lay down their new record by purchasing their most recent LP "Preyer" on Bandcamp! Songs: | Ilsa - Enter the Void | | Matt Akers - Hunting Ground | | Matt Akers - Urge to Kill |
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Pls support the show by subbing to the Patreon: patreon.com/ParaPowerMapping (Full notes viewable via the link) An impromptu Halloween session w/ Orion St. Peter gave birth to this Nicolas Cage dbl feature—in which we discuss occult, cultic, & PTK themes in the loosely defined horror films "Longlegs" & "Mandy", tentpoles of the late Cage capitalism debt-induced “renaissance”. We dig deep into the interplay between the "Longlegs" narrative and director Oz Perkins's personal esoteric & intergenerational familial trauma history, sussing out the sources of inspiration in his own highly strange, quasi-aristocratic pedigree. For ex, his great-grandpa "Count" Wilhelm de Wendt de Kerlor, a psychic detective cum spy in the mold of PPM usual suspects Aleister Crowley or Erik Jan Hanussen who was a member of the Theosophical Society, an avid spiritualist, and supposedly the medium who prophesied tabloid journo & anti sex trafficking crusader W.T. Stead's death on the Titanic... We discuss his Italian great-grandma, world-conquering designer (aka Chanel's rival) Elsa Schiaparelli & her affiliations with Dadaists & Surrealists like Dalí and Man Ray, not to mention the fact the de Gaulle government suspected her of collaborating with the 3rd Reich. Oh, and that she had multiple Egyptologist & "Orientalist" academic relatives. We unpack how psychic detective de Kerlor appeared on the scene in New Hampshire to "investigate" a murder that two BOI agents linked to German espionage in the Northeast during WWI, and we discuss how de Kerlor & Schiaparelli would be surveilled & interviewed, Wilhelm seemingly under suspicion of serving as a foreign agent. These fascinating, little known histories re Oz Perkins's ancestors are an obvious touchpoint for the clairvoyant FBI agent Lee Harker in the glam Satanic serial-killing-by-sympathetic-magick-or-mind-control flick "Longlegs". We also talk about how it's conceivably 9/11 as Mass Ritual pilled, seeing as Oz's mom Berry Berenson died on Flight 11 on 9/11, which gives one a headrushing vertiginous feeling indeed... Seeing as she's descended from this Theosophist spy. Her BDay is repeatedly woven into the sigilistic & algorithmic subtext of the film. And we also discuss how, on the patrilineal side of Oz's family, his Dad Anthony Perkins's confessed childhood Oedipal complex, the early wished-for death of his father, his lifelong closeted life, and his ultimate succumbing to AIDs... How all of this doubtlessly informed the emotionally-charged, cathartic film & its unspoken traumatic seeds... As we go, our analysis of the film begins to force us to confront a theory where a kind of unstated CSA blackhole is the source of the the Longlegs mystery's gravitational pull. We talk: Mandy dir. Cosmatos's father George Pan Cosmatos's final film “The Shadow Conspiracy” which concerns a pres assassination by drone; both Panos & his Dad having Pan in their names; the Mansonian failed songwriter vibes of both villains Jeremiah Sands & Longlegs; the Mandy scene where a planned ritualized orgy lubricated with “the chemist's best batch” & hallucinogenic wasp injections derails when Mandy openly clowns on the cult leader; Longlegs's character obvs nodding at glam Satanism, Marc Bolan, and David Bowie's infamous “Station to Station”, Dion Fortune-informed exorcism of his possessed indoor pool in what was once stripper & burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee's LA manse; Longlegs's cinematic influences - Fincher fare like Se7en, Zodiac, etc; Silence of the Lambs; Don't Look Now; Altman; Twin Peaks; The Omen; New French Extreme; Gaspar Noe; & Phantasm Many thanks to Orion for jumping on for this appropriately spooky dbl feature at such short notice. His death/doom outfit Ilsa are back in the studio as we speak—sound engineering doesn't come cheap. Help them lay down their new record by purchasing their most recent LP "Preyer" on Bandcamp! Songs: | Ilsa - "Poor Devil" | | Matt Akers - "Kill Kit" | | Ilsa - "Shibboleth" |
Starring Mickey Rooney. Yes, that Mickey Rooney. Five years ago, Kerry, Collin and guest Patrick Ripoll made a pact to talk about the "Silent Night, Deadly Night" films every year in October. The pact has been fulfilled with "Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker," as of now, the final film in the series. It did not disappoint. Rooney stars as the titular Toy Maker named Joe Petto. He has a teenage son who might be an android named Pino. You see where this is going? Why are the toys Petto makes turning deadly? What about Ricky, the Santa-Claus-killer franchise mainstay? How should you watch all five films? Which ones are the best? You'll have to hear Kerry, Collin and Patrick's rankings to find out. What a journey it's been! From a crazed Santa Claus killer, to "Garbage day!" to Oedipal themes of longing, the SNDN films each delivered something truly unique. Also, Kerry talks about three films from "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die." Book films covered: "Odd Man Out" (1947) "Le Trou" (1960) "Crumb" (1995)
Graeme Daniels, lead author of the book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, continues a discussion of the unconscious, venturing into a famous dream of a patient of Sigmund Freud's, dubbed "Wolf Man". The interpretation of his famous dream reveals (and represses) elements of aggression, fears of death, of castration anxiety relating to Oedipal wishes and a memory of a "primal scene".
What happens when a Godzilla cell falls into a black hole, merges with an organic crystal, and then absorbs the energy of an exploding star? You guessed it: Purple Godzilla. We scour through the wreckage of this special effects powerhouse to find a struggle between overt force and coercive control, an exploration of the queerness hidden beneath the surface of male conflict, and an image of the Oedipal complex as a force detached from human culture. We have bonus episodes, behind the scenes notes, and post-recording wrap ups for just $1 a month on Patreon. Patreon.com/NoGodsPod Follow us on Twitter and Bluesky @nogodspod Email us at NoGodsPod@gmail.com
Abby, Patrick, and Dan welcome the incomparable Liz Franczak of TrueAnon! The topic is conspiracy theories, from real to imagined, documented to discredited, ludicrous to all-too-likely, and more. The first half of the episode is ground-clearing and working through some basic questions. They unpack the phrase “conspiracy theory,” tracking its shift over the twentieth century from a neutral term to a label redolent with scorn, dismissal, and even pathologization. They explore how this trajectory has reflected anxieties about modernity, technology, and mass movements in general and communism specifically. Sharing some of their own experiences of getting “conspiracy-pilled,” they think through the ways in which the charge of having a “conspiracy theory” or being a “conspiracy theorist” functions in contemporary politics and popular discourse. If a “conspiracy theory” suggests a general way of knowing, an outlook on the world and events, what satisfactions does that provide – both for conspiracy “theorists” and those who marginalize them? Of what do today's conspiracy theories suggest themselves to be symptoms? And how can we productively understand both the appeals and pitfalls of conspiratorial thinking in our own moment, for better and for worse?In the second half of the episode, the group takes up a singular object – the “rich text” that is Conspiracy Theory (1997). Directed by Richard Donner (of Lethal Weapon fame), this bizarre thriller-mystery-romcom-fusion stars Mel Gibson as a disturbed taxi driver/conspiracy-newsletter-writer and Julia Roberts as a hard-charging federal prosecutor haunted by the murder of her father; Patrick Stewart also appears as an American-accented former MK Ultra scientist turned private sector assassin puppet master working for the New World Order (maybe? he has a black helicopter). Anyway, the film's a wild mess, but the overstuffed plot (and Dan's capable navigation thereof) allows Liz, Abby, and Patrick to read the film as: (1) a quaint artifact of a distinctively conspiracy-friendly moment (the Clinton 1990s); (2) the uncanny expression of social anxieties on the threshold of a new millennium of internet-poisoned paranoia; (3) a mystical tale of the dialectic between Belief and Truth, sublated into Love via an Oedipal victory in which nobody can have sex. Plus: our favorite conspiracy theories (good), Mel and Hutton Gibson's favorite conspiracy theories (very bad), and a very special closeout.You can find more Liz at https://www.patreon.com/TrueAnonPod (we especially recommend TrueAnon's incredible series The Game, an investigation of Synanon and the troubled teen industry)Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you've traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! (646) 450-0847 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music
During the Trump presidency, #TheResistance had a powerful figurehead, and his name was (the late) Mr. Rogers. We discuss the Tom Hanks-led #nicecore landmark A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (2019), the strengths and limitations of Fred Rogers as a Trump-era political symbol, and what this movie fails to understand about him. PLUS: What's eating David Frum about the recent Mexican election?"Can You Say... 'Hero'?" by Tom Junod - https://www.neighborhoodarchive.com/publications/press/esquire/index.html"How Liberalism Betrayed the Enlightenment and Lost Its Soul" by Michael Brenes - https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cold-war-liberalism-moyn-reviewMr. Rogers at the Emmys - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upm9LnuCBUM&ab_channel=TheEmmyAwardsMichael and Us is a podcast about political cinema and our crumbling world hosted by Will Sloan and Luke Savage. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
During the Trump presidency, #TheResistance had a powerful figurehead, and his name was (the late) Mr. Rogers. We discuss the Tom Hanks-led #nicecore landmark A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (2019), the strengths and limitations of Fred Rogers as a Trump-era political symbol, and what this movie fails to understand about him. PLUS: What's eating David Frum about the recent Mexican election? Join us on Patreon for an extra episode every week - https://www.patreon.com/michaelandus "Can You Say... 'Hero'?" by Tom Junod - https://www.neighborhoodarchive.com/publications/press/esquire/index.html "How Liberalism Betrayed the Enlightenment and Lost Its Soul" by Michael Brenes - https://jacobin.com/2024/05/cold-war-liberalism-moyn-review Mr. Rogers at the Emmys - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upm9LnuCBUM&ab_channel=TheEmmyAwards
More nihilistic Italian cops, more ancient Etruscan evil, more Oedipal ickiness. This week, Joe and Rob are drawn irresistibly back to Italy to sample Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man (1976), directed by Ruggero Deodato, and Burial Ground (1981), directed by Andrea Bianchi. Cuddle up on the pillion seat - you're in for a very... very slow shamble on the wild side. We will be announcing a Spoiler Territory section for each. For Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man you can then skip ahead to the 54:35 mark, and for Burial Ground, potential spoilers end at 1:43:27. Theme music: "The Cold Light of Day" by HKM. Check out HKM on #SoundCloud or Bandcamp
Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and the author of Psyche: The Story of the Human Mind, explores the history and controversial legacy surrounding the renowned 20th century Austrian neuroscientist Sigmund Freud. Modern psychotherapy has come a long way over the last century. Many of Freud's bizarre theories on psychosexual development and the Oedipal complex have been debunked, yet Bloom points out that in the field of psychology, “there's no figure now [who's] anything close to Freud, either in influence or in scope.”
Comrade Kim Goes Flying (2012) is a North Korean romantic comedy, described as "a girl-power fairy tale about dreaming to fly," by one of its co-directors, Nicholas Bonner. The film follows Kim Yong Mi, a plucky coal miner from rural North Korea, who dreams of becoming a trapeze artist in Pyongyang. The film is as odd, but not in the ways you would perhaps expect; a smoulderingly Oedipal relationship casts a shadow over the entire plot. Enjoy! VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATIONIsaac Bell Holmström's poetry: https://isaacbhpoetry.wordpress.com/Jack has published a novel!Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tower-Jack-BC-ebook/dp/B0CM5P9N9M/ref=monarch_sidesheetApple Books: http://books.apple.com/us/book/id6466733671Our Patreon: www.patreon.com/TheBookClubfromHellJack's website: www.jackbc.meLevi's website: www.levioutloud.comwww.thebookclubfromhell.comJoin our Discord (the best place to interact with us): discord.gg/ZMtDJ9HscrWatch us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0n7r1ZTpsUw5exoYxb4aKA/featuredTwitter: @bookclubhell666
As episode five premieres early on Max to avoid the Super Bowl, Richard, Chris, and Hillary break down Night Country's biggest twist yet, while John Hawkes stops by to talk about writing Hank's unbelievably bleak song and staging a very tense standoff.
This week, we're joined by the great Ari Aster – one of the boldest and most enigmatic voices in American cinema right now. He's a filmmaker that Al first met in May 2019. The New York-born writer-director's debut horror, Hereditary, was a few months old at the time, and Ari was deep in the edit for Midsommar at the time. Al had been sent by Empire Magazine to write a profile that championed him as a new king of horror. Which made sense in the moment: Midsommar, his Wicker Man-esque follow-up to Hereditary, about a Swedish cult, promised more frights, more decapitations.One problem, though. Ari rejected the idea of himself as a horror filmmaker. He kept emphasising to Al, in his quiet, charming way, that horror wasn't where his heart was. At least, not exclusively. No, Ari longed to make a comedy. A comedy musical, if possible. What would a comedy musical by this filmmaker, best known for chilling audiences to the bone, look like? In 2023, we got our audience – the jaw-dropping Beau Is Afraid.Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Beau Is Afraid is indeed a comedy. Its punchline just happens to speak to the existential treadmill-to-nowhere that life can sometimes resemble. It may not have songs to qualify it as a musical, but its case is populated by icons of musical theatre, known for their stage work (Nathan Lane, Richard Kind). Following a middle aged man on an Oedipal trip through an absurdist America en route to his mother's funeral, the movie began life as a short film in 2011. In the spoiler conversation you're about to hear, we get into what evolved from Ari's initial vision for Beau, as the character made his way to the big-screen. We talk about how in early drafts, the orphans of the forest weren't a theatre group but a cult – something Ari had to change when he realised his first two movies had dealt heavily with cults and he couldn't go three-for-three. We also discuss the horror and hilarity of the monster in the attic and what the religious iconography of the movie represents in Beau's journey. It's a riveting peek into the mind of a filmmaker out here making films unlike anyone else. We hope you enjoy.Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, MUBI, Magic Mind, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.Support the show
In episode seven, Nikita Gill joins me to talk about JM Barrie's beloved children's novel Peter Pan. Nikita is a poet and has published several books of poetry including These Are the Words, Great Goddesses and Fierce Fairytales. She's also one of the most popular poets on Instagram, with over 750k followers at @nikita_gill. We chat about some of the more tricky and Oedipal elements of Peter Pan, its sometimes unsettling tone but also its whimsy and wonder. You can find Nikita's books, Pages & Co, and Peter Pan at my Bookshop page: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/bookwandering-the-podcast-s2Next week features Sophie Dahl on The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken.The podcast is produced by Adam Collier with artwork by Hester Kitchen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Subscribe to get access to the full episode, the episode reading list, and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappinessIn the first installment of our two-part Thanksgiving Special, we discuss the so-called “Holiday Syndrome” in general and with an eye towards the upcoming US holiday season in particular. We explore how holidays catalyze some of our most elemental anxieties and fantasies as embodied in the institution known as the family. We walk through Sandor Ferenczi's “Sunday Neurosis,” the social injunction to indulge in “recreation,” and how that demand psychically re-creates the scene of the family in all its traumas, disappointments, and contingencies. Big helpings of regression, bottomless oral need, and displaced Oedipal antagonism are served – plus a reading of the traditional Thanksgiving meal itself, which not coincidentally features a lot of food that resembles what we feed babies.The second part of our Thanksgiving Special – on Freudian anthropology, the history behind (and of) Thanksgiving, and the libidinal structures of settler colonialism – drops Wednesday, Nov 22, just in time for your holiday travel.Articles referenced include:Cattell, J P. The Holiday Syndrome. The Psychoanalytic Review (1913-1957); New York Vol. 42, (Jan 1, 1955): 39, available here.Ferenczi, Sandor. Sunday Neuroses (1919) in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis. London, Karnac Books 1927.Sarah Mullooly Sattin. The Psychodynamics of the “Holiday Syndrome”: The Meaning and Therapeutic Use of Holidays in Group Therapy with Schizophrenic Patients. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care. Volume 13, Issue 4 (October 1975), Pages 156-162, available here.Rosenbaum, J. B. (1962) Holiday, Symptom and Dream. Psychoanalytic Review 49, 87-98, available here.Melanie Wallendorf, Eric J. Arnould, “We Gather Together”: Consumption Rituals of Thanksgiving Day, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 18, Issue 1, June 1991, Pages 13–31, available here.Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you've traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music
Connor interviews author Jasun Horsley about his new book, Big Mother: The Technological Body of Evil, and how the narrative of technological Progress blinds us to the emergence of a demonic Oedipal surveillance state which is devouring human nature.
We discuss this practical effects-driven British alien film and how it plays with ideas of identity, parenting, and gender, mostly in ways that involve eggs. Things get slimy, things get Oedipal.
While the 80s produced a lot of unwanted straight to cable and video movies, the 1983 sequel to the Hitchcock's classic genre defining film might be one of the best sequels of the genre. We discuss what inspired Hollywood to bring back the Oedipal son Norman Bates and more.. About TIR Thank you for supporting the show! Remember to like and subscribe on YouTube. Also, consider supporting us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/join/BitterLakePresents Check out our official merch store at https://www.thisisrevolutionpodcast.com/ Also follow us on... https://podcasts.apple.com/.../this-is.../id1524576360 www.youtube.com/thisisrevolutionpodcast www.twitch.tv/thisisrevolutionpodcast www.twitch.tv/leftflankvets https://www.facebook.com/Thisisrevolutionpodcast/ Instagram: @thisisrevolutionoakland Follow the TIR Crüe on Twitter: @TIRShowOakland @djenebajalan @DrKuba2 @probert06 @StefanBertramL @MarcusHereMeow Read Jason: https://www.sublationmag.com/writers/jason-myles Read Pascal: https://www.newsweek.com/black-political-elite-serving...
The estrogen festival continues as Matt slowly replaces Will with his wife Jen. Is this some kind of weird Oedipal thing? Ask Matt's therapist, but don't look on his hard drive! Apparently Jen is now a vanity listener, meaning she only listens to episodes she's featured in, which we forgive her for. Tune in as they discuss how Jen, Matt and their dog Mushu stacked each other on their paddleboard like an awkward lasagna. Matt relates a boring story about how he ate food that wasn't ordered by his table at a restaurant, and they talk Jen's unhealthy, waxy, smoky obsession: candles. The most interesting part is when Jen says that she and Matt are dating but also married - literally nobody thinks this way and the What Up Brotha Podcast does not endorse her views. @whatupbrothapodcast and wahtupbrotha.com
Elizabeth generously joins Caitlin for re-record of The Birds. (I forgot to hit record last time... RIP.) Elizabeth is a Birds expert, and she's my Hitchcock Blonde. We look at themes of disaster linked to female psyche, man vs nature, and some Oedipal monstrous motherhood. We also do a deep dive into the troubling production, most of which would not fly today. Tangents include: Nick at Nite, pregnant spiders, Reese's preferences, zoos, aquariums, and hamsters.
Episode 10 - Marlowe and Steven discuss the film The Shining and how the Overlook Hotel is the mother in an Oedipal triad. ----- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LostFuturesPod Rate us on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lost-futures-a-mark-fisher-podcast/id1685663806 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0EnwNGZijCDZVIl5JtjwGT Follow us on Twitter: @lostfuturespod Theme Song By: EvilJekyll Art By: Gregory --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/lost-futures/support
Paul and Jade talk Psycho! Comparing/contrasting Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) to Gus Van Sant's remake; Psycho (1998)FYI: Psycho(1960) will be leaving Netflix on July 1, 2023 so get your rewatch in! If you haven't seen Psycho (1998) and don't wish to pay for it, no worries, CLICK HERE for a video of both films spliced together so you can get a fair enough idea of what we're talking about. Enjoy!Join our Facebook group! Shall We Compare Thee? A Remake & Sequel Group Follow us on Instagram! @ShallWeCompareTheeOur next episode will be on Peter Pan! We'll compare Disney's cartoon (1953) to Peter Pan & Wendy (2023) also discuss Peter Pan (2003), Hook (1991) and Mary Martin's made for TV musical: Peter Pan 1960, Mary Martin YoutubeThe following episode will be Comparing Little Shop of Horrors (1960) starring Jack Nicholson to the Little Shop of Horrors (1986) musical directed by Frank Oz.If you have thoughts on any or all of these films, pleave us your feedback!We'd LOVE to read and respond to your comments so send your thoughts, opinions and recommendations to Shallwecomparethee@gmail.com or on Facebook and Instagram. Written feedback or voice message!...Here's talkin' to you, kid. Cheers!Time stamps (will be offset by 1-2 min due to ads- SORRY!)17:39 - start discussion/hotel scene30:41 - The office/driving/car lot57:44 - Marion arrives at the Bates Motel/Parlor scene1:34:25 - Shower/Clean-up Scene1:54:28 - Arbogast, Sam and Lila2:02:34 - Arbogast goes to the Bates Motel2:17:00 - Sam and Lila go to the Bates Motel2:39:13 - Psychiatrist explains it all2:43:50 - AwardsFollow Jade on social media:Instagram- @Jadethenakedlady Tiktok- @Jade8greenYoutube:@JadeAndersonactor Website:Jade-anderson.comJade's other podcasts:Perfectly marvelous! -A Marvelous Mrs. Maisel PodcastMurder Magnets -A Poker Face PodcastDead to Us- A Dead to Me PodcastFollow Paul on social media:Paul's pub quiz/trivia site- quizfixInstagram- @quizfixFacebook- Quizfix Trivia podcast with Monika - Stream Quizfix Podcast on SoundCloud Paul's FB- PaulJensenPaul's band on FB- The ProfitsPsycho links/references:Documentaries-1960:The Making Of Psycho Psycho 1960 - Behind the Scenes - 'Psycho' Sound The Psycho Legacy78/52: Hitchcock's shower scene 1998:Psycho Path: The Making of Psycho 1998 - YouTube The Making of Psycho (1997) - transcript - The Alfred Hitchcock WikiAudio:Audible- Alfred Hitchcock, the making of psycho audiobook Inside Psycho on Apple PodcastsPsycho on Youtube:Psycho/s (both movies spliced together)Psycho (1960/1998): Side-by-Side Comparison - YouTubeSlavoj Žižek presents ‘The Pervert's Guide to Cinema' by Sophie Fiennes [PART1] Slavoj Zizek Explains Freudian Theory in Hitchcock's: Psycho (1960) | Psychoanalysis Bird Symbolism in Psycho: Women as Prey Understanding Psycho: The UncannyManiacs and Psychos - Mental Illness in Horror Movies | Renegade CutPSYCHO (1960) Uncut Comparison - Footage Restored after 60 Years Hitchcock on Youtube:Alfred Hitchcock On Mastering Cinematic TensionHow Hitchcock Creates SuspenseAlfred Hitchcock: Dialogue versus Pure Cinema | Film Analysis Alfred Hitchcock: The Rules of Visual StorytellingFilm Techniques of Alfred Hitchcock (2nd Edition) Suspense Documentary I Alfred Hitchcock: Master of Suspense (2013) I Retrospective Articles:The Savage id- Camile Paglia-on Hitch's influence Ending of Hitchcock's 'Psycho' (Oedipal complex)Freud's Concept of the Unconscious - Hitchcock's PsychoPsycho movie review & film summary (1998) | Roger EbertAFI|Catalog - PsychoVariety: 100 best movies of all time Variety: Psycho review Joblo:Variety names Psycho greatest FilmGus Van Sant Explains Why He Remade Psycho (collider.com)Psycho! – Music and Manipulation in Hitchcock's Great Comedy | Humor in AmericaHitchcock and food articles:A culinary guide to Al
Abby, Patrick, and Dan get into the great Oedipal drama of our times: Succession. They discuss a ludicrously capacious number of versions of the Oedipus story; the development of the Oedipus complex throughout Freud's writing; Freud's notion of the primal father and the band of brothers who gather together to overthrow him; the real-life billionaire primitive accumulation monster dads who want to reverse-age themselves and live forever; Succession's Oedipal double binds and Oedipal victories; how the show thematizes patrimony, inheritance, and destiny; what it is to have “the phallus” (and why the Roy kids don't have it); Shiv as thwarted phallic mother; and Kendall's symbolic castration.The Atlantic article referenced in the episode is, “The Secret Fears of the Super Rich,” by Graeme Wood: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/308419/ Have you noticed that Freud is back? Got questions about psychoanalysis? Or maybe you've traversed the fantasy and lived to tell the tale? Leave us a voicemail! 484 775-0107 A podcast about psychoanalysis, politics, pop culture, and the ways we suffer now. New episodes on Saturdays. Follow us on social media: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/OrdinaryUnhappiness Twitter: @UnhappinessPod Instagram: @OrdinaryUnhappiness Patreon: patreon.com/OrdinaryUnhappiness Theme song: Formal Chicken - Gnossienne No. 1 https://open.spotify.com/album/2MIIYnbyLqriV3vrpUTxxO Provided by Fruits Music
No, not THAT The Room. This is a Shudder exclusive, so it's the perfect time for Slasher creator, Damon, to return. Big Slasher news, ambiguous endings and raging Oedipal complexes.
Mothers- the givers of life; the great nurturers. As we look back on Mother's Day we look at the mom's place in horror, from the Oedipal derangement of Norma Bates to the religious abuse of Margaret White to the vengeful murders of Pamela Voorhees, it has always been an important piece of great stories. Jerry and Matt look at the heroic Donna Trenton from Cujo (1983) and the vile and morally repugnant Ruth Chandler from The Girl Next Door (2007).
Ari Aster's third feature, the Oedipal nightmare comedy ‘Beau Is Afraid,' is here. Sean discusses the film's virtuosic gifts and alienating approach at length with Adam Nayman (1:00). Then, Sean is joined by Aster to discuss how he made his thrilling new movie (58:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Ari Aster and Adam Nayman Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In the third installment of The Secret History of MasSUSchusetts and the second part of our Historical Materia Ultima miniseries, we continue our mapping of the New England node of the transatlantic Rosicrucian and alchemical brotherhood that initiated the colonization, enslavement, & transmutation of America. The sundry foci of this EP: Slave-owning ministers & congregants of King's Chapel; the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the colonizing and plantation-owing arm of the Anglican Church; shitty modified baptismal rites; John Winthrop Jr.'s tutelage of George Starkey; the 17th century obsession with social-reforming “utopias”; Winthrop Jr.'s relationship w/ Jan Comenius; his John Dee fandom and library; his uncle Emmanuel Downing's push for the enslavement of indigenous Americans; John Winthrop Sr.'s bloody rule of MA during the Pequot War and the fact that the Mystic Massacre cleared the land for Winthrop Jr.'s alchemical plantation; John Winthrop Sr.'s membership in the General Court that drafted the MA Body of Liberties, the first legal document in New England, which legalized slavery... ...John Locke's secret Rosicrucian triumvirate w/ Isaac Newton & Robert Boyle, his hypocritical investments in Companies & employment by Councils directly responsible for creating the slavery economy, and the justifications for slavery in his “liberal” political theories; Newton's millenarian interpretations of the Book of Revelation; alchemical & Rosicrucian philosophies reifying social hierarchies... ...the Templar origins of England's Inns of Court barrister society, and the Inner Temple & Gray's Inn's connections to Rosicrucianism through Winthrop Jr. & Francis Bacon (+ the Order of the Pegasus); Hospitallers, fighting monks, and Wat Tyler's Rebellion; Winthrop's education there, and alchemical experiments... ...alchemical ciphers; Winthrop's search for legit Rosicrucians & pilgrimage to Constantinople; Winthrop Jr.'s alchemical economic development of New England, including its first ironworks, salt works, etc.; pansophic & millenarian attempts to convert Native Americans; the divine nature of salt; Winthrop's Eurotrip and a shit ton of alchemists named Johann; Moraien's “universal menstruum” and his beef w/ Descartes; Glauber's salt; animist metallurgical beliefs and spiritual alchemical allegories that Winthrop used to justify Native conversion & colonization; thiccccccc deposits of limonite; makin' money in the Enlightenment; Winthrop's connection to slave-trading Gov. Endecott... ...the saga of Thomas Morton; John Adams, J. Quincy Adams, & Thomas Jefferson's interest in Morton; Morton's arms-trading with local Ninnimissinuok; his friendly relations w/ his indigenous neighbors; his matriculation in the Inns of Court; work on behalf of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, anti-Puritan royalist; his frontier rager & the infamous maypole; a comparative religious & literary analysis of Hawthorne's “The May-pole at Merry Mount” by way of J.G. Frazer's The Golden Bough; May Day, Lord of Misrule, Beltane, wicker men; the Lord & Lady of the May; the quasi-Oedipal story of Attis & Cybele; Bacchanalia; Saturnalia; dick sacrifices; Morton's poem to Hymen; Midsummer (& Midsommar); St. John's Eve; Myles Standish's attack on Merry Mount; Morton's arrest and marooning on the Isle of Shoals; and much more. A list of all the texts, research papers, & articles referenced will be uploaded w/ notes on Substack or Patreon at a later date. Songs: | Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel ~ “White, White Dove” | | The Wizard of Oz ~ “Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead” | | Nina Simone ~ “Four Women” | | Barney & Friends ~ “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” | | Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak) ~ Midsommar (Mushrooms & The Maypole Queen Dance Scene) | | Leonard Cohen ~ “Dress Rehearsal Rag” |
This week we watched Rintaro's “Galaxy Express 999” and discussed the Oedipal complex, Sophia the Robot, the NFL offseason, Goofy being claimed by the Black community, Budd Dwyer's press conference, loving/hating chocolate milk, canceling Dog the Bounty Hunter, Ron Desantis eating pudding, Petric in the Cosmo Bowl, hacking the Akinator, and more! Leave a 5 star rating and a review/movie suggestion on iTunes and we'll shout you out on the show and “review” your movie of choice! Cover art by Sixofspades1 on Twitch Follow us on Twitter: @meandmydadwatch @drew2conclusion
This week we discuss Motivational Speaker which includes Hal vs Evil Hal, Oedipal themes, and a pack of wild dogs. Intro and outro music by Jacob Neufeld. Find him on Youtube Instagram Soundcloud and Bandcamp. If you'd like to support us monetarily you can do so directly on Patreon. Want Life is Unfair merch? Find it here. You can find us in these places: Twitch. Twitter. Discord. lifeisunfairpod@gmail.com
“According to New Testament scholar Frank Stagg and classicist Evelyn Stagg,[1] the synoptic Gospels of the canonical New Testament contain a relatively high number of references to women. Evangelical Bible scholar Gilbert Bilezikian agrees, especially by comparison with literary works of the same epoch.[2]: p.82 Neither the Staggs nor Bilezikian find any recorded instance where Jesus disgraces, belittles, reproaches, or stereotypes a woman. These writers claim that examples of the manner of Jesus are instructive for inferring his attitudes toward women and show repeatedly how he liberated and affirmed women.[1] Starr writes that of all founders of religions and religious sects, Jesus stands alone as the one who did not discriminate in some way against women. By word or deed, he never encouraged the disparagement of a woman.[3] Based on the account of Jesus' interaction with a Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-30 and Matthew 15:21-28, Karen King concludes that "an unnamed Gentile woman taught Jesus that the ministry of God is not limited to particular groups and persons, but belongs to all who have faith."[4] “In psychoanalytic theory, the Jocasta complex is the incestuous sexual desire of a mother towards her son.[1] Raymond de Saussure introduced the term in 1920 by way of analogy to its logical converse in psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex, and it may be used to cover different degrees of attachment,[2] including domineering but asexual mother loves – something perhaps particularly prevalent with an absent father. The Jocasta complex is named for Jocasta, a Greek queen who unwittingly married her son, Oedipus. The Jocasta complex is similar to the Oedipus complex, in which a child has sexual desire toward their parent(s). The term is a bit of an extrapolation since in the original story Oedipus and Jocasta were unaware that they were mother and son when they married. The usage in modern contexts involves a son with full knowledge of who his mother is. Theodor Reik saw the "Jocasta mother", with an unfulfilled adult relationship of her own and an over-concern for her child instead, as a prime source of neurosis.[3] George Devereux went further, arguing that the child's Oedipal complex was itself triggered by a pre-existing parental complex (Jocasta/Laius).[4] Eric Berne also explored the other (parental) side of the Oedipus complex, pointing to related family dramas such as "mother sleeping with daughter's boyfriend ... when the mother has no son to play Jocasta with".[5] With her feminist articulation of the Jocasta Complex[6] and Laius complex[7] Bracha L. Ettinger criticizes the classical psychoanalytic perception of Jocasta, of the maternal, the feminine, and the Oedipal/castration model in relation to the mother-child links. Atossa, in the Greek tragedy The Persians, has been seen as struggling in her dreams with a Jocasta complex.[8] Some American folk tales, like Jocasta, often feature figures expressing a maternal desire for their sons.[9]” According to The Bible, Jesus' cousin John was beheaded to death and put in prison, Herod committed incestuous marriage with his brother's wife, Herod was seduced by a striptease by Herodias' daughter, and Herod wanted infant Jesus to be a fatality via infanticide. That's Biblical organized crime. Judas was a rat and snitch according to organized crime figures. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/support
We know the “Oedipal complex,” but how well do we actually know the Oedipal Plays? This set of three plays is a real Star Wars situation, with prequels and sequels and also lots of feuding. Come for the high school theater stories, stay for the political commentary. This one is a wild ride. Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of death, suicide, incest, self-harm, war, kidnapping, and violence. Housekeeping - Recommendation: This week, Amanda recommends - Books: Check out our previous book recommendations, guests' books, and more at spiritspodcast.com/books - Call to Action: Check out Pale Blue Pod: an astronomy podcast for people who are overwhelmed by the universe but want to be its friend! New episodes every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts! Sponsors - Calm is the #1 app to help you reduce your anxiety and stress and help you sleep better. Get 40% off a Calm Premium subscription at calm.com/spirits. - ThirdLove is on a mission to find a perfect bra for everyone. Get 20% off your first order at thirdlove.com/spirits. - BetterHelp is an online therapy service. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/spirits Find Us Online If you like Spirits, help us grow by spreading the word! Follow us @SpiritsPodcast on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. You can support us on Patreon (http://patreon.com/spiritspodcast) to unlock bonus Your Urban Legends episodes, director's commentaries, custom recipe cards, and so much more. We also have lists of our book recommendations and previous guests' books at http://spiritspodcast.com/books. Transcripts are available at http://spiritspodcast.com/episodes. To buy merch, hear us on other podcasts, contact us, find our mailing address, or download our press kit, head on over to http://spiritspodcast.com. About Us Spirits was created by Julia Schifini, Amanda McLoughlin and Eric Schneider. We are founding members of Multitude, an independent podcast collective and production studio. Our music is "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0.
The Jokermen welcome The Hold Steady lead singer (and fellow Talkhouse podcaster) Craig Finn to the program for a conversation about Lou Reed's The Blue Mask, a front-to-back masterpiece about murderous psychopaths, Oedipal mania, and how women are great. LISTEN TO CRAIG'S PODCAST "THAT'S HOW I REMEMBER IT" LISTEN TO THE LATEST HOLD STEADY SINGLE "SIDEWAYS SKULL" READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO JOKERMEN ON SUBSTACK SUBSCRIBE TO JOKERMEN ON PATREON SUBSCRIBE TO NEVER ENDING STORIES ON PATREON FOLLOW JOKERMEN ON TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, AND YOUTUBE
In this episode, I present weeks 9, 10, 11, and 12, plus the lecture on Oedipal knowledge to wrap up the "Lectures on the Will to Know." If you want to support me, you can do that with these links: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/theoryandphilosophy paypal.me/theoryphilosophy Twitter: @DavidGuignion IG: @theory_and_philosophy
Hamlet is the Shakespearean character that many actors long to play. Jade Anouka is one of those actors. She talks to past Hamlets– Sir Derek Jacobi, Adrian Lester, Samuel West and Tessa Parr – about the challenges in approaching the part. And she hears the fabled story of The Red Book, a red-bound copy of the play, begun by the actor Sir Johnston Forbes-Robinson, who passed the book on to a successive actor on the condition that in turn they passed it onto the finest Hamlet of the next generation. Derek Jacobi tells the story of receiving it from Peter O'Toole and passing it on to Kenneth Branagh, who in turn passed it on to Tom Hiddleston. Jade wonders where the book might go next. Jade also explores why Hamlet as a part holds such fascination for actors. Here's the rub - no one can tell you what Hamlet is about. A revenge tragedy, an Oedipal drama, a political betrayal, a study of insanity, the portrait of a fatally flawed genius. Each actor makes it his own but has to deal with the weight of its history. Derek Jacobi tells the story of performing ‘To be or not to be' only to hear the voice of Sir Winston Churchill joining in from the front row. Adrian Lester describes how he whispered each famous speech to himself in an attempt to get back to the essence of the language. And each generation interprets Hamlet as an expression of their own time. Professor Michael Dobson from the Shakespeare Institute describes a production he saw in Ukraine in a cellar now used as a bomb shelter. Readers: Sir Derek Jacobi, Adrian Lester, Samuel West, Tessa Parr Producer: Sara Conkey A True Thought production for BBC Radio 4 Acknowledgements: Hamlet BBC2 26th December 2009 Director - Gregory Doran Royal Shakespeare Company Production Hamlet – David Tennant Composer: Paul Englishby Hamlet film 1948 Director – Laurence Olivier Screenplay – Laurence Olivier Hamlet – Laurence Olivier Composer: William Walton Two Cities Production Hamlet BBC Radio 4 Production 2014 Director – Marc Beeby Hamlet – Jamie Parker Ophelia – Lizzy Watts President Zelensky address to Parliament BBC Parliament Tuesday 8th March 2022
We ring in the new year and year two of the podcast not adrift in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but somewhere a long time ago in a galaxy far far away (but still owned by the Walt Disney corporation). The Force Awakens: woke SJW propaganda, the Walt Disney Company's hollow retread of A New Hope, a Lacanian manifesto in white men's fragile masculinity, or a JJ Abrams puzzlebox that's all set up and no pay off? Stu and Nicole take a break from capeshit to talk about gay ass space wizards and how delusional everyone was in 2015/2016. Plus, Nicole does some intellectual self-mutilation as by revisiting her award-winning psychoanalytic essay on The Force Awakens. It really was selected as the best essay of 2018. Rate, review, subscribe to our Patreon and join our Discord Community! Special extra thanks to producer Miguel, who had to slog extra hard through technical issues for this one! Production by Miguel Tanhi. Art by Zoe Woolley. Follow us at @MarvelousDeath for updates! Thank you for listening and supporting the show!
Return of the Jedi (1983), the final film of the classic Star Wars space opera trilogy, is packed with psychology, layering in lessons on family systems theory, Oedipal themes, social obedience, and human violence. We learn about our many selves as exemplified by the masks we wear. From the first to last scene, the film is telling many truths about the characters we have been following, their truest motivations and intentions.
https://www.letusthinkaboutit.com/step-69-memetic-desire/ 0:00 Intro1:22 What is mimetic rivalry? memtic desire.2:48 Mimicry as an internal set of neurosis.5:05 What we want is the attention and control that someone else wanted first.7:14 If somebody else wants something, our survival depends on us getting to it first.9:47 Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.11:28 Accelerationism is a means to break out of the deadlock of capitalism.12:56 All of our focus is now embodied in winning the object.14:46 If the system is good enough, it will disperse the energies.16:37 How capitalism fits into all of this.
The Pope finally defined the dogma of The Immaculate Conception on 8th December, 1854; confirming that, in the view of the Catholic Church, Christ's mother Mary had not only been ‘full of grace', but was completely absent of sin even at her own conception. Even though this had been an unofficial concept for centuries prior, it still proved controversial, with 10% of Bishops believing it should not be adopted as doctrine. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly marvel at just how recently this fundamental principle of Catholicism was established; probe around in James, Brother of Jesus' Oedipal memoirs; and look at the role of Marian devotion in the Madonna-Whore complex… Further Reading: • ‘Christianity: Immaculate Conception' (BBC, 2011): https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/beliefs/immaculateconception.shtml • ‘Did Jesus Have Siblings?' (Franciscan Media): https://www.franciscanmedia.org/ask-a-franciscan/did-jesus-have-siblings • ‘Pope Francis explains the Immaculate Conception' (Catholic News Service, 2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCGZRGkTq3U Thanks so much for supporting the show! We massively appreciate it. The Retrospectors are Olly Mann, Rebecca Messina & Arion McNicoll, with Matt Hill. Edit producer: Sophie King Theme Music: Pass The Peas. Announcer: Bob Ravelli. Graphic Design: Terry Saunders. Copyright: Rethink Audio / Olly Mann 2022. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The 1985 Brits, Sam wins a thing, a book launch, strikes, a jazz night out, and looking up to old people. Join the Iron Filings Society: https://www.patreon.com/topflighttimemachine Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dead dummies, drowned tramps, resolving the Oedipal complex, the forever incompleteness of the number "3," sex, the sea, slapstick comedy, irony, competing desires of domesticity versus the desire to escape, the beautiful ending and the reverse coda, and much more is discussed on this episode covering the whole of Ann Quin's Berg. Now Chad and Brian move on to Quin's second novel, Three, which came out in 1969 and, in a way, begins right where we left off, opening "with the disappearance at sea, possibly suicide, of a young woman, identified only as S." You can get the book via And Other Stories, Bookshop, your local indie, or Amazon. This is the book that got Chad completely hooked on Quin, so read along and tune in! This week's music is "City of the Dead" by Superchunk. You can watch next week's discussion of Three live on YouTube at 4pm ET on Wednesday, November 9th. (Reading schedule can be found here.) And you can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel. And you can support us at Patreon and get bonus content before anyone else, along with other rewards, the opportunity to easily communicate with the hosts, etc. Follow Open Letter, Chad Post, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests. All of Ann Quin's books are available through Bookshop.org, or at better bookstores everywhere. Be sure to order Brian's book, Joytime Killbox, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions.
Dead dummies, drowned tramps, resolving the Oedipal complex, the forever incompleteness of the number "3," sex, the sea, slapstick comedy, irony, competing desires of domesticity versus the desire to escape, the beautiful ending and the reverse coda, and much more is discussed on this episode covering the whole of Ann Quin's Berg. Now Chad and Brian move on to Quin's second novel, Three, which came out in 1969 and, in a way, begins right where we left off, opening "with the disappearance at sea, possibly suicide, of a young woman, identified only as S." You can get the book via And Other Stories, Bookshop, your local indie, or Amazon. This is the book that got Chad completely hooked on Quin, so read along and tune in! This week's music is "City of the Dead" by Superchunk. You can watch next week's discussion of Three live on YouTube at 4pm ET on Wednesday, November 9th. (Reading schedule can be found here.) And you can find all previous seasons of TMR on our YouTube channel. And you can support us at Patreon and get bonus content before anyone else, along with other rewards, the opportunity to easily communicate with the hosts, etc. Follow Open Letter, Chad Post, and Brian Wood for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests. All of Ann Quin's books are available through Bookshop.org, or at better bookstores everywhere. Be sure to order Brian's book, Joytime Killbox, which is available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions.
It is not terribly controversial to say that castration fear is one of the key conceptual engines driving the psychoanalytic project overall. Whether one thinks of it manifesting as a looming, retributive threat for incestuous longings or as a struggle to face one's shortcomings, contending with what we are at risk of losing or what has already gone missing animates both the field and the consulting room. Imagine the profession if it didn't contend with this subject: without castration we would have neither Oedipal conflict nor a theory of repression. As such, it is noteworthy to consider the paucity of writing about circumcision in psychoanalysis, especially when you remember that circumcision and castration both involve cutting male genitalia. And before you protest that a penis is not a testicle, it should not come as a surprise that in the unconscious the bits and bobs of male genitalia might not be represented as separately as they are in medical discourse—in the unconscious sometimes a penis is a scrotal sac and sometimes the balls include the dick. Jordan Osserman's Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological, and Gendered Dimensions of the World's Oldest Surgery (Bloomsbury, 2022), approaches the subject of penile cutting née circumcision from myriad angles. It represents the pining of contemporary “intactivists” in search of lost foreskins and lost chances as both poignant if not also politically pregnant with neoliberal meaning. It fleshes out the pondering of St. Paul (of “love thy neighbor as thyself' fame) on the importance of the unimportance of circumcision. It illuminates the ways in which what appears to be a fear of childhood sexuality run amok also belies a prurient interest in it. The discussion of 19th century American medicine's invention of reflex theory, which employed circumcision to cure boys' perceived ailments, investigates a mode of thinking that will be familiar to readers of feminist medical history of the same period. The removal of the foreskin and the removal of the uterus share a close, perhaps twinned, relationship. Osserman has written a book that invites the reader to see circumcision as a rite, experience, discourse and practice that offers itself up to unabashedly efflorescent and ambivalent readings. Is a penis without a foreskin more masculine because it lacks a flowery covering— think of tulip petals or better yet pansies strewn on the roadside? Or is a penis without a foreskin a tad castrated, having been bloodied, (and a tad envious—sorry Alice Cooper but not only women bleed) and so ultimately feminized? We are encouraged to wonder what might keep this practice—the world's oldest surgery—in seemingly perpetual, if at times contested, circulation? What are the unconscious roots of the wish to cut penises anyway? I found myself a little surprised at how little I or others I know have given thought to the beautifully irrational reasons that underlie a surgical practice (performed the world over and without any singular religious allegiance as it ends up) laden with meaning and yet not medically necessary. What has given it such staying power? What unconscious conflicts might circumcision sate, if not actually resolve? In trying to answer these questions, I find myself asking if there is any relationship between circumcision and Freud's idea that the repudiation of femininity functions as a kind of bedrock? What is bedrock is challenging to crack open (intellectually, philosophically) precisely because it is foundational. It is the ground upon which we stand. We fear fucking with it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
When we're stressed, upset, feeling down, or off, most of us have things we do to decompress. Things we find therapeutic — maybe it's listening to music, working with our hands, or unplugging for a while. But sometimes these mood boosters don't do the trick and it seems like it's time to talk to a professional. During the pandemic, more people sought counseling than ever before. But the process of therapy can still seem a bit opaque. What exactly happens in therapy? How does it work? And which approach is right for which issues? On this episode, we get inside the heads of therapists to find out how they ply their craft, and what it takes to really feel better. We hear stories about what happened when a city took a bold step toward providing free, virtual mental health services to its residents. Also: what happens when politics and therapy collide; how Freud's brainchild — psychoanalysis — is still relevant; and what it's like to grow up as the child of two shrinks. Also heard on this week's episode: We talk with veteran relationship therapist Argie Allen-Wilson about who should get therapy and why, how long therapy should last, and how to break up with your therapist. Allen-Wilson is CEO and co-founder of Family and Individual Therapeutic Healing (or F.A.I.T.H.) Inc. and Connections Matter.' Freud may have given rise to modern talk therapy — but these days, a lot of his ideas, from penis envy to the Oedipal complex, have fallen out of favor. So where does that leave modern psychoanalysis? Reporter Liz Tung talks with psychoanalysts Jonathan Shedler and Steven Kuchuck. For more on psychoanalysis, see Kuchuck's new book “The Relational Revolution in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy,” and Shedler's “That Was Then, This is Now: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for the Rest of Us.” From the time she was a kid, Dara Lovitz had one big fear: vomiting. But when she became a mother, she knew things had to change. Lovitz explains her journey, step by step, from phobia to acceptance through exposure therapy. Her book, with psychologist David Yusko, is “Gag Reflections: Conquering a Fear of Vomit Through Exposure Therapy.” Can you imagine having a therapist around 24/7 — analyzing your behavior, your moods, maybe even your dreams? For journalist Micah Toub, that was just normal life growing up as the son of two shrinks. Nichole Currie reports. Toub's book is “Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks.” This episode was first broadcasted on January 7, 2022
Episode one hundred and forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Light My Fire" by the Doors, the history of cool jazz, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "My Friend Jack" by the Smoke. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode and the shorter spoken-word tracks. Information on Dick Bock, World Pacific, and Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger have all released autobiographies. Densmore's is out of print, but I referred to Manzarek's and Krieger's here. Of the two Krieger's is vastly more reliable. I also used Mick Wall's book on the Doors and Stephen Davis' biography of Jim Morrison. Information about Elektra Records came from Follow the Music by Jac Holzman and Gavan Daws, which is available as a free PDF download on Elektra's website. Biographical information on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi comes from this book, written by one of his followers. The Doors' complete studio albums can be bought as MP3s for £14. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There are two big problems that arise for anyone trying to get an accurate picture of history, and which have certainly arisen for me during the course of this podcast -- things which make sources unreliable enough that you feel you have to caveat everything you say on a subject. One of those is hagiography, and the converse desire to tear heroes down. No matter what one wants to say on, say, the subjects of Jesus or Mohammed or Joseph Smith, the only sources we have for their lives are written either by people who want to present them as unblemished paragons of virtue, or by people who want to destroy that portrayal -- we know that any source is written by someone with a bias, and it might be a bias we agree with, but it's still a bias. The other, related, problem, is deliberate disinformation. This comes up especially for people dealing with military history -- during conflicts, governments obviously don't want their opponents to know when their attacks have caused damage, or to know what their own plans are, and after a war has concluded the belligerent parties want to cover up their own mistakes and war crimes. We're sadly seeing that at the moment in the situation in Ukraine -- depending on one's media diet, one could get radically different ideas of what is actually going on in that terrible conflict. But it happens all the time, in all wars, and on all sides. Take the Vietnam War. While the US was involved on the side of the South Vietnamese government from the start of that conflict, it was in a very minor way, mostly just providing supplies and training. Most historians look at the real start of US involvement in that war as having been in August 1964. President Johnson had been wanting, since assuming the Presidency in November 1963 after the death of John F Kennedy, to get further into the war, but had needed an excuse to do so. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident provided him with that excuse. On August the second, a fleet of US warships entered into what the North Vietnamese considered their territorial waters -- they used a different distance from shore to mark their territorial waters than most other countries used, and one which wasn't generally accepted, but which they considered important. Because of this, some North Vietnamese ships started following the American ones. The American ships, who thought they weren't doing anything wrong, set off what they considered to be warning shots, and the North Vietnamese ships fired back, which to the American ships was considered them attacking. Some fire was exchanged, but not much happened. Two days later, the American ships believed they were getting attacked again, and spent several hours firing at what they believed were North Vietnamese submarines. It was later revealed that this was just the American sonar systems playing up, and that they were almost certainly firing at nothing at all, and some even suspected that at the time -- President Johnson apparently told other people in confidence that in his opinion they'd been firing at stray dolphins. But that second "attack", however flimsy the evidence, was enough that Johnson could tell Congress and the nation that an American fleet had been attacked by the North Vietnamese, and use that as justification to get Congress to authorise him sending huge numbers of troops to Vietnam, and getting America thoroughly embroiled in a war that would cost innumerable lives and billions of dollars for what turned out to be no benefit at all to anyone. The commander of the US fleet involved in the Gulf of Tonkin operation was then-Captain, later Rear Admiral, Steve Morrison: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] We've talked a bit in this podcast previously about the development of jazz in the forties, fifties, and early sixties -- there was a lot of back and forth influence in those days between jazz, blues, R&B, country, and rock and roll, far more than one might imagine looking at the popular histories of these genres, and so we've looked at swing, bebop, and modal jazz before now. But one style of music we haven't touched on is the type that was arguably the most popular and influential style of jazz in the fifties, even though we've mentioned several of the people involved in it. We've never yet had a proper look at Cool Jazz. Cool Jazz, as its name suggests, is a style of music that was more laid back than the more frenetic bebop or hard-edged modal jazz. It was a style that sounded sophisticated, that sounded relaxed, that prized melody and melodic invention over super-fast technical wizardry, and that produced much of what we now think of when we think of "jazz" as a popular style of music. The records of Dave Brubeck, for example, arguably the most popular fifties jazz musician, are very much in the "cool jazz" mode: [Excerpt: The Dave Brubeck Quartet, "Take Five"] And we have mentioned on several occasions the Modern Jazz Quartet, who were cited as influences by everyone from Ray Charles to the Kinks to the Modern Folk Quartet: [Excerpt: The Modern Jazz Quartet, "Regret?"] We have also occasionally mentioned people like Mose Allison, who occasionally worked in the Cool Jazz mode. But we've never really looked at it as a unified thing. Cool Jazz, like several of the other developments in jazz we've looked at, owes its existence to the work of the trumpeter Miles Davis, who was one of the early greats of bop and who later pioneered modal jazz. In 1948, in between his bop and modal periods, Davis put together a short-lived nine-piece group, the Miles Davis Nonette, who performed together for a couple of weeks in late 1948, and who recorded three sessions in 1949 and 1950, but who otherwise didn't perform much. Each of those sessions had a slightly different lineup, but key people involved in the recordings were Davis himself, arranger Gil Evans, piano player John Lewis, who would later go on to become the leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and baritone sax player Gerry Mulligan. Mulligan and Evans, and the group's alto player Lee Konitz, had all been working for the big band Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, a band which along with the conventional swing instruments also had a French horn player and a tuba player, and which had recorded soft, mellow, relaxing music: [Excerpt: Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra, "To Each His Own"] The Davis Nonette also included French horn and tuba, and was explicitly modelled on Thornhill's style, but in a stripped-down version. They used the style of playing that Thornhill preferred, with no vibrato, and with his emphasis on unison playing, with different instruments doubling each other playing the melody, rather than call-and response riffing: [Excerpt: The Miles Davis Nonette, "Venus De Milo"] Those recordings were released as singles in 1949 and 1950, and were later reissued in 1957 as an album titled "Birth of the Cool", by which point Cool Jazz had become an established style, though Davis himself had long since moved on in other musical directions. After the Birth of the Cool sessions, Gerry Mulligan had recorded an album as a bandleader himself, and then had moved to the West Coast, where he'd started writing arrangements for Stan Kenton, one of the more progressive big band leaders of the period: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton, "Young Blood"] While working for Kenton, Mulligan had started playing dates at a club called the Haig, where the headliner was the vibraphone player Red Norvo. While Norvo had started out as a big-band musician, playing with people like Benny Goodman, he had recently started working in a trio, with just a guitarist, initially Tal Farlowe, and bass player, initially Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Red Norvo, "This Can't Be Love"] By 1952 Mingus had left Norvo's group, but they were still using the trio format, and that meant there was no piano at the venue, which meant that Mulligan had to form a band that didn't rely on the chordal structures that a piano would provide -- the idea of a group with a rhythm section that *didn't* have a piano was quite an innovation in jazz at this time, and freeing themselves from that standard instrument ended up opening up extra possibilities. His group consisted of himself on saxophone, Chet Baker on trumpet, Bob Whitlock on bass and Chico Hamilton on drums. They made music in much the same loose, casual, style as the recordings Mulligan had made with Davis, but in a much smaller group with the emphasis being on the interplay between Mulligan and Baker. And this group were the first group to record on a new label, Pacific Jazz, founded by Dick Bock. Bock had served in the Navy during World War II, and had come back from the South Pacific with two tastes -- a taste for hashish, and for music that was outside the conventional American pop mould. Bock *loved* the Mulligan Quartet, and in partnership with his friend Roy Harte, a notable jazz drummer, he raised three hundred and fifty dollars to record the first album by Mulligan's new group: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "Aren't You Glad You're You?"] Pacific Jazz, the label Bock and Harte founded, soon became *the* dominant label for Cool Jazz, which also became known as the West Coast Sound. The early releases on the label were almost entirely by the Mulligan Quartet, released either under Mulligan's name, as by Chet Baker, or as "Lee Konitz and the Gerry Mulligan Quartet" when Mulligan's old bandmate Konitz joined them. These records became big hits, at least in the world of jazz. But both Mulligan and Baker were heroin addicts, and in 1953 Mulligan got arrested and spent six months in prison. And while he was there, Chet Baker made some recordings in his own right and became a bona fide star. Not only was Baker a great jazz trumpet player, he was also very good looking, and it turned out he could sing too. The Mulligan group had made the song "My Funny Valentine" one of the highlights of its live shows, with Baker taking a trumpet solo: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan Quartet, "My Funny Valentine"] But when Baker recorded a vocal version, for his album Chet Baker Sings, it made Baker famous: [Excerpt: Chet Baker, "My Funny Valentine"] When Mulligan got out of prison, he wanted to rehire Baker, but Baker was now topping the popularity polls in all the jazz magazines, and was the biggest breakout jazz star of the early fifties. But Mulligan formed a new group, and this just meant that Pacific Jazz had *two* of the biggest acts in jazz on its books now, rather than just one. But while Bock loved jazz, he was also fascinated by other kinds of music, and while he was in New York at the beginning of 1956 he was invited by his friend George Avakian, a producer who had worked with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and others, to come and see a performance by an Indian musician he was working with. Avakian was just about to produce Ravi Shankar's first American album, The Sounds of India, for Columbia Records. But Columbia didn't think that there was much of a market for Shankar's music -- they were putting it out as a speciality release rather than something that would appeal to the general public -- and so they were happy for Bock to sign Shankar to his own label. Bock renamed the company World Pacific, to signify that it was now going to be putting out music from all over the world, not just jazz, though he kept the Pacific Jazz label for its jazz releases, and he produced Shankar's next album, India's Master Musician: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Charu Keshi"] Most of Shankar's recordings for the next decade would be produced by Bock, and Bock would also try to find ways to combine Shankar's music with jazz, though Shankar tried to keep a distinction between the two. But for example on Shankar's next album for World Pacific, Improvisations and Theme from Pather Panchali, he was joined by a group of West Coast jazz musicians including Bud Shank (who we'll hear about again in a future episode) on flute: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Improvisation on the Theme From Pather Panchali"] But World Pacific weren't just putting out music. They also put out spoken-word records. Some of those were things that would appeal to their jazz audience, like the comedy of Lord Buckley: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Willy the Shake"] But they also put out spoken-word albums that appealed to Bock's interest in spirituality and philosophy, like an album by Gerald Heard. Heard had previously written the liner notes for Chet Baker Sings!, but as well as being a jazz fan Heard was very connected in the world of the arts -- he was a very close friend with Aldous Huxley -- and was also interested in various forms of non-Western spirituality. He practiced yoga, and was also fascinated by Buddhism, Vedanta, and Taoism: [Excerpt: Gerald Heard, "Paraphrased from the Tao te Ching of Lao Tzu"] We've come across Heard before, in passing, in the episode on "Tomorrow Never Knows", when Ralph Mentzner said of his experiments with Timothy Leary and Ram Dass "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions" -- Heard was friends with both Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, and in fact had been invited by them to take part in the mescaline trip that Huxley wrote about in his book The Doors of Perception, the book that popularised psychedelic drug use, though Heard was unable to attend at that time. Heard was a huge influence on the early psychedelic movement -- though he always advised Leary and his associates not to be so public with their advocacy, and just to keep it to a small enlightened circle rather than risk the wrath of the establishment -- and he's cited by almost everyone in Leary's circle as having been the person who, more than anything else, inspired them to investigate both psychedelic drugs and mysticism. He's the person who connected Bill W. of Alcoholics Anonymous with Osmond and got him advocating LSD use. It was Heard's books that made Huston Smith, the great scholar of comparative religions and associate of Leary, interested in mysticism and religions outside his own Christianity, and Heard was one of the people who gave Leary advice during his early experiments. So it's not surprising that Bock also became interested in Leary's ideas before they became mainstream. Indeed, in 1964 he got Shankar to do the music for a short film based on The Psychedelic Experience, which Shankar did as a favour for his friend even though Shankar didn't approve of drug use. The film won an award in 1965, but quickly disappeared from circulation as its ideas were too controversial: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience (film)] And Heard introduced Bock to other ideas around philosophy and non-Western religions. In particular, Bock became an advocate for a little-known Hindu mystic who had visited the US in 1959 teaching a new style of meditation which he called Transcendental Meditation. A lot is unclear about the early life of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, even his birth name -- both "Maharishi" and "Yogi" are honorifics rather than names as such, though he later took on both as part of his official name, and in this and future episodes I'll refer to him as "the Maharishi". What we do know is that he was born in India, and had attained a degree in physics before going off to study with Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, a teacher of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. Now, I am not a Hindu, and only have a passing knowledge of Hindu theology and traditions, and from what I can gather getting a proper understanding requires a level of cultural understanding I don't have, and in particular a knowledge of the Sanskrit language, so my deepest apologies for any mangling I do of these beliefs in trying to talk about them as they pertain to mid-sixties psychedelic rock. I hope my ignorance is forgivable, and seen as what it is rather than malice. But the teachings of this school as I understand them seem to centre around an idea of non-separation -- that God is in all things, and is all things, and that there is no separation between different things, and that you merely have to gain a deep realisation of this. The Maharishi later encapsulated this in the phrase "I am that, thou art that, all this is that", which much later the Beach Boys, several of whom were followers of the Maharishi, would turn into a song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "All This is That"] The other phrase they're singing there, "Jai Guru Dev" is also a phrase from the Maharishi, and refers to his teacher Brahmananda Saraswati -- it means "all hail the divine teacher" or "glory to the heavenly one", and "guru dev" or "guru deva" was the name the Maharishi would use for Saraswati after his death, as the Maharishi believed that Saraswati was an actual incarnation of God. It's that phrase that John Lennon is singing in "Across the Universe" as well, another song later inspired by the Maharishi's teachings: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The Maharishi became, by his own account, Saraswati's closest disciple, advisor, and right-hand man, and was privy to his innermost thoughts. However, on Saraswati's death the leadership of the monastery he led became deeply contested, with two different rivals to the position, and the Maharishi was neither -- the rules of the monastery said that only people born into the Brahmin caste could reach the highest positions in the monastery's structure, and the Maharishi was not a Brahmin. So instead of remaining in the monastery, the Maharishi went out into the world to teach a new form of meditation which he claimed he had learned from Guru Dev, a technique which became known as transcendental meditation. The Maharishi would, for the rest of his life, always claim that the system he taught was Guru Dev's teaching for the world, not his own, though the other people who had been at the monastery with him said different things about what Saraswati had taught -- but of course it's perfectly possible for a spiritual leader to have had multiple ideas and given different people different tasks. The crucial thing about the Maharishi's teaching, the way it differed from everything else in the history of Hindu monasticism (as best I understand this) is that all previous teachers of meditation had taught that to get the benefit of the techniques one had to be a renunciate -- you should go off and become a monk and give up all worldly pleasures and devote your life to prayer and meditation. Traditionally, Hinduism has taught that there are four stages of life -- the student, the householder or married person with a family, the retired person, and the Sanyasi, or renunciate, but that you could skip straight from being a student to being a Sanyasi and spend your life as a monk. The Maharishi, though, said: "Obviously enough there are two ways of life: the way of the Sanyasi and the way of life of a householder. One is quite opposed to the other. A Sanyasi renounces everything of the world, whereas a householder needs and accumulates everything. The one realises, through renunciation and detachment, while the other goes through all attachments and accumulation of all that is needed for physical life." What the Maharishi taught was that there are some people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by giving up all the pleasures of the senses, eating the plainest possible food, having no sexual, familial, or romantic connections with anyone else, and having no possessions, while there are other people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by being really rich and having a lot of nice stuff and loads of friends and generally enjoying the pleasures of the flesh -- and that just as there are types of meditation that can help the first group reach enlightenment, there are also types of meditation that will fit into the latter kind of lifestyle, and will help those people reach oneness with God but without having to give up their cars and houses and money. And indeed, he taught that by following his teachings you could get *more* of those worldly pleasures. All you had to do, according to his teaching, was to sit still for fifteen to twenty minutes, twice a day, and concentrate on a single Sanskrit word or phrase, a mantra, which you would be given after going through a short course of teaching. There was nothing else to it, and you would eventually reach the same levels of enlightenment as the ascetics who spent seventy years living in a cave and eating only rice -- and you'd end up richer, too. The appeal of this particular school is, of course, immediately apparent, and Bock became a big advocate of the Maharishi, and put out three albums of his lectures: [Excerpt: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "Deep Meditation"] Bock even met his second wife at one of the Maharishi's lectures, in 1961. In the early sixties, World Pacific got bought up by Liberty Records, the label for which Jan and Dean and others recorded, but Bock remained in charge of the label, and expanded it, adding another subsidiary, Aura Records, to put out rock and roll singles. Aura was much less successful than the other World Pacific labels. The first record the label put out was a girl-group record, "Shooby Dooby", by the Lewis Sisters, two jazz-singing white schoolteachers from Michigan who would later go on to have a brief career at Motown: [Excerpt: The Lewis Sisters, "Shooby Dooby"] The most successful act that Aura ever had was Sonny Knight, an R&B singer who had had a top twenty hit in 1956 with "Confidential", a song he'd recorded on Specialty Records with Bumps Blackwell, and which had been written by Dorinda Morgan: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "Confidential"] But Knight's biggest hit on Aura, "If You Want This Love", only made number seventy-one on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Sonny Knight, "If You Want This Love"] Knight would later go on to write a novel, The Day the Music Died, which Greil Marcus described as "the bitterest book ever written about how rock'n'roll came to be and what it turned into". Marcus said it was about "how a rich version of American black culture is transformed into a horrible, enormously profitable white parody of itself: as white labels sign black artists only to ensure their oblivion and keep those blacks they can't control penned up in the ghetto of the black charts; as white America, faced with something good, responds with a poison that will ultimately ruin even honest men". Given that Knight was the artist who did the *best* out of Aura Records, that says a great deal about the label. But one of the bands that Aura signed, who did absolutely nothing on the charts, was a group called Rick and the Ravens, led by a singer called Screamin' Ray Daniels. They were an LA club band who played a mixture of the surf music which the audiences wanted and covers of blues songs which Daniels preferred to sing. They put out two singles on Aura, "Henrietta": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Henrietta"] and "Soul Train": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Soul Train"] Ray Daniels was a stage name -- his birth name was Ray Manzarek, and he would later return to that name -- and the core of the band was Ray on vocals and his brothers Rick on guitar and Jim on harmonica. Manzarek thought of himself as a pretty decent singer, but they were just a bar band, and music wasn't really his ideal career. Manzarek had been sent to college by his solidly lower-middle-class Chicago family in the hope that he would become a lawyer, but after getting a degree in economics and a brief stint in the army, which he'd signed up for to avoid getting drafted in the same way people like Dean Torrence did, he'd gone off to UCLA to study film, with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. His family had followed him to California, and he'd joined his brothers' band as a way of making a little extra money on the side, rather than as a way to become a serious musician. Manzarek liked the blues songs they performed, and wasn't particularly keen on the surf music, but thought it was OK. What he really liked, though, was jazz -- he was a particular fan of McCoy Tyner, the pianist on all the great John Coltrane records: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was a piano player himself, though he didn't play much with the Ravens, and he wanted more than anything to be able to play like Tyner, and so when Rick and the Ravens got signed to Aura Records, he of course became friendly with Dick Bock, who had produced so many great jazz records and worked with so many of the greats of the genre. But Manzarek was also having some problems in his life. He'd started taking LSD, which was still legal, and been fascinated by its effects, but worried that he couldn't control them -- he couldn't tell whether he was going to have a good trip or a bad one. He was wondering if there was a way he could have the same kind of revelatory mystical experience but in a more controlled manner. When he mentioned this to Bock, Bock told him that the best method he knew for doing that was transcendental meditation. Bock gave him a copy of one of the Maharishi's albums, and told him to go to a lecture on transcendental meditation, run by the head of the Maharishi's west-coast organisation, as by this point the Maharishi's organisation, known as Spiritual Regeneration, had an international infrastructure, though it was still nowhere near as big as it would soon become. At the lecture, Manzarek got talking to one of the other audience members, a younger man named John Densmore. Densmore had come to the lecture with his friend Robby Krieger, and both had come for the same reason that Manzarek had -- they'd been having bad trips and so had become a little disillusioned with acid. Krieger had been the one who'd heard about transcendental meditation, while he was studying the sitar and sarod at UCLA -- though Krieger would later always say that his real major had been in "not joining the Army". UCLA had one of the few courses in Indian music available in the US at the time, as thanks in part to Bock California had become the centre of American interest in music from India -- so much so that in 1967 Ravi Shankar would open up a branch of his own Kinnara Music School there. (And you can get an idea of how difficult it is to separate fact from fiction when researching this episode that one of the biographies I've used for the Doors says that Krieger heard about the Maharishi while studying at the Kinnara school. As the only branch of the Kinnara school that was open at this point was in Mumbai, it's safe to say that unless Krieger had a *really* long commute he wasn't studying there at this point.) Densmore and Manzarek got talking, and they found that they shared a lot of the same tastes in jazz -- just as Manzarek was a fan of McCoy Tyner, so Densmore was a fan of Elvin Jones, the drummer on those Coltrane records, and they both loved the interplay of the two musicians: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] Manzarek was starting to play a bit more keyboards with the Ravens, and he was also getting annoyed with the Ravens' drummer, who had started missing rehearsals -- he'd turn up only for the shows themselves. He thought it might be an idea to get Densmore to join the group, and Densmore agreed to come along for a rehearsal. That initial rehearsal Densmore attended had Manzarek and his brothers, and may have had a bass player named Patricia Hansen, who was playing with the group from time to time around this point, though she was mostly playing with a different bar band, Patty and the Esquires. But as well as the normal group members, there was someone else there, a friend of Manzarek's from film school named Jim Morrison. Morrison was someone who, by Manzarek's later accounts, had been very close to Manzarek at university, and who Manzarek had regarded as a genius, with a vast knowledge of beat poetry and European art film, but who had been regarded by most of the other students and the lecturers as being a disruptive influence. Morrison had been a fat, asthmatic, introverted kid -- he'd had health problems as a child, including a bout of rheumatic fever which might have weakened his heart, and he'd also been prone to playing the kind of "practical jokes" which can often be a cover for deeper problems. For example, as a child he was apparently fond of playing dead -- lying in the corridors at school and being completely unresponsive for long periods no matter what anyone did to move him, then suddenly getting up and laughing at anyone who had been concerned and telling them it was a joke. Given how frequently Morrison would actually pass out in later life, often after having taken some substance or other, at least one biographer has suggested that he might have had undiagnosed epilepsy (or epilepsy that was diagnosed but which he chose to keep a secret) and have been having absence seizures and covering for them with the jokes. Robby Krieger also says in his own autobiography that he used to have the same doctor as Morrison, and the doctor once made an offhand comment about Morrison having severe health problems, "as if it was common knowledge". His health difficulties, his weight, his introversion, and the experience of moving home constantly as a kid because of his father's career in the Navy, had combined to give him a different attitude to most of his fellow students, and in particular a feeling of rootlessness -- he never owned or even rented his own home in later years, just moving in with friends or girlfriends -- and a lack of sense of his own identity, which would often lead to him making up lies about his life and acting as if he believed them. In particular, he would usually claim to friends that his parents were dead, or that he had no contact with them, even though his family have always said he was in at least semi-regular contact. At university, Morrison had been a big fan of Rick and the Ravens, and had gone to see them perform regularly, but would always disrupt the shows -- he was, by all accounts, a lovely person when sober but an aggressive boor when drunk -- by shouting out for them to play "Louie Louie", a song they didn't include in their sets. Eventually one of Ray's brothers had called his bluff and said they'd play the song, but only if Morrison got up on stage and sang it. He had -- the first time he'd ever performed live -- and had surprised everyone by being quite a good singer. After graduation, Morrison and Manzarek had gone their separate ways, with Morrison saying he was moving to New York. But a few weeks later they'd encountered each other on the beach -- Morrison had decided to stay in LA, and had been staying with a friend, mostly sleeping on the friend's rooftop. He'd been taking so much LSD he'd forgotten to eat for weeks at a time, and had lost a great deal of weight, and Manzarek properly realised for the first time that his friend was actually good-looking. Morrison also told Manzarek that he'd been writing songs -- this was summer 1965, and the Byrds' version of "Mr. Tambourine Man", Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", and the Stones' "Satisfaction" had all shown him that there was potential for pop songs to have more interesting lyrical content than "Louie Louie". Manzarek asked him to sing some of the songs he'd been writing, and as Manzarek later put it "he began to sing, not in the booze voice he used at the Turkey Joint, but in a Chet Baker voice". The first song Morrison sang for Ray Manzarek was one of the songs that Rick and the Ravens would rehearse that first time with John Densmore, "Moonlight Drive": [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Moonlight Drive"] Manzarek invited Morrison to move in with him and his girlfriend. Manzarek seems to have thought of himself as a mentor, a father figure, for Morrison, though whether that's how Morrison thought of him is impossible to say. Manzarek, who had a habit of choosing the myth over the truth, would later claim that he had immediately decided that he and Morrison were going to be a duo and find a whole new set of musicians, but all the evidence points to him just inviting Morrison to join the Ravens as the singer Certainly the first recordings this group made, a series of demos, were under Rick and the Ravens' name, and paid for by Aura Records. They're all of songs written by Morrison, and seem to be sung by Morrison and Manzarek in close harmony throughout. But the demos did not impress the head of Liberty Records, which now owned Aura, and who saw no commercial potential in them, even in one that later became a number one hit when rerecorded a couple of years later: [Excerpt: Rick and the Ravens, "Hello I Love You"] Although to be fair, that song is clearly the work of a beginning songwriter, as Morrison has just taken the riff to "All Day and All of the Night" by the Kinks, and stuck new words to it: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day and All of the Night"] But it seems to have been the lack of success of these demos that convinced Manzarek's brothers and Patricia Hansen to quit the band. According to Manzarek, his brothers were not interested in what they saw as Morrison's pretensions towards poetry, and didn't think this person who seemed shy and introverted in rehearsals but who they otherwise knew as a loud annoying drunk in the audience would make a good frontman. So Rick and the Ravens were down to just Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, and John Densmore, but they continued shopping their demos around, and after being turned down by almost everyone they were signed by Columbia Records, specifically by Billy James, who they liked because he'd written the liner notes to a Byrds album, comparing them to Coltrane, and Manzarek liked the idea of working with an A&R man who knew Coltrane's work, though he wasn't impressed by the Byrds themselves, later writing "The Byrds were country, they didn't have any black in them at all. They couldn't play jazz. Hell, they probably didn't even know anything about jazz. They were folk-rock, for cri-sake. Country music. For whites only." (Ray Manzarek was white). They didn't get an advance from Columbia, but they did get free equipment -- Columbia had just bought Vox, who made amplifiers and musical instruments, and Manzarek in particular was very pleased to have a Vox organ, the same kind that the Animals and the Dave Clark Five used. But they needed a guitarist and a bass player. Manzarek claimed in his autobiography that he was thinking along the lines of a four-piece group even before he met Densmore, and that his thoughts had been "Someone has to be Thumper and someone has to be Les Paul/Chuck Berry by way of Charlie Christian. The guitar player will be a rocker who knows jazz. And the drummer will be a jazzer who can rock. These were my prerequisites. This is what I had to have to make the music I heard in my head." But whatever Manzarek was thinking, there were only two people who auditioned for the role of the guitar player in this new version of the band, both of them friends of Densmore, and in fact two people who had been best friends since high school -- Bill Wolff and Robby Krieger. Wolff and Krieger had both gone to private boarding school -- they had both originally gone to normal state schools, but their parents had independently decided they were bad influences on each other and sent them away to boarding school to get away from each other, but accidentally sent them to the same school -- and had also learned guitar together. They had both loved a record of flamenco guitar called Dos Flamencos by Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino: [Excerpt: Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino, "Caracolés"] And they'd decided they were going to become the new Dos Flamencos. They'd also regularly sneaked out of school to go and see a jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a band which featured Bob Weir, who was also at their school, along with Jerry Garcia and Pigpen McKernan. Krieger was also a big fan of folk and blues music, especially bluesy folk-revivalists like Spider John Koerner, and was a massive fan of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Krieger and Densmore had known each other before Krieger had been transferred to boarding school, and had met back up at university, where they would hang out together and go to see Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery, and other jazz musicians. At this time Krieger had still been a folk and blues purist, but then he went to see Chuck Berry live, mostly because Skip James and Big Mama Thornton were also on the bill, and he had a Damascene conversion -- the next day he went to a music shop and traded in his acoustic for a red Gibson, as close to the one Chuck Berry played as he could find. Wolff, Densmore, Krieger, and piano player Grant Johnson had formed a band called the Psychedelic Rangers, and when the Ravens were looking for a new guitarist, it was natural that they tried the two guitarists from Densmore's other band. Krieger had the advantage over Wolff for two reasons -- one of which was actually partly Wolff's doing. To quote Krieger's autobiography: "A critic once said I had 'the worst hair in rock 'n' roll'. It stung pretty bad, but I can't say they were wrong. I always battled with my naturally frizzy, kinky, Jewfro, so one day my friend Bill Wolff and I experimented with Ultra Sheen, a hair relaxer marketed mainly to Black consumers. The results were remarkable. Wolff, as we all called him, said 'You're starting to look like that jerk Bryan MacLean'". According to Krieger, his new hairdo made him better looking than Wolff, at least until the straightener wore off, and this was one of the two things that made the group choose him over Wolff, who was a better technical player. The other was that Krieger played with a bottleneck, which astonished the other members. If you're unfamiliar with bottleneck playing, it's a common technique in the blues. You tune your guitar to an open chord, and then use a resonant tube -- these days usually a specially-made metal slide that goes on your finger, but for older blues musicians often an actual neck of a bottle, broken off and filed down -- to slide across the strings. Slide guitar is one of the most important styles in blues, especially electric blues, and you can hear it in the playing of greats like Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Dust My Broom"] But while the members of the group all claimed to be blues fans -- Manzarek talks in his autobiography about going to see Muddy Waters in a club in the South Side of Chicago where he and his friends were the only white faces in the audience -- none of them had any idea what bottleneck playing was, and Manzarek was worried when Krieger pulled it out that he was going to use it as a weapon, that being the only association he had with bottle necks. But once Krieger played with it, they were all convinced he had to be their guitarist, and Morrison said he wanted that sound on everything. Krieger joining seems to have changed the dynamic of the band enormously. Both Morrison and Densmore would independently refer to Krieger as their best friend in the band -- Manzarek said that having a best friend was a childish idea and he didn't have one. But where before this had been Manzarek's band with Morrison as the singer, it quickly became a band centred around the creative collaboration between Krieger and Morrison. Krieger seems to have been too likeable for Manzarek to dislike him, and indeed seems to have been the peacemaker in the band on many occasions, but Manzarek soon grew to resent Densmore, seemingly as the closeness he had felt to Morrison started to diminish, especially after Morrison moved out of Manzarek's house, apparently because Manzarek was starting to remind him of his father. The group soon changed their name from the Ravens to one inspired by Morrison's reading. Aldous Huxley's book on psychedelic drugs had been titled The Doors of Perception, and that title had in turn come from a quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the great mystic poet and artist William Blake, who had written "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern" (Incidentally, in one of those weird coincidences that I like to note when they come up, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell had also inspired the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, about the divorce of heaven and hell, and both Lewis and Huxley died on the same date, the twenty-second of November 1963, the same day John F. Kennedy died). Morrison decided that he wanted to rename the group The Doors, although none of the other group members were particularly keen on the idea -- Krieger said that he thought they should name the group Perception instead. Initially the group rehearsed only songs written by Morrison, along with a few cover versions. They worked up a version of Willie Dixon's "Back Door Man", originally recorded by Howlin' Wolf: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Back Door Man"] And a version of "Alabama Song", a song written by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill, from the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with English language lyrics by Elisabeth Hauptmann. That song had originally been recorded by Lotte Lenya, and it was her version that the group based their version on, at the suggestion of Manzarek's girlfriend: [Excerpt: Lotte Lenya, "Alabama Song"] Though it's likely given their tastes in jazz that they were also aware of a recent recording of the song by Eric Dolphy and John Lewis: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy and John Lewis, "Alabama Song"] But Morrison started to get a little dissatisfied with the fact that he was writing all the group's original material at this point, and he started to put pressure on the others to bring in songs. One of the first things they had agreed was that all band members would get equal credit and shares of the songwriting, so that nobody would have an incentive to push their own mediocre song at the expense of someone else's great one, but Morrison did want the others to start pulling their weight. As it would turn out, for the most part Manzarek and Densmore wouldn't bring in many song ideas, but Krieger would, and the first one he brought in would be the song that would make them into stars. The song Krieger brought in was one he called "Light My Fire", and at this point it only had one verse and a chorus. According to Manzarek, Densmore made fun of the song when it was initially brought in, saying "we're not a folk-rock band" and suggesting that Krieger might try selling it to the Mamas and the Papas, but the other band members liked it -- but it's important to remember here that Manzarek and Densmore had huge grudges against each other for most of their lives, and that Manzarek is not generally known as an entirely reliable narrator. Now, I'm going to talk a lot about the influences that have been acknowledged for this song, but before I do there's one that I haven't seen mentioned much but which seems to me to be very likely to have at least been a subconscious influence -- "She's Not There" by the Zombies: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Now, there are several similarities to note about the Zombies record. First, like the Doors, the Zombies were a keyboard-driven band. Second, there's the dynamics of the songs -- both have soft, slightly jazzy verses and then a more straight-ahead rock chorus. And finally there's the verse chord sequence. The verse for "She's Not There" goes from Am to D repeatedly: [demonstrates] While the verse for "Light My Fire" goes from Am to F sharp minor -- and for those who don't know, the notes in a D chord are D, F sharp, and A, while the notes in an F sharp minor chord are F sharp, A, and C sharp -- they're very similar chords. So "She's Not There" is: [demonstrates] While "Light My Fire" is: [demonstrates] At least, that's what Manzarek plays. According to Krieger, he played an Asus2 chord rather than an A minor chord, but Manzarek heard it as an A minor and played that instead. Now again, I've not seen anyone acknowledge "She's Not There" as an influence, but given the other influences that they do acknowledge, and the music that was generally in the air at the time, it would not surprise me even the smallest amount if it was. But either way, what Krieger brought in was a simple verse and chorus: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] Incidentally, I've been talking about the song as having A minor chords, but you'll actually hear the song in two different keys during this episode, even though it's the same performance throughout, and sometimes it might not sound right to people familiar with a particular version of the record. The band played the song with the verse starting with A minor, and that's how the mono single mix was released, and I'll be using excerpts of that in general. But when the stereo version of the album was released, which had a longer instrumental break, the track was mastered about a semitone too slow, and that's what I'll be excerpting when talking about the solos -- and apparently that speed discrepancy has been fixed in more recent remasterings of the album than the one I'm using. So if you know the song and bits of what I play sound odd to you, that's why. Krieger didn't have a second verse, and so writing the second verse's lyrics was the next challenge. There was apparently some disagreement within the band about the lyrics that Morrison came up with, with their references to funeral pyres, but Morrison won the day, insisting that the song needed some darkness to go with the light of the first verse. Both verses would get repeated at the end of the song, in reverse order, rather than anyone writing a third or fourth verse. Morrison also changed the last line of the chorus -- in Krieger's original version, he'd sung "Come on baby, light my fire" three times, but Morrison changed the last line to "try to set the night on fire", which Krieger thought was a definite improvement. They then came up with an extended instrumental section for the band members to solo in. This was inspired by John Coltrane, though I have seen different people make different claims as to which particular Coltrane record it was inspired by. Many sources, including Krieger, say it was based on Coltrane's famous version of "My Favorite Things": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "My Favorite Things"] But Manzarek in his autobiography says it was inspired by Ole, the track that Coltrane recorded with Eric Dolphy: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Ole"] Both are of course similar musical ideas, and either could have inspired the “Light My Fire” instrumental section, though none of the Doors are anything like as good or inventive on their instruments as Coltrane's group (and of course "Light My Fire" is in four-four rather than three-four): [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] So they had a basic verse-chorus song with a long instrumental jam session in the middle. Now comes the bit that there's some dispute over. Both Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger agree that Manzarek came up with the melody used in the intro, but differ wildly over who came up with the chord sequence for it and when, and how it was put into the song. According to Manzarek, he came up with the whole thing as an intro for the song at that first rehearsal of it, and instructed the other band members what to do. According to Krieger, though, the story is rather different, and the evidence seems to be weighted in Krieger's favour. In early live performances of the song, they started the song with the Am-F sharp minor shifts that were used in the verse itself, and continued doing this even after the song was recorded: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (live at the Matrix)"] But they needed a way to get back out of the solo section and into the third verse. To do this, Krieger came up with a sequence that starts with a change from G to D, then from D to F, before going into a circle of fifths -- not the ascending circle of fifths in songs like "Hey Joe", but a descending one, the same sequence as in "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" or "I Will Survive", ending on an A flat: [demonstrates] To get from the A flat to the A minor or Asus2 chord on which the verse starts, he simply then shifted up a semitone from A flat to A major for two bars: [demonstrates] Over the top of that chord sequence that Krieger had come up with, Manzarek put a melody line which was inspired by one of Bach's two-part inventions. The one that's commonly cited is Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779: [Excerpt: Glenn Gould, "Invention No. 8 in F Major, BWV 779"] Though I don't believe Manzarek has ever stated directly which piece he was inspired by other than that it was one of the two-part inventions, and to be honest none of them sound very much like what he plays to my ears, and I think more than anything he was just going for a generalised baroque style rather than anything more specific. And there are certainly stylistic things in there that are suggestive of the baroque -- the stepwise movement, the sort of skipping triplets, and so on: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] But that was just to get out of the solo section and back into the verses. It was only when they finally took the song into the studio that Paul Rothchild, the producer who we will talk about more later, came up with the idea of giving the song more structure by both starting and ending with that sequence, and formalised it so that rather than just general noodling it was an integral part of the song. They now had at least one song that they thought had the potential to be a big hit. The problem was that they had not as yet played any gigs, and nor did they have a record deal, or a bass player. The lack of a record deal may sound surprising, but they were dropped by Columbia before ever recording for them. There are several different stories as to why. One biography I've read says that after they were signed, none of the label's staff producers wanted to work with them and so they were dropped -- though that goes against some of the other things I've read, which say that Terry Melcher was interested in producing them. Other sources say that Morrison went in for a meeting with some of the company executives while on acid, came out very pleased with himself at how well he'd talked to them because he'd been able to control their minds with his telepathic powers, and they were dropped shortly afterwards. And others say that they were dropped as part of a larger set of cutbacks the company was making, and that while Billy James fought to keep them at Columbia, he lost the fight. Either way, they were stuck without a deal, and without any proper gigs, though they started picking up the odd private party here and there -- Krieger's father was a wealthy aerospace engineer who did some work for Howard Hughes among others, and he got his son's group booked to play a set of jazz standards at a corporate event for Hughes, and they got a few more gigs of that nature, though the Hughes gig didn't exactly go well -- Manzarek was on acid, Krieger and Morrison were on speed, and the bass player they brought in for the gig managed to break two strings, something that would require an almost superhuman effort. That bass player didn't last long, and nor did the next -- they tried several, but found that the addition of a bass player made them sound less interesting, more like the Animals or the Rolling Stones than a group with their own character. But they needed something to hold down the low part, and it couldn't be Manzarek on the organ, as the Vox organ had a muddy sound when he tried to play too many notes at once. But that problem solved itself when they played one of their earliest gigs. There, Manzarek found that another band, who were regulars at the club, had left their Fender keyboard bass there, clipped to the top of the piano. Manzarek tried playing that, and found he could play basslines on that with his left hand and the main parts with his right hand. Krieger got his father to buy one for the group -- though Manzarek was upset that they bought the wrong colour -- and they were now able to perform without a bass player. Not only that, but it gave the group a distinctive sound quite unlike all the other bands. Manzarek couldn't play busy bass lines while also playing lead lines with his right hand, and so he ended up going for simple lines without a great deal of movement, which added to the hypnotic feel of the group's music – though on records they would often be supplemented by a session bass player to give them a fuller sound. While the group were still trying to get a record deal, they were also looking for regular gigs, and eventually they found one. The Sunset Strip was *the* place to be, and they wanted desperately to play one of the popular venues there like the Whisky A-Go-Go, but those venues only employed bands who already had record deals. They did, though, manage to get a residency at a tiny, unpopular, club on the strip called The London Fog, and they played there, often to only a handful of people, while slowly building in confidence as performers. At first, Morrison was so shy that Manzarek had to sing harmony with him throughout the sets, acting as joint frontman. Krieger later said "It's rarely talked about, but Ray was a natural born showman, and his knack for stirring drama would serve the Doors' legacy well in later years" But Morrison soon gained enough confidence to sing by himself. But they weren't bringing in any customers, and the London Fog told them that they were soon going to be dropped -- and the club itself shut not long after. But luckily for the group, just before the end of their booking, the booker for the Whisky A-Go-Go, Ronnie Haran walked in with a genuine pop star, Peter Asher, who as half of Peter & Gordon had had a hit with "A World Without Love", written by his sister's boyfriend, Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Haran was impressed with the group, and they were impressed that she had brought in a real celebrity. She offered them a residency at the club, not as the headlining act -- that would always be a group that had records out -- but as the consistent support act for whichever big act they had booked. The group agreed -- after Morrison first tried to play it cool and told Haran they would have to consider it, to the consternation of his bandmates. They were thrilled, though, to discover that one of the first acts they supported at the Whisky would be Them, Van Morrison's group -- one of the cover versions they had been playing had been Them's "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] They supported Them for two weeks at the Whisky, and Jim Morrison watched Van Morrison intently. The two men had very similar personalities according to the other members of the Doors, and Morrison picked up a lot of his performing style from watching Van on stage every night. The last night Them played the venue, Morrison joined them on stage for an extended version of “Gloria” which everyone involved remembered as the highlight of their time there. Every major band on the LA scene played residencies at the Whisky, and over the summer of 1966 the Doors were the support act for the Mothers of Invention, the Byrds, the Turtles, the Buffalo Springfield, and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. This was a time when the Sunset Strip was the centre of Californian musical life, before that centre moved to San Francisco, and the Doors were right at the heart of it. Though it wasn't all great -- this was also the period when there were a series of riots around Sunset Strip, as immortalised in the American International Pictures film Riot on Sunset Strip, and its theme song, by the Standells: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] We'll look at those riots in more detail in a future episode, so I'll leave discussing them for now, but I just wanted to make sure they got mentioned. That Standells song, incidentally, was co-written by John Fleck, who under his old name of John Fleckenstein we saw last episode as the original bass player for Love. And it was Love who ensured that the Doors finally got the record deal they needed. The deal came at a perfect time for the Doors -- just like when they'd been picked up by the Whisky A Go-Go just as they were about to lose their job at the London Fog, so they got signed to a record deal just as they were about to lose their job at the Whisky. They lost that job because of a new song that Krieger and Morrison had written. "The End" had started out as Krieger's attempt at writing a raga in the style of Ravi Shankar, and he had brought it in to one of his increasingly frequent writing sessions with Morrison, where the two of them would work out songs without the rest of the band, and Morrison had added lyrics to it. Lyrics that were partly inspired by his own fraught relationship with his parents, and partly by Oedipus Rex: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] And in the live performance, Morrison had finished that phrase with the appropriate four-letter Oedipal payoff, much to the dismay of the owners of the Whisky A Go Go, who had told the group they would no longer be performing there. But three days before that, the group had signed a deal with Elektra Records. Elektra had for a long time been a folk specialist label, but they had recently branched out into other music, first with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favourite of Robby Krieger's, and then with their first real rock signing, Love. And Love were playing a residency at the Whisky A Go Go, and Arthur Lee had encouraged Jac Holzman, the label's owner, to come and check out their support band, who he thought were definitely worth signing. The first time Holzman saw them he was unimpressed -- they sounded to him just like a bunch of other white blues bands -- but he trusted Arthur Lee's judgement and came back a couple more times. The third time, they performed their version of "Alabama Song", and everything clicked into place for Holzman. He immediately signed the group to a three-album deal with an option to extend it to seven. The group were thrilled -- Elektra wasn't a major label like Columbia, but they were a label that nurtured artists and wouldn't just toss them aside. They were even happier when soon after they signed to Elektra, the label signed up a new head of West Coast A&R -- Billy James, the man who had signed them to Columbia, and who they knew would be in their corner. Jac Holzman also had the perfect producer for the group, though he needed a little persuading. Paul Rothchild had made his name as the producer for the first couple of albums by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Mary Mary"] They were Robby Krieger's favourite group, so it made sense to have Rothchild on that level. And while Rothchild had mostly worked in New York, he was in LA that summer, working on the debut album by another Elektra signing, Tim Buckley. The musicians on Buckley's album were almost all part of the same LA scene that the Doors were part of -- other than Buckley's normal guitarist Lee Underwood there was keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, bass player Jim Fielder, who had had a brief stint in the Mothers of Invention and was about to join Buffalo Springfield, and drummer Billy Mundi, who was about to join the Mothers of Invention. And Buckley himself sang in a crooning voice extremely similar to that of Morrison, though Buckley had a much larger range: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] There was one problem, though -- Rothchild didn't want to do it. He wasn't at all impressed with the band at first, and he wanted to sign a different band, managed by Albert Grossman, instead. But Holzman persuaded him because Rothchild owed him a favour -- Rothchild had just spent several months in prison after a drug bust, and while he was inside Holzman had given his wife a job so she would have an income, and Holzman also did all the paperwork with Rothchild's parole officer to allow him to leave the state. So with great reluctance Rothchild took the job, though he soon came to appreciate the group's music. He didn't appreciate their second session though. The first day, they'd tried recording a version of "The End", but it hadn't worked, so on the second night they tried recording it again, but this time Morrison was on acid and behaving rather oddly. The final version of "The End" had to be cut together from two takes, and the reason is that at the point we heard earlier: [Excerpt: The Doors, "The End"] Morrison was whirling around, thrashing about, and knocked over a TV that the engineer, Bruce Botnick, had brought into the studio so he could watch the baseball game -- which Manzarek later exaggerated to Morrison throwing the TV through the plate glass window between the studio and the control room. According to everyone else, Morrison just knocked it over and they picked it up after the take finished and it still worked fine. But Morrison had taken a *lot* of acid, and on the way home after the session he became convinced that he had a psychic knowledge that the studio was on fire. He got his girlfriend to turn the car back around, drove back to the studio, climbed over the fence, saw the glowing red lightbulbs in the studio, became convinced that they were fires, and sprayed the entire place with the fire extinguisher, before leaving convinced he had saved the band's equipment -- and leaving telltale evidence as his boot got stuck in the fence on the way out and he just left it there. But despite that little hiccup, the sessions generally went well, and the group and label were pleased with the results. The first single released from the album, "Break on Through", didn't make the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Break on Through"] But when the album came out in January 1967, Elektra put all its resources behind the album, and it started to get a bit of airplay as a result. In particular, one DJ on the new FM radio started playing "Light My Fire" -- at this time, FM had only just started, and while AM radio stuck to three-minute singles for the most part, FM stations would play a wider variety of music. Some of the AM DJs started telling Elektra that they would play the record, too, if it was the length of a normal single, and so Rothchild and Botnick went into the studio and edited the track down to half its previous seven-and-a-half-minute length. When the group were called in to hear the edit, they were initially quite excited to hear what kind of clever editing microsurgery had been done to bring the song down to the required length, but they were horrified when Rothchild actually played it for them. As far as the group were concerned, the heart of the song was the extended instrumental improvisation that took up the middle section: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire"] On the album version, that lasted over three minutes. Rothchild and Botnick cut that section down to just this: [Excerpt: The Doors, "Light My Fire (single edit)"] The group were mortified -- what had been done to their song? That wasn't the sound of people trying to be McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, it was just... a pop song. Rothchild explained that that was the point -- to get the song played on AM radio and get the group a hit. He pointed out how the Beatles records never had an instrumental section that lasted more than eight bars, and the group eventually talked them
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