Deep Calls to Deep: Reading Together

Can Radio Be Re-enchanted? James Reeves of Midnight Radio

Freud's notion of the "unheimlich," which was translated into English as "Uncanny," might have more literally been translated as "un-homely," which suggests the eerie sensation of the familiar warping into the unfamiliar. "Uncanny" comes from old Scottish meaning not known or safe or prudent. The uncanny for Freud was something previously known becoming unknowable, so that it was the haunting presence of the past but not the past as intentionally remembered. When nostalgia for the past is the promise of a return to a halcyon Eden when everything was in its right place, then it is the stuff of fascist regimes. But when nostalgia accidentally returns what had been carefully repressed by the primary naivete of innocence, then it becomes unintentional and uncanny. James's nostalgia for the late radio of his youth growing up in the Detroit area isn't nostalgic because it includes what algorithmic radio has repressed. His Midnight Radio project is an open platform where anything can happen because it includes the otherness than algorithms cover-over with averages. Some folks turn on the radio to hear what is familiar and comforting, but others turn it on to encounter the novel as the failure of the familiar. The mystics speak of the "Far-Near," which is when elsewhere speaks locally.  Indeed, we are prediction machines whose intentions are to reduce uncertainty, but their is some uncanny drive in us, which Freud morbidly named the "Death Drive," for the irreducible ambiguity of the Other because it is the unpredictability, or the "deterritorialization," of otherness that makes all things new. Radio used to be a place where the far could be brought near. James's Midnight Radio lets elsewhere speak in the clearing that he has made in himself for the Other, so let the otherness in us recognized and the otherness in him, which is the solidarity of twoness rather than of the One. https://youtu.be/wevx36qH2bM https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Deciding to Stay Sick: Backrooms

What about when we choose our disease? There is a scene in Backrooms in which the protagonist "Clark," played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, decides to stay in his disease because coming out of it would mean taking responsibility for things that he doesn't feel responsible for, and what's more, giving up on the enjoyment of blaming others. There is an ambiguity about who or what is responsible where mental illness is concerned. Is environment, genetics, or something else to blame? Regardless, the conundrum is that often with mental disorders, nothing can change unless the sufferer takes responsibility for what he is not responsible for. Clark's therapist Mary, played by Renate Reinsve, realizes too late that she has gone in to Clark's psychosis too far to rescue him, and that she has put herself into great danger. Her mistake was her misunderstanding that she was crossing the line with a truly sick person not entirely to rescue him, but more because she still had an unresolved desire to save her now-dead, mentally ill mother. Horror often deals with the psychological mazes that we trap ourself in. The terror is the built in ambiguity of these interior, dream-like spaces, which is the ambiguity of the monstrous other's connection to oneself. Good horror asks the question as to where the evil lays in such a way as to show how implicated in what we would prefer to see as the outside Other we are. Check us out at the Desire of Horror podcast by following the link below: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184/episodes/19326558 https://youtu.be/QDc0TWDH8ns https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

When Isn't Nostalgia Poison? BOC: Inferno

Nostalgia is poison. So why do I like BOC so much? BOC's nostalgia isn't saccharine but complicated.  When remembering is blocked by a nostalgic concept, the past becomes a projection of the rememberer's wish-fulfillment fantasy. The general structure of this sort of fantasy projection is that of the fascist who imagines a past greatness, or a lost Eden, that never was to recover the past from a decadent present. It is a well worn and now all too obvious observation that "Make America Great Again," is a totalitarian dog whistle. But there is a sort of remembering that also enjoys imagining the past, but which includes those parts of the past that the nostalgic concept tries to screen out. The nostalgic concept can be rehabilitated when it is used to present the pass by way of contrast to how the nostalgic concept presents it. This dialectical way of remembering takes the concept and contrasts it with what it tries to repress about the past. BOC's uses of nostalgia are like this latter sort of dialectical remembering that includes the otherness that was previously suppressed by the screen memory of the concept, so that their uses of nostalgic musical concepts and samples highlight the menacing dissonance of their dips back into the "innocence" of childhood. I am reminded of Terrence Malick's "Tree of Life" when I think about how BOC does this. Malick created the most convincing depiction of childhood ever to be laid down on film because he allowed the cloudy nostalgia of his subject matter to by vitiated by the lurking, cloudy threat of violence and transgression. James and I are back at again. You're going to want to hear this one. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Can AI Care about Us?

James and I discuss Under The Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami. We get into whether AI can have an intention other than the ones given to it by our Human intentions. And we wonder whether AI can have the conscious intention to save humanity from itself as a result of the purity of its love for humanity, a purity unlike the yin-yang(y) love-hate of humans that will ultimately be our undoing. Kawakami's AI claims to love human beings in the Positivistic sense of without any negativity; whereas, human love is always tinged with hate. Both James and I agree that love without hate isn't human love, just as human intention is both undermined and generated by the counter-intention of the death drive. But James feels that AI may someday have a different kind of consciousness because it has a different kind of singular intention, singular as in unique as well as in the oneness of a purified positivity, which seems to agree with Kawakami's take on AI. Kawakami's AI fails to keep human beings alive because it fails to cleanse human intention of its negativity. I hold that without this negativity there is no love and no intention of any kind. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Recovery from Eternal Conscious Torment 2: A Short History of the Afterlife

In part two Kevin and I continue to work on Bart D. Ehrman's Book, Heaven and Hell: The History of the Afterlife. We recount some of our life experiences with various doctrines of Hell and the immense suffering that the idea of eternal separation and punishment has wrought in our lives and the lives of others. And then we get into Chapter One: Guided Tours of Heaven and Hell, Chapter Two: The Fear of Death, and Chapter Three: Life After Death Before There Was Life After Death. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]