Winds of the Weird – Page 4 – Counter Esperanto: a Podcast Chronicling Journeys Into The Impossible

Jubel and Karl give in to the lure of nostalgia and return to movies that they haven’t seen in 25 years or so: The Keep and Phantasm. These are weird movies, and also really Weird movies.

We talk about them, how we enjoyed them in our salad days, and what they mean to us now.

Other subjects include high school cabals, sci/fi fantasy video crash pads, and the good-old bad days of cocaine-fueled media.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

July 25, 2020

Ep. No. 33: This is… “The Last of Us”

….But Counter-Esperanto will return:

Greetings Listeners, Jubel Brosseau here.

We are doing something a little different with this episode. Late June saw the release of the long-awaited sequel to The Last of Us, a fan-favorite and critically heralded game exclusive to the Sony Playstation platform. The Last of Us Part 2 had a lot to live up to, and I was absolutely floored by the game. The original was a beautiful, heart-rending game, but this release is absolutely a watershed moment when it comes to elevating video and computer games to the level of high art and literature.

I knew I needed to talk this over with someone, but our co-host Karl Eckler doesn’t play video games, so it was time to improvise. I decided to invite Twin Peaks Unwrapped and Geekonomics Podcast co-host Bryon Kozaczka and Red Room Podcast, and In Our House Now Podcast co-host Josh Minton, who are avid gamers, to do a big crossover episode which will be available on our respective feeds.

I hope you enjoy it, and Karl and I will be back with our regularly (not so scheduled) programming soon.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

May 31, 2020June 1, 2020

Ep. No. 32. Millennium is Coming

Millennium is Coming

“We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

April 28, 2020April 28, 2020

Ep. No. 31 Horror and the Zeitgeist: Candyman’s Heart of Darkness

In this episode, your hosts delve into two jungles; one 8,000 miles removed from from familiar Twin Peaks psychogeography, and the other in the very center of America’s heartland. One set in, arguably, the most hopeful American Decade, the 1960s. The other marinates in the psychic despair of “The End of History.”

Both, in their own ver different ways could be called Cold War movies. They depict the varied fields the first Post-Modern War took place on: one at its figurative and literal hottest, the other in the chill of its coldest pyrrhic victory, where the forces of Liberal Democracy declared themselves winners of the conflict, and in so doing managed to grab defeat from the rushing jaws of victory. This juxtaposition became even more interesting to us when we realized that both “Apocalypse Now” and “Candyman” have their tap roots sunk deep into the 19th century, the slave trade, and the most murderous ghost to ever stalk the world: Colonialism.

So, what does a psychedelic war movie based on Joseph Conrad’s 19th century critique of Belgian murder in the Congo, “Heart of Darkness”, have in common with a ghost story set in Chicago’s most notoriously failed housing project? Join us and find out what we think about domineering, even cannibalistic power structures, the desperate revenge and stratagems of resistance by oppressed lands and peoples, and the weird nature of very real evil have to do with it.

If you are patient with us, we will trace Conrad’s river of blood through its roots in a disturbingly mundane 19th century colonial genocide to the weirdly repressive focus of slasher mythopoetics up to the present moment (“The horror. The horror.”) we find ourselves in. If you are very, very patient with us, we might even say something about how all this relates to how Lynch and Frost see the World.

Some jungles are made of Douglas Firs.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS