Excited to bring you a new Patreon exclusive series I'll be doing with, friend of the pod, Chaise Levy of the Hagstone Podcast. For those who haven't fed the tip jar, the first one is free! We wanted to find a way to expand on some of the conversations we've been having behind the scenes and share them with the kind folks who support our respective Patreon and Substack pages. I think this spin-off show is very much a living thing that will likely grow, evolve, and change. This episode is us jamming on some possible directions it might take.

SHOW NOTES:

Theme Song: "Move it" by Dunham

Chaise's Patreon

Chaise's Substack: Inspiration, Move Me Brightly

The Hagstone Podcast

Outro Song: "Maiden Voyage / Everything In Its Right Place" - Robert Glasper

Three years ago, Douglas Batchelor of the What Magic is This? podcast released a series that caught my attention. I had been a fan of his show for years and had come to expect his episodes to revolve around magical history, often with an emphasis on the ceremonial and evocatory variety. He called this series A Fistful o' Fairies, and over six episodes, he brought on an assortment of amazing guests to delve into different facets of the various interpretations of "who faeries actually are." As someone with a strange compulsion to explore this liminal realm and its denizens, this was a rare encounter with a podcast that didn't broach "fairies" as a one-off curio but rather gave the vast topic the searching consideration it demands. I loved this series, and after it ended, I asked myself, "What if that series spun off into an entire podcast?" Within a matter of months, Radical Elphame was born.

In light of the monumental influence Douglas had on the inception of this show, it was a true honor to chat with him and explore what inspired him to go down the faerie rabbit hole in the first place, and where it has continued to lead him today.

SHOW NOTES:

What Magic is This? Podcast

Douglas' Patreon

Douglas' Website

Before I was a Witch, I was a cinephile. When I was younger, I subscribed to the "Auteur Theory" of film appreciation, which posits that the best movies are essentially a masterful reflection of a god's eye view, and that in the case of cinema, the director is god. The Auteur Theory of the director doesn't describe a dreamer or a collaborator, but a visionary master of their medium, who, prior to shooting, has already meticulously perfected their next film in their head. To the Auteur, the sets, actors, and film stock are all uncarved blocks for them to impress their vision upon. Interestingly, though, I don't think many of the great directors of the last century actually experienced filmmaking this way. I think the Auteur Theory is a story created by film critics living in an era dominated by the ontology of scientific materialism, trying to find a way to classify this new art form in ways that conform to these limited beliefs.

If there is a poster child for the masterful Auteur, it has to be Stanley Kubrick. There's an entire feature-length documentary formed out of a collection of wild theories about the "hidden meanings" encoded in Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining, all of which hinge on the shared belief that he was such a meticulous genius that any odd or out-of-place props or unrealistic set geography must have been intentional clues to a mysterious puzzle that only they could solve. A common example of Kubrick's perfectionism was the often torturous number of takes he would demand of his actors, even for what seemed like less significant moments in the story. The presumption being that Kubrick needed so many takes to ensure he had captured his unshakable vision.

In just the past few years, deep dives into Kubrick's creative process, through rare interviews with his closest collaborators, have burst this obsessive-genius bubble. His reputation for excessive takes, it turned out, was not an attempt to crystallize his inner vision, but rather giving the scene enough space for something he couldn't have scripted to manifest, no matter how long it took. This same porous approach to storytelling is why his film Dr. Strangelove went from being an existential thriller to a black comedy midway through development. After trying earnestly to adapt the novel Red Alert for months with its author, Peter George, at a certain point, they couldn't ignore the inherent absurdity of nuclear deterrence and mutually assured destruction, and just leaned into it, or learned to "stop worrying and love the bomb" as it were. A comedy "masterpiece" was born, completely by accident. Essentially, Kubrick was always just trying to "catch the big fish," as David Lynch would say, but he had such a difficult time doing it that his method became misconstrued as genius.

Although certainly an "Auteur" in his own right, David Lynch never conformed to the Auteur Theory's conception of a master over his craft. Lynch unapologetically rejected "explaining" his often confounding films, to the ire of critics, not because he had ingeniously encoded them like a puzzle for the viewer to solve, but because his films were designed as thresholds for the viewer to cross and experience on an individual level. To Lynch, the meaning of his films was intentionally subjective, circumventing the intellectual interrogation of the critic, who usually seeks to explain and "rate" the work, à la the scientific materialist paradigm. To some, this made Lynch less of a "master" of his craft and more of a madman with a budget.

It's this same use of art and imagination as a threshold state to engage with "The Other" that Chaise Levy sees in the works of William Blake and the Romantic movement he would go on to inspire. How might we see Blakean "Double Vision" as a form of seership? What can Romanticism teach us about animism? Chaise is here to tell us.

SHOW NOTES:

Join the Patreon! The Coven of Wider Inclusion

Inspiration, Move Me Brightly Substack: Substack

Chaise's Website: chaiselevy.com

The Hagstone Podcast: Spotify Link

Chaise's Instagram: @telluric_tounges

Aidan Wachter's After the Fall: A Black Book Working