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"Music is worth living for," Andrew W.K. sings in his latest rock anthem. In this second episode on the weirdness of music, JF and Phil focus on two works steeped in ambiguity and paradox: Bob Dylan\'s "Jokerman," from the landmark post-Christian album Infidels, and Franz Liszt\'s "Mephisto Waltz, No. 1: The Dance at the Village Inn," inspired by an episode in the Faust legend. If this conversation has a central theme, it may be music\'s power to unhinge every fixed binary, from God and the Devil to culture and nature. Music, as exemplified in these pieces, can put us in touch with the abiding mystery of the eternal in the historical, the unhuman in the human... The hills are alive!

REFERENCES

Bob Dylan, "Jokerman"
\\nFranz Liszt, \\u201cMephisto Waltz no. 1,\\u201d performed by Boris Berezovsky

Andrew WK, "Music is Worth Living For"
\\nLeonard Cohen, \\u201cThe Future\\u201d
\\nC.G. Jung, Aion
\\nDouglas Rushkoff, Testament
\\nThe Guardian, \\u201cCarthaginians sacrificed own children, archaeologists say\\u201d
\\nGarry Wills, "Our Moloch"
\\nMinoan snake goddess statues
\\nRichard Wagner, Parsifal http://www.monsalvat.no/
\\nT.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
\\nDaniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts
\\nBeckett, Not I
\\nNikolaus Lenau, German Romantic poet
\\nWolgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, translated by David Luke
\\nWeird Studies, Episode 3: Sin: "Ecstasy, and the White People"