Fergal Schmudlach

Sisterfucker: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, pt 3

In this final session, we put the proverbial big old boulder into the sweltering primordial pond with meditations on myths of brother-sister marriage and divorce from the Kojiki (712), the taboo on...

The Birth of the Comprador Chief and the Defeat of the Secret Society: Profound Desires of the Gods w/ Nathan, part 2

This time we hit our stride, discussing the interplay of Indigenous state and deep state, chief and secret society, sometimes in resistance to colonization and sometimes in service of comprador opp...

A Yakuza Filmmaker Takes it Back to the Dawn of Time: Imamura Shōhei’s Profound Desire of the Gods, part 1

Nathan, AKA KUBARK Stare, @postcyborg on Twitter, and an organizer of a film club in London which listeners should check out, joins me for a conversation about noided proletarian filmmaker Imamura ...

Japanese First! (into the digital prison and the war machine)

I have several episodes in development, but each one I feel like I need to read at least one more book before it’s ready, so for now, some newsy musings on current events mostly in Japan, where t...

Riffing in the Dark w/ Sina Rahmani

Sina Rahmani of The East is a Podcast and Red Media had planned to come on the show before this, and in light of the Zionist entity’s unprovoked attack on his ancestral country of Iran in violati...

English for Compradors on the Eve of the Final Enclosure: A Journey into TED Talk Hell

It’s a pungent bouquet of TED Talks! A blast from the past! Some shots from the aughts! Put on your Pynchon goggles, your Mabeuf plague mask, and your Cuttlefish gloves, because we’re opening u...

When Karate was a Weapon of the Colonized Working Class: The “China Hand Technique” in Japanese Proletarian Fiction

If you had a male-coded childhood at all recently in the Anglo-American world, you have felt the influence of the Soldier of Fortune culture of the 1980s, within which martial arts and other action...

Martial Arts in Japanese Proletarian Literature: Fujisawa Takeo, “Ryūkyū’s Weapon,” December 1929

Fujisawa Takeo, “Ryūkyū’s Weapon,” December 1929, trans. Fergal Schmudlach

Karate has become very famous for its overwhelming power. In the Faculty of Medicine at Kyoto University, ap...

Martial Arts in Japanese Proletarian Literature: Kataoka Teppei, “We Got Strong Guys,” June 1929

A supplement to an upcoming episode.

Kataoka Teppei, “We Got Strong Guys,” June 1929, trans. Fergal Schmudlach

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That guy does Judo, he’s got a strong Yankee fist [Meriken],...

Hanami on a Black Stone Bench

Eat the Yellow Powder, Get in the Wara: The first king, the first collapse, and the first underground bunker society in the Avesta and the Ṛigveda

What is the difference between East and West? One helpful line to draw is that between Iranian and Indo-Aryan cultures, as seen in the extremely ancient traditions of the Avesta and the Ṛigveda, ...

Note: more English episodes coming soon!

I know, I could have started a different feed for the Japanese language stuff, but that feels superfluous given that I’m not sure how much interest it’ll even attract, and even if it were to ta...

総論①階級格差社会には始まりがあった

人類30万年。その大半を占めるさまざまな平等・自由・創造性ある先「史」社会、そして穀物国家における階級闘争五千年のごく小さな誕生。

The Conversion of Kevin Gaijinson ケビン・ガイジンソンの転向

To introduce Kevin Gaijinson, the show’s new Japanese language host, I share an old conversation with him from back when he was still a raging weeb spreading Anglo-American imperialism in blissfu...

Ritual Serial Murder and the Birth of a Ruling Class: Popol Vuh, Title of Totonicapán (Maya, 16th c.)

At the end of the ancient mythology section we discussed last time, the Popol Vuh (here paralleled by the Title of Totonicapán) depicts the restoration of militari...

Roasting out the old year

Before the dawn of what I hope will be a much more productive year for the podcast, join me in a warm and toasty room for some green tea, guitar, and guileless meditations.

Fireside Chats on Turtle Island, take 2

I did it, folks: I returned to the burning bouncy castle that is the small town settler entity on Turtle Island. In between fulfilling various karmic obligations and reconnecting with fellow settle...

Fireside Chats on Turtle Island, take 1

I did it, folks: I returned to the burning bouncy castle that is the small town settler entity on Turtle Island. In between fulfilling various karmic obligations and reconnecting with fellow settle...

The Classic Postclassic Maya: Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the Popol Vuh (Kʾicheʾ, 1550s)

The first half of the Popol Vuh as we have it from the Kʾicheʾ colonial tradition is a quintessentially Kingless epic, as the story revolves around pre-human gods, successive genera...

Asiatic Athena: karmic roots of Greek culture in Hittite class struggle (Song of Release, 15th c. BCE)

In a series that I hope will include Martin Bernal’s classic Black Athena (about the modern British fabrication of “ancient Greece” and its true roots in ancient Egypt), we start with the Eas...

Kingless Piano Lesson: Triumphant Struggle in A♭

These days I find myself irresistibly drawn to the music of the last revolutionary juncture in world history, the funk and soul of ca. 1970. There’s some revolutionary legacy to be named and clai...

Consuming the Samurai Self (anon, “The Playboy Dialect,” 1770)

A close reading of “The Playboy Dialect,” a classic sharebon, or narrative of fashion and manners in the pleasure quarters of Edo-period Japan, where a consumer culture, to rival anything conco...

The origins of class society and revolutionary consciousness according to Second-Temple Judaism: 1 Enoch, Jubilees

The rise of ancient empires in the Eurasian continent ushered in the Axial Age, with its ideologies of absolute good and evil and the promise of revolutionary recompense for unheard-of oppression b...

Return to Camões’ “Isle of Love” w/ Min

I thought I had a hot take in response to the Little Mermaid discourse last year, but predictably I’m not the first one to think of reading the Isle of Venus in Camões’ Lusiads against the Age...

ParaPower Mapping the Six-Pointed Crusader State

The antisemitic, Nazi-adjacent ideology of Zionism says that members of the Jewish religion must be uprooted from their ancestral homelands and gathered into a white supremacist settler colony rule...

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 8: a mushroom dinner, a falsified archive

In the final installment of the series, we cover all that is known about the mysterious death of this strangely GLADIO-brained scholar of classical Japanese literature and favorite translator of �...

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 7: The Shield Society of Notting Hill

We explore the Windsor Free Festival, Sunday Head, Albion Free State milieu of hedonist, individualist, libertarian (and decidedly anti-communist) radicalism in 1970s Britain, led by figures like U...

Kingless Piano Lesson: « Cette année-là »

We introduce basic rhythm and chording patterns for ‘American’ pop music, which stem from the New African Church, as well as perhaps Irish uilleann pipe drones which scintillate back and forth,...

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 6: Clockwork Albion

From the semi-autobiographical novel of Ivan’s second Japanese wife, Nobuko Albery (née Uenishi), we have some very sardonic portraits of the Morrises and their upper-crust left-wing milieu in F...

Ivan Morris, Weeb Superspy 5: Ogawa Ayako, ballet master of Cold War Japan

From 1956 through 1966, during which time he moved from London to Tokyo to New York, Ivan was married to the ballerina Ogawa Ayako, known in the society papers—by analogy with Jackie (Kennedy)—...