5 Star Tossers

Dear, stubborn, listener, Are you still there? For our weirdly unlikely 50th Episode -- mine and Jake's Gold Anniversary or something(?) -- we went populist. Donald Trump's re-election is now fact, but the meaning of that fact remains to be articulated, engaged-with. We seem to be in agreement that more than Trump's winning the elections, the Democratic party lost it. Jake calls it...

In this episode we discuss the absurdity of the taboo against cultural appropriation. Introducing specific examples like which Halloween costumes to wear, or which recipes you can and cannot cook, the Tossers argue that culture is itself appropriation, and thus the taboo attempts to inhibit something that can never be inhibited. To emphasize this universal necessity of cultural appropriation, we i...

We all loved a movie, oh, actually Jack hated it. This is a perfect episode, you should listen to it. Aside from withering take downs of the myriad misreadings of Coralie Fargeat's new movie The Substance, we introduce you to the narcissistic split of the melancholic subject. Beginning with Freud and moving to Melanie Klein, we read this movie as a visceral portrayal of the infantile position...

With a healthy dose of disdain, we enter the multiverse via the Marvel movie Deadpool and Wolverine and the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere all at Once . Sagi talks about the hollow nostalgia of the cameo, and the way that the characters become something of a Heideggerian standing-reserve for more scenes, more plots, and more revenue. Is Sagi finally doing Marx Grudge? Andy wishes that t...

Oh boy... This episode is longer than usual, more contentious, as it addresses the current genocidal violence in Gaza in ways that neither 'the left' nor 'the right,' as they are now called (defined?), would stand behind; except perhaps with a dagger?.. We are both against what Israel is doing in Gaza, and think it ought to stop immediately (which would still be much much too l...

In a political climate of unbearable urgency, the Tossers ask: "What if we just stopped talking?"

Hello listener, How's it been? Great, right? Right?.. This episode follows Naomi Klein's recent book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World , and Errol Morris' 2018 documentary around Steve Bannon, called American Dharma (2018). In both, we get a rare glimpse into the mind of this highly effective manipulator, or enemy, of (social) media; who treats it like a political actor tha...

In this episode, we look at one of the longest running sitcoms in Televisual history (1987-1998), Married... with Children . Ostensibly a misogynistic pigpen ripe for retroactive cancelation, we  Tossers find the show delightful and read an unabashed radicality into the relentlessly bitter depiction of the horrors of married life . We bring up the Marxist tradition of family abolition to help thin...

In this episode, we discuss the thought-provoking 2019 New Inquiry essay by Asa Seresin "On Heteropessimism: Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem." Andy defends the future of heterosexuality from the sidelines so to say. Jake introduces Lacan's "there is no sexual relation," gets personal, digs his own holes, holds back his tears, and offers the formula "the p...

Greetings, audient! Thanks for hanging in there. It can't be easy. This episode tackles the Tossers' own Marx Grudge Star -- come to collect its resentful dues. Karma imposes its menacing presence in the form of a book by Daniel Tutt, with the provocative title How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left got High on Nietzsche . A unique pleasure it was to host Jamie, who joins us from a mo...

Sagi has recently learned about the Internet and relations that  people have on it. We discuss. Parasocial relations lead us to think about a plague of narcissistic personality disorder that capitalism breeds.

Welcome back, listener! No joke with the title, some real Hunter Thompson, Bazooko Circus vibes in here And it seems to be spreading beyond the wrestlers, converting everyone in sight. All are engrossed in a spectacle that permits no shadow and emits the meaning of the 'manifest' in all its glory. It is meaning that must be immediate, spectacular, the kind that bypasses judgment and obvi...

The Tossers gave themselves  a rather impossible task: prove that  Barbie and Oppenheimer are the same movie. In typical Tosser fashion, we try to turn our failure into charm.   Our sometimes quiet podcaster Jack comes out of the woodwork to take some heavy hits at Christopher Nolan's directorial chops and to educate Sagi on the reason why teenage girls hate their mothers.  Jake is really out...

(*) I refuse to check whether this is/was a porn title. It's finally out, dear listener! Our new episode, long time coming, will take a whack at the concept -- and the social/sexual/political/racial/economic/religious phenomenon (did I miss anything?) -- of cuckoldry. Though Sagi originally suggested it for the obvious purpose of exploring the alt-Right and their repeated "Cuck" acc...

Though absent from the title,  we watched Ricky Gervais's "The Invention of Lying" and Jim Carrey's "Liar Liar" for this episode. Mainly as an excuse to discuss whether lying is something like the fundamental human factor. Jake bundled the stars Beast and Sovereign, Pervs 'R Us, and Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais together to study Jacques Lacan's famous id...

Hello listener, This is a "retoss"  of a January 6th (no relation) episode, where we discussed 'From Software' games, particularly Elden Ring, particularly how  Sagi sucked at it, which led to his radicalization,  with him expressing Souls-phobic, extremist positions.. It's not the first time. In the meantime Sagi went on a journey -- of self-discovery and community discov...

Tossers are back. We always come back. This time we compare the "comedy" stylings of Larry David and Louis C.K. The frame for this comparison is that they are both assholes, but they are assholes of a different color: one is Jewish and the other is Catholic. This introduces a discussion on the different way that they interact with the law and also the different way that they make us (or...

Oh boy... Well Sagi found this obscure blog written by some academic dropout that had an interesting take on Mansplaining (but after listening to this podcast you will have gotten everything of substance in that ode to desperation this guy calls a blog)... Again it's a hard nose dive into the shit, in the hopes of finding a golden shovel. Did we? Time (and death threats) will tell. We discuss...

In this episode, about Stanley Kubrick's classic movie The Shining, we divide our interests neatly between sexual trauma and racism. Well, we attempt to divide them neatly. Andy and Alicia on the side of sex, Jake and Sagi on the side of Race. Andy starts us off by hypothesizing, in intricate detail, the possibility that the movie is about the actual sexual assault of young Danny by Jack Torr...

Dear, patient listener.. We meet again, 2 weeks late, we know.. no creative endeavor is ever an assembly line and we had to drop a dud podcast  by the wayside. Maybe it will be unearthed one day by a particularly desperate AI bot. Maybe we'll sell it for a million dollars as a collector's item. Until then, may it rest in peace. This week's episode asked after the origin of identifyi...

This week we discuss the movie version of John le Carré's novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold . Alicia leads us in a séance of sorts, asking us to consider why the main character, Alec Leamas (played by Richard Burton) is such an effective protagonist. To make sure the ghosts are summoned, she does not offer us any definition of effective. We float around the following themes: the questio...

Oh it's you again.. welcome back! So today it's always sunny in Philadelphia again, this time we're (loosely) talking about the first episode of Season 4, Mac and Dennis: Manhunters (2008). Jake found  in it a certain brilliance, by which I mean a glowing excuse mainly to talk about de Sade... oh, and to push his Cannibalist agenda. The cannibal appears originally as an ethnic refer...

Welcome back dear listener! 5 Star Tossers grudgingly presents: Shakespeare's 1596 play The Merchant of Venice ! And boy do the grudges flow in this one: Marx, Jew, Woman, Lacan... even Peggy Kamuf and Beyoncé were pretty miffed by the end there. Capitalism is of course (grudgingly) on the table, since both place and time are almost unanimously hailed as the cradle of global capitalism. But C...

We have a really special episode for you today. Sagi has been temporarily banished, and we replaced him with the absolutely brilliant Alicia. Our cultural object this time around looks at the way Zoomers (Gen Z) relate to to sex. Some people claim they are not having enough of it, and some Zoomers claim that sex scenes in movies are non-consensual invasions of their innocence.  Throughout the epis...

We are back this week with a barage of Freudian theories and crisp, clean-sounding microphones! We discuss the movie "The Menu "from the vantage point of Freud's structural metapsychology and his diagnostic distinctions between hysteric and obsessive. For those who want a refresher on the relation between Id, Superego, and Ego, speed ahead to about 1:12. Andrew gives a wonderful sum...