Cursed Objects

They are marketed as democratised holiday rentals, where you get an ‘authentic’ experience by literally living in someone's home - so why are Airbnb’s full of crap, generic art? The answer is obvious (predatory venture capitalism), but the effect is cursed in uniquely jarring ways.  

Welcome back from your summer holidays - to a new season of Cursed Objects! This week Kasia and Dan explore the geographically and culturally bewildering experience of looking at a monochrome, wraparound canvas print of the Manhattan skyline, in a professionally managed Airbnb located miles from New York. What does it mean to travel, when you could be anywhere in the world once you arrive? 

Journeying through a grimly commonplace experience of 21st century capitalism, how do identikit interiors and IKEA beakers expose Airbnb horrors we would like to pretend don’t exist? What tactics - and political might - does this rental behemoth have, and who are the people fighting back? 

En route, we cover authenticity, anti-tourist protests, carbon guilt and why the left maybe ought to be pro-travel, actually!

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Theme music: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

If smart, humane, pro-migration Ed Miliband really hated Labour’s infamous ‘Controls On Immigration’ coffee mug – both of his parents were Jews who escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Britain – then why did he let it happen on his watch? Why is there so much cowardice, ignorance and fiction at the heart of our immigration conversation? Why does Labour have such a toxic relationship with migrants, given that most people with migration in their recent family histories (like Dan and Kasia, indeed) are expected to vote for them?

Where does the notion come from that in order to ‘defeat the far right’, you have to imitate their racist rhetoric, and repeat grim tropes like “legitimate concerns” and migrants putting “strains on public services”? As Kasia says, “Does it have to be like this?"

Small boat crossings peak in August and September – four human beings drowned in the English Channel the day we recorded this episode.

Nine things Starmer should do - open letter from 300 organisations working with refugees and asylum seekers

End the 24/7 GPS tracking of migrants

Jack Shenker’s brilliant Hostile Environment Newscast for Tortoise

*** FOR THE FULL EPISODE, please join our Patreon ***

Theme music: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

How do you start collecting objects for a cursed museum? Kasia and Dan spend all of their money in the gift shop of the Museum of Neoliberalism (well, it wouldn’t be a Museum of Neoliberalism if you left with more money than you entered with). They find a world curated by Darren Cullen - artist, activist and collector of some of the most mundanely dystopian objects imaginable. They discover corporate sponsored scout badges, chainsaws for kids and an Amazon employee’s bottle of piss. How can you represent an ideology like neoliberalism that has such far-reaching but poorly understood implications? 

PLUS they look at some of Darren’s own creations that mimic and subvert the horrors of the everyday: ‘baby’s first baby’, the infamous Hell bus, and a mini diorama of an Amazon ‘fulfillment centre’. But don’t worry, there are some blessed objects too - including ‘Don’t talk to them’ placards, that you can download from Darren’s website. The Museum of Neoliberalism is closing in mid-September, get down as soon as you can (and make sure you book!). 

If you want to hear more about Kasia and Dan's thoughts on neoliberalism (particularly in the Labour Party) find them in Rainbow Rhythms and Neoliberal Blues. You can also hear more about playmobil border force and riot cops in our episode on Dystopian Soft Play.

Theme music: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Special thanks also to Alex Rees, for EQ advice.

Troubling war merch, Van Gogh bucket hats, Soviet space dogs and the scourge of ‘world’ history - Kasia and Dan stage their first-ever live show to celebrate 100,000 downloads! They tell a sell-out crowd about some of their favourite cursed objects from museum shops, plus some of their favorites from the podcast. And we heard from YOU - via audience questions! Including: Why are museum shops all so same-y? Can you ever sell ‘respectful’ merch? And why is glasses cleaner one of the most successful products sold in Italian museum shops?

For first news and first dibs on tickets for the next live event – as well as the full-length episode! Along with 25+ others –  please join our Patreon!! ** ONLY £4 A MONTH TO SUPPORT YOUR FAVOURITE CULTURAL HISTORIANS **

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Special thanks also to Jade Bailey, for lending us her ears. 

A record etched onto an x-ray of a (probably, now) dead Soviet citizen’s head. That is the uniquely cursed object Stephen Coates came across in a Russian flea market in 2014.

Weird, eerie, and almost polyphonic in quality, these DIY records captivated him and sparked a mission to find the bootleggers who had risked up to *five years* in a gulag for their love of music. How did they turn x-rays into subversive ‘rib music’? And what can a flimsy bit of plastic show us about subcultural life in the USSR? 

And if you enjoyed this episode please join our Patreon!! ** ONLY £4 A MONTH TO SUPPORT YOUR FAVOURITE CULTURAL HISTORIANS - AND GET 25+ FULL BONUS EPISODES AND A CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK**

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Oh god, not another one! When BREAKING NEWS bursts through the wall, we spring, gently and apologetically, into action, with a (cough) emergency p for the snappy g. That’s right guys, we’ve got a bootleg Keir Starmer mug and we’re not afraid to do a podcast about it.  

Real change. Change you can believe in. Change for you, change for me, change for the entire human race. This week we are talking about campaign slogans, and the surprisingly long and contested history of “for the many, not the few”. Who is the ‘many’ in this sentence?? And who are the few? How can it be that figures as diffuse as Blair, Corbyn and Starmer have all deployed the same slogan? And what was Theresa May’s unique twist on it? 

We also call in on one of our favourite subjects, TIME. How have the 1983, 1997, 2017 and 2019 election years come to stand-in for an entire political philosophy, and strategy? And what does it mean when election campaigns try to invoke mythical pasts – ‘we want our country back’, ‘let’s make Britain great again’ – rather than imagined or promised futures? Also, can the Microsoft Paperclip icon help our political parties make a bit more sense?

And if you enjoyed this episode please join our Patreon!! ** ONLY £4 A MONTH TO SUPPORT YOUR FAVOURITE CULTURAL HISTORIANS - AND GET 25+ FULL BONUS EPISODES AND A CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK**

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

What if there was an object so cursed that it was never even made? This week we are joined by culture studies don Prof Anamik Saha to discuss anti-racism, racism and corporate diversity in pop culture - via Agatha Christie, Yellowface, American Fiction and One Day - woke agendas and cultural elites, colourblind casting, sensitivity readers and cultural consultants. What does diversity and anti-racism really mean in publishing, TV, film and music – and when is it just for show, or to assuage white guilt? What happens when a long-dominant culture is dramatically challenged, as happened in the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests?

ALSO: What does an authentic depiction of a space cowboy look like? Is it ‘race-bending’ when Anne Hathaway plays someone from Leeds? Is culture studies an entirely vibes-based discipline?

You can get stuck into Anamik's brilliant, enlightening work here: https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/media/staff/4390/professor-anamik-saha. His most recent book is Race, Culture and Media (SAGE, 2021). 

And if you enjoyed this episode please join our Patreon!! ** ONLY £4 A MONTH TO SUPPORT YOUR FAVOURITE CULTURAL HISTORIANS - AND GET 25+ FULL BONUS EPISODES AND A CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK**

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Were you into Cursed Objects before it was cool? Like Grandpa Simpson remembering the war, this week Dan and Kasia are holding a seance for those perennial whipping boys and girls, the hipsters – and recalling the green remembered hills of artisan beards, cereal cafes and small-batch trucker hats. Kicking off with a revisit to seminal, frequently painful 2005 sitcom Nathan Barley, we ask whether it is possible to make a defence of hipsters? Isn’t it a better world when people are enthusiastically pursuing their own mad little niches and styles – even if their moustaches look a bit daft? Why do hipsters get blamed for gentrification instead of property developers? Why did Adbusters blame them for the demise of the counter-culture?

And what about the future: does the word mean anything anymore, when they sell flat whites in Costa? Are we ready to declare the hipster officially dead, and have we identified the assailant: the influencer? 

If you enjoyed this episode please join our Patreon!! ** ONLY £4 A MONTH TO SUPPORT YOUR FAVOURITE CULTURAL HISTORIANS - AND GET 25+ FULL BONUS EPISODES AND A CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK!**

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

The police just follow the law, right!? Our guest Melayna Lamb thinks we need to flip this thinking around - and see the police as a law unto themselves. Using the example of the very cursed ‘thin blue line’ police badge, Melayna challenges the police’s foundational idea that they are the ‘thin blue line between order and chaos’. What happens if - as we have seen on multiple occasions - it is the police who are a danger to the public and not the other way around. Expect discussions of the worst police merch you’ve ever seen, 90s sitcom The Thin Blue Line ft. Rowan Atkinson, kettling, colonial boomerangs, and yes, somehow we’ve managed to get Walter Benjamin in there too. 

Melayna’s investigated the relationship between the police and law in her co-authored book Policing the Pandemic - How Public Health Becomes Public Order, and in her brand new book A Philosophical History of Police Power, out with Bloomsbury now. 

For further listening on the horrors of the police force, check out the Bad Gays podcast on Cressida Dick.

If you enjoyed this episode please join our Patreon!! ** ONLY £4 A MONTH TO SUPPORT YOUR FAVOURITE CULTURAL HISTORIANS - AND GET 25+ FULL BONUS EPISODES AND A CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK!**

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

How do you like your eggs in the morning? Hopefully not wet?? It’s Easter, so in the spirit of bringing you some seasonal #content, Kasia and Dan explore what came to be known as ‘wet egg discourse’ via a Morrisons food-to-go container of six hard-boiled eggs.

Is it ever appropriate to eat an egg on a train? Why are eggs eaten around the beginning of spring? Why are there so many phrases and idioms that reference eggs? How much is the most expensive Fabergé egg on the market? And why is Frank from Always Sunny in Philadelphia so obsessed with them?

*** FOR THE FULL EPISODE, please join our Patreon!! *** ONLY £4 A MONTH TO SUPPORT YOUR FAVOURITE CULTURAL HISTORIANS - AND GET 25+ FULL BONUS EPISODES AND A CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK!

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford