Cursed Objects

Forget everything you thought you knew about the housing crisis! This week we have a very special guest, housing lawyer Nick Bano, with a hugely enlightening and at times shocking lesson in just how we got into this mess. Drawing on his searing new book Against Landlords, Nick argues that the YIMBY / NIMBY argument is distracting us from the real problem - landlordism (even if we build more bloody houses, who will be able to buy them??)

What does Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech tell us about the long history of racism in the private rented sector? Why do all the worst people want to build on the Green Belt? What does it mean when Keir Starmer says he will build a "patriotic economy" through home ownership? Just how recently was landlordism unprofitable? And HOW can we bring in old pal Marx and use the state to fix all this?

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis (Verso) by Nick Bano is OUT NOW, do go and buy a copy.

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Kasia and Dan are earning their lunch. And it’s a big, steaming bowl of cuteness! They go to the Somerset House ‘Cute’ exhibition to unravel how this seemingly benign cultural phenomenon has come to infect our brains with adorable kittens and kawaii.

Often seen as infantile and saccharine - can cuteness be emancipatory or is it an escape from the grim reality of the world? What does it mean for accountability when you turn yourself into a ‘smol bean’? Who or what is behind the ‘cute’ disciples who preach the Hello Kitty gospel on internet forums and instagram reels? Kasia and Dan discuss the sinister influences of global capitalism while simultaneously mourning the lost utopian futures of PC music via the very cursed object of Hello Kitty-branded motor oil.

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

This week, Dan and Kasia are getting into a submersible and heading into the dark blue depths, poking around the extremely cursed domain of Britain's unnatural party of government, THE CONSERVATIVE AND UNIONIST PARTY. The Tories. The true Blues. That lot. 

Specifically, we're talking Tory merch. Just what the hell is going on in the Tories' online shop, who is all this crap for, and what does it tell us about the British right in 2024? Who are the Tory faithful, and what stories do they want to tell about themselves? Why did any of them 'TRUSS' in Liz? Why does Theresa May get a £32 commemorative toby jug but Harold Macmillan doesn't? Why are so many Conservative leaders depicted by their own side as mournful dogs? Why did we coin the term 'shagorama', and is it too late to take it back?

Elsewhere, we discuss the role of the infamous 'Hang Nelson Mandela' posters in the 1980s, and Dan tells us about the time he went undercover to a young Tory Christmas party in the name of journalism.

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

We're baaaack! And we're feeling FIT, while also reassuring you that it's what's inside that counts.

Kasia and Dan return with a new series, where today we're talking about the beauty industry, vanity and gender, and - following a Cursed Objects outing to the Wellcome Collection's new exhibition The Cult of Beauty - early modern German wife-prettying windmill technology. 

From the masterful make-up artists of Glow Up: Britain's Next Make-Up Star to the hall of rubbish mirrors of the Palace of Versailles, this episode has it all. We also hear about the beauty industry exhibits in the Museum of Transology – as liberatory objects that affirm a sense of self in a culture that would too often deny it to trans people. 

Also: if pretty privilege is really a thing, shouldn’t the parliamentary Conservative Party be a party of hotties?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

It's a classic Haunted Dickensian Cursed Objects Office Christmas Party! If you think Halloween is the spookiest time of year - you’re dead wrong.

We’re gathering round the metaphorical office photocopier to delve into the pagan origins of festive ghost stories. What can a mysterious RNLI lifeboat poster in Kasia’s hallway tell us about the ‘happy ghosts’ found in the haunted house that is Cursed Objects HQ?

And no festive season would be complete without a slightly tipsy guide to hauntology. Did Burial create it in a south London branch of McDonald's, or are its origins in the organic sounds of vegetables being destroyed for foley effects? Only a trip back to the 1970s and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop holds the answers. PLUS we have real-life, genuine ghost stories (well, one - about a ‘ghost plane’... oooOOoooOoo).

Back by popular demand, our now-regular Christmas tradition - we are a full house ft. our whole team, sound designer Mr. Beatnick and artwork maverick Archie Bashford.

Stay tuned to our Patreon for some special festive bonus content - including a reading of an M.R. James ghost story.

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Service! This week, we are hovering around ‘the pass’, checking our plating is okay, and asking how a simple labour-saving device, a coffee shop palette knife, caused Kasia so much angst and strife – “like a dagger to my heart”? Maybe it’s because of the uniquely painful and exhausting nature of working in food and drink service.

Kasia and Dan discuss the legendary pamphlet Abolish Restaurants, the politics of tipping, the way food TV and memoirs (even the sainted Anthony Bourdain!) valorise a macho, masochistic attitude to epically long shifts in the kitchen, and the objects which symbolise the drudgery of low-paid work. Why do the same restaurants and cafes that bang on about how sustainable their ingredient-sourcing is never EVER talk about how their workers are treated?

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Here is the Abolish Restaurants pamphlet - download, share, print it out! https://files.libcom.org/files/Prole.Info-%20Abolish%20Restaurants.pdf  

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Mice, lice, moths…and prehistoric-looking ‘weta’ grasshoppers. We are in the grips of a pest control moral panic. Could the humble hedgehog be the solution to the bedbug APOCALYPSE that newspapers keep telling us is wracking London?

From Ancient Greek prayers for worms to eat someone else's crops, to lousy experiences of the Spanish Civil War, and ‘squander bugs’ that undermine the wartime economy, pests have always plagued civilisation. So why is everyone obsessed with them right now? It’s a creepy, crawly episode of Cursed Objects, featuring Bill Spikes, a lil' cuddly hedgehog toy from the Charles Dickens Museum. 

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Recorded on a hungover rainy Sunday, it's a history-on-TV episode, and it's an episode about HISTORY IN THE FIELD. Literally in the field, or rather in a field: metal detecting, archeology, and a little bit of mudlarking on the side. Don't we all want to find some buried treasure?

This week, Dan and Kasia talk about the sweet and gently profound Mackenzie Crook sitcom Detectorists, and what a powerful case it makes for 'ordinary civilians' doing grassroots history as a hobby. Maybe we all have a Saxon burial ground underneath our feet? Isn't that a thrilling thought? Can even a ringpull from a can of Tizer help bring the 1980s to life? Then there's Time Team, the show responsible for bringing archeology to the masses and making it sexy - how did it end up as a YouTube show, and what became of the anti-establishment hero at the heart of it (we're not talking about Tony Robinson, sorry Tony).

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

It's our 50th episode! Sort of. There's an asterisk. But it's sort of our 50th episode!

To mark the occasion, Dan and Kasia are tackling their own logo, the Cursed Objects avatar and icon: the beans clock. They take on the politics of time, and discuss the use of the clock to discipline people into docile worker-drones. They learn the helpful unit of time measurement "pissing-while" and why some people thought the clock was "the devil's mill".

Other vital questions: Why did Hugo Chavez put the clocks back by 30 minutes as an anti-imperialist gesture? What is it like to experience time being floaty, bendy or stretchy, rather than flying in a straight line like an arrow? Why do we talk about saving time, wasting time, time theft, clock-watching and our time being 'our own'? Why on earth does Kasia always have her time set one hour ahead? Is she really 'hacking time'?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

What happens when a revolution dies? Jack Shenker witnessed firsthand the phenomenal Egyptian strike waves of the late 2000s that led to the toppling of the Mubarak regime, reporting from Tahrir Square and the towns and factories beyond - in 2016 publishing The Egyptians. This episode, our very special guest brings in a mug from the April 6th Youth Movement, once among the leaders of the revolution and now outlawed by the state and designated a terrorist symbol - the first time our cursed object has had to be smuggled across borders. Reliving Jack's experiences of revolutionary promise, collapse and anguish, we discuss the painfully quick cycle of birth, life and death or a revolution, just as the mug became revolutionary legacy-tat, before being banned as a symbol of sedition.

How did Jack end up burning incriminating documents in his old Cairo apartment? How many references to Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile will we squeeze in? Is everything neoliberalism's fault? Get involved in this very special episode to find out.

Find Jack here: https://twitter.com/hackneylad

*** Also, why not join our Patreon? *** ONLY £4 A MONTH TO SUPPORT YOUR FAVOURITE CULTURAL HISTORIANS, IN EXCHANGE FOR 20+ BONUS EPISODES AND A CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford