Cursed Objects

Abolish Restaurants!

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

Bed, bugs, and hedgehogs

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

Detectorists vs Time Team

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

Beans Clock - 50th Episode Extravaganza

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

Pyramid Schemes and Revolutions ft. Jack Shenker

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

 

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Rainy Empire Island ft. Charlotte Lydia Riley

Welcome to a new series of Cursed Objects! For the first episode back, very special guest historian Charlotte Lydia Riley brings in a souvenir mug commemorating the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 – where the very normal exhibits included a working coalmine, a model of the Prince of Wales sculpted out of butter, and… actual human beings brought back from the colonies to the metropole. Charlotte explains how groups like the Union of African Students pushed back, and the imperial undertones of Winnie the Pooh and Adrian Mole.  We discuss Charlotte’s brilliant new book Imperial Island, about empire in the 20th century, and whether reading deep into everyday pop culture is the best way to escape the official narrative of empire. What did you learn about the British Empire at school??

 

Imperial Island is out now - go and get it immediately, you won't regret it: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442125/imperial-island-by-riley-charlotte-lydia/9781847926432 

Charlotte can be found here: https://twitter.com/lottelydia

 

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Cursed Summer Sessions: The Revolutionary Potential of Antiques Roadshow

For the next Patreon-only Cursed Summer Session, Dan and Kasia get stuck into a decades-old British institution, with a TV review of Antiques Roadshow - comparing the huge gulf between the show in 1990 and 2023. Is it the most suffocating, reactionary show on TV? Twee middle-class commodity fetishism?

Or is there more to it than that - couldn't this also be a democratic goldmine, a forum for grassroots, participatory material history for the masses? What kind of objects need to appear on Antiques Roadshow to make it something more than Tory heritage industry fluff? 

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Still Trippin’ on These Shrooms

Sit up straight, hippies! Kasia and Dan have some questions for you, and it's high time you answered. Where did all this magic mushroom merch come from? What makes tye-die and flares swing in and out of fashion? What is the thread between psychedelia in 1960s pop culture and medieval dance manias? What does Camden market have to do with all this? Are drugs still winning the war on drugs? And most infuriatingly of all, how is there so much cowardice, hypocrisy and bullshit in British discourse around drug policies that we are now behind even the United States?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Jamie’s Cursed Cookin’ - ft. Jonathan Nunn and Biz

Pukka! We’re dancing in the moonlight with the king of the English culinary world, Jamie Oliver. How did someone so cringe achieve such dizzying levels of fame and power? How did he end up being an unofficial advisor to Tonty Blair? Special guests Jonathan Nunn and Biz take us through Jamie’s Naked Chef years, the Downing Street years and the Jerk Rice years, via the extremely cursed Cookin’: Music To Cook By compilation CD. From New Labour and school dinners to the notorious Lamb Curry Song (complete with dodgy Jamaican accent), it’s a wild ride with the world’s most milquetoast indie soundtrack.

 

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Jonathan Nunn is a writer and co-founder of online food magazine Vittles. He edited the brilliant London Feeds Itself. 

Biz is Director of Resonance FM, and has written for the New Statesman, New York Times, The Nation, and the Times Literary Supplement.

 

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

The Work Of Toblerone In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction

Come fly away with us and Alain de Botton (sorry but he's coming too), and take a trip on Venga Airways - but we're not leaving the ground: you're trapped with us in the departure lounge, for ever. Are airports the most cursed spaces in the modern world? Liminal spaces between nations and cultures, a surveilled, high-security purgatory, with access to Oliver Bonas. Why the hell are Gen Z *choosing* to hang out there, for fun? And are personalised gifts like our Cursed Objects Toblerone the last gasp of late-period consumer capitalism?

FULL EPISODE HERE >> ONLY £4 A MONTH for this and 20+ more bonus episodes, AND a free Cursed Objects sticker pack! https://www.patreon.com/posts/work-of-in-age-85132408

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Milking It

It's a source of strength, life, sickness, disgust, delight and deep nausea. It's fraught with climate controversy and tensions over rights, care, state power, social democracy, misogyny and outrageous colonial history.  Where did we learn that strong kids drink milk? Why is the Laughing Cow not laughing anymore? Why have neo-Nazis adopted it as a weird signifier of their racism? And what does the rise and rise of oat milk - with its cringe hipster tweevertising - tell us about late capitalism?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Death to False Metal! H&M Guns ’n’ Roses baby grow

Oh so you're 6 months old and you say you're a true Guns 'n' Roses fan? Name their top 3 albums then! Coming to you live from the furious and cathartic heart of the moshpit, this week Dan and Kasia take on the golden age of RAWK, homemade metal 'battle jackets', music fandom and nerdery, masculinity, authenticity and the long history of rock 'selling out'. What happens when a music and fashion sub-culture moves on from its golden era - what is left in its wake? And why are metallers so obsessed with fortified wine?

 

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Here is Jude Rogers on band t-shirts: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/oct/13/band-tshirts

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Elf Bars For Days

Smoking is almost too on-the-nose a subject for Cursed Objects. But vapes - candy-coloured, daftly-named, targeted at children, making wads of $$$ for the same tobacco companies - vapes are perfect. How are these cursed little dummies - cheap plastic disposable tat, destined for landfill - marketed? Why did fags disappear from the movies? How has Big Tobacco adapted to bans on its lobbying, advertising and product placement?

In 1974, 45% of British adults smoked. People smoked not just in restaurants and pubs, but on the tube, and in hospitals. Those numbers have fallen to 13% today - a huge social change - but what else has changed, since smoking ceased to be an integral part of the fabric of everyday life?

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Where were you when.. (ROYAL EDITION)

The desire to feel like you are 'part of history' can turn even the most ardent republican into a flag-waving monarchist shill. So why are we all so desperate to tell subsequent generations that we were 'there' and how does this urge corrode politics? Just in time for the King's Coronation, from our Patreon to main feed, we explore the period of national mourning we recorded in September 2022 following the Queen's death. 9 months have passed, but many of the themes explored in this episode are timeless..

 

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Chairman Meow

Kasia and Dan address their toughest question yet: are cats left wing? Springing from a shared love of feline friends, they trace the history of cat-obsessed activists and intellectuals through Kasia's cat The Professor's very gross lost claw. Why did the left choose to welcome these ruthless killers into their homes? Are cats incapable of love, or is that a myth spread by 'Big Bird’? And they trawl the digital recesses of blog sites (so you don’t have to) to test if cat memes will turn you into a libertarian or communist. They also read Leigh Claire La Berge's brilliant book Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary. 

 

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

 

Artwork: Archie Bashford

BONUS episode - In the Guantánamo Bay Gift Shop

There is a gift shop in Guantánamo Bay. That’s it. That’s the episode. From ‘mindfulness’ mugs to lip balms, Kasia and Dan explore the extremely cursed Guantánamo merchandise and everyday objects on offer - alongside ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ like waterboarding, and the kidnapping of foreign nationals for long-term detention without charge. From their use of euphemistic language, to the geography and history of this highly secretive US naval base, still squatting on Cuban soil – this is part history lesson, part fury at the continuing injustices committed in the name of the war on terror and 'all our freedoms'.

 

FULL-LENGTH BONUS EPISODE AND MANY OTHERS HERE >> FOR ONLY £4 A MONTH https://www.patreon.com/posts/81073683 

 

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

 

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Making a Meal of It - ft. Lucy Dearlove

A plain ham sandwich, a bottle of still water and a pack of ready salted crisps – it's a meal (deal) fit for a King, and a Cursed Objects x Lecker collab! This week, legends in their own lunchtimes Kasia, Dan and special guest Lucy Dearlove delve into claggy sandwiches, terrible sushi and supermarket psychology and ask: what the hell is going on in Britain that our most well-known high street chemist changed the way we eat lunch?

What do your meal deal choices say about you, and what’s the most cursed meal deal of all? How have the intertwined histories of British capitalism, office work and food led us to this point - where a ham and cheese sandwich, Coke Zero Vanilla and Itsu seaweed thins is a normal lunch combination?

If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon, for regular bonus episodes (and a Cursed Objects sticker pack!): patreon.com/cursedobjects.

You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK.

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

BONUS episode - The One With The Long 90s

Could we BE any more cursed? This week, Dan and Kasia talk about the strange, mutant afterlife of Friends, the world's least cool situation comedy. On the agenda, such questions as: has some kind of Friends merchandise atom bomb been detonated in recent years? What does the show tell us about the politics and culture of the 1990s - and why is that decade so 'long'? Why are tweens in Britain in 2023 wearing Central Perk t-shirts and 'We Were On A Break' socks? What kind of comfort is it that we find in lightweight sitcoms - "playing in the safe memory of history"? And why did 9/11 not occur in the Friends version of New York?

FULL EPISODE HERE >> ONLY £4 A MONTH TO LISTEN AND SUPPORT YR FAV CULTURAL HISTORIANS AND GET A *FREE* CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK https://www.patreon.com/posts/73409944

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

Swear Down!

Kasia and Dan explore the crisis in British swearing through Robert Peston’s very cursed book ‘WTF’. What does it say about our society that a leading political pundit sells his books through expletives? And with groans of despair viscerally being felt across the UK whenever someone calls Matt Hancock a ‘cockwomble’, what has become of swearing as a once transgressive art form? It’s a wild ride into Westminster’s ‘chumocracy’, the publishing industry’s sweary self-help books that atomise your depression and captisalise on a 'punk' ethos, and the most groan-worthy recesses of Internet forums.

 

If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon, for regular bonus episodes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. And very soon: CURSED OBJECTS STICKERS.

You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK.

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

BONUS episode - Herbal Tea Advent Calendar

What happens to the space-time continuum if you open an advent calendar in April? What are the healing properties of "different flavours of damp twig"? This week, Kasia and Dan are exploring the quasi-mystical powers of herbal tea, via an out-of-time advert calendar covered in a thick layer of dust. We talk about measuring the passage of time with hot drinks, about Kasia's relationship with the Polish diaspora in the UK, about folk culture, identity and assimilation, about foraging, about herbal remedies, and about our estranged relationships with the land.

FULL EPISODE HERE >> ONLY £4 A MONTH TO LISTEN AND SUPPORT YR FAV CULTURAL HISTORIANS AND GET A *FREE* CURSED OBJECTS STICKER PACK https://www.patreon.com/posts/73409944

Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford