Cursed Objects

FROM PATREON TO MAIN FEED: Are we heading for a 'summer of discontent'? Are we going 'back to the 1970s'? Three day week and a four-day bender? What really happened when the lights went out? Why do we cast particular eras as 'dark ages' or periods of decline, and who does it serve when we do so? Why were the 70s such an excellent time for white utility candles? This week, Kasia and Dan try and unpick the myths and moral panics from the realities: that the 70s were a decade of decline, social breakdown and perpetual unrest -- rubbish in the streets, blackouts, shortages and strikes. Has that decade shaped everything to do with work and politics ever since? Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

Celebrating Walter Benjamin's 130th birthday with a truly cursed journey into the darkest end of the experience economy... from yuppie ballpit bars in Shoreditch to the commodification of the Holocaust, it's a wild ride with the spiritual godfather of Cursed Objects. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

Health warning!!! Kasia and Dan are cracking through the radioactive, ever-expanding global energy drinks market LIVE ON AIR... From patriotic energy drinks brought to you by Albion's sovereign bulldog, to middle-class FBPE Euroshopper cans... what unites jocks, bros/bruhs, ravers, skaters, bungee jumpers, construction workers who actually have to get up early and work really hard, coders, gamers and goths? A big dose of sugar and a big dose of caffeine, that's what. How did a love of energy drinks come to stand for an entire (male, young, online) sub-culture? Why is their catchphrase "heart attack on blokes"? And which Japanese philosopher is the sharpest energy drink guru? If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, you can get regular bonus episodes on our Patreon: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

Are we heading for a 'summer of discontent'? Are we going 'back to the 1970s'? Three day week and a four-day bender? What really happened when the lights went out? Why do we cast particular eras as 'dark ages' or periods of decline, and who does it serve when we do so? Why were the 70s such an excellent time for white utility candles? This week, Kasia and Dan try and unpick the myths and moral panics from the realities: that the 70s were a decade of decline, social breakdown and perpetual unrest -- rubbish in the streets, blackouts, shortages and strikes. Has that decade shaped everything to do with work and politics ever since? FULL EPISODE is available exclusively to Patreon subscribers here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/68680196  Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

We’re BACK following two Patreon-only episodes – and we are celebrating! Bunting? Check. Tables? Check. Unelected head of state who costs the British taxpayer £67 million a year? CHECK. That’s right – this week we are discussing HM The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. The resources for which the Government have spent big money for you to download. All this fuss has got us wondering - is coronation chicken a good thing? Does bunting have a latent revolutionary potential? And, is the monarchy an important question for the left? If you've enjoyed Cursed Objects so far, please support our Patreon - regular bonus episodes coming after S2 finishes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

Crayons out for universal health care! Stay home, protect the NHS, make a sign to put in your window, clap for your doctors and nurses, give them all a badge - but don't bother with a pay rise. This week, Kasia and Dan delve into the deep passions, protective instincts, personal pathos and politics swirling around every British resident's relationship with the National Health Service, the only acceptable face of the state - but one increasingly covered in bandages? FULL EPISODE is available exclusively to Patreon subscribers here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-episode-of-66778799 Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

Welcome all free-born Englishmen, sovereign citizens, rebel barons and new patrons! On this first of what will now be regular Patreon-only episodes - we're talking about myths of Englishness, why the state has such a fragile ego, a Covid-denying soft play centre called Cirq-D-Play, and why everyone is obsessed with an 807-year-old legal document that had to be rewritten several times and was then scrapped anyway.   FULL EPISODE is available exclusively to Patreon subscribers here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/65903988    Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick   Artwork: Archie Bashford

Series 2 ends with a bang, and some serious vexillology: talking homonationalism, gay villages, the commercialisation of Pride, the history of criminalisation of LGBTQ people, the Gay End of History, and this flag - The Pink Jack, with legendary writer and podcaster, Bad Gays' Huw Lemmey. Bad Gays: A Homosexual History is published by Verso on 31 May 2022 and you can (and should) pre-order it RIGHT NOW. Huw Lemmey's Utopian Drivel Substack is here. The Bad Gays podcast, which Huw hosts with Ben Miller, is here.   If you've enjoyed Cursed Objects so far, please support our Patreon - regular bonus episodes coming after S2 finishes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

U-F-Whoa! It's the penultimate episode of Series 2, and this week Dan and Kasia consider the Wyrd 1990s, bedding down in Area 51 with Mulder and Scully (and their mates from the Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik NWO) to ask why alien conspiracies thrived in mainstream pop culture immediately after the end of the Cold War. Was this catharsis as the threat of nuclear annihilation receded? Or just a silly distraction in a godless universe? Why do conspiracy theories appeal to people in the first place? Also featuring crop circles, Corbyn conspiracies, yer man Senator McCarthy and S Club 7's visit to the Bermuda Triangle.   If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - regular bonus episodes coming after S2 finishes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

'Wall Street's Guantanamo' or 'our Statue of Liberty'? This week Dan and Kasia grapple with a series of very large cursed objects, the sky-scraping glass-and-steel totems to finance capitalism in London's former docklands. There is discussion of the east London grime scene, hostile architecture, Stuart Hall, dystopian privatised public spaces, and how buildings can embody the spirit of the age. If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - regular bonus episodes coming after S2 finishes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

It's the end of another busy day running the patriarchy. You drop your designer briefcase in the hall, put on your football-shaped slippers, and place your watch on your executive watch stand. Your apartment is filled with many leather-bound books and smells of rich mahogany. There's whisky in the decanter and a ludicrously expensive Lego Millennium Falcon to build. You are modern man incarnate, and these are your man-gifts - and this week, Kasia and Dan are going to find out just what it is that's so cursed about all those gendered gifts for 'the man in your life'.   If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - regular bonus episodes coming after S2 finishes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

Cursed Objects sells out!! (Not really.) This week, Dan and Kasia investigate why every sinister corporation in the world has started obsessively pursuing 'brand collabs'? Why are we letting multi-billion dollar companies cannibalise the language and practices of creative work? Where is the line between art and commerce, and how do we unpick this stuff without sounding like tedious Bill Hicks-loving 14-year-olds? Also, why won't the corporate world leave rap music alone - and what do they get out of co-opting the "cool" of Black culture?   If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - regular bonus episodes coming after S2 finishes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

Class. Gender. Nuclear families. Savoury jelly. Fish paste. National identity. The 1970s. Innovation in post-war capitalist production. AND! Highly specific pieces of kitchen equipment and dinner parties. This week, Dan and Kasia ask: why do we all hate dinner parties? Or rather, why do we all *say* we hate dinner parties, but love having dinner with our friends? Where did all the stigma come from, and what are the most useless niche pieces of kitchen equipment?   If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - regular bonus episodes coming after S2 finishes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

Art and commerce, haunted ears, starving artists and the way galleries fetishise madness to make £££. Welcome back, and welcome to our first ever guest (!), the wonderful Alice Procter. Series 2 returns, the UCU strike is finished, and Kasia, Dan and Alice are DEEP in the politics and economics of the museum gift shop, as well as checking in on how that whole 'decolonising the museum' thing is going.   Thanks so much to Alice for joining us - check out her excellent podcast Historical Friction and her legendary Uncomfortable Art Tours.   If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - regular bonus episodes coming after S2 finishes: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

This week's episode of Cursed Objects has been postponed - because we are supporting the University and College Union (UCU) digital strike. Please consider joining us in donating to the UCU’s strike fund by going to www.ucu.org.uk/fightingfund We return with Series 2 Episode 4 next Monday -Kasia and Dan x

When did our star signs start running our lives? According to horoscope app Co-Star, it has been downloaded by a quarter of all young women aged 18–25 in the U.S. Even if we are living in a material world, maybe the great horoscope renaissance is offering something that's missing from modern life? Via a cursed Capricorn necklace and some Tik Tok witches, Kasia and Dan tackle the weird, the mystical and the metaphysical, with help from Frankfurt School philosophers Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin - who had more to say about horoscopes than you might think. If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - and get access to bonus eps and extra content: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Celebrity gloss, celebrity GOSS! How do you write a 260-page biography of a young TV presenter who you've never met and never interviewed, and hasn't ever done anything but be on TV? Padding! Baffling, bizarre digressions and weird AF padding. But you've gotta just churn it out in time for Xmas. Dan and Kasia discuss the cash-in tat produced around 2000s celebrity pop culture, the grim misogyny of that decade, Topshop Metallica T-shirts, 'cool' and 'phoneys', 9/11, TMZ, Closer, Heat and Perez Hilton, and how capitalism tries to imbue mundane individuals with great meaning to sell us crap we don't need.   If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - and get access to bonus eps and extra content: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK.   Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

If this is indeed a new Cold War, then when did it get so hot in here? Dan and Kasia are back with a bang, launching Series 2 of Cursed Objects with a bit of geopolitical pizzazz - talking leadership cults, "great men of history" and the ironic veneration of dictators. Stalin makes an appearance, and we look at the time Vladimir Putin extolled the virtues of hip-hop for clean living and a greater Russia.   If you're enjoying Cursed Objects, please support our Patreon - and get access to bonus eps and extra content: patreon.com/cursedobjects. You can also follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK.   Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

A sexy Putin calendar. An unauthorised Fearne Cotton biography. A Van Gogh eraser shaped like his dismembered ear. Adorno takes on his horoscope, Stuart Hall takes on Canary Wharf, the 1970s take on dinner parties and the 2020s take on "brand collabs"... guess who just got back today? That's right! Hosts Dr Kasia Tee and Dan Hancox return on Monday 31 January - and then every Monday for the next 10 weeks - with your favourite podcast about big ideas, weird history, pop culture and tat.    For more info: follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK or join our Patreon: patreon.com/cursedobjects Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford

Kasia and Dan are struggling to feel ‘mindful’ despite using their fresh-off-Amazon colouring-in wallcharts, puzzles and self-help books. Interrogating the mental health crisis and neoliberalism, they discuss ‘mindfulness’ and the ways that employers and political parties pay lip service to the health of the nation. Key object: Labour 'colour-in-at-home' postcard.   For more: follow us on twitter and instagram @CursedObjectsUK, and if you are enjoying Cursed Objects support our Patreon patreon.com/cursedobjects   Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford