Woodbine Podcast

Woodbine's podcast returns with an episode on Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim's new film You Can See Everything. Eric and Matt are joined by Abe Walker to discuss who or what Nathan Fielder's work is about, where the drama and artistry comes from, and what genres he's working within and against. Is the film true crime, a documentary, a mockumentary, a making-of, or performance art?--Replication as Revelation: Contingency, Detail, and Cinephilia in Nathan Fielder's Re-creations" - Jordan Schonig, 2025: https://www.invisibleculturejournal.com/pub/replication-as-revelation/release/4--The Year’s Best Film Is This All-Time Great Mind-Melter - Nick Schager, 2026: https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/you-can-see-everything-nathan-fielders-elizabeth-holmes-movie-is-the-years-best-filmAbe Walker is author of Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and Struggle for Unionism in the American South, published in 2026 by Temple University Press.

For this week's episode, we discuss the State Department's recent report "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism", which was released three weeks ago.Matt and Sam are joined by D, a lawyer with a wide-ranging practice in civil litigation and criminal defense, to talk about the political context the report is being released in, the myth-making operation its performing to influence both domestic and foreign policy, and the implications in its targeting of the National Lawyers Guild, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the People's Forum.READINGS:--"Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism" - The Department of State, 2026: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cuba-Report.pdf--"U.S. Squeezes Cuba Even as It Searches for a New Regime Leader" - Tyler PagerJulian E. Barnes and Frances Robles, 2026: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/us/politics/us-search-cuba-leader.html--"Remarks at the Opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism" - Scott Bessent, Christopher Landau, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, 2026: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/remarks-at-the-opening-of-the-ministerial-on-the-resurgence-of-political-terrorism--"Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence" - Donald J. Trump, 2025: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/

For this week's podcast we're joined by George Katsiaficas, author of the classic texts The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (1987) and The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (1997), as well as the more recent collections Gen Z Makes History (2025) and Eros and Revolution (2024). We discuss his idea of the eros effect and what we can learn from following global waves of uprisings. We think together about where both radical consciousness and self-organization comes from, as well as the danger of a Thanatos effect, where we see a contagion of confusion, depression, and nihilism. LINKS:--Gen Z Makes History: https://www.eroseffect.com/gen-z-makes-history--George Katsiaficas's Website: https://www.eroseffect.com/George Katsiaficas is a social theorist who is known for his many writings on social movements, 1968, and Asian uprisings. A longtime activist for peace and justice, he was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Together with Kathleen Cleaver, he coedited Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. He was a professor of humanities and sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston for more than three decades. Katsiaficas is a militant researcher, who lives amongst and collaborates with the people he writes about and sees his research as advancing global activism, not simply describing or analyzing it.

Chaia Heller & Mason Herson-Hord join Andrew and Matt to discuss their work with the Institute for Social Ecology, co-founded by communalist philosopher Murray Bookchin in Vermont in 1974. We reflect on the ideas and legacy of both Bookchin (1921-2006) and Occupy Wall Street; the need for joy and the celebration of life; the limitations within both Marxism and anarchism for facing our present ecological crisis; the task of counter-hegemony and keeping a set of ideas alive across generations; and the role of feminism and creating new forms of socialization together.--"Ecology, Desire and Revolution: An Interview with Chaia Heller" - Rebecca DeWitt, 1999: http://www.cwmorse.org/archives/perspectives.on.anarchist.theory.vol3.no.2-fall1999.pdf--"Notes on an Ecology of Everyday Life" - Chaia Heller, 1999: http://new-compass.net/articles/notes-ecology-everyday-life--"Biotechnology, Democracy, and Revolution" - Chaia Heller, 2005: https://social-ecology.org/wp/2005/01/biotechnology-democracy-and-revolution/--"A Government From Below" - Mason Herson-Hord, 2018: https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/fall-2018/a-government-from-below/--"Assembled in Detroit" - Mason Herson-Hord, 2020: https://assemblymag.org/assembled-in-detroit/Chaia Heller is a writer, activist, anthropologist, and artist who has been teaching political and feminist theory at the Institute for Social Ecology for nearly four decades. Chaia has been active in movements ranging from ecofeminism and the Left Greens, to the global justice movement, and Occupy. Chaia is the author of The Ecology of Everyday Life (Black Rose Books) and Food Farms and Solidarity (Duke University Press).Mason Herson-Hord is an organizer and writer in Detroit, Michigan, where he is an active participant in the development of neighborhood assemblies and the solidarity economy. He is a founding member of Symbiosis, a North American federation of dual power organizations, and a board member of the Institute for Social Ecology. His work has been published by outlets like the Next System Project, ROAR Magazine, The Ecologist, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.Andrew volunteers at Woodbine and is currently working toward finishing a master’s degree in Political Ecology, Degrowth, and Environmental Justice at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen join Giulia and Matt to discuss their shared nomadic journey as artists, anarchists, parents, curators, teachers, partners, writers, thinkers, friends, and so much more. In 70 minutes, we discuss their last 50 years of collaboration. Meeting amidst the utopian movements of the 60s, they were influenced by their encounter and friendship with anarchist groups such as Anarchos, the Judson Dance Theater, and Situationism in America. Believing in the power of collectivity and the potentials of oppositional culture, their work has dealt equally with the spectacle of disaster and the invisibility of daily life. With a practice simultaneously reflecting on authorship and ownership, audience and autonomy, independence and institutions, they have been editors of the radical film journal Jump Cut, and curators and archivists of forgotten revolutionary cinema.--"Escape Routes" - Ernie Larsen, 2021: https://herri.org.za/5/ernie-larsen/--"Flying under the radar: notes on a decade of media agitation" - Ernest Larsen, 2014: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc56.2014-2015/LarsenAnarchistActivists/index.html--"The Dialectics of Making Movies: Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen interviewed by Lia Yoka" - 2009: http://womenfilmeditors.princeton.edu/assets/pdfs/MILLNER_Dialectics_of_Making_Movies_Yoka.pdf--"The Last Word: To unite filmmakers and film critics" - Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner, 1979: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/LarsenMillnerEdl.htmlSherry Millner & Ernie Larsen collaborate on film, video, photo-text, book, curatorial and other research projects. Together they have produced more than a dozen films exhibited in festivals, museums, cultural centers, squats, windows, and storefronts. Millner creates installations such as The Domestic Boobytrap, which detournes U.S. army manuals to manifest the vulnerability of domestic space, with blueprints and models of boobytraps placed in everyday life situations within the nuclear family. Larsen's feminist detective novel Not a Through Street was nominated for an Edgar Award. His nonfiction novel The Trial Before The Trial, describing his “disruptive” service on a grand jury in New York, was published by Autonomedia. He is currently writing a novel about the French anarchist Ravachol.As co-creators of the collaborative video project State of Emergency, they involved 15 artists in protesting U.S. invasions of the Middle East. In 2008 at the Oberhausen Film Festival they co-curated  “Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers,” 10 programs that aimed to rewrite the conventional history of experimental political media. They co-curated the Fall Flaherty Foundation series in 2013 at Anthology Film Archives, under the title “Global Revolt: Cinematic Ammunition.” They are co-curators of Disruptive Film, a two volume DVD set of experimental short-form non-fiction films and videos, for Facets Media. They organized and contributed to the collaborative book Capital’s Greek Cage (Autonomedia), an exploration of Greece’s near-collapse in the aftermath of the debt crisis. Their most recent video How Do Animals and Plants Live? is an inquiry into the forcible eviction and immediate demolition of the self-organized anarchist-supported migrant squat Orfanotrofeio in Thessaloniki on July 27, 2016.Video Data Bank: https://www.vdb.org/artists/sherry-millnerAutonomedia: https://autonomedia.org/?s=larsenFacets DVD: https://www.facetsdvd.com/searchresults.asp?Search=millner&Submit=