ACFM - ACFM Microdose: A Festive 50 For 2023

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

The ACFM gang get together for the last time this year to deliver a Festive 50. Keir, Jem and Nadia select the best bits of culture and politics from 2023, from music, films, books to games, strikes and actions. Unwrap to find sci-fi blaxploitation, comedy history, gobby glam-punk, Judge Dredd analysis, a fresh angle on Silicon […]

This is Acid Man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kea Milburn and I'm joined as usual by my very dear friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And my other very dear friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we've got a very special microdose for you, celebrating the winter solstice coming up tomorrow as we record,

and the turning of the notional year, the new year that Europe has imposed on the rest of the world. We thought we'd bring you our cultural, perhaps our political highlights of the year, frame perhaps, as the things that have brought us a little bit of enjoyment, a little bit of joy in these dark times. And in fact, we're going to call it our festive 50, although I don't think we're going to do 50 entries, in reference to, in homage to the great festive 50 that the DJ John Peel used to collect up and play. Very important to those

of us of a certain age. Talking about people of a certain age, Jeremy, could you introduce who John Peel was? John Peel was a radio DJ, a music radio DJ, In Britain, he was active from the 60s right up until, when did he retire in the late 90s, I think. Might have even been later. He was a sort of national institution. He was basically the one DJ who for decades was allowed to play any music he wanted on his late night radio show. And so he became famous for breaking lots of bands, especially sort of punk and post-punk, often with live sessions on the show. a real sort of national institution

quite an idiosyncratic one with very quite specific taste and the festive 50 was what would happen he would get he would play in the run up to Christmas 50 tracks which were supposedly ones that had been voted on by the listening

audience when they first started doing it they could be from any period and then later it became the case they had to be from that year nobody really knows how rigorous the selection process was There wasn't really any way of monitoring those things in those days. If you wanted to vote, I think you just had to send a postcard to the PO box for the show. That's who John Peel was. That's what the festive 50 was.

Thanks, Jeremy. After you've accused John Peel, a dead, great national institution of impropriety in voting. No, I did. I'm just saying nobody know. Maybe they do know. Maybe it was very carefully moderated. To be honest, I haven't checked. Yes. I don't. What I mean is I don't know. Okay, great.

So I'm sure somebody does know. Actually, I was completely complete nonsense. Categorically, someone we all know. I just don't know. Maybe the postbag is out there with all of the saved votes. Yes, it'd be a nice little PhD project for somebody.

Anyway, before we get going on this, let's just do our usual formal notices. The usual thing, we release a newsletter every month to go along with the theme of our episodes. So this month, you want to sign up because the episode, our trip, Our main trip has been on the topic of protest.

I do believe there'll be some very embarrassing photographs of your three lovely hosts on protests in earlier days, perhaps, with various haircuts, etc., which may now prove embarrassing. So sign up to that, and if you want to sign up to that, you just go to Novara.com. Forward slash ACFM newsletter. Of course, you may tune into this show to listen to the music and not. your host going on for hours and hours. If you do do that, that's very strange as the chat very much exceeds the music. But of course, if you just want the music, you can follow our playlist, our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify.

Just search for ACFM, and that's got every song that we've ever mentioned on the show. The other thing we're asking people to do is to leave us reviews, good reviews, I might add, five-star reviews. They really helped to bring new listeners to the show. and of course we want to spread the ACFM weird left revolution as far and wide as we can. So please go ahead and do that. Of course, we are hosted by the ever wonderful Navarra Media. So if you want to support ACFM and so want to support the wider work that Navarra Media do,

and indeed you should support that, you should go along to navara.media forward slash support and become a supporter, just pledge as much as you think you can have. forward. Perhaps that would be a nice New Year's resolution for you. I'm going to support all of the media that I use. Okay, parish notice is done. Let's have the first entry in our, in our festive 50 slash festive N. Jeremy, you have you got one for us? Yes, I've decided, I think I've decided at the last minute. I'm going to bring in a bit of music that was actually released last year, but I definitely have continued to listen to it this year and it does make me definitely make me feel optimistic every time

I do I think this like probably most of the music picks will be familiar to anyone who listens to The Love is the Message podcast but Tim and I sometimes pick records

we've been listening to that year but not to listeners of ACFM more broadly and so this apologies to any of those people but this is going to be under the lilac sky by Aruishi Jane

and Aruishi Jane is an American-based producer composer who is modular synth artist and who uses kind of drone and melodic techniques derived from her training in North Indian classical music and it's really extraordinary. It is really like a record that stands up with some of the greatest sort of new age, psychedelic, ambient classics. Really fantastic. One of the things about the moment we're in now culturally,

there's been this great revival of that kind of music just in the past few years, which is really producing some fantastic stuff. So a Rushi Jane titled track from the album Under the Lelik Sky. A very Gilbert selection, that. Nadia, what have you got for us on your first thing that brought you a little bit of joy this year? I'm going to start with a novel, actually. So a novel which brought me joy in 2023 is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevine. It's a fantastic read.

It really made me appreciate gaming and the protagonists create the first block. Buster called Ichigo in the book. I thought it was so rare to see a love story written in this way in a book because it's a love story between two friends between a guy and a woman and it spans over 30 years in the book. And I think it's really, really beautifully done. It deals with disability really well. It also has a bicultural Korean and American aspect and deals with identity in that way, that kind of life experience of straddling to different cultures, which is something that I can really identify with. And yeah, I thought it was an exhilarating and very funny and poignant novel, and it brought me a lot of joy this year. When you say gaming,

do you mean like video games and so forth? Video games, yes. So they are video game creators. And as someone who kind of, as we talked about on the games episode, you know, like I played lots of Nintendo when I was younger, but I'm not really a gamer as I got got, got, older, I didn't really game very much and I don't at the moment, but it really got me back into that world of appreciating world building and the kinds of conversations that go on between two people, kind of creating games and how it would work in reality. And it's the story of that, basically, and the friendship between these two people. World building within world building, I see. The play within the play. Very clever. Jay really loved that book as well. Yeah, I might

put it on my list, actually. It sounds up my alley. I was trying to think about what the TV that I enjoyed this year. And if I did just talk about that, I'd just talk about I'm a Virgo by Boots Riley, which I think has been the best TV show this year. But I already mentioned that on the episode about surrealism, and we were talking about after surrealism. So I thought I would talk about a film, actually,

a film that more or less went straight onto Netflix. It was produced by Netflix. I think it had a couple of weeks in the theatres, but it was basically a made-for-netflix film. called They Clone Tyrone, directed by first-time directed, Jewel Taylor. And that definitely has got a Afro-Sorealist feel to it. And people have compared it to Boots Riley's work. Sorry to Bovey in particular.

But it's got something interesting going. It's a riff on 1970s black exploitation films. It sort of crosses black exploitation films with, like, sci-fi, and perhaps like conspiracy, conspiracy films. There are a big wave of conspiracy films in the 1970s. And it brings those. two sort of genres, perhaps up to date in some sort of way. I should probably explain what Black Exploitation films are really, really briefly.

Blacksploitation was this genre of film from like 1977, now, 1977-1921 up until the end of the decade, which were the sort of first genre really to have black protagonists, black heroes, if you like, or anti-hero to some degree, because they, classically the film featured somebody who was around the criminal underworlds, perhaps a drug dealer, perhaps a pimp or a private eye, was floating in that sort of world. And the sort of, what would go on would be, you know, you'd see that sort of gritty stuff, lots of nice, lots of great music, etc. And then this drug dealer would be operating in that world,

and he'd discover that the white world is, in fact, much more corrupt than the criminal world, and he'd defeat some sort of element of the white world, which was impinging on this, on the black world, if you want to put it, that way. The sort of first film of black exploitation is, was this film called Sweet Sweet Back's Badass Song by Melvin Peebles, which is in 1971. And it's interesting that the sort of reactions to that by the civil rights movements are really interesting, I think. I'm explaining black exploitation films just briefly in order to explain why I think they clone Tyrone is really good. Sweet Sweet Badass Song, this is the sort of first sort of black exploitation film. It sets

the genre in a way. So sweepback is sort of like, I suppose they'd call him a sex worker these days or a stud or something like that, who is non-political and he gets politicized because he gets in detangle some racist cops who are beating up like black revolutionaries, etc. And a black revolution is helping escape to Mexico. I think that's how the ending goes. The reaction to that film were within the civil rights movement, or the black power movement, in fact, between those two movements was very interesting. The word black exploitation comes from a civil rights leader for a leader of the NAACP, the National Association for Advancement of Colored People, which is very much in the sort of, much more than the moderate sort of civil rights sort of end of things where the

idea would be that African Americans could advance themselves, perhaps assimilate into white society sort of thing. They really condemn black exploitation films and sweet, sweet back's badass song, because it sort of played up to stereotypes, basically. And it said, you know, it's just reinforcing that stereotype of black, and associations between African Americans and crime, whereas Huey P. Newton and the Black Panthers really celebrated that film. They said, you know, it's the first ever film of Black Revolution, etc. In fact, it was mandatory for Black Panther Party members to watch that film at that point. I remember in the myth episode, we talked about Staggart, the myth of Staggart, and how the Black Panther Party

sort of embraced that myth of, like, the violent criminal who basically didn't care if he live or died, and so we could portray a certain form of freedom, so I think there's that sort of thing going on. Anyway, let's fast forward towards the present day, and like, people have done, like, rehashing of black exploitation before. It's a big influence of Quentin Tarantino, for instance, and there was a remake of Shafter a few years ago, but, like, basically, they haven't done anything interesting with it. And I think they clone Tyrone really does do something interesting, basically. And I'm going to give some lots of spoilers. I'm going to give some spoilers now. But basically, the plot is something like this. There's a drug dealer called

Fontaine, played by John Boyega. Jamie Fox plays Slick Charles, who's sort of like a pimp from like this 1970s. He looks like he's out of the 1970s. And then Teona, Paris, plays yo-yo. they form a sort of like investigative team to solve a mystery that emerges basically and they directly reference Nancy Drew as they were going on so we're going to Nancy Drew this motherfucker

and the story sort of goes like this Fontaine is a drug dealer sort of like looks contemporary gets killed in the first couple of minutes that he wakes up alive the next day and then him slick and yo-yo try to work out like what's going on and they sort of discover that the local

area called the Glenn is being pacified by these drugs being put into like stereotypically black consumption products, fried chicken, hair straightener, grape juice, these sorts of things, basically. And you can see, like they build up this sort of like critiquing it, where there's a teacher who's complaining about, you know, underfunded schools, I have to pay for equipment at my own wages sort of thing. And then as she gets her hair straightened, she said, oh, well, fuck it, it's probably just inevitable.

There's nothing we can do about it. they're being pacified to stop them revolting, basically. And then a bit later on, they sort of find, they find this underground tunnels, etc. And they find out that, like, what's happening is that they're trying to keep this area as a control area, basically, keep all of, like, the multinationals out, keep white society out of this area

in order to experiment on how to pacify the black population, African Americans, pacify them, and assimilate them into white culture, basically, and in fact, eventually to sort of, like genetically breed blackness out of them or something like that. And the way they do that is that they keep pimps and gangsters and drug dealers in the area. And if one of those gets killed, they've got clones of them and they just replace them, basically. They're cloning these villains.

In fact, they're cloning the stereotypes that were repeated over and over again, the stereotypes that are repeated over and over again in black exploitation films, which I think is what's interesting about it, basically. They sort of using this black exploitation genre and the stereotypes that, like, the NAC, the NAACP were criticising and making this argument about, you know, perhaps that's what keeps white society out. It's an interesting one that I can't quite work through, but it's very interesting to think about it in terms of other ethnicities

who became white, such as like the Irish Americans became white, and the Irish Americans became white by stereotypically and classically becoming policemen, becoming part of the oppressive apparatus, basically, and becoming racist. I remember Bernadette Devlin and Northern Irish civil rights. leader coming over to America and being horrified by the racism amongst the Irish American community. So yeah, so it's something really interesting going on with that. And there's also something really interesting in the sort of conspiracy, like it's a huge, it's meta-conspiracy. The only

person who really knows what's going on is this, is this paranoid drunk guy who sits outside the shop begging for, begging for booze, etc. So it's like that paranoid, huge conspiracy sort of theory that doesn't actually, the sort of conspiracy fantasies rather than any sorts of conspiracies that might happen in. everyday life. I thought it was for the first time somebody was doing something interesting with black exploitation films and doing this sort of like conspiracy fantasy element and this sort of like treasure hunt element of conspiracy fantasy that we've seen in contemporary society and we talked about when we talked about the cosmic right.

I ain't been to church in a while. Okay, that's a quick one from me. Now then, Jeremy, I think it's your go to chuck some of it in the mix. I'm going to talk about Joe's book. This is, you know, family plug time. My partner Joe Littler published a book called Left Feminism, which is a really good collection of interviews with self-identified left feminists of various ages. I mean, also relatively prominent writers and or activists.

It was published by Lawrence and Wishart, and I was really happy to see that kind of. out. It was really a good thing. I think the sort of revival of socialist feminism as a distinctive political current, especially among younger women over the past few years, is really encouraging, given that it was really treated as a historical curiosity still, so 10 years ago. So I think that's definitely something to be celebrated. Super important. Can't wait to read that. Who's interviewed in it, Jeremy? Nancy Fraser, Akugo Emajulu, Sheila Robotham. Verona. Marika Gargo, that's a really interesting interview. Wendy Brown, Lynn Siegel,

Hilary Wainwright, Vron Weir, Carol Tulloch, Angela McRubby, Gargubatiria, Sylvia Bulby, Finn Mackay and Sophia Siddiqui. Yeah, but that's an interesting mix of, like, older feminist theorists, our friends on the show, and like, younger, younger theorists who've, like, retaken up their work around contemporary themes. Yes. Yeah, Veronica Gargo, in particular, she does this, like, neoliberalism from below, which really, really interesting, this idea that, you know, that it's neoliberalism is just something that's imposed, but we come to want it sort of thing, which is a really interesting angle that

she uses social reproduction theory for. Okay, I think it's an idea now. Yeah. Thanks, Jeremy. I am going to speak about an article, a short essay called Skin-centric Ecology by Andreas Weber, a Berlin-based ecologist, German biologist, philosopher and journalist. He's into concepts like sensation, subjectivity and beauty as fundamental lenses for interpreting the world. I'd never heard of him, but this piece, concentric ecology, was put on the reading list for a reading group which I'm involved in called Inquilab, which is a cross-college students and staff reading group at University of the Arts.

shout out to them because it's a brilliant initiative and it was put on the reading list and it absolutely blew my mind because I had not I don't think I'd actually read something written with such a cadence. Basically what he's trying to do is to put into words the admiration and the grief he feels when he's like working at a friend's house somewhere in Italy and he looks out and sees these lightchens, and he forms these really strong feelings towards, you know, these forms on these tiles. And I just thought it was so beautifully written and really touched something in me, a kind of sensation that I feel when I perhaps look at a certain tree or leaves or whatever, the kind of feelings that I feel when I commune with nature in that way on a

daily basis, or I try to commune with nature on a daily basis. And I'd not really come across writings like that. So I'd really recommend that reading. It brought me so much joy to read that. So it's called the Skin Centric Ecology by Andreas Weber, and is available free to read on a website called Humans Nature. What's the argument of that article? There isn't an argument. Oh. It isn't an argument. That's the point. He sees something and he writes about it. I absolutely he loved the quality of the writing. I thought it was really beautiful. I mean, I'm sure he makes an argument, but that's not the point to me. It's about aliveness and what aliveness is and the things that you can't, that are very difficult to express in words, but I thought he did it brilliantly.

And what, you know, beauty and skin and nature and all of these things. Only takes 12 minutes to read as well. We should have done a microdose reading it out. My turn again now. I've only got a quick one. This should only take 30, 40 minutes at the absolute. No, I wanted to, I was thinking about like non-fiction books I'd read, but like not theory books that I've read, but like I've had non-fiction books. I've just started this different times by David Stubbs, friend of the show, about, it's like a history of British comedy, which is sort of almost like with, they're very similar arguments, in fact, to the ones we made when we discussed comedy whenever we discussed comedy on the show.

It's it last year, I can't remember. But, you know, in that, if I'm not finished it, I'm sort of just enjoying reading about, reading descriptions of my favorite Ealing comedies as a man of a certain age would. I'm talking about men of a certain age. The book I wanted to talk about is a book called, I Am the Law, how Judge Dread predicted our future by Michael Mulker.

So it's about this comic character, Judge Dred from the comic 2000 AD, which I read from like, the 2000 AD started in 1977. I read it from like 79 up until like 1990, I think. and then I've inherited a couple of people's collections. It goes on a bit more for me. I've filled in quite some of the blanks since then,

because it's still going. It started in 1977. It went past the 2000 AD, which was the future, and it kept its name, etc. It's a really interesting book, though. Michael Malka is the publicity officer or the publicity man. They call them a publicity droid in 2000 AD language for 2000 AD. And so it recounts the history of Judge Dredd

and the main sort of storylines. But interestingly, links that to theory, basically, to different elements of theory, and ends up, in fact, with contemporary sort of like abolitionist, defunded police arguments and how Judge Stredd sort of predicted some of that and how the storylines like are revolved around that. It's really interesting because it starts off with a reference to sort of like the growing in 1977 up to that 1979. There's this growing sense that like some, there's going to be an authoritarian turn, basically. And of course, Margaret Thatcher gets in and there is an authoritarian turn.

And so he talks about policing the crisis by Stuart Hall, not Stuart Holm, the fiction writer. That's only funny if you've actually said this to him. This is what we tried to record this the other day for anyone who's listening. And that's, and Keir accidentally said Stewart at home. Stuart Holmes is like a fairly obscure, like anarchist situation. It's all right to it. Oh, God, he'd hate that. But perhaps he'd hate this being called the situationist.

It's policing the crisis by Stuart Hall, which is about that sort of like, you know, the use, the development of this like authoritarianism in order to bring in neoliberalism, like one of the criticisms you could make of writers who were writing for 2000 AD, such as Alan Moore, for instance, one of the greatest comic writers.

You know, writing in that period, people thought that what we were seen was a new fascism, and in fact it was an authoritarianism in order to bring in neoliberalism, basically. I think we're going to see something very similar in Argentina, where they've just elected a supposed anarcho-capitalist who's just announced incredible repressive measures, who he's talking about, basically rounding people up, et cetera, for protesting. You know, you need that sort of authoritarianism in order to liberalize the economy, basically, and to

diminish people's rights dramatically. But what's very interesting about this is it goes through the storylines. There's all sorts of very interesting storylines around democracy. Chris, we have Judge Dredd in 2000 AD, and it links it to the Black Lives Matter movement. One of the things about 2008 is, did you ever read that, Jeremy, 2000 AD? Yeah, yeah, I read 2000. We've talked about this on the show before.

Are we? Oh, yeah, I'm sure we have. Well, not only, did I read 2000 AD, but there was years and years ago, Mark Fisher and I were talking about starting a podcast, which he was going to involve some other people in, and I think O.J. Wesson had come up with the name Redshift for this putative podcast.

And then I told him about this idea I had had. It was just a casual observation, a conversation we had one day. And my observation was no piece of fiction had anticipated the lineaments of neoliberalism as accurately as Judge Dredd. And Mark was really excited by this idea and wanted us to do a whole episode of this imaginary podcast about that theme. That would have been about nine years ago, I think. So, yeah, it's a familiar idea.

interesting because this comes out of the 2008 stable itself, you know, the actual 2018 stable by the person who is most associated with 2018. Now Michael Malko, who does lots of videos about 2008, etc. And it is an abolitionist argument. One of the things about 2008 is that, classically, it held its audience, people who started reading it when they were young in the 1970s and 1980, sort of stuck with it. And in fact, it struggled to find a new audience. So it's a really, really interesting way that this guy is found. to make abolitionist arguments to a cohort who would be from a wider demographic, who would be most resistant to abolitionist arguments, basically, late Gen X's, basically.

Yeah, it would just be Gen X's, perhaps late boomers, I don't know, but Gen X's anyway. And so he's found a way to make very, very radical arguments, in fact, in a way which would really, really resonate with the sort of world that was formed by this comic in their youth, I think. And it made me think about the huge impact that 2008 had about my imaginary, my political imaginary. The only things that exist in the world are these big mega cities. Everything else has been destroyed by nuclear war, which was the big fear of the time. And in the early episodes anyway, there is something like 96% unemployment, because robots do all the work, of course, which is that idea that Keynes thought that, you know,

we would all be working for 15 hours a week, etc. of that sort of 20th century idea that the automation would bring about free time. But interestingly in 2008, there's huge inequality still, a huge authoritarianism. And so it sends people mad, basically, this, and being unable to work. I mean, one of the very early Judge Dreads was some people who went mad, futi, future madness, and smashed up some robots who were cleaning so that they could do the cleaning instead of them. And uncharacteristically for Judge Dread, he sentences them to 10 years hard labor of which

they're absolutely overjoying. Yeah, anyway, had a very big influence from me in 2008. Like, it really formed my imagining in lots and lots of ways. It probably informed, like, other imaginaries as well. It's the imagery of a city is very much the one that Bladeswinter picks up and runs with, etc. So it's probably part of our wider imaginaries, basically. But I'd recommend that book, although it did mean I went and spent quite a lot of money buying Judge Dred collections afterwards.

Okay. I'm going to do another bit of music. It's another bit of North Indian classical music. It's another one that we've played on a patron's episode of Love is the Message. But there are many people listening to this who are not patrons of Love is the Message, deplorably. So this will be a track from the album Samarpan by Manish Pingel. Manish Pingel is a young Indian musician, I think based in Mumbai, who plays

the Mohan Zvina this is an instrument sort of invented by the great Indian musician Vishwa Mohan Bat which is a sort of specially adapted slide guitar

and it's just it's an album of really really well executed classical ragas it was particularly exciting to me because as far as I know

and I'm pretty much am an authority on this it is the only new recording of an Indian classically trained musician playing classical Raga's to have been released on vinyl for possibly 25 to 30 years.

It got a small vinyl release from its label, I think it's called Rambling Records in Australia. I'm sure most people will listen to it streaming, but if you can stream a high-resolution copy, which does sound really good. So the out, that's a Manish Pingles album, Samarpan. I mean, there's other Indian musicians that release stuff that gets released on vinyl, but it's all, it's not just, it's not classical Raga's, it's stuff going for a more sort of popular or modern audience, and then there's, there are loads of albums of people playing

classical Raghas, but they usually get released on CD, but this was a real novelty for me. But anyway, whether you're listening to it on vinyl or just streaming or something, then I can really recommend it. Yeah, so I'm also going to talk about an album, which I came across this year, that brought me joy. An album that brought me joy in 2023 is Amel and the Sniffer's comfort to me, which was released in September. at 2021. I'm not typically a punk aficionado, but I absolutely love this album. Shout out to my friend Ben, who introduced me to it. They are an Australian pub rock or punk, a punk, sorry, rock band based in Melbourne. And I just absolutely love the energy of this band. The communication of

frustration, anger, and all of those good punk vibes are really helpful at a point where you're angry and have a lot of anxiety as I did this summer. It was really great to me. I absolutely love the sound of this band and all of different things that they communicate because sometimes you don't need meditation, Zen and yoga to get you through. Sometimes you need punk. So I recommend this album comfort to me, especially the songs, uh, hurts and knifie. I turn around and backtrack Because I ain't that tall But you still fuck with us

All I ever wanted was to walk by the past Oh I ever wanted was to walk by the past Great, I'll just do a quick one 20, 20 minutes, 25 I was saying I wanted to just talk about novels basically I read Colson Whitehead's crook manifesto When there came before that

The first one in this is a sequel to Harlem Shuffle, the reason Crook Manifers is interesting is because it's got a sub-theme of black exploitation film. But I'll leave that be because the book I actually wanted to talk about is the book called The World We Make by N.K. Jemison. I've been interested in a couple of years in this sort of wave of fiction

which people have talked about as race-craftian fiction, H.P. Lovecraft that we've talked about on this show before and how that gets turned around so his racism becomes a feature of that and it gets turned around. So if you can see it from a different angle. It's one way of thinking. There's a wider, it's part of a wider sort of trend as well. The cultural theorish, Stephen Sheviro's talked about a speculative nostalgia where you're reworking the past, basically, to try to work out a different future sort of idea.

But the book, the world we make, it's a sequel to the 2020 book, The City We Became. And it's sort of set in a contemporary world, apart from in this world, each city, sort of when it gets to a certain stage that one person becomes the personification of it becomes like an avatar but it can get sort of like special powers to some degree and new york in this series of books is just coming into it's the size where it's coming into consciousness and instead of a single person it has each of its boroughs has an avatar sort of personification the four boroughs like queens the Bronx etc etc and Manhattan etc and then And there's a fifth borough, Staten Island, which doesn't join together with these other four boroughs.

It's, in fact, it's scared of the big city and scared to visit the big city because, you know, of white fear of the, of the multiracial city sort of thing. And in fact, the Staten Island, the avatar of Staten Island, this woman, starts to form alliances with the thing that the, she's in this world of battling, which is an avatar of the city of Rillia, which is one of H.P. of Kraft's Great Lost City, basically, which is sort of like it gets mingled up with, like, the old ones, these huge cosmic gods, etc. This sort of like setup is a way in which Jameson can sort of talk about contemporary effects, contemporary events, basically, particularly the like the rise of fascism in the US. Because the effect of really, when it attacks at New York or when it tries to interfere with New York is to spread like racism and mean-spiritedness and petty-mindedness, etc.

and to spread racism. And so in the first book, in the city we became, like there are alt-right trolls in this who are operating for the city of Rillia, right-wing trolls like art world provocateurs, sort of edge lord provocateurs, etc. And then in the second book, the proud boys are marching through the city, etc.

And there's an analogue for a sort of sub-Trump character who's standing to be the city, the mayor of New York City, etc. this racecraftian fiction is a way of sort of thinking through the construction of race which gets sort of conjured up basically to think it through in a similar way to sort of like the supernatural or the occult or magic etc some of those jemison books i i know there has been a lot of speculation about the fact that cosmology in the book seems to be very close to the cosmology in the 90s table-top role-playing game unknown armies oh really also figures like avatars the

Not of avatars of places, but of types of coming to existence as a manifestation of a sort of collective consciousness. Oh, nine armies is a game. We've really got to get to the table, as they say, one of these days. It's a really great game. When we did the episode about myth, one of the distinctions we made about myth was, like, who were the actors? What's the myth about? Is it like a collective agency or individual agency? And of course, a collective agency is very difficult to write about. And so, like, this idea of avatars is a way of resolving that base. you can have collective agency, which is sort of funneled or personified through an individual. Jeremy, what's your next thing? Shall I mention hegemony? This is sort of a joint one.

Keir and I have carried on playing quite a lot of games together this year. Probably the one that brought me the most joy because it was my little creation, and there's a lot of fun as the game set in Ed Worsi in London. We play at Christmas time, it seems, which is based on the sort of M.R. James. and Conan Doyle and PG Woodhouse. Yeah, well, you should explain it. It's based on M.R. James, but the characters we created, we just fell into playing it like Jeeves and Worcester.

So I've started calling it an M.R. Jeeves game, because it's a fantastic. I realised even before we started playing it, when I'd created the rules, I saw that I had made a comment to you guys that it's come out a bit PG Woodhouse. I mean, we're playing sort of caricatures of Edwardian upper class types, like having supernatural adventures,

but also being quite reactionary for our own entertainment. That's the sort of thing we like to do in our spare time. You guys like to do, and I like to watch with interest from afar. You would love it, An idea. There's lots of stuff for you to do. I don't know. I think I always like it in theory, but it just, as we discovered over ACFM Christmas,

role-playing games just don't animate me in the way that it does you guys. it just doesn't. And I can't figure out why, but I'm afraid that's the truth. But carry on. If you are a fan of so-called Euro games, in other words, extremely, extremely complicated board games that take hours and hours to play, which are called Eurogames, basically because they're really popular in Germany. I don't think they're really popular anywhere else in Europe, to be honest. Then this year's big event game was a game that both Keir and myself backed on Kickstarter as soon as we became aware that it was a project. And that game is called Hegemony. lead your class to victory

and yeah we played it with our friend Alex and David we put aside a whole day an afternoon and an evening we played it for like about nine hours or something

and we didn't manage to finish but we hang on a minute we didn't manage to finish one round of that game there was something like five rounds or something for ridiculous I think we did a couple of rounds

You're supposed to play five. I think both times we played it. We got two, we got like halfway through, about halfway through and ran out of time. And then we played it online, which I have to have to say, was a slightly more sterile experience. I think without the tactility of each other's company and the boards and pieces, and the fact that you are basically just doing some quite challenging homework. Like, is the thing you're doing with your time at that moment, kicks in? I would say it was really good that they did it.

I think it is a pretty good. As an attempt to depict a basically Gramscian theory of sort of political sociology in a board game, it's pretty good, pretty successful, does it pretty well. I did find it really fun playing it. Like I would have been quite happy to spend a whole weekend playing it and finish it in theory if I didn't have other stuff to do. But in reality, any other future occasion when we managed to get that many friends in a room, together for a whole weekend. I think we're probably not going to spend it playing a board game. Yeah, but I would still, if you like that it's that sort of board game,

or if you just want a really unique gaming experience, just the once, I would put aside a couple of days to learn it and play it, but it was really good game. We should explain it. It comes through like quite a fat book of concepts to explain the different concepts. Well, it comes, yeah, it does come with a book of concepts. Although I would have to say the academic they commissioned to write this book of concepts is not somebody noted for any expertise.

So the punchline of this, of course, is that Jeremy and Alex Williams, who was one of the people we played with, I recently wrote a book called Hedge Money Now. We did. We've barely mentioned it on the show, but it came out in September, like, 22. But, yeah, if you want the up-to-date state-of-the-art of hegemonic theory and analysis, then, yeah, go and buy My and Alex's Williams book, Hegemony Now, published by Verso last year. A very nice stocking filler, as long as you have quite a large stocking. All right, is it you now, no idea?

It is. So I would like to talk about an event which brought me joy this year. So the event was a conversation with Erini Vallejo, a classicist at the Hay Festival in Hay on Y this year in June. And she was talking about her book, Papyrus. and I thought it was such an incredible event because Irini herself is just so enthusiastic about her topic. The book is basically about an immersive journey through the history of books and libraries, like who invented this form and this idea.

And she talks about it in the sense that the concept of a library was as disruptive as the internet. And another thing that I discovered in that talk is this idea that reading aloud was, was the norm. And so the idea that you would look at a scroll or what later became books and read them silently to yourself was like never thought of as a thing when it first started out. But it is just such an amazing talk itself. I did buy the book. I thought the talk was just so inspiring to sit there in a big tent in Hay and Y with her speak about a topic that she was so passionate about. And it takes you from everything from, you know, it starts in the Alexandra Library, Alexander the Great, and there's all of these women in it as well, and all of this

chat about all these really empowered women, but also like censorship and when censorship starts and how it plays out in these kind of ancient times. It also introduced me to Hypatia, which I did not know about, slightly embarrassed. Yeah, yeah, no, I didn't know about hypatia. Have you seen the movie? Have you seen Agora? No, I haven't. No, I haven't. And I didn't know anything about her and being, you know, this philosopher and astronomer and mathematician who lived in Alexandria and Egypt and I just became fascinated by her after that talk. But it was one of those events where you were in this tent at, you know, a literary festival and just the whole room was just so excited by there being this speaker who was just really, really engaged in her topic

and it was a wonderful event to be at. So that's Irini Vaiejo at the Hay Festival in June this year. Yeah, that history of silent reading is so fascinating. It's such an interesting idea when you think about it, that it just wasn't something. That was done. They think people didn't really do it before, like, the 18th century. The people didn't just sit there, like, having the words in their head. Nobody's totally sure.

Is it sort of tied up with the novel then, and, like, the novel as the thing that introduces, you know, the sort of private. It's kind of with a novel and, like, reading in bed as, like, a new thing to do. Yeah, yeah. Because I guess, I guess just physics. Like if you've got like a handwritten manuscript or a scroll, it's not that convenient to read in bed.

Yeah, you'd be standing or walking around. But it's also like the novel is always thought of as like, you know, the thing that introduces interiority into. That's right, yes. To some extent, yeah, the whole idea of the inner life of the characters being the thing that you're interested in and your own inner life being a thing you'd be interested in, which there's not much evidence of, apart from people writing about,

kind of romantic infatuation sometimes. There's not much evidence of indeed at any point in history before the 18th century. It is really unhypecia. And that, Hypatia is a fascinating historical figure. And everybody should watch that film, Agorra, about Hypatia, which is a really extraordinary film. It's one of those things like, Matt, how did they get money for this?

It's a film about like a fifth century, like, Alexandria. Female mathematician, yeah. Yeah. Wow, that's, but it's great. It's great. It's made me really, I so much want to do a role-playing games that you're like late Antique Alexandria at some time. It would be so fun.

Yes, I can see a theme developing on how me and Jeremy now relate to the world. I think it's my go next. And I was, following your lead, Nadia, I want to do, it's not an event, but like an exhibition I stumbled across at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. So, Yorkshire Sculpture Park just outside Wakefield, really. I suppose it's a nearest place between Wakefield and Sheffield. An old stately home, loads of fantastic sculptures. I once met Nadia there for an extremely wet walk,

where it absolutely poured down. We tried to have a picnic. You can go for walks and this sculpture all around the park, but also there's sort of exhibition hall. So it is something you can sort of stumble across, and I stumbled across quite a small exhibition by an artist called Jonathan Baldock. The exhibition was called Touchwood, and it was quite small, one room.

It's like a series of like ceramics and then sort of textiles, tapestries, I suppose you'd call them, all surrounding a wicker coffin. And in fact, these incredible textile sculptures of like the sort of green man and sort of like, you know, folkloric sort of figures, basically.

And the ceramics were very much that as well. You know, it really played on this sort of like mythology and folklore. But because it was surrounded in a coffin, it almost had like a folk horror sort of. of feeling to it, basically. I really, really, really enjoyed it, and it started making me think about this, like, why is like that folklore,

folk mythology, folk horror, such a big thing at the moment. We've talked about it, of course. Well, we talked about it probably on several shows, but we did an episode on folk, and we'd done myth. We did magic as well, actually. We've sort of circulated around this.

And this time last year, I went, I saw the horror show at Somerset House. I don't know if I've used to saw that. And that ended on a sort of folkloric mythic, sort of witchy sort of room, like a collection of artworks around that sort of theme. It just, you know, like tarot's having a bit of a comeback. There's like all sorts of new tarot cards, tarot decks being created, repeated in this very nice philosopher's tarot book, which has got a card, an acid communist card in it, in fact. And I just, it made me think about, like, why is it so attractive at the minute? And in particular, like, you know, this idea of, like, intuitive thought of intuition and those sorts of things that can bring out intuition, such as like tarot, et cetera, just seem very, very popular at the minute.

I have my own theories, but yeah, I just found it very interesting, basically. It's set of a whole series of thoughts on. Come, it is time to keep your appointment with the Wickham Air. I'm going to plug a couple of books by people I know again. One is After Work by Nick Sinichek and Helen Hester, which finally came out after a long struggle to get it written. It's a book in the general vein of sort of postwork, anti-work, critiques of work, books. But this is relating to the labour of social reproduction and domestic labour

and just thinking about what it might mean to reimagine a world in which we deliberately try to reduce domestic labour. through social organisation and technological means. It's really interesting. It's had a fair amount of coverage already, but it's definitely, it deserves as much as it can get. And another book by a couple, actually, that came out a couple of years ago,

but I keep coming back to you, and I think definitely deserves to get a lot more coverage than it has had is Ben Little and Alison Winch's book, The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism, which I think I have mentioned, actually, on the show about the internet, but goes into a really strong analysis of the intersections between certain kinds of new misogyny and social reaction and cyber capitalism.

I think it's also worth mentioning the fact that that post-work politics has been pursued in after work has had a really good run in the general activities of the think tank autonomy this year. And that's, they've got quite a lot of coverage for some really strong analytical policy work and conceptual work around what it would mean to shift towards, in particular, a four-day week as a working norm. And in a really politically gloomy year, it's been quite encouraging to see some of that happening. Seesfire now. Seek's fire now. Seek fire now. What do we want? Sees fire. When do you want it? So another significant event which brought me joy this year has been the phenomenal demonstrations in support of the Palestinian people who have been subjected to this ongoing attack by the state of Israel.

The reason it's brought me joy is I absolutely love these moments where, as we discussed on the protest episode, the establishment grossly misreased the British public and the national. sentiment. It was blatantly obvious, I think, to people that human beings in Palestine were being massacred and that the Israeli government is effectively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people and the establishment, both the Labour rights and the Tories, were trying to paint this whole story as something completely different. And it was obvious, I think, to the British people, what was actually going on. And these demonstrations, as we know, the largest one has about 750,000 people, at least the local actions are ongoing. And I find that these moments of collective action in public space are incredibly healing.

I think for all of us, I think not just because this is such a horrific situation and horrific injustice that people want to be able to get together and express some sort of view on, but also I think because of the last 15 years or so of austerity and injustice in the UK, it's given people a space to be able to funnel that anger through. And I really experienced it as a public space of healing. And it's been really important to me to be able to be involved as much as I can throughout the end of the year. And of course, these demonstrations are still ongoing. and it's just really good to see public space taken over by just normal people in the UK once again.

So, yeah, it's the Palestinians in support of Palestine this year in the UK that have brought me a lot of joy. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I mean, it's strange in it to think of joy amongst that horrendous misery. But, like, you know, those attacks on Gaza, I think, are meant to be demonstrative to the rest of the world in some sort of way. you know, of like, this is a potential future, basically, a sort of eco-apartheid world in which there will be the deployment of, like, incredible authoritarian measures and excessive violence, basically. And some people will be inside and some people will be outside of that protected zone.

And, of course, the rise of, like, nationalism and fascism has to be seen some degree in relation to that, the prospect of that. But I also think it's like, it says something to me. about people in the UK, like, understanding the fact that this is one of the last holdings of a Western colonial project in the Middle East. Like, this is about colonialism. This is not in the 20th century. This is in the 21st century. And I think people recognize that. And that's what I felt on the streets. You know, it's an exceptional situation. What's going on? It's not, there isn't really a model like it around the world. And the project is to kill as many Palestinians

as possible. And I think the British public know that. that's what I felt on the street. And it makes me feel a part of something. It makes me feel a lot less alienated to be a part of that in these, like you said, Kea, horrific circumstances. The base of the joy is that the British public or at least large sections of it, you know, are able to see through like an almost complete propaganda effort, the effort to completely block out any dissenting voices in both politics and media.

And so the joy is that the world is a little bit more full of potential. potential, then it would have been if those protests hadn't happened, basically, something like that. In that realm, my last one will be in a similar sort of vein, actually, a bit earlier in the year. Well, actually, it's still ongoing, but it's the United Auto Workers' Strikes in the US as something that's given me joy and hope for the future, because it's part of a wider trend in which more militant and more left-wing union leaders are getting elected in the US, and particularly very smart ones. So the leader of the UAW, I think got elected last year, but like the strikes took place. This was Sean Fane, who has introduced really very, very

clever striking tactics, where there would be like strikes would go up the supply chains, so key supply chain factory supplying a certain product would go on strike. And the rest of the union wouldn't go on strike. And they'd just be putting money into the strike fund. And then they changed that and a different factory would go on strike, etc. A way of causing maximum disruption to the bosses with like minimum disruption to the social reproduction of the workers. It's really, really interesting, very, very clever. One of the interesting things about the UAW is that last sort of like decade, I think, they started recruiting amongst graduate students in the US, which is sort of very interesting thing. There were some criticism saying, well, it's

the graduate students which have elected Sean Fane. It's not true. Actually, he would have won even if you discounted the graduate students. But that in itself also says, yes, the very transversal alliances that are being made where people are seeing similarities in their situations across sectors where you really wouldn't have thought that those sort of alliances could be built, I think, and then the bringing of different skills together

to create like new innovative and very effective tactics. It's probably, you know, in these things that you're like, pop up into visibility every now and then, you know, the hard work of organising and it's being done and the shifting of cultures amongst unions, etc. I think there's something similar going on in the UK at the much sort of quite lower level.

I think that sort of thing is going on. You can see that there's been various strikes across the UK, which will be very, very interesting actually and very, very strong. And so, yeah, those sorts of things, the things that happen outside our view are probably the things that set the potential for the longer term, basically. And so in a very, very dark year, you know, perhaps we can see things shifting under the surface, you know, bursting up in this

and a very unexpectedly large, well, for me anyway, demonstrations against Israel's war on Gaza, for instance, is showing the potentials that are there for the battles to come, basically. All right, so happy New Year, everybody. Happy New Year from all of us at ACFM. Yes, happy New Year, everyone. The solstice has passed, and as we know, when the solstice happens, every revolution will bring more light, more and more light. Hold on to that message as you go into the new year. Thank you.