shabcast
Shabcast 29 – Wheelers Beware Girls Who Ask Questions
The Shabcast is back.
Shana guests again, to talk about 80s fantasy cinema classics Return to Oz and The Neverending Story.
Shabcast 28 – The 2nd Annual (so far) Eruditorum Press Christmas Party
Title says it all really.
This time I’m joined by EP’s ‘new recruits’ from 2016, Josh, Shana & Daniel.
We don’t actually talk that much politics, so this is a relatively safe space if you’re trying to self-care a bit over the holidays.…
Shabcast 25 – Phil and Jack talk about High-Rise
Hello again, my fellow muggles.
First, apologies: I wanted to provide you with some written material this week, but I was unable to get the next bits of either Psychic Landscape or Are You Sitting Comfortably? ready in time, so you’re getting yet another Shabcast instead. It’s a good one though. I’m joined by Phil again, and we chat about High-Rise, both the Ballard novel and the Wheatley/Jump movie. In the process we veer wildly off topic at times (I can hear your gasps of surprise), touching on subjects such as Phil’s upcoming Build High For Happiness project, ‘Paradise Towers’ (of course), The VVitch, some other movies, Stranger Things, and whether or not Robert Holmes read J. G. Ballard.
Download or listen here. (Beware Triggers and Spoilers.)
ADDITION: I forgot to link to a couple of relevant documentaries. I posted this one – a dated but still-excellent account of some of the hidden history of Modernism – at my own YouTube channel recently. (I’m slowly working my way through a huge stack of old home-recorded VHS tapes. When I encounter a good documentary that I can’t find anywhere else online, I post it at my channel.) This one is about Pruitt Igoe and that whole thing, who is mentioned by Phil during the Shabcast. It takes a political, myth-busting look at the issue.
In other news, it’s apparently Star Trek‘s 50th anniversary today, and so ATB Publishing are now taking pre-orders for their forthcoming collection Outside In Boldly Goes. Every episode of original Star Trek written about by a different writer. As you may recall, I was in the first Outside In, the one about classic Who, with a little essay about ‘Snakedance’ that was initially written for the fanzine Panic Moon. This time I’m in Outside In Boldly Goes with an entirely new and original piece about the TOS series 3 episode ‘Requiem for Methuselah’.
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Shabcast 24, Part 2 of the JFK / Nixon Conversation
And here it is at last, Part 2 of Shabcast 24.
Rejoin the conversation between myself, Daniel, James, and Kit. We talk more about Oliver Stone’s grandly bad, silly, outrageous, audacious, irresponsible, febrile, fascinating epics of 90s political cinema, JFK and Nixon.
(Part One here.)
This episode concentrates more on JFK (man, myth and movie), and moves to a wonderful final act in which the awesomely well-informed Daniel, under Kit’s adroit questioning, dismantles some of the more pivotal parts of Stone’s conspiracyballs. (And it is balls, by the way, just in case any of you were in any doubt. I speak as a one-time believer, as does Daniel.)
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Here are some links for you:
Generously, Oliver Stone and the Mail Online (brothers under the skin) have been helping to promote this episode of the Shabcast, with a new ‘news’ story – here.
Here are the two parts – Part One and Part Two – of an excellent TV documentary about Nixon, which picks at the scab and uncovers some of the pus Stone doesn’t let you see, including the factual conspiracy on the part of Nixon and his people to commit treason and sabotage LBJ’s 1968 Paris peace talks. This article from a couple of years ago is a good way into the subject.
While I’m referring you to YouTube, here‘s a good documentary about the Kennedy assassination – a rarity on YouTube (I refer to quality rather than subject matter).
Here‘s John McAdams’ site about the Kennedy assassination. McAdams may be, as Daniel says, a Right-wing nutjob, but his site seems to be generally considered a good portal for real info about the assassination, and is a good place to go to quickly get myths and factoids busted.
The audio at the start of the episode is of my own mixing, but the audio at the end is mostly taken from a couple of John Pilger documentaries, Vietnam – The Last Battle and Year Zero – The Silent Death of Cambodia. Lots of Pilger’s documentaries are on YouTube and they’re mostly essential, scorching, and revelatory (though Pilger and I have our differences).
Sadly the Errol Morris documentaries about Lee Atwater and Robert Macnamara that Daniel mentions are not on YouTube, but they can be found online if you look in the right places. Not that I’d ever encourage anyone to do anything illegal. I’m not a crook.
If you want to know about some real, actual, historical ‘conspiracies’ (carried out or just planned) by powerful people (which have the benefit of having actually happened) check out these links:
Suez – Iran-Contra – Northwoods – Operation Mongoose – The Gulf of Tonkin Incident (which, with intense irony, Stone refers to in JFK without mentioning even that there is a controversy about what really happened) – COINTELPRO – Pinochet’s coup – the coup in Guatemala – and I could go on.
As you will see from the above examples – which are, if not undisputed, at least part of the historical record to the point that they’re on Wikipedia – is that real conspiracies of the powerful are mostly conducted within what the conspirators broadly consider normal business, even if they feel the need to be clandestine about it. …
Shabcast 24, Part 1 of the JFK / Nixon Conversation
It’s Shabcast listenin’ time again.
This time I was joined by James and Daniel again, and – for the first time – by Kit Power. We talked for as long as you’d expect about Oliver Stone’s insane, brilliant ’90s political movies JFK and Nixon, thus helping to remedy the desperate online shortage of white guys talking about movies about white guys made by white guys.
This week you can listen to the first half of our conversation, here.
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Shabcast 23, Part 2 – New Atheism is the Opium of Misogynists, Islamophobes, and Imperialists
Yes, I use the Oxford comma. I use it because it is sensible, stylish, and clarifying.
Oh, and this is Part 2 of Shabcast 23, featuring the continuation of my latest chat with Daniel Harper. I think the title is pretty much self-explanatory.
That’s my thing now. Self-explanatory titles. And Oxford commas. They’re my thing too now. And irrelevant commentary on my own style.
Self-explanatory titles, irrelevant commentary on my own style, and Oxford commas.
See, they’re nice aren’t they? If that comma hadn’t been there, before the ‘and’, it could’ve looked like I was saying I now make irrelevant comments about my own style and about Oxford commas.
And clearly I would never make irrelevant comments about Oxford commas.
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By the way, here‘s a link to Rebecca Watson’s video (referred to in the Shabcast), in which she mentions (in passing) that a guy tried to chat her up in a hotel elevator in the wee small hours, and that, guys, it’s probably not a good idea to do that. That bit starts around 4:30.
Further to the discussions about biological reductionism in the Shabcast, I recommend the works of Steven & Hilary Rose, Richard Lewontin, and Stephen Jay Gould. Further to the discussion of ‘New Atheism’, I heartily recommend a book called The Threat to Reason by Dan Hind, and (slightly more guardedly) a book by Terry Eagleton called Reason, Faith, and Revolution.
I also recommend (sight unseen but with all confidence) Daniel’s piece touching on these matters, which be along tomorrow here at Eruditorum Press.
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Shabcast 23, Part 1 – The Ruling Class Thinks Idiocracy and Democracy are Synonyms
Please find attached the latest Shabcast. It’s the first part of another long chat between myself and Daniel. In this episode we talk about the 2006 Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, which is ‘relevant’ nowadays as loads of people have jumped to the wrong conclusions about the Trump phenomenon and clambered aboard the everyone’s-an-idiot-nowadays-except-me bandwagon, using Idiocracy as a cultural touchstone. (Seriously, google the phrase ‘Trump Idiocracy’ and behold the avalanche of sneering, purblind, elitest drivel.) Daniel has little time for the film and isn’t shy about saying why. And nor am I.
Download or listen here.
The rest of this Shabcast will be available on Thursday, and will feature Daniel and myself moving on to the broader (and connected) subject of the New Atheists, etc. This little mini-arc of linked posts will then conclude on Friday with Daniel’s new written piece about… well, wait and see.
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Shabcast 22ish
Another week, another Shabcast.
Sadly, I haven’t been able to manufacture an actual brand-new episode recently, so I’ve put together a compilation of some of the more interesting bits of previous Shabcasts which had to be cut for one reason or another. But it does mean that you get more guests for your money. This episode features myself in conversation with Daniel, Jane, Josh and Elliot. If it’s the most disjointed Shabcast ever, it’s also the second-most populous after the Christmas episode.
Enjoy here. …
Shabcast 21, Part 2 – The Stern Section
Join me and Josh once again for the back half of our huge natterfest.
Find out why the Titanic sank!
Find out what Josh and I think of The Dark Knight movies, and Jared Diamond, and narratives of the end of the world, and the sociology of disaster, and the relationship between the rise of agriculture and the rise of hierarchy/patriarchy! (Form an orderly queue, kids!)
Hear Josh’s thoughts on the fall of the sacred feminine, and the Aesir/Vanir war, and dazzle ship-camouflage, and Mad Max Fury Road (here‘s my stuff about it… and more here) and loads of other nice things!
Here‘s a link to the article Josh mentions about resilience vs. collapse and paleolithic mysticism.
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And once again, some pertinent links about the Olympic liners:
Here‘s the website for the Titanic – Honor & Glory game project, complete with a chilling computer animated video of the ship sinking in real time. And here‘s their Facebook page. And here‘s their Tumblr. And here‘s some info about the Olympic, Titanic’s sister ship, as a war ship. And here are some more photos of Olympic. (Thanks for Josh for sourcing all these links.)
And here is the website for Ken Marschall, an artist whose visions of the Titanic have inspired Josh and many others.
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Astonishingly, I haven’t intruded into anyone else’s podcast lately… so that’s yer lot.
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