In this Halloween episode of Locust Radio, Tish and Adam discuss folk horror, folk devils, and ghosts, listen to music from Fat JackRabbit, Omnia Sol, Hans Predator, and Worthless Scarecrow, and hear poetry from Mike Linaweaver and Leslie Lea. Our co-host Laura Fair-Schulz was out sick and we look forward to their return in the next episode.
Our discussion starts with the story of a spectral hound called “Old Black Eyes,” a cryptid that dissolves itself in its own tears, and more. Tish and Adam talk about the ethos of Halloween cutting against the capitalist impulse to map the entire world for profit and that UFOs are a secular visitation of “Biblically accurate angels.” We also discuss the persecution of witches, Silvia Federici’s argument that magic is antithetical to capitalism, the irrealist strategy of appropriating “folk devils,” solidarity with monsters, and how the working-class itself summons the hauntological ghost of Marxism. Tish and Adam invent a new cryptid that has an anteater-like proboscis that steals children from Christian Nationalists and the worst members of the bourgeoisie to “save their souls.” Lastly: “no one wants to Sysphus anymore'' and “we are the monsters we’ve been waiting for.”
Songs featured in this episode include: Fat JackRabbit, “Bad Dream”; Omnia Sol, “Rod Lavars”; Hans Predator, “Suck-cess”; and Worthless Scarecrow, “Not”. Please check out their work (linked here to their bandcamp pages) and show them some love, and buy some music. Poems featured includeL “Someday Massacre” by Mike Linaweaver (forthcoming in Locust Review #9); and “Spring” by Leslie Lea (from Locust Review #8).
Some subjects, artworks, videos, whatever, and readings touched on in this episode: China Mieville: Marxism and Halloween at Socialism 2013; Interview with Anupam Roy (2019), “We Are Broken Cogs in the Machine”; Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972); Silvia Federici, “Witches and Class Struggle,” excerpt from Caliban and the Witch; Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression: Hauntology and Lost Futures (London: Zero Books, 2014); Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx; Adam Turl, “A Thousand Lost Worlds: Notes on Gothic Marxism”; Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (London: Zero Books, 2011); Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire (1852); Cervantes, Don Quixote; Charles Dickens, Hard Times; Keats’ “Negative Capability” letter; Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993).
Locust Radio is hosted by Tish Turl, Laura Fair-Schulz, and Adam Turl, and produced by Alexander Billet and Omnia Sol. Theme music is by Omnia Sol.
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