ATTENTION HUMANS. We at Locust Review are pleased to announce SWARMCAST, a monthly podcast on the weird, the political, and where they intersect in fiction, art, poetry and creativity. Hosted by LR editors Tish Markley, Adam Turl and Alexander Billet, SWARMCAST will feature discussions of the radical weird, history and current events, interviews with artists, writers, and musicians, readings of poetry and fiction from contributors to LR, and even the occasional comedy performance.
Premiering in September, we intend for SWARMCAST to be available on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts and many other portals of audio depravity. All ears with access to these services (whether human, robot, or other) will be able to imbibe our maniacal sounds in regular episode format. Those who are subscribed through the Locust Patreon will have access to longer episodes featuring bonus content, including readings, discussions, sketches and more!
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AS THOSE familiar with Locust Review will no doubt know by now, our project was founded partly in recognition that the political struggle on this dying rock is also fought on the planes of culture and aesthetics. It was also founded on the recognition that the interaction of these planes is frequently experienced through the bizarre, the uncanny, the other-worldly and the just plain terrifying.
Hence our stance of critical irrealism, of embracing the weird so that we might transcend the horror. Working-class and oppressed persons daily navigate a panoply of experiences both too painful and too banal to endure. We are stuck: between a capitalist-imperialist system all too willing to grind us under the heel of racism, misogyny, queerphobia, nationalism and alienation on the one hand, and the promise and urge toward freedom on the other. The urge to be fully realized, to experience life as some semblance of human. And because we experience these as unique and individual beings, the social subconscious we are mining is vast.
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A quick story about one of these unique beings: in 1994 Brian Canfield was driving his truck down a desolate Wisconsin road after dark. He saw in the middle of the highway a giant winged creature that has since become known as Batsquatch. He was quoted in the local paper: “It was standing there staring at me, like it was resting, like it didn’t know what to think. I was scared. It raised the hair on me. I didn’t feel threatened. I just felt out of place.”
Jase Short, in a recent essay, notes of recent horror films the formless monstrosity trope; an amorphous environmental threat, an alien presence that surrounds the subject. While Brian Canfield’s Batsquatch had a clear form, the wings of a bat, the eyes of a demon, and a canine head, the eerie and most noteworthy aspect of his retelling is that it was Canfield -- not the creature -- who was out of place.
This experience is one aspect of what we hope to mine on each episode of SWARMCAST. In capitalism all workers are alienated from the products of their labor; and therefore alienated from other human beings and their environments. As the old labor song goes, “We stand outcast and starving amidst the wonders we have made.”
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We also hope to ask what it might look like to transcend this condition, how fantastical and yet urgently necessary as that may be. “NOW THAT it’s just as realistic to fantasize about a queer commune on Mars as drinkable wanter in Flint,” A.M. Gittlitz writes in his book, I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism, “jokes about ‘fully automated luxury gay space communism’ communicate that if nothing is possible, than at least we can demand what we really want, since it remains equally unattainable as our more ‘pragmatic’ concerns.”
Recent years have seen a flourishing in writing and cultural production dedicated to understanding the oddities of apocalypse, social oppression and radical transformation. From the work of the late Mark Fisher, to Rochelle Spencer’s book Afrosurrealism and Leila Taylor’s Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, to other podcasts like Old Gods of Appalachia and Horror Vanguard, and yes, to the popularity of Space Communism memes. SWARMCAST seeks to build on and contribute to this ecosystem, daring to imagine a gothic future where liberation exists amidst the rubble.
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As noted, SWARMCAST will be released early for all Locust patrons at and above the $5 monthly pledge level (as well as patrons of Tish and Adam’s Evicted Art Patreon). Subscribe now to get early access to our very first episode and other bonus content! Your support of Locust Review over the past 10 months has been central in allowing us to continue publishing and launch this new project. But to keep going we need more of you to subscribe and support Locust Review. Tell your friends and comrades to subscribe and submit their work.
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Submit work to Locust Review by e-mailing us at locust.review@gmail.com.