Free as in Freedom

Every year some months have five Fridays, and every time this happens we find something to do there: something out of our normal schedule. We try to adopt an annual theme. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we found four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back to four early episodes of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse.
This year whenever we stumble into the fifth Friday of a month we will look around us and find a podcast that interests us: one published under a Creative Commons licence that relates in one way or another to our areas of interest.
Where better to start than with a podcast produced by a friend of ours with whom we have already talked? We talked with Agnieszka Pokrywka twice in 2021 about Ferment Radio. Since then she had produced 41 episodes, and the podcast has become one of the projects produced by Super Eclectic, a “a multimedia production house for the world we want” that she has founded with Humberto Duque.
Today we listen to Episode 40, "Show me your kitchen, and I will tell you who you are" with David Zilber, chef, fermenter, food scientist, and author of "The Noma Guide to Fermentation".

We have arrived at the final podcast of 2023, which also happens to fall on the fifth Friday of the fourth month of 2023 with five Fridays in it. We therefore take a final look into the Miaaw past and listen once more to another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie dig out their copies of Marxism & Literature and discuss the cultural theory that Raymond Williams develops there in considerable detail.
They reflect on Williams’ insistence on keeping in mind that we live our lives as processes, and that cultural theory needs to avoid turning these into finished products that we can dissect at our leisure.
Next year, Friday Number 5 will have a new focus: one that will provide you with a set of interesting cultural listening from outside our usual orbit.

We have come to the third month of 2023 with five Fridays in it, and so we look back at another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie continue their discussion by focussing on the resurgence of interest in ideas of cultural democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, and the relationships between these and previous ideas.
This episode stands as the third in a series. It follows on from Episode 4 which looked at a kind of pre-history of cultural democracy, and Episode 6 which discussed the relationship between the community art movement in the 1980s and cultural democracy.
They refer to the Art with People book that Malcolm Dickson edited in 1995, and look at the work of the Scottish Cultural Policy Collective. They discuss work carried out by Kings College and AHRC this century, and the attempt to build a grassroots Movement for Cultural Democracy in the last few years.
Finally they imagine the possibility of writing a history of cultural democracy that does not situate it as an oppositional movement, but sees it as a vision of a possible future.

We have come to the second month of 2023 with five Fridays in it, and so we look back at another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie grappling for the first time with the relationship between what we used to call community art and ideas of cultural democracy.
The term cultural democracy began to find favour among some people working in the British community arts movement in the 1980s. They used it to describe the goal and purpose of their work, once Roy Shaw, the Secretart General of the Arts Council of Great Britain, had begun to try to paint them as quaint missionaries.
In The Arts and the People, Shaw wrote that:
The efforts of community artists to serve ‘the people’ in centres of urban decay or neglected rural areas are often admirable attempts to apply in cultural terms the principle which John Wesley commended when sending his methodist missionaries to the working class: ‘Go not to those that need you, but to those that need you most.’
As François Matarasso once observed, “Patrician indeed”.
As soon as it became clear that the Arts Council wanted to pretend that community arts had nothing to do with politics but only with a general wish to “do good”, many people began to look for an idea that could describe their ambitions in their own terms.
Cultural Democracy became that idea and a conference in Sheffield in 1986 became the (not necessarily successful) attempt to launch the idea publicly.

We have arrived at the first month of 2023 with five Fridays, and so we start another set of Friday Number Five. This year, as Miaaw gets ready to celebrate its fifth anniversary, we look back at some memorable episodes from our short history. We begin with the very first episode in which Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look at a report by 64 Million Artists, and the responses it has drawn; and wonder what they thought they were up to.
Although they don't quote from it directly, they start their discussion from a perspective similar to that proposed by Steven Hadley and Elionora Belfiore in Cultural Democracy & Cultural Policy, an article they wrote in issue 221 of Cultural Trends. They wrote that:
Contemporary articulations of, and engagements with, the ideas of cultural democracy must both reconcile themselves with the nuanced and semi-documented history of cultural democracy and the significant macro-level shifts in economic, technological and social fields which have made an imperative of the need to reassess these arguments… Historical research may provide the foundation for the development of a theory of cultural democracy in relation to the issues of cultural authority and normative allocation of cultural value. This would require the theoretical development of a renewed concept of cultural democracy that acknowledges and addresses the social, cultural and economic changes that have taken place since its first formulation in the 1970s.
The issues that Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly have with Cultural Democracy in Practice lie not in its intentions, which seem good-hearted if naive, but in its lack of any historical perspective, or any suggestion that more sorts of art for more people may not mean the same as cultural democracy.

In 2022, on months that have a fifth Friday, we have delved into the history of radio to bring back historical examples that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents; something tangentially related to ideas of cultural democracy.
In this episode we conclude with an episode of Dragnet: “perhaps the most famous and influential police procedural drama in media history”, and one that translated from radio to television with equally popular results.
This episode, A Twenty Two Rifle for Christmas, broadcast on December 22, 1949, features Jack Webb as Sgt Joe Friday and Barton Yarborough as his partner, Sgt Ben Romero in a seasonal case. As always, it features an explicit, albeit paternalistic, moral (in this case, one still sadly applicable).

On months that have a fifth Friday we break from our normal schedule and produce something tangentially related to ideas of cultural democracy. In 2022 we delve into the history of radio to bring back some historical examples of comedies, documentaries, and serials that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents.
In this episode we go back to June 3, 1956 to listen to an episode of the western series Gunsmoke. The series takes place in and around Dodge City, Kansas, in the post-Civil War era and centers on United States Marshall Matt Dillon as he attempts to enforce law and order in the city. It also focuses on Dillon's friendship with Doc Adams, the town's physician; Kitty Russell, owner of the Long Branch Saloon; and Chester, Dillon's deputy.
CBS intended Dillon as a "Philip Marlowe of the Old West", and Gunsmoke as a western series for adults. The writers emphasised the brutal nature of the so-called Old West. Charles Meston, the head writer felt disgusted by the archetypal Western hero and set out "to destroy [that type of] character he loathed". In Meston's view, "Dillon was almost as scarred as the homicidal psychopaths who drifted into Dodge from all directions." In many ways it served as an ancestor of series like Deadwood.

On months that have a fifth Friday we break from our normal schedule and produce something else related in one way or another to cultural democracy. In 2022 we delve into radio archives to bring back some historical examples of serials and comedies that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents.
In this episode we go back to June 21, 1950 to listen to episode 15 of the science fiction series Two Thousand Plus. The series aired over the Mutual network from the spring of 1950 until very early in 1952. Nearly 100 30-minute episodes were produced although fewer than 20 survive as recordings.
These stories reflect the times in which they were written, and they provide a glimpse of the way mainstream media in the middle of the twentieth century viewed what they regarded as the future, and we regard as the present. Their version of the future reflects all the assumptions, biases, and prejudices of conventional nineteen fifties thinking. As such it offers us a way of understanding how we got here, and the baggage we brought with us.