The Plague

Welcome to The Plague, the podcast where we look, not just at the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, but at our nation’s home-made plagues, plagues created by human socioeconomic systems, that make the coronavirus more virulent and dangerous. The coronavirus infects the human body, but what illnesses in our body politic make us more vulnerable to it? Economic inequality? Environmental devastation? Labor precarity? Alienation? We pick a different societal plague each week and talk with an expert about how that plague makes the coronavirus deadlier. We then move on to discuss “treatments” or even “cures” for that plague: what kinds of political or cultural action we can take to “cure” it. Since many of our guest experts are also artists, they are invited to share a creative work on the topic—a song, poem, monologue—of their own creation or choosing. Guests include poet and Friends of the Earth organizer Jeff Conant, Dr. Rupa Marya of the Do No Harm Coalition and the band Rupa and the April Fishes, performance artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, theatre activist Aryeh Shell, affordable medicine activist Merith Basey, playwright and San Francisco Mime Troupe member Michael Gene Sullivan, and many more. Your host, L.M. Bogad, broadcasts from his “shelter in place” bunker, while himself conspiring in ongoing creative activist campaigns on these issues. The Plague Podcast: Created, Hosted, Edited by L.M. Bogad (www.lmbogad.com), professor of political performance at UC Davis, and author of the books Tactical Performance and Electoral Guerrila Theatre, and the play COINTELSHOW: A Patriot Act. Music by Jason Montero (https://m.soundcloud.com/jamoja) and Bogad’s Other Friend Named Jay. Logo by Bogad, with clip art from nicepng.com. For more information on L.M. Bogad’s books and performance work: www.lmbogad.com. L.M. Bogad is an author, performance artist, professor of political performance at U.C. Davis, and co-founder of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. He has performed and led workshops in mischievous activist pranks internationally, most recently in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Latvia, at SFMOMA and other major museums, on a squatted military base in Barcelona, and in Cairo during the first phase of the Egyptian revolution. He was the “Art and Controversy” Fellow, and the Distinguished Lecturer on Performance and Politics, at Carnegie Mellon University, and the “Humanities and Political Conflict” Fellow at Arizona State University. His projects includes a historical role playing game called “Possible Pasts,” and performances which excavate and explore the memories of historical confrontations including the Haymarket Square Riot, the Pinochet coup, and the FBI’s COINTELPRO activities. His books are Electoral Guerilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, Tactical Performance: The Theory and Practice of Serious Play, and COINTELSHOW: A Patriot Act and the forthcoming Perform/Inform/Transform: Works of Radical Memory for Times of Social Amnesia..