Zero Squared

Nadim Bakhshov is the guest this week as we continue a conversation about Islam that we started in episode forty-nine entitled Against Capitalist Education. Nadim is the author of a book from Zero with that same title, he is an apostate of a sort, and he was very patient as he discussed the fractured nature of the Muslim faith. This is a conversation that attempts to put the mass shooting in Orlando into a partial context, one that specifically tries to take on the question of Radical Islam from a left perspective, and I want to encourage listeners to respond either with comments on the blog or on Facebook or Twitter. In this episode you’ll hear a clip describing the philosophy of Emile Durkheim, a clip from the BBC about Nadim’s student who joined ISIS despite Nadim’s best efforts to guide him away from the worst interpretations of the Koran and Islam, as well as some music from the Bezmara Ensemble.

Nadim Bakhshov is the guest this week as we continue a conversation about Islam that we started in episode forty-nine entitled Against Capitalist Education. Nadim is the author of a book from Zero with that same title, he is an apostate of a sort, and he was very patient as he discussed the fractured nature of the Muslim faith. This is a conversation that attempts to put the mass shooting in Orlando into a partial context, one that specifically tries to take on the question of Radical Islam from a left perspective, and I want to encourage listeners to respond either with comments on the blog or on Facebook or Twitter. In this episode you’ll hear a clip describing the philosophy of Emile Durkheim, a clip from the BBC about Nadim’s student who joined ISIS despite Nadim’s best efforts to guide him away from the worst interpretations of the Koran and Islam, as well as some music from the Bezmara Ensemble.

Douglas Lain was a guest on the American conservative radio program "The Brett Winterble Show" and spoke briefly to Brett about Zero Books' new line calledAdvancing Conversations, as well as about Aubrey de Grey's ideas on life extension and Karl Marx. Winterble made sure that Lain didn't believe in UFO conspiracies and Lain assured Brett that he did believe that the moon landing was real. The Brett Winterble show is a four hour talk program broadcast five days a week in San Diego, California.

This week’s podcast is a recording of Mike Watson’s talk with Mark McGowan (AKA the Artist Taxi Driver) at the Open School East. Mike Watson is an art theorist and curator based in Italy and he writes regularly for Frieze, Art Review and Radical Philosophy. His book, Towards a Conceptual Militancy, is currently out from Zero Books. Zero Books will be rolling out a membership site towards the end of this month. Members will get access to members only podcasts, online workshops with our authors, and audiobooks. To find out more follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or check out Zero Books blog at zero-books.net. Also, Zero Books authors will be reading in libraries this summer in an effort to promote summer reading as a time for thinking as well as thrillers, celebrity gossip, and beaches. And if you enjoy Zero Books you might recommend us to your local librarian. Let your library know about us, our website, our monthly newsletter announcing new titles, and urge them to include our books in their collection. The music in this episode includes what the Swingles performing Bach’s Fugue n.5 in D Major as well as Crosley Bendix at Jamcon ’84.

This week’s podcast is a recording of Mike Watson’s talk with Mark McGowan (AKA the Artist Taxi Driver) at the Open School East. Mike Watson is an art theorist and curator based in Italy and he writes regularly for Frieze, Art Review and Radical Philosophy. His book, Towards a Conceptual Militancy, is currently out from Zero Books. Zero Books will be rolling out a membership site towards the end of this month. Members will get access to members only podcasts, online workshops with our authors, and audiobooks. To find out more follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or check out Zero Books blog at zero-books.net. Also, Zero Books authors will be reading in libraries this summer in an effort to promote summer reading as a time for thinking as well as thrillers, celebrity gossip, and beaches. And if you enjoy Zero Books you might recommend us to your local librarian. Let your library know about us, our website, our monthly newsletter announcing new titles, and urge them to include our books in their collection. The music in this episode includes what the Swingles performing Bach’s Fugue n.5 in D Major as well as Crosley Bendix at Jamcon ’84.

A recording of the Zero Books panel “Overcoming Capitalism” from this year’s Left Forum replaces the usual interview this week. The panel participants were Terry Tapp author of "A Serf's Journal," the radical journalist Anne Jaclard, Andrew Kliman author of The Failure of Capitalist Production, Pete Dolack author of It's Not Over and Douglas Lain publisher of Zero Books There are a few announcements to make here at the start, some exciting developments. Zero Books’ own Mike Watson will be launching his book “Towards a Conceptual Militancy” this weekend. Mike will be in conversation with two contemporary art. Tomorrow, the 10th of June, at 1pm he’ll be talking to the video artist Fiamma Montezemolo at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, located on The Mall in the heart of central London. Then, on Sunday, he’ll be talking with Mark McGowan (AKA the Artist Taxi Driver) at the Open School East from 5pm to 630. The second event is free and you’ll be able to find links to both events in the show notes for this episode. Also, Zero Books will be rolling out a membership site towards the end of this month. All the details are still be working out, but I can say that a Zero Books membership will get you access to members only podcasts, online workshops with our authors, and audiobooks. To find out more about what is happening at Zero Books you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or check out Zero Books blog at zero-books.net. Finally, Zero Books authors will be reading in libraries this summer in an effort to promote both summer reading as a time for thinking as well as thrillers, celebrity gossip, and beaches. If you enjoy Zero Squared please leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever else fine podcasts are distributed. If you enjoy Zero Books you might recommend us to your local librarian. Let your library know about us, our website, our monthly newsletter announcing new titles, and urge them to include our books in their collection. The music in this episode is the Bran Flakes’ Countdown to The End (Choo Choo Mix).

Our Cairo correspondent and Zero Books Reader C Derick Varn is the guest this week as we follow up on an episode of the Alpha to Omega podcast with a conversation about overcoming capitalism. In the Alpha to Omega podcast there was, what I consider to be, a failure of communication as Varn tried to explain how Capitalist logic sneaks into even the most utopian of projects. In this episode you’ll hear an excerpt from a Rocketbloom youtube video entitled “Ontological Paradox,” a computer reading an email from Andrew Kliman, computer generated dubstep, Will Durant reading “The Philosophy of Nietzsche,” Maynard Ferguson and Bill Chase’s rendition of the theme for the 50s television show The Adventurs of Superman, and Maze Rockwell’s synthesizer cover of the Willy Wonka classic “Pure Imagination.”

Right before I jetted off to NYC to attend the Left Forum I’d edited a conversation with C Derick Varn for this week’s podcast. Upon my return I see that I made a mistake and saved the wrong file. So that podcast will be put off for a bit. Instead this week’s podcast is merely a reading of a blog post reporting on the Left Forum and the Zizek controversy. This is entitled “Standing with Slavoj Žižek and Against an Illness on the Left” and it’s dedicated to Vakhtang, a fellow traveler and Lacanian who I know on FB and met for the first time in NYC. Cheers, Vakhtang. Let’s not let the PC police get us down. In this episode you’ll hear a clip from the Left Forum and a clip from Slavoj Zizek’s appearance on the podcast Comedy Bang Bang!

Tom Slater is the guest this week and we discuss his book out from MacMillan entitled Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus which came out from MacMillan books in April. Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked, UK. He coordinates spiked’s free-speech campaigns Down With Campus Censorship! and the Free Speech University Rankings, the UK’s first university league table for free speech. Tom has written on politics, pop culture and free speech for the Spectator, the Telegraph, Times Higher Education, The Times and the Independent. In this episode you’ll hear from some Yalies who are afraid of Halloween, Joan Baez, instructions on how to freeze a peach, and clips from John Adam’s “The Chairman Dances” and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s get it on” and the Vitamin String Quartet cover of Happy by Pharrell Williams.

Dr. Youssef El-Gingihy is a GP at Bromley by Bow Health Centre and the author of How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps that was published by Zero Books in July of last year. We discuss how the NHS is being broken up into a private insurance system based on the American model. Here in the States life took an absurd turn in the last few days as the reality television star Donald Trump locked in the Republican nomination for the presidential campaign. In related news hell froze over and pigs were seen circling Ronald Reagan international airport. In this episode you’ll hear Martin Freeman throwing his support behind the NHS, an establishment oriented description of the TTIP produced by IBT Partners, and “For the Love of Money” as covered by Nektar.

Joanna Demers is associate professor of musicology at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where she specializes in post-1945 popular and art music. Her book with Zero Books Drone and Apocalypse was published on December 11th in 2015 and this week she returns to the for part two of a conversation on drone music. Last week we lost two great musicians. The pop Star Prince and the experimental musician Richard Lyons. Everyone knows about Prince, but Lyons was a founding member of Negativland and it seems appropriate to dedicate this week’s podcast to him and his band. In this episode you’ll hear an airconditioner shift tones, Timothy Morton discussing the style of the consumer, a clip from 1999, Negativland’s Time Zones, Negativland’s Harry to the Ferry and Pastor Dick and Muriel's Purse Fund.

Joanna Demers is associate professor of musicology at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, where she specializes in post-1945 popular and art music. Her book with Zero Books Drone and Apocalypse was published on December 11th in 2015 and this week she returns to the podcast to discuss drone music more generally. I want to thank people who reached out to me in the last week or so. Many people left compliments about last week’s podcast with Iona Singh and I think this week’s podcast about drone music works well as a follow up. Again we return to discussing aesthetics, perhaps from a formal perspective. In this episode you’ll hear a clip from an old BBC documentary about Musique-Concrete, an original work of drone music created in Audacity by combining imported digital noise from the Adobe application and combining that with a stretched version of the National Anthem, an excerpt from John Cage’s album Indeterminancy, and the dronification of Star Wars, and Negativland’s Yellow Black and Rectangular.

The book Color, Facture, Art and Design is the topic this week as author Iona Singh joins me to discuss Constructivism, materialism and Marx. Iona, as well as being a Zero Books author, is an artist. Those are her paintings on the cover for this week’s show. It was great talking her. Last week I mentioned and linked to an essay by Brendan O’Neill at Spiked and asked that people reach out to me either through comments, by email, or on Facebook. I received a couple of emails back, one from Vinnie in New Zealand who said he’d been listening to the podcast and who, rightly, accused me of wanting to be Marc Maron. I also received some comments on the O’Neill piece. An anonymous listener said that O’Neill is consistently defends the powerful and the privileged while making an undeveloped reference to “true leftism” and the other comments were fairly similar. I would just like to point out that, while the rich and the powerful don’t deserve any sympathy there is a danger in getting too invested in the latest charges of corruption. Namely that this will revive a dream of a functional capitalism that manages to produce something like social equality. The music in this episode includes Velimir Khlebnikov’s The Radio of The Future, a condensed explanation of Kant’s Aesthetics, an excerpt from The Boards of Canada’s song Aquarius, and a history of the color blue. The music you’re listening to right now is from the short film Suprematism in our Life, but in just a moment you’ll be listening to Iona Singh and I discuss Color and Form.

Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 15 entitled “Machinery and Modern Industry” is the subject this week as Andy Marshall and Andrew Kliman return for part two of the podcast. However, the three of us also discuss how capitalism deforms education and what today’s education system really is and how it works. It’s Wednesday, the 6th of April, 2016 and I’m Douglas Lain the publisher of Zero Squared and the host of this podcast. I'm curious to know what people think of Brendan O’Neill’s essay The Panama Papers: Rich-Bashing Won’t Fix the Crisis. You can find the Zero Books Facebook page, find us on twitter, you can contact me at me through my personal website (that's douglaslain.com) or just leave a comment below. The music in this episode includes street musicians covering Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall and Negativland’s A Nice Place to Live. The music you’re listening to right now is an excerpt from Negativland’s first album entitled Negativland, but in just a moment you’ll hear Andy, Andrew and I discuss The Machine.

Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 15 entitled “Machinery and Modern Industry” is the topic this week as Andy Marshall and Andrew Kliman return to the podcast. For people who have been paying close attention you might realize that Andy, Andrew and I have been reading Capital together for a little over a year, and that we’re coming to the end of the endeavor. Since 2008 Marx has suffered through a resurgence. He’s often spoken of or referenced, but little read or understood. This episode of Zero Squared is one small part of a project to work against that trend. The music in this episode includes a ukulele cover of Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” and the theme from the television show “Out of the Unknown” and Metal Machine Music.