Zero Squared

Margaret Kimberley has been an editor and Senior Columnist of Black Agenda Report since its inception in 2006. Her work has also appeared on sites such as Alternet and Counterpunch and in publications such as The Dallas Morning News and The Chicago Defender. She is a regular guest on radio talk shows and has appeared on Al Jazeera English, Russia Today, the Real News Network and GRITtv, and this week she's on Zero Squared to discuss two seemingly separate subjects. First we talk about the Greek economic crisis and then we cover a small incident at the Netroots conference involving leaders from the Black Lives Matter movement and US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. On this topic Bruce Dixon, the managing editor at the Black Agenda Report, wrote: All in all, the NetRootsNation confrontation wasn't the stirring of black women activists “taking their rightful place at the front of the progressive movement,” as one breathless tweet called it. It didn't tell us anything we didn't know about O'Malley or Sanders, or about hypocritical Hillary. It was about flying the #BlackLivesMatter flag to jockey for positions inside the machinery that is the Democratic party and its affiliates. In this episode you’ll hear a clip from Rick and Morty, the music of Negativland from their album Negativland, a clip from an interview with Michael Nevradakis at the Real News network, Blonde Redhead's For the Damaged Coda, Mazzy Star's Look On Down From the Bridge, Bernie Sanders as he's interrupted by Black Lives Matters, and another Negativland song called Booper Symphony.

Brian Willems is Assistant Professor at the University of Split, Croatia, where he teaches literature at the Faculty of Philosophy and film theory at the Arts Academy and his book Shooting the Moon was published in May this year from Zero Books. Laurence A Rickels, author of Germany: A Science Fiction, blurbed the book this way Shooting the Moon shows how our most abiding object or objective on reality’s horizon was overshot and displaced by the other reality of realization of our wish fantasies. When we ask for the moon we travel a jump cut from an idealized past to a future of wish fulfillment lying deep inside the film medium and its ongoing history. In this episode you’ll hear a clip from Futurama, Slavoj Zizek explaining a bottle of tea, Chris “Isto” White singing the jazz standard “It's Only a Paper Moon,” The Evolution Control Committee's “The Fucking Moon,” a clip from the auralgraphic entertainment “Dreamies” by Bill Holt, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner performing in “The First Men in the Moon,” Doctor Who and the Monolith reversing the polarity of the neutron flow, Negativland, and in tribute to Don Joyce, one of "Crosley Bendix's" Arts Reviews.

Chris Bateman is a game designer, outsider philosopher and author. His book Imaginary Games was published by Zero Books in 2011. Bateman is also the blogger behind Only a Game and he posts regularly in between writing how to manuals on game design and lecturing at the University of Bolton. Jon Cogburn, Director of Philosophy at LSU blurbed Imaginary Games this way: Chris Bateman’s Imaginary Games may just do for videogames what Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror did for scary books and movies.... not only philosophically compelling and interesting; it is also a great read. In this episode you’ll hear a rerun of a conversation about the movie Tron between me and my then thirteen year old son Ben, theme music from Super Smash Brothers Melee, Chad African explaining Zizek and his idea of ontological incompleteness, clips from a youtube documentary about smash, a short clip on Hegel from the 8-bit philosophy series, and the theme music from Super Mario Brothers.

Rudy Rucker is the guest this week and we discuss his recently published book Journals 1990-2014. Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who spent 20 years as a Silicon Valley computer scientist. He's a contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His 37 published books include novels and non-fiction books such as THE FOURTH DIMENSION. He composed Journals 1990-2014 over twenty-five years. Rucker describes his process this way: I turn to my journals when I’m undergoing a personal crisis—I find it calming to write what’s on my mind. And I'm always looking for an easy path to enlightenment...I like to describe the things that I see going on in the daily world around me. I’ve always enjoyed Jack Kerouac’s practice of using words to sketch a scene around me in real time. In this episode you’ll hear Richard Sandling as he describes doing stand up at a science fiction convention, a ukelele cover of the Star Trek theme, Rudy Rucker describing his novel Soft Ware, and Paradise 3001's Mondo 2000.

Elaine Graham-Leigh is a the guest this week. She's a member of Counterfire and a former member of the steering committee of the Campaign against Climate Change. Her book A Diet of Austerity was published by Zero Books in April of this year. Jonathan Neale, Author of Stop Global Warming, Change the World blurbed Elaine Graham-Leigh's book as follows: Who is to blame for climate change? Graham-Leigh says it's not fat people, cows or the working class. A challenging and interesting book, packed with new ideas to make you think again about what you thought you knew. In this episode you'll hear clips from a news report about Belgian Blue cows, a cow saying moo, dueling banjos from the film Deliverance, Brendan Cooney explaining Socially Necessary Labor Time, a nutrious breakfast torture collage, an instrumental cover of the protest standard “We Shall Overcome,” and an audio collage built on advertisements from the 70s, and Green Onions by Booker T and the MGS.

C Derick Varn is the guest this week and I'm reopening the old podomatic feed. If you are reading this and are glad to get this feed reopened please contact me through douglaslain.net and let me know. Varn is a reader at Zero Books, a poet, and a University Lecturer and what we really discuss is an essay I wrote as a way to clear my head. This was a draft of an essay that will eventually end up on Truthdig, but which for now I’ll just include in this week’s shownotes. The title of the essay is Open Thinking vs. Praxis. The music and voices you’ll hear in this episode will include Bryan Magee, Peter Singer, Pink Floyd on the Ukulele, a Ukulele version of the 1970 hit Popcorn by Hot Butter, Brendan Cooney, Anne Jaclard, Ricky Jervais, Stephen Merchant, Karl Pilkington, and Schoenberg’s 3 Piano Pieces. Open Thinking or Praxis? The purpose that has fallen to them in a society based on the division of labor may be questionable; they themselves may be deformed by it. – Theodore Adorno, Resignation There is nothing easier than to type up a list of the dangers, inequities, and injustices that appear before us everyday. We can find such a list in the New York Times, on yahoo news, or on our Facebook newsfeed, and without even looking we already know that today the police have murdered another unarmed black man, that another frog or fish or insect has disappeared as climate change continues unabated, and that there are at least six different ways poor people are being screwed listed on Buzzfeed. So, given this is the case, given the need for radical social change is as pressing and evident as ever, it may seem a strange to suggest that the thing to do is to turn to philosophy, or to advocate for what Theodore Adorno called “open thinking.” Still, this is what’s needed, precisely because, while another world may or may not be possible, the reasons to seek it abound. Philosophical thinking is necessary because only such open, undirected, impractical thought is free from the imperatives of the very system we’re attempting to change. Anything practical, any thought connected to action or politics, any position that appears to be obvious, already fits into the present system. On May 29th, Christopher Hedges spoke at the Left Forum. He introduced a panel entitled “Why Marx Was Right” with some observations of his own about how capitalism is supported by ideologies that appear to be obvious because they are useful for the reproduction of the current “means of material production” already operating, and in this way serve the ruling elites who own and control these means. Hedges began with a quote from the preface of Marx’s “The Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since looking at the matter more closely, we always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist, or are at least in the process of formation. This would, on it’s face, appear to be an argument against “open thinking” or the posing of problems in the abstract apart from practical concerns or plans for action. However, such a simple reading of Marx would preclude social change from the start. In fact, reading this passage (and the rest of Marx for that matter) provides us with exactly the kind of opportunity for open thinking or free reasoning that is necessary for radical social change to have a chance. Let us take a close look at this to see, first, what the passage means and then if it might be true. No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed. Historic(continued)

Alfie Bown is the guest this week and we discuss the book from the EDA Collective Twerking to Turking which is coming from Zero Books this month. With the tag line: “Analysing the signs of everyday life” this is the second collection by the EDA. It is a follow-up to their book “Why Animals are funny.” Jamie Mackay, writing for Review 31, praised the EDA, writing: It is not often that theory is this fun to read, and less often still that satire is so well versed in the language of its assailants. It's Wednesday, April 15th, 2015 and I'm Douglas Lain the publisher of Zero Books and the host of this podcast. In this episode you’ll hear a longish clip from Radiolab on the subject of Yellow Rain. The podcast was originally aired on September 24th, 2012, and I'll provide links to it in the show notes. If you go to the site you'll find an apology from Robert Krulwich wherein he apologizes for the way he aggressively questioned the Mr Eng Yang regarding reports that “yellow rain” was used on people in Laos after American forces left Vietnam. I want to make clear that, in my opinion, Robert Krulwich should not have apologized. If the oppressed of the Earth are going to find a voice that matters they will, simultaneously, have to be open to the truth and to pursuing the truth. This will require transcending their own experiences even as they act in their own collective interest. You'll also hear clips of Philip Glass's Photographer, an excerpt from a documentary about Audrey Hepburn entitled “World's Most Photographed Woman,” the comedian Godfrey Chi, Phlearn Photoshop's “The Basics of Studium and Punctum in Photographs,” and "Got a Good Thing Going" by the Beetletown Players and Mister Show.

Eugene Thacker is the guest this week and we discuss his Horror of Philosophy series, two new volumes of which ( Tentacles Longer than Night and Starry Speculative Corpse) are coming from Zero Books on April 24th. In these book Thacker, instead of taking fiction as the mere illustration of ideas, he reads horror stories as if they themselves were works of philosophy. The horror author Thomas Ligotti praised Thacker’s first volume, In The Dust of this Planet. He wrote: Thacker's discourse on the intersection of horror and philosophy is utterly original and utterly captivating...In the Dust of This Planet is an encyclopedic grimoire instructing us in the varieties of esoteric thought and infernal diversions that exist for the reader’s further investigation, treating us to a delightful stroll down a midway of accursed attractions that alone are worth the ticket of this volume. In this episode you’ll hear a clip from the Laverne and Shirley, Rick and Morty, Rick Roderick, Bryan Magee and Bernard Williams on Descartes, Laurie Anderson, Kraftwerk, a reading from the Gideon bible, the theme from True Detective, and the opening music from Mister Show.

Aaron Leonard is the guest this week and we discuss his book Heavy Radicals which was published by Zero Books in February. With the subtile: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists, Aaron Leonard's book covers Maoism in America from the 60s through to 1980. Sarah Khan at the Washington Book Review praised the book. “Heavy Radicals is an excellent addition to the literature on the history of revolutionary groups which played important roles in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the first comprehensive and complete history of ... the Revolutionary Union. It is a well-researched book which fills the gap created by the absence of historical literature on an important period in the history of the United States.” In this episode you’ll hear a clips from Bob Avakian, the American propaganda film “What is Communism,” the 1963 instrumental hit Pipeline by the Chantays, Mario Savio at Sproul Hall in 1964, Andrew Kliman, a String Quartet cover of Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit” and the aria “I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung” from John Adam's opera Nixon in China as well as John Adams' “The Chairman Dances.”

Chris O'Leary is the guest this week and we discuss his book Rebel Rebel which is coming from Zero Books in two days. With the tag line: “Every single song. Everything you want to know, everything you didn't know” the book catalogs all of Bowie's songs from 1964 through 1976. The Cultural Critic Mark Dery (author of All the Young Dudes:Why Glam Rock Matters) sent me a blurb for O'Leary and I'll read it now: Marooned in '70s suburbia, I and countless weirdos like me awaited every new Bowie record as a deep-space ping from a world where weird ruled—proof that there really was life on Mars, if not in tract-home sprawl. To date, what passes for thoughtful inquiry into the polymorphous, polyvalent phenomenon that is David Bowie has consisted almost entirely of potted biographies and coffee-table photo albums. At last, the Homo Superior gets the exegesis he deserves: Rebel Rebel is the Lipstick Traces of Bowie studies, and Chris O'Leary its unchallenged dean. I should also point out that you can win a copy of O'Leary's book by entering the fictional Bowie lyric contest at DavidBowieNews.com, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. In this episode you’ll hear a clip from the Chris Hadfield on the International Space Station, a clip of a cover of Kim Wilyde's The Kids in America done by Nirvana, David Bowie with Bing Crosby from Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas, an Andy Warhol/David Bowie interview juxtaposition and Bowie's Warszawa played on a Minimoog by the youtube star orchestron.

Andrew Kliman is the guest this week and we discuss his essay at the New Left Project entitled “Harvey Versus Marx On Capitalism’s Crises Part 1: Getting Marx Wrong.” The Harvey in this essay is the prominent Marxist Geographer David Harvey and not Harvey the rabbit, just in case you're wondering. It's Wednesday, March 18th, 2015 and I'm Douglas Lain the publisher of Zero Books and the host of this podcast. In the last week or so I've talked to several Zero Authors including Chris O'Leary (author of Rebel Rebel) and Eugene Thacker (author of In the Dust of this Planet, Starry Speculative Corpse, and Tentacles Longer than Night). In the weeks to come I hope to talk to Aaron Leonard (co-author of Heavy Radicals: The FBIs secret war on American Maoists) as well as Daniela Cascella (author of Footnotes, Mirages, Refrains and Leftovers of Writing Sound), Robert Jackson (author of Bioshock) and many, many others. In this episode you’ll be hearing clips from the Big Chill, Slavoj Zizek, Brendan Cooney, Nirvana and the Piano Cat, a clip from Tom O'Brien's interview with Thom Workman, the history of cell phone commercials, and an instrumental version of a Whiter Shade of Pale. Right now you're listening to the theme from Groucho Marx's “You Bet Your Life” but in just a moment you'll be listening to Brendan Cooney explaining the Declining Rate of Profit and then you'll hear Andrew Kliman and I discuss Marxist Entertainment.

Frank Smecker is the guest this week and we discuss his book Night of the World which came out from Zero Books in 2014. Todd McGowan (author of Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis) blurbed the book. He wrote: Night of the World seamlessly weaves through complex philosophical conjunctions and cultural practices in order to articulate a theory of ideology for today's world. From the Jacket: By situating objectivity at the level of ideology, while placing it within a dynamic, experimental and, at times, unorthodox interplay with Hegelian and Lacanian philosophy, The Night of the World offers a unique and radical re-thinking of objectivity. Encompassing a constellational array of wide-ranging subjects, from popular culture, politics, history, science, and philosophy, while deploying an engaging prose that is both incisive and seamlessly tangential, Smecker is both an ally with, and emerging voice in, the field of Zizekian dialectics. Incorporating Zizek's philosophy, Smecker speculates over both objectivity and ideology, evoking methods of thought not so prevalent since German Idealism was all the rage. In the spirit of Kierkegaard, The Night of the World is the result of an imaginative hypothesis. And that is only the half of it. Written in a style that will undoubtedly leave the reader itching to read it again once finished, The Night of the World is an ongoing engagement with an abundance of additional postulations, whose sole purpose is to produce more products of thought. In this episode you’ll be hearing from Chad African, Doctor Who, Wolfman Jack, Richard Dreyfus, the cast of the pilot episode of Star Trek (including Leonard Nimoy as an emotional seeming Spock), and Nik Walton's improvized loop Diggin Dug.

Please check out the new Double Feature Review podcast over at douglaslain.com. Jim Farris and I review and rant about Bobby Deerfield and Thunder Alley, two race car movies from the seventies and the sixties respectively. And if you're looking for the new Diet Soap Audio Collage Podcast, you'll find that next week at douglaslain.com. This podomatic feed is being slowly retired, but new podcasts are coming. Please do check them out.

Peter Rollins is the guest this week and we discuss his book The Divine Magician: The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith which came out from Howard Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in January of this year (2015). Rob Bell, the author of Velvet Elvis, blurbed the book this way: What Pete does in this book is take you to the edge of a cliff where you can see how high you are and how far you would fall if you lost your footing. And just when most writers would kindly pull you back from the edge, he pushes you off, and you find yourself without any solid footing, disoriented, and in a bit of a panic...until you realize that your fall is in fact, a form of flying. And it's thrilling. The two new titles from Zero Books this month are Rebel Rebel by Chris O’Leary and No More Heroes by Carl Neville. Chris O’Leary will be on the podcast in two weeks to discuss that Space Oddity who is known as David Bowie and there is also going to be a contest at davidbowienews.com. I'll let you know about that and how you might win a free copy of the book in the weeks to come. I want to mention the passing of Leonard Nimoy. As some of you might know I've been working on a book about Star Trek and Hegel's approach to the dialectic for a couple of years now, or more accurately I've not been working on it. The original title of that book was “Star Trek is the true religion.” I'm saddened by the passing of Leonard Nimoy. I feel similarly to how I felt when Johnny Carson died, only more so. In a way the death of Leonard Nimoy is like the death of Ronald McDonald. It feels like something that wasn't supposed to happen. In this episode you’ll be hearing from a youtube magician, a clip from the David Fincher movie The Game, from the Woody Allen movie The Purple Rose of Cairo, from a lecture by the death of God theologian Thomas Altizer, from Late Nite from David Letterman, and from the album Mister Spock's Music from Outer Space, but in just a moment you'll be hearing Peter Rollins and I discuss Magic Tricks and The Big Other.

David Webster is the guest this week and we discuss his book Dispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality Makes Us Stupid, Selfish, and Unhappy which came out from Zero Books in 2012. Dr Mikael Askander blurbed the book. He wrote: Annoyed by the phrase 'I am not religious, but I’m very spiritual', Dr. David Webster successfully maps out the problems and contradictions it leads to. This is as close to a 'must read' as it gets, for the religious as well as the spiritual reader, as well as for atheists.   Zero Books has titles coming next month: Rebel Rebel by Chris O’Leary and No More Heroes by Carl Neville. Chris O’Leary’s book Rebel Rebel has been getting some attention. It's a big book on David Bowie, O’Leary runs a blog called Pushing Ahead of the Dame about David Bowie, and he’ll be a guest on Zero Squared soon. The Radical Theologian Peter Rollins is also coming soon to Zero Squared. I believe my conversation with him will be online next week as we're scheduled to talk this Friday. In this episode you’ll be hearing Shirley MacLaine , Johnny Carson, Robert Solomon, the narrator for the instructional video Spiritual Reality, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Steven Shakespeare, Peter Rollins, the Dunkin Donuts guy, Frank Sinatra, the group XTC, the theme from Waking Life, the music of Delia Derbyshire, the soundtrack for the film CQ, and some radio static.