Showing posts with label Chris O'Kane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chris O'Kane. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
best of 2013 by chris o'kane
2013 was a busy year for me with many highs and one prolonged and tedious low. I spent a third of it in England, a third of it in Berlin, and a month or so in Olympia; which was excellent. I spent much of the rest of it applying for jobs in Seattle; which has obviously been shit. What follows is an unranked list of my favourite bits in 2013.
TV
I’m sort of embarrassed to admit that the time I spent watching TV in 2013 outranks all my other cultural pursuits. Since that is the case I thought I would put it first.
Justified. The best written, best paced, and most constantly entertaining show on TV.
Enlightened. A warm-hearted satire of the self-help industrial complex and the vacuous sort of progressive politics it promulgates.
Top of the Lake. A film noir about the patriarchy!
Rectify.A meditative small-scale drama about how a man, his family and a small southern town react when he is released from prison after spending two decades or so of his adult life on death row.
Eastbound and Down.Another satire that manages to be equally stupid, incisive and hilarious. In my opinion, it’s also far better at representing the decline of American hegemony and the obscene norms of American masculinity than Mad Men or Breaking Bad etc.
In the Thick of it. I finally got around to watching this, and it lives up to the hype.
Veep. Not as good as In the Thick, and not as much swearing, but its still good.
Archer. It makes me laugh. I also like that the USSR still exists in it.
Breaking Bad. The hype was tedious and the last episode was a let down, but it was still gripping.
Music
New
Big Business – Battlefields Forever.
Paysage D’hiver – Das Tor
Chelsea Light Moving – S/T.
Vexx - S/T.
Hornet Leg - Wrecking Ball.
Body/Head – Coming Apart.
Stillsuit – S/T.
Unwound – The Kid is Gone.
The Fat White Family – Champagne Holocaust.
The Rebel – S/T.
Old
Arthur Alexander – You Better Move On, Detroit City, Call Me Lonesome
The Fall -- up to and including I am Kurios Oranj
The Go-Betweens – Live in Vienna
Black Flag – The 1982 Demos
Pallbearer – Sorrow and Extinction
The Saints – Eternally Yours
The Country Teasers – Satan is Real, Destroy all Human Life
Thin Lizzy – The Peel Sessions
ZZ Top’s first three albums.
After ending up on the same plane as Mudhoney, and having Mark Arm flip shit at me, I decided to listen to them on a lark and got into Superfuzz Bigmuff, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge and My Brother the Cow.
Reading
Endnotes 3
Viewpoint 3
Werner Bonefeld – Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy.
Roberto Bolano – Woes of the True Policeman.
Rachel Kushner – The Flamethrowers.
Ellen M. Wood – The Ellen Meiksins Wood Reader.
Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos et al. – A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and its Crisis.
Ingo Stutzle et al. – Polylux Marx – A Capital workbook in Slides.
Ingo Elbe – Between Marx, Marxism and Marxisms—ways of reading Marx’s Theory.
Karl Marx – The 1861-1863 Manuscripts.
Louis Althusser – Essays in Self-criticism, The Humanist Controversy, Philosophy of the Encounter, The Future Lasts Forever.
Georgakas and Surkin – Detroit do I Mind Dying?
Films
Mike Kelley - Going West on Michigan Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Westland.
Mike Kelley - Going East on Michigan Avenue from Downtown Detroit to Westland.
Stewart Bird et al. -- Finally Got the News.
Chantal Ackerman – From the East.
John Carpenter – They Live.
Noah Baumbach – Frances Ha.
Hal Ashby – The Last Detail.
Bob Rafelson – The King of Marvin Gardens
Werner Herzog – Happy People: a year in the Taiga.
David C. Thomas -- Mc5: A True Testimonial.
Shows
David Hasslehoff at the Berlin Wall.
The Melvins playing Lysol, Egnogg and Stoner Witch.
M’lady’s Birthday Party with The Hysterics, Vexx, Ruby Pins and Nukular Aminals.
Melvins Lite/Big Business.
StillSuit/Death Drive etc.
The Witch/Hornet Leg/Western Hymn.
Joey Shithead/Movieland
Mudhoney at the Seattle Center.
Wet Drag
All the other times I saw Vexx, Big Business and The Hysterics.
New Year’s resolution: Communism. Failing that; get a job, spend more time writing and less time applying to jobs, and watch more films and less TV.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Best of 2011 by Chris O'Kane
I don’t periodize by year well. I’m also a skint grad student who spent most of the year studying. So my list does not consist in the best of what was new this year. It consists in a jumble of what I thought was best in 2011.
The Global Revolt of 2011:
What is often portrayed as a number of discrete events—The Arab Spring, The Indignados, The Greek Riots, The English Riots, The Occupy Movement etc.—should really be seen as a widespread, and long overdue, global revolt against the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism. I was excited and inspired by many of the waves of this revolt. I took part in others. I also had problems with aspects of it. I think it was smart to frame much of the rhetoric in terms of calls for ‘real democracy’ and the ‘99%.’ As slogans they were easily understood and appealed to people from a range of backgrounds and political orientations. In 2012, however, I hope the criticisms move beyond these slogans to a criticism of how the capitalist system functions and why it necessarily produces a class antagonism, financial disparity, exploitation and domination. I also hope the moves to occupy foreclosed homes, abandoned spaces etc. and efforts at debt refusal pick up.
The Return of Marx:
Greenspan, hell even Keynes, don’t cut the mustard when it comes to explanations of or solutions to the crisis.
Communisation:
How do we abolish the capitalist social form and its related forms of antagonism? Communisation is a problematic that tries to answer this question by theorizing the creation of communism under our total subsumption by capital as a process that negates value, class, gender etc. As theorized by Theorie Communiste, End Notes and others in SIC and Communisation and Its Discontents, communisation addresses the systematic nature of the capitalist social form and its overcoming in manner that possesses critical relevance for the global revolt:
“The abolition of capital, i.e. the revolution and the production of communism, is immediately the abolition of all classes and therefore of the proletariat. This occurs through the communisation of society, which is abolished as a community separated from its elements. Proletarians abolish capital by the production of a community immediate to its elements ; they transform their relations into immediate relations between individuals. Relations between singular individuals that are no longer the embodiment of a social category, including the supposedly natural categories of the social sexes of woman and man. Revolutionary practice is the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-transformation.” (from the editorial in SIC 1 available at www.sic.communisation.net)
The Republican Presidential Election:
The perverse electoral process at its most perverse is also the best reality show of the year. A freak-show in which the candidates compete to try to out do their opponents bigoted regressive policies and 1950’s clip art style grooming.
Freedom 1590 AM:
Right wing talk radio in Seattle that proves the paranoid style of American politics is alive and well. A portal into an alternate universe where the Nazi’s were left wing and evangelical Christianity is under attack. The tributes to Christopher Hitchens were particularly perverse.
Manifestos:
The Automatic Insurrectionary Manifesto Generator http://www.objectivechance.com/automatic_insurrection, The International Werewolf Conspiracy.
Music:
I usually listen to music while studying. For some reason I find that avant-garde kinds of doom/drone/black metal are the best for studying. So I spent a lot of time listening to the following new albums: Loss-Despond, Yob-Atma, Krallice-Diotima, Wolves in the Throne Room—Celestial Lineage, Big Business Quadruple Single and unreleased songs by The Whip I found online. I also loved the new Comet Gain.
Films:
Le Havre, The Muppet movie and The Black Power Mix-tape were the only new films I saw in the theatre in 2011. They were all good but not great. I also saw a showing of Freaks at the theatre. It was awesome. The great films I saw on DVD were the jimmy Stewart westerns by Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang westerns, Buster Keaton two reelers, Beaches of Agnes and Fassbinder’s the Niklashausen Journey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0U0tn8W-8I
TV:
Re-watching Deadwood, which tells the story of manifest destiny from primitive accumulation to formal and real subsumption through a violent bunch of sociopaths who are covered in shit while engaging in a lotta swearing and a lotta drinking.
Books:
Scam and On the Lower Frequencies by Erick Lyle, The Third Reich and Between Parentheses by Roberto Bolano, Ask the Dust by John Fante, The Sociology of Theodor Adorno by Mathias Benzer, Space, Difference and Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, The Concept of Nature in Marx and History and Structure by Alfred Schmidt, The Dialectics of Labour by Chris Arthur, Mike Davis’s writings on cities, Open Marxism and the Common Sense journal, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital by Michael Heinrich and Alex Locascio.
Other:
Revolutionary graves, ports, wandering in Portland, Seattle, Brighton, Rome, London, Oxford and Paris, the Czech photo exhibit in London, Gill’s sculptures, Taylor St Coffee and Tooktas café in Brighton. Aaron and Daily seeing Sonic Youth and eating at Del Posto.
The Global Revolt of 2011:
What is often portrayed as a number of discrete events—The Arab Spring, The Indignados, The Greek Riots, The English Riots, The Occupy Movement etc.—should really be seen as a widespread, and long overdue, global revolt against the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism. I was excited and inspired by many of the waves of this revolt. I took part in others. I also had problems with aspects of it. I think it was smart to frame much of the rhetoric in terms of calls for ‘real democracy’ and the ‘99%.’ As slogans they were easily understood and appealed to people from a range of backgrounds and political orientations. In 2012, however, I hope the criticisms move beyond these slogans to a criticism of how the capitalist system functions and why it necessarily produces a class antagonism, financial disparity, exploitation and domination. I also hope the moves to occupy foreclosed homes, abandoned spaces etc. and efforts at debt refusal pick up.
The Return of Marx:
Greenspan, hell even Keynes, don’t cut the mustard when it comes to explanations of or solutions to the crisis.
Communisation:
How do we abolish the capitalist social form and its related forms of antagonism? Communisation is a problematic that tries to answer this question by theorizing the creation of communism under our total subsumption by capital as a process that negates value, class, gender etc. As theorized by Theorie Communiste, End Notes and others in SIC and Communisation and Its Discontents, communisation addresses the systematic nature of the capitalist social form and its overcoming in manner that possesses critical relevance for the global revolt:
“The abolition of capital, i.e. the revolution and the production of communism, is immediately the abolition of all classes and therefore of the proletariat. This occurs through the communisation of society, which is abolished as a community separated from its elements. Proletarians abolish capital by the production of a community immediate to its elements ; they transform their relations into immediate relations between individuals. Relations between singular individuals that are no longer the embodiment of a social category, including the supposedly natural categories of the social sexes of woman and man. Revolutionary practice is the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-transformation.” (from the editorial in SIC 1 available at www.sic.communisation.net)
The Republican Presidential Election:
The perverse electoral process at its most perverse is also the best reality show of the year. A freak-show in which the candidates compete to try to out do their opponents bigoted regressive policies and 1950’s clip art style grooming.
Freedom 1590 AM:
Right wing talk radio in Seattle that proves the paranoid style of American politics is alive and well. A portal into an alternate universe where the Nazi’s were left wing and evangelical Christianity is under attack. The tributes to Christopher Hitchens were particularly perverse.
Manifestos:
The Automatic Insurrectionary Manifesto Generator http://www.objectivechance.com/automatic_insurrection, The International Werewolf Conspiracy.
Music:
I usually listen to music while studying. For some reason I find that avant-garde kinds of doom/drone/black metal are the best for studying. So I spent a lot of time listening to the following new albums: Loss-Despond, Yob-Atma, Krallice-Diotima, Wolves in the Throne Room—Celestial Lineage, Big Business Quadruple Single and unreleased songs by The Whip I found online. I also loved the new Comet Gain.
Films:
Le Havre, The Muppet movie and The Black Power Mix-tape were the only new films I saw in the theatre in 2011. They were all good but not great. I also saw a showing of Freaks at the theatre. It was awesome. The great films I saw on DVD were the jimmy Stewart westerns by Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang westerns, Buster Keaton two reelers, Beaches of Agnes and Fassbinder’s the Niklashausen Journey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0U0tn8W-8I
TV:
Re-watching Deadwood, which tells the story of manifest destiny from primitive accumulation to formal and real subsumption through a violent bunch of sociopaths who are covered in shit while engaging in a lotta swearing and a lotta drinking.
Books:
Scam and On the Lower Frequencies by Erick Lyle, The Third Reich and Between Parentheses by Roberto Bolano, Ask the Dust by John Fante, The Sociology of Theodor Adorno by Mathias Benzer, Space, Difference and Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, The Concept of Nature in Marx and History and Structure by Alfred Schmidt, The Dialectics of Labour by Chris Arthur, Mike Davis’s writings on cities, Open Marxism and the Common Sense journal, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital by Michael Heinrich and Alex Locascio.
Other:
Revolutionary graves, ports, wandering in Portland, Seattle, Brighton, Rome, London, Oxford and Paris, the Czech photo exhibit in London, Gill’s sculptures, Taylor St Coffee and Tooktas café in Brighton. Aaron and Daily seeing Sonic Youth and eating at Del Posto.
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