Avsnitt
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There's gold in them thar podcasts, I tell ya, GOLD!
Talking this time about Part Five of New York 2140, "Escalation of Commitment." We get what could be an ending--finding gold, rescuing Mutt & Jeff, confronting Henry Vinson--but isn't! Our characters are getting together and scheming how they might save the building by ignoring the law, even if that means bringing down the entire global financial system.
Thank you for listening, and thanks for your patience. It'll likely be a few weeks before we can get another episode out. But you can get your Matt & Hilary fix at the Wetwired Podcast soon, where Sean and Jules generously hosted us and we had a great conversation about all things KSR.
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In this episode (recorded a few days after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, hence the opening discussion), we talk about Part Four of New York 2140, "Expensive or Priceless?" Our (long) wide-ranging conversation takes a rather critical view of the novel, or at least this part of it. We're trying to suss out what the rest of the world outside New York looks like, and what the status of the "police state" is. To do this we start to talk about the book's concept of citizenship, which we'll have to continue in future episodes. We also try to think about what is "sticky" in this novel as regards our own world (the question of whether this is an allegory of the present or a vision of the future). While decarbonization has happened and the fossil fuel industry evidently demolished, a lot of the political and social structures and institutions of our present reality (which themselves are integral to the fossil fuel economy as well as capitalism writ large) appear relatively unchanged in 2140--the law, the Federal Reserve, the NYPD, the United States of America. However, we're also interested in other sticky social forms that New York 2140 seems to wrestle with, if not criticize: the couple form, the romance plot, the bourgeois family. And as ever, Robinson's novel also tends to valorize literature itself as not merely a utopian space, but a utopian action: after all, is not even the law itself a (flawed) attempt to write the world that we want to see into existence? Or is it?
Thanks for listening! Sorry for the long delay between episodes. We'll be out with a new episode shortly, but then alas there will likely be another long delay of at least a couple of weeks. Good thing we have the most patient fanbase in all of podcasting!
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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In this episode we discuss "Liquidity Trap," Part Three of Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. We talk about the citizen chapters and think about where to locate an authorial consciousness in this book, meditate on the difficulty of locating ourselves in a possibly ungraspable present between the "past" and "future," speculate on the explanatory power of numbers, ask about the status of the police state in the novel, and wonder whether this is a book about finance capital or about property. Among other things.
Thank you for listening! We will be back soon with another episode and then may be more than usually intermittent for a couple of weeks...but we'll see!
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Hello! This week we continue our conversation of New York 2140, talking about Part Two, "Expert Overconfidence," in which our various experts get in over their heads (some more literally than others--actually, all of them do it literally, since this is literature...anyway, we don't have time to sort this out right now). We talk about the nature of the future being envisioned here around food production, property, borders, and various overlapping layers of non-state governmentality, both visible and invisible. And, of course, polar bears.
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In this episode we declare there's not much to say, this is just a table-setting section of the novel, we won't discuss each and every subchapter, but then we talk for nearly two hours, starting with Matt and Hilary's Garden Round-Up. Then it's a shallow dive into Part One of NY2140, "The Tyranny of Sunk Costs." Hope you enjoy and we'll be back soon with Part Two!
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We're back from a long work- and life-related absence to fart around for a couple minutes trying to log in to our old accounts, and then we're off and running with the kind of meandering, half-baked musings you've all been missing lo these many months.
That's right, New York 2140 is the topic of our next season (series?) and we spend this episode recalling where and when we were when the book was published and pondering what it might mean today. Here's a novel that takes both place and literature itself very seriously, in a really fun way. A massively ambitious work, drawing on the literary imagination of New York as well as characteristic KSR ideas about ecology, climate change, and capitalism, inflected here through the aftershocks financial crisis of 2007-08, including the Occupy movement and the double meaning of "liquidity," NY2140 finds itself post-Obama, mid-Trump, pre-COVID, pre-AI pump-and-dump "revolution," pre--the-shit-really-starting-to-hit-the-fan-regarding-climate-change (i.e., pre-massive summerlong forest fires that golfers still manage to play through but that block out the sun for weeks at a time from Calgary to Chicago). It's still a book that imagines America as lying at the center of a global project of capitalist hegemony, if we recall correctly, and the stickiness of capital as a force that organizes society and politics is something we'll be paying close attention to, as well as the way the novel imagines collective and personal responses to crisis. Is this an optimistic or a pessimistic novel? Was it then? Does it envision an alternative to the eco-fascist path we seem to be on in this decade of "dithering"?
We do then talk about genuinely interesting things likegardening, Anya Taylor-Joy, Waterworld, weird Bryan Adams lyrics, and the relative quality of The Expanse and the joylessness of most contemporary TV, before dropping some really gratuitous spoilers about Red Mars. (This is NOT a spoiler-free podcast, for those just now joining).
Anyway, we're back, we hope to bring you new episodes every week over the course of what promises to be a deadly hot summer, and we're mostly excited to be here! We'll be back next week with Part One of NY2140, "The Tyranny of Sunk Costs," so head to your local bookstore, pick up a copy, and start reading!
Thanks for listening!
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Our review of Ridley Scott's Napoleon.
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We're still here! Grumpier than ever, complaining about things we probably shouldn't be, reading books, talking.
And you're still listening! Thank you. We've been away for a long time for...reasons. But we are momentarily back, and maybe we'll be back again soon to talk about Napoleon and Ridley Scott. But this time we chat about the impossibilities and injustices of the working day under capitalism, capitalist education (indoctrination) and entertainment (propaganda), and let you in on what we've been reading instead of KSR, namely:
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
LOTS of Philip K. Dick, especially Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Dr. Futurity, and Clans of the Alphane Moon
the crime noir novels of Jean-Patrick Manchette
The Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "Direction of the Road"
Grapes of Wrath
and Bartolome de las Casas, just as a pick-me-up
You cannot hear a cat purring at around 37:40, college students are planning for a future they don't believe will arrive, and we're all wondering when our last hot shower will happen.
Happy Thanksgiving, and please to enjoy.
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A very special episode of Marooned on Mars, a backdoor pilot, as they say in the biz, of Obstructed Viewing with friends of the pod returning-guest champion Bill and Dauphin Josh debuting their new movie podcast (has anyone ever done a podcast about movies before?).
The theme of the show today is sabotage and movies that feature it: The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964) and Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977).
If possible, you should watch these movies before listening, just so you know what the heck we’re talking about.
What is sabotage, who does it and why? Is terrorism sabotage by another name? What level of complicity does a saboteur need to have with the object or process that is the target of their sabotage? Why do people commit sabotage? How does sabotage relate to self-sabotage? Is it a negative or positive action? Is there a dialectics of sabotage? What is the good of sabotage in and of itself? What is the temporality of sabotage?
But more importantly, how awesome are these movies, huh? Lots of stuff going on in them that’s sabotage, and perhaps even more that’s not sabotage!
We talk about money, the national question, art, culture, modernity, economics, labor, politics, all the classic Marooned topics our listeners have grown accustomed to love and expect.
With a special appearance by Slavoj Zizek.
Follow Obstructed Viewing on your podcast app of preference! Marooned will be back sooner or later with more of whatever it is we do.
Thanks for listening!
Find Obstructed Viewing at obstructedviewpod.com, here, or wherever you get your p'casts!
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In our final reckoning with GALILEO'S DREAM, we talk about our horrible voices and their dumb verbal tics, the trickiness of time travel narratives, anticlimactic moments, conspiratorial webs, the decentering of Event, crabbing sideways toward the good, rocking, the universal unity of grief, and Milton doing TikTok dances.
Thanks for listening! We'll be back later, probably with a movie episode or several. You can let us know what you'd like us to read next by emailing or tweeting. Stop donating to our podcast!
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This episode we discuss the Jovian society, the way the novel posits the relationship between science and religion, the entwined logics of extraction and redemption, the astrological epistemology, ecstasy, the our own Thirty+ Years War, and whales.
Thanks for listening!
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In probably our greatest episode ever, Matt and Ms. Partial Sentence talk about all the stuff we normally talk about, like Shark Tank, redemption, helmets, jazz, the Divine Comedy, and Constructivism. Plus Matt does drugs.
Stay tuned to the very end to hear our next-level casting idea for who should play Galileo in the movie adaptation. The answer may shock and surprise you!
Thanks for listening!
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Buongiorno! We're back with another thrilling series of discussions, and back to our author of choice, Kim Stanley Robinson. This time around we're discussing his weird and wonderful 2009 novel Galileo's Dream!
Lots to talk about here, like history and who it's for, narrational voice, genre, science's relationship to religion, politics, money, power, and labor, and, of course, cats.
For this book our conversations will focus more on big themes rather than a narrative blow-by-blow. So: spoilers ahead! (Oh, and we also discuss the concept of spoilers with relation to this book.) This episode covers roughly the first hundred pages or so, though again our conversation is mostly conceptual and thematic. But it was a fun talk to have, hopefully a fun one to listen to, about a book that is super super fun!
Thanks for listening!
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This week, we apologize for discussing STEALTH, an extended Incubus music video/ American military propaganda directed by Rob Cohen.
Join us as we discuss the exploits of Ben "Big" Gannon (Talon 1, Josh "George" Lucas), Kara "Caraway" Wade (Talon 2, Jessica Biel), and Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx (Talon 3, "Henry"), as they face the threat of global terrorism and technological job precarity at the hands of EDI (Extreme Deep Invader), a VLO (Very Low Observable) UCAV (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle), call sign Tin Man. If that isn't enough names for you, please listen to us talk about this quasi-post-western of the GWOT era and wrestle with the moral conundrums surrounding the question of who, when, and where to drop bombs and "get these bastards." The answers may surprise you! (They are "the bad guys," "always," and "over there.")
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This week we are reading a very special, wonderful book, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi from Common Notions.
Told as a series of interviews by two ageing ex-academics (because academia has been, thankfully, finally, abolished), Everything for Everyone depicts a future in which the central organizing force of human society is the Commune. Emerging unevenly, violently, and somewhat spontaneously around the world at various times and in various forms, the Commune is the form society takes when needs are met and the ubiquitous crises of everyday life under capitalism are addressed head-on. Ordinary people tell their own stories of bringing about and sustaining this post-capital, post-commodity, post-gender, post-state future.
Matt and Hilary discuss how this book makes a problem of narrative itself, as well as many of the beautiful features of the world depicted. Care and community are the focus of everyday life, but the book also acknowledges that "care" and "community" are not, and have never been, static concepts. Rather, they are always changing, and the project of human living-together is precisely the work required to meet those ever-changing needs. We see characters bringing about the new ways of life by doing them, by living them. At the same time, the future depicted is not without pain, trauma, or struggle. Rather, trauma--in all its forms--take center stage as the thing to be addressed, worked on, overcome, and healed in a social organization worthy of the name. The Commune here is not a form yet to come, but rather something that's constantly being built.
We talk about crisis, the myth of property, technology, nostalgia, commitment to a social whole, gestation, and writing a future for ourselves, that includes ourselves. We also find potential parallels to KSR, William Morris, Octavia Butler, and Marge Piercy.
Buy this book! And get an extra copy for a friend, family member, or enemy, and make them read it and talk to you about it!
Thanks for listening!
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WARNING: This podcast is a paid advertisement, for a book. The payment for the advertisement that this podcast is was the book that this podcast is advertising. So, it’s not really “paid,” in the sense that the IRS should not worry about this.
In this very special episode of Marooned on Mars, we discuss the recently released anthology Tomorrow's Parties: Life in the Anthropocene, edited by Jonathan Strahan and published by MIT Press.
We manage to touch on every story in the collection, at least in passing! And in this episode we try our best to minimize spoilers, considering the format of the texts we’re reading and their recent publication. Featuring stories by Meg Elison, Tade Thompson, Daryl Gregory, Greg Egan, Sarah Gailey, Justina Robson, Chen Quifan, Malka Older, Saad Z. Hossain, and James Bradley, artwork by Sean Bodley, and an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, Tomorrow's Parties touches on many themes that that should be familiar to our listeners: political economy and ecology, trying to make history while living with the legacies of the past, the weirdness of being burdened with a body, capitalism and wage labor. Described by Strahan in the introduction as neither hopepunk nor material for doomscrolling, the stories here are imaginative and engaging, and well worth checking out (if you're into that kind of thing).
Next up we'll be doing a deep-ish dive into Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, published by Common Notions. There will be spoilers, so buy it and read it! (You won't be sorry!)
Thanks for listening!
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In the thrilling conclusion to our conversation about ALIEN: COVENANT, the final (so far) installment of the ALIEN franchise, Matt, Hilary, and Bill talk about Walter, David, and robots that (mis)quote poetry and Ridley Scott's placement of himself in a line of artists stretching from Milton to Shelley to David Lean. More on empire and settler colonialism, automythopoesis and Old Hollywood, the "perfect" organism, love and disappointment, the diversity of forms and difference, good and bad Christians, science vs. luck, and rudely interrupted shower sex.
We'll be back eventually to cover ALIEN VS. PREDATOR, and soon to talk about some books!
Thanks for listening!
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Part 1 of 2!
In our final episode of our miniseries exploring the Alien franchise, Matt and Hilary, joined by the inimitable Bill, discuss Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott's second non-prequel, released in 2017. We like this installment quite a bit, and have a lot of fun picking it apart. We talk wheat (the grain!), xenomorph kitty kats (to protect the grain!), and interstellar neoliberal postmodern settler colonialism (to grow the grain! and build a cabin!).
Also pregnancy, reproduction, embryos, history and/ of/ by prequels, robots with accents, and kinship.
Back very soon with part 2!
Thanks for listening!
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The fifth and penultimate episode in our ALIEN Franchise series. Joined once again by Bill, we discuss Ridley Scott's return with Prometheus (2012), starring Noomi Rapace (pronounce as you will), Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, and that guy from UPGRADE (a really good sci-fi action movie).
We spend a lot of this episode making fun of this movie instead of properly analyzing it. You can blame Matt for that. We even skip over most of its imagination of reproduction—which we will address in the next episode!
What we do talk about is puffy humanoid aliens who might be related to Jesus, the way corporations express love, TED Talks, vulgar Nietzscheanism, Frankenstein, Lawrence of Arabia, the Tower of Babel, intelligent design, and Armond White.
Thanks for listening!
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We're back, with our discussion of a serious piece of shit, Alien: Resurrection, the Joss Whedon-scripted, Jean-Pierre Jeunet-directed, 1997 mess that concludes the Ripley arc of the Alien franchise. We hate this movie, and unfortunately for you, we talk about it for an hour and a half! If you've never seen it, you might have to suffer through it just to understand what the hell we're talking about, so: our apologies.
This disasterpiece is full of anxiety about sex, panic about gender, and downright hatred of women. It's an abysmal example of what Matt terms late-1990s Hollywood Baroque, containing no ideas and making no sense. The phrase "it raises more questions than it answers" could be used here, but only in the worst way, because Alien: Resurrection isn't even interested in the questions it raises in the first place, let alone answering them. Why, for instance, does whiskey come in solid cubes? Why does the Ripley clone know how to fly a spaceship but not how to work a fork? Why doesn't Christie just shake his foot to free himself from the grip of a dead xenomorph? Is that fingernail polish or are her nails actually that color? (And by the way, if you know the name of the popular late-90s nail polish that Hilary references, please let us know)? The answers: stop thinking about it, pigs! Just eat your popcorn and shut up!
This movie made us so mad we didn't even notice the distinct and fatal absence of cats.
So, again, sorry, but it's not our fault this movie exists. At least Prometheus will be pretty to look at.
Thanks for listening, and sorry!
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- Visa fler
