Dennis Perrin is the guest this week and we discuss the low art of comedy. Dennis is the author of Mister Mike the Man Who Made Comedy Dangerous, a stand-up comic himself, and a regular on the Diet Soap podcast.

I'd like to thank my subscribers who donate monthly. That would be John L, Andrew M, Jacob L, and Ted F. Also, if you're a fan of the Diet Soap Podcast why not leave a review on iTunes? If you'd like to donate you can find the buttons at douglaslain.com and at dietsoap.podomatic.com but keep in mind that my Kickstarter campaign for the Diet Soap Tour "Think the Impossible" is coming soon.

There are many sound clips in this episode. There are clips of Michael O'Donoghue, Jonathan Winters, George Carlin, Robin Williams, and a bit of stand-up from Mr. Perrin himself.

Here's a clip from an essay Perrin recently penned for the online comedy magazine Splitsider:

I can't think of an American comedian more revered and respected than Jonathan Winters. (There's Jack Benny, for those who remember him.) Winters created a world where you were welcome, but you had to keep pace. His rapid-fire mind took hairpin turns. The inattentive might be left in his dust.

Winters was one of the more offbeat performers in mainstream comedy. He was as polished as Hope. As graceful as Gleason. As biting as Rickles. Yet Winters pushed it further. Breathed different oxygen. No matter how far out he went, Winters was accepted and cherished in the most conservative venues.. Read More at Splitsider.

This week instead of an expert interview you'll hear my son Benjamin and I discuss the television show Arrested Development, Hipsters, and Hegel. We cover the section on the Law of the Heart in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and try to make sense of gibberish like this:

"This ordinance is the sphere of perversion. For in that this ordinance is the law of all hearts, in that all individuals are immediately this universal, it is a reality which is only that of self-existing individuality, i.e. of the heart. When consciousness therefore sets up the law of its heart, it finds itself resisted by others because it conflicts with the equally individual laws of their heart; and the latter in opposing it are doing nothing else but setting up in their turn and making valid their own law."

You can also find me discussing similar subject over on Jason Horsley's new website Crucial Fictions.

I'd like to thank my subscribers who donate monthly again. That would be John L, Andrew M, Jacob L, Tracy V, and Ted F. If you'd like to donate you can find the buttons at douglaslain.com and at dietsoap.podomatic.com but you might consider that my Kickstarter campaign for the Diet Soap Tour "Think the Impossible" is coming soon. There are many sound clips in this episode. There are clips of Arrested Development, Norman Mailer, Dairy Queen, Europe, and the youtube star Kazookeylele.

The guest this week is Jason Horsley and we start to discuss his most current project called "Crucial Fictions" and specifically a chapter of his book "The Prisoner of Infinity" wherein he examines Whitely Strieber's reported experiences as it relates to Horsley's own conceptions of trauma, but we quickly diverge from his text as we spiral around the central concept of trauma itself. Jason Horsley is the author of many books including Matrix Warrior: Being the One and The Secret Life of Movies, and he is a regular guest on the Diet Soap podcast. If you visit his website crucialfiction.com you'll be able to listen to the raw recording of this conversation in its entirety.

I'd like to thank my subscribers who donate monthly to the podcast. That would be John L, Andrew M, Jacob L, Tracy V, and Ted F. If you'd like to donate you can find the buttons at douglaslain.com and at dietsoap.podomatic.com, however I'll be running a Kickstarter campaign in June and July and people who are thinking of donating might hold off and help out with that.

There are many sound clips in this episode. You'll hear from Alenka Zupancic, Slavoj Zizek, Ryan Gosling in the movie Half Nelson, Sebastian Horsley discussing his propensity to cause himself trouble, and the Sesame Street Pinball song.

John Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. He is a critic of civilization and especially agriculture and he wants to return to a more primitive collective life. He advocates the nomadic life of prehistoric hunters and gatherers as a potential future.

Zerzan was the guest on Pop the Left #4 where we discussed the idea of reification and took a close look at Zerzan's own notion of nature. This month on Pop the Left C Derick Varn and I speak briefly about the Zerzan interview.

Clips from an interview with Steven Vogel on the radio program Against the Grain, of George Bush singing an REM song, and from Monty Python's Life of Brian can be heard in this one, and Varn and I discuss potential future guests.

Nicholas Pell is again absent, but plans to return for a future episode wherein we'll discuss historical materialism.

You can now leave a voicemail message for Pop the Left and participate in the show. Just head to speakpipe.com/poptheleft and leave us a message.

The guest this week is Jay Gertzman and we discuss his book Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist. Samuel Roth was a literary pirate, a purveyor of smut, and a champion of high modernism. For instance Roth published the dirty bits from James Joyce's Ulysses as a serial in his literary journal Two Worlds Monthly.

It's Wednesday, April 24th, 2013. I'm Douglas Lain the host of the podcast, and this week the secret word is "masturbation" and here's an excerpt from Samuel Roth on the subject.

Diet Soap relies on donations, but rather than make my usual plea for help through paypal I'm actually going to tell you to hold off. I'm about to run a Kickstarter campaign to fund a US Diet Soap tour under the banner "Think the Impossible." In fact, I just finished editing the Kickstarter video a few days ago and if you'd like to watch the video all you need do to get a sneak peek is join the Diet Soap International Facebook group. It's much more an exploration of the ideas of Henri Lefebvre through a decidedly Hegelian lens than it is a straight forward call for funds, so I encourage everyone who is listening to check it out. Also, if you like Diet Soap but can't afford a donation, why not share the podcast with a friend or write a review of the show on iTunes.

There is some smut in this episode of Diet Soap. For example, at the end, you'll hear a bit of Molly Bloom's soliloquy. You'll hear a bit more than this:

...shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

The music you're listening to right now is an instrumental cover of the Violent Femmes Blister in The Sun as covered by the Vitamin String Quartet but in just a moment you'll be listening to Gertzman and I discuss Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist.

This week I discuss Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit with my lovely wife Miriam. We take on the section entitled Pleasure and Necessity and discuss how Jan Svankmajer's film Conspirators of Pleasure seems to enact Hegel's critique.

Diet Soap relies on donations and if you'd like to donate you can find the paypal buttons on douglaslain.com and at the podomatic page for Diet Soap. On the other hand, in the next few weeks I'll be starting a Kickstarter campaign in order to fund a Diet Soap tour that called "Think the Impossible!" You can get more information by following me on Facebook, tweeting me on twitter, putting me in a Google Plus circles, or by gassing me, kidnapping me, transporting me to a village on a mysterious island, interrogating me mercilessly, and taking away my name and leaving me with only a number.

Here's a quick explanation of Hegel and Self-Conscious desire:

Our self-consciousness, this way of seeing or perceiving, seeks an object as something alien from itself, it seeks to enjoy this object and in enjoying it to understand the distinction between the self-consciousness and its object as something that belongs to self-consciousness. We cease to live for ourselves, but in seeking to enjoy our separation from the world, we lose ourselves to this universal category of separation.

The guest this week the University lecturer and no good commie C Derick Varn. Varn and I discuss the ideas of the French historian, literary critic, and philosopher Rene Girard while also taking Siskel and Ebert as our subjects.

Diet Soap relies on donations and if you'd like to donate you can find the paypal buttons on douglaslain.com and at the podomatic page for Diet Soap. In the next month I'll be starting a Kickstarter campaign in order to fund a Diet Soap tour that I plan to call "Think the Impossible!" but that shouldn't stop you from kicking in a fiver or a tener now.

Per wikipedia Rene Girard was:

a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. He is the author of nearly thirty books (see below), in which he developed the ideas of:
mimetic desire: all of our desires are borrowed from other people;
mimetic rivalry: all conflict originates in mimetic desire;
the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry;
the Bible reveals the three previous ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.

Siskel and Ebert, on the other hand, were:

...two film critics [who] shared their opinions of newly released films. Their program aired under various names. Its original hosts were Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times and WLS-TV and Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune and WBBM-TV.

The guest this week Michael Karman. Karman is the editor of Asymmetry Music Magazine, a magazine dedicated to exposing the general public to new and interesting art music, and we discuss how to listen, the problem of tradition, concrete music, John Cage, Coca-Cola bottles and more.

The music and sound in this episode includes A String Quartet playing Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, Lady Gaga herself only mashed up, reversed, and filtered, an excerpt of Michael Rodd from the BBC 1979 documentary "The New Sound of Music," Emmanuelle-Gibello's "Crashtest 10," Ernst Krenek's "Sinfonia no. 4", John Cage talking about Coca-Cola bottles, and Luc Ferrari's "Exploitation of Concepts."

I want to thank Jacob L, Andrew M, Tracy V, Ted F, and John L who are regular subscribers to the podcast. I also want to thank Terry T, Andrew M (a second time), Adrien S, and Babafemi M for their very generous one time donations. If you'd like to donate you can find the paypal buttons on douglaslain.com and at the podomatic page for Diet Soap. And in the next two months I'll be starting a Kickstarter campaign in order to fund a Diet Soap tour that I plan to call "Think the Impossible!"

The music you're listening to right now is Paul's Dance by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, but in just a moment you'll be listening to Michael Karman and I discuss How to Listen to the New.

This month both C Derick Varn and Nicholas Pell are missing and instead there is a special guest. John Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author.  He's fairly well known, especially in the Pacific Northwest where I am, and his books about Green Anarchism have been influential.  But we don't really talk about the environment, agriculture, or civilization, but rather I try to explain what I think is Zerzan's conceptual or philosophical mistake.

For Zerzan civilized life is a mediated or alienated life that isn't worth living and his solution is to return to directly lived experience. What I try to point out in my conversation with him is that his solution is a part of the problem.  That is, while he wants to overcome the problem of reification his solution doesn't manage to avoid that mistake.

The word reification means to mistake an abstraction for a physical or empirical object. A reification is not when we see an example of an abstraction in the world, it's not when we take a rubber ball and think of it as an example of roundness, but rather when we take an abstraction to be its own example.  That is, when we think that an abstraction can exist on its own without an example.

There are many ideas that are founded on this mistake.  God, for instance, is the kind of idea that is a good example of a reification. Nature is, similarly, the same kind of idea.

Again, my conversation with John Zerzan wasn't about prehistory or hunters and gatherers or the current ecological problems that are facing us, but was aimed at his concepts.  It was aimed at his idea that we might be able to escape concepts, which I think is his fundamental mistake.

The guest this week is David Blacker. A professor in the school of education at the University of Delaware, Blacker is the the author of several books including Dying to Teach and, most recently, the Falling Rate of Learning.

The abstract of the book reads, in part: "As profits fall and finance rises, capitalism has at this point shifted into a mode of elimination, where human beings—and all life—are now precariously positioned as waste material undergoing managed disposal.
The education system is caught in the throes of this eliminationism across a number of fronts: crushing student debt, impatience with student expression, the looting of vestigial public institutions and, finally, as coup de grâce, an abandonment of the historic ideal of universal education."

This week I want to thank my regular subscribers for their continuing donations to the podcast, and to thank Babafemi M for his donation. If you're thinking about donating you can find the button at douglaslain.com or at the podomatic page for Diet Soap. In the next few months I hope to start a Kickstarter campaign in order to fund a Diet Soap Tour. My novel entitled Billy Moon will be coming out in late August and I'm organizing three events in three cities. I'll be headed to San Francisco, Chicago, and New York for the Think the Impossible Diet Soap tour, and each even will be a live version of the Diet Soap podcast. Guests will include the pop philosopher Daniel Coffeen, the journalist Margaret Kimberley from the Black Agenda Report, Christ Cutrone from the Platypus Affiliated Society, McKenzie Wark author of The Beach Beneath the Street and the Hacker Manifesto, and the economist Andrew Kliman from the Marxist Humanist Initiative. As I say, I'll be raising funds on Kickstarter in order to pay for the trip and accommodations. The idea is that, once I raise enough to cover the initial cost of the trip, donors to the tour will set my itinerary, creating additional stops as I traverse the country by rail.

The music you're listening to right now is Different Trains by Steve Reich, but in just a moment you'll be listening to David Blacker and I discuss the Falling Rate of Learning.

There is no guest this week. Instead my son Benjamin and I discuss Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The section on The Realisation of Rational Self-Consciousness through its Own Activity is seen through the television program Lost.

For those of you who haven't watched the show, Lost is, per wikipedia "an American television series that was originally aired on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) from September 22, 2004 to May 23, 2010, consisting of six seasons. Lost is a drama series containing elements of science fiction and the supernatural that follows the survivors of the crash of a commercial passenger jet flying between Sydney and Los Angeles, on a mysterious tropical island somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean."

We also discussed the XKCD comic entitled Lego.

This week I want to thank my regular subscribers for their continuing donations to the podcast, and I want to urge everyone listening to donate, to follow me on Facebook, and join the new Diet Soap International Facebook group. Upcoming episodes of Diet Soap will include conversations with David Blacker and Michael Karman from Asymmetry Music Magazine.

The music you're listening to right now is Locke's Theme from the television show Lost. In just a moment you'll be listening to Benjamin and I discuss Rational Self-Consciousness through our Own Activity.

C Derick Varn and Douglas Lain return for the third episode of Pop the Left, a podcast dedicated to moving beyond the impasse in Left politics. This week we take a look at conspiracy theories, the psychology behind them, and the Left's inability to cope with the prevalence of this approach to politics. Does the bourgeois left benefit from conspiracy thinking? Can we get beyond our own tendency to blame conspiracies for our ideological and political failures? Was 9/11 an inside Job? Did we ever land on the moon? What about entryism?

Three years out of the Zero years and the attendant Bush administration, are we finally ready to face up to the how the Left turned over radical politics to the likes of Alex Jones and David Icke?

Next time on Pop the Left Nicholas Pell will return. Possible subjects to mull over: What is Historical Materialism? What should we make of the Arab Spring? Marxist Humanism and the Self Thinking Idea.

Do you have a suggestion or topic you'd like to hear us discuss? Leave a comment. Special thanks to the North Star blog for helping to promote Popping the Left.

The guest this week is the author and professor Jodi Dean. Professor Jodi Dean teaches political theory at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, and she recently blogged about a chapter from Gilles Dauve and Francois Martin's book The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement. We discuss her blog entry and the book in this week's episode.

It's Wednesday, February 13th, 2013 and I'm Douglas Lain, the host of the Diet Soap podcast.

This week I want to thank Michael T and Brandon F for their one time donations to the podcast, and I want to urge everyone listening to follow me on Facebook and join the new Diet Soap International Facebook group. I also want to tell Shane and Michael P that I haven't forgotten about sending copies of my dusty memoir Pick Your Battle your way.

Upcoming episodes of Diet Soap will include conversations with Jason Horsley, David Blacker, and my son Benjamin. Also a conversation with the primitivist John Zerzan is brewing for a future episode of Pop the Left.

The music you're listening to is the Beethoven's Ode to Joy played in tribute to the Late James DePreist, who was the music director for the Oregon Symphony from 1980 to 2003. James DePreist was a student of Leonard Bernstein's and a Portland icon, and he died on February 8th this year. In just a moment you'll be listening to Jodi Dean and I discuss The Subject of Capitalism.

The guest this week is TJ Clark. TJ Clark is an art historian and a former member of the Situationist International. His paper For a Left with No Future has gotten quite a bit of attention over the last six months, and this essay is the subject of our discussion this week. My hero Slavoj Zizek has supported this essay saying "We have to admit the grain of truth in this simplified bleak vision which seems to sap the very possibility of a proper political Event: perhaps, we should effectively renounce the myth of a Great Awakening—the moment when (if not the old working class then) a new alliance of the dispossessed, multitude or whatever, will gather its forces and master a decisive intervention."

In my conversation with TJ Clark he contradicts this interpretation, saying that he does believe in the ability of the people to make a spontaneous revolution, and yet he continues to advocate a tragic vision.

It's Wednesday, February 6th, 2013 (well past the Eschaton) and I'm Douglas Lain, the host of the Diet Soap podcast.

Okay. So the Podomatic feed is up and running again and I'm slowly uploading the back catalog for the podcast. So you can subscribe to the podcast through my website douglaslain.com or through podomatic, and you might get email alerts as I upload old podcasts.

I also want to urge you donate to Diet Soap and to tell your friends about the podcast. While I'm aware of how dreadfully Marxist the podcast has become I also believe that I haven't wandered away from real human concerns here. My goal for 2013 is to continue on, to hold tight to the direction the podcast has found, while also returning to the sense of desperate improvisation that founded this thing. The strange moment that I'm in is this: I believe more firmly than ever in Value theory and Marx's critique of Capital while I'm simultaneously convinced that we are as far away from resolving the deadlock of Capitalism as we've ever been.

In any case you can find the donate button at douglaslain.com and at dietsoap.podomatic.com.

In this episode you'll here clips from older episodes of this podcast and of Talking Art. My son Benjamin and I discussed the Arab Spring and Manet's painting Luncheon in the Grass for Diet Soap and the now defunct One Thousand Words podcast. (I'd love to revive that second effort, although editing an art podcast was very time consuming.) This conversation with TJ Clark represents a culmination or conclusion for Diet Soap. Without meaning to I think we've reached a turning point here.

This week on the Diet Soap channel: Pop the Left #2

Pop the Left is currently a special program done irregularly with C Derick Varn (a University Lecturer living in Jeonju) and Nicholas Pell (a freelancer writer and cynic living in LA) and this episode features a conversation with Varn as we dissect just why Anarchists are so different, so appealing, while Marxists look like they've spent the evening coughing into their overgrown beards and forgetting to clip their fingernails.

The other question we ask is why is it that Anarchists and Marxists alike can't really think past Capitalism.

However, the weird thing is that by the end of this second episode we've stumbled into our unconscious and end up in a seemingly never ending stream of penises...I mean Freudian slips.

Enjoy!

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