Top Ten

ArtForum, Nov, 2002 by Sam Durant

9 HATRED OF CAPITALISM: A SEMIOTEXT(E) READER Best title yet (thanks to Jack Smith, who came up with it) and with anti-intellectualism so rampant these days, I can't help myself. Eileen Myles opens the book with "An American Poem," a blast from Massachusetts--" I am a Kennedy. / Shouldn't we all be Kennedys?" Helene Cixous's essay "The Writing, Always the Writing" is a great parallel to Myles's poem. The two works confront alienation and the sense that you're not at home in your own home. Slyly compiled, this anthology brings together fiction, narrative, philosophy, and critical theory without imposing a hierarchy among genres.

10 KILLDOZER, UNCOMPROMISING WAR ON ART UNDER THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT A brilliant, hilarious "concept" album with footnoted liner notes that needle academic Marxism while cunningly introducing Simone Weil, Ramsey Clark, and Eugene V. Debs to disenfranchised working-class kids. Though released in 1994, songs like "Enemy of the People" (about Wal-Mart's happy-faced ruthlessness) and "Turkey Shoot" (about the press's slavish complicity with Bush Sr.'s Gulf War) remain, unfortunately, entirely relevant.