Mills is right to call Will Oldham remarks about Wes Anderson’s soundtracks what they are: stupid. Oldham says of Anderson that “his completely cancerous approach to using music is basically, ‘Here’s my iPod on shuffle, and here’s my movie.’ The two are just thrown together.” Right, naturally, because all those Mark Mothersbaugh original compositions that make up fully half of Wes Anderson’s soundtracks were just kicking around on the latter’s iPod.

Oldham also seems wrong to me because so much of what makes Anderson’s films our own is precisely that his iPod looks just like ours; his movies wouldn’t be half as memorable if their scenes weren’t so tightly coupled with these songs we grew up with, these songs we know every word of by heart.

Like when Steve Zissou first learns that Ned is his son and marches to the prow of the ship to light up a joint, the distant lights of the bay framing the Belafonte in glimmering panoramas—could that shot be even remotely as beautiful were it not paired with the crescendo of Bowie’s “Life on Mars”?

Or later, when Zissou finally meets his white whale, would the sight of this broken, worn-down, flawed old man, comically stuffed inside the cabin of the Jacqueline Deep Search with his estranged wife, his motley crew of accidental marine biologists, his producer, his nemesis, his beloved, and his bond company stooge—would this scene be able to bring us to tears were it not for Sigur Rós?

Or when Max Fischer finally get his dance with the much older and more mature Ms. Cross, there could be no better coda for this moment in which all the ignorance and bad behavior of this precocious and innocent kid get swept under the rug than for Rod Stewart to deliver a message from Fischer’s future—and all of ours, inevitably—in “Ooh La La”.

Or when Margot Tenenbaum steps off the Green Line bus to meet Richie at the pier and you see her and you’re like yeah you’re Gwyneth Paltrow and you’re a total babe and I’ve had a serious crush on you ever since “Shakespeare in Love”, but add Nico’s “These Days” to the equation and all of a sudden it’s like oh my god you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen and I’d give anything just for you to be my nine-fingered adopted sister so that I could fall tragically in love with you and slit my wrists in the bathroom to Elliot Smith.

Andrew Ross Sorkin:

Morgan Stanley received a $9 billion investment from Mitsubishi UFJ in the fall of 2008 that kept the firm from collapsing. The payment was supposed to be wired electronically, but because it needed to be made on an emergency basis on a holiday, Mitsubishi cut a physical check, perhaps the largest ever written.

So I’m sitting on the can, distracting myself with the fine print on the packaging of an unopened roll of SCOTT® 1000 Tissue (“Giving you five times more sheets than most other brands’ regular rolls. It lasts and lasts, making it a value that you and your family can count on.”), when I start obsessing over the data points for these one thousand 4.5”x3.7” squares oblongs of tissue paper.

After some rough calculations I determine that I’m holding ~112 square feet of toilet paper in my left hand.

After some further calculations I determine that I’m holding 57% of the square footage of my entire fucking studio apartment in this roll of toilet paper.

“The stupendous productive power developing under the capitalist mode of production relatively to population, and the increase, though not in the same proportion, of capital values (not their material substance), which grow much more rapidly than the population, contradict the basis, which, compared to the expanding wealth, is ever narrowing and for which this immense productive power works, and the conditions, under which capital augments its value. This is the cause of crises.”

Jace Cooke, my very best friend in the world, has spent the past several months working alongside the superlatively awesome Justin Shaffer and a team of thoroughly rad guys building a business called Hot Potato, the first Williamsburg startup to raise over $1 million in venture. They’ve been busy creating new ways to help friends connect and collaborate around live events.

Justin unveiled Hot Potato moments ago at the TechCrunch RealTime CrunchUp, and while “CrunchUp” may be the only word capable of turning my stomach even more than “TweetUp”, I just couldn’t be happier for them.

Hats off to you, guys. I hope you’re all as proud of each other as I am.

“City resident Mark Little said he’s so genuinely tantalized with Palin and her book that he said ‘it will be the first book I’ve ever read.’”

This is at once the most amazing and the most depressing thing I’ve seen in a long time: I laughed and cried and threw up in my mouth the whole way through each of the three minutes and thirteen seconds until its bitter end.

As if bringing in $200 million in annual revenue thanks in no small part to an affiliate marketing scam wasn’t enough, Zynga executives have another reason not to sleep at night: viciously snatching the promise of a meaningful and rewarding life from the flower of youth with shitty Facebook games.

(I kid. [Sort of?])

I think this was my shining moment on the internet. I’ll only go downhill from here.

Jamison Foser hit a home run in today’s MediaMatters with regard to the massive orgy the media are having over Sarah Palin right now, and one part stood out for me in particular. In an exchange between MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Meet the Press host David Gregory, the latter said:

It’s extraordinary, and, I mean, she’s extraordinary from that point of view of not just the book. I mean, all this year, it’s as if she’s like a senator or something. I mean, she issues statements and posts things on Facebook as if she’s an incumbent or if she’s a candidate for something.

To which Foser appropriately responded:

Palin “posts things on Facebook” and it’s “as if she’s like a senator or something.” Yeah, “or something”: There are about 300 million people who post things on Facebook. Posting things on Facebook doesn’t mean you’re behaving like a senator; it means you’re behaving like someone who has a pulse and an Internet connection. But David Gregory finds it extraordinary and senatorial that Sarah Palin does so.

Somehow anything this woman does is remarkable to these idiots, and yet only 23 percent of the country has a favorable opinion of the woman and a whopping 71 percent think she’s not even qualified to be President. The only reason she remains on the radar is because the beltway media insist on keeping her there.

But what really terrifies me is the following thought experiment: imagine someone who knew nothing of politics decided to take an interest in government. Imagine she had two methods at her disposal for informing herself. On the one hand, she could discuss politics with her peers. On the other, she could turn to the fourth estate for her news.

Were she to simply talk with her peers she’d have a 71% chance of running into someone who would tell her that Sarah Palin is a hack. Were she to turn to our media, however, our watchdogs, the institution on which we rely to keep our democracy healthy, she’d have a 100% chance of being told that a woman whose political experience consisted of a half-term in the Alaska statehouse and two terms in the city hall of a 5,000-person town who couldn’t name a Supreme Court case beyond Roe that she even had an opinion on was behaving senatorially by posting updates to her Facebook page.

(via lolerature)

Hypothesis.

I suspect there is probably a strong correlation between those people who are hating on today’s Tumblr marriage proposal and those people who will go to sleep tonight in an empty bed.

“I did not see Didion’s style as belonging to Didion; I saw it simply as the way sentences were written before I was born.”

One of the downsides for assholes like me when documentaries come out about trendy philosophers—like when the eponymous Jacques and his silver lamé suits were paraded across the big screen in “Derrida”, or when Jean Baudrillard was profiled in “The Matrix” (ha?)—is the sinking feeling that all these bitches get to buy their philosophy on the cheap while the rest of us who actually soldiered through the taxonomy of différance in Grammatology just end up looking like we got played, hard.

So Slavoj “Žižek!” Žižek makes a funny in his doc about Judith Butler and a bottle of Snapple that leads into a talk about distanciation and how nobody who means to say “I love you” ever really says “I love you” anymore but adds this rhetorical distance by saying something like “As the poets would say, ‘I love you’” (this is an ongoing debate outside of the film between Žižek and guys like Peter Sloterdijk on the status of belief and ideology in contemporary society, but this was probably lost on most viewers because Sloterdijk never said anything that got set in 50pt Gill Sans Ultra Bold over a soft-focus photograph of a woman looking woefully through the windows of a train passing through the Swiss Alps that got 500 notes on Tumblr).

Point being: I was in a meeting today and I said “fuck it” when what I really meant to say was “fuck you” and I thought of Žižek.

“Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

In the startup business we’ve got all these buzzwords like “agile” and “lean” and “scrum”, and management just eats that shit up because you get to “fail faster” and “succeed sooner” and have a giant wall of Post-It notes in your office and save big on decorative wall art—plus, when you’ve got like a thousand stickies making up this Jackson Pollock schmierkunst of sprint tasks it’s basically an open invite for project managers to feature-creep the shit out of the engineers, in the same way nobody at the MoMA would even notice a couple extra drops of burnt umber on One: Number 31.

One of the tenets of agile/lean/scrum/realtime/cloud/2.0 project planning is a “stand-up”, a daily meeting in which everyone gives a status report on their sprint goals, all while remaining standing so as to ensure the meeting stays short. This morning I got to thinking how much better these meetings would be if each team member got introduced with a song in the same way hitters do when they come up to bat in baseball (sports haters: think Rick Vaughn in “Major League”).

This would totally be my song.