Matt Langer

Pavement, “Spit on a Stranger” Get out your...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:19:50 -0500

Pavement, “Spit on a Stranger”

Get out your handkerchiefs.

meaghano: You know, and burn me at the stake and call me Joan of the antifeminist narrative arc for...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:19:00 -0500

You know, and burn me at the stake and call me Joan of the antifeminist narrative arc for saying this, but, I talk to so many men about a similar horror. That cringe factor you get when calling to mind a self-righteous teenage self or a college self who found the clitoris and thought they knew all there was to know— it seems men, or it seems a masculine characteristic, a proclivity I suppose (at least in the men I speak to, and believe me, I’m aware that that is a special set/sect), to want to die when they think of the mistakes they have made or the fools they have been, but why?

Oh I don’t know, Meaghan.

I’m thirty-years-old and I still have no idea where the clitoris is, and pleasuring a woman is always kind of like trying to work the clutch on a manual transmission you’re unfamiliar with, this sort of trial-and-error thing where you just go up and down until things start moving and then pray you don’t stall out when you hit the gas (and—HA!—seeing as I’m single and I can’t talk to girls and I live in a city with a great public transportation system which has relieved me of any need to ever use a car I end up dealing with both sides of this metaphor with almost identical regularity [read: never]), and yet I absolutely loathe the person I was at various points in my life, and not because I wasn’t fucking enough girls or doing enough partying or whatever else it may be that was available to me then but off limits to me know—but simply because I was doing it without the knowledge I now have, the knowledge that every minute of your life will be looked back upon from some distant point in the future with sentimentality and longing, and that if you don’t live it right you’re going to end up regretting it.

And I think about Yeats saying “That is no country for old men. The young/ in one another’s arms” or Pascal saying “We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight”.

And then I think about how I went to college kind of late and when I was a grizzly 26-year-old sophomore I was walking through campus one day with this 18-year-old kid I’d befriended and I said to him something along the lines of “If you don’t hate who you are right now when you’re my age then you’re doing it wrong”, and then I think about how much I hate the guy who said that—but not because he was wrong, but simply because I don’t think he realized just how right he was.

Mills is right to call Will Oldham remarks about Wes...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:01:00 -0500

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...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:47:00 -0500

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...

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:30:00 -0500

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..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:54:30 -0500

“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.”

- Karl Marx, Capital, volume III, chapter XV.

I hope that someday all these polls asking “who is to blame for the current recession?” will offer multiple choice options that extend beyond simply “Democrats? Republicans? Or both?”.

Jace Cooke, my very best friend in the world, has spent the past...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:44:00 -0500

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..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:26:45 -0500

“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.’”

- Fort Wayne News-Sentinel: Palin makes connection with ‘common folk’ during visit

Palin stops through my hometown. ;(

(via zachklein)

This reminds me of the time I was working at a small indy bookstore back in Princeton when Anna Karenina ended up on Oprah’s book list and wave upon wave of barely-literate daytime television addicts poured in asking for a copy of “AN-nuh KA-ruh-NEE-nuh” by “that Leon Tolstoy guy” and it broke my heart over and over again but I tried consoling myself with the fact that at least Oprah was getting people reading.

So actually I guess this doesn’t remind me of that at all because you can’t really tell yourself “at least Sarah Palin is getting people reading” and find any consolation in the sentiment.

This is at once the most amazing and the most depressing thing...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:42:28 -0500

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...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:22:46 -0500

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...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:30:00 -0500

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)

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:22:24 -0500

(via lolerature)

Hypothesis.

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:49:00 -0500

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..."

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:46:00 -0500

“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.”

- VL Hartmann in The Morning News, beautifully illustrating the delicate relationship our generation has with one of my favorite writers. Didion’s is a seemingly timeless voice, with cadences as resonant in 2009 as in 1969, a resonance which inspires us to tell ourselves her stories in order to live. But when we are honest with ourselves we realize that her stories are not ours, that her sentences were written before we were born, back when John Wayne captured the American imagination and southern California was terrified of a man named Charles Manson. I’m sometimes driven to romanticize her subjects because of the sheer poignancy of her writing, but Hartmann’s words are instructive here:

“Life changes in an instant,” I remembered my mother saying on the phone, quoting the repeated line that runs through The Year of Magical Thinking, in the days after we had both read it. “It’s chilling.” For my generation, Didion showed us the world when our parents were young; with a memoir on grieving, she suggested where they were headed. It was a bit of a clichéd line, but this was Joan Didion writing it. This was Joan Didion without better words and that was what was chilling.

I may try to find romance in Didion, but when even she can’t find the words, she to whom I’ve so regularly turned to always have the right words, I realize I’m seeing something I cannot yet understand—and maybe never will.

One of the downsides for assholes like me when documentaries come out about trendy...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:33:32 -0500

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."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:04:24 -0500

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

- Cormac McCarthy in the WSJ, via ★DF.

In the startup business we’ve got all these buzzwords like...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:53:09 -0500

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.

Cray-1 Computer System promotional brochure (pdf) The Cray-1,...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:35:43 -0500

Cray-1 Computer System promotional brochure (pdf)

The Cray-1, released in 1976, had a single megabyte of RAM, weighed 5.25 tons, cost $8.86 million, and was advertised as “a compact mainframe occupying a mere 70 sq. ft. of floorspace”.

The Cray-1 had roughly 4% of the computational power of an iPhone 3GS.

In House Record, Many Spoke With One Voice: Lobbyists’

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:29:00 -0500

In House Record, Many Spoke With One Voice: Lobbyists’:

We’re so fucked:

WASHINGTON — In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident.

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

E-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that the lobbyists drafted one statement for Democrats and another for Republicans.

Several months back I jokingly set myself to the task of making...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:33:00 -0500

Several months back I jokingly set myself to the task of making this year Command Line Oh-Nine, a project which accidentally resulted in the greatest productivity hack I’ve ever pulled off. I moved email to mutt and chat to bitlbee and Twitter to ttytter and I run them in a screen which I usually leave at an empty prompt so I can’t see the activity in any of the windows.

And it’s amazing what it’s like to work without an iChat icon bouncing in the dock or a purple Tweetie menu extra or a dinging Gmail notifier, to read through email or Twitter or get distracted by IMs only when I choose to, to not have my schedule or concentration dictated to me by an automated poll.