Matt Langer

"I’ve been sitting here now, and do you know what I was saying to myself? If I did not believe..."

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:41:27 -0500

“I’ve been sitting here now, and do you know what I was saying to myself? If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were to be struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment—still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I’ve drunk it all! However, by the age of thirty, I will probably drop the cup, even if I haven’t emptied it, and walk away… I don’t know where.”

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

Thirtieth birthday wishes on Facebook take on a whole new form when they come from comrades from your nerdy liberal arts alma mater.

Thank you, Jen.

The guys in the office knew I was freaking out about turning...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:56:48 -0500

The guys in the office knew I was freaking out about turning thirty, so they got me a birthday cake in hexadecimal to help soften the blow.

NERDS!

“Dance Dreams (Lady GaGa vs. Eurythmics)”, by Divide...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:57:00 -0500

“Dance Dreams (Lady GaGa vs. Eurythmics)”, by Divide & Kreate

This is basically the biggest thing to happen to music since the Beatles played Ed Sullivan.

"Age is, in sooth, a fever cold,With frost of whims and peevish need:When more than thirty years are..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:44:35 -0500

“Age is, in sooth, a fever cold,
With frost of whims and peevish need:
When more than thirty years are told,
As good as dead one is indeed.”

- Goethe, Faust, part II, act 2.

I turn thirty this weekend. I’m basically dead.

"In a way, those who, without outrightly advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:30:25 -0500

“In a way, those who, without outrightly advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of debate, are in a way more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It only thrives if it is sustained by what Hegel called ‘objective spirit’, the set of unwritten rules which form the background of every individual’s activity, telling us what is acceptable. For example, the sign of progress in our societies is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is “dogmatically” clear to everyone that rape is wrong, and we all feel that even arguing against it is too much. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, it would be a sad sign if one had to argue against him—he should simply appear ridiculous. And the same should hold for torture.

This is why the greatest victims of publicly admitted torture are all of us, the public that is informed about it. We should all be aware that some precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break apart our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.”

- Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes

Jason Fried: It really bothers me that the definition of success has changed from profits to...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:15:00 -0500

Jason Fried:

It really bothers me that the definition of success has changed from profits to followers, friends, and feed count. This crap doesn’t mean anything. Kids are coming out of school thinking, I want to start the next YouTube or Facebook. If a restaurant served more food than everybody else but lost money on every diner, would it be successful? No. But on the Internet, for some reason, if you have more users than everyone else, you’re successful. No, you’re not.

37signals was once a neat idea and a compelling business model, but it ceased to be even remotely neat or compelling as soon as it became a fundamentalist ideology, a broken record repeating its own mantra with ever-heightening disdain for the alternatives.

With Fried’s singular obsession over profit he has a similarly myopic definition of the word “success”. Success, to Fried, is revenue now, profit now, and businesses that do not meet those criteria are not simply “unsuccessful”, they’re worthy of mockery and derision.

There are actually other definitions of success and other motivations for wanting to build a successful business, and it’s not just wrong but downright asinine for Fried to suggest that a company like Facebook isn’t “successful”. Mark Zuckerberg launched a website that created 700 jobs. 37signals wrote a manifesto that created 15. That’s got to count for something.

Mark your calendars.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:31:44 -0500

Don’t forget that tomorrow features a handful of elections nobody in the country is paying any attention to—including gubernatorial races in two states, two special congressional elections, and mayoral races in about a half-dozen major cities—and yet despite the fact that nobody is paying any attention the beltway media will seize on these races as “bellwethers” and pronounce the results to be invariably either very good news for Republicans or very bad news for Democrats.

katiebakes: justsayjolie: Your Daily 90s: Guns N’ Roses,...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:32:00 -0500

katiebakes:

justsayjolie:

Your Daily 90s: Guns N’ Roses, “November Rain”

OBVIOUSLY.

Right around that period in my life when I had no life and vainly attempted to smother my stifling loneliness with such diverting diversions as reading dictionaries cover-to-cover (and thereafter utilizing the phrase “of or pertaining to” with an alarming frequency in casual conversation) it became one of my obsessions during the summer of ‘92 to rigorously deconstruct the video for Guns ‘n’ [“motherfucking”] Roses’ epic “November Rain”. I captured a VHS copy of of the video, complete with an introduction from Kennedy during an episode of “Alternative Nation”, and I watched it religiously during that summer, stressing out every time over the technical impossibility of Slash being able to execute such an intense solo while standing on a canyon ledge without any visible cords emerging from his Les Paul. I visited every public library in central New Jersey in an effort to enrich my researches in a futile hunt for a copy of the unpublished “Without You”, the short story by Del James on which the video had been based. And I stayed up at night haunted by the image of Stephanie Seymour, the object of so much pre-pubescent lust, lying dead in that casket.

It’s tempting to consider this a low point in my life, but then I remember that my chief diversion the previous summer had been memorizing the lyrics to “Ice Ice Baby” and engaging in time trials in which I’d attempt to rap the song faster than my previous standing record—so, really, things were looking up by ‘92.

A thought.

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:20:00 -0400

If we are to take seriously the thesis which states that fascistic and reactionary right-wing politics emerge in the void created by the radical Left’s failure to capitalize on revolutionary fervor, then it likely follows that the Left can learn a tactical lesson or two from the Right.

Specifically, the Right has experienced decades of success with the strategy of easing the public reception of reactionary discourse and politics by safely abstracting this inflammatory content from its undesirable source. A case study: some unhinged survivalist with a blog proffers some absurd theory; the Drudge Report covers it; Fox covers the Drudge Report’s coverage; everybody else covers Fox’s coverage of the Drudge Report’s coverage; and the unhinged survivalist’s equally unhinged conspiracy theory has now become a part of the established discourse.

The Left could use a bit of abstraction itself, and, considering how much richer its intellectual tradition is compared to that of the Right, this public relations buffer zone isn’t hard to come by. Take the example of Anita Dunn getting taken to task by Glenn Beck for quoting Mao. One really must wonder what the fuck Ms. Dunn was thinking, seeing as one would be hard-pressed to cite the last time someone on the right got caught quoting Pinochet. The left’s intellectual tradition is still very much alive, and if it doesn’t wish to abandon its theoretical roots (which it’s already done enough of) it need not cite the most divisive ghosts of its past in order to do so.

Seriously: if Anita Dunn, instead of quoting Mao, had instead quoted Badiou’s reading of Deleuze’s reinterpretation of Althusser’s formulation of Marx’s conclusions in the Grundrisse, Glenn Beck never would have gotten past the pronunciation of “Badiou”.

"Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the..."

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:49:38 -0400

“Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!’ Such impatient outbursts betray a refusal to understand or engage with the complexity of the situation, and give rise to the conviction that there must be somebody responsible for the mess—which is why some agent lurking behind the scenes is invariably required. Therein, in this refusal-to-know, resides the properly fetishistic dimension of populism. That is to say, although at a purely formal level fetishism involves a gesture of transference (onto the object-fetish), it functions as an exact inversion of the standard formula of transference (with the ‘subject supposed to know’): what fetishism gives body to is precisely my disavowal of knowledge, my refusal to subjectively assume what I know. That is why, to put it in Nietzschean terms which are here highly appropriate, the ultimate difference between a truly radical emancipatory politics and a populist politics is that the former is active, it imposes and enforces its vision, while populism is fundamentally re-active, the result of a reaction to a disturbing intruder. In other words, populism remains a version of the politics of fear: it mobilizes the crowd by stoking up fear of the corrupt external agent.,”

- Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Pavement, a studio outtake that can only very loosely be titled...

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:02:00 -0400

Pavement, a studio outtake that can only very loosely be titled ‘Box Elder’

If that last song broke your heart, this should put a smile on your face. Maximum volume yields maximum results.

Late update: my editor informs me that ‘maximum volume yields maximum results’ is a phrase reserved exclusively for music of the ‘metal’ genre. My ignorance is here duly noted.

Pavement, ‘We Dance’ (alternate mix) ‘We...

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:01:44 -0400

Pavement, ‘We Dance’ (alternate mix)

‘We Dance’ has always been something of a saddening listen, but this pre-production mix from the ‘Sordid Sentinels’ re-release amplifies that sadness rather dramatically. Malkmus’ voice is just so close, the piano so piercing, that ambiguous percussion so haunting.

"Did Madoff not know that, in the long term, his scheme was bound to collapse? What force denied him..."

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:50:47 -0400

“Did Madoff not know that, in the long term, his scheme was bound to collapse? What force denied him this obvious insight? Not Madoff’s own personal vice or irrationality, but rather a pressure, an inner drive to go on, to expand the sphere of circulation in order to keep the machinery running, inscribed into the very system of capitalist relations. In other words, the temptation to ‘morph’ legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation process. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate business morphed into an illegal scheme; the very dynamic of capitalism blurs the frontier between ‘legitimate’ investment and ‘wild’ speculation, because capitalist investment is, at its very core, a risky wager that a scheme will turn out to be profitable, an act of borrowing from the future.”

- Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Fareed: The thing about Facebook is that Zuck wants it to--

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:03:19 -0400

Fareed: The thing about Facebook is that Zuck wants it to--
Me: Did you just call him 'Zuck'?
Fareed: Yeah.
Me: Are you pals now or something?
Fareed: No, that's just what everyone at Facebook calls him.
Me: That's just anti-Semitic.
Fareed: How do you figure?
Me: It's like at Ellis Island when all the Jews got their last names changed from 'Ziegelstein' to 'Smith'.
Fareed: It's just a nickname.
Me: It's disrespectful of his Jewish heritage.
Fareed: But everyone at Apple calls Steve Jobs 'Steve'.
Me: Steve's full name isn't 'Stevelberger'.
Fareed: You make fun of Jews more than anyone else I know.
Me: I'm a self-hating Jew. I get a free pass.
Fareed: I think he likes that everyone calls him 'Zuck'.
Me: Of course he would. He's a Jew from White Plains.

IT'S DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS.

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:09:00 -0400

Colin Nissan for McSweeney’s:

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

slaughterhouse90210: “You can think clearly only with your...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:22:28 -0400

slaughterhouse90210:

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Yankees fans are the right-wing Republicans of baseball.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:37:00 -0400

There are baseball fans and there are Yankees fans, just as there are Americans and there are right-wing Republicans.

Baseball fans pledge their allegiance to the sport before affiliating with a favorite team. Yankees fans are devoted to franchise first. Right-wing Republicans would rather see the nation crumble than see Obama succeed.

Baseball fans can happily watch a game regardless of the matchup. Yankees fans probably don’t watch the Cincinnati Reds take on the Pittsburgh Pirates. Right-wing Republicans aren’t interested in the game if their team isn’t in the big show.

Baseball fans can identify the greatest players in the game, citing a shortstop in St. Louis, a left-fielder in Milwaukee, and yes, even a first baseman in New York. Yankees fans are pretty sure Jorge Posada is the best catcher in the game. Right-wing Republicans think Ayn Rand was the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century.

Q.E.D.

Growing up is realizing the main reason you want to get married and have a family is so you have a...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:44:00 -0400

Growing up is realizing the main reason you want to get married and have a family is so you have a good excuse not to go home for the holidays.

Pedro Martinez v. The New York Yankees: this is where the magic...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:16:49 -0400

Pedro Martinez v. The New York Yankees: this is where the magic happens.

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds..."

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:10:18 -0400

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.”

- Historian Richard Hofstadter, writing for Harper’s on the subject of right-wing politics… in 1964.