Matt Langer

It’s almost Labor Day!

Which means all you assholes out there who think it’s ever OK to wear white are finally about to be morally and legally obligated to wear some proper denim like the rest of us. Also: summer’s almost over! And it was a busy one! So busy that I think it’s worth asking: how will Summer 2k10 be remembered? Which of these will stand as the most enduring/relevant/meaningful/authentic¹ event of this long, hot, sweaty, muggy, humid, searing, wretched fucking New York City summer?

1. “The Artist is Present” (and/or that one bro who cried a lot at Marina Abramović)
2. Lebronukkah
3. Sad Keanu Reeves
4. Antennagate
5. Lindsay Lohan’s perp walk
6. Bros Icing Bros
7. The President’s ignorance of Pitchfork
8. Don Draper’s kinky sex habits
9. Justin Bieber’s face-plant into a revolving door
10. Justin Bieber being pursued on a Segway by a rabid pack of tweens

—

¹ In deference to the longstanding tradition of Nobody Ever Giving A Fuck, Ever, the editors of this list have omitted the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Prop 8 court challenge, the 9/11 GROUND ZERO TERRORMOSQUE™, Shirley Sherrod, the end of major combat operations in Iraq, and the floods in Pakistan on the assumption that these have all already been forgotten.

The Brooklyn Makery

I’m very excited to announce my latest project: I recently leased a beautiful commercial loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with plans of turning it into a co-working space. Now I’m busy bringing together writers, entrepreneurs, early-stage startups and freelancers with the goal of creating an enriching, cross-pollinating environment where people making great things can make even better things when they’re surrounded by others doing the same. 

We’re all thoughtful, intelligent, creative people, and we’re all passionate about making wonderful stuff—and we want to do it around other thoughtful, intelligent, creative people.

So we started The Makery, and we’re opening up shop on the first of September.

So far our inaugural lineup—our “maker’s dozen”—includes Immerss, Jauntsetter, Vowch, Bnter, two different YCombinators, and more—and we’ve still got some space available, so if you’re working on something wonderful and you think it would help your project if you got off your sofa or out of your garage then we just might have a desk for you.

Keep an eye on makery.org, and if you think you might be interested in some space feel free to reach out to me directly via langer [at] makery [dot] org.

The Further Annals of Jewish Neuroses

Back when I was a spry, healthy, virile youngster (read: ante vodka and Camel Filters) I was this kinda-big-deal up-and-coming track star kid (seriously!). It was my way of being Sporty and Athletic without ever having to be depended on by teammates (too much pressure) or share a locker room with the manlier bros (too many towel snaps and/or teabaggings and/or “Roman Soldiers”). And even though nothing ever came of it (seeing as my meteoric rise was ruthlessly preempted by a tragic accident) it is nice to remind myself on occasion that I may be the only pack-a-day smoker in the world who can proudly say he once ran a 4:17 mile.

But anyway! About this tragic accident.

So I’m out on this 16-mile run and it’s raining and getting dark pretty early because it’s the middle of winter (meaning I’m wearing jogging shorts over full-length spandex leggings) (meaning this is why I’m afraid to walk into the locker room) and I’ve already run something like 15⅞ miles of this route and I’m exactly one block away from my high school when I go through a crosswalk and come head-to-head with an early-90s Honda Accord doing roughly 45mph.

And what happened next all unfolded very quickly (obviously), but this is what I remember: the bumper throws me up onto the hood of the car and I go face-planting into the windshield and my very first thought is “oh my god this is the kind of thing that only happens to Fox Mulder oh my god this is so fucking awesome”, and then bro behind the wheel slams on the brakes and just as my inertia causes the right side of my face to separate from his windshield wiper I get a glimpse through the glass and realize that the guy who just guided his bumper into my right knee is fucking Tony P.—Tony P.! The same asshole who beat me out for first chair viola in the orchestra!—and then I get launched through the air for about twenty feet until I land on my ass and slide another ten feet or so on the wet asphalt before coming to a stop and immediately trying to stand up when, just as I’m realizing my leg can’t support any weight, I see this UPS truck come crashing over a curb and skidding to a stop on the front lawn of the nearest house and the driver (the only witness to the accident) jumps out and races towards me yelling “Don’t move! You could have broken your back!” and when he reaches me he tackles me and throws me back to the ground (being convinced it’s better for me and my potentially broken back that I remain prostrate on the ground regardless of how I end up there) and despite the best intentions of our parcel-professional-cum-bodyslamming-good-samaritan my head hits the pavement and everything goes black.

When I come to I’m still lying on the ground in the rain only now there’s an ambulance and I’m surrounded by paramedics and over on the side of the road there’s a crowd forming of literally every single varsity athlete in the school all just standing around watching the dork in the full-length spandex get loaded onto a gurney—and then for whatever reason I think to glance down at my Timex® Ironman™: it’s 4:44pm.

And in this moment, having just been mowed down by a shitty Japanese sedan, having just splintered the right half of my promising track career, having just been subjected to the emotionally crippling gaze of the entire basketball team, having just been hoisted onto a stretcher so as to be loaded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital, the only thing I can think to myself is, “oh shit, now I’m going to miss the late bus.”

SHOTS FIRED: Episode II - Attack of the Clueless Interns

politico, via buzzfeed et al.:

The view from our ivory tower? Freaking beautiful! And we didn’t realize that 3 years as a mostly online publication made us the Established Print Media, but, um that’s cool too. 

Hi Politico! Thanks so much for engaging with your audience! Coupla things though:

1. you were founded by Jim Harris and Jim VandeHei, two veteran Washington Post reporters; you were financially backed by Albritton Communications, an arm of ABC-Disney; you employ such high-profile journalists as Mike Allen (formerly of the New York Times and Time), Ben Smith (Wall Street Journal and New York Daily News), and Roger Simon (Chicago Sun Times, Chicago Tribune, US News and World Report). Sounds pretty established to me!
2. you distribute a print edition five days a week when congress is in session. Sounds pretty printy to me!
3. you have a peculiarly smug way of engaging your audience—at least when compared to the likes of SB Nation, Capital New York, or heck, even Buzzfeed (who at least has a sense of humor about it all)—and while I’m from New Jersey and as a result pretty comfortable with being engaged like this the rest of your audience might not take too kindly to you guys being a bunch of assholes.

Anyhow, toodles!

Shots Fired?!

capitalnewyork / aka gillianmae / aka Tumblr spokesperson for a media outlet which I very much enjoy and whose recent launch I very much anticipated and whom I never would have thought to implicate in my earlier rant because I have very high hopes for them:

But we get it: seeing those posts reblogged by what seems to be every major media company gives us the willies too, even when we do it. Sometimes it’s a bit like being at one of those schmoozy mixers where it’s so obvious that everyone is there to “make an appearance” and pass around air kisses before they go to the bar where their real friends are going to be.

followed shortly thereafter by anthony / aka soupsoup / aka citizen activist and fucking righteous grassroots revolutionary who’s probably (tragically!) not getting very far in his quest to raise $1 million for the Village Voice after Foster’s rather expensive dick joke:

I don’t think there is any issue with media companies following and reblogging each other on Tumblr.

But wait you guys, there kind of is! For three reasons (maybe more?).

First: we’ve seen this before! And while I can understand Gillian’s optimism because she’s just trying to do her job (and kicking ass!), and while I can also understand Mark’s position because he’s just trying to do his job (and also kicking ass!), this isn’t the first time that media have discovered some hip new distribution channel to help them connect more meaningfully with their withering readership that ultimately just resulted in said media all peeing in the pool. Now it’s a part of Mark’s job to hope that trend can change—and I admire his dedication to such a seriously uphill climb—but I’ve got no dog in that fight and I’ll just have to wait to be disabused of my skepticism.

Second: sure, Anthony’s right that there’s nothing wrong with it at face value, and Gillian and Mark both make similar points that media are all very new at this and they’ll all get better once they figure out the ropes, but there’s something very wrong with it as soon their arrival is billed as Tumblr’s official baptism, as if they’re legitimizing a platform that lacked its own legitimacy prior to their participation. You don’t even have to be as old as I am to remember the time when some small-time blogger named Josh Marshall almost singlehandedly brought down Trent Lott, and then Paul Krugman mentioned him in a column and all of a sudden the media world was abuzz with talk of how traditional journalists were officially knighting the new wave and it was like wait a minute, Marshall established his own legitimacy all the way back during the 2000 recount, back when you couldn’t get any decent coverage from the “legitimate” journalists because the “legitimate” journalists were too busy getting played by the Brooks Brothers riot. 

And third: those “schmoozy mixers” Gillian references? They’re exactly the problem. All this business with the established media reblogging the established media wouldn’t be ruffling so many feathers if it wasn’t completely in line with exactly the sort of cocktail party bullshit they’ve been engaged in for so long now. And that cocktail party bullshit is a serious problem! Because it’s a serious problem that established media only knows how to talk to established media, since from within their warped little cocoon they’re able to perpetuate a whole host of myths—some silly, some destructive—such as Sarah Palin’s inexplicably enduring relevance, Al Gore’s invention of the internet, Bill Clinton’s $500 runway haircut, social security’s imminent insolvency, or Iraq’s possession of chemical and biological weapons.

So you’re going to have to forgive me my skepticism, because after spending ten years now watching a bunch of unsung and unshowered masses slaving away in their pajamas on the internet to put together the pieces and do the sort of critical thinking the establishment media seems incapable of doing anymore in this age of the 24-hour news cycle—and then getting made fun of for being a bunch of dirty hippies simply because they refuse to worship at the altar of the White House press pool—I’m not exactly going to rejoice when that same establishment media comes in and “legitimizes” a community that established its merits long before the latecomers ever showed up.

This is not our regularly scheduled rant!

Really more of a backup rant seeing as the rant we’d originally lined up for this time slot was pre-empted at the last minute at pain of both Doree¹ and Katiebakes² auto-close-tabbing³ our asses—but hey, we got rants to spare around here!

So! Let’s begin.

See that you guys? The print media! They’re on Tumblr! I mean you heard, right? You didn’t miss the last two weeks of relentless self-congratulatory announcements, did you? About how We The Established Print Media Are Coming To Tumblr To Engage Our Audiences?

Except that maybe you did, seeing as so far “Coming To Tumblr To Engage Our Audiences” seems pretty indistinguishable from “Bringing Our Insidery Circle Jerk To Yet Another Social Media Echo Chamber.” Just look at this exchange: high-fives from Politico, an alley oop from The New Yorker, all rounded out with a celebratory ass-pat from The Atlantic. And what’s really sad is just how symbolic it is to see Mark Coatney give them the formal intro—the guy whose job it is to help these Established Brands™ reach out to the Tumblr community—and all they can think to do with it is cheerlead amongst themselves.

You can lead a horse to water, I guess.

So then I got curious as to just how well these guys were engaging their newfound audiences and went looking around. Check out who Politico is following:

Or how about The American Prospect:

And while none of the other Big Media Tumblrs that I could find display a list of other Tumblrs they keep up with, still, you can paint a pretty good picture based on their reblogging habits: The Huffington Post Tumblr seems to exist for the express purpose of reblogging other Huffington Post subsidiary Tumblrs; The New Yorker reblogs the shit out of its own staff writers; and The Atlantic once courageously parted ways with the hallowed club of elite media to reblog… the founding editor of Gawker.

Meanwhile, outlets like The Paris Review and The Economist are making no attempt whatsoever to engage an audience, using their Tumblrs instead as just another channel for inbound links to their existing websites. Which is fine! Until, of course, that sort of good old fashioned link-whoring gets billed as the second coming of journalism.

You know, Mark Coatney brought Newsweek to Tumblr with astounding success because Mark knows how to be a part of a community, because he’s smart enough to see that his audience works just as hard as he does at producing the sort of content that makes this community worthwhile, an audience that did all this without ever expecting a ticker tape parade to celebrate our esteemed arrival.

Then the rest of the established media came to Tumblr to engage their audiences and in so doing revealed that the only audience that really matters is themselves.

—

¹ cf. http://twitter.com/doreeshafrir/status/21342913678
² cf. http://twitter.com/katiebakes/status/21348285683
³ I was going to rant about how royally fucked up it is that this whole outrage over the 9/11 GROUND ZERO TERROR MOSQUE™ has been initiated by two specific demagogues—Sarah and Newt—and how obviously calculated and utterly meaningless any sort of “populist outrage” is when it’s been manufactured by two people who, collectively, represent a combined constituency whose grand total is FUCKING ZERO—but then I held off on ranting about it out of respect for the wishes of Doree and Bakes, but then I snuck it in here as a footnote because hahahaaa you guys you can’t auto-close-tab a footnote!! lol!1! 

When Life Imitates My Twitter, Everybody Loses.

@mattlanger, Sat. Aug. 14th, 5:14pm, via Twitter for iPhone:

Really in the mood to refudiate something today. Wonder if anyone’s building a sushi restaurant next to Pearl Harbor.

Newt Gingrich, Mon. Aug. 16th, via “Fox and Friends”:

We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There’s no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.

The city so nice.

So I leave the office in Williamsburg yesterday and I reach the corner and I have a walk signal so I start crossing the street (no big deal) and I look to my right and see a car coming and think “no big deal, I have a walk signal,” and as I start approaching the middle of the crosswalk I get the sneaking suspicion that this guy isn’t slowing down and I think “no big deal, he’s just one of those late brakers,” but then I get more than a sneaking suspicion that this guy isn’t slowing down because I finally have to jump backwards to avoid getting barrelled over as he plows through the crosswalk, and when he does finally slow down for traffic I yell “Hey, you almost hit me!”, to which he replies with a single erect middle digit proffered from the driver’s side window, “right on red, asshole!” at which point he speeds away and I lose all composure and I start hysterically yelling “Right on red? In New York City?! Have you never even seen a Woody Allen film?!?”

I finally reach the other side of the street to find an octogenarian in a derby and a three-piece suit who points his cane in the direction of the offending motorist and says, “Did you see his license plates, son? He’s from New Jersey, a place where making a right on red is in fact their only cultural advantage.”