October 2008
93 posts
Wilco — Magazine Called Sunset...
Election night! Party! Awesome!
We can probably all agree that T-Pain says it best in Kanye West’s “The Good Life”:
Is the good life better than the life I lived When I thought that I was gonna go crazy And now my grandmamma ain’t the only girl calling me baby And if you feeling’ me now then put your hands up in the sky And let me hear you say hey, hey, hey, ooh I’m good
It’s in that same spirit that the guys from Conduit...
“One thing must be understood: I have said nothing extraordinary or even...”
– Maurice Blanchot. I was reminded of this line by the Jeffrey McDaniel quote posted today on amorousmusings: “I want to locate a bit of you, cradle it,/ say: this, there is no word for this.”
The McCain campaign has now devolved so hilariously into the realm of self-parody and comic blunders that it’s no longer as much a campaign as it is a traveling comedy troupe. This just in from ABC:
Joe Wurzelbacher has been a regular part of McCain’s stump speech for the last several weeks, and so anticipation was high this morning in Defiance, Ohio, when McCain seemed set to finally meet...
“From a bag of loose pictures: a trick photograph taken in an Atlantic City...”
– Paul Auster, in his devastatingly heartbreaking memoir of his father’s death, The Invention of Solitude.
I just want to say.
I am eternally grateful to be alive at this moment in history. I’ve spent the better part of my life wondering what it must have felt like to be alive in 1968, to experience the campaign of Robert Kennedy, to be truly inspired by your public servants. For the first time in my life I don’t have to wonder anymore.
“If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, binding me...”
– Karl Marx
iPhones are like friends with benefits
via TechCrunch:
AT&T just sweetened the pot for all of its iPhone subscribers. If you own an AT&T iPhone, you now get free WiFi access at AT&Ts 17,000 hotspots across the country, including at most Starbucks. Although just last summer AT&T teased customers with the same freebie service, only to put up a pay wall afterwards, this time it looks like the free WiFi is here to stay. So...
“You tell that guy he can find Tony Garcia down at the West Dade library every...”
– Tony Garcia, via a terrifying report on 538.com, after being threatened today at a McCain rally in Florida.
It's 11pm.
Polls close in California in exactly one week.
Los Campesinos — Frontwards
Dear world: more...
“Nobody ever listened to me until they didn’t know who I was.”
– Banksy (via andrewpaulbond)
And art imitates art: his message and his medium wouldn’t resonate before he started wearing his colored underwear on the outside of his tights, before he adopted a mask and cape. He took a page straight out of Batman’s playbook: you must become more than a...
“He has now written tens of thousands of sentences, many of them tiny miracles of...”
– Sam Tanenhaus on John Updike in this week’s New York Times Book Review.
(via Amorous Musings)
Identity Crisis
I learned today that my co-workers have unanimously decided that I’m a hipster.
With Us or Against Us
Sarah Palin has clearly done her homework on the Bush Doctrine since that calamitous interview with Charlie Gibson. Her summary last night should be admired for its pithiness.
If you blow shit up because you disagree with right-wing policy you’re a terrorist.
If you blow shit up because you believe life begins at conception you’re not.
“The American imagination demands the real thing and to attain it must fabricate...”
– Umberto Eco in Travels In Hyperreality, as quoted in “Simulated Worlds”
A great quote and, at least in politics, that hyperreality will only grow even more unbearably absurd over the next twelve days.
(via kb)
The Data are Wanting →
My roomie started a new blog, summarized thusly:
This is a blog in the pursuit of non-crap. It is my best attempt at taking a careful look at creativity and piecing together semi-coherent thoughts on media, technology and design.
If art and new media are subjects of interest to you I’d highly recommend reading his stuff. He’s a smart guy (so smart, in fact, that he’s usually...
Weezer Homie — American Girls
It’s...
Bartender: Dude, quick, move over a seat and that blonde might sit down next to you.
Me: Dude, I'm sitting alone at a bar translating French poetry. If every seat at the bar was open and she didn't want to sit on my lap then there's something wrong with her.
Bartender: More vodka?
Me: Good call.
Pavement — Fillmore Jive
This song simply...
Chromeo - Momma’s Boy
Despite...
“I like the little things. The way a glass feels in your hand - a good glass,...”
– Leo McGarry
“It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman for...”
– Garrison Keillor
“I think a very interesting question for the next 16 days is going to be: which...”
– Jon Meacham, on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.”
“I don’t know that it was always this way, but, for as long as I can remember,...”
– David Sedaris (via thebronzemedal)
“New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter...”
– Paul Auster, City of Glass.
About me.
I usually loathe the exercise of preparing biographical copy about myself, but luckily my company is pretty wonderfully lighthearted, which made drafting this bio of myself for the site this morning a bit less painful:
Langer
After ditching plans to pursue a doctoral thesis entitled “The Spectacle, the Real, and a Discursive Ontology of Paris Hilton,” Langer rekindled his passion...
“Music has to be recognized as an…agent of social development in the highest...”
– José Antonio Abreu
Jeff Buckley — Sweet Thing (Live at...
School of Seven Bells — Chain
Discovered...
dow:
The Dow tumbled 733.08 points today.
Whoa—that’s a big tumble.
It’s a pretty awesome thing this World Wide Web.
There are so many wonderful people in my life that I didn’t meet in school, or at a bar, or in the neighborhood growing up, but people I’ve met nonetheless, and for whose lives I have just as much of an emotional investment as I do for anyone else I know.
You’ve all in your own way opened up about yourselves, and as a result I find myself...
It was my intent to draft a longer post in response to this comment on fred-wilson, but I’ll settle for this: The Republic is lofty and gloriously high-minded, but at the end of the day the poets are kicked out of the city, the hoi polloi are governed with an elaborate sequence of lies, and Plato erects in his mind his ideal city in which enlightenment is the privilege of the elite few.
...
Elastica — Vaseline
These girls (and...
“My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.”
– John McCain delivers the “last throes” of the ‘08 race.
Paul Krugman wins Nobel for economics →
Amen.
While it’s the shouts of “terrorist,” “kill him,” and “off with his head” that have garnered all the attention since McCain/Palin went for the gutter over the past days and weeks, there’s another incipient threat that’s gone unnoticed: the reflexivity of a politics of the Other.
As Maverick nosedives for the political hard deck and stokes the...
"Barack Osama" Printed on Hundreds of NY Absentee... →
I don’t get it: the “b” key is like at least four steps removed from the “s” key.
“I want to eat all of your cheese so bad.”
– guy in line behind me to the barista at this coffee place.