November 2009
57 posts
A thought.
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...
“Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of...”
– Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
October 2009
40 posts
Pavement, a studio outtake that can only very...
Pavement, ‘We Dance’ (alternate mix)
...
“Did Madoff not know that, in the long term, his scheme was bound to collapse?...”
– Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
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.
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....
Yankees fans are the right-wing Republicans of...
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...
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.
“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we...”
– Historian Richard Hofstadter, writing for Harper’s on the subject of right-wing politics… in 1964.
mills:
And what of intelligence? I believe intelligence is no more laudable than athleticism, morally; it makes one good at some things and not at others. It is not a moral virtue; it is not a mark of goodness; someone cannot be faulted for not possessing it; and Fowler is right: we should regard the display of knowledge as comparably vulgar to material ostentation.
It may indeed be the case that...
“I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting...”
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Pavement, “All My Friends” (from the...
Me: I didn’t realize until just now that the...
Built to Spill, “Conventional Wisdom”
...
The publishing industry is one of those matters that occupies the special intersection of Things I Know Too Much About and Things That Are Really Important And Yet Somehow Got Irreparably Damaged By Big Business and, thus, has a unique ability to seriously stress me out (see previously: How the Publishing Industry Is Ruining Literature; or: Barnes & Noble Executives Eat Their Young and Why I...
So last night while lying in bed I developed an innocent cramp in my left leg, and seeing as I’m about to turn thirty and I recently viewed “Synecdoche, New York” and even when I was in my early twenties I felt a profound identification with fictional characters like Jack Gladney and Yossarian and their irrational fears of death I took this cramp to mean only one thing: I was...
Speechless.
A weekend bombshell from Philip Greenspun:
Wall Street banks have had profitable quarters. JPMorgan Chase reported $3.6 billion in profit (more than $1 billion per month). Goldman Sachs was only slightly behind, at $3.2 billion. These profits supposedly came from “trading.” I asked a friend who has worked in the money business how this was possible. “For someone to make money trading, there has...
Thermodynamic folly
????: Prometheus steals fire from the gods; loses liver
1667: Johann Becher posits “phlogiston” theory; gets sent to the Amazon
1777: Antoine Lavoisier debunks phlogiston in favor of equally loony “caloric”; gets guillotined
1845: Michael Faraday prototypes the first Bunsen burner; goes crazy in old age
1871: James Clerk Maxwell derives fundamental thermodynamic...
Monday.
A brief list of things to contemplate before setting out to write your first novel or draft your first screenplay or run your first startup or record your first album or build any other big idea into something from which you ultimately hope to draw a paycheck:
80 million people bought The Da Vinci Code
16 million people tune in each week for “Two and a Half Men”
8 million people...
Pauline Kael is famously quoted as saying that she couldn’t understand how Nixon won in 1972 seeing as she didn’t know a single person who voted for him.
I was reminded of exactly this sort of highbrow insularity while riding the subway this morning when I was completely bewildered by a man I saw reading Dan Brown’s latest publication, doing so not only in public but seemingly...
“Of course, a century ago and even less, ranchers in sparsely settled sections of...”
– Charles Rosen, via NYRblog: The Lost Pleasure of Browsing
The New York City skyline once boasted the World Trade Center. Boston’s got a giant illuminated gas station billboard.
Just sayin’.
βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ
So at undergrad I had this professor—an old balding man with round, over-sized spectacles and wispy, graying, antennae-like hair and a large growth protruding from the back of his head which a number of us theorized was the result of his enormous brain bulging through his skull—who’d been shanghaied into the program sometime in the sixties via the misunderstanding that he was...
“This is an odd award. You’d expect it to come later in Obama’s...”
– Josh Marshall
Startup Diary, 10/06/09
8:15pm: leave the office
8:18pm: board the subway
8:24pm: meet first date for drinks
10:06pm: realize the reason you’re slurring your words after only two drinks is that you forgot to eat all day
10:24pm: cash out, end date
10:31pm: stop off at the office on the way home; discover CEO and producer eating bad Japanese delivery
10:40pm: leave office with CEO and producer for more...