À bout de souffle.

A few things that make me choke up a little
(for reasons that I explain in probably too much detail):




• Bon anniversaire, “Breathless”!

Jump cuts, natural lighting, and improvised plotting; the French New Wave, I see now, has clearly provided the template for me as I blog my way through life and attempt to tell stories in an entertaining fashion.

Truffaut vs. Godard is yet another battle within the heads of nerds that seems terribly important if it's your head or the head of someone in your nerd crew, but it's a battle that most outsiders yawn at. This-thing-vs-that-thing, clash-of-the-titans bickering by members of each titan's respective fans is too emotion-laden to ever be a grown-up debate. I've seen this before, many times. Innervisions or Talking Book? Hathaway or Cooke? Champion or Polo (in '93)? Shut up, yawn, and nobody cares—unless of course you want to discuss these things with me, in which case please be at apt. 15 by 6 pm sharp for drinks & bickering.







Jean Seberg is adorable, bien sûr. I could never pull off that haircut, which requires finely textured, pin-straight hair like that of a tomboyish French girl, since I have the thick, unruly hair of my Celtic forepeople. My kind of hair looks great if you're a Kennedy on a yacht, the sun bleaching it at the tips and the saltwater boosting its natural curl. But if you live in present-day Los Angeles and don't make it to Cape Cod much because you're just blogging and daydreaming all the time, it's just a high-maintenance thing in your life that takes an hour to blow dry and looks best at about 2 1/2 feet in length. Why so much talk about hair? Oh my. I appear to have lost control of this post.

Alas, I’m not now nor will I ever be classified as “gamine,” and you people will just have to deal with that. You probably wife up Seberg; she just looks like the type--skinny pants, ballet flats, Camus novels and dainty facial features. Your mom would approve. You kick it, however, with the full-lipped, long-haired girl in the fur hat*. She's more fun. Cherchez les hips. (I see you, Belmondo).






*

• Fuck a Mixtape, says T.I.
OK, pumpkin. Easy now.

If he'll just keep giving me that bouncy, playful flow in that Geougiah accent, T.I. can say fuck this and fuck everything, fuck the NBA salary cap, fuck BP and fuck Rand Paul, fuck fuck all day long. What do I care. He's adorable and diminutive and has a wonderful smile (sometimes my estrogen gets in the way of true music fandom).

The mixtape is not worth all that download time so don't bother with it--the song below is the only one of quality, and since I can’t tolerate an entire DJ Drama anything (including mixtapes), I left the rest of the thing alone. Skip right to the part where my ex-boyfriend Killer Mike comes in, snappin and trappin and takin my breath away.

The song with Lil Wayne (“Yeah”) is noteworthy only because of its intro. “For those of you who care,” T.I. says--except in Atlantan, it's Cyeah. Cyeaugh. (I’ll get it eventually). I gave it a couple listens just because it's been a while since I've had any Wayne fodder. My new thing is wishing hard that Wayne takes a meeting with BP execs upon his release from jail to yell at them, or that he at least calls his next mixtape Top Kill. This is because I am not very reality-based. (I also hope that Nicki Minaj writes her own stuff and that Blu and Redman will do a mixtape with Green Lantern, but those things are probably not happening either.)


T.I. feat. Killer Mike, who will never be successful in getting me to refer to him as Mike Bigga - “Ready Set Go.” (produced by No I.D.!)

mp3.









• I'm breathless when I think of all the things an LA-Boston series means to me (which is mostly misty childhood memories of really good televised matches of sport), and when I consider the beauty of this photograph.

That's right, Green Jacket. You fucking get Mr. Worthy a beverage.

The Celtics and the people who love them clearly need an uplifting series of moments, an injection of mirth and energy, to make up for all the Guru melancholy weighing their city down. I believe a championship would provide this. However, to paraphrase my good friend T.I.: fuck a Boston team. Also, they do know it's not pronounced “selltics,” right? I've been whining about this since I was a know-it-all 10-year-old. I'm assuming people have just been too polite to inform them all these years.




Dosh & Andrew Bird - “Number 41.” Because it's only 1 digit away from Big Game James, and because they haven't made a “Number 24” yet. YET.

mp3.











• This one's a holdover from Sunday, and it's so good that I still haven't been able to catch my breath. NYC, fresh from begging and whimpering for LeBron, makes a strong comeback with this story in the Times about the origins of the metal rims in all the public basketball courts. They're made by blacksmiths--referred to as a team in the article, since there are 6 of them, of course--who cut, weld, and paint each one, by hand, from a hand-drawn blueprint, “using a century-old method that has long since vanished elsewhere.” Woody Guthrie should do a song about these guys and the related difficulties of the perimeter shot.

“The finished product is a remnant of an earlier era of the sport, somewhere on the evolutionary chain between the original wooden peach baskets and the modern spring-loaded breakaway rims used by the National Basketball Association”...

“Other cities, including those with their own share of contributions to basketball lore like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Newark, buy modern, factory-made rims. New York is among the few places, and possibly the only one, where municipal rims used at more than 700 public parks are still made by hand.”

And the opener! That first paragraph is so inspiring, I may have to copy it and hope the writer never notices:

“The old steel rim that presides over this public basketball court absorbs missed shots with an angry clank, sending the ball careening upward and the wood and metal backboard into a rickety seizure.” Sending the backboard into a rickety seizure is the particularly nice language moment for me.
















• Gasp! Look how stunning!

Lightleafs are illuminated OLED bookmarks that are as thin as a book's page and provide just enough light for reading in the dark. I'd like one of these, and maybe several more, as only then will I be sufficiently pleased and distracted enough to overlook the incorrect use of language on display here (light leaves) the likes of which I have not seen since the travesty that was the 2010 Rock the Bells poster.



The bookmark runs wirelessly, and the light is rechargeable with brightness controls to turn it down so that it won’t bother others nearby. Courtesy of DesignBoom.










• Are the rims big? Do it ride good? Lean back, right hand on the pinewood.

The god Craig Sager and I agree that the most flattering colors on one's person are those adopted from the Dreyer's* palette. The playoffs arrived right around the time my mother announced to me that all of my clothing is pastel, “which makes sense because you like ice cream so much.” Why yes, Mom. It does make sense. And yes, I am ignoring the subtext of your observation (that I'm a big girl now, too old to be wearing chocolate- and lavender-hued things).

I'm resisting the urge to say French vanilla, butter pecan, chocolate deluxe at this time, and will instead just give you all a Cream on the inside/Clean on the outside. Yeah buddy.

6 12's in the trunk, 4 screens in the deck. And yes, the outside frame in the trunk is wide.
(STOP MAKING IT INTO SOMETHING SEXUAL, YOU GUYS.)

* Edy's, for my NY cohort.









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