Black Cab Sessions

The Black Cab Sessions (here, Spoon and Saint Vincent). I love these and their motto: "One song, one take, one cab." It might be my second-favorite foreign indie rock video series, after The Take Away Shows.

It's time I started my trope, interviews conducted during cab rides. Soon...

Our Blog Could Be Your Life

How is it possible that every article about Quarterlife isn't titled "Our Blog Could Be Your Life?"

A Nexis search reveals that it hasn't been used even once.

Links, Some

• Something about how I would definitely fall down these stairs.
• Something about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the anniversary. And Anne Frank.
• Something about The Echo Park Time Travel Mart.
• Something about liking New Jersey Turnpike tolls.
• Something about I recently discovered and now sort of love this blog.
  

HP73? 73HZ?

I'm loathe to leave his number, even as I indict him here.
(Also, I didn't take a receipt, so my recall of the number is sketchy.)

Maybe if he wasn't driving around New York with a trunk full of porn, I wouldn't have reason to write about him.

His car was clean.
He helped me with my suitcase.
He ignored my histrionic cell-phone call.

But he kept them in a big, clear trash bag.

Trashy.

Found: You Are An Electro Remix Of A Song About Love & Loss & Redemption

(Made by shaderlab.)

Things, Some

• Something about festival dailies.
  
• Something about frozen dumplings.
  
• Something about that stranger, leaning against the doors for the entire ride, writing alternating lines in blue pen and in black pen in a tiny notebook, and never messing up, and balancing.
  
• Something about Botox and sweating.
  
• Something about where they keep the carts at night and when it's cold.
  
• Something about this being the block where I lost you.
  
• Something about the bakery staying open for one more holiday's haul.
  

Things I Don't Understand And Definitely Am Not Going To Talk About

• Things I don't understand and definitely am going to talk about.
• Everything.

Backseat Shooter: Football Helmet In Place Of A Hardhat, SOHO

Broadway, at Houston.

Away Message

My away message had a link to this blog.
This is what I found when I returned to the computer:

bonniesnow: Jennifer, are you dating a cab driver?!

bonniesnow: I don't understand.

bonniesnow: Why don't you tell me about these things?!

bonniesnow: It's okay if you're dating a cab driver.

bonniesnow: We should talk.

bonniesnow: It's not okay if you're dating a cab driver. It's WEIRD!!!

bonniesnow: Just because a boy tells you that you're pretty doesn't mean that you have to go out with him.

bonniesnow: I tell you that you're pretty.

bonniesnow: I think you should call me.

Girls Are Funnier Than Boys

Nina is right.
Also funny: Monday night road trips, as a ritual.

Backseat Shooter: 2C68

There was a kite and a beach and a family and a fight and there was a cab, and it was out of place, and it made them laugh. A little.

Reading In Cabs With...

"We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab, and you had no warning. It was the last time you were going to have Lake Tung Ting shrimp in that entirely suspect Chinese restaurant, and you had no idea. If you had known, perhaps you would have stepped behind the counter and shaken everyone's hand, pulled out the disposable camera and issued posing instructions. But you had no idea."

Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York,also, New York Times Magazine.

(I'm not sure I know how to write about this essay without being corny. It's super-sentimental, and perhaps overwrought, and I hadn't read it in years — although I'd read it about a million times since I first saw it in the NYT Magazine — when I saw the book, Colussus of New York, in a store recently, and turned right to it, and it definitely made me cry. And so, because it made me cry in the middle of Bookcourt, and because it's still one of my favorite pieces of writing about New York, and because it meets the key criteria of "Reading In Cabs With," i.e. it mentions a taxi, that's why it's here.)

What's So Funny About Brooklyn?

Ed Park will be at the Brooklyn Public Library tonight. He will read from the forthcoming/awesome Personal Days.
Ed Park is what's so funny about Brooklyn. Even though he does not live here. Perhaps this will be discussed at the event.

Gray Nail Polish Is Not Gross.

More info here and here.

To The Library, And Step On It!

Any excuse to use the phrase.

You Are Trying To Break My Heart

Apparently, “3N23” stands for "I am trying to hit that girl as she crosses Delancey."

Not “hit on.”

Hit.

You Give Girls A Bad Name

"Do you like me more than dinner?" she asked.
(I should mention: they were clearly on a first date.)

His response, "Dinner as a concept, or this dinner?"

Then, and without hesitation, she started to cry.

He waited what I thought was an appropriate amount of time (two minutes), he put down some money, presumably for the check, and he left.
She sat, still, at the table, and cried.

He doubled back, and handed her a twenty-dollar bill, "For your cab home."

GL41

GL41?
IL4G?
(sigh)
I've forgotten your number.
But you were sweet, hipster cab driver.
And that song by that band, that has the line about cabs --
do you play it for all the girls?

First Tear To The Table

I could win this competition. I've practiced, unintentionally, my whole life. I think the video, an outtake from an old issue of Wholphin, is sort of beautiful. (Better than the film they intended to make/the one they included on the actual disk.)

Gray Nail Polish

I made this nail polish shade in a cab. I first used it on the subway. Nina gave herself a manicure, with it, at Sunny's, a bar in Red Hook, on Saturday night. LZP took the photo. We have a new business.

This Thing = That Thing

I think I've mentioned that Indexed is one of my favorite blogs. I still can't pick a favorite of Jessica Hagy's aphoristic venn diagrams, but soon there will be a book. Well-designed, sometimes hilarious, sweet, smart, and simple.

Cheaters. Also, Champions.

The Cheaters Cup is now in the possession of The Fightin' Caziques — Morgan Clendaniel and Gideon Friedman — the winners of 826NYC's Scrabble For Cheaters tournament. They hold the title and the trophy until next year.

More on all the cheaters later at www.826nyc.org.

You Can Buy Your Way Out Of Bad Letters

Time Out New York's article about Scrabble For Cheaters is out now.

Melena Ryzik give us a sweet shout out in today's New York Times Urban Eye.

The Brooklyn Papers misquoted me, pretty severely. Sigh.

Sign-ups are closed. Sponsor a team. The smackdown is soon.

Annual Manual

I love Nicholas Felton's Annual Report.
I don't even know Nicholas Felton.

I got one in the mail last year and now I'm hooked. I've had no contact with him or his work in 12 months, and yet I'm excited to find out how many unique taxi routes he traveled, to see a chart of books he read sorted by first publication date, a pie chart of dishes eaten by type (wings, fins, legs, shells), clothes purchased sorted by color, geographic dispositions of the fifty most-played artists on his ipod, etc.

I wish my life was this well-designed.