Not-so-vintage t-shirt shopping.

With it being hot and sweaty and summer-y out a boy's thoughts turn naturally to skateboarding. The better angels of my nature have stopped me from purchasing a new skateboard in the last couple of years although I've been jonesing for a new deck nearly as bad as when I used to dog-ear California Cheap Skates catalog pages and TWS issues in my salad days. The only thing more absurd than a grown-ass man on a skateboard is a grown-ass man on a razor scooter. Doesn't mean I can't revel in the accoutrements of skating, which culturally left me behind around 1995, when I realized that although skateboarding was arguably cooler than baseball, they were both at their cores athletic activities, and athletic activities were not going to be where I made my mark.

Some shirts that would look great with a pair of redsand shorts.

Stussy


Slapshot


Uniform Choice--for those keeping the edge


Redsand Rusty (thanks KC)


And a few late entries from McNairy Brothers, Mark McNairy's old line (which I never saw in stores)

Is it an opulin, Iceland?

This Toots and the Maytals song is the bees knees, and if you feel differently I will fight you. I tried to find the lyrics online, Toots being the James Brown of reggae, and I don't think anyone's getting it right. Admit I'm not a patois expert, but no way is Toots bringing up Iceland in a song that seems to be about everyone dropping pretenses and relaxing on a happy day.

The championships.

In a sports-obsessed culture, recurring events take on a weird synechdoche (or is it metonymy? this isn't worth looking up)--they are a calendar unto themselves . If the World Series is on, it's getting a little cold for baseball. March is, well. Derby day marks the start of spring as much as Easter or March 21 do. And I'm bound to watch some of Wimbledon on a sunglared TV set at the shore around the 4th of July.

I was originally putting together a post on the McEnroe/Borg years of Wimbledon, but hell if The Selvedge Yard didn't do a way awesomer job than I could last year. So I'll console myself with some archival photos inhabited by the odd mix of tradition and innovation, exertion and reserve of Wimbledon.

First--a video from British Pathe: Wimbledon 1960-1961 in color. Little too much on how Slazeneger makes a tennis ball, but the beginning and end make up for it. Enjoy the casual sexism from the narrator.



And some stills...





























 
American Big Bill Tilden IN ACTION


American Don Budge ALSO IN ACTION


Kiwi A.F. Wilding post-action


I'm lazy and I forgot who this was, but doesn't she look nice? Straight off the pages of Mister Mort.

A negative review of the Sleigh Bells album cobbled together from three overwhelmingly positive reviews of the Sleigh Bells album.

Bands like this only will themselves into existence out of extreme restlessness. Sometimes boredom. Krauss and Miller have been making music for a while--he in the hardcore band Poison the Well, she in some kind of manufactured teen-pop group that never got off the ground--it's easy to see them as a connected band with the right gimmick at the right time. The blown-out sonics trade on some of the last three decades of pop music’s most noxious textures. The volume and power of late 90s rap metal. Tasteless CD-era overcompression. The trick could wear thin quickly, and the duo have managed to extend their uncomplicated formula across 11 tracks. It's hard to say what the songs are about, since so many words are so difficult to make out.  They're more than likely to be publicly over by their second album. All of which, for me, anyway, makes the hype melt away.

Sleigh Bells -- Tell 'Em

All pulled from the following: Onion AV Club (A-), Pitchfork (8.7), and lostatsea (10/10).