Patience.org

Finding places for a kid to ride his bike in this town are obviously not that easy, unless you happen to live close to Central Park, which we do not. So the past few Sundays I’ve taken him down to the delightful-sounding Stuyvesant Cove, which is actually a demarcated swathe of concrete beside the East River and the FDR Drive just below 23rd St.

But that is honestly selling it a bit short. It is a valiant attempt to give people a place to sit, read, jog, cycle (that Manhattan Greenway path I traversed last year bisects it) or whatever takes their fancy.

There’s a large mural painted on the ground in front of a a little envirobmental center called Solar One and M has great fun steering his bike of choice around there, though recently he’s chosen his trike rather than his new bike.

We see the usual menagerie of New York there – one week we were greeted by and ambulance carting a guy away who had been sleeping in the undergrowth and didn’t appear to be moving any time soon.

And each Sunday around 5pm the first seaplanes arrive to deposit those more fortunate types, presumably avoiding the roads back into town from the Hamptons. We spot them, watch them take off again and then head for home.

Robert Moog’s sad death at just 71 brings back a memory of the first year of secondary school when the music teacher played a record – Walter Carlos’s ‘Switched-On Bach’ – which was one of the first records to make extensive use of Moogs when it was made in 1968 and which I had heard previously during assembly at primary school.

Our primary school always played a piece of classical (a.k.a. ‘serious’) music as the kids filed in and had a board up displaying the composer’s name and the name of the piece of music (which I recall Dad made from blue Perspex!). We were exposed to numerous pieces of music this way, but mostly strictly from the classiscal and neo-classicial eras (I know that now but obviosuly didn’t then). But one day they played Switched-on Bach and I recall being at least a tad intrigued. (Incidentally ‘Walter’ is now ‘Wendy Carlos‘ after a sex-change op, but that’s another story. )

So when in the muisc class at secondary school early in the first year the teacher asked us which instrument was being played on that record, I was alone in answering ‘synthesizer’. I recall the other kids laughing at the suggestion, but I knew what I was right – smug git that I was.

Amy & Dan were in town last week to see the Daily Show and other stuff and stopped by to see us. After his customary two minute warm-up, M put on a little show. Here he is singing along to Kaiser Chiefs which we recorded a few weeks ago and that he’s been watching at least a few times every week since, rehearsing for his big moment, to such an extent that he knows the gestures of the lead singer, as you can see here and especially here.