Patience.org

I went to see Maximo Park last week – damn good live, the singer has bags of energy and uses it well. The keyboard player does too, but he ends up looking like as if he has no control over his movements. He bounded on stage (quite a small one at Webster Hall), ran around like a dervish and fell over. Mate, if you wanna move around on stage, take up the guitar. Anyway, I digress.

Like many people with kids now, my music is the same as my kids’ music. The boy’s most played song on iTunes is Belle & Sebastian’s ‘Funny Little Frog’ and he’s a big Maximo Park fan (as well as Kaiser Chiefs, his most favorite of his favorite bands). But not even being six yet, it’s hard for him to experience the gig atmosphere.

So it’s great to be able to go to YouTube the next morning and show him a song from the gig his Dad had been to less than 12 hours before to give him some idea. Since then someone has gone further and put a compilation up:

Meanwhile I had taken a picture of the outside of the venue with my camera that was so bad I can’t even use it here. OK well here it is anyway:

But the funny thing about it was that as soon as I took it, the guy was on the stepladder taking it down and replacing it with ‘Girl’s Night Out,’ which was happening straight after the gig.

You’d have been a bit confused if you’d come along to Webster Hall late for the gig that night, I can tell you.

This is what I love (and miss) about Europe.

You’re driving along in one country (Austria in this case) and there’s the choice of heading off in all sorts of different directions. You want to go to Slovakia, or head off to Hungary? Or stay in Austria and head for Graz, Linz or Gurtel, or even the intriguingly named Simmering Haide?

The lad and me went to the Mets last night – his third game and despite them being really good these past couple of seasons, he has only seen one win (in fact we left while they were losing last season, but they won eventually) and two losses including last nights – but that’s the chance you take when you play 160-odd regular season games plus the post-season stuff (hopefully).

Anyway I’ve long wondered whether things in America couldn’t be run more efficiently and baseball is an exemplar. You have people to show you to your seat, even though you can find it easily enough, people carrying beer around so you don’t have to get off your (in many cases sizable) backside to get something to eat or drink and then there’s the ground crew.

When they’re painting the lines, each guy seems to get one line each and seemingly takes nine people – count them – to water the diamond. That’s a whole baseball team!