Patience.org – Page 5 – Family life, funnily enough

Mets? Who they?

Losing 10 out of your last 17 games (and 6 of the last 7, all at home) isn’t going to put you in a good place no matter how good your lead is.

For you British folks, the Mets failure to win the National League East (and thus get into the playoffs, which eventually could lead to the World Series, where they could play the winner of the American League) it’s a bit like Fulham being 8 points clear with 3 games to go (we can dream) and fluffing the title. It’s that bad. Well sort of, it’s hard to compare.

Anyway, anyone for hockey?

Lets Go Mets (please)

Say it ain’t so. Our New York Mets are now only 1 game behind the Phillies and in grave danger of snatching defeat from the jaw of victory having led the National League East since mid-May.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about….it’s too complicated to explain right now. But we’ll know where we stand by Friday, I’d imagine. Suffice to say, the playoffs without the Mets will be painful to bear in our house.

As Keith Hernandez said tonight, in these situations, “you put your boots on and go out and play”. Boots at the ready.

Golf

After a few sessions a driving ranges in Erie PA, Maine, and most recently in Shawnee, PA, the lad expressed a preference for another ball-meets-swinging-thing sport; golf. His hand-eye coordination is great and he takes to all games where there’s a ball to be hit. So we booked him into Chelsea Piers’ junior golf program for one hour each Saturday, which started yesterday.

They let the kids have at it in terms of hitting the balls fo the first half hour or so (after cautioning them abut walking forward and falling off the top deck on to the one below, naturally) and gave them gentle coaching. Given it’s one of those Japanese systems where the next ball pops out of the ground as soon as you’ve hit one, he couldn’t beleive his luck in not having to reach down and place one on the tee each time.

Consequently he started hitting them as if he was in a baseball batting cage, with the club starting from behind his head (not easy to do but he managed it), before the coach stopped by and suggest some changes. The parents were strongly urged not to coach, merely to cheer lead, despite my temptation to point out this very basic facet of golf, i.e. it’s not basball. Oh well, I won parenting points from the coaches.

The results were two fold, he hit a lot of balls in one hour, 370 to be exact [Update: that can’t be right, that’s more than one a second! the next week he hit about 220, which is more like it, but still a helluva lot! The machine the first week must not have been set to zero.]:

Plus he ended up being able to finish his swing like this (he’s hitting balls towards New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson):

I think that’s one of my favorite pictures I’ve taken of him among the many thousands, despite its low quality due to it being with my phone. He’s a quick learner.

Boys around town

The boy came to my relatively new office the other day for the first time. It came time to go home and we started to walk when I realized it was getting a bit tight, time-wise for us to walk home. We saw a couple in a pedicab – New York’s equivalent of a rickshaw that have been around for a few years and are currently the subject of a licensing row. Anyway, we spotted one by the lights outside the Empire State Building at 34th & 5th and we jumped in.

The guy was Russian, having been in the country for about 9 months after living in San Francisco – not so good for cycling, too many hills and all that. Anyway he spotted the accent and us 2.5 Europeans were off through the streets at rush hour.

It was $15 plus tip to get home, about double a cab ride from the same spot, but more fun and a ride home he won’t forget for a long time.

Retail space available

It would be disingenuous for me to get nostalgic about the demise of CBGB‘s last year – I only went there three times in the past 11 years, as far as I can recall. But like so much in NYC, when you live here with young kids, you not so much go to all these places any more, as live vicariously through those that do. And just knowing that they’re there if and when you need them, all conveniently close by (a bit like a pharmacy if you live in the suburbs, but we have those too!) is some comfort.

Except when they disappear, of course.

And so walking up the largely-gentrified Bowery with the lad the other week, we passed this:

The graffiti says something like ’20 years ago we were all sedated….CBGBs forever!!’ because of the strong links with the Ramones. The corner of Bowery & 2nd St is now called ‘Joey Ramone Place’.

Not much of a fan of the Ramones either – always struck me as even more rehashed 50s rock n roll than the Sex Pistols, without the upfront anger and dark humor of the latter.

But again, knowing it was there was comforting, in an urban-vitality kind of way.

But interesting to note that about 9 months later, they haven’t rented it out to anyone else. Perhaps the cleaning took longer than expected?

UPDATE: I had no idea when I posted this that CBGB’s founder & owner Hilly Kristal had just died, in fact it was announced today more or less at the same time I posted it. I took the photo more than a month ago. Now there’s a coincidence. Or something.

I Know it’s Over, or These Things Take Time?

Well Morrissey certainly makes his position quite clear on the matter of a potential reunion of The Smiths:

“Finally, in an effort to stop the speculation and kill off the rumor mongers who seem to use these things to take advantage of committed fans, we can tell you that one thing the future will not bring is a Smiths reunion tour. Per recent reports, Morrissey was approached during the course of the summer by a consortium of promoters, in the wake of the success of the Police, U2 and Rolling Stones tours, with a $75,000,000 offer to tour in 2008 and/or 2009. The offer called for Morrissey to do a minimum of 50 shows all over the world under the Smiths’ name, with the only proviso being that Johnny Marr was also in the band. The offer has been refused.”

No wonder concert tickets are so expensive.

Still, we’ll be seeing him here in NYC in October.

Becks & Boos

The lad and I went to see NY Red Bulls vs LA Galaxy on Saturday night – his first MLS game and David’s first start for the Galaxy. I thought it would be a good opportunity for him (the lad, not Becks at this stage of his career) as he isn’t yet comfortable being surrounded by large numbers of people screaming, howling, cheering & booing. I mean, it’s MLS – home of the soccer moms and teenagers cheering everyone hoping someone ‘shoots a goal.’ How wrong can you be?

More pictures here.

Our seats were at the back of the second tier, seats that would normally be empty in a normal MLS game, where 12k or so supporters would be rattling around in the ~80k-capacity Giants Stadium. We had a low roof over us and were one section to the right of the official standing area, where the boys that make most of the noise are. So the sources of noise were nicely in place. All they needed was a catalyst, and they got one with three goals in the first eight minutes. It went on like that and we had to leave when the score was 4-3 to make sure we got on a bus (I’ve been stuck there for hours before) and by the time we got on the bus we found out it finished 5-4 to NY.

Beckham was almost equally cheered (at the start everything he did, even a simple 5 yard pass was gushed over) and booed (each time he took a free kick this rose to a crescendo). But I don’t think they really meant the boos. The whole thing was something of a circus, and the crowd were just playing their roles. No doubt some of them would dispute that.

Maximo Park & doin’ it for the kidz

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.

Europe

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?

Teamwork

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!