Before coming here Magda and my dad went to the park to check out The Gates. They were apparently filmed by NBC and were featured prominently on the NBC Nightly News.

The house is silent. Everyone is hard asleep. In these quiet interludes I slip downstairs noiselessly just to make sure everything is ok.

Often I'll stand still in the dark listening to the breathing and let my mind wander for a moment in large lazy circles. Sometimes I slide over to the crib and make sure our son is tucked in properly. He never is these days, having become adept at breaking free from his swaddle so I do my best to get him covered up again. Then I will retreat back to work until the sleep is overwhelming and my head fuzzy. Then again I venture down this time into a sleepy embrace.

I don't know what I will think about in the long lonely years of old age, and I'm sure that there will be countless cups of bitterness to swallow between now and then, but I imagine that sometimes I will come back to those moments when I am standing in dark listening to the soft breath of my wife and child awash in full sweetness of things.

...

Little by little I'm getting a sense of our boy's musical tastes. Every morning while his mom is still asleep we hang out upstairs and listen to some tunes while we play on the floor. At 10 weeks he registers instant joy or distain for songs... Happily itunes makes switching tracks easy.

He definitely enjoys classic country, smiling through Tex Ritter and Karl Denver. Hank Williams is a fav, although (worryingly) he seems to prefer the really dark songs like Ramblin' Man and Lost Highway to peppier numbers like Jambalya.

He is indifferent to 'difficult' jazz. Mingus in particular seems to annoy him. But Donald Byrd & early John Coletrane put him in a good mood right away.

Almost any 80's rock elicits a frown. Big 70's bands like Led Zeppelin are also a no go.

The kid likes funk. The funkier the better. I throw on Mothership by George Clinton and he lights right up. He smiles through Don Julian's version of Shorty the Pimp and by the time we get to Lynn Collins singing Baby Don't Do It he is practically laughing.

Gingerbread cookies AND a ukulele. My wife knows me all too well. I hope everyone else out there had as nice a day as we had here.

Love it or hate it, The Gates project seemed to put almost everyone in the park in a good mood.

A momentous day in the life of every New Yorker, a first subway ride:

Y A W N.

do you feel like yawning?

not even just a little bit?

ha!

YAWN. yawn. zzzzz

Spending so much time holding a 2 month old child I start losing perspective on the world of the large and find myself looking at full grown people astounded by their size.

In the uncatalogued recesses of my brain I dredge up unformed memories of childhood--of the perspective from the floor, of mysterious language, and of being carried to bed. Perhaps these passing thoughts aren't memories at all but only misplaced empathy. Either way it makes my understanding of the boy and his processes slightly less opaque.
. . .
2 Months old as of yesterday. 15+ pounds and almost 26 inches long. He's already comfortably in clothes for 9-12 month olds. The boy is gaining on us.
. . .
me (& my mom of course) at roughly the same age:

New York radio has never done it for me. In all my stints of living here I've listened to exactly one station, WFMU. And WFMU isn't even based here, it broadcasts out of Jersey City. LA had a couple of good stations, KCRW being the big gorilla of radio goodness. There were also several good college stations scattered about although I could only ever pick them up in the Valley.

Anyway, frustrated with local NY radio, in my general quest to make everything digital, and because of Jenn's desire to have music in the kitchen, I impulsively bought a Tivoli tabletop radio with Sirius satellite radio.

Spying the attractive Tivoli box, visiting friends instantly assume we are in radio nirvana, but it hasn't worked out that way.

First the satellite radio sound quality is poor--probably worse than normal radio. This is, I'm sure, a consequence of living in a city with lots of tall buildings, but even with a clear view of the sky... not so good. (normal radio on the Tivoli sounds great).

The second issue I have is the whole concept Sirius is built on, namely mainstream narrowcasting. There are 184 channels each one very specifically focused on a certain type of music. So for example, there are 6 jazz channels, each dedicated to a different type of jazz, but each is basically a "greatest hits" channel. None delves deep. And many of the DJs are just record spinners who just read label info and put on records almost at random. My idea of a jazz dj is some former beatnik who lives in a house whose foundation is crumbling from the weight of the records it bears, a guy who gets furious when you make a mistake identifying a session drummer on Bill Evans live show... a guy who wants to share what he knows because he loves and breaths the music.

Ditto for the punk DJ, ditto for the old time country DJ, etcetera. Wait. Sirius has no pure punk channel. Nor does it have a real classic country channel (it has something called the roadhouse prone to playing 70's crap. Where's my Tex Ritter, Hank Snow, and Jimmie Rodgers? How about some Collins kids.) How about playing music that music buffs actually get excited about?

Sirius has it all wrong. They are taking the same approach that Clear Channel used to destroy commercial radio, except they have more bandwidth available and are making each channel more specific. There is logic to this, but ultimately this strategy will always lose out to the ipod. The ipod is the ultimate narrowcast, it's only the music you already love, commercial free delivered whenever you want it.

How does satellite radio compete against this? By offering real DJs in the mode of the late John Peel. People who are fearless musical explorers with a taste for the unordinary. A good DJ brings you into his world, if he is happy, he plays happy songs, if he's sad he'll play an hour of music that will break your heart, if it's raining he might play a couple of rain songs. He doesn't stick to one genre or time period. He just plays the next song that needs to be played because it feels right. That's radio that excites and draws people in, not this mindless polite stuff they are now broadcasting from too many channels.

Sirius also has commercials (for Sirius!). The shame.

Jenn's family. That's her with the red bow on the right. Funky pants. Her mom is holding her. She surrounded by aunts, cousins and her grandparents. Her dad is not pictured, I'm sure he was busy away at work.

Hey a flickr photo of me taken by my wife just got BoingBoinged. To be fair they could care less about me... it was on a story about the Millenium Park sculpture... Anyway, here I am jumping like a fool in front of the sculpture:

BoingBoing
Too bad Boing Boing doesn't link flickr thumbnails properly so they can be clicked through.

The original photo appeared on this blog back in August.