This morning I happened on the wonderful “BikeNYC” portraits by Dmitri Gudkov, of New York cyclists and their bikes. This collection is the strongest case I’ve seen in support of expanded bike infrastructure around the city; the subjects of Gudkov’s portraits represent the true range of cyclists I see in the bike lanes, especially here in Bed Stuy. Many are emphatically normal-looking; there are some oddities, too, though not in the ways you might expect. The impression you get is that cycling is a routine, practical activity, not just the domain of fixed-gear scorchers and insane people with toe-coozies. The photos themselves are nicely done, too.

Luis The Super is one of my favorites. My god, this guy needs his own protected bike path. He’s blind in one eye and rides around with a giant bucket hanging from his handlebars.

Thomas Adès’s Mazurkas are, I believe, the finest Mazurkas yet to be written in the 21st century. I’ll be playing all three of them on my Lincoln Center show on Sunday, February 24th; in the meantime, I made a little home-recording demo of the second one. I’ve got another month or so to practice, so listen up and tell me how I could be doing better:

Thomas Adès: Second Mazurka

Timothy Andres, piano

He dressed in more or less Ivy League fashion casually, informally, and yet with an occasional touch of flamboyance. As soon as he could afford to do so, he indulged his interest in good clothes freely and took inordinate pride in his tailor. He often dragged along his friends to fittings which came to be known as “Lenny’s dress rehearsals.”

—From Leonard Bernstein: A Biography for Young People (1960) by David Ewen.

Popped over to Ft. Greene last night to hear Dave Kaplan play the Goldbergs. Dave’s playing, like his customary bow tie and corduroy suit, is instructive in the best way, without being overly didactic—his interpretations have a clarity which allow you to notice things you hadn’t before.

I’ve noticed that my interpretations (especially of “standard rep”) tend to swing between poles of naturalness and didacticism—constant reacting and re-reacting to oneself, rather than a process of winnowing down to a consistent ideal. Probably not the best way to be a “concert pianist”, but it keeps things interesting, and anyway, as Victor Borge might say, “That’s just the way I’m built”.

Afterwards we all went to Die Schwarze Kölner, one of my favorite bars (Schneider Aventinus on tap!), then home, to assemble Linzer cookies. Truly the best of Germanic culture, right here in Brooklyn.

Did everybody catch that article a couple of weeks ago in the New Yorker about the virtuoso pickpocket, Apollo Robbins?

In the video above (I know, it’s flash, terribly sorry) he demonstrates some of his methods on Adam Green, who wrote the article. What’s especially amazing to me is that even after he’s revealed his “secrets”, the routines appear, if anything, more impressive and just as impossible, because of the amount of technique involved. We should all be so lucky.