And I'm Over Getting Older

Well, it's obvious that thinking about the state and trajectory of the species couldn't depress me very much more, so maybe it's time to change the subject to something that is a madcap buzz of positivity and optimism, you know, like getting older. Thirty-eight and counting, and somehow, without realizing it, I've crossed over into crinkled-forehead, responsible adulthood. This sucks! I mean, what the fuck, how did this happen? How did it happen to me?

I was never huge into trendy music movements, but there were a few bands I'd try and see if I could, and I generally liked the experience of a good crowd enough to try and get out once in a while. I haven't gone and seen a big rock show for ten years now, and I'm not sure how I got permission even that time, but the last experience was typical. Waiting in traffic, watching everyone toke weed in the parking lot, a run to the beer tent to pleasantly remove the edge, sweat, noise, screaming, darkness, dancing with minimal rhythm. It was almost exactly ten years ago, and I tell you, there's nothing like being outdoors with a beer in a crowd on a summery evening. It's exhilirating. I've never seen a professional baseball game, but last weekend's concert had me walking the kids on the sidewalk outside of Fenway park right before the Red Sox game, and there was something similar. Since the last show though, my live music experience has generally been limited to bar blues (meaning the setting rather than the musical structure), and your more ecumenical sort of outdoor event (a number of bluegrass festivals in that last category). I've really come to appreciate the summertime show that can get multiple generations up there and dancing around. Somehow, I've drifted away from any venue where you might readily spot a defiant youth.

I went to my first "real" concert when I was 15, when a friend dragged me along to go see Cheap Trick at a small outdoor venue. Good times, enjoyable show, but there wasn't a lot of 'em I needed to see at that age. At 13, safe to say that I had no friggin' clue at all about the music scene. My daughter, well, hasn't been quite the same. She's been following a Canadian band for about a year, and in February not only got her chance to see them, but actually got her picture taken wih her favorite singer (supervised, thank goodness). Since then, she has become totally insufferable, branching out into an appreciation of the general scene, blasting the radio or plugging herself into it, and coming up with all these annoying expectations.

What's her music like? I'm googling up some descriptors of the genre, including punk, rock, pop, and emo, but I probably would have used none of those words. Or maybe you need to use all of them, either as some kind of post-generational fusion, or (depending on the artist) the usual approach to the lowest common denominator. I've found it to be musically competent (even if it failed to melt my face off, dude), and it doesn't suck out of the gate. I'd describe the sound as something resembling dance tracks that someone finally decided would be more worthwhile with actual instrumentalists playing them and with songwriting that actually aspired to care what the lyrics said. I'd warrant a guess that the fan community occupies some transitional ground between the factory-made teenybopper garbage and whatever the college kids are into nowadays. Or maybe it's the legitimate big thing--who can tell now that there's no radio anymore?

Suggestively, it rises to about an entendre and a half, which appears to fly right over the heads of the fangirls (and it's just as well). I can't tell if the whole thing has been strangled down to semi-authenticity by what's left of the music industry, or if they're all just resigned to not out-do their parents and grandparents. I mean, our rock icons have already got the sexual ambiguity, religious affront, tuneless shouting, drug culture, music comprised entirely of sampling, death iconography, creepy body art, and angry rebellion covered, so what's left to piss off the parents? All that hasn't gone out of style is the stuff that never will: sex and youth. I mean, if these guys were to pump their fists and scream how it's all bullshit anyway and fuck The Man, then Mom and Dad are going to be cheering louder than the kids are.

Anyway, I digress. Here's the scene from a couple weeks ago. "Please Daddy, my friend already bought tickets. I love this band, you can't say no."

Now, I am a pretty permissive parent, but telling me that I can't say no is right up there with telling me that that's all you can eat--I'll show her what I can or can't do. Also, I really didn't want to have to deal with it, so I thought that saying the dad thing played up nicely to the family gift for contrarianism and reverse psychology. "No way are you going to a concert without an adult. Thirteen years old? You must be joking. Hell no." (Yes! Triumph!)

Which how I ended up with a ticket to go see All Time Low on Friday, along with a couple of other bands a that fanned out a little bit in either direction on the teenager/adult spectrum. (The headlining band collected bras, which is a bit creepy given the fans' age, but I suspect they weren't removed at the scene. My daughter's friend brought some pajamas in her bag to throw, but we were too far to reach, and had a better chance at hitting the sound guys and so refrained.) As mentioned above, it wasn't the music that was so bad, but the crowd was definitely ...offputting. A two-hour drive with the Fenway traffic, and the beer was overpriced and crappy, but the line to the bar, as well as to the men's room, was non-existent. There were 13-14 year old girls as far as the eye could see, and I failed to pass myself off as a teenager, even though I tried to dress down. On the second-tier section, where we were, the kids all lined up along the along the balcony, and there was enough space behind them for the straggling minority of parents to mill around and look bored. The cheering was decidedly high-pitched.

(Late in the show, they put the Bruins game on in the bars, and sometimes male cheers would sound up out of nowhere, drowning out the kids for a few seconds. I think it pissed off the band a little, but you know, welcome to Boston.)

When I used to go to rock concerts, people would hold up lighters during the inevitable ballads. (The one Grateful Dead show I watched, the place looked like a Christmas tree the second the lights went down, as the lighters got to more normal use as well.) Now it's constantly-waved iphones and cameras, to similar audience effect. It's weird without the (absence of) smells, but smoking is now outlawed here in Massachusetts for just about all public places (the single most benevolent accomplishment of the nanny state), and it's weird without the general intoxication, but most of the audience was too young to drink. There wasn't much press of crowd up in the balcony, as I said, but it looked somewhat energetic down below. Kids still mosh evidently, to varying approval of the bands.

My daughter and her friend snapped about ten dozen pictures, and at least one bedroom now has a new All Time Low shrine. And of course I'm curious what it will grow into. But what's the rush? Older comes before you're ready anyway.


Close it out, kiddos:
Maybe it's not my weekend, but it's gonna be my year,
And I've been going crazy, I'm stuck in here...

Five More Thoughts: Important Questions Ed.

1. Does this ever happen naturally?
In the first place, it impresses me that such a gigantic quantity of hydrocarbons has been infusing the crust all these millennia. Crazy that it's even there; crazier still that it's so well seized up in the rocks for so long. Organic crud is lighter than stones are, and lighter than water too for that matter, and you'd think that it'd've bubbled up eons ago, farted out into the air by seismic activity, tracked across the verdure by the dinosaurs' gooey talons. The earth's geological cycles, evidently (or at least by successful analogy) swirl around similarly to other convecting systems, they just do it really slowly. Impossibly slowly. The forests and pond scum of yesteryear get drowned, buried, subducted, chemically reduced. The suite of un-oxygenated organic materials ranging from from methane to graphite gets caught up in the cracks and pores, frozen bubbles waiting out the interminable centuries till the crust gets turned over and the pressure's released.

The oil leak in the Gulf is horrific, really, shaping up to be a generational national disaster, maybe an epochal one. What fucking hubris--nothing can go wrong? you really thought that?--and yet I keep thinking that with all these pressure bombs lurking under the surface, don't any of them go off from time to time without human influence? Are there no recorded gushers due to earthquakes? Along faults? This is not meant to be an exercise in douchey climatological contrarianism, just something that got me curious. There is (or was) a lot of oil under there, and are we the only reason it ever gets out? Sounds anthropocentric.

No Googling turned up any inadvertent natural blowouts, although the crust certainly outgasses regularly. Some of the more famous modes are gas seeps from the sea floor, along which methane-eating microbes flourish. Near active geological regions and fault lines, these trapped organics, as well as water, can also get hot and get released. Mud volcanoes are one way that hydrocarbons get released from the earth, causing trouble, or just looking cool when observed in the depths. (Hee hee, mud "diapir"!)

Other reading has suggested that an oil slick emerged from Haiti's recent earthquake, maybe from new faults that released the subterranean material. Oil formations might underlie one of the Caribbean's more tragically impoverished communities. Would energy development save the island? (Resources have had ambiguous benefits in the past.)

Some hydrocarbons on the ocean floor are present in clathrates, crystals composed of methane and water, resembling ice (more generally, clathrates have cage-like molecular structures in which various compounds can be incorporated). Methane clathrates burn, which is just awesome--I want some in my freezer to impress my friends. These are evidently sedimentary minerals, formed by the reduction of carbon dioxide by methanogens or some similar bugs, and fallen to the anoxic depths. It's been hypothesized that enough atmospheric warming and ocean acidification could release all this otherwise stable methane (a greenhouse gas), raising global temperature in a runaway fashion. This may have even caused the big Permian extinction. Scary, but according to the Wikipedian sages, most of it is deep enough that it's not expected to play the major part in our own lurking doom--I'm thinking of these clathrates as the shallower turns of the carbon cycle, an epicycle jiggling along the even slower elemental circuit. Methane lives a relatively short time in an oxidative environment, and if you go back far enough, free methane must have been more significant in the reducing Achaean proto-atmosphere. Where did the carbon originally come from? Condensed with the rest of the planet probably, buoying itself along the surface regions with record ebullience, as far as geological terms go.

And so we have mud volcanoes, but tar pits are famous too. They're still here, having leaked the heavier crude fractions along fault lines for ages, sustaining permanent lakes of sludge. We've found a lot of cool stuff preserved in there, and my suggestion is that we deliver time capsules into the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, sunken offerings for far-future paleontologists to discover, for whatever they may make of all of this.

2. Seriously, if the problem was that we neglected to clean the bathtub for a whole month, what makes us think that the solution is to get one of those spray bottles that you have to use *every single day*?
Update: it's still sitting there.

3. Did coal cause the Renaissance?
A lot of things changed at the end of the middle ages, which to us moderns, appear to have happened very fast (we like to forget the generations that passed in obscurity, as always, and celebrate the pockets of leisurely thinkers that woke up here and there). Anyway, suddenly we imagine a Renaissance, an explosion of art, science, economics, population, international instability, schism, and war. I've been asking myself, off and on, over the years of this blog, how the hell did it happen? Did prosperity cause democritization of power? Or maybe it was the other way around. Did the establishment of systems of learning and patronage (universities, monasteries, pet intellectuals) spur secularism in Europe (or Protestantism, the next-best thing at the time), or was it the reverse? To pick any one observation as the cause of the others is to taint yourself with ideology, and I try to avoid that. Well, usually I do.

Even if an inferiority complex about the grandeur that was Rome pervaded the West for centuries, progress didn't exactly grind to a halt. The accelerated close of the late middle ages may well have been a consequence of the enthusiastic recovery from the famines, plagues, and climate disaster of the the regrettable 14th century. Urbanization was happening apace, and it was running on wood: by the 1500s deforestation was already major problem. Northern Italy was pretty well wiped clean of trees when the Medicis aspired to employ the likes of DaVinci and Machiavelli. Later, Elizabethan England would be built on, and run on, imported timber.

Coal was well known enough by the time of the Renaissance, but it was not preferred thanks to its general stinkiness. But as the economy took off, there was little else to go on. Surely there was an interdependence in all these changes: innovations required fuel, and even if, say, ship-building couldn't help but be wood-intensive, the means of manufacture of everything else still had to be accounted for. It might be too much to say that new fuels caused the new thinking, but they certainly sustained it. Coal came just in time, and if it came to soot up the streets of London with obscene quantities of filth, it kept the imagineers of the age employed too. In our own times, the industrial revolution couldn't have proceeded without an immense supply of oil either.

Without energy availability, you can't do anything. What scares the shit out of me is that (regardless of the rest of the ecology) if sixteenth century people couldn't be sustained by wood, the current population sure as hell can't come close. If we're low on hydrocarbons, what the hell are we going to revert to as fossil fuels get scarce? The next amazing fuel? We might be a little behind. I deeply fear the limits to Cornucopianism.

4. Daddy, can we watch Spider Man tonight?
I am surprised to regard myself as an authoritarian. "What's allowed" is what they ask. Apparently, these royal indulgences are sufficiently rare that they're scooped up with budding entitlement. Uh, rated PG? I guess. (I don't give much of a shit about the language, but I tell the kids they can't watch violence until they understand irony, and as far as sex goes, I'd rather they learn to be in charge of it--I know far too well how much you should trust boys, and, well, we can have a discussion of what happens if you don't treat fucking very seriously--which the media seems a bit sketchy on, and I'm less comfortable sharing this than I thought I'd be when I first joined the club.)

Anyway, what's curious is that if a movie is watched once together, it becomes part of the family canon. Spider Man, now that he's been admitted into the club, is one of the handful of flicks that my little darling troll for obsessively on the on-demand (not to mention the sequels). Cartoons that I've happened to mention hating less are the preferred viewing when I'm around. It's like the cargo cult of parental affection, television selections in place of non-functioning airstrips. "See Daddy, we reproduce the stuff that was on when you loved us," or maybe it's a just their stretch for common ground. Am I so stingy in my interaction? In my affection? What a terrible thought! My god, turn it off, let's do something real!

5. Will this change the price of beer?
Yes!

I take back whatever I might have ever said about John Kerry over the years. The senator is proposing to reduce the taxes on brewers that make less than two million barrels of beer yearly (about the Sam Adams threshold). He's clearly targeting the microbrew industry, which is still strong in New England, despite the decline in the small-brew fad over the last ten years or so. For the tax discount, we're talking three bucks a barrel for the little guys, an excise tax, which I guess means on production, which according to my calculations, might save me as much as six cents on a ten dollar six-pack if it all of the windfall is reaped by the consumer. But you know, it's the priciple of the thing, and if it's an edge to keep local brewers alive, then I'm all for it.

(I hope they have similar relaxations for local agriculture. As it is, the regulations often favor the big boys...)

Better Poetry Than Mine

I'll have a normal post up soon (tomorrow, or Monday at the outside). In the meantime, I want to take advantage of this verbal lull to turn the spotlight to one of the coolest girls I know. These are some of her poems, which, as something of an incentive, I offered to show off on her Daddy's blog if they made the grade. They are from a book ("No Listening Allowed") that she recently dedicated to her great-grandmother, and before we drop it in the mail, I am upholding my end of the bargain. She's got more voice than I had at that age (and she's not doing so bad against the old man right now...), a bit of a naturalist evidently, and fond of naked word associations. Her silly streak makes me proud. Enjoy.

(untitled)
Gentle butterflies in my stomach
Waiting, watching, listening
I plea, "Robins sing your first chirp
Sun RISE!"
First day of spring right around
the
corner.

Walrus (Cinquain)
Walrus
Fat, majestic
Swimming, spitting, maneuvering
Mounds of blubber
Upside-down beast

I am Earth
You know me for the eldest land you worship.
My mother is earthquakes.
My father is volcanic eruptions.
I was born in a meteor shower.
I live in the cracks of every rock.
My best friend is the Moon
Because she keeps the world balanced.
We like to frolic in circles.
My enemy is Mars
Because he throws meteors at me.
I fear losing Moon
Because of constant climate changes.
I love the flowers
Because they hide the rocks under the luscious scent.
I dream to go green.

Summer Day (Diamante)
Summer day
Sunny, bright
Sweating, blistering, showering
Sunburns, flip flops, stars, crescents
Soothing sleeping, comforting
Chilly, fresh
Winter night.

5 Ws Poem (included at her request)
Zoot
Eats bugs
On the floor
On Saturdays
Because it's extra yummy that day.

Technology and Nostalgia in Children's Books

Slate ran a slide show article this week by Erica Perl about the representation of technology in young children's books. It was cute, and she brought out half a dozen examples of books that have representations of a child's world with primarily retro hardware. I don't know if I'd call it a theme, there are oceans of the things published, and you could pick out any ten and probably come to different conclusions. From the overflowing library and bookstore shelves, I'd have said that the overwhelming cohesive structure is a landscape for artists of obscure technique: everywhere are watercolors, paper cuttings, collage, fabrics, whimsical pens, and a heavy focus on the object itself, with holes in the pages, things to pull, things that make noise, and characters interacting with the paper. You might call it retro too, but I think it's more fundamental. The writers and illustrators are people that are comfortable interacting with homely techniques and art-class sorts of creativity, they want to put their hands on things. But so does the target audience.

But Perl's onto something too, I think. Technology has had an odd focus in children's literature for a long time. Some of the earliest stories that I remember being read to me were about anthropomorphic machines--trains and steam engines that always had faces--living to improve the lives of children to their dying gasp of coal-smoke. Looking back, I see them almost as industrial propaganda: better living through both backbreaking labor, adherence to routine, and celebration of technological prowess, and since all of them were obviously old when I was a boy, I'd guessed they must date to some marvelous industrial revolution heyday, but these books were all retro too. Little Toot, that happy little tugboat, was written in 1939. The Little Engine that Could trucked toys over the mountain in 1930. Tootle learned the importance of conformity in 1945, (after the war for God's sake). When these were written, all the little engines were already anachronisms, and while my parents no doubt could spot trains and such in their childhood, no one was shoveling coal to feed them.

One of my earliest exposure to pathos had to be Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939). (I have no idea how old I was when it was read to me.) In this story, the machine was facing obsolescence in the face of diesel power, and the poor thing was so loved, it broke boy Keifus up every time, and thankfully everyone was happy in the end. The Little Engine that Could faced competition from worthier locomotives too, but she managed to get the toys over the hill by herself anyway, proving, just like the steam shovel, that even if she was still relevant despite her obvious obsolescence. You can blame some of it on the thirties, and this business of coping with the modern, of loss and optimism, jibes well enough with the adult literary themes I can think of from that time.

(Did children's authors have much of a career before the thirties? [UPDATE, if anyone's reading. Yes, of course.])

Adults' portals to children's minds have to go through the past, right through the author's own childhood memories. No surprise that writers for young children in thirties and forties called back their fond memories of engineers in overalls and striped hats who'd wave from chugging locomotives, and no surprise at the theme of transition, of growing up and growing old and good times past permeates the enduring stories too, and works into modern kid-lit. It's more than the times: they're memorializing their own childhoods, and if you see typewriters or a corded phones today, well, there you go.

The Holy House of Mouse

Religious training for me was an odd thing. We weren't a church family, but my parents pushed us kids toward some measure of Christian exposure, just on the off chance it might take. We went to Sunday school, to Jesus camp, got conscripted into inept musical performances at services, which my Mom and Dad would attend only under pressure to support the kids. (To this day, they'll neither confirm nor deny their agnosticism, which I suppose is how you do it.) The church was like someone else's house, that I visited frequently. The faith belonged in the building, but I somehow fit in there too, all its nooks I knew, all the places a kid could tear around and play or act serious when people were looking.

So there I'd find myself for a Sunday a month, accompanying the yearly murder of Bach, or otherwise taking my part in some divine pageant or other, trucking the blue vinyl robes off their shelves, and hanging the silly gold diamond from my neck so that it would fall down my back in the most dignified way. The choir robes, at least those for us irregulars, had all the grace and durability of a graduation gown, consciously designed for appearance and not wear. It conforms with my enduring impression of church: insufficiently vacuumed back rooms, sterile kitchens, rooms full of battered folding chairs, boxes of filthy waiting-room toys, ragged stages heading auditoria of linoleum tiles, institutional smells. It's not as though these places lacked love, but it is impossible to apply the same sort of attention to an official space as the rickety box you spend most of your days living in. And it's not merely a flaw of the easygoing Protestants. The Catholics in town have it even worse, married to larger notions of frugal grandeur: "stained glass" of peeling applique, threadbare pews and fraying carpets, grand entrances with atrocious drafts. On Sunday evening, whether following the Latin or otherwise, all of the sacred vestments must necessarily get stuffed into some closet or other, maybe next to the choir robes, forgotten between cigarettes, coffee, and whatever business the cloth undertakes until they're used again at the next service. These objects can't take the sort of beating, the sort of love of everyday use. We don't caring for them like we do our dishes or our jeans, it's more like the occasional attention we pay to our halloween costumes, ignored for 50 weeks a year.

These humble dioceses, they'll attract their aesthetes I suppose, and certainly their locals, but in the business of marketing salvation, you need to have the look of success. Once upon a time, maybe it was enough to wave damnation around and send the flagellants through the town square every once in a while, selling, you know, that pie in the sky. Life used to be cheap enough (and no doubt it'll eventually be cheap enough again) to pull off the soft sell. For the rest of the Thomases, there's always the might of Rome to pound in the nails. What draws the discriminating into the the house of Peter? The thought that there's some mere spirit floating through the collective unconscious isn't going to do it, you can find that blowsy poetic crap any time people are left alone long enough to dream. Something must convince our unseemly pragmatic minds away from the low and local versions of wonder, and into the official corporate mysteries. The doctrinaire are pulled to the trappings of wealth, no faith worth its divine endorsement can subsist on Wonder and Welch's. If you've ever wondered what draws the penitents and pilgrims to Rome, it ain't the purity, it's the idea there is, in fact, no salvation on a budget. I've never been to St. Peter's, but I assume it's spotless, opulent. The Pope either scrubs the grease off the chalices himself, or else wipes his bedazzled sleeve over them and declares the blemishes holy. Whichever, and whoever, and who gives a fuck, so long as it's made of gold.

When my children were young enough to be easily impressed, we toured our share of low-budget amusements. Mother Goose, bereft of copyright and bound to her stations of the cross--here imprisoned the Shoe, there in a treetop Cradle, there with One Shoe On--immortalized, at least for a while, in rotting plastic, gathering mold seven months of the year, and dusted off by lackluster teenagers for the adulation of the cheap summer rubes. Icons of glory, um, lapsed. As children grow, many develop higher expectations of their faith. There is the expensive honor due the institution, sacred obeiscances and glorious tithes available to only to those of appropriately molded imagination. You can buy a hundred cartoon knockoffs, but in its deepest mysteries, Disneyworld markets the whole-family Hajj with the full force of its copious shareholder accounts, cramming an unfunny cartoon mouse onto cruises, into plastic fairy castles and styrofoam mountains, onto roller coasters, reducing him to ears (a bifurcated and bulbous excuse for a cross), and replicating those dispensible icons in profusion and moving them through innumerable gift shops. Make no mistake, there is no ground-in grime on Goofy's nose, and at the first hint of wear, his rubber suit is rapidly recreated in the smoke-belching Imagineering foundries. I do my best to bring my children up decently heathen, but the Spirit calls to them, it calls.

Seth Stevenson made a good pass at the experience, noting the corporate horrors, the more seductive for the enormous endowment glimmering from every carefully arranged crack. The reactions of the comments section is telling: how dare he question the teachings of Mickey? The truth of any living God must be in the myriad interactions of His smallest elements, eye-motes and tumbling sparrows and all that, but the Mouse's epiphany is decidedly top-down. Yeah, there's quality in there sometimes, but quality is only a gateway. Even the most precious Disney Moments are cribbed from better written material, and any actual genius is thoroughly digested to pap in the corporate tract before it is finally shit out as canon. The immortal Sheherazade gets a shade of Robin Williams, does a stint with the Disney Princess, dancing on lunchboxes with the rest of the shamelessly co-opted fables, makes a brief stop at Burger King before finally nestling snug in the landfill, eternally staring at wishing stars along with a generation's worth of other plastic dreck.

I guess what really pisses me off about the Disney experience is that vaunted attention to detail. They lay claim to the wonder of the mind in carefully packaged detail, much like the church would corner our spiritual journeys and the less coherent political and commercial powers are well served by a country that sucks up the idea of the American dream, shoehorning us all into the suburbs, onto highways, married with kids, struggling with shifting minutae of planned moral behavior, crippled under eternal and massive debt. There's nothing wrong with these narratives in themselves, but it chafes my spirit to watch my life shuffling along according to the mapped outlines. Real imagination takes us beyond the obvious story, at least in our minds, and maybe even pulls us out of the patterns of fervent consumption. To angle a monopoly on the very process of dreaming, sucking dollars off of it as it tumbles down every step of the value chain--that's inhuman. It takes a mouse.

It was a slow day

It was a slow day

…and the sun might have been shining somewhere in another hemisphere. Icy New England winds whipped grit around under the sidewalk lights, which, if I turned around, I'd be able to see through the big windows. I thought about it--turning around that is--but the chilly outdoors didn't hold a lot of allure either.

"Tedious? Could you say it again?"

"Tedious."

"T-E-D-E--" Ooh. Evidently there are no take-backs in official, certified spelling bees. She sighed and continued, eyes drifting floorward and shoulders slackening. "…I-O-U-S."

The panel had been as hopeful as I had been (probably for different reasons), although they tried to keep any feelings under their black suit jackets. I could see it in the slight tilt forward, and hear it in a brief indrawn breath on the microphone. From the back row of the audience, I could only see the backs of the panel members, dark business-wear to a woman, heads varying from black to gray and cropped in severe educator fashions.

"That is" [pause] "incorrect."

I guess they can't point out how close they got either, but everyone knew.

The speaker's hair was dark, cut in a horizontal line just above her shoulders, and it rippled a little bit every time she moved. When she looked down at her sheet, a cheek or jaw sometimes flashed, and I found myself wondering, without much interest, what she might look like, if she had bangs, maybe if she had wrinkles. Evidently she took this thing seriously--moreso than anyone else--so maybe she was there in some official lexicographic capacity. But that wouldn't describe the disappointed pause. Did it come from a freshly minted naiveté, still young enough to hope? Maybe it came from a bureaucratic frisson of seeing someone (almost) succeed within the rules. Her voice had neither the piping lightness of a young woman nor the breathy warble of an older one. "Is that person a teacher?" I stage-whispered to my younger daughter, who looked me in the eye for a second before scooting even further out of reach and deeper into her own fantasies, chattering softly. I myself daydreamed about a soft-eyed spinster handing me a form at the DMV.

"Your word is: 'Soldier.'"

Here's a kid with a lot of tells. The odds were bad just by the way he was standing, kind of shambling in place, not suggestive a lengthy attention span by any means. But in his defense, it's 6:30, he's still at school, and at three times his age, I was also fidgeting. He raced into a reply, without confidence or concern.

"S-O-L-J-U-R"

"That is incorrect."

He grinned his way to the losers' bench. The children who had had their turn were a badly organized row of disconsolate wrecks and, like the last contestant, overanimated goobers. The only thing that kept them from bolting was the glare of the principal. The ones who hadn't yet had their turn remained orderly and attentive.

"M-E-D-I-C-I-N-E"

Score, and about damn time. This is shaping up to be the shortest spelling bee in history, which is good, but there has to be some dignity salvagable from this sham. I mean, there were two hundred people and change stuck in there. Out of the first thirty or so contestants, "medicine" was the third correct answer. What are the odds they could spell 'decimate?' (Actually, decimate wasn't right--what's the word for one in ten left alive? For that matter, does 'medicine' come from the famous Florentine family? Nah, probably not. What's going on up there?)

"Um, could you use define that, please?"

Ha, someone had seen this done. Maybe there would be a competition after all.

"A musical term describing the perfunctory application of a musical note, usually with upbeat rhythmic phrasing."

Somehow, I don't think that helped.

"Um…S-T-A-C-C--"

Yes, yes…

"Um…E-D-D-O"

Jesus.

"That is incorrect."

Staccato signals of constant information… The bastards put those three words together on purpose, didn't they? A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires, and… "Daddy, stop singing!" (The nerve of that kid. Well, what could I say?) "Don't cry baby, don't cry."

The little one has been working for months to perfect a withering stare, and I got one of her best. I glanced around at the crowd, and there was no evidence that anyone had made a similar connection. Just what the hell is wrong with these people? I hate this town.

"Your word is: 'Distraction.'"

The colons were all audible.

"D-I-S-C-H-R…"

One game you can play while feigning interest at this sort of thing is to watch the kids, and try to surreptitiously guess which parents are theirs, based on how they dress and how they sit, what they seem to think of all this. The fat kid's parents are garrulous and large, the sorts of people that take up twice their allotted space, figuratively and physically. A few cute kids have ugly parents (and vice versa), but mostly it looks like the same crowd regarding itself through slow glass. The poor girl who flailed on "staccato," her parents appeared confident and caring, and not particularly concerned about this ridiculous event, a smile at the earnest attempt, a sympathetic eye-roll at the missed ending. I liked them on sight, but not so much that I wouldn't avoid a chat if it got me out of there thirty seconds sooner.

"Your word is: 'Chagrin.'"

The only parents that I already know were already sitting at the other side of the room when I walked in, which was just as well. Their daughter didn't come close to getting her word right, tacking on a string of nonsense letters at the end to fill up the space. My own little girl whiffed too, but made a passable guess at a word she'd never seen. She so much like me it's scary sometimes, but in fifth grade, I was always reading. This one, you have to twist her arm.

In that year, I came in a tightly contested second place in my own school spelling bee, ultimately missing on "freckle," which I spelled, like a dolt, with an "el." I remembered to share the story with Junior on the ride home, and performed my best fatherly scowl when I mentioned reading habits. I felt like a tool, and probably looked like one too.

"Your word is: 'Plebian.'"

"Can you use that in a sentence, please?"

The only thing that was keeping the curtain from falling was that a child, for the victory, also had to correctly spell a bonus word. This was a tough order, under the circumstances. Only one girl made it through the first three rounds, but she missed her game-winner. As a consequence, all eight survivors from the previous round had to be called back up for a replay. I felt bad: some other little kid ended up on the stage after that spelling for the victory, a little boy whose best effort that day would only get him shamed in the state competition and waste his whole family's day. Well, there was a trophy. The principal was looking uncomfortable on the side of the stage, and if I wasn't imagining it, the spinster's movements were getting just a little bit more stiff as she called off the final word. Could this be it?

"Condescension."

"Okay, C-O-N-D-E-S-" [come on…] -"C-E-N-S-C-I-O-N"

But you know, these people are all right. What's more annoying than a spelling Nazi anyway? There can't be a more useless measure of intelligence than spelling prowess: it's no substitute for actually using the vocabulary, for effective language. The most valid reason to aspire to good spelling is to insulate yourself from looking stupid, but really, at the point you might actually consider using some non-Latinate, multisyllabic string of gibberish, you shouldn't anyway, and even when you insist, no one will get upset if you look it up first. Competitive spelling is the celebration of rote over critical thinking, of memorization over imagination. Maybe it works as a sport? Maybe the inspiring moments come from mining the improbable depths of the brain's resources, making the most tenuous inner connections and coming up right. My early vision of overeducated and underfulfilled parents slavering at the sideline as their diminutive homeschooled twerp morosely prattled out "phlegmatic" or "magniloquent" or whatever in front of a crowd of hundreds at some drab heartland community college theater turned into something more pleasant, the thrill of victory, or better, since it's not the sport that usually gets positive attention, a subplot of secretly held hands and unexpected kisses stolen from other little helicoptered kids, alone backstage for a few minutes, cornered, for once, with someone else's sympathetic fears and passions.

I also can't avoid noticing that I take some pride in being a fairly good, if utilitarian, speller myself, and all of these life prescriptions I'd been spouting looked, just a little uncomfortably, more like projections than anything. It's something that might really have sunk in if I gave it time, but the kids were pouring off the stage by then, and the little one was tugging at my sleeve and the older one needed a hug. The crowd of mostly strangers pushed through the door together tightly for a moment and then spread into the cold evening. The way we look to us all, oh yeah, oh yeah.

Nurture, Nature, and Eddie Murphy

"All right, gather up kids, it looks like one of the best movies of all time is on."

"Isn't Eddie Murphy in this, Daddy?"

"Yup, back when he was funny, thank Bowdler."

"Thank what?"

"Huh? Oh, nothing. It used to have some swear-words is all. I don't think it loses much."

"Where's Eddie Murphy? Who are those people?"

"He'll be here pretty soon. Now see he used to be poor, but those two old guys..."

"Who's that guy?"

"That's Dan Aykroyd. I think this was the only time he was funny. Now look, he used to be have Eddie Murphy's job, but those guys switched. They're trying to say..."

"He looks pretty gross."

"Yeah, well, he's had some hard times. That's kind of the point."

"Why is she dressed like that?"

"Um, well, she's not a real classy girl."

"What's a pimp? Daddy? What's a pimp?"

"Yes, well, see, they're those guys that dress all crazy like I was telling you before. They, um, are mean to girls though. They take all their money."

"He looks pretty sad."

"That's kind of what they're getting at. You take someone's money away, and look where it gets them. But he was pretty lucky in the first place, you know? And now he has to find out how everyone else lives."

"He's not a very nice Santa."

"Shush now, this is a funny part."

"Hey, there's Eddie Murphy!"

Thank god she didn't make it far enough to ask me explain their stock trading scheme.

That conversation Thing One's way of picking on me a little, giving back what she usually gets. My kids always follow the rules, but that's more because they prefer to be creative and could often give a rat's ass about the letter of the law (this according to their teachers, which makes me secretly, and excessively, proud). That's my little angel. Be a playful little pain in the ass.

Maybe it's wrong to call Trading Places one of the best ever--there are extraneous gags, and the closing sequences are oddly put together--but I've got to call it out as one the best-directed comedies. Even though it channels a piece of young Murphy's comic energy, it's much more a director's project than a star vehicle. The best jokes are elaborately constructed, set up with the care of a Rube Goldberg machine. There are half a dozen scenes where John Landis crescendos and concentrates the energy up to a single point, balances it on a pin, and uses the smallest possible change to send the momentum in a completely different direction. Maybe it's meant to capture the dynamics of floor trading. The false calm shattered by the opening bell and the huge shift when the crowd shifted from buy to sell, are very much examples of what makes this movie tick.

It's not just a matter of timing. Landis worked to make that big pivot in the smallest possible space too. There's one scene where Eddie Murphy is surrounded by (white) cops with guns, which were arranged to fill the whole of the shot except for the star's face, very small in the frame. The entire mood of the scene hinges on Murphy breaking a smile. Time to laugh, everyone.

He used space to paint wealth and poverty too, letting the two worlds emerge as characters of their own, shrinking the actors when the abstracts need to have their screen time. Even though the film's 25 years old, it's probably singularly responsible for my (positive) mental image of urban Philadelphia. I don't imagine using setting as character is terribly original, but Landis was clever enough to let it crack a joke or two as well. One of the better scenes, where the Dan Aykroyd character is fired, an executive pool of hundreds of harrumphing old men is dwarfed by an enormous wood-paneled boardroom, the embodiment of old money. It ends with the portraits of the founders looking down in silent disapproval from their bygone eras. Brilliantly timed.

I couldn't explain any of this to my children, who are still brainwashed to think that low-budget Nickelodeon's live action crap is the essence of comedy. Hell, I think they giggled at drunken Santa (the rain opening up when he steps off the bus, the gun going off after he fails to shoot himself, both brilliantly timed) only because they are so conditioned to laugh track cues that they did what I did. They didn't appreciate a damn bit of it in fact, but it was fun trying to get them to.

Activities and Idiots

The turning point took about six months longer than usual. I think that has to count as something of a success. My plan was to blog about it then, sitting in the steaming clamor, but a string of missed practices--snowstorms, construction--has ruined my chances to kill time scribe insightful comments amid the shouds and splashes and uninteresting parental banter. She's only been swimming sporadically this month, and, by the consent of all involved, we've opted out of the insipid bonding rituals. Two weeks ago, we dodged what feels like the last one.

It's a well known fact that if children lack structured extracurricular activities, their skulls wither up to little husks until the clown liquefies their gray matter to the soggy ccardboard consistency of a McShake. It's understood that just booting their asses outside doesn't build quite the character that it used to (and judging by my parents' generation and mine, there might be something to this) but absent the halcyon days of child labor, I have to do my penance as child event enabler. When the whistle blows on Friday, I hightail it from my office to my wife's place of employment (this affords me an extra twenty minutes of labor, more than Junior could earn in a week, except I'm salaried), perform the kiddie switcheroo, and proceed another 45 minutes to the pool.

Though it may sound like the logical solution, my daughter does not swim at the same pool as myself. That would lack quite the number of organizational hurdles. I mean, it was good enough for her last summer, when she enjoyed the sorts of activities that normal children enjoy in pools, which is to say suffering an hour of instruction follwed by an afternoon of soggily tearing the place apart for the rest of the afternoon. But you see, that wouldn't be training for anything. Moreover, it would leave little outlet for the trainers, or rather, the motivators.

Maybe there's been some day you were lucky enough to bag work on a weekday--mild illness, mid-day dental appointment, Tuesday, whatever--and maybe you thought, "Gee, this'd be a great time to get something done," and you hiked your minivan to the supermarket and clanged your squeaky-wheeled wire cart through the teeming parking lot, thinking "wow, I thought most people worked during the day." Maybe you elbowed your way to the checkout past some sourpuss of a woman who paused yakking into her cell phone just long enough to eyeball you menacingly as you gingerly placed the plastic divider on the conveyer behind your Cheetos and bloody mary mix. You hurried out of the store in confusion and embarrassment, with a renewed vision of workplace productivity. Lucky you: you just got winged.

On one level, I know a family community is important. On another level, about 80% of the people in that community really irritate me. Probably I should have moved to a smarter town, and if that only means bonding around higher-class kiddie activities, then at least the conversations would be theoretically more interesting. Ooh, a lawn tractor Bob? That's interesting. (In that smarter town I imagine it's portfolios and affairs--so maybe just as bad.) Since I trek twenty miles to swim practice, a dropoff is infeasible, so I sit up there and watch the kids do their laps, while the little one pulls at my elbow. I look at the other "sports parents." Somehow, I'm always younger than any of them, but I don't think that's really teh source of the dissimilarity. You have some people reflecting my bored and empty stare, sure, but most of these people know each other. Most of them like it here.

My daughter's been swimming for a year. She's good at it, but she is not a competitive kid, and we've been keeping her out of meets. This is for her protection, but also our sanity. She'd been in wrestling before (not particularly good, but very enthusiastic), and her turning point in that sport came after losing five times in succession at a meet and crying on the way home. From our point of view, it was a day-long hell of smelly pubescent kids and cramped noise amid child-sized bleacers for the purpose of about five minutes of watching my little girl compete, forced to channel an antagonism she didn't enjoy. She didn't want to go back to practice after that, but Mom and Dad insisted she keep her commitment for the season--character, you understand. Plus, we'd already paid for it.

At the end of wrestling season, there were, of course, awards at which teh organizers all thanked themselves for a job well done. I will give them credit for their effort, which I do respect, but there's only so much self-appreciation I can stand. Hint: I don't care about your ski trip; I already know your kid had the best season of anyone, or that your troop is just super; I don't care who donated the baskets and I don't want to win them; it's nice to mention the organizers, but you know, not everyone needs to utter a few words, especially when none of you are any good at it. There's that urge to take a kid's activity and make it ceremonial and make them blatherfests quite out of proportion to the significance (to most of us) of the activity itself... kind of like the meets themselves, actually. There's something magical about the way amateur bloviaters can fill up an evening. If you're ever looking for a fine synecdoche of political rhetoric, may I suggest you attend a sports award ceremony for eight-year-olds? Same buffoonery, less polish.

Back at swim practice, there are a few active parents bustling around us bored-looking ones. They're planning something. Last time, it was pre-registration for an extra meet, because otherwise, there'd be four whole weeks gone past without one. It's the parents who want this. They're bubbly with excitement at the prospect of hours of waiting and shouted conversation above the deafening splashes. Two weeks ago, there was a big spaghetti dinner planned so the tykes could carb up before swimming the next day at the meet. My daughter's nine. She doesn't carb up. But it's the beginning of the end, I can feel it.

There is, of course, parental guilt involved in all of this. Shouldn't I be squeezing some life lessons from this, preparing her for a life of toiling for limited merit? Shouldn't I, uh, be devoting more?

Well, maybe when she's ten.

Keifus [when I coached soccer for her, my aim was to make sure everyone got a chance to play.]

Innocent Music

(How'd this one escape the archives?)

Warning to diabetics! This post is rich in treacle and poor in musical taste (or knowledge). Proceed at your own risk.

"Daddy, what's this cd?"

"Put it in sweetie, tell me what you think."

Keifus grooves, junior observes, thinking.

"Do you like the sound of it," I ask.

"Kind of. Actually, it's a little scary."

And she's right I suppose, though I might have gone with angry as the adjective of choice. If you asked me ten years ago (back when I meant to buy the cd), I'd have argued that you'd need a certain measure of seething anger--need to know just how much to direct inward and just how much to send out--to really appreciate that sort of music. I wish like hell I could tell you what does it--it seems like the same old three or four chords, if ordered a bit differently. I can see how unexpected progressions could prick the hackles and all, but maybe it's just the powerful and wavering vocals and the heavy guitars. My daughter evidently gets some of the emotion however, and rejects that sense of menace for now. Good for her.

"Daddy, I'd rather listen to that bluegrass cd.**" (G, C, and D again, but now in happier progressions.) So we do. I practice rhythm as the kids dance around. It's cute, and it's maybe the best fun I've had all week.

But it's a funny thing. We didn't used to need fun music to catch the mood. It was anything with a beat and a melody. We were never a Raffi family, and we didn't shield the children from stuff we enjoyed. Keifus got moody and pretentious and my wife had a penchant for the mellower moodiness of Vietnam-era tunes: Paul McCartney and Buffalo Springfield and Creedence sort of thing.

Six or seven years ago, when she was little, my daughter and I would dance around together to heavy guitar riffs, at her request, because she knew I liked them. She'd groove along with me to the brooding strums, and we'd both be grinning, finding the modicum of joy that's the kernel of any artistic release. It was a pure thing in its way.

But no more. She's growning an appreciation of context.*** She still prefers the simpler pleasures, as you'd hope a child would, but now she needs the pleasurable cues to help her access them.

Ah well, there's a lot of life to learn yet, and she will. And even though her tastes are innocent now, I already miss the days when they were innocent enough to listen to angry rock and dance to it with Daddy.

Keifus

**Note that she doesn't mean the good bluegrass--I can't even play their rhythm fast enough--but rather the play-along garbage that wifey bought to learn the fiddle during her quarterly musical inspiration. It's very frustrating stuff, actually. It's just the right speed so that the bare melody they play is dreadfully boring, but playing fills or solos is just north of my speed limit.

*** I drive the kid nuts telling her that she's not allowed to watch certain TV programming until she can tell me convincingly that she knows what irony means. She's closer than she thinks