Trampoline hair girl, Castro Valley, CA.
Archive | January, 2009
Hallelujah.
Couldn’t have said it better myself: a series by Maira Kalman, “The Inauguration. At Last.”
She’s been given a berth the last Friday of the month at The New York Times, “And the Pursuit of Happines,” in which she’ll explore American democracy. I might find myself tempted every now and then to send you over there. If her eye for detail and the moment continue to do such a fine job of conveying what I might have liked to have conveyed, had I been there. Wherever there is. Was.
[By the way: Kalman refers, in the series, to having listened to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's singing Bach cantatas en route down to Washington. Which makes me want to say: listen to this. Nine minutes six seconds. And also say: here, here's the second part. And the third. But just a minute sixteen seconds into the first part, that will do. Her voice singing: Ich habe genug, I have enough. (Also: I have had enough? Depends I suppose on what you're listening for.) Some might have seen her sing this, directed (I think) by Peter Sellars, decked out in hospital garb, indicating terminal illness. When you know that she died quite young -- quite, quite in her prime -- of cancer. Well.]
Music puzzler
Okay, I could have foisted this trio of cameraphone videos on a pianist friend and asked her to try to identify the piece (hi, Skye!), but then I thought: wouldn’t it be more fun to ask the world wide internets?
Desperately seeking Aclaudia
Our girlchild burst in the door last week in as close to a dither as I think I’ve seen her. She’d been at the neighborhood toddler playground. “Baba, Baba! I made a new friend at the playground today!”
Which of course put me in a dither, because our daughter is — how can I put this diplomatically? — she’s a touch eccentric. Not so much anti-social as, well, a-social. Like, if she needs other kids her age, it’s a little hard to tell sometimes. Let’s put it this way: at preschool, for the first half year, we would find ways to casually ask her which kids at school she was making friends with, and she’d usually say something along the lines of, “I don’t so much play with the other kids. But I do talk with the teachers.” Eventually she seemed to actually develop friendships with other kids at preschool. I was nearly as grateful as I was when she started peeing into the toilet.
Still, even recently, when I nudged the old “any people you especially enjoy spending time with at school?” topic, she mentioned a gal who’d left the school last fall for Kindergarten. Sigh. I followed up with another question, and she said, “I usually play with myself. It’s less rowdy and more mellow that way.” She accompanied this with a little nod, and a sort of a studied, thoughtfully-knit brow.
Peapod vision
“It looks like an opened leaf, with tiny green raindrops on it,” said the lil’ monkey, as she held the opened snap pea.
When I am running through the short list of why it is that living around growing young people is a really, really wonderful experience — meaning, literally, wonder-full; mostly theirs, and hopefully as much as possible, mine — this kind of stuff ranks very high.
Basically, they see the world differently than we do. Thank heavens. Lucky world.
Yet another nifty thing off the internet
Erm. Cool visual used to be here (okay, from Jan 23 ’til late Jan 28) but you’ll have to link to it below to see it, since it may have been lousing up some folks’ Internet Explorer-mediated connections to this page? ?
Made from words in Obama’s inaugural speech, and found here. Thanks to granolasusan’s Twitter stream. Press the “click to interact” jobbie and you’ll see it more clearly, and be able to fiddle with the words a bit. Puts one to mind of Edward Tufte, just a little bit.
[And here, Stanley Fish offers a more analytical than visual take on the speech. Winding up, interestingly, at a point quite nicely depicted by the image above.]
Seen and heard on date night
This was last week. We’d just finished eating a fine meal at our favorite neighborhood Italian restaurant. And no, I don’t like it just because there’s a waitress there who for years has been willing to (unable to not?) flirt regardless of whether the mother of my children is sitting right there at the table opposite me. Though flirting is in the eye of the beholder; I’ve often argued that she’s just veeeeery gregarious. Mostly I think she’s good at her job, and knows which member of a party to charm in which way, for maximum income. Though the beloved has begged to differ, and is convinced that the gal, while fairly evidently straight (a femme lesbian knows her sistren), harbors a thing for the dapper butch and simply can’t contain herself. Who am I to contradict her? At any rate, it helps, I’m sure, that whenever she comes up to check on us and we’re lovey-dovey or laughing, she tells us how “cute” we are. We always say: parents on date night. Hard not to have a good time.
But I digress. We’d just left the restaurant, collars turned up against the nip in the air. We were peeping in a nearby store window when I heard the unmistakeable sound of a gaggle of high-spirited teenage voices. It was around 9:30 PM. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them coming toward us in the crosswalk of the four-lane thoroughfare.
“Are they stopping for us?” said one of them to another, clearly referring to oncoming traffic. ”They’re not stopping. They’re totally not stopping for us.”
Laughter ensued, and then other remarks out of earshot. I thought to myself: God love the young people. I mused a bit to myself about how interesting it was, how you could tell the mutual affection between the friends, and the self-confidence, all from the tone of voice. Not a one picked up her pace in the crosswalk, but all arrived unscathed and full of good cheer. Ah, the uncanny sense of invincibility that only the teen years can convey.
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