Living in the past

In August of 1990, Jane's Addiction - Perry Farrell's alternative band and pet project - released their second album, which was perhaps most notable for the massive frat party hit 'Been Caught Stealing,' and for an extended track called 'Three Days' that features the guitar work of Dave Navarro (who went on to play for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose work is possibly known to even the most culturally isolationist of this blog's readers).

At some point in the mid-1990s, I sent my dad a mixed tape that featured a number of rather recent rock tunes, including 'Three Days.' Such gifts, as I remember it, necessitated at least a bit of contextualization, for a similar mixed tape sent by my brother, a year or two earlier, had been interpreted as a sampler of my brother's band's recent output. Given that that tape had included 'Been Caught Stealing,' the misinterpretation was a fun one: working on the assumption that my brother had co-written and played on the song, but not realizing that it was one of the decade's biggest hits, Dad seemed only mildly impressed. But dads can surprise, and months after I'd sent him my (clearly labeled and attributed) tape, he mentioned that he'd enjoyed cranking 'Three Days' in the old Reliant K wagon.

And, just this week, during a longish spell of Cleo-watching, I was looking for some background music, and found that same Jane's Addiction CD on our shelves. Hadn't listened to it in years, but popped it in, and turned it up. And Cleo and I played a chaotic, no-holds-barred, rules-waived version of backgammon while the bass quietly established a floor, and Farrell shrieked in his inimitable way, and Navarro's guitar soared, and soared.

Sure, context matters in the interpretation of art. (Unless you're the staunchest of New Critics, and in that event you're not new anymore: you're a half century behind the times). In fact, I still remember hearing about Kurt Cobain's suicide on MTV news while at a beach house with my parents - and, upon telling them, realizing that they'd never heard of Cobain. But, all of that said, context only matters to a degree. To a grad student making a mixed tape, to a dad driving in a Reliant K, to a dad on dad duty on a cold December day... something about the song works. And now, as it works, and as Cleo hears it for the first time, it carries me back, as well as forward.

Current hobbies

What's Cleo up to, you ask? Well, beyond fighting off the rather grim stomach flu that's making the rounds, a few things, on a daily basis. Pointing out, as soon as one of us enters her bedroom in the morning, that we should turn off the heater and the vaporizer. The advent calendar, made by a generous friend. A book called Where Does it Park? Shoes, still. Puzzles, as long as they don't have interlocking pieces. And, perhaps above all, a vigorous recording of Old MacDonald that we were given a few months ago and that has been in heavy rotation ever since.

You can see, and hear, two of those interests overlap in this video, which records a more or less daily ritual.

The view from a distance

As far as I know, there's no word in English for the combination of loneliness, liberation, and disorienting sense of an adjusted perspective that one can feel when stepping away and looking back, from a distance, at a group to which one nominally belongs. Presumably some existentially fraught Eastern European tongue - Slovak, perhaps, after the rather sad 1993 attainment of countryhood? - has coined a word for the condition. But in this blog post I'll have to do without a convenient, economical summary of my topic.

Here's what I have in mind. Today, at the little Roland Park library nursery rhyme group that Cleo and I been attending for more than a year now, Cleo suddenly grew a little tired of the song that I and the other 8 adults were singing: ironically, enough, The More We Get Together. So she simply stood up and walked off to another section of the large room - a section that featured a large rocking chair that was clearly more exciting than our plodding, methodical incantation. But, after a few moments of exploring the chair, she looked back towards us, with a sense of both curiosity and mild transgression on her face.

I knew, I think, what she was feeling. In my file of essays-to-be-written, I have one set of notes dedicated to moments in art and literature that detail a sudden cut away, to a distant view of the subject at hand. The best example I know of occurs in James Cameron's Titanic, during the long, cold sequence in which the ship breaks apart and sinks. For most of a half hour, we closely follow the actions of dozens of individuals, in tight, swamped settings. And then, suddenly, we're offered a distant view, from about a half mile off, of what seems to be a tiny, illuminated boat lost in the vast night. It is a remarkable moment: an intense tragedy becomes a momentary incident on the huge plane of the sea.

There are other examples of the tendency, as well. In Brian O'Doherty's "Inside the White Cube," and important piece of modernist criticism, he opens with an imagined, distant view of the modernist tradition, as though seen from space. And, more playfully, at the 10-minute mark of The Flying Guillotine, a martial arts movie, a long fight sequence is punctuated, at one point, by a middle-distance view from inside a rock wall: the efforts of the combatants reduced to mere abstract motion.

Is that, more or less, what Cleo saw, as she watched and listened from, as it were, offstage? Did we simply look small, and insignificant, to her, as we chanted our children's songs? Or did she feel some of the sense of adventure that I feel when I step away from the utterly familiar, and see it as anew?

To the airport

What is it that they say? Time flies when you're... in North arolina for Thanksgiving, and then juggling parenting, teaching, painting walls in West Virginia, and making revisions on a book? Yes, yes: those old folk sayings sure have a truth to them.

So my apologies for the hiatus - but, fortified by homemade pumpkin pie, visits with all four grandparents, and a shiny new first-place trophy in my fantasy football league, I'm back, and full of ideas. My first idea, though, isn't quite wholly new, since, as some of you may remember, I've written on airports before. That was long before, however, I had a cute little one-year-old in my charge, and so on a recent, raw Tuesday Cleo and I drove out to BWI to see what we could see.

As adults, we often think of airports as purely functional spaces. Signs direct us to the checkpoint and then to the gate. Maybe we dart into a newsroom and buy a paper; restrooms are always generously spaced. Got a laptop? There's an outlet. From the point of view of a toddler, though, airports are ridiculously sick playgrounds. Elevators, escalators, moving sidewalks: BWI has that holy trifecta, in spades. The large window in the observation deck peers out towards a number of planes that look just like the ones in the board books, and no one seems to mind if you just purse your lips and do your best, slobbering imitation of a plane in the air.

So you can imagine. Cleo rolled her stroller about, being careful to avoid the huge jet engine in the children's hall, and I tried to slide as far as I could on the highly polished marble steps. We squeaked, and she squealed, and we chatted, in a manner of speaking, and then Cleo made that great airplane noise again. And then we split a granola bar.

But even as I tried to give myself over, over and over, to being one, there was another sort of soundtrack in the back of my mind. Something much more deliberate, more meditative, more restrained. More abtract, and more adult. Something comforting, in an entirely different way. Perhaps you know which airport music I mean.

It's grand to be 18 months old, in an airport. And it's great to be 40, as well.