Three moments

One, as we sat in Starbucks on Saturday morning, and you ate blueberries and stirred my coffee, and I asked you if you could hear the guitar music, and you craned your neck as if trying to see the spandrels of a frescoed ceiling, and peered judiciously at the speaker set above us. Two, just this morning, when you spent much of storytime at the bookstore climbing over a small bench, sprawled at crazed angles while the crowd of kids and moms offered a ragtag rendition of If You're Happy and You Know It - only to join in, vigorously, in the ultimate verse, shaking your little mullet as energetically as you could. And three, the modest, private chugging whisper that you made as we walked toward the light rail stop to get the train, the white train, that left you saying, minutes after we'd gotten off, in a rising and drawn out tone, More.

Private languages

On a minor detour during a burst of reading and writing this afternoon, I happened to encounter the name of Bix Beiderbecke - a quirky 1920s Jazz Age cornetist whom I now wish I'd met long ago. Beiderbecke's story is an engaging one: born in Iowa, in 1903 to a mother who was a church organist, he quickly became known as something of a prodigy on the piano; by the age of 10, he was sneaking onto riverboats and playing the calliope for admiring listeners. In 1916, he took up the cornet, more or less teaching himself the instrument (he reportedly played lefthanded for 8 years, before switching to his right). Soon, though, he was also finding his way into trouble, and after being expelled from the Lake Forest Academy, in Chicago, he turned to music as a full-time job, soon joining the Wolverine Orchestra. His work with that group earned him a measure of fame in the jazz world, before his early death in 1931.

Beiderbecke owes his reputation in large part, I gather, to that premature death: he has been variously viewed, since 1931, as a martyr, a saint, or a sort of romantic hero. But his music has also been praised, especially for its perceived influence on the similarly idiosyncratic Lester Young. But what do critics enjoy, specifically, about Beiderbecke's playing? Well, listen to Michael Steinman, on his blog Jazz Lives: "Bix Beiderbecke lived in and created his own world, much as Lester Young did — and it had its own private musical language. Think of the special break on SOMEBODY STOLE MY GAL, the modulation into the vocal on SUNDAY, and more."

Curious, I purchased "Sunday," and gave it a listen. It's a bright, prancing melodic tune that put me, at least, in the mind of live gazebo performances, afternoon sunshine, and ice cream stands. But Steinman's certainly right about the curious bridge to the vocals: the horns give way to a guitar, which then seems to strain with the work of imposing a new rhythm on the tune. Sure, I'm hardly the one to judge how unusual such a move was in jazz works of the time. But 'private musical language' certainly does ring a bell - perhaps because L. and I spend lots of time, these days, in the company of another quirky individual with a very idiosyncratic style of her own. And so, in honor of Beiderbecke's unusual style, I thought I'd offer up, in today's post, a brief glossary of Cleo's own private language, as it's evolved over the past few months. Let's let 10 examples stand in for a host:

sha shoo: shower
muni: banana
munu: macaroni
kookah: circle, and clock
ba too-ah: backgammon
(h)ummi: hummus
aw doo: all done
boo bwee: blueberry
doo: stool
meh see: medicine

You can't find a compilation of these, yet, on ITunes. But, if you want to give 'Sunday' a listen, it's there for you, for 99 cents.

Eminem and Dion; peas and yogurt

With a few free hours on hand this past week, I decided to indulge my crush on Iranian culture by sitting down with a new book by a Jamie Maslin, an English backpacker who traveled the country a couple of years ago, and recently published an informal account of his journey. Despite its joyfully lowbrow title – Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn – it soon proved to be an infectious read, combining a whimsical and idealistic travel philosophy (that feels increasingly remote to me as I sink into middle-aged care and love of planning) with a range of observations on Iranian etiquette, generosity, driving patterns and dating habits.

And, I should say, Iranian musical tastes, because Maslin is repeatedly struck by what you might call the unexpected heterogeneity of the sounds that flow from taxi sound systems and teens’ computers in Tehran and Shiraz. Instead of Koranic recitations, it’s often Chris de Burgh, the Irish crooner who peaked in the 1980s and who is deemed acceptable by Iranian mullahs because of a song called “There is Only One God” – a title that happens to neatly reflect Shi’ite dogma. Maslin’s also struck, though, by the ubiquity of a German pop duo named Modern Talking: a group virtually unheard of in England or the U.S., but given entire subsections in Iranian bookstores (Maslin even purchases a bilingual transcription of lyrics from songs by Modern Talking). Then, too, the teens he meets also listen to, and sing along with, Eminem, and Celine Dion, when they’re out of the public eye. Indeed, it’s the teens’ ability to move seamlessly from rap to ballad, and from ballad to technopop, that ultimately impresses Maslin as most notable. One minute, a kid in Tabriz is rapping about life on the streets of Detroit; the next, his voice is soaring as it accompanies the theme from Titanic.

I’ll remember that observation. To be honest, though, the musical promiscuity of Iranian teens didn’t strike me as that unusual – perhaps, I think, because I spend a good deal of time around a toddler. And toddlers, of course, specialize in the very sort of jarring combination that Maslin encounters in Iran. Peas and yogurt? Oh, yeah. Insisting on brushing her teeth while taking a warm bath? Totally typical. As a result, I’d be more surprised if Cleo dressed herself conventionally than I was when she decided, the other day, to try on a second pair of pants, after managing to partly don a first pair, backwards.

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to compare Iranians to toddlers. Rather, it’s just that there may be a simple joy or beauty, often overlooked, in the juxtaposition of normally sequestered forms. Genres can result in artificial walls; conventions can restrict; a sense of propriety can limit daily pleasure. Or, to put it slightly differently (as the Persian Sa’di did, in his sublime Gulistan), “if a camel will go mad with pleasure at a desert song, and a man not feel it, he is but an ass.”

And did you cry? And, if so, why?

When, and how, does the ordinary world give way to the transcendent? At very unpredictable moments, sometimes, and in temporarily disarming or even shattering manners. Listen, for instance, to the author Robin Parks:

"I cried so (so hard I had to leave) at a little concert where a young man plaed solo cello Bach suites. It was a weird little Methodist church and there were only about fifteen of us in the audience, the cellist alone on the stage. It was midday. I cried because (I guess) I was overcome with love. It was impossible for me to shake the sensation (mental, physical) that J.S. Bach was in the room with me, and I loved him."

Cleo was in the room with me the other day, and she wandered into my closet, emerging a few moments later with two crisp pairs of clean boxers. She promptly sat down at the foot of the bed and began to try them on, one leg at a time, in a delicate, deliberate series of motions. A minute or two passed; I simply watched, and enjoyed the quiet focus of the action. Suddenly, she took one pair, and gracefully passed it over her head; next, the second pair formed an accompanying necklace of sorts. And, seemingly satisfied, she stood up, and strolled across the room, wearing the two pieces of underwear as if they were stoles of sable, or spun silk.

Cleo was in the room with me, and I loved her.

Stopping to listen

Do you remember the 2007 experiment in street music involving Joshua Bell? At the suggestion of The Washington Post, Bell - one of the most celebrated violinists in the world - played works by Bach and several other composers on his 18th-century Stradivarius near a D.C. Metro station for roughly 40 minutes. Dressed in sweats, and standing next to his open case, Bell resembled an ordinary street performer, and yet the sounds that greeted the morning commuters were those that had regularly filled the concert halls where Bell commanded as much as $1,000 a minute. So what happened? Well, The Post surreptitiously filmed the performance, and then analyzed it - and when they did they saw that only 7 people, out of 1,070 who passed Bell over the course of his impromptu concert, stopped for at least a minute. 27 threw some money at him, for a total of $32.

Surprising? Revealing? Both - in various ways. But perhaps the most telling detail is one cited by Jeanette Bicknell, in her new book Why Music Moves Us. Bicknell notes that of the several dozen people who paused to listen to Bell, a significant percentage were children, or teens. Why would that be? For Bicknell, the answer has to do with what you might call frames. Adults think of subway stations as mundane places of transit, and of street performers as slightly less than top-flight. Having made these classifications, they thus simply ignored Bell. But children haven't yet learned to impose such rules upon what they see, or hear - and so they could listen, rather objectively. And, when they did, they were richly rewarded. At several moments, in fact, small children, drawn in by Bell's playing, resisted as their preoccupied parents pulled at their hands.

And therein, it seems to me, lies a moral that can be applied to music and parenting alike. It's a simple one: remember to stop, to look, to see beyond the routine and convenient frame. The other day, tired after watching Cleo for much of the day, I encouraged her to play while I tried to read a magazine. But she was having none of it; she wanted to involve me. I initially resisted, and pointed her to her crayons, and easel. She tugged at my pants leg. Finally, putting the magazine down, and looking up - and listening, rather than seeing her through my simple assumption that she was merely bored - I soon learned that Cleo wanted to wrestle. Wrestle! We'd never really tried it before, but soon she had her knees on my chest, I was blowing raspberries on her belly, and we were both laughing harder than we had all day.

I'm no Joshua Bell. Far from it, friends. But, for a few minutes at least, neither was I a mere passerby, head down, oblivious to the rich music that swirled around me. Instead, I partook and received, for free, what was priceless.

The empty pool

All right, halfsteppers: let's put on those visual studies hats, and take a quick look at Constantin Alajalov's 1959 Moonlit Future (above). A handsome young couple reclines against a sturdy tree, and peers up at the summer night sky, where a cloud of imagined futures appears, gossamer-like, against the tapestry of stars. A vacuum cleaner, a television, a pool, a station wagon: the two see, among other things, a life of modern convenience and creature comforts ahead of them. in addition, a lovely house awaits them, and a boy shags a fly ball and a girl sits upright at a piano. The full moon presides, then, over a destiny that seems spun out of simple conformity with mid-century goals: these two wish for a nuclear family, a modern household, and - well, the rest is merely implied, rather than written in the stars.

As you might have guessed, though, what really catches my eye here is the characterization of son and daughter. The son runs, presumably outside; the daughter is static, and indoors. The boy aspires to be athletic; the girl, perhaps, artistic. He's loosely diagonal; she's primly vertical.

Now, admittedly, it may be unfair to put much pressure on such minor details. And, of course, there certainly were little boys catching balls, and little girls playing scales, throughout 1950s America. But wait a minute: ultimately, these aren't exactly minor details. Rather, they're the rough embodiment of family planning, on the cover of a widely circulated magazine. In other words, they're not merely offhanded characterizations; rather, they're part of a larger process of definition, or socialization. Boys play sports, and girls play pianos. And boys who play pianos? Well, during the McCarthy years they were often seen as slightly less than boyish; indeed, as the composer Ned Rorem later remembered, his interest in learning to play Ravel as a boy served as an early perceived indicator of his homosexuality. In fact, even Charles Schulz' Schroeder, who began to play Beethoven on his toy piano in 1951, was recently depicted, in a contemporary play, as a middle-aged gay man. The point? Images like Alajalov's both draw on and perpetuate social assumptions. To use academic lingo, they're models of, and models for, behavior.

Again, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that; all images do something of the sort. But, still, one wishes that works like Alajalov's could somehow accommodate a more flexible, or less simply predictable, world view. Given images like this, the future of a little girl like Cleo feels restrictive and even foreclosed: she's virtually expected to take piano lessons. But what if her talents lie elsewhere? What if she enjoys, say, wrestling? Or what if she prefers blue to pink? Or DiMaggio to Scarlatti?

The boy plays ball. The girl plays piano. And the pool, sadly, remains empty. As a result, I want to nudge Alajalov's girl towards the water. Go on, put on a suit - and don't just recline, like your handsome blonde mother. Jump in! Splash about! Invent a game or two, and swim strongly, so strongly.

After all, Charles Shultz didn't only give us Schroder, the boy pianist. He also gave us the intense and unrepentantly infatuated Lucy. And Lucy, as you know, suited up for a number of ballgames in her day.

The individuality of power

What's more insistently individual than a toddler? Not much, as Cleo's increasingly withering nos - skillfully issued with a curt shake of the head - and her recent decision to mix pears and lentil soup imply. But of course it's not just Cleo. We recently had friends, with a toddler of their own, over for dinner, and thus got to watch a protracted conversation about whether pants of any sort were needed for the journey, in 26-degree weather, home. Call it control, unfettered id, or mere whimsy - whatever your view, toddlers are suddenly individuals bursting at the seams.

Which is why I smiled when I came across this passage from John Stuart Mill's 'Of Individuality' this morning. Few persons, wrote Mill (who was quoting, in turn, the Prussian reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt), fully understand that the object

'towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts... is the individuality of power and development'; that for this there are two requisites, 'freedom, and variety of situations', and that from the union of these arise 'individual vigour and manifold diversity,' which combine themselves to 'originality.'

Hi-falutin' language, for sure. But I choose to see it, today, as an affirmation. Instead of feeling residually embarrassed about sitting on a mall floor an hour ago and feeding a vocally hungry Cleo part of a peanut-butter sandwich, I'll recast my diregard for polite convention as an attempt to give her the 'freedom' to eat in a 'variety of situations.' And the frustrated cry, from the car seat, after she'd dropped a plastic egg? Merely, I now see, the manifestation of 'individual vigour.'

Pace, Mill. I'd never read you closely, and now begin to see the wisdom in doing so. And what I'd feared was odd or overly conciliatory now acquires the rich patina of utopian philosophy.

More or less alike

'By and large, objects made by groups look more or less alike because, in order to articulate certain purposes, some persons are taught or trained in similar techniques to make similar objects, much as some are taught or trained in traditions of poetry or music to make certain kinds of poetry or music.'

-David Summers

Yes, sure, that sounds fair. But why, really, stop there? Couldn't we also say, wonders the father who has now read Good Night Moon aloud more than 50 times, that the thoughts thought, and the words used, by groups are more or less alike because our toddlers are taught and trained using a relatively narrow shared band of examples?

Farm animals, jungle animals, shapes, and numbers. Mommies, daddies, brothers, and sisters. Head, shoulder, knees and toes. Stars and the moon; cars, trains, and planes. There is a common currency of images used, I think, in some combination by nearly every contemporary American family.

Which is fine. But it also makes me wonder: what are we leaving out, and why? Why not images, in board books, of elms, and pines, and cedars, and oaks? Why do we still point, over and over, to the cows and pigs that might well have been standard features of a 19th-century Illinois-born childhood, but that have given way to billboards, stoplights, and yield signs? Why does Richard Scarry include, in What Do People Do All Day?, images of bakers and road-builders, but nothing on fashion designers, or diamond miners?

Idle questions, perhaps. Perhaps - but the other evening, as Cleo and I looked up at the early night sky, I pointed to the only light visible above us, and baldly lied: star, I said, knowing full well that it was a planet. We teach children, of necessity, a manageable band of concepts. But those concepts may reflect our own preoccupations and wishes more than they do our child's needs, or the world's actual form. Children are trained and taught, and the world begins to look the same, instead of beautifully diverse.

Again, and again

How important is determined repetition?

How important is determined repetition!

Heard a feature on 'The Story' (an American Public Media radio show) the other evening about a singer-songwriter who calls himself Paleo and who spent an entire year in 2006-7 driving about the U.S., playing occasional shows - and writing, recording, and then uploading a new song every single day.

The results are - well, you can be the judge. But the underlying spirit, I think, is notable and worth remarking on. So much of life, and so much of accomplishment, seems to rest on simple, concerted, sustained effort. Woody Allen may have been right, in other words, in claiming that 80% of life is merely showing up - but with the understood qualifier that one has to show up again, and again, and again. And, thankfully, there seems to be something in most of us that leads us to do exactly that, in many ways. I'm thinking partly of the hundred trips to the gym that result in a strength and an energy greater than one could acquire through one prodigious visit. Or of a colleague's recent candid admission that after two years of studying Mandarin he has come to the conclusion that fluency lies about five years of hard study away - and that he'll be going to China this spring to begin those five years.

But most of all, of course, I'm thinking of Cleo. Unfamiliar with Woody Allen, or Paleo, or the word repetition, she nonetheless sits down, every day, with a book, or several books, and slowly learns the places, and colors, and names of the objects scattered across the pages. Car, yellow, roof, elevator... over weeks, and weeks, the results of her investment surface. And now a little girl who, at this time last year, couldn't even crawl stands up, walks to a book, lifts it, and carries it to me, to read again.

One reason, among many

This week's issue of The New Yorker featured a brief piece on Marnie Stern, a vigorous finger-tapping rock guitarist and singer (click here for a sample of her work) who debuted in 2007 with what the Times then called "this year's most exciting rock'n'roll album." (Although, to be fair, the online reviewer Piero Scaruffi was somewhat less impressed, putting it no. 44, two slots below an entry by Birchville Cat Motel, whoever they might be). In addition to some kudos from The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, Stern also got a glossy full-page photo, which carried a quote as a caption. "The idea of potential and possibility," Stern was cited as saying, "is the only thing that drives me to keep going with music."

Aye, cap'n: that's well put. And, in fact, seems reasonable enough to explain other motivations, in other fields. Why would Jerry Brown want a third term as governor of the economic moonscape that is California? I have to believe that on some level, he's spurred by the idea of potential and possibility. Why would Michael Jordan have decided to play for the lowly Wizards, with six titles and a place in Springfield already locked up? Potential, man, and possibility.

And what, I wonder, about parents? No doubt, we're driven to keep going - to keep changing those diapers; to keep dully pointing out red cars and green grass as though we were in a never-ending ESL class - by a range of pressures and rewards. Social expectations play a role - as I learned once when I was chided by a parking meter officer for leaving a sleeping Cleo in the car as I ran 20 feet into an adjacent Starbucks (mea culpa, mea culpa - and please note that your belated disappointment in me is only another example of the phenomenon I'm describing). But so too do the occasional peaks: the sight of Cleo playing with her grandparents, or laughing at the generous antics of cousins, over the Christmas holiday, is a sort of high-octane fuel that keeps this dad, at least, running.

Above all, though, I think that many of us are spurred to parent actively, or creatively, by the very ideas of potential and possibility. Indeed, on New Year's Eve a friend suggested that one compelling reason to have another child would be the possibility that they could solve the world's environmental problems. (True, but contrast the improbability of that lovely idea with the dull certainty that the child would inevitably produce roughly 50 tons of garbage). Or, rather more prosaically, as much as we love our children, we love seeing them grow, as well. And while we can control the direction of that growth to some extent, it's the realization that we can't actually fully control it that's truly exciting.