Into voices

For the past ten days now, I've been carrying about, in my satchel, an increasingly worn copy of the September 11 New York Times Sunday Review section, folded to page 2. Was that perhaps, you ask, a particularly affecting piece on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks? Well, not exactly. Rather, I keep looking at a brief interview with the French shoe designer Christian Louboutin - and admiring the clear, bright simplicity with which he speaks of his tastes.

I was particularly struck by his description of what he's been listening to, of late. "I listen to my stomach," he begins, in jest. "It tells me when I am starving." Well, okay: at least he's not overly serious. But then, lest he seem merely trivial, Louboutin then quickly offers a crisp answer to the interviewer's query. "I like Adele, Mika, Natacha Atlas, and a beautiful old record, 'An Evening with Belafonte/Mouskori." An interesting list, I thought: I've long enjoyed Atlas' work, and it's been hard to avoid Adele's bluesy anthems in the Hopkins weight room over the last month. So I read on, and came to this: "I am very much into voices. I would say I'm a fan of voices, not of sound. I'm a fan of singers, not of bands."

For some reason, the confident directness with which he could articulate his tastes (and rule out entire fields of musical endeavor!) appealed to me. No hemming and hawing here: the man knows, or seems to think he knows, what he likes. And while I like bands, as well as singers, his list was intriguing enough to move me, today, to order the Belafonte album.

Why only today? Well, because it's been tough to find much free time of late - precisely because there's an emergent voice in our house, too. Cleo - or Jo, as she now prefers to be known - has been talking enthusiastically, and increasingly ambitiously, of late. The past tense? She's got it. The future's harder, but she occasionally nails it, too. She'll say "I need some oatmeal," and then, having eaten it, announce, "I must go." She asks to go to particular playgrounds, questions the appeal of others, and tells her pet monkey to smile, for the camera.

For the first time, then, we can have reasonable, extended conversations with our daughter, and plumbing the depths of her mind - her likes, and her pains - is fascinating. Fascinating enough, in fact, that I wind up carrying fragments of newspapers about, as yellowing reminders, and take more than a week to press purchase, and order an album full of allegedly promising voices.