Buster

For better or for worse, one of the most deeply established elements of Cleo's daily routine is her morning video. It's not always the first thing we do - sometimes the day kicks off with a book, or a dressing session - but usually by 7 a.m. she's settled in her big black Thinking Chair, with a cup of warm milk in her hands, and an age-appropriate video all cued up.

But of course as Cleo grows older, the material that suits her changes. The mild chaos of Max and the cool-headed practicality of Ruby once appealed, but then gave way to the slightly more complicated narrative arcs of Curious George cartoons. For a time, this summer, the raw energy and seasonally-apt inventiveness of Phineas and Ferb (two boys who are determined to make the most of their summer vacation) was what she wanted. And now, intriguingly, it's Buster Keaton.

You've probably heard of Keaton, even if you don't remember the name. An exact contemporary of Charlie Chaplin, he was the more physical and acrobatic counterpart to Chaplin's elegant grace: in the relatively small world of silent film comedy, Keaton was Gene Kelly to Chaplin's Fred Astaire. You turn to Chaplin's films for the expressive possibilities of a flower held in clenched teeth, or for hints of substantial social criticism; if you're in the mood for wild chases and antics on the roof of a moving train, though, Keaton's your man.

And now he's Cleo's man, too. When I first showed her a Keaton sketch - a year ago, after picking up a DVD at a thrift store while on a road trip with her - she was downright frightened by a scene in which a bumbling family man, played by Keaton, somehow manages to drive his model T into a harbor. It's meant to be a silly scene, with Keaton as an unharmed buffoon, but Cleo had never seen anything like it, and she asked me to turn it off. Every now and then, in the subsequent months, she would occasionally refer in a slightly awed manner to the car in the water, and would sometimes even insinuate - echoing my apologies - that I should not have shown it to her.

But, recently, she announced that she wanted to see it again. I emphasized that it's just a movie, and put it on and read the title cards to her, as they appeared, in a slightly simplified manner. And, as you can see in the video above, she's grown into something of a fan: she understands the weird eccentricities of Keaton's wildly engineered electric house, and the charm of his inept attempts at boatbuilding. So the plots appeal. But might other elements, too? Keaton's films, of course, feature no dialogue, but they do embody a strong sense of rhythm - rhythm that's sometimes manifested in the accompanying music, and that is also implicit in Keaton's comically rapid motions and the relatively quick cuts from scene to scene. In watching the films with her, I've come to see them as antecedents of later Warner Bros. cartoons: they evoke both the quickness of the Road Runner and the narrative velocity of, say, a short involving Sylvester the Cat. They're jazzy, in short, rather than symphonic, and percussive, rather than lush. And while Cleo may, in time, grow interested in videos that can evoke the complexity of a Brahms composition, we're more than satisfied for now with films that speak a musical language - concise, energetic, rhythmic - that seems to be that of many 3-year-olds.

Umbrellas

There are many reasons, I think, to feel a belated affection for the composer Erik Satie - but perhaps the most endearing of them revolves around his passion for umbrellas.  He regularly left dozens of them, all open, scattered around his apartment; he spoke of them as flowers, and when he died nearly a hundred of them were found: a veritable garden. Once, when he realized that he had left an umbrella at a cafe, he supposedly hurried to that establishment, muttering, Oh, how worried my umbrella must be to have lost me! Sure, Satie's music can be ravishing - but has anyone, really, ever enjoyed umbrellas as him?

Well, maybe: above, one of the may set pieces involving umbrellas produced in recent weeks by Cleo. Already a master of repetitive music, a genre championed by Satie (and still occasionally perpetuated in our car, through successive playings of Milkshake), she can also act, like Satie, in a minimalist or Dadaist vein. (Her abbreviated, three-line, nonsensical knock-knock jokes might qualify as both). And yet she is closest to Satie, in spirit, in her love of the common umbrella as a basic element of interior decoration. Today, she saw them as protection against monsters, rather than as flowers, but the end result seems to be about the same: a living room awash with color, if not rain.

Keep on, girl. The past is a fog, into which we occasionally see with partial clarity, and through which we can perceive tiny shards of color. You make the present feel equally mysterious - and even more colorful.

That note

About a year ago, Salon ran an interview with the Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, on his attitudes toward improvisation - a subject that turns out to be centrally important to his musical practice. In it, he mentions a wide range of precedents and examples, and even contends that he feels freer while playing the guitar than he does in ordinary conversation. But perhaps the moment I enjoyed most was his allusion to a single note, in a tune by Hendrix:

I started listening to improvisational music when I was in high school. Before that, I was more interested in composition. I listened to “West Side Story” and Sly & the Family Stone — really listening to their arrangements and how they laid all the melodies. But, in that way, good improvisation has a structure. It has a form. I remember, like many guitarists, being obsessed with Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys. It was the record.

I listened to that solo on “Machine Gun” a million times.

With that one amazing note.

Yeah, the note! 

What's that note? Ah, folks: the Internet gives, and it gives some more. But while you're waiting for that solo - "the greatest note ever played!" - you might also mull over the assertion of Elizabeth Peterson, a fourth-grade teacher who keeps a blog on education. "Everyone," she writes, "should have the opportunity to reflect on how the beauty of improvisation can play a part in our daily lives, both personal and professional. Imagine if we could all learn to improvise alone and in collaboration with others."

We're trying, Elizabeth. The last two afternoons, lovely lambent exercises in autumn skies, Cleo and I have simply wandered sidewalks after school, finding impromptu balance beams, studying puddles, and making pretend mint leaves from maple trees. Our notes may not be amazing, to the outside ear, but I'm already looking forward to whatever unpredictable form this afternoon might bring. 

As you were

This morning I came across a wonderfully odd document online: a 1935 master's thesis by a Martha Byrne, who set out to chart the relative popularity of a dozen waltzes among groups of children and musical experts. There are all kinds of methodological problems with the study, including the relatively small sample sizes, but her earnest tone and the sheer idealism of the project (which cites, among other authors, Aquinas: Byrne was at Loyola, in Chicago) make up for most of what it lacks in scientific rigor. And then, on page 159, we arrive at the heart of the matter. "[I]t is true," she says, "too that these young children have marvelous imaginations; they are at an age when it is natural for them to follow a lead, so it is easy for them to allow their imaginations to follow the ideas which the composer puts forth and to let their young minds travel where the music leads them."

Well, amen to that. I've been struck repeatedly, over the past months, with Cleo's sheer aesthetic flexibility. Sure, the girl likes her Milkshake, but she's generally open to other types of music (with one real exception noted thus far), and she admires pretty much any visual art that I show her. And, wonderfully, her tendency to accommodate extends to clothes and to personal appearances, as well: she never seemed rattled by my unkempt summer style, and when we darted into a store, recently, to try to find some new pants, she was a pleasant one-man chorus of ayes and yeses. ("And, Cleo, what do you think of these?" "Good.")

But of course it's not just Cleo: children tend to be accepting in ways that can surprise us. Last night, while reading Rick Bass's Why I Cam West, I smiled when I came to his self-deprecating list of the times that he's mistakenly sprayed himself with the searing hot pepper spray he sometimes carries to ward off grizzlies. the worst time, arguably, was when he mistakenly set the canister off by crouching, while on a walk with his two daughters; the spray covered his groin, forcing him to run for a river, and to seek relief on the long walk home by covering the stained areas of his pants with pounds of moss and lichen.

"Curls of black lichen," he remembered, "protruded from the neck of my shirt ad from beneath the sleeves of my T-shirt. Wisps of black tuft gathered around the tops of my boots, and as I lurched humpbacked through the forest, pausing from time to time to readjust the shifting lichen, I'm sure I looked like nothing less than a werewolf, and it was both alarming and touching at how matter-of-factly my daughters accepted this strangeness."

Waltzes, slacks, lichen-covered daddies: there's a willingness to overlook and to accept, in little girls, that's both disarming and somehow close to holy.