As the world turns

The globe spins; day gives way to night. The tide recedes; the geese fly north again. Babies learn to sit, and then crawl, and talk; retired ballplayers become managers; students in music education take jobs as music instructors, at local preschools.

And now one of my own former students instructs, according to the same beautifully inevitable logic, my own little girl. Yesterday the Yellowbirds and Redbirds climbed onto a bus and headed down to the Walters Art Museum, where Kate (whom I once taught and who is now a full-time employee in the museum's education program) led them from a Egyptian mummy to an example of Gothic stained glass, teaching them how to see and speak about works of art made centuries ago.

What trickles down, through such connections? Were any of her words informed by mine, of years ago? Perhaps - but likely only very faintly, if at all. For Kate, in fact, had also worked occasionally for us as a babysitter, when Cleo was still a tiny toddler. She was wonderfully gentle and invariably positive - and yet, when I asked Cleo who had taught them at the Walters, she simply responded, "Two ladies." Kate is, it seems, a total stranger to Cleo now, even if she once held Cleo and calmed her, while L. and I enjoyed an evening out. If such warm gestures are forgotten, surely lectures are even less permanent.

What is remembered, and what forgotten? The mummy still stares into space, intact, after thousands of years. But the words that I once uttered in a classroom are now beyond reclaim; they're evaporated. We live in the moment, doing our best to craft durable, generous legacies. But at the same time we are governed by larger forces. The preschoolers take up their instruments, and even as they become more proficient over the course of years, the memory of the name of the woman who first instructed them fades.

Dollars to donuts

On a Friday in mid-1969 Bill Thompson, the manager of Jefferson Airplane, had a problem. His band was supposed to play before thousands of fans at Woodstock, and he wanted to make sure that they would be paid, and paid fairly, for their upcoming performance. But the event managers just kept talking, as he later put it, "about peace and love and all that stuff." So Thompson brought one shoe down, hard. "Hey," he told the event planners over the phone, "we got everybody [in the band] in the motel here. And we're not going to play unless we get the money."

The Airplane got $15,000, on cold hard cash, on the day of their show. Only Hendrix, apparently, received more for his appearance at Woodstock.

Today Cleo, tired of winter and nonplussed by what seems like a relentless stream of upcoming school days, asked when her next holiday would be. Valentine's Day? she wondered. Well, yeah, I answered, I guess you could call that a holiday, but it's not a school holiday. But we might, I added, be taking a short trip to Ohio and Kentucky in the spring. Kentucky? she said, dubiously. "I know three places," she added, and listed them: Baltimore, North Carolina, and West Virginia. "I don't want to go to other places."

Well, I said. You mom and I love to travel, and we love to go to places that we've seen before, and we also like to go to new places. And we know a terrific potter in Ohio, who might let us see his kiln, and I've read that there are a lot of good donut stores in Kentucky.

Cleo turned this over, in her mind. Did the potter make her Peter Rabbit cup? No, I answered truthfully, but he did make us a large and beautiful vessel. More silence. And then, emphatically: "If there are hundreds of donuts in Kentucky, then I will be happy to go there."

There are. And, arguably, in some ways it almost resembles Woodstock.

Links

Here is the top hit if you Google, on this pleasant January morning, John Cage Cleo Houston.

Here is a link to John Cage's Silence, which was once reviewed by John Hollander - who commented, as part of a haughty effort to show that he had something in common with the composer, that his 3-year-old daughter had drawn a smiling face in the margins of the text.

And here is another relevant link, in the form of a loose pictorial analogy, between the two:

Palette of sound

With L. out for drinks with a friend the other night, and Cleo upstairs dreaming her dreams of sea monsters, I plopped down and gave myself over to episode 3.07 of Breaking Bad. That's the episode, for all of you connoisseurs, out there, in which Hank takes on the cousins - or, in more abstract terms, it's 45 minutes of t.v. that boils down to one painfully attenuated and exceptionally violent minute in a box store parking lot.

After the climactic scene, wanting to know more but finding myself with no more episodes on hand, I began to trawl through the extra features on the DVD. I heard the director relive the series of compositions in the 2-day shot that yielded that one minute of action; I watched a few outtakes. And then I stumbled on the short documentary devoted to the show's musical choices and compositions. Want to know more about that lilting, heartbreaking tune that accompanies the demise of the r.v.? You've come to the right place, pardner: it turns out it's a tune by Los Zafiros, a Cuban outfit active in the 1960s. But I was just as interested in the composer Dave Porter's explanation of the music that he'd drawn up to accompany the ominous cousins. At the very outset of the season, he said, he had tried to create a palette of sounds that would accompany the two men. And over the course of the season, he then toyed with this palette, isolating, juxtaposing, stretching - and, in 3.07, recombining, in a soundtrack that is something of a televisual tour de force.

A palette of sounds. If only we all had a composer working behind us, developing the motifs, the entrances, and the falling diminuendos that might describe and heighten our day. But then, of course, perhaps we do: it's us. Take Cleo as an example. She begins the day, typically, with a few elastic variants of a siren's cry: "Da-a-a-a-ad," we hear, from down the hall, in a voice that's just below a shout. When I fail to answer - a cue that it is probably about 5:17 a.m. - she slowly transitions into a playful laboratory of faint whoops, sirens, and words that sound like arabesques, or recall treacle in their flexibility. And then, in a firm, confident, jubilant voice - the voice of a scientist, who has isolated a resistant element, after months of work: "It's SIX! Guys, it's six."

On, then, to the rest of the day, and its widening palette. Surprisingly heavy footfalls in the hall, as she speeds towards us. The gurgle of her straw in her empty sippy cup, as she drains a cup of milk while watching (in recent days) a Disney Silly Symphony from the 1930s. Soft whines, percussive laughs, and then we're off to school. The bold color of her voice as she enters the Yellowbird room and announces to her teacher that she has brought a rubber turtle to class. And next, from my point of view, the staggeringly disarming whisper in which she tells me, at 4:20 on a Friday, that "I was hoping you would come." Home, then, to another field of sounds: the quiet intensity of Cleo at play, packing a small bag with items for an imagined trip, which recalls to me the focused, reverent gestures of a priest during the waning moments of communion, or the small clicks and shushes of woodland mammal cleaning, or feeding. Loud, coarse boasts about her skill at Candy Land; the bright energy of Motown, when L. gets a dance party going in the living room; her weary, schoolmarmy tone of correction, when I misread a passage in one of her Angelina books. The whiny protest, when it's time to brush teeth, and the miraculous return of energy, as she runs from the bathroom with her towel wrapped like a wedding dress about her.

And then, finally, the regular rise and fall of her chest, and the strong rhythm of her night breathing, as another day gives way to night.

Pop

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I've been playing, well, perhaps a little too much SongPop Free. A spare few minutes after reading Clavjio's account of his embassy to Tamerlane, while at Barnes and Noble? Yeah, I'll admit it: I might use those minutes throwing it down with some other smart phone user who thinks she knows her vintage folk music or Billy Joel melodies cold. Got ten minutes before a meeting on campus? Well, we could leaf quickly through the latest Artforum... or we could go for a clean sweep in Metal, by identifying five melodies in less than ten seconds apiece.

So what's come of this part-time hobby? Nothing much, in a sense, since I don't get a thing for plugging the game - except for a slight case of tendinitis in my thumb after an exuberant initial session. But there are other ways of looking at it. How to quantify, for instance, the pleasure of identifying a long-unheard song by Asia in less than a second? How to describe the happiness that comes from hearing Tupac, and remembering his sheer excitement in describing the Italian ices of New York in "Old School" - even as you're frantically trying to touch your phone's screen so that you might win a round of classic rap?

And then there's this. Suddenly, as a result of the game and the frequency with which Today's Hits comes up as a category, I'm better versed in recent pop music than I've been since... well, since around 1987. Bruno Mars? Yeah, I know a few of his tunes. Frank Ocean? I just bought the CD. Taylor Swift's smash hit is a familiar anthem, rather than a mere abstraction, and while I'm a bit late to the Party Rock Anthem scene (the song went to number one in 12 countries, I read, two years after it did so), I now know it's by LMFAO, the uncle-nephew duo comprised of Redfoo and Skyblu. I mean, there's now a small part of me that feels like I could actually have an unembarrassing conversation with a 12-year-old.

But then I listen to Cleo. She's only three, but the other day she surprised us by telling us that her best friend Justice often sings a song while at school. Oh, really? I said, expecting some Mother Goose rhyme, or twist on the alphabet song. And what song is that? And Cleo, in turn, sang "This girl is on fire" - that is, a portion of the massive hit that I later learned is by Alicia Keys and Nicki Minaj.

So, um. Where I thought I might be au courant, it turns out that my Yellowbird is more up on the hits than I am. Chastened, I figured I'd make about the only sort of contribution that I can: I fired up the computer, and found a non-explicit video of the song, recorded by Keys. See, Cleo? I can be hip, too. But no: while she watched with some interest, the only lasting result was this: now Cleo sings the refrain nearly in tune, and with a proper flourish at the end.

Even as, doubtless, she wanders on to the next current anthem, while I learn belatedly, and through the filters of time-delayed games, what is current.

Quotability

So Cleo's now 3 and a half, and change - or, to put it more exactly, she's at the perfect conjunction of willfulness and quotability. She's interested in questions of direction and control - why does she have to go to school? why does she have to wear a coat? - and she commands an impressive but not quite infallible range of linguistic principles. The result, as I'll try to show you, is something like the utterances of a North Korean dictator. Or, perhaps more surprisingly, the dynamics of Mozart's distraught family.

I'm thinking, for instance, of a moment on Christmas Day, when Cleo was trying to throw a Frisbee with her older cousin Jack. Jack can really hurl the disc, and was a bit disheartened to see that Cleo can only fling it about four feet - and with no sense of direction. But he played gamely, retrieving the rolling Frisbee while Cleo boldly announced that she is in fact really good at Frisbee, and that she can throw it a hundred feet.

"That wasn't a hundred," said Jack, as he walked to pick up her latest effort. "That was about six feet."
"Okay," announced Cleo, undeterred. "I will throw it one more time."
And then Jack, with a calm sarcasm: "Is one like code for a billion?"

Six, a hundred, a billion. When you rule the world in your mind, the distinctions between such values dwindles. Remember in 1994, when the North Korean press reported that Kim Jong Il had made 11 holes in one in a single round, in the process of shooting a remarkable 38-under-par 34. And this was the first time he had ever picked up a golf club. When you're truly remarkable, nothing is really remarkable.

Except, perhaps, your parents' (or your Western rivals') bizarre continued conceit that in fact they are the ones in charge. Which, in turn, you must challenge. Or, as Cleo put it the other day, at 5:30 a.m., "If you don't let me watch my video, I won't let you sleep." Hmm. We ignored her, but it turned out she had a point: it is difficult to sleep when a tiny person is screaming, two rooms over. On the other hand, it's also difficult to get the DVD player working when you're only 3. I considered our sleep-in, then, a gesture towards mutual affirmation.

At more reasonable hours, however, I'm more than happy to set up her video. And, in fact, I did so just yesterday evening - but forgot, in the process, to actually start the video, getting to the menu before tramping off to the kitchen to stir up some dinner. "How silly!" remarked Cleo, as L. entered the living room. "I mean, really."

That combination of acquired airy pretense and sincere frustration, coming from Cleo's mouth, was new to me, and I laughed. But in fact it was rather familiar, from other contexts. As Mayard Solomon shows, in his biography of Mozart, the composer faced real resistance from his father when he announced that he planned to tour Italy in 1778. Rather disingenuously, Leopold assigned his worries to Mozart's older sister, claiming that she had cried for two full days upon hearing the news. Mozart was, initially, resolute, and wrote back: "Tell her she must not cry over every sill trifle, or I shall never go home again!" But Leopold persisted, and suggested that Nannerl was worried that, should Mozart perish while abroad, she might be sold into service. "So your sister was not crying over a silly trifle," he concluded in a further letter, "when she wept over your letter."

Emotional blackmail! Battles for control, and the deployment of passive aggressiveness! Claims of silliness! Through our 3-year-old we live, I'm learning, the lives of more famous and accomplished men and women. Even if I still can't quite shoot that round of 34.

2013: emergent plans

Among the many quotable chestnuts associated with the composer John Cage is this reasonable observation: "It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next."

Cleo, I think, would agree - at least, at certain moments. Today, when we picked her up at school, one of her teachers warmly pointed to a new poster on the door. On it were a series of resolutions and plans for 2013: one for each of the Yellowbirds, who had apparently thought at length about what they were going to do now that they were turning 4. Forrest, I noticed, plans to grow up. Another was more modest: "I'm going to hang out," announced Nia. And Cleo? "I'm going to learn," she had said, "how to build a tall building."

Okay... but, it appears, not in the immediate future. On the way home from school, I asked her what she might like to do with L. and me tomorrow, on our free day. "Well," said Cleo. "I don't really have any plans for tomorrow yet."

Sometimes we get glimpses of what we might do next. But sometimes there's simply no saying.