And I did not know

One of the many books that currently form the teetering pile on Cleo's dresser is Rembrandt Takes a Walk, a slightly off-color story of a boy who discovers that the paintings in his disheveled uncle's house can come to life. Ultimately, the boy gets some aid from Rembrandt, who emerges from a self-portrait to help in replacing the fruit in a ransacked Cezanne - but not before donning the uncle's gaudy colored tie.

Today, it was Cleo and I who took a walk, as we strolled southwest from Union Station, checked out the new black box video at the Hirshhorn, and then had a look at Leonardo's Ginevra, the Kahn and Mellon Madonnas (about which Cleo's Papa has written quite thoughtfully), works by Manet and Cassatt - and those two remarkable rooms full of Rembrandts. And while Cleo seemed open-minded about each one, responding thoughtfully to my questions, the self-portrait of Rembrandt clearly surprised her. "And I did not know," she giddily proclaimed, "that in a real museum there was a real picture of Rembrandt."

It's true: seeing something that one has only heard about, or read about, in the flesh can be overwhelming. Her reaction, in fact, reminded me of the disbelief that some early American Beatles fans felt, when they first saw the lads from Liverpool in person. A memory posted on a site devoted to Clevelanders' memories of the band might be taken as typical:

"I was 15 and won a ticket from the WKYC radio station with Jerry G. and the crazy deejays. My mom took me to Cleveland for the concert... I was in the 6th row of the balcony on the right side... practically overhanging the stage!.. It was insane! I was so overwhelmed by the whole evening. I couldn't and still can't believe I saw The Beatles..."

Didn't know; can't believe. And yet the ticket, and the photo above, offer indisputable proof. But there in the background is another sort of trace, or proof, as well. When I pointed to Rembrandt's shadowy darks in the lower left of the canvas, and suggested that we're not quite sure what is even represented there, she wasn't as uncertain as me. "I think," she volunteered, "that that's his tie." That is, the one that he had taken from an unsuspecting uncle, in a book on her dresser back home.

Autres dessins beaux

Folks, you can try Googling "drawings by Mozart," or "drawings by Verdi," but you won't get a single hit. Beethoven created some wildly beautiful scores, but he doesn't seem to have left a single sketch, of a more conventional sort, behind. Composers who draw, or drew, are flatly rare - which perhaps makes the John Cage piece pictured above ('River Rocks and Smoke,' 1991) all the more satisfying.

And which suggests, perhaps, that little Cleo may never grow up to be a composer. Because, you see, she is currently leaving a mad wake of drawings behind her, wherever she goes. Is the living room eerily quiet? It's probably because she's holed up again with her big bad of markers and crayons, and is hard at work on yet another dense composition featuring a family of bunnies, or sprouting flowers, or Rapunzel's tower, or rough approximations of labels.

But why tell, when I can show? Take this, Beethoven: here's a gallery of drawings by Cleo - a phrase that should now yield, when Googled, at least one hit.

Bons mots (et dessins)

Cleo's generally a pretty focused kid these days; she can really bury herself in a princess book, leafing slowly through the pictures and quietly mouthing an accompanying narrative, and it's not unusual to find her spending ten minutes or even longer on one of her sprawling, colorful drawings. Heck, the girl even got engrossed by a nature video (African Cats, a beautiful film about African lions and cheetahs), in sections, over the past few days.

Such concentration can be fun to watch, even if it's also a touch isolating: she is, momentarily, in her own world. Occasionally, though, a stray comment or sung line will give a bystander a rough sense of what she's thinking about. Just yesterday, for instance, she and I were sitting in the car, waiting as L. dropped off her computer, for repairs. Cleo was quiet for a few moments, and then started to clap with the music on the radio. And, suddenly, after clapping rhythmically for a bit, she brightly exclaimed, in an apparent reference to herself, "Keep the beat up, sparkle girl!" And then, from a slightly different perspective, and in a reassuring voice: "Very good, class."

Very good, indeed - for if Cleo is happy doing her thing, she's also pretty neatly convinced that she does it well. This morning, for instance, she sat down purposefully with her markers and crayons, and produced a dynamic drawing of Rapunzel, in her tower, flanked by the witch and by a prince concealed by a tree. When she finished, she showed it to me, and proudly proclaimed that she is the best drawer in the world. "Well," replied her rather dully literal dad, "there are a lot of good drawers in the world." And she, unfazed: "But I get letters. I creep downstairs, and open the mailbox, and get lots of letters from people saying how good I am."

Well, then. Turns out she's not alone at all, even when she appears to be. Very good, class.

Why, indeed

Fourth Tuesday of the month, folks, and you know what that means: Brews and Board Games, at The Wind-Up Space. Cleo and I showed up with our copy of Enchanted Forest, and as soon as we began to set it up a pleasant 40-something man, a father of two, asked in: he was wondering if it might be a game that he could play with his kids, as well. Well, sure. As long as you're willing to put up with our slightly modified rules, and missing trees.

Before we joined the gamers, though, we stopped by Joe Squared for a terrific olive pizza. Cleo was in a great mood, and we checked out upcoming bands' posters, watched a minute of The Simpsons, and started to take in the background music. 'Why,' I decided to ask her, 'do you think they play music at restaurants?' And she, in turn: 'So that you can enjoy the restaurant and have a good time and not have to play with your forks or knives.'

Yeah, that's probably fair. But playing with fairy tale-themed cards and plastic trees? That's cool, too.

Memory and improvisation

In his celebrated study The Mind of a Mnemonist, the Russian psychologist A. R. Luria tries to explain the means by which a Jewish journalist managed to astound European audiences in the 1930s by memorizing vast swatches of text, or series of numbers. Onstage, he would ask the audience to generate a series of words, which he would then recite, methodically, back to them. Hoping to stump him, audience members would sometimes bring sadistically nonsensical or difficult fragments - or, in one case, the first quatrain of Dante's Divine Comedy - in its original Italian. And yet S., the mnemonist, correctly repeated the medieval Italian - even though he knew no Italian at all.

How did he do it? According to Luria, he asked that the words be read clearly, with pauses between them; as they were read, he quickly developed a mental picture that incorporated details that were predicated on the evolving passage. These could vary widely, but in the case of the Divine Comedy, they happened to be, initially, musical. Let's listen in, as the mnemonist explains:

[First lie]
(Nel) - I was paying my membership dues when there, in the corridor, I caught site of the ballerina Nel'skaya.
(mezzo) - I myself am a violinist; what I do is to set up an image of a man, together with Nel'skaya, who is playing the violin.

And so on. But the kicker? He was still able to remember this image, and to recite the text correctly in full, fifteen years after initially memorizing it.

Over the past few years, I too have been forced to do some rather involved memorizing - albeit of a much more modest nature. Several of Cleo's puzzles depict gathered Disney princesses: Belle, Jasmine, Snow White, and so on. Cleo, of course, knows each on intimately by now. But her dad - not so much. Sure, I can identify Snow White, and I know Belle through her fiery hair? But Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty? I tended to get their generic beauty confused, until I finally set my mind to it: Cinderella wears blue, and Sleeping Beauty pink. Behold: the mnemonist at work.

I'm kidding, of course; learning two minor details is hardly a feat. But I am struck, in thinking about it, at how Cleo's sense of memory can work much more unconsciously than mine. I set my mind to it, and learn the colors of the dresses. Cleo, meanwhile, seems to relate more abstractly to her memories. Often, when we return to a site that we haven't visited for a few weeks or months, she'll ask to do exactly what we did when we were last there. At the Towson Barnes & Noble, we sit on the floor, against the south wall, and read. Golden West is the restaurant at which each meal ends with a York peppermint patty. And so on: it's not quite a conscious process, but rather a re-enactment of deeply embedded memories.

That said, though, it's not as though each of her steps is pre-ordained. Far from it. And as a demonstration of that assertion, I offer the video above. Cleo has sat at pianos dozens of times, and generally tries to bang out a series of notes as loudly and as quickly as possible. In a lounge at Johns Hopkins last week, though, she tried something new, something unremembered, something improvised. And I like, I have to say, the result.

Vibe people

So maybe you already saw John Seabrook's piece, in a recent New Yorker, on Lukasz Gottwald. And so maybe you know that he goes by the moniker Dr. Luke, and that the guy is on a real run when it comes to composing pop hits. Maybe you even knew some of them: Katy Perry's 'Roar,' perhaps? And maybe you were interested enough to read through the third paragraph, where you would have seen Dr. Luke defining his role as a vibe person. Vibe people, he tells Seabrook, don't write lyrics, or even music, in a traditional sense. Instead, they "know how to make a song happen, understand energy, and where music is going, even if they can't play a chord or sing a note." Vibe people, in essence, nudge ideas for songs in a direction that makes them more listenable, more memorable, more infectious. They give them life.

I like the idea. And the more I think about it, the more I think that we vibe people probably exist in all walks of life. Kerouac's Dean Moriarty, full of charisma and a productive disdain for convention? A vibe person. That old guy in the cap at the Berkeley Springs McDonald's on Saturday mornings, who keeps the chatter of the senior citizens going with his brief utterances and clever quips? A vibe person. Jean-Michel Basquiat was, I suppose, a vibe person; so, too, was Khalid El-Amin, the now-forgotten point guard for the 1999 UConn men's basketball team that won the national championship. They knew how to make it happen; they understood energy.

Is Cleo a vibe person? I suppose that all four-year-olds, to a certain extent, are. They seem to know where music is going, even though they can't play a chord. And even when they've had no training in mark-making, in composition or contrapposto, they seem to have a native instinct for the balanced and the dynamic. Or, at least, that's what this happy father thought when he saw the page of sketches above, which Cleo drew up as her dad read, one chair over, in a lounge in a Johns Hopkins science building, where young men and women training to be physicists and robotics experts ambled to and from class. Rules and systems, as the students knew, have their value. But that value lies at least partly in the fact that it can produce the architecture, or the environment, in which vibe people work.

No matter

A very good stretch, these last two weeks. Cleo is slowly learning to read, and can string together several short, simple words at a time. She's got some good friends, and they generally play well together, dashing off to devise narratives that are usually long on princesses and costumes (if a touch short on traditional cohesiveness). And she remains curious about the world around her. Yesterday, as watched a cartoon version of the Babar story, she asked if the accompanying music was by Mozart. Well, no - but I love the question.

Put some of those tendencies together, and occasionally you get a delightfully surprising new burst of creativity. The other day, feeling heady after a good day, Cleo started to sing a song that she's made up precisely to convey her sense of unflappable confidence. You can see the result, re-enacted yesterday, above; hope you enjoy.

Collaboration

In David Byrne's wholly enjoyable How Music Works, he refers smilingly to an article in Pitchfork that held that he would collaborate with pretty much any musician, for a bag of Doritos. Not quite, says Byrne - he does, he insists, have some standards. But in the end he winds up acknowledging that working with others has always been important to him.

Cleo, meanwhile, doesn't even know what Doritos are yet. She does like cucumber wedges, and pita chips - but doesn't require either, when it comes to collaboration. In fact, she's pretty much willing to play with any peer who comes along - just as long as they're not heads taller than her, or too many years faster. Yesterday, when I arrived at her nursery to pick her up, she shot me a firm look, and announced that she wanted to stay, and to play. And what was so involving? She and three other little girls were dressing up, assembling mock bouquets, and preparing for a wedding. It turned out that there was only one spouse - Cleo, in this case - but the others busied themselves nevertheless with their own roles: one was a flower girl, and one was a mother to the flower girl, and so on.

And above, an image from Sunday, when she and Jasper turned sticks in a park into swords, and navigated their way through a complex impromptu narrative involving a knight and a princess. The two chopped, and shouted, and consulted one another, and gamboled. Finally, they sat down, weary, and asked if we had any snacks. We did: Jasper's dad, it turned out, had a pumpkin cupcake on hand. And so, all of a sudden, the two collaborators were happily chewing - not on Doritos, perhaps, but in a manner that only confirmed the value of working together.