Gah!

Remember when Jennifer Lawrence, approaching the Academy Awards stage in a long, elegant dress, stumbled on a stair? And remember her disarmingly candid reaction, and the general swell of support that met her as a result? There's something quite refreshing, it seems, when a polished and seemingly invulnerable celebrity momentarily becomes all too human. Stars, one celebrity magazine reminds us, are just like us: they balance groceries precariously in the dairy aisle, and they sometimes emerge all too awkwardly from their hatchbacks. Or, like Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder at the 3:59 mark in the video that helped to make that band famous, they experience a visible doubt about the situation into which they've gotten themselves. And, in the process, they remind us of our shared fallibility - and thus, too, of our common humanity.

But of course not only celebrities have this power. I'm thinking, too, of 8-year-old Elizabeth Hughes, a budding singer who had been asked to sing the national anthem at a Norfolk hockey game - and then, in her nervousness, forgot the words. One fan reacted by laughing immodestly, but the rest of the crowd - well, you can hear their reaction for yourself, if you'd like (it's at the 1:30 mark). In some cases, a public mistake can warm the heart.

Cleo's not a celebrity, and she hasn't sung the national anthem in public yet. (Although she does like to try to impress new acquaintances with a rendition of the pledge of allegiance: 'and to the republic for Richard stands...'). But she does have, like most 4-year-olds, a stridently confident sense of self, a general assumption that she can do everything. And so, as she and I played miniature golf recently in Austin, TX, and she struggled with the steep slopes of one hole, it was somehow touching to see her softly mocking her troubles with the ball. 'Gah!' she says, as she marches after the misbehaving ball 'That was silly.' Sounding momentarily like Bridget Jones, Cleo is, in the video above, simultaneously lovely and aware of the limits of her loveliness. Or, as she might put it, she is both Wonder Woman and little girl. And I love her for it.

Collaborations

So what's your favorite example of an artistic collaboration? The question quickly opens onto a field of tempting possible responses. Cage and Rauschenberg? Picasso, producing a Cubist drop curtain for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes? Rodgers and Hammerstein? Webber and Rice? Or do your tastes perhaps run a little more obscure? No worries: there are corresponding lists of lesser-known teams, as well.

Cleo and I don't appear on any of those lists, but in recent weeks we've been having fun exploring the possibilities of collaboration nonetheless. In fact, it's been a relative highlight of this extended winter: repeatedly, we've retired to a coffee shop, pulled out some paper, markers, and stickers, and gotten to work, riffing on the other's designs and trying to produce something that coheres and maintains an air of difference.

So it's not Exquisite Corpse, exactly, but we have managed to produce some relatively memorable, if not exquisite, monsters. The two-headed, lava-breathing, scaled specimen above is merely an opening exhibit, in this direction. At other times, though, the drawings develop in a more centrifugal manner, with a range of familiar motifs - crowns; Christmas trees - finding their place in a hectic environment of random objects and confrontations. Again, I don't want to force a parallel, but it seems to me that there's a vague echo of Basquiat's jazzy deployment of a private vocabulary in such images:

Ultimately, though, this drawing is most interesting to me for another reason: that is, in its function as a prompt. We drew it on a Saturday morning, before setting out for West Virginia. As we then drove, Cleo took up another sheet of paper and, without any access to the above image, produced a rough copy of it, from memory:

The sun, the spider, the plaintive dragon, and the ship, complete with rear window: they're all there, albeit in slightly modified form. But I see, too, an elegant emergent clarity, as the over-busy density of our teamwork gives way to a gentle, but hardly absolute, symmetry. Here, then, Cleo is not only author, but also viewer, and editor. Or, to put it differently, she extends the notion of collaboration so that it can encompass the active processes of memory and revision, as well.

Obviously, Cleo didn't invent that idea. Indeed, literary theorists have been arguing for more than a generation that that's how reading works. As Zadie Smith put it, a few years ago, "the problem with reads, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television... And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it." Yes, that feels about right - and so, too, does Richard Rodgers' claim that "in many ways, a song-writing partnership is like a marriage. Apart from just liking one another, a lyricist and a composer should be able to spend long periods of time together - around the clock if need be - without getting on each other's nerves."

I'm no Rodgers; Cleo is no Hammerstein. But we do like each other, and we do spend long periods of time together. And one of the ways of passing that time, happily, is through the sort of collaboration that Rodgers and Hammerstein perfected.

A kind of test

Like many 4-year-olds, Cleo likes sticks, mud, sweets, and the idea of gum. And she's also in a solid majority of 4-year-old girls in showing an interest in ballet - which is why, a few months ago, I sent an e-mailed a terrific former student who once danced, before arriving at art school, with the New York City Ballet company. Hey, I wondered, any chance you'd like to give a brief weekly lesson in ballet and its history, or in movement more generally, to my little girl?

Yes, came the answer, and soon we were setting up a regular Wednesday rendezvous. Typically, it's consisted of some stretching, some brief technical education - spotting, for instance - and then some creative dancing, with Tchaikovsky in the background. Cleo was thrilled, initially, by the barre, but she has also embraced some of the formal pieces of etiquette: the reverence, for example, that closes each session. And, in turn, my student has really shone, developing thematic exercises that illustrate particular points while also challenging Cleo to think creatively: against the music of Swan Lake, for instance, Cleo was asked to mimic various birds, and on another day she danced around a pretend fairy garden that was composed of tiny Christmas tree lights.

But behind the whimsical facade stands, always, an insistent respect for the history of dance. After all, Cleo's teacher reminds us, her teachers were forbidding former Soviet matrons, and ballet has always been work, as well as fun. In the wake of one class, then, came a wonderful e-mail, full of supplemental information about Swan Lake. It included a link to a video of one of Cleo's teachers favorite dancers, Diana Vishneva, in the role of the swan. And then it also included this pertinent observation on Swan Lake: "It's also sort of a marathon for the main dancer as she is in all three acts and must play two roles: Odette, the good swan, and Odile, the evil swan... In Russia they say a ballerina's first Swan Lake is a kind of test to see if she can handle being a prima ballerina because it's such a difficult role."

I love it: casual and informal, but also pointedly intelligent. And, at the same time, wholly relevant. Because, if you think about it, 4-year-olds are always undergoing kinds of tests, of various sorts. Can you nap without having an accident? Can you run as fast as Mary Anne? Can you climb the spiraling piece of equipment on the playground? The outcomes, of course, don't always matter very much - in the end, everyone passes, in their own way. But being 4, just like being 44, is full of small contests and incidental revelations about one's own place in a larger world.

Which is why it was fun to see Cleo dig in and try some new things on our recent Texas jaunt. Above, you can see her slowly sliding down the twisting spiral on the playground. But what you don't see is her announcing, in a large hot tub south of town, that "I can do this" as she set out to swim about six feet with no flotation equipment of any sort. And then, having done it, rising up on the opposite stair with a huge, proud smile on her face, and returning to the other side, again, and again.

Being 4 is not exactly a difficult role at most times; it's filled, as far as I can tell, with wonderful props and magical moments. But it can also be, like the role of the prima ballerina in Swan Lake, something of a marathon. And so, at moments, it's worth enjoying the small victories along the way.

Let it go

On a short flight from Dallas to Austin yesterday, I came across a review in the Morning News that caught my eye. Scott Cantrell, the paper's classical music critic, had taken in a Thursday performance by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra - and he was not very impressed. Specifically, a series of what he saw as questionable decisions and interpretations by the pianist left him feeling underwhelmed. Or, as he put it, "Anna Fedorova may be an eloquent interpreter of Mozart or plenty of other composers, but her account of the Rachmaninoff was the most clueless I can remember."

Ouch. But then I turned the page, and noticed a brief story on a Dallas-area college student who had recently posted a video in which he sang the Disney anthem (and Oscar winner) 'Let it Go' in the voices of twenty Disney and Pixar characters. A skilled imitator and effective singer, Brian Hull had been initially thrilled to see his video generate, in its first morning, 30 views - only to watch it then garner, within a week, more than 7 million views.

Two accounts of pieces of music, then, and two very different sorts of reactions. The acidic critic, and the warm hug of the crowd-sourced embrace. Or, to phrase it in terms that Cleo would understand: Anton Ego and the jubilant peasants dancing across the castle court at the end of Tangled. And while such different reactions to art might feel almost irreconcilable, it's hard to deny that they nonetheless work together to shape our impressions, and our actions.

This morning, then, Cleo and I sat down this morning to watch Hull's effort, instead of seeking out work by Federova. And suffice it to say that three minutes later, we both had smiles on our faces.

South by southwest

A few nights ago, I read some of Henry Rollins' entertaining - but is that the right word? - Get in the Van, his account of touring in the 1980s with Black Flag. Those were heady days for the punk band, but the journal tells a different story, too: a relentless series of fights during concerts, raw hunger, and cold, dank clubs and studios. Yes, they play clubs in sites as diverse as Vancouver and Berlin, but at most stops Rollins is openly nervous about another skin head attack or conniving event manager.

Here at halfstep, we never claimed to be punk. And how could we, when our own tour - Austin to San  Antonio - has been so much simple fun? Mini golf, taco trucks, and (above) Cildo Meireles; the River Walk, two swimming pools and a trampoline.  No, we've got no street credibility at all, and our own journal hardly reeks of risk and hard work - but we do have smiles on our faces, both in admiration of Black Flag and out of a silly suspicion that Rollins might have enjoyed, as we did, canoeing on the Colorado River.

Back atcha

So some of the folks at Reddit got a bit nostalgic yesterday about 1990s hip-hop: specifically, about Busta Rhymes, and the remarkably creative and energetic videos that he produced toward the end of that decade. And, yeah, I could relate: I remember watching one of those videos on a small monitor in Rome in 1997, and taking a deep delight in his idiosyncratic art.

Soon enough, though, the Reddit thread took a few turns, and people began to list other favorites in the genre. Are there any current rappers, they wondered, who might be compared to Rhymes? Well, yeah, said a few: what about, for instance, Aesop Rock? And suddenly I was in unfamiliar waters: I'd never heard of this figure, and spent a few minutes following the proffered links to videos, interviews, and reviews. In the end, I was mildly impressed - can one really ever completely abandon the loves and tastes of one's twenties? - but belonged to a clear majority, in feeling that any golden age is long gone.

Still, that sense of fresh discovery stuck with me. There's not much that's more flatly exciting and richly pleasing than wandering into a new field of promising evidence: whether you're following a link or parting the fronds of a weeping willow and now peering out over an unfamiliar pond, that sense of discovery is about as close as many of us get to magic. And, happily, it's also a regular part of my interactions with Cleo these days. Of course, she actually claims to be magic, and so I'm often learning about powers that somehow have escaped the cold dominion of documented science. But she's also, simply, 4, and so we're constantly discovering, as most 4-year-olds do, new possibilities in our given landscape. The other day, for instance, a trip to Whole Foods on a warm day turned into a sustained battle with Huns along a crumbling Great Wall; standing about a small river, we defended our turf with sticks converted into swords, and with mysterious poisonous pods that we worked into our enemy's soil. I'm not sure how we looked to more errand-bound passersby, but to this day the neighborhood remains Hun-free.

More often, though, she's simply interested in learning something new. "Tell me," she said (as she often does), "everything that you know." And so yesterday, as we drive from library to lunch, I found myself trying to teach her, in basic terms, the distinction between owning and renting. What sorts of things can we rent? A house. A car. Perhaps a bus.

Or, as we learned last night when we settled down for a bedtime story, a mill: indeed, on the first page of our copy of Puss-in-Boots, there's an important reference to a rented mill. I don't know, in short, if Cleo will retain for very long the concept of rent: these things have a way of quickly dissolving, and giving way to new waves of imagined Hun attacks. But I like to think that, for a moment, as she sat in her carseat and listened to my few coarse sentences on ownership, that she felt a simple delight in the emergent contours of the world that was not unlike that which I felt in reading, initially, about Aesop Rock.

What am I?

With L. scheduled to return from Cape Town tonight, Cleo and I hit the road yesterday, driving to West Virginia for a spell from the sclerotic traffic and salt residues of still-wintry Baltimore. But even a 2:30 departure time, it seems, isn't quite early enough to beat the developing rush hour entirely, and so we spent a good bit of the drive simply chatting.

And chatting with Cleo, these days, is certainly interesting. She's full of opinions, but also generally rather conversationally graceful, and truly interested in what I have to say. Unless, that is, I'm offering one of my suspiciously revisionist readings of the lyrics from Disney's Frozen. I haven't even seen the film, but I'm pretty sure, for instance, that the ice princess is claiming, in the title song, that she is 'Frozen / In the life I've chosen.' Unfortunately for me, though, that conflicts with the variant that has become canonical in the halls of Bolton Hill Nursery, and which runs like this: 'Frozen / In the life of Chosen.' It's a subtle difference, sure. But it's also the difference between a voluntary exile and a fictional kingdom. And so I play the dull straight man, wondering if perhaps, possibly, there could be an alternative way of thinking about the lyrics.

No dice. But I had much better luck in telling Cleo a few riddles. Her favorite: He who invented it, didn't want it; he who makes it, doesn't need it; he who needs it, doesn't know it. And soon we were making up our own, in turn. I was relatively proud of my initial effort (Less than six, more than four; two and three and nothing more), which led to a prolonged silence in the back seat, before Cleo then suddenly and happily blurted out the correct answer ('Five!'). But I was even more impressed with her initial effort, which was apparently a visual response to the row homes of West Baltimore, but bore a certain taut poetic air: Brick and brick: what makes a brick stick?

I like it, Cleo. And so I'll give you one more, our last before we turned onto I-70 and bade the city a momentary goodbye. I have a wooden mouth, and four glass eyes. I'm made for people, and large in size. What am I?

Powerful women

L. flew to Cape Town for a week on Saturday, and so Cleo and I have been holding down the fort here in Baltimore - but with a major assist from Grandma and Grandpa, who arrived shortly after L. departed, and have been all hands on deck ever since. Given the weather - which included the lowest March temperature ever recorded in Baltimore - their help has been invaluable; given Monday's ice and snow, after all, we weren't able to make it out of our little neighborhood. And so their energy, imaginations, and generosity are deeply appreciated - almost as much, Cleo might venture, as the Cinderella jewelry game that Grandma brought with her.

But four days together has also given us the chance for some informal, unstructured conversation, and the other day, in discussing Bruce Springsteen's recent cover of a Lorde song in that singer's native New Zealand, I happened to mention that pop music seems to be blessed at the moment with a crop of strong-voiced female singers. Katy Perry, Adele, Lorde: these girls can belt, and it's a welcome turn, I think, from the over-produced and auto-tuned vocals of the last few years.

Moreover, the strength of their voices does trickle down. Cleo, you might remember, spent some of last year singing 'Girl on Fire,' an anthem by Alicia Keys, another gifted siren. And then, too, there's Idina Menzel, who sang the Oscar-winning 'Let it Go' - which has torn through the small community of princess aficionados at Cleo's nursery school. Sure, Cleo gets a couple of the words wrong, but in rather fascinating ways (when she sings it, Elsa's 'kingdom of isolation' is transformed into a realm of vacillation). And, mistakes or no, she's happy to belt it out.

Elsa may or may not prove to be an enduring feminist icon. And Cinderella? Well, let's just say that she certainly is sweet. But in fact, despite her current fascination with princesses - or even, at times, because of it - Cleo is being exposed to some strong women. Yeah, sure, I'm referring in part to Mulan, the Disney heroine whom we watched defeat an entire army of Huns a few days ago. But I also mean Meiying, Cleo's current ballet instructor and a former dancer for New York City Ballet. I mean Miss Kelly, one of the Bolton Hill Nursery instructors who manages to raise her two children while also keeping the school on an even keel. And then, too, there's her own mother, currently hard at work halfway around the world. If Cleo's paying any attention at all, she's learning that women can do, well, pretty much anything.

She seems to be learning the lesson. Yesterday she casually told us that she has magic powers that can do anything in the world. And today, she and Grandpa sat down and produced an image of spring, part of which you see above. When I first saw it, it struck me as a wishful image: with snow still on the ground in all directions, can we really hope to see flowers at any point soon? But then I recalled, happily, that Cleo has magic powers. And I remembered, too, that Grandma and Grandpa are heading south in the morning - just as temperatures are forecast to rise into the 40s.

So maybe there is something to all of this. Maybe the girl is on fire. Maybe we will see spring. In any event, the days before it arrives will now be full of the pumpkin pie and warm memories that are the delightful residue of a visit from Grandma and Grandpa.