Exercise

As you open the car door, near the playground, she's all ears: she can hear the shrieks of children, and she leans far forward in her car seat and twists, in order to get the lay of the land. When she's out of the car, though, she can grow shy, and she'll often announce a familiar goal - 'Can you swing me in the big swing?' - partly in order to alleviate any uncertainty. That swing also gives her a perch, from which to watch the other kids, to gauge the temperature of the place. And so, after about ten minutes on the swing, she's often ready for something else - as today, when she had her eye on the spiral slide. So, too, though, did another little girl. At first, the two seemed impediments to each other: Cleo awkwardly chose to climb up the slide, as the other girl tentatively slid down. Within a few minutes, though, there had been a change: it was as if the kindling had caught fire, or the magnets had rotated, or...

...well, it was rather like watching, or listening to, one of the exercises described by Bruce Adolphe in The Mind's Ear: Exercises for Improving the Musical Imagination for Performers, Composers, and Listeners: "The flute continues to play this note," he writes, "and is joined by the trumpet. Hear them sounding together; hear the flute louder than the trumpet; hear the trumpet louder than the flute."

One girl goes up; one goes down. The two sit at the top of the slide together. The two slide down, at different paces, and say something to each other. And then, just as organically, the other little girl makes her way over to another slide, and Cleo saunters over to my bench, and says that it's time to go home.

"Now," writes Adolphe, "they both fade to silence." The exercise concludes.

Of the I see

If you happen to be hanging out near Cleo these days, and she's really engrossed with what she's doing, and you listen rather closely - well, you might get to hear an interesting rendition of 'America.' She learned it in class - or, rather, learned a version of it that makes sense to her, and that bears a general resemblance to the more widely accepted version. That is, she sings it something like this:

Tis of the
Sweet land of liberty
Of the I see
Land where my father died
Land of the pilgrims pride
On ev'ry mountainside
Of the I see

It's easy to smile at such a version, and its gentle misunderstandings and alterations. But don't try to correct it! When I suggested that in fact the song says, 'Of thee I sing,' I was met with a sheer wall of denial and criticism. And, really, why insist? After all, the original lyrics, written by Samuel Francis Smith in 1831, were simply set against the melody of 'God Save the Queen,' producing a patriotic variant on the British hymn to royal authority.

To an Englishman, in other words, the words feel all wrong. Or to an almost-five-year-old, who feels that her version is the one that matters.

Improvisation

Good times at Penn Station Plaza last night, as the Station North Arts and Entertainment folks had invited several parkour specialists to Baltimore for about a month, and then paired them, in a formal demonstration of their skills, with some local hip-hop artists and a marching band. Even the mayor stopped by, making calls from her shiny black SUV before emerging into the lambent evening and speaking to the hundred or so of us who were assembled in a rough crescent. Cleo, one of only two children in the crowd, ate a bagel, lay in my lap, and wagered that the mayor would be wearing some makeup.

And then the show began. As a track by TT the Artist (whom I taught, many moon ago, at MICA) played in the background, five men dressed in business casual and thin, pliable sneakers began to flow like mercury over the surfaces in the plaza. The base of the massive Borofsky statue served as one prop; a parapet beneath a landscaped garden another. The men leapt; they tucked their shoulders and rolled. Next, a solid wooden bench attracted their attention, and in a tightly choreographed routine they crossed paths, lifted each other into the air, and vaulted - all in a mode that was aimed at a soft, safely organic smoothness.

How many ways to reimagine a dull, inert object! The bench sits in the plaza, day after day. Perhaps commuters sit on it; set their coffee on it; read the paper on it. A pigeon might alight on it. But now it appeared differently, as a dense collection of possibilities. Could one somersault over it? Straddle it? Use it as a sort of pommel horse? Yes, yes, and yes. A potential obstacle had become part of an urban playground.

But perhaps that's hardly surprising. Most musical instruments, I assume, arose out of a similar sort of exploitative experimentation. What happens if I pluck this reed, and blow on it? Tie this thread to two pegs, and pluck it? Dry and stretch this skin, and strike it?

And, soon enough, we witnessed an answer, of sorts, to this last question, as well A shrill whistle turned heads, and the marching band lurched into action. The percussion was immediately gripping: the sharp tat of the snares, and the emphatic, conclusive punctuation of the bass drums united the square. Smiles on our faces, some of us gently imitating the majorettes, we fell into a loose parade, and left the station behind us, our vision of the city recharged, our sense of sheer possibility heightened.

I herald dawn

Cleo knows her days, and she'll know as soon as she wakes up that today is Friday. But her grasp of larger calendrical time is still shaky. How many days until my birthday? she regularly asks (and is now increasingly delighted with the answer). And is it summer yet?

That second question is a hard one. Do we hew to the astronomical definitions of seasons? Or do we note that her school is almost out, that Memorial Day is past, and that - well, you can see the picture above. In many senses, it's summer.

The poets can help here, perhaps. For example, Basho, the great Japanese haiku artist, knew the appeal of these soft mornings:

Summer moon -
Clapping hands,
I herald dawn.

Or herald dawn, feed the cat, and stir a cup of coffee, and listen to the music of the songbirds. But the birds are not the only sound of early summer. Think summer, and you have to think of the Beach Boys, as well, with their innocent odes to the pleasures of high summer on the coast. But even their tunes can be shot through with a recognition that summer is never infinite, even in southern California. Think, for instance, of 'All Summer Long':

All summer long you've been with me
I can't see enough of you
All summer long we've both been free
Won't be long until summer time is through

And in this sense, they belong to a much larger poetic tradition. If you flip through the roster of poems beginning with the word 'summer' in The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies, it's hard to avoid being struck by the frequency with which poets comment upon the diminishing of the season. Sure, there are poems about high summer, but reflections on the passage of summer are more common still.

One entry in that list, though, stands out to me, for its combination of celebration and an awareness of the season's fragility. It's by Khaled Mattawa, and it begins like this:

Summer, and a woman lowers her jug to the river.
She bathes and sings the word 'why.'

Yes, Cleo, in my mind it's summer. And so we make our way to the water, and in the midst of the quiet music of the world we take in what we can and perhaps shake our head at the meaning of it all.

No matter what they say

The two five-year-olds, members of our host family on a recent visit to Winston, pressed up close to Cleo, looking at her as she put her dress on. 'What is that?' they asked, pointing to a freckle just above her thigh. 'It's a freckle,' explained Cleo. 'It's really big,' said one of them. 'It's too big to be a freckle. It looks like someone spilled chocolate on you.' And Cleo, insistent but slightly aggrieved: 'It's a freckle.'

Slowly but surely, Cleo's entering that arena - that seemingly vast arena - in which attention is trained upon appearance. Differences are noted and dissected; opinions are offered freely. Sometimes, happily, the process is relatively gentle; on that morning, for instance, Cleo's two friends seemed satisfied with her response, and the three of them were soon fast playmates again, and went about efficiently erecting a fort in the living room. Inevitably, though, there will be more complicated moments.

As the kids slept, the four parents watched an episode of American Ninja Warrior, and traded casual conversation about t.v. shows. The Voice came up, and I asked if there were any talent show hosts whom our friends enjoyed watching. They each paused for a moment, looked at each other, and then nodded: Shakira, they said, referring to the Colombian singer who regularly appears as a voice coach. She's intelligent, they explained (and, sure enough, The Huffington Post recently reported that she has an IQ of 140). She can be funny, they added. And, then one of them, playfully: and she's hot as hell.

Fair enough. But even Shakira, it turns out, has had her doubts. As the Examiner noted, in 2010, the Grammy-winning singer has consistently seen a therapist for up to an hour daily in an effort to boost her low self-esteem. "I've become so much more comfortable with who I am and the body God has given me," she said. "In their 20s, women try to be somebody they're not and try to turn themselves into something different. Now in my 30s, I'm very happy with who I am."

20s; 30s. What about, I wonder, when they're 4? So far, Cleo seems to be doing fine. And yet, in thinking about all of this, I'm reminded of a song by another Latina artist: that'd be Christina Aguilera's 'Beautiful.' So, Cleo, I hope that you can draw, when you need to, on some of the resilience embedded in her lyrics:

I am beautiful, no matter what they say
Words can't bring me down

It may look, to some, as though a drop of chocolate has marred your skin. But I've always loved that freckle, and hope you do, too.

Love and litost

In the film Belle - currently in a theater near you! - Dido, the young mulatto protagonist, is urged to play the family piano as several potential suitors look on. 'And you?' one of them asks. 'What about you?'

The young woman sits at the piano, clearly nervous. Her mother quietly tells another woman that Dido has never played in public before. But then, suddenly, the finger find the keys, and a melody begins to take shape: a handsome, coursing tune, played brilliantly. Dido, it turns out, knows her Handel.

The scene, to be sure, is almost certainly historically inaccurate. We know, in fact, almost nothing of Dido's life, beyond an acidic journal entry written by the Lord Hutchinson, the former governor of Massachusetts, who met Dido and her family at a 1779 dinner party. Less than impressed by her, he nonetheless registered her responsibilities, in withering terms. 'She is a sort of superintendent over the dairy, poultry yard, etc., which we visited.'

And yet, in more abstract terms, the scene feels fair, or somehow essentially believable. After all, even children who are granted nothing in the way of responsibility somehow manage to master new skills and to impress with their courage and ability. A small example: this morning, at about 7:10, Cleo swam across an entire swimming pool, with no assistance, no flotation aids - and no apparent alarm. Her head bobbed just above the water, her little legs kicked, her eyes shone with determination, and after about 30 seconds she was hanging from the opposite edge.

That's not to say, though, that Cleo had impressed a flock of suitors. I was delighted, to be sure, but the rest of the hotel pool was entirely empty. And in fact, if she ever gets any better at swimming, she may find that the talent can also represent an impediment: I'm thinking, for example, of the moment in a Kundera novel when a female character, a gifted swimmer, leaves her boyfriend in her wake in the salt water of the sea, simply because she cannot resist the sheer pleasure of athletic exertion. He, in turn, feels litost: a Czech word that Kundera celebrates for its sense of forlorn desire.

I don't know if Belle's filmic suitors felt anything like litost as they watched her at the piano. But at least one filmgoer in the audience did, during tonight's screening. It's wonderful to watch the young girl find her confidence. But it's almost heartbreaking, at the same time, to watch her grow into someone who no longer needs my shoulder or my aid.

Off and running

I mentioned, in my last post, that we recently enjoyed a meal of fish and chips. And I meant what I said: we, as in, Cleo was eating fish. She's insistent that she only likes whitefish - no salmon or sushi quite yet - but, still, this is news: before yesterday, she'd never been open to eating it. And yet, just last night, she tried to order whitefish on three separate occasions (as the waiter tried to take our drink orders, for instance, and to ask if she wanted a side with her chicken tenders).

But, really, Cleo seems to be growing up in all sorts of ways. She's no longer a Redbird, for instance, for her graduation from nursery school took place on Friday. And this morning she swam - actually, literally swam, under her own power, with no boost from the edge of the pool, for six or seven feet at a time - for much of a delightful hour. Of course, not every change is welcome: lunch was accompanied by a series of odd threats involving the possibility that we withheld her pie, and a playground visit yesterday took a slightly awkward turn when Cleo began to tell the other kids sharing the slide that she was being flushed down a toilet, into the ocean. Growing older doesn't always imply, apparently, a gentle refinement of taste. But, still, it is intriguing to watch her becoming very much her own person.

Maybe Simon Leng's biography of George Harrison is helpful here. Noting Harrison's cynicism involving the Beatles' early American concerts, in which the crowd noise often drowned out his guitar entirely, Leng writes that Harrison was deeply attracted to the refined classicism of Ravi Shankar, whose work he began to listen to quite closely in the later 1960s. Harrison's personal goals were relatively modest, but his admiration seems to have been sincere. Or, as Leng puts it, "While George Harrison knew that his lifestyle would never permit him to become a true sitar player, his exposure to sitar study made him the best musician in the Beatles. It also gave him the basis of a new style that would only flourish when he discovered slide guitar."

Will Cleo ever become an Olympic swimmer? The odds are long indeed. Will she delight us at every meal, astounding us with the variety of her healthy diet? No; in fact, she proved as much at lunch this afternoon. But in trying these new things, she is developing what you might call the basis of her own style. And she has already, in fact, become the best developer of creative, outlandish threats involving dessert in our little family. Moreover, she's only five. And she hasn't even heard of Ravi Shankar yet.

Influence

A few evenings ago, we dropped by an English-themed restaurant for dinner. The walls were covered with banners of great Liverpool football squads, a hunting horn hung from the ceiling, and the men's room featured posters announcing upcoming concerts. And the joint was named Penny Lane.

In short, we were in the realm of Beatles hagiography - and, in fact, images of the Fab Four filled cabinets throughout the space. So we spent a few moments explaining the Beatles to Cleo; as I've mentioned, she's heard 'Yellow Submarine,' but the immense arc of their career is generally unknown to her.

But how, exactly, to explain the importance of that career? It's not enough, surely, to point to the kitschy steins that featured the faces of John and George and to say, 'They were huge!' Might there be some more objective way of quantifying influence?

Well. The very next day, I was looking at the back page of The Atlantic, which asked a panel of musicians and musical historians to offer their nominees for the most influential song of all time. And, of the dozen or so responses, not a single tune named was by the Beatles. Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' was, interestingly, the only tune to get multiple nominations; otherwise, the list implied little unanimity, as it featured an early aria, some archaic blues songs, Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' and 'Amazing Grace.'

In short, an interesting a rather diverse list. But how, again, are we to characterize influence? Surely David's psalms have exerted an immense influence on the history of religious and literary thought - and yet they didn't get a single vote. Of course, that's part of the point of such surveys: to kindle debate and discussion. Maybe, though, we could go a step further here, and conclude that the very diversity of the responses suggests that influence - musical or otherwise - really can't be easily isolated. How would we weigh, after all, the fact that the Beatles have inspired a Richmond-based restaurant against, say, that diffuse force that an anthem such as 'We Shall Overcome' emanated in the 1960s? And, similarly, how can I even be sure that Cleo will recall her visit to the restaurant, or my brief parental soliloquy on the Fab Four?

Influence, it seems, is diffuse and contingent. Our lives, happily, are the outcomes of millions of small forces, instead of one blunt push. And trying to average those forces, to chart a common vector, may make for good copy, but inevitably simplifies things.

So play, on Penny Lane. We' enjoyed our fish and chips - but we also enjoyed the Journey and the Duran Duran that play, for reasons that weren't entirely clear, from your sound system.

Mellow yellow

I may have mentioned this at some point - after 480 posts, you do run the risk of becoming occasionally repetitive - but I've always been struck by the haphazardly unsystematic way in which most of us learn about music. You're 15, and you turn on the radio, and maybe you happen to hear Merle Haggard, for the first time in your life. Perhaps your college roommate is a fan of Brazilian music. And at a yard sale you come across a suite of recordings by Keith Jarrett. Or perhaps you're four, and your dad is driving you to soccer practice, and the Saturday morning DJ decides to play Donovan's 1966 hit single Mellow Yellow.

It's hardly a logical, organized education - but at least there's a constant sense of unexpected discovery. And perhaps I shouldn't really be so surprised, after all: for while I work to craft classes that develop in a clear and almost organic manner, much of life is a crash course, built more around random encounters than around syllabi.

A few weeks ago, for instance, Cleo and I sat down with the Bible, looking for some good stories. We read about David, fighting Goliath. And then we turned to the story of Moses - and I suddenly learned that his wife was named Tzippora. I'd wondered about that name for more than a year, since teaching a student with the same name; she had told me that it means bird, but hadn't added that it had a Biblical prominence. All of a sudden, that snapped into focus - and so, when I saw her walking at graduation a few days ago, I mentioned the Mosaic association to a colleague. "Yeah," he duly added, "it's an early ancestor of Deborah."

Is it, now? And where was he, years ago, when I first met her? But that's how we learn, I guess: in jots and drabs, in drips and drops - and rarely without a larger pattern. And yet, somehow it all coheres, in time. Tonight, as Cleo was getting ready for bed, I heard her singing, "They call me Mellow Yellow."

We don't control the pace, or the rhythm, in which we learn. Electrical banana may - or may not - be bound to be the very next phase. But eventually the world becomes a part of us, and we a part of the world.

The blues is what it's all about

There must be many ways of defining the blues as a musical genre, but it seems to me that one way would be in terms of asymmetrical knowledge. That is, blues singers typically don't know enough, or know more than they want to. Think of B.B. King, for example, in 'Three O'Clock Blues':

Now here it is three o'clock in the mornin'
And I can't even close my eyes
It's three o'clock in the mornin', baby
I can't even close my eyes
Well, you know I can't find my baby
And I can't be satisfied.

Where is she? An all-night whisky joint? Another man's bed? B.B. doesn't know - and that's precisely the problem. On the other hand, Albert King sometimes mourns the state of knowing too much. In 'Get Out of My Life,' for instance, he says goodbye to his woman because he knows exactly how she feels:

Get out of my life, woman; you don't love me no more
I said, get out of my life, woman; you don't love me no more

Given such problems - staying on good terms with a woman is hard, in the world of the blues - it's not very surprising that there aren't many blues songs about parenthood. Blind Willie McTell and Robert Johnson are generally more worried about a delivery from romantic suffering than they are about the delivery room. Nonetheless, I would argue that at least in one sense - in the sense of an asymmetrical knowledge - there's a way in which blues songs echo parenthood rather usefully.

Here's what I mean. A few months ago, Cleo began to complain rather consistently about an aching stomach. We had no idea what it could be: was she simply hungry? No; at times she was momentarily doubled over in pain. A food allergy of some sort? No, it didn't seem so: she's always eaten dairy, and when we eliminated that and glutens from her diet as an experiment, nothing improved. Miralax and an X-ray were no better. She continued to tell us, once or twice a day, that her stomach really hurt; some days, her teachers told us that she had been unable to nap, as a result.

It was, I found, the not knowing that was hardest. We were letting her down, we felt, as parents - and yet, of course, neither we nor the pediatrician could get inside her. Was it really a serious pain? What was causing it? We simply didn't know. And then, finally, we started giving her probiotic pills in the morning. Cleo's been on a number of antibiotics in her little life - Lyme disease; ear infections - and it seems that they may simply have worn down her digestive tract. After a good week of probiotics, her complaints more or less dried up. And now it's rare that she mentions any discomfort at all.

There are still, though, things that we don't understand. Yesterday, I found myself momentarily stunned by the tendons in her ankles. How did her body know how to grow, to evolve, in that way? I know, I know: nearly every body obeys such a basic organic logic. And yet that sense of being wholly exterior to her - a mere observer, rather than somehow responsible for her - felt both amazing and crushing.

So, then. Middle-class parenthood is not the terrain of classic bluesmen. But the two may not be wholly irreconcilable. After all, with the change of a mere word or two, B.B. King's jeremiad, above, could be made into a suitable anthem for new parents:

Now here it is three o'clock in the mornin'
And I can't even close my eyes
It's three o'clock in the mornin', baby
I can't even close my eyes
Well, you know I hear my baby
And I can't be satisfied.

What's wrong? Who knows? And so we sing the blues.

From solid repose

Above, folks, is a photograph of a sculpture by Franz Rudolf Knubel. But it also pictures, as we'll see, a basic musical principle, and acts, I want to suggest, as a concise summary of Cleo's first five years.

Knubel's sculpture is not especially well known, but it was given a certain prominence when it was discussed on page 435 of the 1974 edition of Rudolf Arnheim's influential Art and Visual Perception. Noting that the piece was designed on the basis of a suggestion by Theodor Fischer, Arnheim then went further: "The central block is a cube; the others have the ratios of elementary musical intervals: 2/1, 3/2, 5/4, 1/1, 4/5, 2/3, 1/2."

Interesting, right? But to a Gestalt theorist like Arnheim, this had specific consequences, and he wasted no time in spelling them out. "The similarity of shape," he wrote, "and the gradualness of the changes in height and width induce the viewer to see a coherent event of transformation rather than a sequence of independent shapes. The event is compellingly dynamic: the object contracts and rises, thereby changing its character from solid repose on the ground to towering strength."

I'll buy that. But I'll also up the ante. Just over years ago, I described taking a ten-month-old Cleo to a party that featured a number of similarly young children; one of them, I noted, had toppled over into a "resolutely horizontal position." And Cleo, in the accompanying picture, was hardly vertical herself; instead, she lay in a solid repose, in her mother's arms. Scroll through the blog, though, and soon you may feel as though you're doing something more than merely looking at single posts, in sequence. As Arnheim put it, rather, you may be induced to see a coherent event of transformation. And at the very end of it, the object of the blog will rise, changing her character from lolling baby to - well, if not quite towering strength, something nonetheless undeniably distinct:

Wacky Wednesday

About a mile west of me, a little girl is enjoying the heck out of Wacky Wednesday. It's the last Wednesday of the nursery school year, and all of the four- and five-year-olds were encouraged to dress as wildly as they wanted. So Cleo appeared, this morning, at the top of the stairs in a pajama suit worn backwards, with a pair of pants draped across her head (the legs falling like a rabbit's ears) and held in place by a pair of princess panties. For most of a day, at least, Cleo and her classmates can thus delight in flaunting the basic rules of fashion: they can invert, as the Bakhtinian academics would have it, the natural order.

Meanwhile, about two miles northwest of me, there's an entirely dry flannel sheet, stretched across an entirely dry mattress. Which is no small deal: rather, it's another proof that Cleo is gradually putting the need for night-time diapers (or pull-ups, she would insist, with indignity) behind her. She doesn't do it every night, but when she's feeling hopeful, and has managed an evening visit to the bathroom, it's full speed ahead - and, more and more frequently, the results are wonderfully dry.

In Music 7-11: Developing Primary Teaching Skills, Sarah Hennessy thinks a bit about how children learn music - and about how adult teachers of music sometimes go through similar processes. Neither group, she argues, can learn entirely through texts, or verbal instruction. Rather, direct experience is of central value. "Making the sounds," she writes, "responding through listening and moving, and sharing ideas and feelings about the music are the ways in which we come to learn the necessary skills." And, in turn, this suggests a certain teaching style - even when the students are adults, training to become teachers in their own right. "Because of sometimes deep anxieties felt by colleagues about teaching music," Hennessy suggests, "the leader needs to be sympathetic, patient, encouraging, and not-over-critical. An atmosphere of trust is essential."

That sounds about right. A couple of years ago, when Cleo first became interested in sleeping without nighttime diapers (kids shed them at a remarkable range of ages, from 2 to... well, 7 or 8), we often told her that accidents were no big deal. Quickly, though, she embraced that philosophy a bit too actively, sometimes announcing, as we wiped her dry in the morning, that "It's not a big deal." In time, then, we shifted to a more aspirational message: wouldn't it be awesome to wake up in the morning all dry? And we waited for it to sink in: to make its way into those distant regions of the brain that control our basic, nighttime actions. And, throughout, we tried to be patient and encouraging, as Hennessy recommends - at least when within earshot of Cleo. And, finally, the student seems to be learning: to be mastering, that is, another central social norm.

Which means, happily, that on this Wednesday she could wake up wearing one dry pair of panties and then jam another, with no hesitation, onto her head, in preparation for an especially wacky day.

Perceived as

Father's Day isn't for a few weeks, but this past Sunday's New York Times seemed unable to wait, as it included several open references to fatherhood and its potential power. In an interview, Colson Whitehead heaped praise on Kevin Young's Book of Hours, calling it a superb and "wrenching investigation of what it is to be a father." He then went on to describe, rather self-mockingly, the tears that had overcome him at a New York BBQ joint as he read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. "I'd just become a father," Whitehead explained, "and something in the book about the dad trying to save his kid from nutso hillbillies - great, here I go again." But why such self-consciousness, Colson? After all, in a review in the same issue of the Times, John Schwartz singled out a moment in the audiobook version of Rob Lowe's Love Life in which the actor describes the powerful conflicting emotions that he felt as he dropped his son off at college. "Lowe's voice," Schwartz wrote, "grows husky when he recalls that he used to wrap the boy in a blanket 'like a burrito.'"

Rather like Whitehead, though, Schwartz seems to have felt compelled to qualify, or undermine, such open emotionalism. "Some may tear up," he wrote. "I cringed a little." Men opening up about fatherhood, after all, still occupy an underdeveloped territory, and their accounts are often muted or neutered through the use of stoicism or humor. Uncomfortable with Lowe's apparent sincerity? A curt proclamation of your discomfort can establish your own conventional manhood, in contrast.

Or perhaps a reference to Joy Division can do the trick. Shortly after acknowledging the potential emotional force of fatherhood, Whitehead enthusiastically recommends the music of the legendary post-punk band from Manchester. Talk about an antidote to weepy nostalgia: Joy Division is perhaps best known for a sound that has been called eerie and energetic, for lyrics that tended to focus on themes such as coldness, distance, and failure - and for the 1980 suicide of its lead vocalist, Ian Curtis. I remember at least one Joy Division poster in my college dormitory, and I recall associating it with a sparse, rugged individualism - and not with recollections of babies wrapped as burritos.

In fact, though, Cook's suicide did inspire a certain degree of nostalgia, and of what the literary critics would call re-membering. As the band's percussionist Stephen Morris put it, in 2007, "This sounds awful but it was only after Ian died that we sat down and listened to the lyrics. You'd find yourself thinking, 'Oh, my God, I missed this one.' Because I'd look at Ian's lyrics and think how clever he was putting himself in the position of someone else. I never believed he was writing about himself. Looking back, how could I have been so bleeding stupid?"

That's powerful, and understandable. But, looking back, we almost always see things differently. Indeed,as Jon Savage noted, in an obituary of Curtis written for Melody Maker, "Now no one will remember what his work with Joy Division was like when he was alive; it will be perceived as tragic rather than courageous."

And so, too, to an extent with parenting. L. and I have spoken of wrapping Cleo like a burrito. But in time that offhanded and casually affectionate term will acquire a different patina. Will it prompt tears, or cringes? That depends, of course, on how, and where, it's framed, and with whom. But it seems worth remembering that what we do now will almost inevitably be perceived as something else when read in a BBQ restaurant, or heard 27 years after the fact.

Further answers

We're still chewing on those questions that appeared in our comment box a few days ago. And at this point are ready to report our latest round of findings:

You asked, what's the difference between a hero and a superhero?
Almost anyone can be a hero. You can pick up trash, or something like that. It's not like being a superhero. To be a superhero, you have to have some power, like flying, or being able to run really fast.

And are princesses superheroes?
No.

And you also asked: which is harder, singing or dancing?
Singing is harder: You have to know all the words. A song like America has a lot of hard-to-remember words.

So there you have it, folks: straight from the source. Again, our researchers will continue to probe the depths of the four-year-old's mind with diligence and propriety, and we will be sure to keep you posted should any data emerge.

Happy

So yesterday was a big day, from certain angles. Or at least, from the point of view of a certain 4-year-old. There was, after all, a New York Times article on the ongoing popularity of Frozen: Cleo and I read it, and afterwards she jokingly threw her hair back a few times, emulating the girl who likes to emulate, according to the story, Elsa's dramatic gestures. And then there was the realization, based on a story in the Yale Alumni Magazine, that I lived in New Haven at the same time as Robert Lopez, the composer behind the Frozen soundtrack. Can it get any better, really? No, not according to Cleo, who announced (as we lounged in a sunny playground), "Today is the greatest day of my life."

"I'm so happy to hear that," I responded, quite honestly. And then she, following up: "I always say that because every day is a great day."

Really? So it's not the realization that your dad might have played a game of pickup hoops with the man who scored your favorite movie? No. But that's okay: I'd be every bit as happy to know that it was simply the sun, or the game of monster chase, or the tent in the senior thesis show, that made you smile. The reason, in short, doesn't matter, given the sentiment. And here's hoping that you keep saying it.

Opera aperta

And, speaking of finishing: the Rainbow Dragons' spring soccer campaign wound to an end yesterday, with an enigmatic 1-0 victory over the red team that featured, to be blunt, rather nonchalant refereeing and a single shot on goal. One of our players notched the only tally of the game when he displayed a piece of nifty footwork and then slid the ball into an inexplicably empty goal, capping what can only be characterized as a complete breakdown in the opposing team's defensive logic. A few minutes later, the kids were all holding boxes of raisins and fruit juice, league badges were distributed, and players began to drift towards cars with their fathers and mothers.

Not an uncommon ending, perhaps. According to Max Graf, in his very colorful psychoanalytic 1946 book Composer and Critic, on the same day that Richard Wagner completed "The Flying Dutchman," he wrote his mother for the first time in years. Had he seen, perhaps, in composing a work that related to his own childhood, "the large bright eyes of his mother resting upon him?" Perhaps. Certainly, the Rainbow Dragons, if they had looked up from their raisins, could have seen the bright eyes of their parents, too (and at least a few digital cameras, as well). One form of closure involves a return to the arms of the parent.

But wait! Because Umberto Eco is here to remind us that many modernist works are characterized by something other than complete closure. Writing in the early 1960s, he noted (in "The Poetics of the Open Work") that "A number of recent pieces of instrumental music are linked by a common feature: the considerable autonomy left to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play the work." Eco had in mind compositions by Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and Henri Pousseur - but in fact his point was a larger one that encompassed, as well, the work of James Joyce and Alexander Calder. "Every performance explains," Eco argued, "the composition but does not exhaust it." We hear a version of the score; we see Calder's mobile sculptures in a certain arrangement. But if we returned to the work tomorrow, we could very well encounter a very different set of forms.

And that sounds familiar. For, it turns out, no two photos of the Rainbow Dragons are quite the same:

Which image, then, denotes the end of the season? Each explains it, perhaps, but does not exhaust it. We hold up our badges, and play on.

Beginnings

How does she know just how to begin?

Yesterday I got to Cleo's school as she, and another girl, were beginning to paint. The watercolors were set out, and they'd both retrieved brushes. Clean sheets of white paper stared up at them.

No big deal, right? Kids paint. And yet, beginning a work is a big deal, and always has been. Think of Homer, invoking the muses, asking for inspiration so that he can undertake his heroic song. Or Dante, gathering his strength before embarking on a particularly difficult descriptive passage. How to begin? Often, artists have begun by remarking on how difficult beginning is.

The same basic point plays out in many ways. I remember a college suitemate of mine handing in an essay that was stapled shut, on all four corners. When the professor finally managed to get beyond the cover page, the first sentence that greeted him was "Openings are always difficult." And, about three years after that, the young rapper Nas - who just began a set at the Preakness track infield, up the hill, about an hour ago - discovered something similar. As the background beats played in the studio and the tapes rolled, Nas delivered two quick lines, and then paused, and lost confidence. "I don't know how to start this shit," he mumbled. As DJ Premier later remembered it, "I'm actually yelling, 'We're recording! and banging on the window. 'Come on, get ready!... and then everyone was like, 'Oh, my God,' 'cause it was so unexpected. He was not ready. So we used that first verse." Rather like Inferno, then, Illmatic - one of the most influential hip-hop albums ever recorded - begins with an open crisis of confidence: a wobbly moment that belies an underlying ability.

But on Friday I saw no such thing. Cleo dunked her brush in the water, stirred some paint, and deftly began to make a small circle. And then another, and another. I simply watched, and the painting soon became more and more complicated; eventually, it evolved into an image that she said was inspired by Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. At no point was there discernible doubt, or uncertainty. One mark followed another. And then it was over, declared done.

Perhaps appropriately, I don't know how to end this post. How do children act so unselfconsciously? Why do adults doubt their own abilities so acutely? The questions quickly become complicated. But for now, we'll keep it simple. One simply begins, I guess - and then ends.

Game on!

Even occasional bloggers, of course, need material: they sometimes wonder what their next topic might be. But, every now and then, the topic simply pads down the hall and presents itself: like Cleo, this morning, at 5:45. Still wiping sleep from her eyes, she half-stumbled along the hall, looked at me, and mumbled something. Happily, though, I was already up, and so I steered her away from still-sleeping L., and we went downstairs to play some Blokus.

We've been playing a lot of Blokus - a cleverly simple game in which players try to lay colored tiles of various shapes corner to corner - recently. But in fact it's merely the latest in a relatively long line of board games and card games that have served as temporary favorites. Sure, for a brief time it was Candy Land; there was also a princess jewelry game, a world traveling game, and a quite handsome version of bingo based on a U.S. map. Recently, though, Cleo has begun to embrace games of real strategy, and I've been delighted to go along for the ride. There was Max, for example: a Canadian game in which players work together to try to steer little creatures out of the path of a hungry cat (typically, not all of the creatures make it, lending a sober edge to a rather quaint design). Mummy's Treasure, with its emphasis upon probability and geometry, fascinated for weeks, and now Cleo is trying her hand, too, at Mille Bournes, dishing out accident cards with the best of them. At 6 a.m. today, though, it was Blokus that Cleo wanted to play.

But even as the stack of manufactured games in the corner of the living room grows taller and taller, there is an equally rich vein of improvised games: brief moments of play or contest in which the rules evolve, as often as not, spontaneously (if, indeed, they're ever fully clear). It might be a variant on rock, paper, scissors, or a new permutation on the chase games that we've played on playgrounds for more than a year now. Or, last night, it was more of a trivia game: Cleo was in the bath, and the stereo downstairs was still playing the Disney channel that we'd called up during our after-dinner game of Mille Bournes. Upstairs, Cleo could just make out the music, and - given that she's seen a substantial fraction of the Disney corpus at this point - began to try to identify the compositions. "For the first time," I heard her cry, as she recognized a tune from Frozen, "in forever!" Moments later, though, a hint of doubt: "Is this Rapunzel?" And then, an admission of the limits of her abilities: "What is this one?" (It was from Aladdin, which she hasn't yet seen). I'd thought, in other words, that she was only taking a bath, but in fact she was playing Name that Tune.

And not only playing that. A few minutes later, I heard her clearly announce, "I'm going to throw a real duck in the water." A fraction of a second later, there was a clear splash. "I just threw a real duck in the water," she observed, aloud. And then continued, in the same vein: "I'm going to throw a real frog in the water. I just threw a real frog in the water." A hippo followed. And once again, rules had seemingly materialized, where moments earlier there had been no game at all.

Rather like, you might say, Cleo herself, at 5:45 on a Saturday morning.

The evening of the day

"I sit and watch," sang Mick Jagger in 1965, "the children play."

Well, I've been doing my share of that recently, as I've been arriving at the big playground down the street from Cleo's nursery at about 4:30, so that she can stay on and play as the other kids trundle back up the hill to the end of their school day. Cleo's never the only one who stays on; there's usually a cohort of between five to ten kids whose parents gather on the picnic tables and chat, or send a few e-mails, or read. Or simply watch as the children play, wonderfully, all around us: disappearing into bushes, tossing balls, hanging from beams, and grappling, while they call out superheroes' names.

It's a lovely sight - but, given that here are only six days left in Cleo's school year, it's also one shot through with a slight current of bittersweetness. Will there be a comparable playground, one wonders, in the fall, at her new kindergarten? Will she see, with any regularity, these children once they're all enrolled in their various new schools? And what becomes of the surprisingly strong ties between us parents that have developed over the past three years?

I know, I know: it's still very early summer. The Orioles are still in first; the temperature has only hit 90 once thus far. And yet, struck by the simultaneous beauty and transitoriness of the scenes on the playground, I sometimes feel like a character in one of the late summers that seem to dominate the fiction of Updike, and Cheever. Think, for instance, of Cheever's Shady Hill, which seems strangely poised between summer and a suddenly aggressive autumn. "It was a frosty night," we read in "The Country Husband," "when he got home. The air smelled sharply of change."

That's how the air in the playground, I would argue, smells. In the process, though, it arguably only heightens the simple wonder of the scene. Nabokov once wrote appreciatively of Cheever's story, admiring its structure: "the impression of there being too many things happening in it," he claimed, "is completely redeemed by the satisfying coherence of its thematic interfacings." But I might put it even more simply: the summer acquires a tragic beauty simply through the fact that it cannot last. The sun will give way to ice; the children will grow tall; the slides will no longer interest in the same way. But somehow, for now, it is all just right.

"It is," the Stones concluded, "the evening of the day. I sit and watch the children play."

Ordinary people

So perhaps you've heard the new John Legend song, 'All of Me' - his biggest hit, in an interesting career that's now a decade old. Or, that is, perhaps you've heard one of the two versions of 'All of Me,' for the song is actually circulating in multiple forms. There's the spare original version: a love song, co-written with Kanye West, in which Legend accompanies himself on piano. And then there's a lively remix that features a prominent percussive part and a club feel, and that was released by the Dutch producer Tiesto . If you're listening to, say, an adult contemporary station, you'll likely hear the former. But if you're listening to a Top 40 satellite radio station, you'll just as likely hear the latter.

The basic idea of releasing multiple versions of a song, of course, is not new. Even the Beatles and the Stones did it occasionally, and it became something of a tendency in the 1980s, when the broad popularity of MTV's Unplugged had bands scrambling to record acoustic versions of well-known hits. And, at root, the tendency is an understandable one in several senses. The remixes keep the song and the artist in the news, may attract some new audiences - and, in a sense, correspond to a tendency that has long interested linguists.

That's the idea of an identifiable distinction between 'ordinary language' and other forms of linguistic communication. Wittgenstein is the central figure here, historically speaking; in some of his writings, he thought about a difference between ordinary language - the pragmatic forms of communication employed, say, by bricklayers on the job - and poetic language, which works in different ways, and toward less practical ends. That distinction then interested an entire generation of linguists; thinkers from J.L. Austin to Derrida, for instance, grappled with the terms, and Stanley Fish once wrote an essay entitled 'How Ordinary is Ordinary Language?'

Regardless of your position in relation to that debate, though, there's another linguistic distinction that characterizes our daily communication - and it's one that came up this morning, as we drove Cleo to school. She trotted out to the car in a summer dress and a little bracelet. Unthinkingly, I remarked that her bracelet looked fetching - which prompted her to ask what the word meant. Within a minute, we were playing an impromptu game of synonyms: if something tastes great, for example, how might we say that without using the word great? And, a minute later, we had arrived at one of the great truths of English: that it's such a wonderfully rich and diverse language precisely because of its very complex linguistic background. Are you weeping because of that weird smell? If so, you're relying on three words derived from Anglo-Saxon precedents. But you could also express the same thought in terms evolved from Norman speech: if so, you'd be crying because of that strange odor. And so on: perhaps the specific examples don't matter as much as the general observation: English is full of rich choices. Moreover, the choices aren't always flatly equivalent: often, the Norman derivatives still carry a more refined tone. A beverage sounds, quite simply, more sophisticated than a drink, even if the two mean more or less the same thing.

Well, then. You can decide for yourself, I suppose, if Legend's original is more refined than the club remix. But the very existence of the two, it seems, is far from surprising. It's merely a new example, a Norman might say, of what an Anglo-Saxon would call an old thing.

La voici!

So was the great horse meant to be seen, or not? Yesterday morning, in a clammy drizzle, the three of us drove up the road to Old Hilltop, to the Pimlico Race Course, where the club was offering views of the thoroughbreds as they trained for the upcoming Preakness Stakes, and tours of the stables beyond. About a hundred people had gathered, and clustered near the rail, gripping cups of coffee and chatting about the occasional passing horse. But where, some wondered, was California Chrome, the unlikely Derby winner and current favorite? We looked up and down the vast track, and signed up for a tour, and we wondered.

So was the great horse meant to be seen, or not? Even Berlioz doesn't seem to have been sure. As Ian Kemp has observed, in an essay on the finale of Act I of Berlioz's Les Troyens, the composer initially seems to have wanted to feature an actual prop of the Trojan Horse. "The gigantic horse appears," the stage directions in the autograph libretto read, "and crosses the back of the stage." In a later copyist libretto, however, he struck these directions, and wrote that the procession "should be invisible to the spectator." The horse was now to be a notion, rather than a fact.

But wait. Despite Berlioz's reservations, his music features a marked crescendo (against which his Cassandra sings, La voici!) that seems to insist that, as Kemp puts it, "the horse should be seen." Yes: that's more or less how we felt, too, as we stood under the gray, insular skies and nursed our warm drinks. And suddenly we were rewarded, as one of the stable guards smiled and proudly announced that California Chrome was about to emerge. Seconds later, he did:

And now we were all Trojans, doubts cast aside, ready to take the horse in, in all of its splendor.

Don't need explaining

What, exactly, should you do when one of your dinner companions keeps steering the conversation back to booger-butts?

No, I'm not talking about L., whose dinner conversation is generally relatively polished. I'm talking about the little girl, and the way in which a chat about the day's events can suddenly grind to a halt and then give way to a series of combinatory permutations involving booty, or bottom.

We know what the theorists say. We've read, for instance, William Bastone's "The Point of Reception Theory," and are thus familiar with his contention that "She plays with the play of language. Like adolescents who play with social roles and future identities; like the clever slave who plays with the plot. And this play is an act of world construction and of self-construction, one that proceeds in part from mimesis and in part from figuration..." But such airy analysis, while broadly comforting, hardly helps us in shaping our response to a sudden, snickering charge that we are a Mr. Bottom Butt.

And so we reach elsewhere for aid - and find it, finally, in a pop song that's been floating about us for a few months now. That's Jason Derulo's 'Talk Dirty to Me,' a collaboration featuring 2 Chainz that is built around a combination of salty innuendos and blunt, overt sexual reference. At root, it's a series of propositions - but a part of it can also work, I find, as an emphatic rejoinder to Cleo's intentionally  irreverent neologisms. I'm thinking, that is, of this pair of lines, near the outset:

Been around the world, don't speak the language
But your booty don't need explaining.

Yeah, yeah, Derulo is likely referring to the universal language of lust. Or perhaps, as Spin has it (in referring to the song's 'international polyglot/clusterfuck pop atmosphere'), it's an ode to an emergent strain of promiscuity in an era of globalism.

But I prefer to imagine that Derulo dines regularly with a 4-year-old - and is simply growing weary of trying to understand, and respond to, the stream of naughty mash-ups. Booger-butt? Mr. Bottom Butt? Your booty, Cleo, don't need explaining.

Phonometrography

In Erik Satie's 'Memories of an Amnseic,' written in 1912-3, the composer insists that he is not, in fact, a musician. Rather, he calls himself a phonometrographer, arguing that his works are dominated by scientific thought, and that he gets great pleasure from measuring sounds. And then, in the ironic, archly serious tone of a good Dadaist, he offers a few examples:

"The first time I used a phonoscope, I examined a B flat of average size. I have, I assure you, never seen anything more disgusting. I had to call my servant in to show it to him. On my phono-weigher an ordinary F sharp, of a very common type, registered 93 kilograms. It came out of a very fat tenor whose weight I also took."

Well, then. Here at halfstep, we still don't own a phonoscope. (No intrusive ad banners, folks, means no revenue). But we did see that one of you, a sea and intrepid reader, had ventured some questions in response to our call for comments. And so we sat down, prompt and phonoscope-less, with Cleo, and with a list of your questions in hand.

The initial results were - well, they were almost gnomic in their conciseness. 'Apart from Milkshake,' you asked, 'what is the best music there is?' The four-and-three-quarters-year-old paused, thought for a good five second, said, 'That's a hard one,' and then settled on Louis Armstrong's 'What a Wonderful World' - an interesting choice, given that we haven't heard it in months. And, you asked, 'Are puppets alive?' That was easier. 'No,' came the quick, forceful, and confident answer. 'Is there anything else,' we added, hoping to leave room for a more fleshy answer, 'you want to say about that?' But again, and equally forcefully: 'No.'

Again, we wish we could have run these answers through a phonoscope. And, to be totally honest, we probably should not have posed them during a momentary break from play; our researcher had the distinct sense, in fact, that Cleo was interested in returning to the playground and her friends. But we did want to share our initial research sample with you - and of course will be presenting your other thoughtful questions to her, in due course.

Apart

And sometimes, even when we're physically quite close, we're far apart. It might be because Cleo has drifted off to sleep, as on Saturday evening, or it might simply be because people - and Cleo is very much a Person now - inevitably have different interests, and trains of thought, and lives.

For instance, last night Cleo wanted to stay at the dinner table after the meal so that she could play with a pair of dolls. Sure thing, we said, and L. tackled a few chores around the house while I did the dishes and sat down with a copy of Rudolf Arnheim's classic Art and Visual Perception. About 20 minutes later, my mind full of perceptual diagrams and a realization that I should probably help Cleo get ready for bed, I walked back into the dining room - only to find that she had made a tiny jacket for one of her dolls out of a square of aluminum foil. Not more than 50 feet apart, we'd been completely invested in utterly distinct tasks.

Or take yesterday afternoon. On a gorgeous early summer day, L. sagely suggested that we stop at the Berkeley Springs town green so that Cleo could do some romping in the natural springs. Yes, and yes, and yes: Cleo was quick out of the car, across the street, and skipping towards the pools and channels of water, while we strolled behind. And a few minutes later, she was almost completely drenched, her light dress now darkened with wet, as L. and I sat on a park bench and idly leafed through the Sunday Post. Boxscores against the excited cries of children; the Sunday funnies under the sun; a mention of a singer named Keren Ann, whose name I'd never heard before - suddenly interrupted by Cleo's vivid, excited exhortation to watch her jump in once again.

We're together and apart, no? There are moments when we engage, on our own terms, with the world beyond; the circle of family stretches, momentarily giving way to other allegiances, affiliations, and interests. And then we reassert the reality of family, returning to that fold, enriched, and now slightly different for our experiences, even as we recount them to each other.

Master/pupil

So, then: have you, or haven't you, seen the video of the baby trashing the Las Palmas bar? If not, you can have a look at the trailer, above: that's the filmmaker Johannes Nyholm's one-year-old daughter, dressed as a middle-aged woman, laying waste to a set in his studio.

Sure, it's silly - but its silliness derives, I think, from an insight: that the behavior of a toddler is not that different, at times, from that of a boorish drunk. Context matters greatly, of course: but it can be fun to be reminded of the substantial similarities that we sometimes overlook, or repress, in the name of context.

By the same token, though, it can also be fun to be reminded of real differences that we sometimes downplay, in the name of consistency, or fairness. In Beethoven's Chamber Music in Context, Angus Watson retells a story involving Beethoven, who attended a soirée at Count Johann Browne's house. While listening to a rendition of one of his compositions by Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven detected a mistake, and promptly tapped Ries on the head with one finger. Subsequently, the composer himself sat down to play a new sonata - and the alert Princess Liechtenstein, speculating that he might also make a mistake at some point, positioned herself near the sheet music. When Beethoven did in fact struggle with a certain passage, the princess (according to Ries) "gave him several not exactly gentle slaps on the head with the observation, 'If the pupil gets one finger for one wrong note, the Master must be punished with the whole hand for making bad mistakes."

According to Ries, everyone in the room then laughed. Dissonance can be funny, but so too are unexpected continuities.

Request hour

Two days ago, Cleo and I walked through downtown Towson on our way to the WTMD studios to pick up a painted giant squid. (It turns out - but perhaps it's already obvious - that the conjunction of parenthood and an interest in contemporary art can lead to some intriguing outcomes). We walked through a hall stocked with CDs, and looked for Milkshake (no luck); we tapped on a door and saw a room full of young adults at computers. We were given the squid - and then we were given a brief tour of the facility, during which the DJ on request - Galler, that is - even waved at Cleo. And then, back in the car a few minutes later, we tuned in, and we heard Galler play a request.

It's a rather amazing phenomenon, isn't it, even in the age of the Internet 2.0: amazing, that is, that we really can place a call, voice a request, and then, if all goes well, hear the music that we wanted waft from our speakers a few minutes later. There's something wonderfully democratic about it, something inspiringly participatory. And so I explained it, as best I could, to Cleo - who immediate suggested that we call and ask for some Milkshake. Not likely, child, but I like the spirit. Stick to your guns.

Later in the day, while walking home from a dance class, we were thinking about another form of transmission: about this blog, in fact. I spent a few moments reminding Cleo that I post photos of her, and words about her, on the computer so that folks who are interested can know what she's up to. And what, I asked her, should I say today? 'You should write,' she said, after thinking for a moment, 'about what a great dancer I was today.'

Well, again: yes, perhaps... but no. This blog sometimes sags into something almost promotional, but we like to pretend that we still have some integrity. So how about, Cleo, we split the difference? I'll post of a photo of you and Meiying, above. And I'll admit it: you did work very hard in class. But let's open things up, too. We're on the air for about four more weeks. There's a seriously under-utilized comments section directly below each post. Anyone have any requests? Anything you want to know, or see?

We're here, on the air, hoping that you'll drop us a line.

We travel the spaceways (track 9)

Sun-Ra on the stereo in the dining room, as Cleo plays with her small Rapunzel and Flynn dolls - he just rejected, it seems, her marriage proposal. A few minutes ago, we listened to "Rocket Number Nine Take Off for the Planet Venus," and I read Cleo a few choice items from the liner notes. Who know, for instance, that his given name was Herman Blount? Or that, whenever that fact was raised, he coolly insisted that, no, he had arrived on Earth from outer space? Not hard, in short, to keep the attention of a four-year-old who honestly seems to enjoy a good deal of jazz.

But I left aside other details: ones that were too nuanced, or too dense with specific associations to make much sense to Cleo. Blount, for instance, was born in Birmingham, and the liner notes fairly point out that his ties to that city, so closely bound up with the history of racial discrimination and the civil rights movement, may have played some role in shaping his eventual interest in parallel realities or duality (his songs include "The Alter Destiny," "Other Places of There," and "Somebody Else's World"). What's Birmingham, after all, to someone whose entire life has been lived with Obama in the White House?

And yet: earlier, as I made dinner, I heard Cleo speaking slowly in the living room. When I wandered out, to see what she was up to, I saw that she was mouthing the text in Roz Chast's cover cartoon on this week's New Yorker. She had seen the issue in my bag earlier in the day, and asked me to explain it - and so I walked her through the rather complex, but certainly relevant, series of panels in which a mom experiences a range of powerful emotions as her child plays (and plays violently, apparently) at the playground. "That IS my kid," I heard Cleo read. "Get OVER here!"

When I had tried to explain the panels to Cleo, I noted that it's a cartoon aimed more at adults than at children. There's a reason, in other words, that we see the mom and not the child - and I clearly recall, too, the sensation of dull incomprehension when I looked at my parents' copies of the same magazine, years and years ago. But wait: at dinner, Cleo surprised me by stating that the cartoon on the cover was both silly and scary. "It's scary," she said, "because she's so angry. It's very dramatic."

So why assume that Birmingham, as well, would fly over her head? After all, Sun-Ra is clear in his liner notes: "With your mind's eye," he exhorts us, "you are invited to see other scenes of the space age by focusing your eyes on the cover and your mind on the music."

So we listen on, and keep looking, and continue to learn.

Came across

What's the lower-case version of a revelation? The diminutive of a discovery? A find? A chance occasion?

In any event, this Tuesday offered two concise examples. Cooped up in the office for much of the afternoon, and needing some musical accompaniment to my grading, I confidently typed 'Mozart' into Grooveshark's search box, and spotted an album entitled 'Mozart for Meditation.' Full speed ahead, I figured - and a few minutes later was treated to the ravishingly beautiful Vesperae Solennes (K 339).

That made the grading go well, and a few hours later a bright, sunny sky made the late afternoon with Cleo go equally smoothly. We picked up a sub sandwich and drove to a rather little-known meadow just off of Alpine Drive, west of a creek that we like to muck about in, when the weather permits. As we munched on our sandwich, we chatted about food groups - and then, as boys played on it, recalled the large acoustic sculpture adjacent to to the forest. Not long after, Cleo was shaping tunes with its ample pipes, as L., who had walked up from work, and I enjoyed the lambent early evening.

But wait: one last unearthing. The sublime soprano aria of Vesperae Solennes, it turns out, is based on Psalm 117. And that Psalm, a devout prayer, includes these lines: "Praise the Lord, all you nations." I can, I think, understand the sentiment: the sense of an almost binding piety. But today I was equally impressed by the ability of various environments to offer up lovely music of their own accord.

But what, exactly?

There's a basic human tendency - isn't there? - to categorize, and to label. You could see it at work, for instance, in the entertaining (but also rather vicious) conversation between two New York Times music critics in Saturday's paper. Pondering the phenomenon that is the violinist Lindsey Stirling, they expressed puzzlement over her popularity - and then tried to stuff her into a convenient box. "My guess," said Jon Caramanica, "is that pop wants little to do with her. Is she a bold warrior for classical crossover? Is she the new New Age, making music for healing and uplift?" And then Zachary Woolfe, in turn: "So, then, Ms. Stirling makes competent but unoriginal dance music. But is this classical music in any meaningful sense?" Ultimately, the two music critics settled on a rather unflattering parallel: Stirling, they decided, is something like a contemporary Yanni (although, in a final dig, they suggest that posterity will be even less kind to her).

Cleo, I think, is not very much like either Yanni or Lindsey Stirling. But, all around her, people are classifying her. When I stopped by school at the end of the day today, the director pulled me aside for a moment, and said, "She is so... self-possessed. I mean, she plays with the other kids, but she's also fine by herself." Yesterday, on the other hand, it was the father of one of her friends. We were hiking in the woods, and Cleo trotted off into the middle distance, toward a bend in the trail. "You might have a runner, or an athlete, in the family," offered the well-meaning dad, with a smile.

Perhaps. Or perhaps we really don't know - for, after all, L. and I have seen her baldly refuse to walk at times, and break down at others. Of course, we all want to understand, and categorizing is a means of doing so. But it's also a way of forgetting that genres and labels are coarse tools. New New Age? Classical crossover? The terms sound awkward; they point to the rudimentary aspect of our mental machinery. And they thus serve as a reminder that sometimes, perhaps, we need to simply let the new unfold, on its own terms.

You'll be a woman

'Let me tell you something,' Cleo likes to say, before launching into a narrative. Well, let me tell you something: when she woke up from an (increasingly rare) nap today, she immediately:

1. Wondered why we hadn't seen the Mad Scientist float in the Kinetic Sculpture race a few hours earlier - because, she said, she once had a science experiment kit and so that is her favorite entry;

2. Noted (to her father's relief) that she had not had an accident while sleeping;

3. Commented on how she is becoming a woman. It may take, she later clarified, until around 35, but she is confident that the change is underway.

Just over twenty years ago, Quentin Tarantino shed a bright light on a band called Urge Overkill by featuring a song of theirs in a memorable scene starring Uma Thurman and John Travolta. The song's opening line? 'Girl, you'll be a woman soon.'

But not so soon, Cleo. Happily, there's still a ways to go, in several respects. Sure, largely made your own breakfast this morning. You dressed yourself. And, yes, you tartly pointed out that Mom and I weren't exactly eating in a queen- and kinglike manner at various points during dinner. But as long you cannot quite wipe yourself, and as long as you still pronounce the plural of test as test-es, and as long as each bowl of ice cream leaves an emphatic chocolate mustache above your lip - well, you've still got a little ways to go. Which is, frankly, fine by us.

Regular superhero

Maybe you never know when you're in the presence of a superhero, or super heroic activity. A few days ago, Cleo and I were walking along Charles Street, and she when spotted some small discarded scraps of paper, she stooped to pick them up. It made her sad, she said, to think of the earth being hurt, and so she wanted to make it beautiful again. She then proceeded to pick up a weighty, soggy, and drooping plastic bag that held - well, something. And she looked at me, and said, 'Here, Dad.'

Was that superheroic? Certainly not in the traditional, Marvel-comic mode. There were no miraculous origin stories, and no stunning superpowers; heck, there wasn't even a BLAM!!!, or an archvillain. It occurred to me quite a bit later, though, that Cleo hasn't read any Marvel comics yet. Instead, her idea of a superhero was largely shaped by Milkshake, the children's band whose song 'Superhero' was a favorite of Cleo's when she was 3. That song offers a very different notion of super-heroism:

You think I'm so amazing, it's hard to believe
All my superpowers are in my heart, you see.

But in fact the Milkshake take on superheroism isn't unique. I think, too, of the Foo Fighters' 'My Hero,' with its heartwarming video and its comparable lyrical emphasis on the everyday:

There goes my hero
Watch him as he goes
There goes my hero
He's ordinary

So, then. This week, Cleo and the Redbirds studied superheroes, and one of her teachers brought in an old set of paper dolls depicting relatively conventional roles: fire fighter, for instance, and nurse. The 'birds were then asked to design their own superhero - and Cleo quickly decided to fashion 'a regular girl who picks up trash.'

There goes my hero.
Watch her as she picks up paper.

Don't know

For the most part, Cleo, this blog has been about things that have happened: things that we've seen, and done, and heard together. But yesterday I realized that a substantial part of parenting - of living, perhaps, but of parenting, too - is about what has not yet happened. It was late afternoon, and I was at Camden Yards, watching the Pirates and the Orioles, as Mom prepared to pick you up. Comfortable in my seat, and in the generally familiar environment of lineups, statistics, and innings, I sank into the game. But from time to time I thought, as well, of you, and of how you don't yet understand the rules and the pace of the game, or the relevance of the organist's choices. Someday, I'm sure, you will, and someday we'll be able to watch a game together, with focus.

In The Infinite Variety of Music, Leonard Bernstein speaks at length about his practice, and his views of the history and the future of music. He argues against an easy biographical interpretation of music, and he insists upon a tragic element in Mozart. But at one point, he becomes interested in the difficult idea that even he does not always know where his own compositions will lead him, and that the act of composition thus feels both odd and inspiring. "Let's say that you get an idea," he explains, "and you go to the piano and you start with it; and you don't know what you're going to do next, and then you're doing something else next, and you can't stop doing the next thing, and you don't know why. It's madness and it's marvelous."

Even the composer, in other words, doesn't know what comes next. So why should a parent? I assume that someday, in some park, in some city, as some teams go about their infield battle, you will throw your arm up and yell, 'Charge!' Perhaps; perhaps not. Will orchestras, Bernstein wonders, someday become mere museums of the past? And he soon finds himself in a realm of unsolvable complexity. "No; yes," he offers. "No; yes. Yes; no. What is really true?"

We don't know what will happen. But the thought of what might exerts a consistent pressure on what is.

The condition of fun

"All art," Walter Pater once argued, "aspires towards the condition of music."

Well, okay. Here at halfstep, we're hardly opposed to the bold truism. But precisely because we spend so much time in the company of a certain 4-year-old, we also have our doubts about Pater's assertion. In fact, after walking through Alan Siggers' remarkable MFA thesis show yesterday, we would confidently suggest that some art aspires towards the condition of savvy fun.

The centerpiece of Siggers' show (which shares a gallery in MICA's Fox building with the work of four other MFA candidates) is a sprawling ensemble of repurposed architectural forms - second-hand doors; used banisters - and painted plywood that forms a devilishly irrational series of spaces. Doors open onto tiny rooms, which give way to stairs that seem to lead into walls - which, in turn, surprise us by giving way to slight pressure. Tight right angles force us to turn our body, and to lose track of our place in space. And, meanwhile, the architecture gently taunts us: a lintel protrudes, only partially supported, into space but does no apparent work, and further flights of stairs climb provocatively up the walls of the gallery, but cannot be accessed. Painted in a bright series of pastel tones, the installation is ridiculous, and takes considerable joy in that fact.

And yet, it also suggests a fluid, intimate art historical self-awareness. In its almost organic organization, the piece loosely recalls, for instance, Kurt Schwitters' celebrated (but lost) Merzbau, an accretion of forms built in the artist's home over the course of five years in the 1920s. At the same time, it also prompts comparisons with the sharp, canted angles of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - and, too, with the impossibly protean forms of Surrealism. But wait: as you wander through it, you might also think of that band of works from the 1960s that forced viewers to pay a renewed attention to their own place in a compressed space: to Robert Morris' passageway, for instance, or Bruce Nauman's video-taped corridor. And then, too, there's that lintel: a soft and playful gesture, in my mind, toward the openly non-functional postmodernism of architects like Charles Moore. As we emerge, then, we not only step out of a work of art: we exit a dense web of art historical allusions.

And, as you can see in the photo above, at least some of us do so with a big smile on our face. So, then: let's put it this way. Art may aspire, in some arguable sense, to the condition of music. But, happily, it can aspire to other things as well - and, in the process, can kindle a range of forms of delight.