Doors, steps

Happen to have a door, or a step, somewhere in your house? I know a little girl who'd like to visit.

Over the past month, Cleo's become fascinated by swinging valves and very slight changes in elevation. The tastes developed slowly: in March, she'd tug at a door, but was stumped when it ran into her leg, and refused to move further. And we spent a happy hour in a hotel suite in Staunton, VA, as she negotiated, again and again, a three-inch rise between living room and kitchen.

Since then, she's grown more confident, and more fluid, in her movements. Doors zip back and forth, unimpeded, and she's starting to try to climb more ambitious steps. The other day, in fact, she and a 9-month-old boy at the library reading group looked like clowns cast in a comedy of futility as they both tried to scale a ridge that must have been 14 inches tall. No dice, but the sight of their little legs rising, and bending, and striving, was memorable.

When I named this blog, I had both musical scales and babies' steps on the mind. Nearly eleven months of being a father have helped to show me how they relate: watching Cleo on the loose is increasingly like hearing a scale played, quickly, and with some adroitness.

To the cassette

L. took Cleo down to Bethesda for a girlie brunch this morning, and so I was suddenly faced, with little coursework to do in the waning weeks of the term, with a rare and exquisite dilemma: how to spend four free hours?

Given how little free time we have these days, it might be fair to say that our deepest wishes are laid bare during such respites. Days of planning lectures and field trips, of picking up the carrots and peas that land in an ever widening radius around Cleo's high chair, and of waking up to the plaintive wail, only slightly muted by two intervening doors, of a suddenly awake infant who has rendered our alarm clock irrelevant, mean that to-do lists now consist of day-to-day necessities. Attending to less pressing and more refined whims simply seems impossible.

Thus, in a way, you can tell what a new parent has been really missing when they finally do have some free time. And so part of me wishes I could say that I spent the this morning volunteering in an orphanage, or reading Wordsworth, or taking a restorative stroll. But no: my priority was simpler. I simply sat for 90 minutes, reading the Sunday Times, a cup of coffee at hand, and then eventually made my way outside to do some work in the long untended garden. Nothing special; indeed, I used to spend virtually every Sunday in grad school over the Times. But, damn, I don't remember it feeling this sweet.

Anyway, one of the high points of the Times for this satisfied reader was Rob Walker's article on the fate, and the partial resurrection, of the music cassette. As he noted, in terms of popularity, the cassette's been routed: where 8.6 million were sold in 2004, last year saw that number fall to 34,000. And yet, as Walker notes, there are still fans of the cassette - users who are drawn, he says, to its easy flexibility (the mixed tape still holds a real romance for many of us who came of age in the era before recordable CDs), or to its innovative combination of portability and social listening (you try sticking an LP in a car stereo).

That all sounds more or less right to me, but I do disagree with him in one respect. Walker takes for granted the advantages of LPs when it came to design: quoting an essay on PopMatters, he concurs that records had a certain majesty, or artistic interest, that was never really rivaled by cassettes. Well, okay, in one sense: certainly, Warhol's clever album design for the Stones' Sticky Fingers, with its operable zipper, would hardly have carried much force if somehow transferred to cassette. And I do remember the sheer presence of an opened album: it felt, in its dimensions, significant.

But, by the late 1980s, cassettes could also be rather amazing, in their own modest way. Part of the reason for this, I think, was simply that the bar was set very low from the outset. If you pick up a cassette produced in the 70s, it'll almost certainly consist of a meager insert, of poor stock, that's printed on one side only. A reproduction of the album cover, a spine identifying the band and title, and then a list of the song titles beyond the second fold: that's all there was.

Or that's all there was until, in my experience, around 1986. By that point, bands were beginning - and I'm not sure why, exactly - to become much more ambitious with their cassette inserts. At first, this often simply meant a larger insert, which was folded to create the effect of pages. And those pages could contain some pretty great information: I remember an Iron Maiden cassette, for instance, that included, in a tiny font, a list of the various items they'd consumed on a recent tour. So many bottles of bourbon; so many drumsticks. More commonly, bands began to include the lyrics to their songs - and darn if we didn't end up poring over those, mouthing the words as we listened to the tracks for the first time. For some reason, I remember doing this most clearly with Terence Trent D'Arby's Neither Fish Nor Flesh. I can only recall the melodies to two songs from that cassette, but, man, was the packaging a thing of beauty.

I realize that this now sounds quaint, or even ridiculous. In an age when CDs often come with supplemental multimedia recordings, and in which one can simply look up the lyrics to a song on the Web, what I'm calling beautiful can seem rather meager. But maybe that's precisely the point. Cassettes were small, and yet they also contained what we perceived as acts of generosity - acts that unfolded, if one was lucky, as one opened the plastic case. A six-paneled page of lyrics to U2 songs, with photos of the band, may not seem like much. But it was significantly more than nothing, and I think that Walker might have acknowledged that, as well.

Laughing, laughing

One of the greatest experiences I ever had with a book occurred in around 1989, when I came across a copy of Richard Meltzer's bizarre 1970 cult classic The Aesthetics of Rock in a used bookstore in Chapel Hill. Ever heard of it? Poorly designed, and clearly the late-night product of a grad student who had lost his faith in the academy and turned the record player up, up, it has the manic energy of Kerouac, and the pop cultural theorizing of, say, a Baudrillard.

I lost my copy long ago, but was happy to find out, recently, that Google Books offers a limited preview of it. And so, from Meltzer's typewriter to you, via Silicon Valley, a passage on Jim Morrison's habits in concert: "He would yell at and stare and and sing, 'When you laugh, you laugh at yourself,' in response to anything from inappropriate laughter to mere inattention; the stares have been particularly telling on an audience, and hesitations extended far too long for an audience's patience have been big too. Even fear: audiences have been frightened by his leaps and the other Doors themselves have gone in for being nervous before a crowd."

The unconventional performance, in other words, leads to nervousness on the part of the crowd - which leads, in turn, to something new, or different. The fourth wall's dissolved, and Morrison entertains himself by turning the tables on an audience that expects to be entertained but feels finally, something else. Or that, at least, seems to be Meltzer's interest, and it gives you a taste of his unique approach to early rock.

21 years after first encountering such prose, I still like it. But I'm now seduced by simpler modes of entertainment, too. In the video above, there's no self-consciousness about a fourth wall; it's more or less pure, unreflective happiness. And yet, if you think about it, even a video of Cleo laughing introduces certain complexities that might have interested the late Lizard King. For is Cleo the audience, as she laughs at L. running about the kitchen? Or is she the entertainer, as she brings smiles to our faces?

Misdirection

Personally, I'm a fan of the occasional lyrical misdirection: that is, the use of an expected rhyme to create a certain effect, while ultimately shying away from actually voicing the (often vulgar) word or notion.

Example? In the gym on Saturday - note the author, offhandedly calling attention to his healthy fitness regime - my IPod offered up The Killers' Mr. Brightside, a rollicking song about jealousy:

Now I'm falling asleep

And she's calling a cab
While he's having a smoke

And she's taking a drag

Now they're going to bed

And my stomach is sick

And it's all in my head

But she's touching his...

You knew, of course, that the following word was chest - right, reader? But, boy, the song wants us to envision another possibility.

Or, today, at the library's Mother Goose on the Loose half hour, our intrepid group leader led us through a rousing reading of Mem Fox's Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes. It's full of anticipated rhymes (And both of these babies, as everyone knows, had ten little fingers, and...). But it also includes - or at least seemed to, to my addled mind - an odd, unintended inevitability, at one point. After meeting a number of babies with ten fingers and ten toes, we arrive at the writer's own child: "But the next baby born was truly divine,a sweet little child who was mine, all mine..." Good Lord, I thought; that doesn't rhyme with ten! I wondered how the little group of parents and nannies, and babies, would react to a child with nine toes. And yet, not to worry; Mem Fox brought us home, subsequently, with a reassuring "And this little baby—as everyone knows..." Ten fingers, ten toes.

In the same vein, it's fun to try to predict what Cleo, who's now crawling confidently about the house, will do in various spaces. Sometimes it's obvious: if there's a new feature - a vacuum cleaner left out, or a Cheerio on the floor - she'll quickly scoot over to that. Occasionally, though, I think I'll know where she's headed, only to learn that I've misanticipated, again. Assuming, the other day, that she was crawling over to the kitchen cabinets, to work through, again, our small collection of tupperware, I barely stopped her when she continued on to the cat food, and nearly took a large bite.

Songs and stories can have a certain flow.

Their arc is something we think we know.

But trusting rhymes too much leads to: Uh-

Currents

What if we thought of more of the world as rivers, as constant flowing currents into which we can temporarily dip a hand, or wander, weightless?

Today as I was driving north through the city, windows open, I was humming a tune I'd heard while at the gym, and turned on the radio. Saturday afternoon opera. A moment later, as I pulled up to a light adjacent to the Hopkins campus, the amplified sounds of a college band spilled into the car. A minute, or less, and three separate melodies, or musical events, washed over me. And then, as I'd listened to one on an IPod, and another on a radio, and figured that the band could more or less play the third tune on demand, I began to think of each as a perpetual song, always extant in some Platonic form, needing only the flip of a switch to bring it to life. Turn the radio on, and enter the current.

Later in the day L. and I took a clapping Cleo to a large party, thrown by two friends celebrating recent born days. Given our demographic, and that of our friends, it was hardly surprising that we were soon surrounded by a bevy of other babies, as well. A tiny two-month-old slept in a car seat, in the corner. A five-month-old sat upright, and occasionally toppled over into a resolutely horizontal position. And a graceful year-old wandered patiently through the crowd of adult limbs.

Tune in, tune in: like separate songs, each baby had his or her own melody. This one could do little but lie; this one could look about; this one could stand, with assistance. It was as though, in the space of a single room, we could choose a precise age, and explore all of its limitations and possibilities. In short: baby radio. Each station distinct; each station constantly on view, in some place, to some observer.

Square inches

In a brief piece in Sunday's New York Times Style Magazine, Alex Kuczynski described the work and philosophy of an "acoustic ecologist" named Gordon Hempton. In 2005 Hempton selected a spot of land (a square inch, to be precise; this was a gesture; not an investment) in Washington, and decided to do everything that he could to eliminate any and all human-related sources of noise audible on his plot. Those overhead jets, whose roar fell like a veil on his land? He wrote to several airlines, asking them to reroute their flight paths, so that they spared his land and that of nearby Olympic National Park. And so on.

With the weather in Baltimore quite pleasant of late, Cleo and I have had a few chances to spend some serious time outside. Yesterday, because the legendary Memorial Stadium playground happened to be locked up, we wound up on a quilt on the grass of nearby Clifton Park. A few golfers puttered by, completing rounds; some schoolkids ambled, slowly, towards a school. And as Cleo practiced standing, I simply listened to the ambient noise.

A steady stream of cars, on nearby Harford Road, was most obvious. There was the sound of a mower, as well, and the occasional beat of a recorded snare drum, from a nearby tool shed. The voices of workers, every few minutes. And, beneath, that weird and constant hum of any city. In all, an insistent symphony: so strong, in fact, that when a jet actually did pass overhead, on its way to BWI, I couldn't even hear it. Its noise was lost in the steady rush of the city.

Obviously, no one expects cities to be quiet. But, as Hempton argues, it may be possible that the constant need to tune out ambient noise has led us, on one level, to become insensitive listeners. We spend so much energy, he says, ignoring extraneous sounds that we also repress the sounds of our community and our children. So for a few minutes, I simply listened to the drum, to the cars, to the wash of noise. And then I listened to Cleo: to her tiny but persistent huffing; to the slight rattle in her chest that's the residue of a cold; to the arc of her juicy raspberries. Is there more? Obviously. Is it often lost? Sure. Inch by inch, though, we fight to retain what's important.

Pastoral

In more than 20 years of studying (in an admittedly on-again, off-again manner) the art of the Italian Renaissance, I've never really felt that I understood the great pastoral paintings of Giorgione or Titian. You know the type: handsome youths and nude nymphs reclining under trees, in sprawling meadows, with no clear aim in sight. Don't these people have shopping to do? I wondered, in the back of my mind. And, even if not, don't they eventually tire of hearing that same set of 16th-century standards on the lute?

I wonder no more. On a summery afternoon last week, weighed down by a cold and feeling a bit overwhelmed by the rote pressures of work, I rolled Cleo out to the large open tract that stands about a hundred yards from our house, and which is the result of the historic 1972 flood, which destroyed several houses. Once the home of families, it's now home to a few daffodils, a stand of dandelions, a couple of rabbits, and a community of vocal robins.

We threw down a quilt, and simply lolled. Cleo looked about, perhaps slightly stunned by the July-like heat, and I lay on my back. Eventually I took her over to a tree swing, and we ranged back and forth in lazy arcs. She leafed, distractedly, through a tiny board book. Maybe we made a few raspberries.

It wasn't a long stay; I think we were only on the quilt for about a half hour. But, boy, it was nice. Nice enough, in fact, that it seemed a pleasure worth commemorating in an oil painting. And, with that realization, I reached a tentative peace with the pastoral as genre. It's not, perhaps, a band of art that appeals to us when distracted. Appointments, duties, scores: such things can make the melody of a lute seem patently ridiculous. And yet, when we put away our temporary cares, the same melody can seem a siren song. Pastorals may seem like the residue of pleasures past, or the promise of pleasures possible: in either event, I'm now more alert to their charm.