Ted, Ted, Ted

CAUCASIAN AMERICANS: BASIC SKILLS WORKBOOK is reviewed on this lively website about Native American literature. It apparently helps children develop empathy for this often-misunderstood ethnic group. There is also this capable assault on that mawkish “Chief Seattle” iconography.

How To Tell If You Were Adopted: “Only adopted, or ‘rejected,’ children have to brush their teeth.”

Are these boom times for Kid Lit or what? “Surely it says something about Powell’s loyalists that ‘Captain Underpants and The Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman’ is currently our bestselling book — we’re just not sure exactly what.” That from the ever-so-literate Powell’s Books email newsletter that arrived this morning. On a work trip to Portland a couple of months ago, I got a chance to hang out at Powell’s for an evening. Everything they say about that place is true. It is Disneyland without Disney, Barnum & Bailey for the brain. Pack up your kids and make a pilgrimage. If you can’t, at least start using Powells.com instead of that other one.

OK, it’s a little dorky and middle-brow, and we could go on and on about overexposure sapping the power of critical cultural signifiers and everything, but come on: this is pretty stirring stuff, if you let yourself think about it. Everybody in Chicago (my home town!) is reading the same book together for a few weeks. Can we do this in San Francisco? What book would it be? (I feel like I’m going to regret that question.)

pics/james090401.png” align=”left” rightmargin=5>From Frances, an update on Oliver and James, L & L’s newest cousins:”After sleeping through the night (except when their hands have disappeared up their sleeves, causing untold annoyance when they want to suck their thumbs), they mostly enjoy themselves greatly during the day nowadays. ~tmkuster/images/oliver090401.png” align=”right”>They especially like to smile at anyone who’ll make funny faces at them, or alternatively dance and sing for their amusement. They sometimes stare into each other’s eyes now, and crack a broad smile or two, before completely ignoring each other again. We’re not sure how much they weigh now, but it’s probably a lot. Their new friends include several other twin babies and a three-legged dog who they like very much.”

I guess the first day of kindergarten went well. Laura was as excited about it as you might expect. For a couple of weeks she has been asking every day if it was tomorrow. I stayed home late so that Mary and Lillian and I could all be there for the big drop-off, and made Laura waffles with milk for her special breakfast. She played in the paved yard with her buddy Elena until someone rang a horrible, screechy electric bell. Laura pranced in, found her seat and sat down as if she had been doing it for years. I listened to the teacher instruct the parents and felt a winded feeling coming on, like I was being punched in the stomach in slow-motion. There went my toddler, my preschooler, just when I was getting to know her. To be replaced by who knows what. Then the teacher kicked us out so she could have our kids all to herself. While we listened to speeches in the auditorium/cafeteria (the cafetorium) Mary asked me how I felt and I couldn’t say anything. She laughed, “He’s speechless. It’s a first.” (That’s what she says every time I’m speechless.) I couldn’t decide if my total ineffectuality the rest of the day was due to the usual Monday difficulties or that my mind wouldn’t let go of Laura in that classroom, with that expectant look on, ready for anything.

By the way, I don’t suppose anyone has been just jumping up and down to get at the archives for this site, but just in case you are, guess what: they aren’t working again. I’ll probably get around to fixing them over the weekend.

Reason No. 1,352 why there’s obviously something wrong with me: This kind of thing just makes my day. Laura has already picked out “Mom” and “Hannah;” perhaps in a couple of years she’ll be ready for: “Straw? No! Too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts.”

I wonder what some of these online-branded-content outfits are doing to stay alive. Most of them I don’t miss, but I’m glad this one is still with us. For publishing this informative piece on girls and self-confidence, I vote them another, say, six months of life.

Michelle Whittington died Sunday. For several years she was the head teacher at Playmates Preschool’s Young 5 section, which is for kids who are almost ready for kindergarten but aren’t old enough, or old enough but not ready. She built it into a strong, joyful, lively place, a little fog-belt Summerhill. When Laura got there last year Michelle had retired because of her illness. We got two very smart and original teachers to carry it on, but you could tell it was still Michelle’s place. In the Playmates archive box there is a picture of her in gardening gloves, taking care of things around the co-op. She was a real tree-planter.

My dad was a big ham radio buff when I was growing up. I’ve always wondered why those guys attracted the crew-cut, law-and-order stereotype when the next wave of techies, the computer hackers, seem to lean the opposite way, toward anarchism of various kinds. (Mostly the silly kind, but that’s another argument.) Here is Rick Prelinger throwing some preliminary light on it. I hope someone is pursuing this further.

Needs no comment. Courtesy of Michael Smith again, the intrepid Peru journalist/blogmaster.

“If we really want our girls to be safe, then we should start right now to TRUST HER and build up her strength and savvy — the very things that will best serve her in protecting herself. Withholding our trust in her undermines her trust in herself, and makes it that much more difficult for her to develop the inner strength she needs to make her way around the world when we’re not there.” That is Joe Kelly, master of the Dads and Daughters website and as thoughtful, articulate and sensitive a guy as you’ll meet anywhere on the Web. It was part of an exchange on the site’s mailing list, too long to reprint, but I saved an excerpt here if you want to read more.

Someone told me about this ultra-hip collection of Asians’ and Asian-Americans’ weblogs. Never mind the unfortunate name, it has some interesting stuff. (Warning: When you open the site a bunch of annoying little advertising windows pop up. If you hate that kind of thing, don’t click on the link.)

Cathy responds:

Although l too love Princess Mononoke, I seem to enjoy just the things that you find silly. I think that the supernatural stuff, though maybe too far on the spiritual realm for you, adds a density and poetry to it that grabs the viewer’s imagination. So what if it’s dark, maybe too heavy-handed. For me, the symbolism is as rich and enigmatic as the prince’s physical and internal moral journey must be. I admit that none of this is stuff kids would pick up, but then this isn’t entirely a kid movie, is it? Elena loves the martial arts stuff and the power it gives the female characters in the movie, and she has appropriated this power for her own play. It is, after all, the most concrete aspect. But here is the movie’s biggest flaw: I hate the depiction of the men who work in the service of Lady Iboshi, whether they are the useless spouses of the gutsy women or the drudges who merely carry the weapons and do as they are told. The men are reduced to caricatures, clowns, with the interesting exception of the leper who, in his deathbed, utters some words of wisdom. But he doesn’t really count, does he, because he’s not “whole” either, in a different way. I don’t mind strong women, as you know, but it should never be at the expense of ridiculing men. The other thing about Lady Iboshi is that though her motives are repugnant, Miyazaki is in conflict over depicting her too harshly. I think it’s his ambivalence over portraying women negatively. The effect, of course, is that they turn out to be multidimensional and interesting, but that is tarnished by his one dimensional treatment of the men, I think, with the possible exception of Ashitaka. The more I think about it, though, Miyazaki is trying too hard, doing too much here, which explains all the loose ends that we’re finding as we look closely at this movie. My Neighbor Totoro is growing on me, for the same reasons I like Mononoke — the magical, almost Alice in Wonderland realm. It also plays with some of our darker fears of loss, while playing host to the most fantastic flights of imagination. And I’ll always love Kiki. It presents a balanced and healthy view of female independence and the first blush of love without poking fun unnecessarily at men and boys.

There are a bunch of Peruvians in the Bay Area, maybe 20,000 if you believe some people. I know some of them because when I came here in 92 my brother-in-law Paul hooked me up with a semi-pro salsa band that was mostly Peruvians. I hadn’t been playing my bass outside the house for most of my New York years, and I’d missed it more than I knew, so that was a big favor for which I’ve never adequately thanked Paul. I’ve played mostly with Raul’s and Luigi’s band, in its various incarnations, ever since. I’ve got large portions of the charts memorized by now, so even though I don’t read music very well I can pick it up whenever the band picks up again. Which it just did. The latest version started firing up for some gigs this fall at some local dives. (Paul calls it the Cuchifritos Circuit.) This time I recruited my friend Breck, a better bass player but not a native salsa guy, to split it with me so I can skip half the gigs and avoid being out at night too much. That’s been a lot of fun. And Luigi asked me to make some flyers, for which I came up with this funny thing. There’s something about salsa music — I mean the straight stuff, the grittiest, sweatiest, lowest-brow variety — that feels as solid as food to me. If you don’t count my daughters and wife, followed I guess by my books and computers, I don’t think there’s anything in the world that makes me happier.

Princess Mononoke reminds you at once of how far Japanese animation has come since Speed Racer and how much it’s stayed the same. The motion is still jerky, the dialogue choppy and heavily reliant on exclamation marks, and the good guys’ faces are all drawn exactly alike. They look like what would happen if someone tried to draw Ron Howard after seeing ten seconds of the Andy Griffith Show. Hayao Miyazaki somehow accepts all those conventions completely while aiming way past them. We’ve seen three of his movies. Kiki’s Delivery Service, in which a young country witch finds her place in the big city, is a complex coming-of-age story about selfhood and loyalty and trust. My Neighbor Totoro is another coming-of-age story, this time with giant animals that change their shapes at will. Princess Mononoke is about all that, plus medieval ironworks and ecological forest spirits and stuff. Each of them has taken over Laura’s world for weeks at a time. Not even Pinocchio or Dorothy gripped her so tightly.

The basic Mononoke story is, it’s the 13th century and a girl raised by giant wolves is waging a guerrilla war against some people who are clear-cutting the forests to feed their iron foundry. The ironworkers are women ransomed from brothels by their leader, the mysterious Lady Oboshi. (There are some guys around, but mainly for carrying stuff; it’s the women who do all the talking and shooting.) A mysterious young warrior arrives from afar, seeking the origin of a curse that has befallen him. The curse takes the form of a burn mark on his arm that gives him fearful strength in moments of anger. Through quick thinking, physical courage and a whole lot of shouting, the wolf girl and the warrior defeat the ironworker chief, some soldiers and a monk (yes, he’s mysterious) and bring peace to the forest and themselves.

I like this stuff, but I liked Wing Chun, the Michelle Yeoh action vehicle, better. It was a lot like Mononoke, but without all the supernatural silliness. And you can pick up cues from the faces of the actors as they ham it up, which doesn’t work that well in cartoons. But most of all, Wing Chun had some slapstick, some lighthearted parts to dilute the menace, while Mononoke is as dead-earnest as only Japanese animators know how to be. Despite the graphic violence, I felt comfortable with Laura acting out Michelle Yeoh’s moves, because they were all about protecting the village and embarrassing the bully, not saving the world from rage-driven demons.

What degree of literary distance is available to a small child? We know she makes distinctions between story and the “real” world, but on what basis? Why is physical force such a compelling theme for her; why is she so eager to act out swordplay and martial arts? When do these movies and this acting build her self-confidence, and when do they erode the sense of fair play and peacefulness that we try to promote? I don’t know. I’m going to watch some old Speed Racer episodes and see if they have any answers.

I haven’t spent much space on Lillian’s exploits lately, and they have been coming very fast, so I’ll have to just catch up with the latest ones. Her research on the physics of small objects recently yielded the insight that many things move on their own when held up and released, and further, that they tend to move downward. So she has been spending a lot of her high-chair time lately hanging her head and shoulders over the edge and staring at the floor, trying to make out what’s become of the spoons and other toys that have gone that way. The two lower teeth that showed up last week have made her bite considerably worse than her bark. I didn’t even know about the teeth until she grabbed my finger for the routine taste test and left a couple of red marks. I’ve been more careful since. She seems interested in what might be inside people’s noses and mouths, and uses her fingers to explore. If you aren’t paying attention, she can hook a hand in your hair, pull you close and take a bite out of your nose before you can stop her.

Last night I saw her new standing-up trick for the first time. This has been going on all week, Mary says. She pulls herself to a standing position, leaning on some object or person, then pushes off and wobbles there for a good five seconds before falling on her butt. Then she tries it again. I remember our excitement when Laura turned out to be an early walker. Later on, with sore knees and overtaxed nerves from constantly diving to catch her, I realized that a few more months of crawling might have been nice. Well, here we go again. And I’m in even worse physical shape this time, so this should be interesting.

This is true: my head is increasingly a part of the Internet. If I could take some weight off, I could call myself a thin client.

You can picture James Gurney’s publishers, worried that they might not be squeezing all the lucre they could out of his wildly popular Dinotopia franchise, begging Gurney for something even juicier for the third book in the series. “We’ve hit the young adult demo and the older kids, but the real gold is in them anklebiters.” Gurney was a boyhood pal of velvet-Elvis merchant Thomas Kinkade (says the jacket bio for the first Dinotopia book), which isn’t necessarily a strike against a guy, but it makes it easier to understand why Gurney went for it. So the third book in the series, First Flight, is a naked grab for market share: idea-wise, a bunch of outtakes from the first two books, and in story and narrative style reminiscent of George Lucas at his boneheadedest.

But that’s OK. The pictures are still fabulous, with the ghost pencil lines and brush strokes to give the feeling of being sketched on the fly from real life, the bright clear Hudson Valley School light, and Gurney can actually pull off that silly kind of steam-punk technology that Bruce Sterling couldn’t. Laura can sit and examine the pictures for a long time, without anyone to read her the text. And it comes with a built-in board game that works reasonably well for a five-year-old.

I wonder, by the way, if all these books are going to have to be done over now that someone has rearranged the dinosaurs’ faces. It turns out that the nostrils are farther down in front than anyone thought, which changes the look of at least some of the dinosaurs pretty significantly. We await the recall notices.

Remember that time when those ace U.S.-trained and U.S.-paid Peruvian fighter pilots, flying U.S.-supplied equipment, shot down a civilian airplane handed over to them by U.S. advisors and killed a woman and her 7-month-old baby? It turns out the State Department report is finally out, after much dragging of feet and washing of hands. So far the media uproar appears safely contained. The Washington Post did some huffing and puffing about it last week, but the tone is decidedly “Oh, well.” Thanks to Michael L. Smith for keeping daily tabs on this on behalf of those of us with weaker stomachs.