Ted, Ted, Ted

We got a much earlier start this morning — left the house a little after 9:30 to meet my aunt Anna and cousins Maija and Max. Anna and Max were dropping Maija at the bus station to go back to Boston. We met them on 54th St. (near the Red Parrot, the first salsa club I haunted when I came to New York in 87; scene of my first weapons frisk, at an immortal double bill with El Gran Combo and Oscar de Leon) and walked together down to Port Authority, stopping at a coffee shop to warm up on the way. Lilly looked a little dazed, as if she could’t believe it really was this cold. Laura and Mary took it OK, though. I had expected it to be a lot colder, so it didn’t seem that bad to me. It couldn’t have been under 30.After a lunch of bad pizza in the bowels of the Port Authority (I told Laura this is how the colorful locals eat, which is true), we took the crosstown train to the Central Park Zoo. It was a perfect day for winter animals, and the polar bears, penguins and sea lions were duly putting on shows. Laura, bone-tired, had her second real meltdown of the trip as we were leaving, so we came back to Mary and Diogenes’ place in a taxi and took a rest. Then Laura and Lilly and I took the train to Ethan and Mary’s place in Park Slope. (Mary, our Mary, was feeling fluish, so she stayed home with Mary and Diogenes and a hot water bottle.) Laura found that she shared both a Harry Potter obsession and a certain taste for the scatological with E & M’s twins Adam and Charlie, so they had a fine time. Lilly found the vast array of plastic toys irresistible. If you ever get to be a kid again, make sure you get a dad who is crazy about comics and action figures.

Mary and Diogenes are just back in New York from Taiwan, where Diogenes picked up a prize in the Taipei print and drawing biennial. Now he is clearing out his studio on Lexington and 103rd for a push to finish new material for a show in San Francisco in the spring. I went with them to the studio last night, every step bringing back things I’d forgotten or just not thought about for years. East Harlem looks tighter, a little more gentrified, a little less chaotic. Giuliani’s police terror strategy has quieted the streets as designed, but not that many yuppies are confident venturing into this neighborhood, the place even the Alphabet City developers were afraid to touch ten years ago. I remember being stitched up by an intern at Mount Sinai hospital nearby after a skating accident in the Park on my way home from work one night. The intern asked where I lived, checking for a concussion I suppose, and when I pointed east she looked surprised and said, “I didn’t know anybody lived over there.” I did not have a comeback to that, and I still don’t.At his studio on 106th and Lexington, Diogenes laid out some of his newer drawings and prints on the floor and I stood on a chair to look at them from an adequate distance. Diogenes always seems to want me to see what he’s been up to, and I always end up loving what he is doing. Lately he has taken a sharp turn away from the dark, foreboding, highly tactile stuff he was doing when I met him, in favor of a more explicitly representational thing with a lot of very accessible icons and totems held up at an almost ironic distance, with surfaces playing a smaller role than drawn images, at least to my eye. The two silkscreen prints I liked the best turned out to be the ones he’d planned to give me. This wasn’t the first time that’s happened. I remember seeing a show of his somewhere on the Upper West Side around 1990. I looked around for a while, and then when I had determined my favorite I looked at the tag to see the title, and it said, “Euphoria. Collection of Ted Kuster.” After that we took a stroll down to 3d Ave., where I used to live. We could see Christmas tree lights in the window of my old apartment. It’s nice to know someone is living there. I hope they kept the loft I built out of stolen police barricades, and I hope they figured out a better way to cover up that three-inch knothole in the kitchen floor that was the roaches’ foyer. I stayed in that tunnel-like apartment for five years, only half the amount of time I’ve lived in San Francisco, but they were big years and I get a lot of pleasure out of thinking about them now.

When in New York do as New Yorkers do. So today we walked down Central Park from Mary and Diogenes’ place in East Harlem, stopping to marvel at the rocks shouldering up out of the ground, the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, the pond where Stuart raced, the promenade of poets, until we reached Wollman rink and stood in line for two hours to circle with a hundred thousand others, elbow to elbow, staring up at the lights appearing on 5th Ave. and 59th St.After that we strolled down 5th, giving the Bergdorf windows a close inspection and oohing and aahing at the lights and the traffic with the rest of the bumpkins. We joined a huge crowd doing the Hajj to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, then made our way over to Lexington and came back Uptown. I’ve missed this place a lot. I’ve been vaguely aware of the feeling since September, , but being here on the crowded, raucous sidewalks and the clanking subway and the Park in its crisp, starchy winter look, those things have really brought it back.

Let us now praise really, really bad books for children. Has anyone seen anything worse than Robert Munsch’s monumental Love You Forever? Forget about books that don’t quite live up their potential (see below). This one has none to live up to. This unbelievable dog, which regularly shows up on the checkout stand racks at Borders-type stores, manages to combine in a single thin book all the simpering sentimentality, reinforcement of conservative cultural norms, bad writing and horrible art work that made children’s literature the publishing backwater it was for so many years. I think it’s the worst children’s book now on the shelves. Tell me I’m wrong. Your homework for the holidays is to come up with the most horrendous children’s book that you know to be currently in print. Painful as the exercise may be. Do it for the community. Do it for closure, or whatever. (The “in print” part is designed to eliminate Struwelpeter, my German grandmother’s favorite cautionary book for kids, because I just don’t like to think about that one. I’m pretty sure it’s out of print.) Note: Munsch’s labor of schlock has been hashed over pretty thoroughly over the years. There may not be much more to say about it. But I don’t know of any actual collections of bad kids’ books. So let’s get started.

From the Children Now site’s new report on kids and computer games:”The video game industry explains that girls are not interested in gaming and that it would not be economically wise for them to invest in producing games for a female market. The truth, however, is that girls do enjoy playing video games. According to PC Data, 45% of computer and video game players in 2000 were female.”

Today Laura and Lillian each got a birthday present of their own domain name. The names are pointed to this site for the time being. It won’t work right away, but in the next couple of days if you type in www.laurajue.net or www.lillianjue.net you will come right here to this very page. How neat is that?

So I took the Geek test, and found, to my horror, that I am only 37% geek. Something I need to work on, for sure.The output:”I probably work in computers, or a history department at a college. I never really fit in with the “normal” crowd. But I have friends, and this is a good thing.”

My sister Karen runs a very nice website about childbirth and parenting. Today she points to some more work by the SIDS researcher James McKenna about how OK it is to have your baby sleep next to you.

I’m glad that this guy still reads Newsweek, so the rest of us don’t have to.

I point out this new culture site, even though it is a little off-topic here, for the obvious reasons.

Lillian started walking (lunging, technically) a week before her first birthday. She has also acquired another skill that may prove just as important, viz., drinking through a straw. She showed it off to Laura and me at the neighborhood cafe this weekend, acting all casual like she’d known the trick all her life but just didn’t elect to use it until this particular banana-strawberry smoothie appeared. She is pretty clearly talking to Laura now (”Wuh wah! Wuh wah!”) and calling for a drink (”A-wah! A-wah!”) and pointing out things she wants (”Meh-meh! Meh-meh!”) and experimenting with a wide range of other sounds to see which ones will get us to do things. Among her best toys are some of spice bottles on the rack behind the kitchen door. You give her one of the noisier ones, like cloves or peppercorns, and she shakes it a few times and breaks into a huge grin.

This delightful spam was passed along by Paul.Capitalism:You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.Enron Venture Capitalism:You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The Annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new President of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

Let me paraphrase Lyndon Johnson and say Alexander Cockburn is wacko, but he’s our wacko. Here he weighs in, perhaps a little more heavily than necessary, on the Potter iconography and current events: “In the death games played by adults, children are always the pawns.” Courtesy of Gail.

The World at War “On March 2 [1933], Hitler was asked by a [reporter] whether the suspension of liberties was permanent. He answered in the negative, saying that full rights would be restored as soon as the … danger was over.”

Stephy Says: Aw, Ted, it’s an accident of birth. It could have happened to anybody. (and did, to many others.You all survived and got out.) It might have been a port wine stain in the shape of the crucifixion across your forehead. (Or butt!) Your true friends don’t hold it against you. Though you had a conservative religious upbringing, few of even the worst Christian Conservatives are as megalomaniacal as John Ashcroft and his ilk. Your shame is one of the sad holdovers from your upbringing. Play with your kids a while. It will pass.

Lemony Snicket is flying off the shelves. Now here’s something I can get behind. Says the Post: “Child psychiatrists say that these books, and other works that deal with kids’ deepest and often unspoken fears - of separation, abandonment, loneliness and death - can be therapeutic, far more so than tales that are relentlessly optimistic. Some children’s mental health experts say that darker fiction can help children master the inexplicable and terrifying events they witness in real life.” Has the Attorney General heard about this stuff?

And speaking of geekery: Amen. “I have never ever met a technical person (including me) whom I would trust to know what is really the right thing to do in the long run.” — Linus Torvalds last weekend.
If you are interested in software design and stuff like that, you might find this exchange pretty interesting. If you aren’t, don’t touch that link, could be dangerous.

I’ve never been ashamed of my conservative religious upbringing. I just figured it was something that happens to some people, like rainy weather or a toothache. Today, driving to work and listening to John Ashcroft testifying at the Senate hearings, I realized what it must be like for those people who do feel ashamed. I heard that sad, hostile, hateful man gloating about the recent advances in his lifelong mission to return the freedoms summarized in the Bill of Rights (except No. 2, of course) to the ornamental status they enjoy in most other countries, and I felt ashamed of everything about me that had anything in common with him. I had always been pretty confident that the religious conservative was a complex phenomenon, containing some honor and caring mixed in with the fear and hate. I’ve argued that with other open-minded people who don’t know them as well as I feel I do: yes, parts of their minds are still in the caves, but it’s not that simple, and besides, many of them eventually come out and join the rest of us. Listening to Ashcroft explicitly and directly lie about the plain English in his military tribunals order, then decline to answer questions from Senators whose patriotism he openly didn’t trust (any one of whom with half the guts of even a Stevenson could have moved to hold him in contempt), I felt that conviction dissolving. Before this fall, it was possible to act like Ashcroft and his strange, complicated, semi-medieval constituency were, as scary as they might sound, ultimately just one of the more colorful slices of our diverse civil society. Today he made it clear that he is abandoning that pose and making a grab for the whole pie. The idea that I came from somewhere a little like the place this man lives in just makes me feel awful.

Everyone has some terrible thing their parents did to them that they can never forgive. Mine is Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. My dad had an old Ford LTD wagon in 1976, which came with a couple of 8-track tapes containing Herb’s greatest hits. We made liberal use of the infinite-replay feature of 8-track technology. Now that I’m pushing 40, it’s beginning to look like the sick attraction to Herb’s modest, pleasant brand of Muzak may be a lifelong disorder. Today I own a copy of every LP Herb ever recorded, plus several by the Baja Marimba band, an even less compelling spinoff group. (Laura likes For Animals Only, with the immortal “Last of the Red-Hot Llamas.” Describing this as a joke album would not help you distinguish it from the rest of the BMB’s oeuvre.) We were listening to some of this stuff over the weekend, idly listing its many deficiencies, and it occurred to me that this could be one reason I have music on all the time, at home and in the car and at work: to drown out the Herb tunes in my head.

Here’s more evidence that Librarians Are Corrupting Kids. Watch out, Daniel Pinkwater. Cardinal Ashcroft will be after you soon. (Pointed out by the very observant and connected Craig Jensen.)