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the new “can i please watch a cartoon?”

Over the past few months Sharaun has more than once offhandedly mentioned to me that, during the days at home, she thinks about setting Keaton loose on the computer to play around. Keaton has an interest in the thing; how could she not? Her dad is practically tethered to one and her mom makes good use of the Facebook and the Tweeter on occasion as well. It’s only natural for her to desire to use this obviously magical machine herself.

So on Saturday I sat down and created a user account on the machine she could call her very own. For her user icon I used a box of crayons and the wallpaper is a huge spread of Princess Ariel (which she picked herself). I made the interface all magnified and simple thanks to the old-people options in Windows 7, and I got rid of all her desktop icons, notifications, and other distractions. She’s got one big icon in the middle of her desktop that launches Chrome and once inside I pre-loaded about ten or so bookmarks on the top ribbon for her to choose from. I installed AdThwart so she will see only content, and gave her a cursory lesson in mousing. And with that, she was off. Bouncing between bookmarks, she spends her time playing games on NickJr, PBS Kids, and a host of other edu-tainment centric kids’ sites.

Over the past few days she’s become quite good at navigating, and has picked up on the interface and controls surprisingly quickly (a child of a the technological age, I suppose). She knows how to repeatedly get to the same place consistently, figures out how to control games just by trial-and-error, and for the most part is self-taught. In fact, Sharaun and I have a rule that we’re not going to come to the call for “help” while using the computer. There are so many things she can do that will either take her away from where she wants to be or get her “stuck” or something that we told her up-front that if she feels like she needs help she can just click the ‘X’ in the top-right corner and start over. Hopefully that way she learns by herself and we don’t have to come running every thirty seconds (we learned fast that this should be our approach).

And now it’s all she wants to do. “Can I please watch a cartoon?” has gone by the wayside and, “Can I please get on my computer?” is the new hotness.

Hopefully we’ve done a good thing.  (Or at least a benign thing.)

Goodnight.

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she may have a point

2:30pm and truth be told it’s too hot to still have the house open.

Doesn’t matter; I’m stubborn about it.  Throw open the windows and throw open the doors.  Raise the blinds and turn on the ceiling fans.  Doff your longpants and don some shortpants, consider something that “wicks.”  “Too hot” be damned, what do we know from “too hot?”

For one thing, I love the fresh air.  You close a house for a few days and the air starts to feel “stale” to me, breathed to many times; recycled through dusty air vents too many times; stagnant.  It’s a psychological thing.  I also like the idea of being miserly and not running the air conditioning.

Hundreds of years ago the land where we live now was home to a Native American tribe that built stick-huts to shade themselves from the heat of the day.  Sometimes they’d dig down into the ground a ways before erecting the structure to increase the cooling capacity.  I feel like, if they made it through these 100°+ days with a dugout stick teepee, I should count myself lucky.  Somehow, thinking about the days those folks fared naturally makes me even more loath to trip the thermostat.

Sharaun, however, thinks that if the Indians had AC they would’nt have been so dumb as to not use it when it was hot.

She may have a point.

Goodnight.

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pointless little pockets

Saturday morning Sharaun had a hair appointment and I was on my own with the brood.

The job is many-fold, and yet ultimately defined by one prime directive: take care of the children.  Sharaun should not come back to find them A) missing, B) broken, or C) disfigured in any way.  As an adult, my brain tells me there are multiple paths to success when it comes to the directive.  In fact, the engineer in me reckons that, statistically, it would be very hard for me to not accomplish my charge.  So I take a nonchalant attitude towards the whole thing.  I’m a two-time dad, father of a four and a half year old girl who I think is pretty OK, I got this.

Anyway, on this day I was successful yet again – maintaining my streak.  And one of the ways I “personalized” my road to success on that particular Saturday was to choose “cute” yet undeniably manly outfit in which to dress baby Cohen.  In the end I went with a solid blue one-piece thing on top and these teeny-tiny little frat-boy khaki pants on bottom.  Oh man did that kid look sharp for a three-week old.

And as I was pulling on Mr. Cohen’s miniature Sigma Chi specials I couldn’t help but notice the level of “real pants” details, right down to the diminutive little pockets.  I had a moment then, thinking for a minute while looking at those small pants how absurd those pointless little pockets were.  “What’s a baby going to keep in his pockets?,” I wondered.  A spare pacifier?  Mylicon for those bender days on the boob?  Change for the tollbooth?  Kid’s got pockets and no way to use ’em, let alone know they can be useful.  I felt like putting something in his little pockets, just to give them some purpose.  Maybe a baby girl’s phone number or a stick of gum for his perpetual case of morning breath (you try staying fresh sleeping twenty hours a day).

In the end I left it as a lark.  But I really do love those pants on him.  One day he’s going to be my big boy and in his pockets he’ll have stuff like guitar picks and firecrackers and ball markers for the links.  For now I’ll let them be empty, symbolic of all the concern he has in God’s wide world.

Goodnight.

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BPF

Friday.  Watched the Arcade Fire’s live show from MSG on the big TV; the YouTube stream was surprisingly solid and high-definition.  Was great.  We should try and see them again when they come around for the new record…

I’ve written before about the plague the Lord placed on my face during my junior-high years.  Perhaps I was being punished for all the evil things I was doing.  With all my evil friends and all our evil urges and our evil homemade napalm and stolen cartons of smokes.  Whatever the reason for the curse, my previous entry recalls the way those pimples sunk my self confidence.  Sharaun, too, suffered from a particularly nasty attack of the pimples – although her time came much later in life.  Between the two of us then, we’re like an acne survivors support group.  We should be able to at least provide some empathy to our kids when their time comes.

I write all this because I was reminded of it by little baby Cohen’s “infant acne.”  Our poor little man has a pretty ugly case.  Keaton had baby acne too, but I don’t recall it being as pronounced as Cohen’s is.  Maybe that’s because his little-man body is simply bursting with awesome hormones (because his dad is so manly and strong).  I’ve taken to calling him “baby pizza face,” out of love, of course – and Keaton has even picked it up.  BPF, for short.  Oh nevermind you who say I’m mean… it’s a nickname and it helps me acknowledge to people who may see him and think, “Dear God, what’s wrong with that baby’s face,” that yes: my little kid has zits.

Don’t worry Cohen; don’t let the world get you down… that acne’s gonna clear up and you’ll have perfect newborn skin again until you’re twelve or thirteen.  Then, just when every flaw is under 100 social microscopes, it’ll come back to test your mettle.  And if it couldn’t best you when you were three weeks old, just think how much easier you’ll fare with twelve more years under your belt to thicken your skin.

That’s my boy; baby pizza face.

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musty smut

Sometime back in 2009 I started a draft entry about finding dirty magazines in the woods.  Wait; stick with me.

I had seen a funny thread that someone started online about the very subject, and was surprised at just how many folks chimed in to say that they, too, had seen some of their first pornography by virtue of “discovering” some mildewed magazine half-buried under a pile of rotting leaves.

Back in my day (wow, that makes me feel old), finding and then hiding your dirty magazines in the woods seemed to be a common thing (look on the internet here and here if you don’t believe me).  In fact I can remember we would go strolling through the woods with eyes on the ground for the express purpose of stumbling upon porn.  And we found it when we looked, too; if you were a pack of twelve year old boys in the 80s, you had some kind of Playboy sonar… and no camouflage could hide a Hustler from that.

As I wrote back then, the whole “chase” of porn is lost on today’s young men.  Porn is on your TV at night, no watching through snow required; porn comes to you on the computer; porn is on your cellphone.  There’s no looking anymore, there’s no “discovery,” there’s no state of un-knowing.  Back in my day, we relied on our found porn to reveal to us the magical secrets of sex.  Someone in that online discussion I read over a year ago, and that inspired this entry, put it best with the following:

We found an issue of Club in a garbage can, and in it there was a picture of a woman sticking her nipple into another woman’s vagina.

We acted all knowing with each other, like “Yeah, that’s something people do. You didn’t know about that?”

In this modern internet age kids have probably seen worse than that by 3rd grade computer lab.  Whither have the innocent days of thumbing through a tattered Jugs in a draining ditch with a couple friends gone?  Our poor young men today have no chance… Gone are the days of having to muddle through not understanding every other word in those Penthouse Forum articles,  having to guess from context and later being embarrassed whilst employing it incorrectly after getting up enough courage to dare use one as you’d self-defined it.  Oh man that was embarrassing to find out that “woody” doesn’t always mean a paneled surfer-mobile… kids can be rough.

I suppose I’m not really lamenting some great lost innocence of my day here, I mean there’s plenty more to be sad about aside from the mechanics through which our youth are introduced to smut.  In fact I’ve quite forgotten if I was driving to any point here or not.  I think maybe I just wanted to talk about finding porn, quote that hilarious nipple thing, and maybe opine about “kids these days.”  Mission accomplished?

Goodnight.

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cooing & head-petting

It’s only Tuesday.

Sitting here at 9pm reveling in the fact that the 9:30pm meeting I’ve been dreading since my 6pm arrival home from work is on its off-week of its every-other-week cadence.  Seriously, three hours of between time isn’t even enough for my work-brain to fully shut down and my home-brain to take over.  When a bad work day happens to align with one of those few and far between days where I have late-night meetings I clock-watch from the moment I get home until the moment the cellphone rings.  Stupid work, encroaching on my time.

We leave for a week in Florida around the middle of the month.  And even though I just had some time off work when Cohen was born, I’m ready for some more.  While there I plan to hang out with friends, maybe take walks by the river, spend some time in the pool and sit around reading.  None of the family back South has met Cohen yet so we’re all excited to give him his east coast debut.  Keaton might be most proud, she’s so in love with the idea of being a big sister and takes real joy in sharing him with other people.  She wants everyone to know how well she can perform her sisterly duties… and it turns out that, luckily, Cohen actually seems to be calmed by her cooing and head-petting.  Her very real ability to soothe him is a really cool thing for her (and us) and she wants everyone to know.

Let’s hope their relationship stays as sweet right through highschool.  Goodnight.

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best of 2010 – halfway

Hard to believe it’s already more than halfway through 2010, right?

I’ve had my usual “halfway best of” list near-ready to post since way back in early June, but I was really unhappy with the substance of the content I’d written on each record.  What I needed to do was sit down and listen to each one as I wrote about it… but even until now I’ve only had times to do that in fits and starts.  With Cohen’s arrival and work and the other trappings of the daily grind the best I could muster was a few re-writes aimed at saying something more than “this album is good, you should try it.”  I’m still not entirely satisfied, but I’ve been working on this thing so long it’s just time for us to part ways.

So I sat around Sunday night with headphones on and banged this out.  I tried to flourish where I could.  Hopefully it might turn you onto something, or at least give you cause to call me a front-running wanna-be hipster, one of those two (perhaps both).  See if there’s anything you can dig on:

10. Sleigh Bells – Treats [listen]

People who know my taste might find it odd I like this record so much, but so help me I do.  You know what this record is?  It’s a cheerleading record.  No I swear I’m not kidding.  It’s an album that tweaker cheerleaders do routines to.  At times the guitars and beats and vocals and everything else are so distorted and clipped that songs risk becoming a static wall of sound, but in the end the beats and teenage-chant vocals prevail and land smack after smack of meth’d-out Toni Basil.  All of it hits hard, but “Kids” and “Riot Rhythm” are likely my favorite of the stompers here.  A lot of times I’ll try and give my opinion on what setting a particular “best of” album works best in – but for this one you should just turn it up and dance.  Go; dance.  Badly around your living room with your sons and daughters like I do.  Dance and have fun doing it.  This music is stupid and disposable and that’s what makes it so very enjoyable.

9. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today [listen]

One of the later entrants on the midyear list, Before Today didn’t grace my ears until sometime midway through May.  I can still remember my first impressions: “What is this?  Some retro Bowie/Eno/Hall & Oates mashup thing?  Oh no wait here comes some Velvet Undergroundy guitar stuff.  Man this is oddball.  Drug music.  Music for drugs. Slick; intravenous.”  I guess this is what they call “art rock;” what a dumb taxonomy, music nerds are so full of themselves.  But man, this swings.  Pink’s music divides critics; some hate it some love it.  With ties to indie wunderkind Animal Collective and a ton of underground press I think people are actually afraid to like this album for fear of being judged to be among the sheep.  So do I like it or did the internet tell me I should like it enough that I’m brainwashed?  Does it matter?  I like it, of my own doing or the hivemind’s… I like it.  Shut up.

8. Yeasayer – Odd Blood [listen]

If most of what I dug in earl 2010 can be pigeonholed as dreamy harmony-based pop, then Yeasayer’s record is the outlier.  Opening with a relatively unapproachable (at first) beat-based Radiohead-sounding experimental piece, the album changes quick and offers up several pieces of highly danceable quirk-rock.  In fact, I daresay that tracks like “Ambling Alp” and “ONE” would get most people shaking something.  While other numbers aren’t as easy to categorize, the album as a whole leaves you with a happy feeling – each song upbeat in its own way, no harshing of one’s buzz here.  It’s a hard sound to describe, and maybe a hard one to fall in love with, but I’m convinced that spending some time with this one will turn you, too.

7. The National – High Violet [listen]

The National’s records have always been “growers” for me.  I don’t know how they manage to do it, but the urgency and energy of their music is often masked to me upon the first few listens. Yet as I listen more and listen carefully the real push and charge of each track is revealed.  Sharaun has commented more than once that this album sounds “slow” and “boring,” but she’s still got the scales on her eyes and I’m just a little closer to Damascus.  When those scales drop, my friends, you’ll hear such a passion in each deceptively muted rythym and baritone lyric you’ll know right away there’s substance to this one.  The National do more with less (the pause between the words “blood” and “buzz” on “Bloodbuzz Ohio” drips with anticipation and is likely to make the weak swoon).

6. Surfer Blood – Astro Coast [listen]

Surfer Blood make trashy surf rock that, upon listening, recalls hearing Weezer’s debut album for the first time.  You like guitars and fuzz?  You like triple-tracked vocals with stadium echo? You like shimmery cymbals on a majority of downbeats?  You like a 2010 take on 1960s beach-styled phrasing?  Well by God man you owe it to yourself to get this album!  I want to listen to these tracks hanging onto a rope stretched off the backside of a ski boat, a wakeboard strapped to my heels and a bellyful of beer while my bald head simmers in the summer sun – it’s that record you were listening to that one time you lost your sunglasses.  The Ventures and Beach Boys meet Weezer (when they were good) and JaMC.  You’ll want this to accompany your waterside summer, get it and find a palm tree to lounge under, bring a chick and a blanket.

5. Zeus – Say Us [listen]

I’m not even certain how I heard about Zeus, but this album is what Dr. Dog should have made in 2010 (let’s not talk about what they did make).  Every month of every year since the days of The Beatles some band released an album that sounds like the Beatles.  That’s a lot of Beatles-esque records since 1969.  Zeus shouldn’t be shy about their Beatles-tinged effort, however, they’ve done a great job and crafted some great pop-rock gems in the process.  If you are looking for the most universally-approachable entrant on this year’s list look no further than “Say Us” –  hardly anyone would ask you to turn this off at the barbecue, I promise.

4. Wavves – King of the Beach [listen]

The whole Wavves frenzy of a couple years back completely missed me.  I didn’t even download that acclaimed record.  The reviews alone turned me off, rambling on and making the music sound all a bunch of overblown half-baked garage crap, listeners suffering from the same strange mass hysteria that allows bullshit like Trout Mask Replica to rank as a “great” album.  So I didn’t touch it.  Then I heard the title of the new Wavves record and I was intrigued.  For in 2010 the beach/surf/coastal theme is in vogue (sorry The Thrills in 2003, you tried), and calling your album King of the Beach is like catnip to front-running indie hipsters.  Next, I saw the dang album cover.  All Sgt. Pepper badge-esque in terms of color and featuring some kind of Freemason weasel or fox smoking a joint.  I mean come on – I had to download it.  And you know what, it is simple, it is garage, but it’s anything but overrated.  In fact it’s right up my alley.

3. The Local Natives – Gorilla Manor [listen]

This record, the Morning Benders Record, and the Beach House record pretty much sum up the “sound” I’m digging so far in 2010.  These LA-area folks seemingly came out of nowhere.  I read about them in the UK press sometime early in the year and decided to give the album a try.  Wow.  With harmonies that would do any modern folk outfit proud, rim-and-stick happy percussion, and enough chops to get loud when they should – the Local Natives have made one of the best records of the year.  And so yes, people may say that the album droops and sags at points (namely points that aren’t shored up by the stellar “Airplanes” and “Camera Talk), but the whole effort is sound to me.  I mean, honestly, you could put eight tracks of random noise around the awesomeness that is “Airplanes” and I’d still buy the record.

2. Beach House – Teen Dream [listen]

Picked and plucked scales, dreamy harmonies, and plush backdrops.  I got this album as winter was turning to spring and it fit so well.  I just love the tunes here, the melodies are incredible – almost understated to the point of near breakdown, but done to perfection.  As far as songs go, I often find myself falling for tracks with vocal melodies that are well-defined enough to be standalone songs in their own right.  When a band or artist is able to craft a killer song musically, and then layer a completely different, yet just as amazing, vocal accompaniment on top of it I get goosebumps.  Teen Dream is like that, and although you might think it’s too slow or limp at first I’d urge you stick with it.  I mean just listen to the harmonies on “Love of Mine” and you’ll see what I mean.

1. Morning Benders – Big Echo [listen]

There’s that very last scene in the very last episode of the Wonder Years.  It’s a slow-motion soft-focus Fourth of July parade and we learn the fate of the entire cast; it was a perfect ending.  Even today my heart swells when I watch that scene, my eyes sting with tears held back.  Not sad tears but the tears you experience when years of nostalgia crescendo and eclipse everything else in your head.  When those moments come, those points of piled-on memory when all else in the mind slips away, you get a moment of pure feeling.  That’s what happens in my head when I hear this record.  The songs are somehow so familiar to me that I instantly loved them, “remembered” them even.  In part I think it’s the lead singer’s voice, in part it’s the subject matter.  I mean, the, “I can’t help thinking we grew up too fast,” bit in “Promises”… the tinkling piano and hints of feedback at the ends of the chords… fantastic.  This is the kind of record that doesn’t come often, one of those love-at-first-sight things, and nothing in 2010 has topped it for me yet.

Honorable mention this year goes to The Radio Dept.’s Clinging To A Scheme [listen] and The New Pornographers’ Together [listen].  Both excellent records but each, whether due to pure whim or a lack of diligence or true deservedness, not bowing in my top 10.  This should not, however, prevent you from checking them out – and it does not preclude my listening habits from elevating them come end-of-year.

So that’s what I dig so far.  And yeah I know the Arcade Fire’s new one leaked already, but I’ve only been listening to it for a week or so and it can debut at end-year if it deserves it (I’ll let you guess).

Goodnight.