Sophie Made a Photo Book

Well, technically, I made it. To her specifications, which were quite exacting. At some point during hour two, she let me commandeer the design process. Ignore all the Shutterfly propaganda below, but do enjoy a nine-year-old's POV on 2014...

Click here to view this photo book larger

Photo books are the perfect gift for any occasion.

Crazy Stuff The Kids Say

S: I have laser hands, laser eyes, and I can make people disappear.  When I’m flying, I can be a star in the sky.

H: I don’t have any superpowers. I have a super guy, and I can ride on him. I’m going to go to the shopping store.

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S: Are we ready for our first exploring?

H: Yes, I am ready to zap people! Huh. Actually I feel a little bit tired.

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H: When people are trying to speak a different language to me? Then I just speak a different language to them. And they don’t even know it.

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H: I have a question. Why is there an arrow pointing at your head from that tree? Actually that doesn’t make any sense. 

Inoculating Against The Messages I Absorb

Yes, I took the "Postmodern Literature and Life" and "Critical Thinking" courses in college, so, yes, I know that ads, the media, the culture we swim in, etc. can do a number on our minds. But I also know that knowing that doesn't make me immune from their power. 

To inoculate myself against the messages I'm absorbing from people who are trying to sell me things, I put together the images below -- iPhone billboards, if you will. You should be able to click, download and save them if you want them too. (If you become desperate to have them in some other size, let me know - I can probably oblige.)  

I Heart Haim Ginott

If I were going to put a bumper sticker on my car, it might say "I Heart Haim Ginott." 

Dr. Ginott is funny, charming, wise, and wonderful. His ideas and the skills he teaches have been the number one influence on how I relate to and communicate with my kids -- and really with everyone. His workshops and books were the prompt fpr Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish to write How To Talk So Kids Will Listen, and Listen So Kids Will Talk (free summary here). I buy up copies of this book at Goodwill and give them away to anyone I meet who seems vaguely interested.  

Above are two wonderful videos of Dr. Ginott's apparances on Phil Donahue. You can find more videos on You Tube (some of which are black and white videos featuring Dr. Ginott being interviewed by Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs!) 

I recently ran across the article below, which gives an overview of his approach to parent education.  Pasting this article below so I'll have it in the future to help remind myself, and influence the way I talk with other parents.

Ginott's Method of Parent Education

Haim Ginott developed a process for working with parents that helps parenting educators model the behaviors they are encouraging parents to practice with their children.

1. Recitation.

In this first stage the parent(s) are encouraged to talk about their challenging experiences as parents. This allows parents to discover that all parents have problems. It also allows the parenting educator to model attention, understanding, and acceptance. Many parents have never had some one sensitively listen to them before. It is important for parents to feel heard and understood.

Such sensitive listening may not be easy for the parenting educator. The educator must listen carefully, resist the temptation to correct or preach, and be skillful in remaining supportive, and encouraging: "Wow. That must have been very difficult." "You probably wondered what to do." "Yes. Parenting can be very challenging!"

The objective at this stage of a discussion is not to teach new skills to the parents but to allow them to talk about their challenges while feeling valued and understood. This skill is especially important when parents have many challenges or are forced to participate in a parenting education program. When a parenting educator is supportive and encouraging, parents can embrace their unique strengths and feel safe enough to explore strategies to address their challenges.

Sometimes class members lack confidence in their parenting skills and worry that they make many mistakes. The effective parenting educator recognizes, values and encourages each parent's desire even as their skills are still emerging.

2. Sensitization.

This second stage of parent education can begin when parents feel accepted, valued, and safe---which may take 30 minutes, a whole session, or many weeks or months. In the second stage the parenting educator turns the attention of the parents to understanding their children's feelings. "How do you think you daughter felt in that situation?" "Why might that have been especially difficult for your son?"

The parenting educator may help the parents understand their children's feelings by asking them how they might have felt in similar situations. "How might you feel if you worked all day to get the house clean and your husband (or a friend) only noticed a dirty window?" Parents may come to better understand their children's feelings when they relate them to their own experiences.

Everyone has struggles and disappointments. One of the challenges of parenting is to apply our own human struggles to understanding how our children feel. While we will never completely understand how an experience feels for our children, we can appreciate how real the pain (or joy or confusion) is.

Parenting is often made more difficult when parents react to their children's behavior without taking time to understand. Under such circumstances the child is likely to become angry and resistant. When the child feels understood, the parent and child can work together more effectively,

3. Learning of concepts.

Parents can learn rules that will help them be more effective. For example "Take time to understand what your child feels." is a rule that can help parents listen. The parenting educator may have a series of rules to suggest. He or she can involve the group by asking them to apply the rules to situations in their homes. The parenting educator may even invite parents to develop their own rules as they examine their dilemmas with their children
.
Parents may learn through these discussions to analyze and improve their parenting. They may better understand their children's behavior and how to respond to it more effectively.

4. Teaching and practice of better skills.

In this final stage of Ginott's process, parents learn how to use their new skills and get practice in applying the principles. They may get practice by responding to situations presented by the parenting educator and other parents. They may also get practice by developing ways to deal with situations with their own children.
A wise parenting educator will not try to be the source of all answers but will ask parents for their ideas. For every situation there are many ways of responding. It is good for class members to hear many different ideas for dealing with a specific problem. If parenting skills are thought of as tools in a tool box, then it is important for parents to have many different tools and to know how to use them well. Each of us has different tools and different skills in using them. We may learn from each other.

It is also important for parents to learn how to evaluate their various options. For any idea that is suggested, you might invite parents to consider two critical questions: "Would that work for me and my child? Does it show respect for both of us?"

The main objective of Ginott's four-step process in parenting is to provide parents with the personal experience of a warm, caring environment in which they can learn effective, respectful discipline strategies. Then they will be prepared to go home and create a warm, caring environment in which their children can learn more strong and humane ways of acting. In a way, the parenting educator is a parent to the parents. In that role the parenting educator can be a model of a good parent.

Sometimes there will be parents in a class who are very angry or hostile (just as there will be children in a family who sometimes are very angry or hostile). An angry parent provides a parenting educator a great opportunity to model effective ways to deal with anger. "I can see that you feel very strongly about this." "This must be very upsetting for you."

There are extreme cases when parents feel so angry or stressed that they are not able to participate effectively with others in the classroom. These parents may benefit from individual counseling. Rather than acting as an individual therapist in this setting, parenting educators are encouraged to provide appropriate referrals to trained professionals.

Remembering Robert Reynolds

I wrote an essay about my intersections with chef Robert Reynolds, who died in August 2012 of brain cancer. He was an amazing and wonderful man, who was generous with his time, his food, and his extreme joie de vivre. He was also my neighbor.  Look him up. Find his books. Read his blog. Take a class at the cooking school he founded. You'll quickly see why he was beloved by so many, and why he will be missed so much.
Remembering Robert Reynolds

100 Children For Henry

Over half a pancake, a side of bacon, and a strawberry banana smoothie at a local cafe on Saturday morning, Henry let Sophie and I know he'd like to have 100 kids. He then proceeded to tell us the names he had in mind for some of them. They are listed below. (One person has suggested that Henry could now populate his own sci-fi fantasy novel. But I think he should just publish his own baby name book, and get these into the public domain, where they clearly belong.)

Henry
Lumer
Jumer
Daisy
One
Two
Three
Four
Eight
Nine
Ten
Wayne
Hormany
Sandwicher
Jamie
Gam
Gamzoo
Deem
Sheem
Lamb

Later that afternoon, he thought of more:

Geem
Geemloo
Moonyer
Bajeem
Jeemer
Kaneemyo
Shorm
Johmbee
Gom
Gamboll
Juam
Joymee
Glooma
Jom
Gool
Ji-New
GeeMeeBonyo
Lambnoo
Yahm
Lohglangleem
Jammer
Gleamjoom

All I can say is good luck, Henry's future children.

"Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn’t. It’s fascinating."

I watched Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" the other night. Like his other improvised film with non-actors, "Bubble," it was pretty fascinating. And like Soderbergh's "The Limey" the film played around with time fracture/memory/sequencing brilliantly via editing. I went in search of more info, and came across this interview with Soderbergh from January 2012 by Scott Tobias. The Onion A.V. Club's interviews are the best - they always get to the nerdy nitty gritty. Excerpts from the interview below.

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AVC: Given your collaboration with Lem Dobbs with this and The Limey, and your films in general, I was curious to know when in the process you leave the writer behind. Have there been other situations [like The Limey] where you found yourself radically altering the film as written in the shooting and editing process?

SS: The answer to the first question is, I never leave the writer behind, because you rewrite the movie in post, or at least I do. I always do, and I feel like anybody who doesn’t at least explore that possibility is short-changing themselves. Editing is the most fun and most exciting part of the process. I was showing Lem every iteration to get his thoughts, and talk about structure, and talk about, “Hey, if we wanted to shoot some more stuff, what would it be?” So that’s an ongoing discussion. Haywire is fairly close to what’s written, but when [we were in post], we tried a lot of different structures there before settling on the one we have now. And, ironically, the film that went through the most transformation in post that I’ve ever made was The Limey. That was completely built in the editing room.

AVC: Did you sense when you were putting The Limey together that Lem would have some displeasure, or did that all come later? That was the most scared I’ve ever been in an editing room. It was shot and cut chronologically. It was written that way, and it was done that way, and it didn’t work. I’m not saying that’s the script’s fault. I’m just saying it didn’t work. It had to be rethought from frame one. And before we figured out what the algorithm was, I thought we were in trouble. I remember the day—God, this would be January 1999—Out of Sight had just won the National Society Of Film Critics awards for picture, director, and screenplay, and I got a call from Stacey Sher, one of the producers, going, “I’ve got great news, it was just announced that blah blah blah.” And I remember thinking, “I really don’t care. I would trade that for one edit that would work.” It was one of those weird juxtapositions of people applauding you and the reality of what you’re experiencing in the moment is, “I’m in real trouble. I’m stuck.” And it was ironically a piece of music that Cliff Martinez had sent to me to listen to that got us unstuck. It was this piece that runs throughout the movie, a sort of piano riff. It’s very atmospheric, very cinematic. Just by chance he said, “Here’s a little doodle I’ve been working on,” and when I heard it, it had a memory sound. And I said to [editor] Sarah Flack, “Load that into the AVID,” and I just started rattling off a list of random images from the film, and I said, “Put these images together. Just playing them.” And we started looking at images juxtaposed over that piece of music and suddenly I could see, “This is what we have to do. This is what we’re going to do to solve this.” And we started, and it was painstaking, but that’s how we figured it out.

AVC: And you’ve never had an experience quite like that?

SS: I’ve been in situations where I’ve felt like, “We’ve got some work to do,” or “I need to do some more shooting,” or, “I’m going to have to make some tough decisions.” I have an hour of edited material that was cut out of Contagion. I had to make some really, really tough choices there.

AVC: Are you ultimately pleased to make those choices?

SS: Yeah, you have to.

AVC: You’re not someone who’s like, “Well, I want a three-hour cut down the line at some point”?

SS: No, not at all. I’m not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post. It means nothing to the audience. I’ll chop limbs off. I’ll put an arm where a leg should be. I’ll do anything.

AVC: But it sometimes means something to the actors and writers, doesn’t it?

SS: Yeah. But, again, everybody, including me, has to submit to what it needs to be. The thing is at the top of the pyramid, the best version of the thing; we all have to serve that. You forget that at your own risk. And I think movies are too long, in general.

AVC: Is that the part of the process you like the most, the editing?

SS: Yeah. Absolutely.

AVC: Why? Just the control?

SS: It’s so unique. There’s nothing else exactly like it in any other art form, the orchestration of so many different elements. It’s endlessly fascinating what can be done editorially. You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn’t. It’s fascinating.

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AVC: How much planning do you do before you’re on set? Because with something like Contagion, where you have explicate a lot of complicated information, it seems like you’d have to be very meticulous, but then you have something like The Girlfriend Experience, which incorporates lots of external elements and seems a little looser. Does it vary from project to project?

SS: No, not really. I have a plan, I always have a plan, but then I’m always ready to throw the plan out, and everyone’s ready to make a radical left turn if necessary. But they’re all pretty similar. What helps is, I make sure the writers are around. Or if they’re not on set, they’re easily accessible. How to shoot is not normally the difficult part. What to shoot is always the question. Chances are, if you’re having trouble with how to shoot something, it’s because there’s something wrong with the “what.” And I start to go down the list of questions like, “Why is this resisting all of my efforts to capture it properly? What’s wrong? Is it the text? Are we in the wrong location? Are there one too many characters in the scene? Something’s not right.” I’ll slow everything down and stop. I’ll just stop completely with the cast and the writers and try to figure out, “Why isn’t this working?” It doesn’t happen a lot, but there’ve been days. 

There was a day on one of the Ocean’s movies where I just sent everybody home. We had this one scene—it was one of the scenes in those movies where you have 11 people talking—and I just couldn’t come up with a solution. I was just stuck. I just didn’t know how I wanted to do it. We had two days’ schedule to do it, and at lunchtime on the first day I sent everybody home. I said, “You can just go home, I don’t know how to do this. I need to think.” And I decided how to do it that afternoon, and we came in the next morning and we were finished by 11 o’clock, because once I knew what to do, we went through it very quickly. I’ve learned that you can’t force it; you just got to stop and figure it out.

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AVC: You talked about critical perception. What do you feel is your most underrated film? Is there an orphan in your filmography that you’d like to see adopted?

SS: I don’t know. My sense of [critical reaction] since Traffic is based on a vague understanding of what the response is, because I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people’s movies. My sense is that The Good German was not fully understood. Probably of all of them, that would be the one. There are other things that have been lambasted that I think had things wrong with them, but [The Good German], creatively, from my standpoint, is a very unified piece, and was, again, from my viewpoint, successful at what it was trying to do. It’s a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it. But that issue was more in the forefront because it needed critical support to work commercially, and it didn’t get it. So it lost every nickel. The lesson coming out of that one for me was that you should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you’re going to get crushed. It’s like when people talk about Obama. My whole attitude is, “You should govern like you aren’t going to get a second term.” I make every movie like it’s the last one. “If this was the last movie, what decision would I make?” That’s how I make my decisions.

101 Things To Learn in Art School

Excerpts from the book 101 Things to Learn in Art School by Kit White - the bits that seemed particularly new, surprising, or important to me.  

2. Learn to Draw

- Drawing is more than a tool for rendering and capturing likenesses. 

- It is a language, with its own syntax, grammar, and urgency. 

- Learning to draw is about learning to see. 

- In this away, it is a metaphor for all art activity. 

- Whatever its form, drawing transforms perception and thought into image and teaches us how to think with our eyes. 

3. "To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks." - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

- Whatever we know, we know from the world that surrounds us. 

- Art studies the world, in all its manifestations, and renders back to us not simply how we see, but how we react to what we see and what we know as a consequence of that seeing.

- The world is the source of all of our relationships, social and political as well as aesthetic. 

- Art is a part of the world, not apart from it. 

4. Art is the product of process

- Whether conceptual, experimental, emotional, or formal, the process you develop yields the image you produce. 

- The material you choose, the methods of production, and the sources of the images should all reflect the interests that command your attention. 

- The process does not stop with each work completed. It is ongoing. The cumulative result of that process is a body of work. 

7. "Tradition is the record of imaginative experience." - Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition

- Art describes the world in which it is made. That is its value to us. It tells us where we have been and where we are. 

14. All images are abstractions.

- Even photographs. 

- They are never the thing pictured; they are a conceptual or mechanical reproduction of a thing past.

- As pictures are symbolic assemblages of forms, recognizable or not, they are always metaphors. 

- Metaphor is the medium of symbolic language and is the language of art. 

15. "The unconscious is that which we know, or have experienced, but for which we do not have a name." - Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle

- Images are catalytic as well as cognitive. 

- This is what gives images their special power and why, through the ages, they have been attributed to have dangerous and magical qualities. 

- Images can be retained in memory as experience. 

25. Style is the consequence of something being described in the way most appropriate to its content. 

- Style is the by-product of saying what has to be said in the most appropriate way a maker can say it. 

26. Abstraction comes from the world. 

- It is less a distillation than it is an accretion.

- Composition, harmony, proportion, light, color, line, texture, mass and motion are all part of the vocabulary of sight. 

- The commonality that allows us to respond to images, even abstract ones, is rooted in our ability to recognize infinite manifestations of the physical world and the mental constructs to which they correspond. 

42. Art has no boundaries except those imposed by the needs of the maker.

- Boundaries are a form of definition, nothing more. 

- They are a way to create a heirarchy of concerns, interests and priorities. 

- Boundaries change all the time. That is part of what art does.

- By defining an area of interest or by stating a new priority, art allows us to create new definitions of ourselves and the context in which we operate.  

64. Art is a form of experimentation. 

- But most experiments fail. 

- Do not be afraid of those failures. Embrace them. Without courting the possibility of something [going wrong] you may not take the risks necessary to expand beyond habitual ways of thinking and working. 

- Failed experiments lead to unexpected revelations.

85. The studio is more than a place to work: it is a state of mind.

- It is the place where your practice is established, and the place where you experiment and meditate on the results....[it is] your locus as an artist.

93. Cultivate your idiosyncrasies.

- Every hand, every eye, every brain comes with its own built-in distortions. These distortions represent your signature, your personal slant on the world. When they manifest themselves in your work, do not be afraid to embrace them as long as they do not represent an impediment to some larger objective or overshadow everything else the image contains.

Joseph Had a Little Overcoat

Love this book, and this animated version of the book. 100% fantastic.

"I've never been bored for one second of my entire life."

"I just try to remember what it felt like when I was a kid. I try to stay about fourteen, when I was really excited about stuff and I could practice the banjo for ten hours and never think that was weird or hard. I try to remember that -- just always being curious and learning. I've never been bored for one second of my entire life." - Danny Barnes

Dylan

Quotes excerpted from Mikal Gilmore's interview with Bob Dylan in the September 27 issue of Rolling Stone. I was writing these down in my book on a flight to New York City while listening to Dylan's new album on repeat my headphones. Rare to get the chance to be so immersed in anything...

"The old is still happening while the new enters the scene, sometimes unnoticed. The new is overlapping at the same time the old is weakening its hold. It goes on and on like that. Forever through the centuries. Sooner or later, before you know it, everything is new and what happened to the old? It's like a magician trick, but you have to keep connecting with it."

"Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it."

[On growing up in a small town] "You had the whole town to roam around in, though, and there didn't seem to be any sadness or fear or insecurity. It was just woods and sky and rivers and streams, winter and summer, spring, autumn."

"My songs are personal music; they're not communal. I wouldn't want people singing along with me. It would sound funny. I'm not playing campfire meetings...The thing you have to do is make people feel their own emotions." 

"You have to constantly reshape things because everything keeps expanding on you. Life has a way of spreading out."

"Is performing a fulfilling way of life? Well, what kind of way of life is fulfilling? No kind of life is fulfilling if your soul hasn't been redeemed."

"Inspiration can hit you anywhere. It's magical. It's really beyond me."

"Everybody is called but few are chosen. There's a lot of distraction for people, so you might not never find the real you. A lot of people don't."

Frank Horvat Speaks

"I find you don’t think of new ideas, you discover them"

A friend told me to take a look at Donald Sultan's work. Here's an excerpt from a 2009 article I found about him in the process:

"Growing up in Asheville, N.C., Sultan at an early age got interested in all aspects of theater, including set-building and lighting. At the same time, his father — who owned a tire store — would paint on weekends as a hobby, and Sultan would watch. He found himself studying painting at University of North Carolina and the Art Institute of Chicago. He poured plastic on his canvas, building a thick layer, and not only painted but also put 'debris' — such as bottle caps — into it.

But upon moving to New York in the mid-1970s, he found the plastic drums too heavy to carry to his walk-up. What to do? He liked unusual material.

'I was looking for another material that would give me the same sense of weight and volume,' he says. 'I was never comfortable just illustrating stuff with a paintbrush to make an image.'

The idea came to him one day while working as a handyman for a gallery.

'I was coming down the elevator and they were putting down linoleum tile in the floor,' he recalls. 'In the middle was a metal circle, so I asked how do you cut linoleum so it goes around the circle and they said it was easy because it was very soft. They gave me some tiles, two white and two black. I went home and I carved a little drawing. It was the first I ever did and it’s in this show.

'I find you don’t think of new ideas, you discover them,' he says.

Link to image here. 1992. Tar, spackle, oil on tiles over masonite.

Link to image here


Link to image here  

Recent Conversations With Henry

Henry: I want to make a card for Rocky Sand, Mommy.

Me: For who now?

Henry: Rocky Sand. I like her. She's my friend.

Me: Um.....I'm just not sure...who.....is that a pretend friend? Or....

Henry: Rocky Sand, Mommy!!!

Me: Wait, do you mean Sophie's friend Roxxann?

Henry: Yep.

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Henry: I got a wack! I got a wack!

Me: What?

Henry: Out of my ear. Right here. On my finger. A wack.

Me: Oh...because there are wacks in your ear. But you mean wax.

Henry: Yeah. I got a wack.

Me: Plurals are tricky. Okay, go throw that in the garbage and wash your hands.

Henry: Yep.

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Me: Why are you covering up your pee pee like that?

Henry: To keep it.......safe.

Richard Tuttle

Ran across artist Richard Tuttle. Want to know more.


Richard Tuttle, Sum Confluence, 1964, Acrylic on plywood, 52.4 x 92.7 cm,

http://www.haberarts.com/tuttle.htm - Ricahrd Tuttle, from the 20 Pearls series

Blabla, Sukie, Jenni Rope

Blabla's blog. I was unaware of the level of awesome Blabla toys have achieved. The brother and sister fox (Sox and Suzette) are on their way to our house for Henry & Sophie's birthday.

The Blabla Blog is also chock full of amazing goodness and fantastic links.

Including a link to artist Jenni Rope (www.jennirope.com) whose paintings I like a lot.





And a link to one of my favorite designers, Sukie. (I didn't know Sukie had a blog)

Oh, internets. Cornucopia of amazing/beautiful/wonderful.

Laura Veirs' Tumblebee, My Kids' Songwriting Skillz, and The Old, Weird America

Been listening to the new Laura Veirs CD Tumble Bee quite a bit.

Laura Veirs lives here, in the same town where I live, and occasionally I run into her. Once time I saw her at the supermarket. I came around the corner, and there she was, pushing a cart with her baby son, Tennessee, in it. I accidentally just went ahead and said her name out loud in a dreamy sort of way, "Oh.....Laura Veirs." And then we had a few somewhat awkward moments of conversation. "Catch and release, Poundstone." I told myself.

It's weird to run into someone you revere, whose music has had such a deep, long-term effect on your heart and mind and soul, at the grocery store. It would be like running into Bob Dylan at the gas station. (Or Tom Waits at the dump. Start watching at 1:40 or so.)

A week or so ago, I spotted Laura and her husband (and producer) Tucker Martine at a documentary (a really good one, Beyond This Place) at which Sufjan Stevens was performing live the soundtrack he'd written.

Then the next weekend, there was Tucker again at OMSI with Tennessee. My son and his son were playing at the same water station, so I mentioned how much we loved the new album, and Tucker and I got to talking a bit. I mentioned that I'd just gotten the Smithsonian Folkways Animal Folk Songs For Children at the library. (A couple of the songs that appear on that collection are also on Tumblebee.) He said he'd just gotten that collection for Laura for her birthday. (Which is apparently in October, just like mine - hey hey! I knew we were soul mates!) Then we talked about the documentary a bit. Then Tennessee made a break away from the water play holding pen, and that was that.

The next week, we went to Laura's in-store performance at Music Millenium, and got to talk to Tucker a bit more still. So it's like we are accidentally stalking them. (Henry had an amazing time at the show - he was like the drunk dude at a concert, singing loudly off-tune and clapping loudly off-time.)

I should be in more shock and awe at having these and other freaking amazing artists living in my town. But hey, trying to accept the riches and just be grateful for the crossing of paths in the grocery and at the science museum, etc.

ANYHOO. The Animal Folk Songs for Children CD is a treasure trove - equal parts crazy and wonderful. The oddest song on there according to me is "Snake Baked a Hoecake." (A hoecake is a corn cake baked on a hoe. Yes, the garden implement. My friend Laurie knew this right away.) The lyrics go like this:

"Snake baked a hoecake
And set the frog to watch it.
Frog went a' dozing,
The Lizard came and took it.
Bring back my hoecake
you long-tailed nanny-oh."

That's the end.

I mean seriously? This song has persisted for 100 years?

This led me to think about the songs my kids have recorded, which I have uploaded to Soundcloud, a really neat online audio file hosting/sharing site.

My favorite of the songs by far is "Our Greatest Friends." Sophie came up with this totally spontaneously. I have the kids sing into the "Voice Memo" on my iPhone when inspiration strikes them. I can no longer imagine a world in which this song does not exist. Perhaps it will eventually be just as beloved as "Snake Baked A Hoecake." I think it's got a better than middling chance.

(I am also now wanting to read Greil Marcus' The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, mentioned and recommended by Ben.)

P.S. Laura and Tucker, if you're reading this, despite my awe of the poetry, beauty, and deep-down wonderfulness of the work each of you do, I'm willing to set my intimidation aside and have you over to our house for tacos some time. Feel free to be in touch.

P.P.S. Coloring sheets from Tumble Bee are here for free download. You should get them. They are lovely. Also you should get the CD, obviously. And the fox shirt. Okay, I'm done.

On My Mind This Week

1) 30 Rock hurts me a little bit. I mean every episode is so deeply hilarious. How could it be so good?
"Werewolf bar mitzva, spooky, scary, boys becoming men, men becoming wolves....."

I mean why is that so funny? And yet. And that's the tip of the freaking iceberg of hilarity. 

2) Revisiting the deeply satisfying, mysterious, charming and whimsical Maira Kalman blog for the NYT, "And the Pursuit of Happiness."

3) How much I have loved going to the restaurant Girl and The Goat in Chicago. Stephanie Izard (that's pronounced "eye-zard," FYI) the chef apparently has a new book out. It's hard for me to convey how much I have loved every single experience I've had at Girl and The Goat. Food that's full of awesome twists and surprises (in a 100% awesome way) the kick-ass servers, the music: the whole package is pretty much seared into my heart/brain.  (And I will say there was a certain shiitake mushroom ice cream with peaches and poundcake that made me tear up a little.)

Here's a glimpse of her awesome.

4) By the way, the book is published by Chronicle Books, makers of all of the books I like. Seriously. One day maybe they'll let me work for them. Maybe I could pay them to let me work for them. One time I did get to visit their HQ during this magical trip. It was, predictably, awesome. 

5) Also, I really like the word awesome, I guess. 

Blog Makeover

I noticed I hadn't been here in a while. Just didn't feel like, uh, "home" anymore. So I've given the blog a makeover, and we'll see if I stop by more frequently. I'm quite sure everyone's waiting with breathless anticipation.

Phone Call With Ben Today

Jessica: Hey. What are you doing?

Ben: Serving Little Lord Henry. 

Jessica: Sounds rough. Maybe I’ll come home late.

Ben: Henry keeps looking at me. Suspicious - like "What are you saying about me?" There he goes again. His head keeps whipping around.

Jessica: What's for dinner?

Ben: I’m going to put on a pot roast.

Henry (yelling): What does that mean!

Ben (to Henry): That means there will be some food for you to reject later.

Ben (to Jessica): He’s eaten one of everything we have in the house today. I mean who is he?

Jessica: Right.