Two Today

Little Nico turns a beautiful two years old today. And while it may not be QUITE like this, there are certainly moments when this is EXACTLY what it feels like.

Children's Film Fest

The Northwest Film Forum opens their annual Children's Film Festival this Friday in Seattle. This year's 10-day extravaganza brings more than 125 films from 29 countries, a magical blend that includes animation, features, shorts, historical films and hands-on workshops. Highlights include a live performance from Casper Babypants; an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast; a program spotlighting Chinese animation as curated by the acclaimed animator Joe Chang; and screenings of the rarely seen Mary Pickford silent film, A Little Princess, with a new live score.

The festival opens this Friday, January 28 - not coincidentally a day when the Seattle Schools are closed - and runs until February 6.

Get tickets here.

Queen Shmooquan: Plugged

Queen Shmooquan - the quasi-religious ultra-bizarre high priestess of junk culture - was all set to become the brightest star in Seattle's absurdist firmament. She wowed the crowds at Northwest New Works, blew them away at the Erotic Art Festival, unexpectedly opened for a Stone Gossard side project...and then she went and got herself knocked up.

Two upcoming "UnPlugged" shows (at the Rendezvous on May 6 & at the Can Can on May 13th) are our last two chances see Queen Shmooquan in pre-natal action before she goes on an indefinite hiatus. Parenthood changes everyone, and there's no telling what sort of effect it will have on the psyche of the preposterously political, riotously scatological, preciously sexual wild-child we call Queen Shmooquan. See her while you can.

Born Yesterday

...and a poem.

Born Yesterday

by Phillip Larkin

Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love -
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you're a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn't, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull -
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

Your Daddy Loves You

Call me corny, but it's my brown eyed girl's first birthday today, and I'm celebrating! With a song...

My World is Empty

My wife and daughter have gone away without me for the first time since she was born! Ten whole days!

Bargain Hunt

As a case in point, this little poem for today by Ron Padgett.

Bargain Hunt

Suppose you found a bargain so incredible
you stood there stunned for a moment
unable to believe that this thing could be
for sale at such a low price: that is what happens
when you are born, and as the years go by
the price goes up and up until, near the end
of your life, it is so high that you lie there
stunned forever.

It's a Girl!

Nico Hazmat d'Pepita i Gurldogg was born on March 26, 2009. She's a cute little thing, 3.1 kilos. (First photos here!) This blog will continue as normal, though postings will probably be a little irregular for a while, and may feature a greater percentage of baby stuff. Thanks for reading and thanks for your well wishes!

Each One Good as Gold

It's been very gratifying to see Donald Barthelme getting some overdue love recently. The miraculous story teller and wondrous prose stylist had been unjustly neglected since his death in 1989. After a small flurry of tearful obituaries and a couple of posthumous story collections, Barthelme was largely forgotten. His stories were rarely if ever reprinted, and his books all went out of print. Recently however, with the long awaited publication of the biography"Hiding Man," Barthelme is being reintroduced and reconsidered. Both the New Yorker and New York Review of Books recently featured profiles of the author, and McSweeney's published a whole issue dedicated to his memory, with a terrific celebratory essay by noted Don-o-phile George Saunders. Despite all this, it's worth noting that most of his titles are still out of print.

Here's a charming short story with a signature sense of Barthelme mirth. Just perfect for us parents and expectant parents.

Baby

The first thing the baby did wrong was to tear pages out of her books. So we made a rule that each time she tore a page out of a book she had to stay alone in her room for four hours, behind the closed door. She was tearing out about a page a day, in the beginning, and the rule worked fairly well, although the crying and screaming from behind the closed door were unnerving. We reasoned that that was the price you had to pay, or part of the price you had to pay. But then as her grip improved she got to tearing out two pages at a time, which meant eight hours alone in her room, behind the closed door, which just doubled the annoyance for everybody. But she wouldn't quit doing it. And then as time went on we began getting days when she tore out three or four pages, which put her alone in her room for as much as sixteen hours at a stretch, interfering with normal feeding and worrying my wife. But I felt that if you made a rule you had to stick to it, had to be consistent, otherwise they get the wrong idea. She was about fourteen months old or fifteen months old at that point. Often, of course, she'd go to sleep, after an hour or so of yelling, that was a mercy. Her room was very nice, with a nice wooden rocking horse and practically a hundred dolls and stuffed animals. Lots of things to do in that room if you used your time wisely, puzzles and things. Unfortunately sometimes when we opened the door we'd find that she'd torn more pages out of more books while she was inside, and these pages had to be added to the total, in fairness.

The baby's name was Born Dancin'. We gave the baby some of our wine, red, whites and blue, and spoke seriously to her. But it didn't do any good.

I must say she got real clever. You'd come up to her where she was playing on the floor, in those rare times when she was out of her room, and there'd be a book there, open beside her, and you'd inspect it and it would look perfectly all right. And then you'd look closely and you'd find a page that had one little corner torn, could easily pass for ordinary wear-and-tear but I knew what she'd done, she'd torn off this little corner and swallowed it. So that had to count and it did. They will go to any lengths to thwart you. My wife said that maybe we were being too rigid and that the baby was losing weight. But I pointed out to her that the baby had a long life to live and had to live in a world with others, had to live in a world where there were many, many rules, and if you couldn't learn to play by the rules you were going to be left out in the cold with no character, shunned and ostracized by everyone. The longest we ever kept her in her room consecutive was eighty-eight hours, and that ended when my wife took the door off its hinges with a crowbar even though the baby still owed us twelve hours because she was working off twenty five pages. I put the door back on its hinges and added a big lock, one that opened only if you put a magnetic card in a slot, and I kept the card.

But things didn't improve. The baby would come out of her room like a bat out of hell and rush to the nearest book, Goodnight Moon or whatever, and begin tearing pages out of it hand over fist. I mean there'd be thirty-four pages of Goodnight Moon on the floor in ten seconds. Plus the covers. I began to get a little worried. When I added up her indebtedness, in terms of hours, I could see that she wasn't going to get out of her room until 1992, if then. Also, she was looking pretty wan. She hadn't been to the park in weeks. We had more or less of an ethical crisis on our hands.

I solved it by declaring that it was all right to tear pages out of books, and moreover, that it was all right to have torn pages out of books in the past. That is one of the satisfying things about being a parent-you've got a lot of moves, each one good as gold. The baby and I sit happily on the floor, side by side, tearing pages out of books, and sometimes, just for fun, we go out on the street and smash a windshield together.

Beginning

Assuming all goes well, my child will be born this month. Before things get crazy, I wanted to post this beautiful birth and re-birth poem by Philip Levine.

Let Me Begin Again

Let me begin again as a speck
of dust caught in the night winds
sweeping out to sea. Let me begin
this time knowing the world is
salt water and dark clouds, the world
is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn
comes slowly and changes nothing. Let
me go back to land after a lifetime
of going nowhere. This time lodged
in the feathers of some scavenging gull
white above the black ship that docks
and broods upon the oily waters of
your harbor. This leaking freighter
has brought a hold full of hayforks
from Spain, great jeroboams of dark
Algerian wine, and quill pens that can't
write English. The sailors have stumbled
off toward the bars of the bright houses.
The captain closes his log and falls asleep.
1/10'28. Tonight I shall enter my life
after being at sea for ages, quietly,
in a hospital named for an automobile.
The one child of millions of children
who has flown alone by the stars
above the black wastes of moonless waters
that stretched forever, who has turned
golden in the full sun of a new day.
A tiny wise child who this time will love
his life because it is like no other.

Un Dia Ple D'accio

In the morning, Pepita's beautiful niece Emma was born.

In the evening, we took advantage of our Christmas presents of tickets to see Muchachito Bombo Infierno at Barcelona's Palau Sant Jordi. The story has it that Muchachito, a native of the immigrant-heavy Barcelona suburb Santa Coloma de Gramanet, was discovered playing guitar in the street in 2004 and invited to open for Ojos de Brujo on their world tour. The 10-piece band went on to become hugely popular in Barcelona, building on the success of similar rumba/flamenco/reggae/swing party bands like Dusminguet and Tonino Carotone. Their Barcelona performance was the last stop on a year long European tour. Haven't heard much about a possible American appearance, but judging by the overwhelming reactions of the local crowd, it won't be long.

Scary Stuff

Some superbly appropriate films opening in Seattle this week.

Just in time to freak out expectant parents, "Rosemary's Baby," perhaps the creepiest film ever made about pregnancy, is showing at the SIFF Cinema for a week beginning on November 1 as part of their "Dark Nights" series. John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow play a New York couple expecting their first child while the next door neighbors eagerly await the arrival of Satan's spawn. A terrifying classic, re-released as a glorious new print on the occasion of its 40th anniversary.

And I've been looking forward to this one since reading about it nearly two years ago. "Fear(s) of the Dark" is a feature length creep show featuring black-and-white animated shorts by six international super-star illustrators, including Italian charcoal artist Lorenzo Mattotti, New Yorker artist Richard McGuire, French graphic artist Blutch and local hero Charles Burns. Each segment is a tour de force of emotional intensity, exploring madness, sexual insecurity, rural superstition and disease with a scary and mesmerizing inventiveness.

Review of Books (Children)

As some astute readers have noticed, Pepita and I are expecting a child. Sometime around the end of March, little Babydogg will make his or her entrance into our flawed world. In typical Gurldogg fashion, I've been buying up children's books, concerned that our little wonder is exposed to the richest possible literature as soon as he opens his eyes. A number of titles that I've seen recently have really excited me. I only hope the little one shares my lust for this stuff.

ABC3D is a witty and clever alphabet pop-up book by French designer Marion Bataille. The letters not only pop up but move and transform, creating an almost hypnotic effect. It's an extremely engaging and innovative book - almost cinematic. A must-have for fans of paper-cuts, pop-ups or typography.

The publisher has made a sweet little promo film for the book, and the real thing is even better.



And even though I rarely use Amazon, they do have a great price on this one.

Publisher Drawn and Quarterly has been collecting and reprinting the complete Moomin comic strips by Finnish illustrator Tove Jansson. The Moomins are hippo-like creatures with easygoing personalities and lots of troublesome friends. Jansson's art is pared down and precise, small enough to fit in the newspaper format yet grand enough to compose beautiful portraits of ambling creatures in fields of flowers or rock-strewn beaches. Jansson is regarded as one of the great newspaper cartoonists of the last century, the Moomin strip having been syndicated in some 40 countries to millions of readers, but this is the first time the Moomins have been published in any form in North America. The series now includes three large format books, and Drawn & Quarterly is planning to reprint the entire strip.

And finally, I was happy to see that the ever-adventurous McSweeney's is reprinting the delightfully odd book "The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip," written by MacArthur Award winning writer George Saunders, and illustrated by singularly strange Caldecott-winning artist Lane Smith. The book is a sort of fable involving Gappers (baseball-sized, burr-shaped orange creatures with a compulsion to creep up out of the sea and fasten themselves to goats), the goat herders of Frip, a widower obsessed with the past, and some dumb, mean neighbors. It's a strange story, and is absolutely in keeping with Saunders's wonderfully off-beat aesthetic. Smith in turn evokes memories of George Grosz, Dr. Seuss, and Japanese wood block prints. A good book for literary parents and their disturbed children. I trust we'll get there one day, 'cause that's exactly where we're headed!