Curious George

The original Curious George is a delightfully anachronistic book about a monkey whose friend was a man with yellow straw hat. That's it. Each of the books in the serious has the same premise; the man with the yellow hat tells George not to go out, then he leaves and predictably George gets into trouble until the man reappears at the end to save him. Every book is the same in that way, however the later books that weren't written by the original author change significantly though they stick to that formula, but I'll get to that in a bit.

H.A. Rey and his wife Margret were Jews living in France just prior to the Nazi invasion. One of the few possessions they took with them as they slipped out of Paris and into Portugal and eventually New York was the manuscript for the first George book, which was originally published in 1940.

And the book is full of scenes that would be humorous in that year, and even still are, but are anachronistic in our current world. First off, George is basically poached from the jungle and brought back to be featured in a zoo. Though my kids laugh at that, and don't find that he's in a zoo controversial at all, since the only animals they ever see are there. They must assume that's how all the animals get there. Kidnapping. Once George sets sail for the US and faces the peril of nearly drowning after falling off the ship, he relaxes with a "good pipe". Most parents would frown upon a depiction of a character smoking, but it points to how much George wants to be an adult. Later, he makes a false call to the fire department who arrive and place him under arrest. Then he goes to prison. Not a nice modern jail, but the one from Les Miserables. He escapes, then during his escape he becomes fascinated by balloons and floats away after he grabs them, which requires saving by the man with the yellow hat. George is rewarded by finally getting his place at the zoo, which he appears happy about. It's all pretty quaint, and amusing.

Those anachronisms I don't find controversial. It is the central element of the plot in nearly every book that doesn't fit in today's context. George is supposed to represent the natural curiosity and energy that all small children have, and how it often can get them into trouble during an adventure he undertakes by himself outside the man's apartment (or house). There's always a scene where George realizes he's made a big mistake, cries and then is rescued by the man with the yellow hat. This book is an exception to the others in the series because George does not leave the apartment through his own power, since he's arrested first and taken away. The only thing that resembles the other books is scene where he has to be rescued from the balloons. The controversy arises in the subsequent books. There are large swathes in the middle of the story where the man with yellow hat disappears, which I assume to represent the authority parent leaving for work, and where George is left unsupervised. It is often a common device used in children's books where the main character appears without adults for a period of time. Yet most parents wouldn't even think of letting even there school aged children alone for any period of time. Our kids are probably the most watched generation ever. I was a latch key kid, and my single parent mother would let me be home for several hours by myself after school. My neighborhood was idyllic, I had friends up and down the street and I would play sports with them and their older brothers. I turned out OK, but you would be hard pressed to find a parent who would allow this today. Parents themselves hardly even go outside in my neighborhood. Recently, I ran around the street we live with my kids and I saw some of the other kids in the neighborhood peeking out of their doors trying to figure out what we were doing. Yet in George, and in most children's books the bulk of their adventures are undertaken without parental supervision. I know, because I am guilty of that in my books as well. Perhaps its not an anachronism more than it is irony.

The later books, the ones written by contract writers for the publishing company after the Reys had passed on, also follow this "child left alone" narrative, but the man with yellow hat is less scarce. He will accompany George on an adventure to a toy store, or will leave him alone, but with most of the action taking place within house and out of the dangers of the outside world. I'm sure some parents were horrified by the tribulations George goes through in some of the earlier books and in the later ones the trouble is more friendly. In some way, the cultural phenomenon of Curious George may have contributed to parents being less likely to live their appropriately aged kids alone, though the line of that appropriateness may just have shifted over the years, for fear that they might not survive it. And we sometimes instill this in our kids. We help them to accomplish a simple task whether they need it or not. We tell them they can't be out of our sight at any time. Play areas all have clearly defined boundaries. We're more aware of the various dangers that can happen in the city because communication of some tragic event involving a child is that much more immediate. Dangers have always been there.

Yet, all the stories are about those children or their surrogates like Curious George, and the dangers our children can become self-fulfilling. Ultimately, George is a story of child abduction when you really think about it.

I'm Back

Not that any of the readers care, because they hardly exist, but I've decided to resuscitate this long neglected blog. Why? Because I'm tired of the internet. I spend some good portion of my days when I'm not actually working browsing the same tired sites and get psyche-rattling headaches from the banner ads and the empty headed and petty ramblings that make up 99 percent of that content. I'm going to add to that lack of content. I'll try to be less petty than other people, but at least there will never be an ad here. No one wants to advertise, and I'll not let them start now. So I'm going to tell my readers to check back regularly (by readers, I mean my wife - 'Hi, honey') and whoever else drunkenly stumble across this site while Googling whether they should eat something off the sidewalk.

If you want the blanket answer to that, it's "NO." Unless the five second rule applies.

I Learned Parenting from Mike Brady

There's an episode of The Brady Bunch where Greg gets grounded from driving because he was nearly involved in an accident and didn't admit it. He drives later anyway, using the defense that Mike didn't actual prohibit him because he didn't use the "exact words" that he couldn't drive. So Mike makes him stick to doing everything based on exact words to teach him a lesson, including suffering through taking Bobby with him on a date at the drive-in, because Greg said he would take him to a movie "sometime". Of course sitcom hilarity ensues, when Bobby also takes his pet frog which ends up on a greasy drive-in pizza and resulting in an overly disgusted date for Greg.

At our house, a bout with the cold has been going around; I got it and had a few sniffles and felt wiped out enough that I missed a day of work. I in turn gave it to my son, who got croup for a couple of days and missed school. Then my wife, who braved out a week before taking a couple of days sick. The day before my wife's first sick day my daughter threw up at a kids' birthday party, and couldn't keep anything down the night before. The next day, she wolfed down a piece of toast with chocolate sprinkles and then complained that her tummy hurt after we admitted she might have to stay home from school if she felt sick enough. My wife being very sick couldn't really take care of her, and I wasn't completely convinced she was all that sick, but I let her stay home anyway figuring it couldn't hurt.

Here's where I used the wisdom of Mike Brady. Yes, I am aware that it's a TV show, and Mike Brady represents the wisdom of the show's writers, but hear me out. I told my daughter that her Mom was too sick to take care of her, that she wouldn't be able to play with her and that she had to help her Mom out because she was pretty sick. The Mike Brady philosophy of creating a situation with consequences and forcing the child to learn a valuable lesson from it worked. When I returned home from work the first sentence out of my daughter's mouth was, "Daddy, I want to go back to school tomorrow."

In a way, I find the Mike Brady philosophy of parenting reprehensible. So your kid won't admit to nearly causing an accident. Why won't he do it? Because he knows that you'll create a situation of compounding negativity from which he'll never escape unless he cops to learning a lesson. On TV we move onto the next episode and another valuable lesson, and the negativity is never mentioned again because each TV episode is a complete vacuum so that viewers can consume it without knowing much about the show. But in reality, you can string together the opportunity of negative situations and you hope that your child will get something out of it. At the very least, learning how to avoid them. Perhaps through secrecy and cons, but understanding the consequences anyway.

Crust or No Crust?

I suppose I'm starting another theme pertaining to hypothetical questions, but this one has come up recently as a model of the slightly different parenting styles of my wife and I. It concerns a question that has been plaguing kids for centuries.

Why does bread have crust and why do I have to eat it?

The answer I explained to my daughter. The crust is the outside of the bread that gets the most heat when it gets baked, therefore it's darker. That's it. It doesn't taste different than the rest of the bread. However, kids don't choose food on taste alone. Texture, specifically whether it smells/feels/looks yucky determines whether they eat food. So with boiled whole potatoes, I take off the skin. With broccoli, only the crowns are eaten, not the stems. When I made my daughter her first peanut butter sandwich, she didn't want the crust, so I politely cut them off for her. When my wife made a peanut butter sandwich, my daughter asked for crust removal and my wife refused. I had set a bad precedent. Now we give her the whole sandwich, but she eats everything but the crust. Either way it gets wasted.

To me, you have to pick your battles with kids. It takes all of five seconds to cut the crusts off, and if I remember right I didn't like them when I was a kid either, so my Mom cut them off for me, too. After a while, I got over my "crusts are yucky" phase and learned to enjoy them. I would rather battle with my daughter about not hitting her brother and going to bed on time. My wife, on the other hand, views it annoying that she is asked to do this in effort to encourage our daughter to get over her reticence about certain foods. She's already a picky enough eater that we don't have to indulge this as well.

I suppose this comes down to the difference between my wife's personality and mine; I'm easygoing and she's pragmatic, though not harsh. However, she can also be easygoing and funloving with the kids, and I can be pretty stern with them as well. I'm a heavy-thinking person, I always have a lot of mental gravitas on my plate and need to do something simple for my kids to get me out of that. I think kids like a little indulgence, but in the long run it may catch up with me. Next my teenaged daughter is going to ask whether she can stay out late with her friends, to which I'd respond 'no', and she'll say: "But you used to be nice to me and cut the crust off my bread!"

King and King

UPDATE: Proposition 8 passed by a slim margin in California.

The U.S. is hitting an election on November 4th and here in California there is a proposition on the ballot that seeks to nullify a court decision earlier in the year which allowed same-sex couples to marry in California. Here is an ad currently running on TV in support of Proposition 8.



The commercial's panic is pretty humorous, but pulling the "look what it's going to do to our children" implication is often pretty effective in passing these kinds of measures. Six years ago, the voters passed an amendment to the California state constitution that defined a legal marriage to be only between a man and a woman, and this amendment was struck down as unconsitutional, thus legalizing same-sex marriage in California. Now the religious nuts trying the same thing again.

I mention it on this blog simply because it uses children in this way. The hysterics are that if nothing is done, children will not only think that being gay is OK, but will actually WANT to be gay. It poses two widely ridiculed notions that religious nuts believe, that being gay is a choice, and therefore you can make someone gay by making it accepted. The book they refer to is actually a stand-in for a real book that recently topped the list of the most banned books in the US called And Tango Makes Three. The story geared at preschoolers to third grade is about two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who make a loving couple and who desire to lay eggs and have children like other penguin couples. Instead they adopt an egg and nurture it until it hatches a daughter named Tango.

While the ad is humorous, it does get one thing right. In the state of Massachusetts, where another court decision legalizing same-sex marriage passed, it requires that public schools teach that being gay is acceptable and have a curriculum that shows gay couples as being normal. Similar things could happen in California. However, if Proposition 8 passes, then schools couldn't talk about it at all. Although I feel that it's important to talk about such questions at home when they come up, there are many households who don't discuss it all and where a child growing up gay may feel society is hostile to it. Also, many people know gay couples with children. If every child is told only stories and situations where straight couples are the only partners, then wouldn't that confuse kids about gay couples? If they aren't talked about, a child would wonder, then why aren't they?

Understanding same-sex couples isn't something that requires kids be older and have maturity. They don't understand gender roles, and in a loving household they understand that affection is normal part of life and that human beings hug and kiss each other all of the time. Kids don't care if it's two men or two women, they accept whatever their parents do. And yet, they feel it necessary to teach kids about September 11th in schools, even in kindergarten. How do you explain that to a child? Violent events are OK to teach in school, but love is not? How do you explain terrorism to a kindergartner without keeping them awake with nightmares. My daughter had to learn about 9/11 in kindergarten, but should couldn't tell me an inkling about what it meant.

Why should a married straight guy with children care about this issue? It goes beyond just a ballot proposition. To me, just having to explain why it exists breeds intolerance, a law that exists only to regress something that is more widely accepted. I want my kids to feel that being gay or having friends that are gay is OK. Most kids understand that anyway, so it creates a generational conflict to pass a law like this. Also, I have some personal experience - within my circle of friends in middle school and high school, there were four guys who we suspected were gay. My friends were all geeks of some kind or another, so my group of friends were all the social outcasts, and it was natural that gay guys would hang out with us since no one else would understand. Of course, in the eighties and in a conservative city like I grew up in it was common to make passing jokes and innuendoes that gay was a synonym for anything derisive. I made such suggestions, too. The eighties was also a strange time. The hypermasculine intersected with gay culture in places like music, but gay figures such as Boy George were seen as cultural artifacts and not real. One of the old money elite in my school called me gay because I crossed my legs in class, to give you an idea of the homosexual panic that was going on. That guy, by the way, the product of patrician WASP-y family, was at my ten year reunion, fat, drunk and jobless.

Out of that environment, two of the four gay friends I had in school committed suicide by the age of twenty-five. One, not realizing that he was gay slept with another friend and couldn't deal with the ostracizing he got from his family and his own guilt, so he hung himself. Another just practiced whatever extreme of life he could, doing drugs and killing himself slowly until he hastened it along by swallowing a bottle of pills.

Had they been just told in school early on that being gay was OK, maybe they would still be around.

What I Am reading to my kids, part 7

Where the Wild Things Are
By
Maurice Sendak

"...And it was still hot." This is probably my favorite line of the book, the very last one. It is significant because it is a quintessentially dual meaning line common to many children's books, that is that children and adults will interpret the line in different ways. I suppose that is true for most culture one encounters in life. I was watching a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie not too long ago, admiring the elegant and fleet foot work, and my son was following along, trying to imitate the tap dancing, as if it was something fun that all adults do.

The story of Where the Wild Things Are is almost negligible. A mischievous boy named Max dressed like a monster is sent to his room without supper and he imagines his room to transmogrify to a forest and a voyage to an island populated by monsters who regard him fearfully enough to make him king. After some wordless frolicking on the island, Max realizes he is really hungry and misses his family, so he returns to his room to find his dinner waiting for him "still hot." The dual meaning of the last line: to children, the hot meal represents comfort and becomes the most important feeling after the adventure described in the story, and to adults it is humorous for the same reasons, and an indication of something only adults know, that the only time that has passed is in Max's imagination. Kids on the other think a long time has passed, since that's what the story says and is a surprising afterthought.

The book is unusual in some respects for the middle, where there is nothing to read and only shows several pictures of Max and the monsters frolicking. These days it seems that every picture has to have narration, so when I read to my daughter she expects me to describe what is going on. Instead I just let her ask me questions about it, such as saying which of the monsters is my favorite, a common distinction kids ask for validation (it's the one that looks like a rooster, by the way).

The main trope employed in the story is one where an imaginary world is placed in an ordinary setting without a transition of some kind - it happens without comment. There is perhaps a history of this, beginning with C.S. Lewis' Narnia books or The Phantom Tollbooth, where a vehicle is clearly described to go to an imaginary world, then leading later to books like this one or say Harold and the Purple Crayon where the world is created spontaneously. Today, it is common to see people just existing in an imaginary world as a matter of fact, which not surprising since kids can instantly put themselves actively into a setting via a video game. Unfortunately, it seems as though the aftereffect is that kids can't really differentiate the two, whereas earlier stories focus on a clear transition between the terrestrial and the imaginary. There is no clearer definition than in the Lewis novels, when the world of an England under attack from the Nazis leads to haven in the world of Narnia.

Remembering classic toys, II

Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House

Not a toy per se, but a record. Yes, a vinyl record that one played on something called a 'turn-table'. As a kid, I had a few records, mostly Disney records, that I played on appropriately enough a Disney toy turntable, with Mickey on the underside of the lid and his arm acting as the arm of the record player.



I used to try to get Mickey to pick his nose, but that's another story. Many long hours were spent listening to my Haunted House 33 RPM record, a collection of stock foley sound effects created at Disney Studios and put together as a collection of "scary sounds". Some of the sounds were later used for the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, while others had been previously used in some cartoon shorts. In fact, the cover for the record at top came from the concept sketches for the Haunted Mansion from the early sixties. The record consisted of one side of narrated stories related to the sounds, which try to put the kid in a scary frame of mind, things like "You're near an old dark mansion, and suddenly you see a light in the tower...you go to the house and never come back!". That's followed by a collection of haunted house sounds, wind, thunder, creaky doors and groans and screams, and cat noises. Every story has a scary concept, and all of them end with a blood curdling scream which is supposed to be yours. The same exact two screams. One goes "Wha-wha-whaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" and the other "Whaaaaaa-oooooh-waaahhh-oh!" and trails off. Talk about getting some mileage out of the few sound effects. The cat noises come back again, and the narrator tries to get you to picture your sweet loving cat turning against you, hissing and howling. My favorites are the attempt to make cutting down a tree scary, you hear, saw, saw, saw, saw, saw and then one of those two stock screams presumably as the tree falls on you. The Martian landing, where you the space traveller become lunch for Martians (indicated by two foley artists eating celery). The best is the Chinese water torture, where the narrator refers to them as a "clever race" and then after you hear water dripping for a few minutes, and unsettlingly, the sound of your torturer adjusting themselves in a creaky chair. Finally, the narrator, acting as the victim, blurts out "Ching-chong-ching" etc. supposedly as a confession in Chinese. Well, that's 1964 for you. The second side consists of a collection of just sounds for use in your own stories and for sound effects in your own Halloween haunted house. Those same two screams again appear on the "collection of screams and groans".

I loved sound effects records when I was a kid. You sat there and tried to invoke the images they suggest, merely from sound. Imagine that, an afternoon spent listening to sound effects and using one's creativity. Wow, how far we've come with media these days, with video games, CGI effects, where nothing is left to the imagination that's not explicitly laid out. You don't have to take a step without someone holding your hand, and all we had were measly sound effects records and books as a platform for the imagination.