Virtual Seventies
Jan. 24th, 2007 09:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupSo, as you can see, we have been enjoying things well enough since Mister Softee* decided some months ago that he liked to sit in the bay window. Won't sit in a playpen -- he wants to be where the action is -- but put him in the window, surrounded with cheerios, measuring spoons, pots, and anything else that can be banged, and he can amuse himself for well over an hour. This has worked splendidly for the parental unit whose departure from the room causes him to break out into anguished shrieks. So now that I have a wireless laptop from work I just set up shop on the couch behind him, eat my breakfast, read the paper, catch up on my email, and wait for the day to begin. It goes pretty well. Unfortunately he's about to spoil it all by crawling, which he's very, very close to figuring out.
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I made a conscious decision in the several moves in my life to conserve some toys and other ephemera from my childhood that I found too neat to part with. At times I wonder if I went too far. On a day when I read Jo Obstreperous after she's played with my Fisher-Price Play Village and matching house (complete with the play people that killed and injured toddlers back in the day) and watched Schoolhouse Rock after listening to Burl Ives in the car, for example, it is hard to escape the feeling that your life is one long moebius strip.
In truth she isn't into any of those things currently, but then in the past few days the Mrs. has been exploring the miracle of YouTube, which lets you assemble a kind of purified or ideal version of the Sesame Street you remember from childhood. Jo is put off by the muppet sequences, but what really stimulates the deepest gangliar recesses of your mind are the little animation clips and movies. The Mrs. got all verklempt at the infamous "Milk, Milk, Miiiilk" song, which I actually didn't remember but you have to admit is pretty intense, particularly now that we're parents. For me the shudder of recognition was with watching Little Dollhouse or that weird Indian counting guy. For those of us of a certain age these things can't help but transform us back into gaping four-year-olds. How deeply everything about us must have been shaped by all that -- not least in that folk and jazz-fusion eclecticism that marked so much of the music of seventies children's media, which you can't hear without a kind of visceral shudder. It just feels... weird.
Yet in spite of what I think must be the universal response of my age cohort to this stuff, people I know well continue to give their kids the full crapulence of double-nought children's media with hardly a second thought. "Oh, you know Sesame Street is still on" said an old friend of mine, when I mentioned all this to him on the phone the other night. Yes, but only with that evil satanic bastard who ruined it. "But we love Elmo. Hey, have you discovered the Wiggles?" Sigh.
(Speaking of psychopathic children's media, the Mrs. told Jo that the unimaginably terrifying Boohbah things were "turds," but then got Jo some Boohbah band-aids, so now Jo is thrilled to show everyone her "turd band-aids." I wonder about the Mrs., sometimes.)
So then you can finish off the night in front of the NFL Network watching the entire original broadcast of Super Bowl XIII. Courtesy of Tivo, you can watch it anytime, in the corner of one eye while washing the dishes, say. While fascinating, it also has an eerie, Buffalo '66-like effect of trapping you in a touchstone moment of your own past. But I don't know. There are times when, all childhood trauma aside, going to bed at night knowing that Mister Rogers liked you and the Steelers were the best team ever, yet not knowing who Ronald Reagan or Madonna were, can sound pretty good. It's the kind of world that one is tempted to construct for one's children. So I'm looking forward to when the Free to Be You and Me DVD arrives from the library as the next thing. Let's keep this going as long as possible.
* If you think you have a lot of nicknames for your cat, you have nothing on our silly baby nicknames, but I'm not going to get into that here.
-------------------------------------------
I made a conscious decision in the several moves in my life to conserve some toys and other ephemera from my childhood that I found too neat to part with. At times I wonder if I went too far. On a day when I read Jo Obstreperous after she's played with my Fisher-Price Play Village and matching house (complete with the play people that killed and injured toddlers back in the day) and watched Schoolhouse Rock after listening to Burl Ives in the car, for example, it is hard to escape the feeling that your life is one long moebius strip.
In truth she isn't into any of those things currently, but then in the past few days the Mrs. has been exploring the miracle of YouTube, which lets you assemble a kind of purified or ideal version of the Sesame Street you remember from childhood. Jo is put off by the muppet sequences, but what really stimulates the deepest gangliar recesses of your mind are the little animation clips and movies. The Mrs. got all verklempt at the infamous "Milk, Milk, Miiiilk" song, which I actually didn't remember but you have to admit is pretty intense, particularly now that we're parents. For me the shudder of recognition was with watching Little Dollhouse or that weird Indian counting guy. For those of us of a certain age these things can't help but transform us back into gaping four-year-olds. How deeply everything about us must have been shaped by all that -- not least in that folk and jazz-fusion eclecticism that marked so much of the music of seventies children's media, which you can't hear without a kind of visceral shudder. It just feels... weird.
Yet in spite of what I think must be the universal response of my age cohort to this stuff, people I know well continue to give their kids the full crapulence of double-nought children's media with hardly a second thought. "Oh, you know Sesame Street is still on" said an old friend of mine, when I mentioned all this to him on the phone the other night. Yes, but only with that evil satanic bastard who ruined it. "But we love Elmo. Hey, have you discovered the Wiggles?" Sigh.
(Speaking of psychopathic children's media, the Mrs. told Jo that the unimaginably terrifying Boohbah things were "turds," but then got Jo some Boohbah band-aids, so now Jo is thrilled to show everyone her "turd band-aids." I wonder about the Mrs., sometimes.)
So then you can finish off the night in front of the NFL Network watching the entire original broadcast of Super Bowl XIII. Courtesy of Tivo, you can watch it anytime, in the corner of one eye while washing the dishes, say. While fascinating, it also has an eerie, Buffalo '66-like effect of trapping you in a touchstone moment of your own past. But I don't know. There are times when, all childhood trauma aside, going to bed at night knowing that Mister Rogers liked you and the Steelers were the best team ever, yet not knowing who Ronald Reagan or Madonna were, can sound pretty good. It's the kind of world that one is tempted to construct for one's children. So I'm looking forward to when the Free to Be You and Me DVD arrives from the library as the next thing. Let's keep this going as long as possible.
* If you think you have a lot of nicknames for your cat, you have nothing on our silly baby nicknames, but I'm not going to get into that here.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 03:12 am (UTC)What I especially love is the northern new englandy winter sky, and how the dairy farmer is doing it all by hand. And the generic "MILK" sign on the truck, and how funny the guy looks running around with that hose. There's a lot to like about that one.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 11:35 pm (UTC)I KNOW!!! i'm so compulsive. i apologize heartily.
p.s. i like the turd story.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-29 07:54 pm (UTC)Jo is ambivalent about the puppets. She liked the Muppet Show, briefly, but then lost interest. Now she calls them "silly shows" and evinces distaste for them, but I don't know if that's a preference for animation over live-action generally. (She did freak out at seeing someone in a Big Bird costume last year, though.)