This Classical Life

A must read post by a friend-of-this-blog. This post is sensitive in nature as it mentions an adopted child’s death at the hand of her parents - cardiac arrest brought on by spanking. Please pray for her sister, in critical condition, and for all families struggling with difficult to discipline children that this would not continue to happen.

I love that my alma mater is the center of this story in the new york times about male-female ratios on the college campus.

Lexi and I spend a good amount of time alone together in the car. One of our favorite activities lately is to put the ipod on shuffle and let her rate the songs. Here are some of her current favorites (in a “playlist” order.) I find her tastes interesting, somewhat unpredictable, and occasionally annoying (how can she reject Wilco and Ingrid Michaelson, for example?)

LEXI’S LIST . 2010.01
I Got You (I Feel Good) - James Brown
Video Killed The Radio Star - The Buggles
What I Like About You - The Romantics
I’d Rather Dance With You - Kings of Convenience
Run With All You’ve Got - Jon Black
You Make My Dreams - Hall & Oates
Proud Mary - Creedence Clearwater Revival
When I’m Sixty-Four - The Beatles
Chicago - Sufjan Stevens
The Littlest Birds - The Be Good Tanyas
Wrapped Up in Books - Belle & Sebastian
Three Little Birds - Bob Marley
Peace Like a River - Elizabeth Mitchell
Lovely, Love My Family - The Roots
My Girl - The Temptations
Shoo Fly - Elizabeth Mitchell
Beautiful Girl - Andrew Peterson And Randall Goodgame
Great Big World - Pierce Pettis
This Little Light Of Mine - Elizabeth Mitchell
Bedtime Lullaby - Mark Kozelek

Our friend Jon just posted a new song on his website. It’s beautiful and true.

We spent some time yesterday on youtube, watching “I Have a Dream” and the last speech from Memphis. We watched Walter Cronkite tell the nation about King’s death. And I found a neat roughly animated bit on the Children of Birmingham.

Talking to Kate about it was interesting. Trying to get her head around such hate was difficult. When the camera panned to the audience during I Have a Dream, she asked, “are those the Christians?” It was a reminder to me that God’s people will break her heart and disappoint her. Not sure how to prepare her for that but it’s something I will think about.

There is this part of the speech, “I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Kate smiled at me when she heard it. She told me that was true at Cornerstone.

It’s not always easy to talk to kids about race, hate, prejudice, and injustice. I realized we need to be having more of these conversations.

Heartbreaker by Ryan Adams is an album for tortured souls. The year that I was the most angst ridden for no particular reason (let’s call it the college emo year), I played this album over and over again.

I was living with a girl who did not curse. Or like to hear cursing. A girl who enjoyed listening to K-Love. Whenever I wanted to be alone, all I had to do was start playing it and she would scatter.

Growing up a bit, I dropped my need to play “Come Pick Me Up” loudly. It’s still a good listen. Sometimes I even ache to hear “Oh My Sweet Carolina” with Emmylou Harris providing the sweet harmonies. And when I feel like harmonica (and I do, from time to time) this is one of my first choices. All the passion makes this album one that I will never forget.

I took the girls and two of their friends to see 101 Dalmatians: The Musical this afternoon. It was a good introduction to musical theatre, the story was familiar enough to follow along and the production was whimsical and child-friendly. If we had paid for a babysitter to go see it as a date, I probably would have been disappointed. But, that wasn’t the case, and the kids all had a great time, so I enjoyed it as well.

Parenting is one big adventure of shaping your children’s views of the world, life and everything, and doing things like this makes me consider how much we are exposing them to the arts. It makes me understand how people can get sucked in to over-scheduling with activity after activity because if you neglect one, you might miss a great gift or not develop a passion. I think we can all see how an excess of pursuits can tax a family in many ways, and distort a child’s view of his own importance, but drawing the line between good and too much can’t be easy.

How do you find balance in your family? Is it dictated by time, cost, number of pursuits per child?

I caught the absolutely enchanting duo the Civil Wars live tonight. If you haven’t downloaded their FREE live cd, you ought to go do that, posthaste. You’re welcome.

The way goodreads labels their five star system is

* i didn’t like it
** it was okay
*** liked it
**** really liked it
***** it was amazing

It’s simple and intuitive, but it leaves much to be desired. There are great books that I don’t necessarily like, but I still find worth reading for some reason or another. For example, I don’t know that I “really liked” Lolita. But it is marked four stars on my goodreads account. I think Nabov set out to show us a warped mind, a thoroughly unlikeable narrator, a child we want to care for and can’t always bring ourselves to. He portrayed coercion and tyranny in dark, messy, and very human ways. It was a novel the world didn’t know we needed, and for that, I think the book has a rightful place among the classics.

Sometimes books are written or movies are made with a purpose in mind other than leaving the audience with a warm and fuzzy feeling. And then they need to be evaluated by whether that purpose is worth pursuing, and how well they fulfilled their purpose. Criticism larger than just plain gut reaction. In that way, a movie with an ending you aren’t happy with can still be something that you believe is an amazing film.

I am not sure how we fix the stars of goodreads, just know that likability is not my only concern as I rate.

Just watched this with a free rental credit from Amazon (AVODGIFT - good until 1/3!) - what a great film. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel were perfect choices for the main characters. The non-linear storytelling works really well, as our memories aren’t fixed chronologically and remembering a relationship is like the movie, in fits and spurts, with one memory spurring another. It’s a film where beauty is up front, with an excellent soundtrack, beautiful cinematography, even hip and interesting wardrobe choices. I loved listening to Tom talk about buildings. Architecture is such a key element of the movie, and it’s integrated excellently.

There are some romantic comedy cliches (I am not entirely sure why the long-haired friend is even in the film) but the little sister character was pretty awesome, as cliches go. I loved her saying over wii tennis early in the movie “just because some girl likes the same bizarro crap you do, doesn’t make her your soul mate.” Even though, as the narrator says, it is not a love story, it’s true and real, and not without hope. See it!

An excess of twitter followers, random emails, international phone calls in the middle of the night…

sharing a name with a star can be really trying.

This is pretty momentous. Going to the movies as a couple is typically more or less a non-option between the cost of tickets and the cost of babysitting. Dates are scarce enough, movies are just over the top. (Especially with our HBO included rental, the library, and redbox.)

Not only did we see a movie in the actual theatre… we saw TWO in two days. I am not a movie critic, and don’t feel as comfortable reviewing a film as I do a book, but I’ll do it anyway.

Michael’s choice was Sherlock Holmes. We both loved it. He’d see it again tonight if I would let him. It’s really well done, the acting is great, the colors and conception are both excellent, it’s one I envision we will end up owning.

My choice was Up in the Air. I loved Thank You for Smoking and Juno and think Jason Reitman may just be the go-to guy making real movies about life in our generation and I wanted to support it. It was a fantastic film. You ought to see it. It’s a thoughtful film that explores community, why we need it, how we figure out that we do… in a smart and beautiful way with characters that are real and deeply flawed. Even the editing stood out to me for how well it captured different aspects of the film. I am looking forward to digesting it more over days and viewings to come.