September 1, 2017
[Casa Santo Domingo, Antigua Guatemala.] It is a wonderful strange experience to drive into a place at dark, in the pouring rain, to try to piece together what the place is, but then see it in the full light of the morning…
September 2, 2017
A woman and her son watching the maccaws. Women carrying baskets on their heads. Men driving pickup trucks with the beds full of flowers. Boys carrying bouquets. Schoolgirls standing on the street corner and giggling and eating ice cream…
September 3, 2017
My horoscope told me “Visite la iglesia” so that’s just what I did: wandered the ruins at the San Francisco Inglesia, and threw in a prayer for good measure. Then I went for an avocado ice cream at La Tienda de Doña Gavi (The Store of Mrs. Gavi) and strolled around as the afternoon storm clouds filled the valley…
September 4, 2017
September 5, 2017
Owen was sitting in the corner with his eyes wide open and I asked him what was wrong and he said, “I just don’t know what to do today!”
September 6, 2017
Jules scribbled on a piece of paper with one of my new pens then disappeared into the music room and when I went to yell at him for walking off w/ a pen — it turned out he was putting the paper on a music stand — it was music that he had written that he was ready to conduct!
September 7, 2017
Yesterday I made a list of monster dads: Hemingway’s son wrote him a letter asking if it was worth destroying their lives, Faulkner’s daughter asked him to stop drinking and he growled, “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children,” Picasso’s granddaughter sold off his paintings because she wanted to…
September 8, 2017
[Dad and I] somehow we got to talking about the afterlife and I said, “Well, if there is one, we probably won’t have human bodies.” He said, “I think we’ll get new bodies.” “Oh?” I said. “Yeah, like the one Jesus had after he was resurrected. He actually sat down and ate with the disciples, and said, uh, ‘Got any fish?’” I thought that was the funniest thing ever: Got any fish?
September 9, 2017
Reading I Learn From Children. Caroline Pratt says it does not matter what the students are learning as much as how they are learning. Whether they are learning how to learn. That is the thing you are trying to teach…
September 10, 2017
September 11, 2017
Think of the most mundane, annoying errand — after you have small children, should you be lucky enough to run that errand solo, it will immediately become 100x more pleasurable. (Just got back from Costco.)
September 12, 2017
Spent post-bedtime with my soldering gun, that I finally learned to use by “fixing” Owen’s Baby Einstein music machine and the little monkey book, which was missing a speaker, so I added one from a little musical Hallmark card we’d taken apart months and months ago…
September 13, 2017
Started practicing a new Schumann piece yesterday when the house was empty — No. 7, “Reverie,” from his kids’ songs… Owen took apart a remote…
September 14, 2017
Last night Jules was up on a stepstool, waving his baton and singing a symphony after his tub, and Meg kept trying to put his towel over him and he kept shouting “No!” and shaking it off — it was exactly like the James Brown TAMI show routine w/ his sideman and his cape. Hilarious.
September 15, 2017
What do we owe each other? This question came up in the context of dead artists—Kafka wanted all his stuff burned. Vivian Maier wasn’t even dead when her negatives were loosened on the world by losing her storage unit (has anybody written about how Storage Wars and the Vivian Maier story are close contemporaries?)
September 16, 2017
Things I found on the playground: a potato, a joker card, and a safe sex kit. Birthday balloons stuck in the trees…
September 17, 2017
Owen has made a robot of construction paper and the innards of Ted’s cell phone. He calls him “Circuit” and hugs him and tells him he loves him. Last night he had bad dreams about “vampires, skeletons, ghosts, and mummy fingers,” but, he said, robots don’t get afraid… (We all had bad dreams last night) … I sent him out to get the Sunday paper — he looked like he was shouting at someone [and I asked him about it] and he said he was shouting at the cicadas to be quiet
September 18, 2017
I got up at 6:30… trying to have some thoughts to myself before anybody whines at me, asks them to fix their robot, or tells me they wish I was dead.
September 19, 2017
It’s not even 8AM, and Owen and I have worked out an arrangement of “LED” Soundsystem’s “Oh Baby” — Owen on organ, me on bass and bass drum. “OH SUGAR! OH BABY! YOU’RE HAVING A BAD DREAM…”
September 20, 2017
NEW MOON tonight — I’ve suddenly become somebody who can guess what phase the moon is in just by how shitty they feel…
September 21, 2017
September 22, 2017
I will not argue with people on the internet. I will not argue with people on the internet…
September 23, 2017
I came in from the studio and Jules said, “PAPA!!” and then gave my legs a huge hug… Garage sale day in the neighborhood… somebody had a free digital punch in / punch out system, so after O came out from quiet time, having disassembled his mini lite-brite without asking I suggested that he take it apart, and he did — he’s going to keep the pieces for his robot halloween costume.
September 24, 2017
Owen was trying to sneak screwdrivers off into his room this morning.
September 25, 2017
[O] made new robots so that Circuit wouldn’t be lonely.
September 26, 2017
September 27, 2017
There is a sign you see in antique stores:
“The item you saw today
and want to think about tonight
will be sold later today
to the people who saw it yesterday
and thought about it last night!”
It is folksy, manipulative, effective, and slightly evil, like all good marketing. I always want to know the origins of these signs, as the internet turns up dozens of variations in a quick search. They fit in perfectly with the internet—and I think often of how primed I was for meme culture by my mom dragging me to antique shops and craft sales on the weak-ends. So much of social media is the digital equivalent of a cross-stitched pillow on your grandma’s couch…
September 28, 2017
David Hockney talking about going deaf making him better at art… does this have anything to do with my theory about physical shortcomings sometimes leading to signature work? Walter Murch’s father had an eye injury that “jellied” his vision—lead him to make those strange depth paintings…
September 29, 2017
It would seem that one way to help the weirdos is to help them show their value —to put themselves in marketable terms — but there is the terrible possibility that in doing so you ruin what is so valuable about them in the first place — by making them marketable, or translating them for the market, something essential is lost. We all have to play ball, I guess. Or can we just sit the bench? BENCHWARMING was actually pretty delightful. Picking flowers out in the outfield. The pleasures of sitting in the dugout and mouthing off…
September 30, 2017
