New Music: Underground Playground

Let’s face it: For just about any parent who likes hip-hop, the phrase “hip-hop for kids” is filled with dread. Almost all of the attempts at it can be summed up by the word joke—either intentional (I give Elmo’s occasional rapping on Sesame Street, which is meant to be funny, a pass) or horribly, horribly not. So I once tended to view the few children’s hip-hop CDs I encountered with skepticism.

Then Secret Agent 23 Skidoo came out with his first album, Easy, in 2008. As I’ve written before, and so many other reviewers wrote at the time, it was a revelation: “kid-hop,” as he calls it, was suddenly a viable genre after all. The key—really the key for almost all art forms for kids—was that 23 Skidoo doesn’t dumb things down for children. The subject matter was obviously different than it would be on an adult rap album, but the beats, the rhythms, and the rhymes were not, for the first time in my experience. (It didn’t hurt that 23 Skidoo has been a rapper and producer of grown-up hip-hop, with Asheville group G.F.E., for well over a decade—though it also must be said that others of similar description have made such forays with far less success.)

My wife and kids loved Easy as much as I did, and it got tons of play around the house. We found ourselves eagerly anticipating his follow-up, though my own anticipation was tempered by a little knowledge of sophomore slumps. Now that he was established, could 23 Skidoo maintain his high standards without simply repeating himself?

I shouldn’t have worried. Underground Playground, which comes out August 31 (tomorrow!), is still clearly the work of the reigning king of kid-hop, but it expands on his debut, too. He dabbles in crossover with other genres, from the sunny singsong reggae of “Road Trip” to the Pogues-esque final section of “Wildlife” (representing a cheetah, fittingly enough). Meanwhile, his lyrics again convey positive messages on subjects like friendship (“Secret Handshake”) and honesty (the Public Enemy–tinged “Speak the Truth”) without ever getting finger-waggy, or losing the loose sense of fun that’s the core of so much quality hip-hop. (The verbiage in “Mind Over Matter,” a song about being yourself—perhaps 23 Skidoo’s core message—is a particular highlight.)

Perhaps most important, the beats and riffs he lays down are top-notch—catchy and addictive, they have your head bouncing in no time. Even here the new album pushes envelopes, though. While the cement is still the old-school hip-hop sound this artist clearly loves (think KRS-One), you also hear the influence of more modern names, especially in the song arrangements: Eminem, Jay-Z. Frankly, the eclectic nature of 23 Skidoo’s work is reminiscent of a lot of people, but if I had to pick one, it'd have to be Michael Franti, with whom he shares both positivity of message and an ability to rap effectively over many different styles of music.

Like its predecessor, Underground Playground is an awful lot of fun to listen to, and if your kids are anything like mine, they'll be asking to hear certain tracks over and over. (It’s been getting serious car mileage lately for us!) And you won’t mind a bit. In fact, when you realize you’ve left it on in the car when the kids aren’t around, you might just leave it in there, and coast down the road with your head nodding.

As a taste, here's a video for another track from the album, “Chase the Rain”:



[Image courtesy of Secret Agent 23 Skidoo]

New Music: Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti

The all-star-musician benefit concept goes back years, of course, to George Harrison's Bangladesh concert, and a bit later the "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and "We Are the World" singles. But with the exception of a few giants like Pete Seeger (who's been doing benefit and charity work with his music his whole career, really), there haven't been enough big names in kids' music for such a thing to be possible in the genre.

But Dean Jones (no, not the one from the original Love Bug movies—the frontman of kids' band Dog on Fleas), with a little help from the recent explosion of talent in this genre, has changed all that. Back in January, Jones desperately wanted to do something to help the earthquake victims in Haiti; he came up with the idea of a kindie-rock album to raise money. He joined forces with KindieFest cofounder Bill Childs, and the pair proceeded to put together an incredibly impressive roster of artists for the project.

The result is Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti, a CD of 22 songs, one each from many of the top children's musicians working today. Seriously, if I were making a list of the genre's top echelon of talent, it would look a lot like this track list: Recess Monkey, They Might Be Giants, Frances England, Secret Agent 23 Skidoo, Jonathan Coulton, Dan Zanes, Gustafer Yellowgold, Elizabeth Mitchell...the list goes on and on. Even the venerable Seeger himself contributed a track!

The proceeds (all the greater because everyone involved in the album's production, replication, and distribution either donated or heavily discounted their services) will benefit the Haitian People's Support Project, an organization with a long history of important work in the country. Knowing this is certainly one benefit to parents and kids who purchase this CD.

But of course, you're also getting the best possible sampler of the cutting edge of today's kids' rock, pop, folk, and hip-hop. If your kids are already familiar with most of the artists, they'll be excited to get a new song from so many of them between new releases. (My five-year-old's favorites: "Fiddlehead Fern," by Recess Monkey, and "Quite Early Morning" from Seeger.) And if they're not, Many Hands offers the best single way I've seen to get a taste of so many of the genre's leading lights, all in one place, and find out which your kids (and you!) might want to hear more of.

So it's a great album, and a great opportunity, all serving a great cause. (I should also mention that there are still a few release shows upcoming in September in Brooklyn; Portland, Oregon; and Northampton, Mass., each featuring a number of the artists on the CD, so if you're in or near those places, check those out, too!)

[Cover image courtesy of Spare the Rock Records]

New Books: Chalk

I've mentioned once before how magical a wordless picture book by an accomplished illustrator can be, and thanks to the generosity of our friend Tanya, we've just encountered one that both my sons are currently crazy about—Chalk, by Bill Thomson. (Somehow we missed it when it first came out early in the year, so I'm especially grateful to her for bringing it to our attention!)

The story is straightfoward: Three kids discover that their sidewalk chalk drawings are coming to life—good when one girl draws a bunch of beautiful butterflies, less so when a boy (natch) draws a T. rex. But it's told via a series of drop-dead-gorgeous illustrations that look so photorealistic, it's hard to believe at first that they're illustrations. (There's a note at the back assuring readers that they are, in fact, drawn, and Thomson even details his fascinating process for achieving such realistic detail, complete with his remarkable sketches for Chalk, on the publisher's website.)

It isn't simply that the art is stunning, though; Thomson does a fantastic job of telling the story without a single word. The result is a quietly masterful page turner of a picture book that, if my kids are any indication at all, will have yours obsessed in short order.

[Cover image courtesy of Marshall Cavendish]

Old School: Drive-in Movies

I'm really cheating in calling this an Old School, since I'd never been to a drive-in movie theater in my life before last week, and until recently I had no idea there were even any functioning ones left. My eyes were opened by my friends Joyce and Michael (the proprietor of the wonderful movie blog Cinema du Meep), and after some abortive attempts to attend one of the handful of options within relatively easy driving distance of NYC this summer, we wondered if there might be any drive-ins near the spot where we were vacationing in Rhode Island.

As it turned out, there is one. (Well, it's on the other side of the state from where we were--but it's a really small state!) As seems to be the general practice at many of these places nowadays, you pay an entry fee to one screen there, at which two movies play each evening, usually a child- (and not necessarily adult-) friendly option first, and something R-rated second. With young kids, obviously, you generally just go for the first one, rather than attempting to get your toddler to shut his eyes and ears for two-plus hours of Inglourious Basterds.

In this case, there were two screens that were starting out with kid flicks, and our choice was between Despicable Me and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. Being big saps, we let our older son choose, and predictably enough, he picked the one that didn't at least have Steve Carell's voice going for it. He loves cats. And dogs. (We were going to get Kenneth the Page either way, though—he appears to have a corner on the drive-in kiddie movie this summer.)

Now, this is not a review of the Cats & Dogs movie, though I will admit it wasn't as bad as I expected. (So nice to see Nick Nolte and Bette Midler working together again, even if the last time they actually had to be in the same place at the same time. And I'm always a sucker for a Wallace Shawn voiceover.) The experience of watching a silly movie with your kids in your parked car, though: This I give two thumbs up. Many more veteran families around us came better prepared, actually, parking their SUVs backwards and essentially tailgating for the film. But for our first go, we found it delightful just being enclosed together for the experience. It blew our two-year-old away in particular—his eyes got implausibly wide when he saw that giant white wall turn into a giant video. The whole thing was the perfect summer shared family experience.

Plus, we got Sean Hayes's vocal impersonation of Hannibal Lecter. Truly something for everyone.

[Photo by Drm31, via Wikimedia Commons]

New Books: StoryWorld

I have always been envious of those natural storytelling parents, the kind who sit down next to their child's bed each night and invent rich tales full of memorable characters and exciting plot twists. On the rare occasions I've attempted this, I've found myself internally grasping at straws, with results that are both bizarrely random and overly fixed on getting to the next plot point. ("Once upon a time there was a...muskrat! And he lived in the forest next door to his best friend, a...sloth! And one day they awoke to find...the forest was on fire! So they rushed to...their other friend, an elephant, yeah...and he lived next to a lake, and he took the water in his trunk and put out the fire with it, and the forest was saved. The end.") At the abrupt endings of these tales, my sons tend to look more bemused than amused.

I had more or less given up, accepting that facile, spellbinding storytelling wasn't among my gifts, until I saw the new StoryWorld, by John and Caitlin Matthews. It's an originally British package of beautifully illustrated cards, very much in the style of tarot cards, each featuring a character ("The Mother", "The Youngest Daughter," "The Cat"), a location ("The Castle"), or a magical/potentially magical thing or place ("The Magic Mirror," "The Door to Faeryland," "The Star Blanket"). Each contains a few leading questions on the back ("Where is the cat going on this starry night?"), as well as a number of suitably ambiguous happenings in the background of the illustration on the front.

The point of all this, of course, is inspiration. As the small included instruction book explains, you just pick out a certain number of cards—your child's favorites, or random ones—and then weave them together into a narrative. You can use the provided questions as jumping-off points, or ignore them and come up with your own ideas; you can do the same with all the little things occurring on each card. (You soon discover that these all link together, with major items on one card turning up in supporting roles on others—besides being gorgeous, these illustrations are intricately conceived and crafted.)

The stories still don't tell themselves, of course. But I found these little crutches remarkably freeing the first time I tried: I wasn't grasping for the core characters and ideas of my story anymore, and so I could devote my (clearly limited) creative imagination to filling it out with descriptions and plotting. There's certainly a learning curve—I don't mean to imply I've been transformed into Elmore Leonard or something—but I can feel myself moving along it, rather than completely stuck in place as I was before.

More important than my own storytelling education, though, is that my five-year-old is mesmerized. He's enjoying my stories from the cards, sure, but he's also been eager from the start to use these tools to engage in his own tales. Right now he's in the middle of a stretch where he's adding a couple of cards' worth of plot to a continuing story we both contribute to each night. Nothing like this ever happened before StoryWorld.

I'm hoping we can both eventually reach a point where we don't need the cards anymore. (Dash is a lot closer than I am.) I'm optimistic, and if I'm right to be, StoryWorld will have taught us how to invent compelling tales at a moment's notice. While my son may have been on his way to that anyway (his mother is much better at it than I am, so he has those genes or environment, or both, working for him), I certainly wasn't, so I'll be forever grateful. 

[Photos: Whitney Webster.]

New Music: Rock-n-Roll Recess

Most of the makers of kids' music I've written about here have been fairly established artists, with a proven track record of excellent CDs: Justin Roberts, Recess Monkey, Secret Agent 23 Skidoo (more on him soon, by the way). This is not a bad thing by any means; it's great to have so many musicians and songwriters coming out with music for children that you know in advance will be of high quality.

But, as with any genre of music, it's always a special thrill to discover a great album from an artist who's new to you, one you can add to the personal canon. That's how I'd describe the debut release from the Bazillions, Rock-n-Roll Recess. The Minneapolis band's subject matter is standard kids'-universe stuff that children will glom onto easily—macaroni and cheese, friendship, messy rooms—but songwriters Adam and Kristin Marshall know how to create hooks that are irresistible to kids and parents alike. (I'm finding myself pleasantly addicted to the one from "Super Sonic Rocket Bike" these days.) The music is sunny, jangly, and remarkably catchy, and parents who were fans of bands like R.E.M. in their youth will feel very much at home when it's playing.

The Bazillions have also come up with something I haven't seen before on a kids' CD: They've included versions of two of their most appealing songs without the vocal tracks, so children—and, sure, parents too—can sing to the music by themselves, karaoke-style. (With these songs, they'll want to, believe me.) At first I cynically thought this was just a pad-the-CD gimmick, but now they have me wondering why more kids' bands don't do it.

So add the Bazillions to the list: I'll be looking forward eagerly to their next release, and the one after that, and....


[Cover image courtesy of the Bazillions.]

Parental Suicide?

Like many parents, Whitney and I have a great fear and loathing of noisy toys. There are the ones that play the same annoying tune in a horrible synth-y tone over and over again. There are also the talking toys, usually branded (Thomas the train, characters from Pixar movies), that repeat a catchphrase endlessly, and inevitably start going off on their own as their batteries die out, scaring the crap out of us by suddenly informing us how useful we are in a pitch-black room at 1 a.m. (Before we became parents, we were warned that this would happen by a hilarious Denis Leary routine, but we ended up purchasing the talking toys just the same. We just don't listen....)

But we'd noticed that our younger son, Griffin, who was about to turn two, seemed to love maracas and drums and all things rhythmic, and my wife suggested we get him a little drum pad from the great series of realistic (and surprisingly affordable, given that realism) musical instruments from First Act Discovery. And strangely, my first reaction was not "Are you crazy? We'll regret that from the moment he turns It on!" (To be fair, that may have been my second reaction.)

We did pause to think it over: Would we find ourselves holding our heads in pain daily, seriously considering making our son's prized birthday gift "disappear," tragically, overnight? (Or more long-term, would we rue the day we encouraged our son to embrace drumming?)

Well, maybe we will. But such considerations, in the end, don't have a prayer against the unbeatable counterargument: Think of his face when he sees it, and sees what it does. He's going to go crazy for this.

And since he did indeed, we're feeling pretty good about the whole thing right now, though we know it's early yet. Most of me is still hoping this doesn't lead to a real drum kit in the basement in a few years, but you know what? Part of me hopes it does. Weird.

[Photo courtesy of First Act Discovery.]

Gone Fishin'

I've been on vacation this past week-plus, and was extremely silly and thought I would post from here. Shaky Internet connections and a family not thrilled with the idea of nightly disappearances for that purpose have made this predictably (if you're not me, apparently) impossible.

But I've been gathering fuel for new posts and will hit the ground running come Monday.

New Books: Three Ladies Beside the Sea

I’ve previously mentioned the amazing New York Review Children’s Collection; most of its little-known classics I’ve previously encountered have been chapter books. But the company’s latest reissue is a 1969 picture book, in rhyming couplets. Oh, did I mention that the illustrations are by Edward Gorey?

Both my wife and I have long been big Gorey fans—in fact, I think one of my first birthday gifts to her was a copy of Amphigorey Also. And as I've mentioned before, our older son, Dash, is a big fan of all things spooky, so we gave him his first introduction to Gorey’s work (that same book) early, when he was four. Things were going fine—he loved the macabre tone and the style and humor of the artwork—until, halfway through “The Blue Aspic,” I suddenly remembered how it ends: With the haughty opera star stabbed to death by her longtime anonymous admirer/stalker. (The panel informs us of this with Gorey’s usual calm equanimity.)

So it was with particular excitement that I picked up Three Ladies Beside the Sea. There was no guarantee that a similar surprise didn’t await within, but the slim volume, written by Rhoda Levine, didn’t have that look. That impression was correct—this book is aimed at fairly young children (though its charm and beauty will appeal to older ones too), and there’s nothing more shocking in it than a woman who often spends hours up in a tree.

The story, as the title suggests, is of three elegant (this is Gorey, after all) women who live in neighboring houses by the ocean. Edith is happy and bubbly; Catherine is quiet but positive; Alice is pensive and distant. The three are friends, and even occasionally meet on the beach to play chamber music together. So Edith and Catherine are a bit worried about Alice’s habit of spending long hours in a tree, through all nature of weather, gazing at the sky as if searching for something.

When they ask her about it, she tells them that she once encountered a bird whose plumage was so lovely and whose song was so beautiful that she’s been floating ever since. Now she’s compelled to watch the skies for its return, as only hearing its song again can return her to the ground. After taking a moment to process this, the other two come up with some suggestions that might keep their friend out of the tree, with mixed results. (I won’t give away the ending, except to say it’s a happy one.)

It’s all charmingly told by Levine in short quatrains of well-crafted, unforced poetry that’s perfect for young readers. And then there are the illustrations, whose ornate gorgeousness will be no surprise to anyone familiar with Gorey’s work. Still, the dazzling quality of his art never gets old for me. (Nor, apparently, to my two-year-old, who has claimed Three Ladies Beside the Sea as part of his bedtime-reading canon—every night.)

In sum, it’s yet another gem to add to the set the New York Review Children’s Collection has already accumulated.

[Cover image courtesy of the New York Review Children’s Collection.]

New Toys: MoMA Modern Playhouse

Playhouses come in many styles and formats these days. There’s the colorful plastic Fisher-Price ones that haven’t changed all that much since my own childhood; there’s the many fabulously details options from Playmobil; there are even a few high-end ones made from recycled materials or lovely wood.

What I hadn’t seen till now is a design-oriented playhouse at a modest price point—but that’s precisely what the MoMA Modern Playhouse is. For $20, you get a smartly designed box that holds all an kid-aesthete needs to create his or her own modernist pad. The box itself, and a few smaller ones inside, serve as walls in various colors and simulated textures (brick, stone, a few different painted plaster options). Also inside are three reversible floors and floor coverings (rugs, wood flooring, and even grass or a small pool if your child is designing the patio); a set of punch-out cards of hip furniture (older kids can put it together themselves; younger ones will need a more dextrous parent’s assistance with the folding and inserting); and a panel of endlessly reusable plastic-decal home accessories (lamps, plants, clocks, etc.) that can be attached to the walls anywhere that seems pleasing. 

Considering how compact the outer box is—about half the size of a standard lunchbox—the variety inside is remarkable: The possible permutations are nearly endless. (For the slightly less minimalist child who wants his playhouse inhabited, there’s even an add-on Modern Play Family kit of press-out people with vinyl clothes; it is, in the age-old phrase, “sold separately.”)

Now, many design-y toys are great if you’re, say, Frank Gehry, but can be disappointing to less precocious children, who get frustrated at their failure to approach the gorgeousness on the front of the box. That’s not a problem here—it’s incredibly simple to put together something that looks pretty great. (Since my own design skills are only barely at the pre-K level, the proof is in the photos below. As I always say, if I can do it, a six-year-old can, too. I did need to adjust that lamp a bit, though, I now see....) It does, however, probably take a child with at least occasional tendencies toward stillness to really enjoy this product, and not to accidentally destroy it: While the whole thing is remarkably sturdy given the materials, we’re still talking about cardboard and thick glossy paper here.

Kids with an eye for design, a decent imagination, and some semblance of motor control will get a lot of enjoyment out of the MoMA Modern Playhouse. It’s pretty dreamy for parents, too—one of those toys that actually looks good when a kid forgets to put it away when she’s done. And when she remembers to tidy it up (or you just do it—let’s be realistic here), everything fits nicely back inside the small box—so the playhouse is also perfect for travel, though I’d probably avoid the beach given the materials it’s made from. So the playhouse hits the parent trifecta: Nice to look at, versatile, and reasonably priced. (Seems like a pretty good gift option as well!)

[Box image courtesy of Chronicle Books]

New Books: The Amazing World of Stuart

I can’t say I was all that focused on children’s books before our first child was born in 2004. So my knowledge of the field since my own childhood, but prior to that year, has been largely limited to what’s already made the canon—Mo Willems, and that Harry Potter guy, say. I often wonder what I (and thus my sons) have missed out of sheer ignorance.

Libraries are one solution to the problem, of course, and we’ve made many discoveries from those distant 1990s there. Another is recommendations and gifts from friends who have older kids or better research talents; favorites like Peter Sis’s Madlenka and the previously mentioned Who Needs Donuts? came via that route.

But publishers are doing their part to further my education as well, and a recent reissue just became the latest passion of my five-and-a-half-year-old. The Amazing World of Stuart is simply two short books in one volume: Stuart’s Cape and Stuart Goes to School. They came out in 2002 and 2005, respectively, and were written by Sara Pennypacker, an author I was in fact familiar with (via her sublime Pierre in Love). I was, however, completely unfamiliar with the Stuart books.

Each of these two short chapter books is, of course, about Stuart, a young grade-schooler who’s just moved to a new town and is about to start at a new school. He is a worrier, obsessing about all the things that could go wrong as a new kid in a new place. Luckily, he’s also imaginative, and he uses his powers of invention to both avoid and (kind of) face his troubles, real and imagined.

The trick of the books, beyond Pennypacker’s endearingly wry tone in general, is that there’s no change in the narrative when Stuart’s imagination takes over. When he designs a magic cape and is subsequently visited by three wild animals, who inform him that he’s been playing “wild animal” all wrong and then take a turn at playing Stuart themselves, it’s really happening, as far as this book is concerned. The noise in Stuart’s closet that his parents yell upstairs to complain about? It wasn’t Stuart—it was the bear. Honest.

Pennypacker weaves this kind of fantasy through the reality of Stuart’s first days in his new town (during which he also starts flying all of a sudden, and later finds that his pet cat has switched places with the local garbage man, all thanks to the magic cape) and first encounters at school (which include an adventure with portable holes that’s reminiscent of the late Heinz Edelmann’s work on the Yellow Submarine movie). In Stuart himself, she’s created a neurotic go-getter, a seeming oxymoron that’s actually a pretty realistic portrayal of a certain type of 10-year-old. It’s all delightful, and Dash was hooked immediately; this was one of those “let’s read it again” books from the start.

Not that this is the main criterion I use for kids’ books, but The Amazing World of Stuart is also stunningly inexpensive, even for a fairly thin paperback. I’m unused to paying less than $5 for just about anything that gives either of my children this much pleasure!

[Image courtesy of Scholastic]

Old School: The Cricket in Times Square

I always kept five or six of my favorite childhood chapter books on my shelves, all the way through adolescence and young adulthood and marriage. I was never entirely sure why, other than my general reluctance to get rid of, well, anything. (Yeah, I’m one of those.) 

So for all those years, there sat George Selden’s The Cricket in Times Square next to the Sartre play (yeah, I’m one of those, too). It was my very first favorite chapter book—to a kid growing up in a still-gritty Manhattan, Selden’s classic about an out-of-town cricket who becomes the toast of New York City and saves the family newsstand of the boy who befriends him had a comforting familiarity. Heck, two of the three main characters were New York City archetypes, seen on a daily basis in my Upper West Side existence. It’s also not a classic for nothing; the story itself, while undeniably dated in certain ways, is a true kid’s page-turner.

The book was originally published in 1960, and is set in what was, I now realize, a very different city than the one I was living in about twenty years later. But there were enough touchstones in it for me to recognize my city, too: The teeming insanity of the Times Square subway station hasn’t changed that much even now, even if the layout has, several times. More than that, though: Selden’s writing itself has a timeless quality, especially in his portrayal of his lead characters. If you’ve spent any time in New York, you’ve almost certainly met a Tucker Mouse or twelve, and you’ve probably encountered a few Harry Cats as well.

So the first moment I thought there was even a prayer of his having the slightest interest, I introduced my old, tattered paperback copy (the price on the cover: 95 cents!) to my older son’s bedtime reading. It was his first chapter book, and it was really way too early. I don’t think he was three yet, and while The Cricket in Times Square does feature many wonderfully vivid illustrations by the great Garth Williams, they are occasional, not ubiquitous—it’s a chapter book, not a picture book. But as ever, I couldn’t hold myself back; worst-case, I figured, we’d give it a shot, he’d be bored, and we’d stop.

We didn’t stop. Dash loved the book from day one, and became pretty obsessed with it for about a year. It inspired some of his first playacting, involving both scenes from the book—the fire in the newsstand was a favorite—and ones of his own invention, using Selden’s characters. (Dash was always Harry, while his mother and I traded, in repertory, the roles of Tucker and Chester Cricket.) At bedtime, we would read it over and over again, until my already old and fragile edition began to fall apart. Once, during a visit to my office in Times Square, Dash wanted to go down to the subway station to see Mario’s newsstand and Tucker’s drainpipe, and was nearly inconsolable when I informed him that the station has changed since that time (well, it has!) and so we probably wouldn’t be able to pinpoint their exact locations.

In summary, my first favorite chapter book became Dash’s first favorite chapter book. And yeah, I probably did force the issue a little, but it was still pretty heartwarming.

That isn’t the end of the story, though. The Cricket in Times Square turned into the gift that kept on giving in our household. First there were Selden’s own sequels, of course, which I’d read myself as a child. But then, just as Dash’s interest in the books was beginning to lose some of its heat, I discovered an audiobook version, read by actor Tony Shalhoub (of the TV show Monk and many films, including Big Night). It’s a fabulous rendition, among the best children’s audiobooks I’ve encountered; Shalhoub captures each character brilliantly with his voice work. Dash was hooked anew. (Plus, now we had a new fail-safe tool for long drives and plane rides.)

A bit later, I found (courtesy of my former colleague Christopher Healy) a Chuck Jones Collection DVD that includes a 1973 animated short of The Cricket in Times Square by the animator, as well as two odd but entertaining holiday-themed sequels that use Selden’s characters. The immortal Mel Blanc provides Tucker Mouse’s voice for all of them, which demonstrates just how spot-on Jones and his team are with their adaptation. (The DVD is advertised as featuring several stories from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, also well worth seeing.)

At five-and-a-half, Dash still loves every version of The Cricket in Times Square—books, audiobook, videos—and comes back to each of them often. (Though it does seem to be time for a new edition of the book, as pages are starting to fall out and go missing!) Which means, now that I think on it, that The Cricket in Times Square has been among his most treasured books for more than half his life. And, alarmingly, more than three quarters of mine.

[Photos: Whitney Webster]

New Games: Loopz

I remember my own parents looking at the early-computer-technology games I had when I was a kid and commenting, a little uncomfortably, about how much games had changed since their youth. Of course, they were talking about Mattel Electronic Football and Merlin, so by now I know exactly how they felt.

But every now and then I see a toy or game that magically melds parental nostalgia with somewhat more modern technology. Mattel’s new Loopz has something in common with one of my generation’s old favorites, Simon, but—as a good modern toy should and must—goes way beyond it, too. In several different directions.

As you can see in the image above, Loopz looks sort of like a set of plastic horseshoes stuck together (well, plastic horseshoes from the rec room of the starship Enterprise). Within each of the four arches—I suppose I should really call them “loops,” huh?—there’s a pair of small sensors, one at the top and one at the bottom. When you break through the invisible line between them, you trigger a light and a sound. (After a little practice, I found that the most effective and efficient way to do this was to stick my hands in each arch with a little lift, like a magician or someone playing water glasses. That may just be me, though...the chipper kids in the demos on Mattel’s site use a more direct style.)

That’s the basic concept, but Mattel has found a variety of ways to turn it into game play and ... just regular play. The first is the old Simon one, a memory game: Loopz plays an ever-increasing series of sounds and lights, and the player has to repeat after it. Then there’s a reflex game, in which you try to put your hand in the loop with the flashing light before it goes out, at accelerating speeds. And there are several music games, including one called Freestyle DJ that lets kids “mix” the preprogrammed songs on the Loopz machine by using the loops to turn tracks on and off. Finally, kids can just play their own music in a 10-note scale on the machine. (I was wondering at first how you get 10 notes from four loops, but of course the answer is combinations—for each of the higher notes, you simply trigger two loops simultaneously.)

Both my five-year-old and my two-year-old were instantly fascinated, in that way only young kids can be, at their first sight of the modernistic-looking machine with flashing lights that was making weird noises. But a lot of toys create that effect initially, and then the novelty wears off. Loopz, with its variety of options, and particularly with the freestyle music one, is proving to have real staying power, which makes the investment (the machine retails for about $30) seem worthwhile.

I don’t, however, quite think we’re going to reach this stage of expertise for a while yet:

[Photo courtesy of Mattel.]

New Books: How Animals Work

There are a lot of science and nature books for kids out there—nearly every publishing house, large and small, seems to have its own line. Unlike with most other genres with this kind of volume, though, most of them are pretty good, covering their chosen subject (bats, say, or animals of the jungle habitat) with the right depth for the age level they’re aimed at and, of course, lots of great full-color photography. We probably own 10 or 15 of these little volumes, all told, all from different series but nonetheless quite similar, and entirely satisfying to our five-year-old.

But I haven’t written about them much, mainly because there’s often so little to distinguish one line of books from another. All of them are good, but it’s rare to find one that stands out. DK’s How Animals Work does, and not solely because it’s a much larger volume than the rest. It’s kind of a coffee-table book for kids, really, 192 pages long with a hard cover, and featuring enough really big full-color photos  to keep a kid happy for months.

But as the title suggests, there’s another reason this book will be especially appealing to the science-minded youngster. It uses all that extra space not only to load up on more amazing images, but also to go beyond the basic factoids you usually find in kiddie science books, and delve into how and why animals do the things they do. So alongside that amazing closeup of a snake, you find out exactly how snakes slither. (No spoilers here.) To Dash’s delight, there are in-depth diagrams of the bodies of those bats, too, demonstrating how each anatomical feature that’s vital to the creature’s survival functions.

It goes on and on like that for pages, in something of a parent’s dream: a long, attractive-to-behold book that even a slightly science-minded child can get lost in for stretches of time, learning all the while. The book’s official age range from the publisher is 8 to 12, and some of the biology discussed will be over the heads of children younger than that, but at five, Dash adores this book. Better still, I think he’s going to treasure it for years.

[Cover image courtesy of DK Publishing.]

I Take It Back?

I posted a little while ago my resolution not to expose my sons to so many books and movies and such that they’re a bit young for. But now I’m wondering if I was wrong, after seeing the YouTube video below, in which Scottish actor Brian Cox (probably best known over here for his villainous roles in big Hollywood productions, but also a brilliant stage actor I’ve been lucky enough to see perform twice in person) presides over an impromptu Shakespeare master class with a toddler. Watch:

Old School: Alice in Wonderland

I think I must have read Lewis Carroll’s classics at some point in my early childhood, but I honestly don’t remember doing so. In many ways, I feel like my knowledge of them is more piecemeal, picked up from the many references to them in other literature and art. So I never really expected Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass to become major players in bedtime reading with my kids.

But my five-year-old, Dash, saw some of those amazing original John Tenniel illustrations from the book on some wallpaper or something, and took to them immediately. (I think it was the Cheshire cat that initially drew him in.) That led to our picking up a copy, and eventually the book made its way to his nightstand.

And he loves it. The delightfully light tone; the surreal...well, lack of plot; the offbeat characters—all of it’s very much his cup of tea. (Sorry.) He enjoys the way the narrative just abruptly breaks off into a random, probably nonsensical poem from time to time. Some of the puns and wordplay are a little over his head right now, but there’s not enough of that to bother him. Having recently also seen the old Disney adaptation of the story, Dash has gone back to the original and is having a lot of fun seeing what was changed for the movie and what was not.

It’s also been an education to me, since my memories of the book were so hazy; seeing it through Dash’s eyes as we read it together has been a great experience. I’ve had two separate revelations. First, just how very weird these books are! I’d forgotten how boldly Carroll takes the story every which way he pleases, disregarding tropes of linear narrative and story structure entirely when he wants to. It’s still a breath of fresh air, frankly, even all these years after it was written.

Second—and this shouldn’t really have been a revelation, since there had to be a reason his books have been so beloved for so long—I was taken aback by, simply, how well-written these stories are. In what must be no surprise to many parents who were more familiar with Carroll than I’d been, they are truly a great pleasure to read. I’m really glad Dash saw the Cheshire cat on that wallpaper.

As a side note, another nice thing about Carroll’s work, for the busy and/or vacationing parent, is that it’s  completely out of copyright. In practical terms, this means you can download a copy onto your laptop or phone right now for free, or pay less than the cost of one printed book to get a more aesthetically pleasing version of the text of this book (with many other classics) for your iPhone.

[Image: Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.]

Reading Comprehension: My Two-Year-Old's Yogi Berra Fetish

Normally, when I write about a favorite book of one of my sons, it’s a children’s book—perhaps a picture book, perhaps a chapter book, perhaps a classic that even has adult appeal, but definitely a children’s book. Casting my mind back, I can think of a few temporary picks of theirs that you couldn’t honestly describe with that term, but those were almost always image-heavy coffee-table books, generally science- and/or art-oriented.

But recently, Griffin, my almost-two-year-old, has developed a fascination with a sports autobiography—a 200-page hardcover with very few photographs. I suppose the fact that it’s Yogi Berra’s autobiography could theoretically be part of the explanation—the man is pretty irresistible as sports legends go—but while my Yankee fandom does run pretty deep, I have not, I swear, been coaching my toddler on the names behind all those retired numbers (yet). I’m fairly certain Griff cannot have any real idea who Yogi is.

So when he first plucked the book off my bookshelf, I figured it was just one of those random things: He liked the yellow on the cover, maybe. Or the admittedly winning vintage photo of Yogi there. I figured he’d leaf through it a bit, discover nothing but pages and pages of words, and move on.

He didn’t. He insisted, in fact, on taking it upstairs to join his bedtime reading pile, the rest of which is made up of more usual fare for his age: In the Night Kitchen, a Charlie & Lola book, Mama, Is It Summer Yet?. And, yes, he insists on having it read to him—not much, just a page or so a night before moving to one of the other books, but it’s become part of the ritual. He doesn’t have the attention span for much more than that, even assuming he’s truly interested in the childhood of Lawrence Peter Berra in St. Louis. But he also keeps coming back to the book again and again, and we’ve now made it in this page-by-page fashion through the minor leagues and Yogi’s World War II service to his first games with the Yankees.

About a week ago, Griff hadn’t asked to be read to from the Yogi book for a while. I figured perhaps this mystery had run its course, and brought it back downstairs and reshelved it on my bookshelf, in a slightly different place from where it had been before. The next day, it was out on the floor of the family room with Griffin’s other books. No other books from my shelf were there, or even on the floor next to it; he had gone looking for it, found it, and reappropriated it.

Somehow, I remain unconvinced that the life and times of a professional baseball player who retired a half-century ago can be this compelling to someone who’s not two years old yet. I’m sure Griff will have lost all memory of the Berra book by the time I can really ask him to explain, and will just give me one of those blank looks you get from kids when you talk about their first years. But you can bet I’m going to ask anyway, just in case.  

[Photograph by R at the English language Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons.]

New Books: Terrible, Horrible Edie

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to sing the praises of the New York Review Children’s Collection, which continues to find and reissue great but out-of-print children’s literature from decades past, by authors well-known (e.g., James Thurber) and forgotten alike. Anyone in search of the little-known classics of the genre should look no further than its catalog; I pretty much covet every single book in it. (The website even lets you suggest titles of out-of-print classics you think NYRCC should consider!)

Among the more recent releases is Terrible, Horrible Edie, by E. C. Spykman, a book I’d never heard of, by an author I’d never heard of, that’s part of a series I’d never heard of. It’s actually Spykman’s third book about the Cares family—mainly the six children of the family, four from a previous marriage and two toddlers from the current one; they are modeled closely after the author’s own Massachusetts upbringing in the first decade of the 20th century.

In this one, the Cares kids head off to their aunt’s beachhouse on the Atlantic coast, where they’re to spend the summer under the observation of a caretaker, housekeeper, and cook (if it wasn’t already clear that Mr. Cares was well off from the menagerie of family pets along for the trip, which includes a monkey) while their parents tour Europe. The title character could not be more a middle child—her three older siblings are 18, 17, and 16; Edie herself is 10, and her two younger stepsisters, Chris and Lou, are 5 and 3. Which gets to the heart of the adjectives in the title, too: Edie longs for the independence her older siblings are now enjoying, to command sailboats and drive cars and such, but those charged with looking after her are always getting in the way, and she is forced to find creative ways around the restrictions on her summer plans. Since she is about the most determined 10-year-old you’re likely to meet, she usually succeeds.

Spykman presents the family (sans parents) summer at the beach through the eyes of this no-nonsense child, complete with adventures both typical (a rebellious solo sailing adventure) and extraordinary (a massive hurricane, seemingly based on the real one of 1938 but moved back a few decade for fiction’s sake). Through it all, the Cares children react with a resolute sangfroid reminiscent of characters books about English families—it’s not unlike the tone of the Pevensie kids in the Narnia books, except that this is all happening in real-life Massachusetts. Nothing can faze these children for long.

But the real draw, as it should be, is specifically Edie. She’s fiercely self-reliant, endlessly frustrated at the general uselessness of many adults and almost the entire male gender (“In all her life, Edie thought, she had never met so many stupid, nutty men at one time.”), and remarkably adept at solving problems, even the ones she has created in the first place. She’s also completely irresistible, and not at all terrible or horrible, unless you happen to be one of her caretakers. Spykman, a fourth child in a large family herself, brilliantly transcribes Edie’s 10-year-old logic as she convinces herself that, say, it’s okay for her to take the two young children with her out in the sailboat without telling anyone.

Sypkman’s writing in general is outstanding, maintaining funny deadpan humor throughout with moments of beautiful child-POV lyricism sprinkled in. (“Lou gave her one of her hugs and kisses. It was just like eating a new doughnut while you put your face in sweet peas.”) The portrait she paints of the family is vivid and true-to-life, every single sibling relationship with a color and tone all its own, and despite the chaos—and the shock at how very different parenting was in this country a hundred years ago—you come to like them all very much. But especially Edie.

Now, the subject matter and writing style of Terrible, Horrible Edie were a little advanced for my five-year-old at present—he could follow it, but the story wasn’t immediately grabbing him the way it did me, and I ended up finishing the book on my own. But I think he’ll be ready for it—and love it—within a few years. And for those of you with kids, especially daughters, around Edie’s age, say 7 to 12...well, this is the perfect book to read with them this summer. On vacation, of course!

[Image courtesy of New York Review Children’s Collection.]

New Games: Sound Bingo

This time of year, vacations loom (pleasantly, of course). And so does the need for portable entertainment, both for use during travel itself and for whiling away the hours spent at houses not one’s own. A few favorite books and videos used to suffice for us, when our oldest child (now five) was still very young, but these days, the need for a wide variety of options becomes ever clearer. Since my younger son is not quite two years old, though, it can be hard to find games we can all play together; for the most part, I think, we’ll just have to wait another year or so.

But we have found one game that’s simple enough for Griffin to at least be engaged in (with extreme parental help, but hey) and yet not too dull for Dash to enjoy: Sound Bingo. The concept is, well, bingo, and the execution is simplicity itself: The boxes you fill with your bingo chips contain images that correspond to sounds on the included CD. Each player gets a board and some chips, then stick the CD in the player and put it on “Random.” You then hear a series of sounds—a rooster crowing, an alarm clock ringing, a train whistling, etc.—and if your board contains the image the sound goes with, you put a chip in it.

From there, it’s regular old bingo rules; first one to fill four boxes in a row, in any direction, is the winner. It’s a really easy game to teach very young kids, and while Griff is really too young to learn any game yet, he enjoys following along and hearing the sounds. (The little chips are considered choking hazards, so parental involvement is a definite necessity when he’s involved.)

Dash, meanwhile, is thrilled to be able to really master all the rules of a game. Board games in general still being pretty new to him, we’ve also been using Sound Bingo to teach him good sportsmanship. I must shamefacedly admit, however, that watching him actually get upset at losing a round of such an entirely random game forced me to suppress some laughter for a moment. (I got my serious teaching face on quickly, I promise.)

It did occur to me that this game is so simple that you could create a version for yourself pretty easily…but it also occurred to me that that’s one of the many, many wonderful ideas Whitney and I are extremely unlikely to ever get around to, especially right before a vacation. Being able to pick up a prefab version for $15 or so that we can use for the week we’re away from home is well worth it. I suppose if it turns out to be a favorite, we could create add-on versions, but the boys would have to be almost alarmingly enthusiastic about the game for that to happen, to be honest. In the meantime, I’m grateful to have a play-ready game served up to me on a platter.

[Images courtesy of Chronicle Books.]

Security Blanket: Who Needs Donuts?

Most children’s books written in the 1970s and set in New York would be definite Old School entries here, but somehow I missed this one as a kid. In a way, though, I’m glad I first encountered it recently, when a friend gave it to Dash as a gift a few years back, because I got to experience the same awed sense of discovery he did, and at the same time.

Who Needs Donuts?, which first came out in 1973, was among the first (and almost last) children’s books by illustrator Mark Alan Stamaty, who would go on to an (ahem) illustrious career as a cartoonist for the Village Voice, the Washington Post, Time, and the New York Times Book Review, as well as an internationally acclaimed illustrator (New Yorker covers and the like). It seems to have been perhaps a little ahead of its time, however—it went out of print for almost 30 years almost immediately, which is probably why I never encountered it as a child myself. Happily, this publishing travesty was rectified in 2003, by which time it was reissued, having attained something of a cult following in the intervening years.

Which was and remains entirely deserved: Who Needs Donuts? is a dazzlingly, wondrously eccentric masterpiece. Its story is simple, if unusual: Young Sam has a lovely life in the suburbs—nice house, nice family, nice friends—but he feels there’s something lacking in his life:  He wants donuts, multitudes of them, more than his parents can provide, so he heads on his tricycle to the big city (pretty clearly New York, though it’s never specifically labeled as such) to find them. There he conveniently meets the beaming Mr. Bikferd, a man who collects donuts by the thousand in his big wooden wagon, and who takes on Sam as his assistant. But when his mentor falls in love with a woman named Pretzel Annie and suddenly no longer cares for donuts (proving the edict of a sad old lady they’ve encountered in their quest: “Who needs donuts when you’ve got love?”), Sam is left on his own to figure out what to do with a warehouse full of donuts. (I won’t spoil the ending, but suffice it to say he finds an ideally humanitarian use for them.)

This is obviously not your typical picture-book plot, but to be honest, the narrative is in fact the most linear and logical thing about Who Needs Donuts? Stamaty’s art is like nothing you’ve ever seen, endlessly imaginative in its surreal depiction of the wild, wonderful, weird life of the big city Sam has traveled to. The illustrative style is also detailed to the point of obsession, with the result that you really can’t help but notice something new—many of them, really—every single time you read the book; there’s literally no way to take it all in at once. (You’ll probably need to click on the image below to enlarge it and get a full sense of what I’m talking about here.)

This makes it an everlasting favorite of Dash’s as well—he was blown away by the absurdist humor of the book from the start, which accorded well (as we were to start discovering around that time) with his own burgeoning sense of humor. But he loves that on every new read, he can pore over the illustrations and find something new to be amazed by. Who Needs Donuts? is the perfect picture book for the typical young kid’s reading pattern, really: It’s read intensely for a while, then recedes to the shelf for an extended period, only to re-emerge again and be read just as intensely during every subsequent rediscovery.

As a side note, I also have to say that Stamaty has captured here a child’s perception of New York City in the 1970s to a degree that I find downright uncanny. I grew up in NYC in this era, and this is exactly what walking around with my parents in a downtown neighborhood I didn’t know well felt like when I was four years old—the endless, often incomprehensible surge of activity both drawing me in and scaring me a little, alluring with possibility yet always bordering on grotesque, and all at the same time.

Those who already love Who Needs Donuts?—and really, the rest of you too, because you’re going to—should check out this great interview with Stamaty, in which he tells some great stories about the book’s origins, its initial poor reviews, and its road to rebirth.