Tag Archives: parental guidance

NYC, Parental Guidance

The Kid Who Knew Too Much

This may be the saddest and most glorious thing I’ve ever seen.

I’ve just gotten off the L train at Grand Street. As I run through the turnstiles and begin climbing the stairs, I see a mother carrying her child 10 steps above me. What caught my eye was the way she was doing it. She was carrying this boy in his stroller. I’m sure you’ve seen moms in the subway do this, but not the same way this mom was doing it.

This mom was holding the stroller parallel to the ground, hard against her stomach. It was an umbrella style stroller, meaning it was relatively light. (As opposed to those huge baby carriages for newborns. Try lugging that thing on a subway some time.) Even so, the ease with which she scaled the stairs while holding this thing so tightly against her body was amazing. She had the grit and determination of The Mom Alone. I need to get out of this station so I can catch the bus, because if I miss the bus I will not get to X on time and I will be screwed.

But the real kicker was the kid. He looked to be three years old, maybe four at the oldest. His head stuck out from his mother’s side at a right angle, as if he’d been screwed into place. And the look on his face was not one of fear, as he probably should have had, or one of kiddish “whee!”-type excitement, as some kids might.

His expression was one of resignation. Not sad, just a look of guess we’re doing this now. A look far too world weary and wan for a three year old. It was chilling in some ways, and in others hilarious, almost admirable. A child who had no illusions about what to expect from this world, who had no illusions to shatter. He knew at any moment, he would be hoisted aloft, hovered two feet above the ground, placed flat against his mother’s stomach, perpendicular to her, and then finally placed on the pavement when back in the light of day.

Part of me wanted to catch up to them and offer help. But the mom was too fast and already at the surface before I could get close. And anyway, what kind of help could I really offer? Maybe this kid had already figured it all out.

Cinematics

A Terrifying Glimpse of the Future

Over the weekend, I was somehow forced to sit through the last hour of Spy Kids 3D. I’ve never seen any of the Spy Kids films before, but it’s my understanding they’re about kids who are spies.

Spy Kids 3D is easily the worst movie I’ve ever seen, with a large asterisk. I’m not saying it’s the worst because of its content per se. In pure story/direction terms, I’ve seen much worse. Spy Kids 3D is the worst because it provided a horrifying window into our cinematic future.

The entire time Spy Kids 3D flashed before my eyes, I kept wondering to myself, What in god’s name am I watching? I didn’t hate it, I simply didn’t understand it. It felt like watching somebody else play a video game. It’s a movie starring real actors which still feels resoundingly fake. Nothing but the faces look remotely real, as if everyone is shoving their heads through holes in carnival cutouts. Needless to say, the dialogue leaves much to be desired, and the story is little more than a whisper. Things moved very fast and I had no idea why. Scenes would end and the next would begin with barely a connection between them.

One thing Spy Kids 3D has in its favor, particularly towards the end, is that the celebrity cameos get so ridiculous and unnecessary, it’s almost admirable. One famous person suddenly appearing, then then another piled right on top, and another and another, like a Dagwood Sandwich of Stupid. And at least the celebs give a bit of an effort; especially Sylvester Stallone, who chews up scenery with gusto.

But in one terrifying moment, it occurred to me that maybe the burden was not on this movie to be more coherent, but on me to adjust my mind to it. Because I realized that my daughter had no issues watching Spy Kids 3D. It’s sometimes difficult to tell how much a four-year-old actually enjoys something, since a kid that young will consume virtually anything you put in front of them. But she will tune something out if it doesn’t appeal to her, and this definitely appealed to her. I was openly laughing at certain things that I found ridiculous, and she would shoot me scowls, silently saying, C’mon, dad. (Yes, she does this to me already. I have a long road ahead.)

Because the world she is inheriting, this is a world in which fare like Spy Kids 3D is the baseline for kids’ entertainment. Consider this: Spy Kids 3D came out in 2003, which is eight years ago. Three-D movies were unheard of back then. The success of Spy Kids 3D (almost $200 million grossed worldwide) was a huge reason why Hollywood began to throw its weight behind 3D. And yeah, 3D as a format may be on its way out again, but that only means something just as dumb and expensive is on its way.

Now, consider the Transformers franchise, which relies heavily on exploiting people’s sense of nostalgia. The Transformers movies are essentially no different than Spy Kids 3D. Mindless, disconnected scenes. Characters who barely matter. No connection to anything real. An intensely cynical view of its audience.

My daughter has no concept of commercials. Just think about that. Most kids’ channels don’t have ads these days. Maybe you think that’s a good thing, and essentially it is. But it has also made her used to a world where she gets everything she wants, uninterrupted, all the time. The idea of waiting and patience is alien to the world aimed her. So is the idea of watching anything she wouldn’t want to watch, because thanks to On Demand viewing and Netflix Instant, she knows that she can see whatever she wants to see whenever she wants to see it. Hooray?

So I almost feel like Spy Kids 3D has been placed here by the Terminator robots as a warning of what awaits us in the years to come.

Or it could just be a really shitty movie. I think I’ll keep telling myself that.

Baseball, Parental Guidance

Teaching Tolerance for Those You Hate

On the way to school this morning, The Baby and I had a conversation about fandom, prompted by absolutely nothing she or I had said up to that point. She has been talking about baseball a lot lately, for some reason. I may have mentioned that the season was starting soon, and so she’s been asking me often exactly when it will begin. When I say “Next Friday,” she’ll let out an anguished groan, because any length of time longer than a minute is an eternity to a little kid. She also thinks, because I told her I write about the Mets, that I’m a “baseball recorder”.

So we’re walking to school. I believe the last thing I said was something along the lines of, “Ooh, look at that squirrel up on that telephone wire.” Then, this:

BABY: Do you like the Mets?

ME: Yes, I do.

BABY: Do you like the ‘Ankees?

I paused here for a while, wondering how to respond. Do I say something stupid and hateful? Or do I try to keep as much positivity in our shared lives for as long as I can? I opt for the latter.

ME: I like the Mets better. They’re my favorite team.

THE BABY: I don’t like the ‘Ankees.

I am genuinely perplexed, because honestly, I don’t think I’ve said one word about the Yankees in front of her–good, bad, or indifferent–her entire life. Her only interaction with That Team, as far as I know, has been driving past the stadium on our way upstate. I have not tried in any way to transfer any of my animus on to her. I have to assume this is a product of school. *shakes fist*

ME: Why don’t you like the Yankees?

THE BABY: They smell! They smell like ‘Ankee shirts!

At this point, I have to fight every impulse in my body to laugh. Because as much as I might say I “hate,” the Yankees, I really don’t. For one thing, I know too many Yankee fans who aren’t dicks to wish them too much ill. There’s really no one currently on the team who even bugs me–no, not even Jeter. There’s just a certain kind of Yankee fan who drives me nuts. And let’s be honest: there are douchebags a’plenty in every fanbase. If the Mets had the run of success that the Yankees have had in the last 15 years, they’d attract the same terrible types the Yankees do now, people who want to bask in reflected glory and are not fans of baseball or even sports, only winning.

More importantly, I don’t want to be one of those dads who creates a Hate Clone in his own twisted image to hurl tiny epithets at the object of his scorn. That’s even worse than trying to push kids into a sport or to skip grades, because at least a kid can gain something from those endeavors. But using your child as a vessel for all your hates and fears, that’s just monstrous. I’ve seen kids like these at stadiums, dressed head to toe in team gear, yelling horrible things they couldn’t possibly understand, like Children of the Damned in Zubaz.

If I encouraged this kind of thinking, I feared her growing up to make her own version of Buffalo ’66. Or even worse, becoming a version of one of those mutants from Filip Bondy’s Bleacher Creature columns in the Daily News of yore. I had to read tons of that column when researching my recaps of the 2000 season, and it dented my soul. The kind of hate that came out of these people’s mouths toward Mets fans was at thermonuclear, Alabama 1963 levels.

I did not want my daughter to grow up to be such a person. Sports should inspire love, not hate. So, I took the high road.

ME: That’s not nice. The Yankees don’t smell. Different people like different things. Some people like the Yankees, some people like the Mets. Some people don’t like baseball at all.

THE BABY: [with a resigned sigh] Yeah, I guess so.

And we walked on to school. I felt good for following the better angels of my nature, and I thought of the lyrics of one of my dad’s favorite parodic songs, Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week”: Step up and shake the hand / Of someone you can’t stand / You can tolerate them if you try…