Friday Morning Street Urchin Blogging

Man, these two stewbums really need their mid-morning cigarette. Either that, or this photo was taken just before they had the four drams of rotgut they need to get through a day of replacing bobbins down at the mill. Don't worry lads, you'll be as stiff as a ring-bolt 'ere midday.

There's still a little time to enter the contest of for the new Sandisk slotRadio. Leave a comment here before noon EST today and I'll update this post to announce the winner after noon.

*UPDATE*

Random date/time generator result: 09-Jul-2009 13:20:51

Winner: Susan, 07.09.09 - 1:22 pm.

Congratulations, Susan, and thanks to everyone who left comments. You all were too nice. We'll be giving the last one away next month.

Even though there are so many new books I want to read, lately I've been picking up old ones. As I scan the pages, trying to decipher the notes made by my 19-year-old hand, I realize that I never really understood as much D.H. Lawrence or James Joyce as I liked to think then. Ulysses hasn't changed since 1996, but I certainly have. And how many stanzas of Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens had I read without discerning any meaning? Still I refuse to believe I did not take something of value from the words themselves.

I think about this often at bedtime, right at that cusp of freedom that sleeping children provide. Before I can sit down with a book of my own, I often read both of them books way above their heads. In my daughter's case, it's now stories with fewer pictures, more new words and concepts that challenge my ability to explain without doing so recursively. A year later we have nearly worked our way through The Rattle Bag, and have moved on to selections from the Oxford Book of English Verse. I find I have a lot more patience for poetry now. Some of it is knowing my daughter is grasping for any meaning among the words, while I emphasize only their sounds. My son sits silently on my lap alongside his sister for picture books he cannot understand. This patience for lovely nonsense is, I think, a sort of skill, not unlike fearlessly sounding foolish in a foreign tongue. It is one way we learn.

Sometimes I go back and read cringe-inducing things I wrote over a decade ago, occasionally encountering a particularly delicate line and wondering where it came from. Did that come from me? I wonder. The same dope who wore his pants at his knees and listened only to the Wu Tang Clan? Have you forgotten how powerful it feels to stand in awe of what hasn't yet been written, that limitless universe of language in front of you. Have you forgotten how fun it was to be bold and reckless with words? As one ages there are few things as annoying as precociousness. But sometimes knowing too much is a disadvantage.

* * * * *

We are riding in the car and talking about her beloved friend; her teacher describes them together as "like an old married couple." She tells him what to do; occasionally he kicks her in the shin. But mostly there is mutual devotion. He wakes up in the night and tells his mother he misses her. She chatters on and on about their friendship in the backseat: "I do not think he will ever lose his love for me," she says with such earnestness I cannot laugh.

Then: "You can lose your balance. . ." she says. "But you can never lose your love."

* * * * *

If only that were true, I think. But then again what do I know.

Another slotRadio giveaway

Sweet Juniper sponsor SanDisk sent us another slotRadio with 1000 preloaded songs to give away. Want it? Leave a comment on this post with an e-mail address so I can contact you if you win. No requirements, but feel free to tell me about your summer vacation plans, recommend an album, or just say "me want." I have been in a bit of a rut lately, so I'd love for you to use this opportunity to tell me how I could improve this site, or let me know the kind of posts you'd like to see more often, or just call me a talentless windbag. No one will be disqualified!

Hopefully the odds will be better this time. Last month we had over 400 entries for this giveaway, despite it being sneakily buried at the bottom of a long post. Last night my mac crashed and I lost the entire post intended to overshadow the fact that I'm a total sellout. I'm okay now, but last night I wanted to punch that kid who is supposed to be the personification of Mac in those stupid commercials. Macs don't crash, huh? How about I hit you over the head with a folding chair just to see? Never trust anyone who would consider marrying Drew Barrymore.

You have until noon on Friday, July 10 to enter the contest, and the winner will be chosen randomly and announced that afternoon.

The mother of one of my daughter's friends asks, "Is she not supposed to play princess?"

I have never told my daughter she couldn't play princesses. We may have had a few conversations about how princesses aren't good role models, but I've NEVER said she couldn't pretend to be one. Apparently while playing at her friend's house, my daughter whispered, "My dad doesn't like princesses. He says they're lazy goodfornothings." Then she proceeded to pull one of those prefabricated princess gowns over her torso and said, "I'll just tell him I was being a fairy." This pleases me, because it shows she is beginning to understand that her highly-opinionated father can be quite difficult, though easily appeased by doing whatever it is he doesn't approve of once well out of sight. This will prove a useful skill as the years go on.

When told this happened, I felt a tinge of guilt. Then the other little girl stood up and said to my daughter, "I AM THE BEAUTIFUL PRINCESS. You must do my bidding. Go and fetch me the finest flower in the land." My daughter reacted with a look of incredulity that could only be translated as, "Fuck that, dude." Or, perhaps less crudely, "My father was right: princesses are bossy and not very nice." She refused the quest, and the princess sulked.

I looked down at them in their ill-fitting polyester costumes, stained with mulberry juice and globs of yoghurt. I could have delivered the coup de grâce right then: I could have pointed out that their threadbare, shoddily-made dresses of imitation satin and tulle made them look more like Courtney Love at the tail end of an Oxycontin binge than any representative of The Crown. But I didn't. As Benjamin Disraeli once said, Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.

"Worry not, your Highness," I said, winking at my daughter. "I shall fetch my steed and deliver thee the loveliest dandelion in all Detroit."

Two Big Posts Today

At day camp pickup yesterday, one of the instructors reminded me that we need to bring a white t-shirt today because the kids are going to make tie dye. When I remembered to tell my wife last night, we had forgotten that the kid and I turned every piece of plain white clothing we owned pink last summer during our own tie dye adventure. The neighborhood wig shop sells white tees, but they only carry XXXXL and above for that population of young dudes who seem to enjoy dressing like giant babies. So what did my wife do? She went down in the basement and sewed the kid up a white linen skirt for her to tie dye at camp. Then, when our friend called (a fellow Detroit parent in the same predicament, asking if we had any plain white shirts) my wife said, "Sure, I'll find something." Then she went downstairs and sewed the kid's friend a pair of white linen pants until midnight.

"So, tie-dyed linen pants, huh?"

"Yep."

"You are a true visionary."

Today my talented (and busy) wife has written a powerful post over at Woodcraft about the quilt she is making in memory of her stepfather. It's the longest post she's ever written there and I hope you'll check it out.

Also, we just brought home a painting I commissioned from our friend Kathy Leisen and posted it on the inspiration page. There's a video of Juniper there reciting the myth portrayed in the painting.

Friday Afternoon Street Urchin Blogging

A few moments ago I held my baby in the rocker and listened to his murmuring around the mouth of the bottle. Every afternoon for over a year now I have done this until he falls asleep, at which point I set him down in the crib and creep out of the room. Today he just pointed towards his crib and said, "In." I put him down giggling and chattering, sure that he wouldn't be falling asleep any time soon. Still, I sat in the rocker next to his crib, reading a book, hopeful that my presence was at least comforting to him. A few seconds later he looked up at me and said, "Bye bye" while waving his arm.

And now that little boy is asleep.

Streets With No Name

This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed.

In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren't designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go.

It is an urban legend on many college campuses that many sidewalks and pathways were not planned at all, but paved by the university after students created their own paths from building to building, straying from those originally prescribed. The Motor City, like a college campus, has a large population that cannot afford cars, relying instead on bikes and feet to meet its needs. With enormous swaths of the city returning to prairie, where sidewalks are irrelevant and sometimes even dangerous, desire lines have become an integral yet entirely unintended part of the city's infrastructure. There are hundreds of these prescriptive easements across neglected lots throughout the city. Click on the photo at the top of this post to see just a few of them in greater detail.
Desire lines are considered by many landscape architects to be proof of a flaw in the design of a physical space, or more gently, a sign that concrete cannot always impose its will on the human mind. But what about a physical space that no longer resembles its intended design, a city where tens of thousands of homes have been abandoned, burned, and buried in their own basements? While actual roads and sidewalks crumble with each season of freezing and thawing, Detroiters have taken it upon themselves to create new paths, in their own small way working to create a city that better suits their needs.

Academics around the world argue about whether the first paths were created by hunters following game trails. There are scientists who study ants to better understand highways. They have created mathematical models for trail formation. When the great cities were built, sometimes roads were built along ancient paths. The Romans imposed grids on every city but their own. In Detroit many of the streets are named for the Frenchmen whose ribbon farms stretching north from the river were covered in asphalt: Beaubien, Dequindre, Campau, Livernois, Chene. In many cities, there are streets named for dead men once revered throughout the land but now mostly forgotten (Fulton, Lafayette, Irving) and others named for men no one remembers.

In Detroit, there are streets no one has named. And they belong to anyone.

Auf Wiedersehen, Kindermullet*

"The time has come. It has to go."
"What? No."
"Another old lady called him a girl today."
"Was he wearing the shirt with flames? No one ever confuses him for a girl when he's wearing the shirt with flames."
"He was all in blue."
"But I haven't taken him to the demolition derby yet. And I wanted to take him huntin'."
". . ."
"But it's county fair season!"
". . ."
"Hey, I let you talk me out of naming him Travis."
"Just because your mother never let you grow one when you were a kid doesn't mean you can treat our son like a redneck doll."
"How 'bout a rat tail?"
". . ."
"A rat tail would look so great in the beer mirror I'm going to win for him this summer by knocking down those milk bottles at the fair."
"Please, like you've ever knocked down those bottles."

* * * * *
For the results, see today's photo.

*thanks to Erin for the term "Kindermullet."

One of my law professors once pulled out one of those oldfangled CD boomboxes and played his son's new EP for his property law class. Some of the songs, such as "Girls Own Juice" and "Make Sex" upset some of the more stridently-feminist students, and this, along with the professor's tendency to call girls "Cupcake" made some of them wonder how Catherine MacKinnon ever managed to stand near him at faculty events. I just remember sitting there impressed that a father could be so proud of his son's rock jam about vaginal secretions.

That son, of course, turned into Andrew W.K. whose songs "Party Hard" and "It's Time To Party" you've probably heard in beer commercials or that Girls Gone Wild videotape you ordered in 2003. Mr. W.K. is well known for his piano-infused party rock as well as for always dressing like a house painter, but did you know he has a kid's television show coming out this week? It's called "Destroy Build Destroy" and the preview pretty much speaks for itself:

I guess building rolling robot bombs and facing down a tank are this generation's equivalent of getting slimed on Double Dare. I would have liked to have been there when Andrew W.K. asked these kids' parents to sign the liability waiver. "Yeah, after your daughter blows some shit up with a bazooka we're gonna drop grandma's Mary Kay car from a crane on the edge of a cliff, then we're gonna build some shit and blow it up then we're gonna PARTY TILL WE PUKE."

It's official: Andrew W.K., world's best babysitter.

Friday Morning Street Urchin Blogging

I found about a hundred new urchin photos last night and some of them are really cool. Almost as cool as these girls with their folded arms checking out the dudes outside the factory walls.

You still have time to enter the contest for the free music player, just leave a comment on the most recent post before 3:00 p.m. EST and I'll update this post as soon as I use the random number generator to determine a winner.

**UPDATE**

Thanks to everyone for the hilarious comments. We only have one 1000-song player to give away for Father's Day, but they're sending us a couple more so we'll have another contest in a few weeks and give those away as well (hopefully with friendlier odds). Using the random time and date generator at random.org we determined the winner of this giveaway to be the person who commented closest to 1:24 a.m. on June 11, 2009: Jennifer, from Bend, Oregon. I think Jennifer was one of the first people to read this blog in 2005. Glad you've stuck around all these years, Jennifer.