Last Minute Canvassing -- Bless our Volunteers!

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Our little corner of Pennsylvania is in a frenzy of desperate canvassing by Democrats.

Our Democrat state representative has vehemently opposed fracking by the Gas Industry, and a lobbyist for the latter is reported to have accosted him and told him he was "Going down."

I have no idea what is going on on Television, but there are billboards springing up everywhere, handbills being placed in every mailbox, full of disinformation about what the Democrats have done, and are doing.  Our representative, they say, opposed a 1% tax on the frackers.  (He, with his fellow Democrats, were holding out for a better deal.)  He has supported, they say, the use of State revenues from fracking being used for housing and road repairs in the big cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.  (He opposed spending fracking revenues only in fracking counties, which could have encouraged those counties to support fracking without considering the costs, simply out of greed for the money.)

Democrat activists are anxious to get every vote in Pennsylvania and Ohio, which have been identified as swing states.  But the conservatives are hardened here, and unlikely to listen to reason.  Rural conservatives are what they are for emotional reasons.  Democrats represent the march of progress, the deterioration of the old way of life, and rural conservatives prefer the Republican ticket simply because it appears to promise a return to the glory days.  How can this be combated?

First of all, when a Democrat, canvassing door-to-door asks why the resident favors the Republican ticket, they are unlikely to be told the real reasons; perhaps the residents are not even aware of the real reasons.  It emerges in vague statements such as that they hate the fact that Obama "favors gay marriage."  (They mean: they wish things would go back to the way they were, before they knew there were so many gays around!)  They hate the fact that Obama is "Against coal!  I used to work on the railway, and if coal goes, the railway goes!"  (He means: he doesn't want to be reminded that coal has such a bad reputation.  Obama and the Democrats are probably far more in favor of the Railway System, which uses Diesel almost exclusively, than the Republicans will ever be.  Or perhaps they are under the impression that only the coalmines use railways for transportation.  That is, most certainly, not the best argument for keeping low-tech, polluting coal-burning power plants going.  Coal mine owners and coal-burning power-plant operators don't want anything to get in the way of sucking up any remaining profits in the coal business, before they try to sneak off without helping to make the abandoned mines safe.  Coal-burning plants abroad are far less polluting.  Why?  Because they are subsidized by the government.  Why not in the USA?  You tell me.)

You can't argue with people who won't state the true reasons for their beliefs.  What you can try to do is attempt to combat some of the misinformation being spread by overeager Republican activists, which amount to lies.  But hardened Republicans turn sly when the lies are brought up: Democrats, they're likely to say, are lying too.  Generally speaking, Democrats have not even begun to lie yet, and one hopes they will not start now.

As emerged in the second debate, Obama and the Democrats are not only focused on the immediate problems, such as unemployment and the real estate crisis, they're also working on long-term issues: Social Security, Health Care, Energy, the Environment, where the results will come long after Obama's term is over.  The Republicans, in contrast, say what they have to say: All we care about is to solve the unemployment problem, and remove the obstacles to (your) affluence.  But they too are interested in long-term goals, some of which are far less idealistic: the long-term health of the business class (at any cost), the steady weakening of their political opposition, and the weakening of opposition to American business abroad.  Many of these positions are not well thought out; they're childish whims encouraged by irresponsible political leaders and mindless neoconservatives who depend more on so-called Rules of Thumb and prejudice than careful reasoning: a belief that a strong military will bring in its wake a strong economy, for instance.

[Added later:

Bill Maher reminds us that under Pres Obama we have none of the circus we had under "Dubya" : the moronic Attorneys General, the Maniacal Secretaries of State, the fooling around with the Ten Commandments in State houses, the Shiavo fiascos, the stem cell research, the bans on use of the words Global Warming.  If the Romneymobile rolls into Washington, Maher warns, there will be a whole busload of lunatics, the fringe supporters of the Republicans and Romney, who will want to play because they paid.

Two Plays: Godot, and Hamlet

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I’m not a frequent visitor to stage plays (I would have said ‘the Theatre’ but for the fact that the word is used nowadays for the Cinema as well), though I have enjoyed the few that I’ve attended.  My first major play was Barrie’s Peter Pan, staged by a semi-professional troupe, and oh, how marvelous it was!

Then followed Death of a Salesman, and Hotel Paradiso, which might not be familiar to most of my readers.  Somewhere along the line was Waiting for Godot, so skillfully translated that it was years before I learned that it was in fact a translation.

When I first saw Godot I was just a kid, I’d say something like 15 or 16, and I took most of the play at face value though it was obvious that there was more going on than appeared on the surface.  Then I sent out for it on Netflix: Becket on Film, and watched it again.

It would seem that the staging I had seen as a youth was just the first act, or perhaps I had gone to sleep between acts.  For those who haven’t seen this play, here is an abbreviated synopsis:

Two gentlemen, who appear to be vagabonds, are seen in a wilderness spot by the edge of a trail.  They talk to each other, and we learn that they have fallen on hard times, that they’re so strung out that they hardly remember what they were doing yesterday.  Evidently they’re waiting for someone named Godot, who has promised to aid them.

They fall to bickering among themselves, picking at each other, until they’re interrupted by a man who staggers by, burdened with a number of boxes and paraphernalia, and tied to a rope.  Presently, around the bend, at the other end of the rope, appears a well-dressed man, who imperiously calls out instructions to the burdened man (who appears to be his servant, or slave), and our two friends watch all this with curiosity and some alarm.

The grand gentleman greets them with joy, and makes his servant stop, bring him a stool, and so forth, until one of the two friends challenges him, demanding to know why he treats his servant so harshly.  The conversation gets pretty crazy, until the two friends are persuaded to leave the slave alone.  After a while, the grand gentleman (Pozzo) and his slave (Lucky) exit the stage, going on their way.  Night falls, and our friends are told, by a messenger, that Godot cannot keep his appointment, but will visit the following day.

That is sufficient for the moment, to talk about what my reactions to the first act were.  I must, someday, read what others have said about the play, and possibly what Mr Becket himself might have said, though I suspect he hasn’t said a great deal.  The important thing about a play is that it should speak for itself; if it needs a great deal of commentary and notes, one suspects that it wasn’t an entirely successful piece of theater.

I realize that the play is allegorical, in some sense, and theological in some sense also.  The early years of the 20th century (and the last years of the 19th) seem to have been ones where people were still struggling to deal with the extent to which Christianity had influenced their idea-world.  They battled the impediments to expressing their beliefs and feelings imposed by a vocabulary that was still firmly in the grip of Christian concepts.  Today, we have almost the opposite problem (or the same problem in a more acute form): most people are not familiar with the more sophisticated Christian concepts, despite being surrounded by amateur theologians who flood the airwaves and the media.  With few exceptions, people out there are unburdened with the more sophisticated philosophical ideas of a generation that had to attempt to reconcile Evolution and the Bible; modern Fundamentalists are more at the speed of Just Saying No.

To know more precisely where Becket was going with his idea one would first of all have to watch the whole play ---which I did not, to my shame; and one would have to be familiar with more of Becket’s plays than just this one.  It appears, on the surface, that Becket is ready to indict religion (or at least Christianity) with being a stumbling-block to clear thinking and decisive action.  Or it may be that there is no moral, as such, but that there is an attempt to distil human behavior and human relationships away from the clutter of normal existence and circumstances, to showcase the crassness of certain things, and the beauty of other things.  The dialogue goes round and round almost in circles, but keeps you listening, despite the awkwardness in having been translated from French into English.

Godot is most certainly a play that can be brought to life by good actors, though it probably spurs on even ordinary performers to outshine themselves.  The actors in the movie were beyond merely excellent, my favorite being Pozzo.  Pozzo is a plum role for anyone who is larger than life, domineering and obsequious in alternation.

The second movie we watched was Hamlet, with Mel Gibson (Franco Zeffirelli, 1977).  I had my doubts that Mel Gibson could play Hamlet convincingly, but I needn’t have worried.  Shakespeare was not intended to be played with realism, as we are accustomed to seeing today; theatre was, we believe, a stylized world where the conventions were different, out of necessity.  But a modern staging of Hamlet, especially for the screen, has to compromise.  And this effort was beyond excellent.  The cast was outstanding (Paul Scofield, Glenn Close, Helena Bonham-Carter, Alan Bates, Ian Holm [Bilbo Baggins], Pete Postlethwaite), but the cinematography, the directing, the music, were all perfect.

The questions that arise are: (1) What is Shakespeare trying to convey in this play, if anything?  (2) What makes this play ---and Shakespeare’s plays generally--- special?

I think the overriding motivations for Shakespeare’s plays were economic.  He is first and foremost wanting to entertain and attract an audience; to my mind any moral or message is entirely secondary.  On the other hand, whatever things were preoccupying the man at the moment when the play was being written could be expected to creep into the play in one way or another.  But we can only speculate (in the absence of diaries or contemporary reports that  post-modern critics delight in using to deconstruct art of any sort), and it seems that Hamlet’s preoccupation with death has to be taken in the context of the entire plot of the play, and the means the playwright uses to make the drama plausible, and to heighten the intensity of the action.  Mel Gibson (in the commentary) speculates that Shakespeare was dealing with his own personal demons, which emerged in Hamlet’s soliloquy.  This is something that is impossible to refute, equally difficult to support.  Artists of Shakespeare’s day ---now I'm speculating--- were not the self-absorbed people that present-day artists often are; they were working-class stiffs, barely better off than laborers, and probably did not have the leisure to contemplate their navels, or engage in speculation of the horrors of life after death.  That was left to philosophers and theologians and monks, and for bishops to squeeze in between their love-affairs.  So Mel Gibson is probably a lot more worried about the hereafter than Shakespeare was at any given time.  But Shakespeare perhaps vividly remembered his thoughts concerning suicide from his younger, more passionate days, and channeled them, as most good writers do.  (I’m merely arguing that we cannot conclude that Shakespeare was concerned about death while he was writing Hamlet, something that probably does not matter very much.)

As to (2), I think that the older generation of playwrights were successful essentially because of their sheer eloquence.  There is a clever variation in voice from character to character, even if it all sounds like Shakespeare to our uneducated ears, and even the most crass idiot speaks eloquently through Shakespeare’s pen.  It was stunning, to sit through the play, and hear not just a mere half-dozen but a score of quotations that have come down to us, all from this one play, from "Neither a borrower nor a lender be," to ... "Frailty, thy name is Woman!"  The Simpsons has a tough act to follow.

The famous line "Get thee to a nunnery!" is said by Hamlet to Ophelia, in a moment of disgust.  On one hand, he is anxious to present himself as mentally disturbed to her (realizing that she is the instrument of her father, whom Hamlet suspects of spying).  On the other hand, he alternates between his passion for her, which is real, and his disgust with womankind, as falling short of his ideals in a human being.  (Hamlet is a college boy, on hiatus from his school in Germany.)  Hamlet, throughout the play, grows steadily more misogynistic, and one wonders whether the play gives Shakespeare an opportunity to relieve his own misogynistic frustrations, but then one is falling into the same trap into which Mel Gibson has fallen: attributing the attitudes of Shakespeare's characters to the playwright himself.

It all comes down to the question: why do literary folks engage in their activity?  Is it an economic thing only, or is there some self-expression that refuses to be bottled up?  Does the author want to lay bear his soul, or is all this passion mere artifice, "Acting!" as Master Thespian Jon Lovitz from Saturday Night Live insists?  Is there a didactic motive?  Are these playwrights trying to make a point about contemporary events and characters?  The fact that the plays have stood the test of time is a testament to their universal appeal, but we can't deny that there may have been additional piquancy to their stories depending on whatever was going on at the time.

[To be continued]
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The Cynge of Cliches, the Prince of Parodies: (Weird) Al Yankovic

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As we were cleaning up my wife’s things yesterday, we came across an album [Poodle Hat] by Weird Al Yankovic, which we decided to play in the car as we drove.  It’s not that I haven’t heard much by Weird Al over the years: I’ve been a fan for decades!  But I forget that there is so much there to celebrate!

A hilarious introduction to Yankovic’s work is “I lost on Jeopardy,” one of his earliest songs, a parody of a song “Jeopardy” by the Gregg Kihn Band.  Listen to the quiet plaintiveness of this recording, quite a contrast to the loud carrying on of most comic songs of the past.

One of the first songs I remember from him is “Like a Surgeon,” (spoofing Madonna’s Like a Virgin, if you don’t know already).  That was back when I still had TV service ---we don’t get over-the-air TV where we live--- and saw the video on MTV, or whatever the family watched back then.  I must admit that Weird Al had a genius for physical comedy, and his videos often, if not invariably, picked up on segments in the original music video to caricature.

Another memorable spoof is “Eat It”, a send-up of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”  Weird Al also selects  just the right little fillips to give stand-out places in whichever original recording he is spoofing; in the case of Madonna’s song, the little cry she attaches to the phrase “Like a virgin—(cry)—touched for the very first time …” Weird Al adds a cry in the same spot, with a little extra edge to it.  You can never listen to Madonna’s song with a straight face ever again.  In the case of Beat It, where Michael Jackson interjects “Oh Lord…” Weird Al says “Oh lard,” if you listen closely.  This fits in with the theme of the spoof---parents insisting on their kids finishing their food: “have a banana—have a whole bunch; it doesn’t matter what you had for lunch, just eat it!”

The spoofs are multi-dimensional.  Not only is there an incredible (and hilarious) contrast between the subject-matter of the original song and the spoof, the lyrics of the spoof are just over the top funny in their own right, even if you’ve never heard the original.  The performance of the spoof is brilliant; it mimics the original closely enough to make the spoof musically non-trivial, to begin with, but he (and his team, whoever they are) adds just a little here and there to send up the original beautifully.

In the instrumentation, too, there’s humor; in place of the heavy orchestration in some songs, Weird Al makes do with the skillful use of accordion and synthesizer.  Using an accordion for spoofs is widespread; somehow it seems to make people laugh.  (Weird Al’s father is a well-known accordionist and Polka player with his own much-recorded band.) [Added later: evidently Frank Yankovic, to whom I referred, is no relation.  I stand corrected.]  The seventies band They Might Be Giants, for instance, features an accordion in their funniest songs.  The decadent MacArthur Park by Richard Harris is a wonderful ---if slightly self-indulgent---song that has a sort of opium dream quality to it; Weird Al’s spoof is called Jurassic Park, and is a commentary on the movie of that name in addition to being a spoof of the song.  In this case it is the relationships of the ideas in all three things that is amusing, if not laugh-out-loud funny.  Jurassic Park is, understandably, more of a nightmare than an opium dream, and it is black humor that we find here, not just the usual belly-laughs.

So the members of Weird Al’s band play really well, which adds to the humor, Weird Al does a great job with the vocals, not hamming it up too much, and the lyrics and the musical devices are all funny.

Weird Al destroys George Harrison’s “I’ve got my mind set on you” with “This song’s just six words long!”  As always, the words are funny, and it certainly is laughing at itself, but it’s also laughing at the George Harrison song, which is a potboiler of the worst sort with practically no inspiration in it.  Harrison wrote a far superior song for an album of the so-call Contractual Obligation Album variety: “Only a Northern Song” for Lou Grade, whom the Beatles heartily despised.

“Living with a Hernia” is a parody of a popular song of the eighties whose name eludes me, but it is also a parody of aging rockers from James Brown to Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger.

I try to imagine what it must be like to be around when Weird Al hears a new song, and sees the possibilities in it.  Does he roll on the floor laughing the second it comes on, or does it take a while?  There are more than a hundred spoofs of songs from all genres from his pen.  (Considering some of the songs we hear over the airwaves, I'm not surprised.)

One of the most interesting songs from him is not a spoof at all, really, but a descendant of the sort of funny song Frank Zappa used to do.  I wasn't surprised to learn that Dweezil Zappa was playing lead guitar on the track: it is “I'm a genius in France!”  Some of the references escape me, but musically it is fascinating.




[Added later:

Weird Al has also made a couple of movies, a really good example being (OK, this is the only one I've seen) UHF.  That's its name.  It is a spoof of practically anything you ever saw, beginning with Indiana Jones.  Having see that, I think Yankovic should be given a chance at a main-stream comedy as a director, or at least a script-writer.  He does see the potential for parody ---which is, in my humble opinion, a major force in present-day comedy, if not the majorest force--- at the exclusion of other potentials, which [parody] probably strikes some critics as a derivative art-form.  They say the Pun is the puniest form of wit, but good parody is brilliant.  Mel Brooks did parody, and practically nothing but parody, and in my opinion he was one of the major creative forces in 20th-century cinema, and continues to be respected today.  Al Yankovic could be that great, if things came together for him.  It all depends on whether he stays focused on minutae (which can be pretty funny), or the humor in the big picture (which can also sometimes be funny, but has a bigger canvas, and more potential for greatness).]

Arch

Musical Humor

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Just this afternoon my wife and I were listening to a CD devoted to musical humor, and I thought it might make a good post in this blog.  The humor in our CD was a little heavy-handed, but still funny, I thought.

There has been humor in music for hundreds of years, but I'm by no means an expert, and this isn't intended to be encyclopedic in any way, but I thought you readers might get a kick out of some of these pieces.  Humor --at the risk of going too close to being destructively analytical-- has to do with the unexpected; for this reason, I suspect that purely musical humor arrived only after the establishment of forms, that is, after the Renaissance.  Before that there was plenty of musical humor, but it has to have been driven by text, that is, the joke was in the words.  Bawdy songs probably go back as far as language, or at least alcohol.

Not exactly what we're talking about ...

To get started, I looked to see whether the subject had been covered already elsewhere on the Web, and the first link I turned up was a transcript of one of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts (which I'm told, incidentally, are a fabulous series for anyone to watch and listen to on DVD, and in which he presents an enormous array of musical information and insight) where he addresses the whole subject of humor in music.  Unfortunately, I feel, he takes a very analytic approach, and ruins the humor.  There is a sort of Heisenberg Principle there. I don't doubt for a minute that Leonard Bernstein got the humor in any music he listened to, but doing postmortems on musical humor is an exercise in futility.  Analyzing jokes is best left to comedians, and bad comedians, at that.  I'm just going to introduce you to some of the funnier pieces that I know, and maybe give you a hint as to why I find them funny.

(As an aside, some of the funniest people I know are Jewish, or at least of Jewish descent, such as Jon Stewart and Woody Allen, and Jerry Seinfeld.  But Jewish folks also tend to be over-analytical about many things, a characteristic they seem to share with Indians (and I suppose everyone has their own favorite group of people who study humor to no avail), and manage to reduce a good joke to a pathetic piece of data.  But to get back to the music...)

Haydn (Franz Joseph, in case you were wondering exactly which Haydn it is to whom I refer, and there are at least two of them in the annals of classical music) was noted for musical jokes.  In his case, they were essentially musical practical jokes.

There is the well-known "Surprise" Symphony: by the time Haydn had got his hands on the form of the Symphony, it had settled down to a mostly standard form in which the second movement was mostly in a slow tempo (so much so that it was usually called The Slow Movement).  Some elderly musical patrons at his concerts were evidently in the habit of taking a little nap during the second movement.  So it happened that Haydn wrote in a particularly loud chord right in the middle of the slow movement of his Surprise Symphony.  I have heard this symphony only once, and wasn't particularly surprised!  Still, it is a documented musical joke, and worth looking out for.

Practical jokes, of course, are the main stock-in-trade of many jokesters, and I find them pretty funny myself!  But of course, you're laughing at the discomfiture of someone else, and there's just so much of that sort of thing that people can stand, especially the victims.  (My own students were amused at my calling them Little Bunnies, for some reason that eludes me now, and decided to play a joke on me.  One weekend they managed to break into my office, and fill it with Easter bunnies--stuffed animals of every shape and size, some holding carrots.  I found it both surprising and completely hilarious, that they would go to all that trouble!  Considering other things they could have done, I suppose I got off easy.)

Another of Haydn's practical jokes was the Farewell Symphony, in which the players were supposed to leave the stage one by one, until only one --or at any rate, only a few-- were left.  It might have had something to do with the fact that the musicians were required to leave their families behind in Vienna, and go out to the country estate of their master (Duke Esterhazy) for the summer season, which little charade had the desired effect of alleviating their plight is some way, we're told.  (I paid a little more attention to it just now than I usually have, and it's a good piece of music.  I'm giving you a link, just in case I fail to embed it successfully.)

I'm sure these escapades would be more impressive and funny when the cultural background of the incidents are taken into account.  Practical jokes are very dependent on their cultural context.

You're not going to believe this (or perhaps you are), but our dog finds some things hilarious, e.g. when somebody trips and falls.  A sure way of making her grin from ear to ear is to do a pratfall.  You haven't lived until you've seen a dog laughing.  They also think it's funny when they've defecated on somebody's favorite toy, I'm told.  Practical jokes are a low form of humor, but they have their place, obviously.

Another famous instance of musical humor is Bach's Coffee Cantata.  The humor in this little work is even more subtle, and has to do with the pleasures of drinking coffee.  For various occasions Bach wrote so-called occasional pieces, e.g. for birthdays and name-days, and sometimes the theme was a vice or hobby of the patron.  One aria in one of these secular cantatas had words amounting to: "What I like most is a jolly good hunt!", and I believe it is from this work that one of his absolutely most famous tunes is taken, called Sheep may safely graze.

In Opera, there are numerous instances of musical humor, since a major proportion of operatic themes are comedic.  The humor in comic opera only occasionally is conveyed in the music itself; the comedy is in the situations and the libretto.  For instance in The Marriage of Figaro, Figaro and the Count conspire to send the page Cherubino off to war in the army, and Figaro makes fun of him in the aria "Non Piu Andrai, Farfallone Amoroso".

Among musicians, a major cause of amusement is the ineptitude of instrumentalists.  While we listeners tend to think of bad playing as appalling and unprofessional and perhaps a waste of our money, to their fellow musicians, bad playing is, in addition, hilarious.  For reasons  unknown to me, Mozart (Wolfgang Amadeus, in case you were wondering) wrote one of the funniest pieces of pure musical humor, called Ein musikalischer Spaß, or A Musical Joke.  Here's a clip of the second movement.  Listen closely at 0:40.

The French Horn is notoriously difficult to play, and here the cornists (horn players) have to actually play notes that sound wrong.

Wrong-note jokes are common in music of the late 18th century; Beethoven (Ludwig van) slid in wrong note jokes in lots of places, and I believe the most famous one is in the Eroica, or Symphony No. 3.  In one place it sounds as if the Horns made an entry too soon, but it is written that way.  There is a place in the third movement where there is not only a wrong-note joke, but a correction joke as well, where the horns rudely "correct" the right note played by one of them.  (Horn entry jokes are a sort of running gag in the Classical period.)

Various comedians have developed comedy routines around music, but the music is not intrinsically funny.  Notable among these is Victor Borge, a Danish American, who made delicious fun of well-known piano classics.  Others are Steve Allen, Tom Lehrer andHenny Youngman ("Take my wife, please!")

More recently, American Peter Schickele has been very successful at writing music that is funny.  Schickele's humor is completely over the top; subtlety is not at all what he is aiming for.  The best of Schickele humor were written under his pseudonym of P. D. Q. Bach, the supposed 20th son of Johann Sebastian Bach.  The CD The Wurst of P. D. Q. Bach contains probably the best-known of Schickele's pieces, including the Schelptet in E Flat, in which he parodies Mozart, Haydn and numerous other composers.  His Mozart parodies are amazingly clever, making it impossible to listen to Mozart without smiling to oneself.

Do you know where your kids are?

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-And is that always a good thing? asks an article on the NPR website.

The point is that modern American parents are preoccupied with the safety of their offspring, which leads them to allow them less and less freedom to roam about and entertain themselves with their peers.

Even when I was young, my parents deplored the fact that the neighbors' children went around roaming, and spent very little time at home.  My younger brother came under criticism for going off without telling our parents where he was going.  (I was, too.  I was almost 16 before I was allowed to go off without prior permission.)

Read the article; it describes the phenomenon a lot better than I can.

Well, I believe that limited freedom is here to stay; it is a side-effect of most families having to have two parents working in order to maintain the lifestyle they want.  The adults want a lifestyle that requires more expensive material goods, but increasingly the kids want more expensive toys too, and parents who spend a lot of money on themselves are in no position to deny the little people (or the not so little people) their fabulous playthings.  (The quality of the merchandise does reflect on the quality of the parents, right?  Or is that too crass?)  Also, I have to confess, many parents work so hard to try to ensure the future of their offspring by buying them an expensive education, to put them ahead of the competition (or because the child wants it, or the child needs it, academically). Sometimes the only good education that parents can arrange for their kids is an expensive one, but in my humble opinion, the converse is not necessarily true.  (My daughter might argue that a more prestigious education might assure her more of the things she really needs, but it is hard to decide such questions even with 20/20 hindsight.)

But I want to argue --with the article-- that a certain amount of uncertainty in our knowledge about what the kids are doing is probably a good thing.  I remember going off one summer, in my rebellious period, and the adults who were with me at that time begging me to write home, or call home, and just tell them where I was.  I did not have wheels, but I walked hundreds of miles, to save the bus fare, so I could spend the money on the grub I really liked, and other things my parents could not afford.

A question to those of my readers who grew up in modest circumstances: did your humble beginnings make you a big spender as an adult?  I suppose most of us would say no: I, for instance, feel that I'm a fairly restrained consumer, but I have an enormous collection of fiction, which must have cost me several thousand dollars when I got them new (many of the books are from used book stores), and a collection of music recordings that must have cost me twice as much.  On the other hand, my stereo system is about $1,500, and my TV is about another $300, a gift from our daughter.  I suspect that many families own more expensive systems.

We live in a $100,000 home (which was a lucky buy), and drive cars each worth about $9,000 new, back in 2004.  So in some ways we live frugally, but money runs through my fingers like sand, I have to admit!

Kids who are allowed a lot of freedom to roam probably need fewer toys to keep them entertained.  But you have less control over who they hang out with.  The band of friends your kids connect up with is such an enormous influence over their lives.  Unfortunately you just can't over-engineer this peer group; it mostly just happens, based on where you live, and the things you do as parents (e.g. Church, etc).

When our only child was young--four or five-- we took her first to Ballet class, which she loved.  Then we took her to play Ping-Pong, which a local parent was organizing, to keep the kids in his neighborhood off the streets (fairly successfully, I might add).  Then came Judo and Gymnastics, which she kept up for a long time.  Then came Girl Scouts, and Piano lessons, and finally Odyssey of the Mind, and Tennis, and now that I think of it, Computer Club.

You must get the impression that this kid was a dynamo.  Actually, she didn't know any better; any time I said: let's try this, she was all for it!  I guess it meant something interesting to do, and new kids to meet.

Some colleagues and I have a discussion going at present, and we agree that these adult-supervised activities are no substitute for things the kids run off somewhere and dream up to do by themselves.  Luckily, each of the activities above got our kid a new collection of buddies, and she was very much into introducing each gang to the rest, which meant that they spent weekends organizing get-togethers, and that was a good thing.

Perhaps the most amazing thing she did was to agree to a paper-route when she was twelve, where she made mountains of friends --both kids and adults, not to mention a dozen pets, dogs and cats-- whom I knew only very slightly, or not at all.

Being a girl, of course, she did not have the freedom that a boy would have demanded, and got.  This is a miserable aspect of our society, which I deplore, which some girls transcend, and others unfortunately do not.  Someday girls growing up can do exactly the same things as little guys do, with no threat to their persons either from predatory adults or anything else.

The important thing is not that our girl was any good at the things she did --she was good at some things, but not at others-- but that she got a wide circle of friends, some close, and some not so close.  Temperamentally, I suppose, some kids are more comfortable dealing with no-so-close friends (boys are a little better at this, I think, but I could be wrong) than others.  And let's face it, this is an important first step to getting a wide enough circle of friends with whom you can do something interesting that does not involve adult supervision, or expensive equipment.

Why is this important?  I think it builds the important characteristic of being self-directed.  A self-directed kid is just so much more likely to be a success than a kid who needs supervision.  It turned out that my brother whom I mentioned earlier was self-directed to a fault, and had the most wild and crazy life you could possibly imagine, and was, by my measures, the greatest success of all of us (only limited by extreme poor health).

My wife busted loose the summer of her first year in college, and went on a trip to the Middle East.  She never looked back; she doesn't quite understand exactly how that experience made her the person she is, but it is clear that being on her own, away from her family, made her the self-directed person she is now.

Reading the comments to the NPR piece shows the enormous variety of attitudes to this question: whether to "free range" your kids, and if so, to what extent.  It all depends very strongly on where you live, and the opinions of some of these NPR listeners may or may not be relevant to you.  But the decadent society in which we live influences the lives of our families so strongly, in ways that neither we nor society can control very well.

But other things are emerging that help things in the right direction, provided we use them well: cell phones, which enable us to keep in touch with junior, but also use like a leash, which is not good.  There are lots of issues.  The evolution of our attitudes towards alternative lifestyles has, I believe, actually made the world a safer place.  On the other hand, sensationalized news reporting is not a blessing.

[To be continued, possibly.]

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