art we enjoyed together, if only for a moment

portrait of a sunday at home

One unexpected delight of parenting: I have developed a keen ear for music that my five-year-old will love. I don’t expect this will last forever. I do hope that one day she’ll be introducing me to new music she thinks I’ll like. For now, I feel I have a algorithm-sharp sense of her preferred musical vibe: a female vocal, a catchy chorus, and girl-power theme are always favorites, but a slightly menacing and creepy element usually helps etch a song into her soul. Some all-time favorites: Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls.” The Shangri-Las’ “You Can Never Go Home Anymore.” Eartha Kitt’s “I Want To Be Evil.” Absolutely anything Lana del Rey. “Jolene,” of course. Recently I had a hunch Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” would become a favorite, and I was right—we played it three times in a row, lying on the back lawn. And one of my proudest moments occurred a few months ago when “Good Luck, Babe!” came on the radio and she told me, “Mom, this kind of sounds like Kate Bush.”

I’m conscious that it is kind of silly to be proud of this: to celebrate her good taste feels akin to saying “How cool that my young child likes everything I like!” But it really feels like she’s been introduced to multitudes; she’s pursued her own avenues. To me, the soundtrack of the day is much more than background music: listening to my favorite music energizes me, reaffirming my own tastes and passions to myself, which feels sorely needed in this stage of life. And being frequently prevented from listening to my chosen soundtrack (which absolutely does happen, as any parent whose children have rendered useless their Spotify Wrapped can attest) can feel like an affront to my identity and autonomy. She doesn’t like everything I introduce her to, and she’s certainly not afraid to demand something I dislike. As much as I’d sometimes like to be, I’m really not the type to regulate my children’s consumption of culture overly much. I’m no Susan Sontag (for more reasons than one), who forbade her son David to read children’s books, pushing Voltaire and Homer instead. (“He had to improve his intellectual stature so he could be a companion to her” says biographer Benjamin Moser—I’m in the middle of his Sontag biography right now and enjoying it a lot.) My kid’s true musical obsession at the moment is Disney’s Descendants series—all four films—whose soundtracks are mostly laughable (though I admit they grow on you). She listens to her heart’s content, sometimes on multiple home speakers at once.

When our tastes do align, though, it’s beautiful. When she stays up late reading The Story of Paintings, which I snagged hopefully from the library, and yells at me from her bed, “Mom, look! It’s Van Gogh!” I want to tell her to go to bed, but I can’t. I come back in the room to see what she’s seeing. It’s fun to see art working on her, melding itself with her in this earliest iteration of what will forever be her taste.

Last Sunday we spent an afternoon consuming the following stuff together in a way that felt uniquely satisfying, and that I want to remember.

When are we going to get Lina Lamont’s redemptive origin story (a la Maleficent) on screen? It’s just a matter of time

Over the course of three nights last week, we all watched Singin’ in the Rain together. It’s one of the longer live-action films the kids have watched, so I wasn’t sure it would hold their attention. In fact, both were rapt. (My two-year-old still can’t stand to watch anything that doesn’t involve Elmo, so this was a thrill.) Immediately afterward, the five-year-old wanted to reenact the film’s dramatic conclusion infinite times: I would stand in front of her, lip-synching “Singin’ in the Rain” while she stood behind me singing the real lyrics, then pretending to pull up the curtain and expose me. I had to then run off crying. (Only she was allowed to be Debbie Reynolds’ character; I had to be the villainous—or victimized?—Lina Lamont.) Though she refused to play the part of Lina, she’s been walking around rehearsing under her breath Lina’s signature line, “Do you think I’m dumb or something?”, attempting to replicate the uniquely grating voice that’s deemed unfit for talkies, thus setting the plot in motion. Even the two-year-old now asks to listen to the soundtrack in the car—fun, since her own tastes have been a little later in developing than her older sister’s.

I love this movie’s wacko digressions, its disregard for keeping the plot moving. I can’t look away from the pure physical charisma of every one of its lead actors. I think my kids love the movie for the same reasons without realizing it. And it just seems true to me that stories whose plots and characters are a little out of the grasp of their comprehension capture the imagination so much better than, for example, a typical modern cartoon, whose stupefyingly smooth aesthetic and oppressive didacticism are aimed so precisely at a toddler’s brain as to give them nothing to struggle against. I have a feeling SITR is only the first of many old movie musicals we’ll watch together once it gets colder. (Recommendations welcome!)

A little porch reading.

After the movie, the little girl went down for a nap, my husband went out for a stroller walk with the baby, and I (hoping against hope) took a book out to the back porch without a word, aiming to give the big girl some empty space to fill with self-entertainment. As I predicted, my never-eager-to-be-alone daughter followed me to the back porch right away. The book was Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement that Changed Modern Art. (So glad I’ve discovered in recent years that I love a good group biography—they’ve truly enriched my life. Again, recs welcome!). With the words of Henrik Karlsson in my mind (“Reading challenging books with kids is fun and probably useful”), I offered to read aloud to her. She declined. Then I offered to show her the pictures in the color inserts, which she eagerly agreed to.

We flipped through the reproductions and photos of the artists with great interest. Thinking I’d take the opportunity to teach her about the concept of representational vs. abstract art, I showed her two Lee Krasner paintings on the same page.

“What is this a picture of?” I asked, pointing to the first.

“A girl painting,” she said.

“Yeah. And what is this a picture of?”

I thought she’d be stumped, at which point I would explain, it’s not really a picture of anything, it’s a picture of paint, it’s a picture of shapes. “Flowers,” she said without a second’s hesitation. Looking at it now I see she’s obviously right. (The title was a good clue too: Still Life.)

We proceeded, and at every spread I asked her “If you could be any painting on this page, which one would you be?” (a museum game idea I know I lifted from someone’s Substack and can’t remember whose—help me out if you know it?). Then I showed her how to read in a painting’s caption where the original artwork lives. She was thrilled to discover just about all of them could be found in New York City—we’re all taking a trip there in about a month. We looked at Krasner’s White Squares and found it lived at the Whitney, where a Wanda Gag show (author of one of our favorite picture books, Millions of Cats—talk about a story to grapple with!) is ongoing. “We could go see this one in the same building where the Millions of Cats show is going to be,” I told her. She began to literally jump up and down, clapping her hands. I felt I had succeeded marvelously as a parent.

After that, she agreed to let me read a little of the book while she paced the porch. She needed no prompting to stop me frequently and ask whatever questions arose. This gave us the opportunity to discuss such topics as Van Gogh’s unremunerative career as an artist and posthumous fame, the Federal Art Project (also the Great Depression in general; also the concept of money); the perplexing dismissal of women artists, etc. In case it’s in doubt: this didn’t thrill me because now, having learned these important concepts in her youth, she will be far ahead of her peers in terms of quantity of facts known. The title of Karlsson’s article mentioned above, I think, is apt: the practice is probably useful; it’s certainly fun. I hope she’ll someday read out loud to me from the books she’s interested in so I can ask my questions.

Life with children can feel like a constant mutual struggle for self-determination. They are forever keeping me from the things that I want to do, as I am forever keeping them from the things they want. This is mostly how it has to be: our goals are so different, and we cannot be apart. When we find slack in the struggle, when we can both stop pulling on each other, it feels magical. If I find the space to read 0.75 pages of my book in their presence, I am a major success. I imagine they feel the same when they begin a dish-soap-and-black-pepper potion in the bathroom sink and I decide to let them. Listening to Kate Bush, watching Singin’ in the Rain, discussing Lee Krasner, we are at peace together, we are both ourselves. When I try to pull them into my world, and they seem willing to follow, I am happy. I think they are too. They’d tell me if they weren’t.