Details feature: “Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl”

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/details_feature_rise_of_the_hot_jewish_girl

Redheads. Piercings. Big natural boobs. Now add another item to the list of America’s favorite sexual fixations: Ladies of the tribe. 

That’s right - Jewish women are the latest fetish ethnicity. On a recent poll of readers of the porn blog Fleshbot, “Jewish girls” came in number two in a list of top ten kinks (edging out “girls on bikes” but falling short of the number one entry: “freckles").

Jewesses aren’t just the rage of the triple-X realm: they’re wooing goyim with their wily ways on “Mad Men” and “Glee” and giving movie geeks conniptions over reports that Darren Aronfsky’s upcoming feature “Black Swan” features choice JILF-on-JILF action between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. And what would “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” have been without the hot-smutty-incredibly-Jewy Sarah Silverman?

America, it seems, suddenly can’t get enough hot Semite tush. That’s all the more remarkable given that Jews represent a truly tiny minority (2.2% at last count) that just finished serving up a similarly overwhelming wave of their menfolk—the so-called Jew Crew of Ben Stiller, Judd Apatow and his gang of lovable zhlubs (Seth Rogan, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Jason Segal, et al.)

Unlike their funnymen frat brothers, Jewish girls have to contend with that old stinging JAP stereotype of frigidity, whininess and big hair. But the Fran Drescher rep has given way to a more smoldering, exotic mold - think Rachel Weisz, Emmannulle Chirqui, Jennifer Connelly or Scarlett Johansson. “The dark hair, the olive skin, the dark eyes - it’s the whole physical type,” says Harry Pallenberg, a documentary filmmaker from Italian-German stock who dated a number of Jews before marrying one. “It’s not a religious thing - the more observant the Jew, the less I’m attracted.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. How else to account for “Frum porn,” dirty pictures of religious Jews getting busy that’s earned a devoted following far outside the faith from those who find something impossibly smutty and exotic watching a girl in a sheitel give a blowjob. “It’s something like the Catholic schoolgirl fetish,” says Jewish porn star James Deen. “We all want to defile that purity and wholesomeness.”

Jews are of course no strangers to porn—the Hebrew hardcore hall of fame includes Ron Jeremy, Nina Hartley and Seymore Butts. Only recently, however, have porn performers begun to actively embrace their ethnicity. “I never in a million years thought my Jewishness would be an asset,” says Joanna Angel, who grew up in a strict Orthodox family and went on to star in films with titles like “Cum on My Tattoo” and “Porny Monster.” While she’s hardly observant, she still fasts on Yom Kippur, avoids bacon and checks in with her New Jersey mother more than is strictly necessary. She often finds herself wandering around porn sets in stiletto heels and corsets asking if everyone in cast and crew has had enough to eat.

“I embody a lot of Jewish stereotypes - I have a Jewish nose and Jewish hair and I kind of talk like I’m Jewish,” she says. “I also own my own company and I feel guilty all the time.”

It’s no secret that Jews are comparatively cool about sex - from the racy Purim story of that hottie concubine Queen Esther to the masturbatory fiction of Philip Roth and Erica Jong, the Jewish tradition is a veritable orgy compared to more restrained if not repressive Christian traditions. Jews don’t talk much about “hell” or even “sin” and Rabbis hector their congregants that it’s a “double mitzvah” to get busy on shabbos. While official teaching frowns on sex outside of matrimony, the dirty jokes and astonishing number of Craigslist ads for casual encounters among hot-bodied Jews suggest a lasciviousness that many outside the tribe find irresistible. And while it’s possible that these women might question the intentions of their pursuers—and indeed, there’s something creepy about some guys’ desire to dominate a Jewish chick—most accept the attraction and the fact that that their genetics have delivered some pretty seductive traits.

Many in this Jew-loving camp find their way to dating sites like JDate, which lists 13% of its 650,000 members as religiously “unaffiliated.” Some of these so-called “goyfriends” are seeking educated, marriage-minded partners; others are simply looking to hook up with a hot Jewess. “It’s really annoying—I get emails from guys saying things like, ‘I never regretted not being Jewish so much as when I saw your profile,’” says a New York nonprofit professional who asked to remain nameless, given that her extracurricular hours are spent running a group called Kinky Jews, a social group for those who enjoy mixing religious observance with whips, spiked heels and partner swapping. Goy gatecrashers are not unheard-of at the group’s annual Kinky Seder, a Passover party in which the bondage of ancient Hebrews is honored with chocolate licorice whips and the sharing of “favorite kink items.”

Likewise, non-Jews have been unexpectedly enamored with “The Year of the Jewish Woman,” a 2009 self-published calendar in which writer-actress Jamie Sneider poses nude blowing a shofar and elsewhere covers her 32-Ds with strategically placed bagels, latkes and brisket. While she’s heard from a few Jews who find the images sacrilegious, the calendar has been a hit outside the tribe, getting distributed on a USO tour of Iraq and landing Sneider on Playboy radio. “This is about taking my power as a Jewish woman back,” says Sneider. “I can be a Jewish woman and not be uptight and in fact be really proud of my sexuality and my body.”

For her part, the porn star Angel says while she’s open to girl-on-girl, double penetration and all sorts of stuff that will never earn her the approval of her orthodox relatives, there are certain things a good Jew just won’t do. She’s rejected offers to make a holiday porn in the mold of this year’s “Dr. Suzy’s Porn & Purim DVD Bacchanal,” which mixed group sex with groggers and hamentaschen. “I’ve totally desecrated Christian traditions before,” she says. “In one video I put a cross-shaped dildo inside me, but I’d never do anything with a menorah—that’s just creepy.”

Details feature: “Rise of the Hot Jewish Girl”

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/details_feature_rise_of_the_hot_jewish_girl

The December issue of Details includes my feature on the fetishization of hot Jewish women. Read on for quick, snappy, not-terribly-deep take on “JILFS,” semi-observant hardcore queen Joanna Angel and the glory of frum porn ... Story was slammed by Jezebel (Favorite new nickname: “sloppy, knee-jerk misogynist") and given qualified endorsement by Jewcy.

The December issue of Details includes my feature on the fetishization of hot Jewish women. Read on for quick, snappy, not-terribly-deep take on “JILFS,” semi-observant hardcore queen Joanna Angel and the glory of frum porn ... Story was slammed by Jezebel (Favorite new nickname: “sloppy, knee-jerk misogynist") and given qualified endorsement by Jewcy.

Details feature: “Are You Jealous of Your Kid?”

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/details_feature_are_you_jealous_of_your_kid

Details magazine just posted this feature I did for the September issue about wellspring of resentment that builds up among over-involved parents as they create ever-more-awesome educational and enrichment opportunities for their precious progeny. 

Details magazine just posted this feature I did for the September issue about wellspring of resentment that builds up among over-involved parents as they create ever-more-awesome educational and enrichment opportunities for their precious progeny. 

Details feature: “Are You Jealous of Your Kid?”

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/details_feature_are_you_jealous_of_your_kid

You’re an involved and attuned father. You’ve provided top-notch educational opportunities and excellent footwear. Your kids are smart, savvy and discerning. They sneer at Hannah Montana, revere Johnny Cash and glide through their go-go calendars with aplomb. You couldn’t be prouder, really.

Then one day that parental pride takes a dark new turn. It happens all at once, while driving carpool to surf camp, getting your ass handed to you in a Super Mario Galaxy matchup by your nine year old, or watching your son IM with six girls simultaneously. That’s when you feel it, bubbling up from the same dark wellspring of feeling that stirs when you behold your friend’s new high-def A/V setup or hear about your boss’ trip to Tahiti: You’re jealous.

Let’s be honest: there’s plenty to begrudge. Your kids have a far sweeter setup than you have now or ever had as a kid, back in the bygone days when 16-bit drivel like Galaga ruled and the best porn you could find was in your sister’s Judy Blume. While you fret and hustle and schlep, they merrily feast on a smorgasbord of awesome social, educational and entertainment options. Not only have they got massive multiplayer online games—they’ve got the time to play them. Not only do they know the difference between sushi and sashimi—they get those cool bendy attachments that make chopsticks a cinch (plus they never have to pick up the tab). They keep getting smarter and stronger and more savvy while you wince from that torn ACL and struggle to summon a halfway clever opinion about Lady Gaga.

““It doesn’t make much sense, but yeah, there’s definitely envy,"” says Jason Avant, founder and editor of the blog Dadcentric.com and father to daughter Zoe and son Lucas, who at five has become quite the badass in karate - which is all well and good except for the fact that dad can’t quite let go of the fact that he was pretty good at martial arts himself before his training was cut short by a blown knee. ““’I’m watching him getting better and better and realizing I’ll never have that chance,”” he says. ““It sounds silly, but I’m suddenly become aware that I’ll never be in five-year-old shape again.””

That may be the most common strain of paternal envy -– just as many women resent their daughters as they begin to bloom and fill out and attract the sidelong glances they once enjoyed, dads are often peppered by pangs of jealousy when their boys drop their childish spazziness and come into their own physically.

But well beyond athletics, many dads can’t help but feel jealous of the sheer diversity of options. Whit Honea, a fellow daddy blogger and father of 6-year-old Atticus and 3-year-old Zane, recently moved to a cozy, family-friendly community near Seattle that offers juvenile instruction in yoga and glassblowing. Glassblowing! “"These kids are like little artisans with apprenticeships!"” he says. “"Here they are living a life of arts and leisure, and I’m living a life of grindstone and stress.””

Parental envy is nothing new -– it burns in all its green-eyed glory in the Grim Brother’s tale of an aging queen (later recast as wicked stepmother) ordering a hit on her far-hotter daughter Snow White. And no doubt there were a few Ozzie and Harriet-era parents who wished they’d been given a societal pass to frolic naked in the sun like their hippy progeny. But lately parental envy has reached dizzying new heights, driven by a wave of parental overindulgence and seismic upgrades in what might be called the Juvenile Enrichment Complex.

Even in our recession-addled age, the routine path through childhood begins with music and movement playgroups and deluxe indoor playgrounds and quickly advances into afterschool hip hop classes and under-21 dance clubs.

For fucksakes, they even get Ritalin.

All of which can create deep wellsprings of jealousy among the parents doing all the arranging, planning and financing. So who’s responsible for the jealousy? Go ahead and lie to yourself if you like, duck responsibility, tell yourself you’re simply giving your kids every available opportunity in a competitive world. But you know who’s to blame. You strive to be more fun, more giving, more understanding than your own authoritarian-slash-unreliable-slash-absent parents. Now you reap the reward: kids who are way more privileged and assured and worldly and hipper than you’ve ever been.

That, in the end, is what stings most of all: they’re cooler! It’s pathetic that you even care. After all, your own middle-aged parents settled into a routine of regularity and lameness without much fuss. Not you. You decided long ago not to let the kids slow your roll. You still go to shows, still rummage for bargains at the sample sales, still consider yourself reasonably in-touch. But your kids don’t even have to try. They look good in hats and t-shirts and ties together. They can actually pull off Zac Efron’s haircut. They rule Halo 3. Meanwhile you’re exhausted at nine and feeling entirely unsure whether those new A.P.C. jeans make you look more like Olivier Martinez or Gerard Depardieu.

It’s no wonder therapists like Austin Texas psychologst Carl Pickhardt, author of many books on parenting including The Connected Father, so often encounters parents with the same age-old complaint: “My kids have no idea how lucky they are.”

Few parents can identify the true source of this ungratefulness: themselves. “"Parents are entirely complicit,"” he says. ““They give to their kids what they never got and then get angry at their kids for not being appreciative. But of course the kids don’t know. All they know is this abundance and affluence. How could they ever be appreciative?””

They can’t, and resenting kids for how great their lives are can lead to dark places indeed. One need look no further than that high priestess of parental jealousy, Dina Lohan, for a scary object lesson. Surely Mama Lohan has, at some point, felt unadulterated pride at her daughter’s success, but her strenuous attempts to out-glam, out-do and out-party her own child speak to a particularly awful outcome of parental envy.

The trouble comes in overcoming what feels like an unassailable impulse: the need to provide the best for your kids. Too often, that desire can mutate into a drive to furnish your kids with all the stuff you actually want yourself. Bruce Miller, a television writer and father of three from Los Angeles, had his reckoning with while touring private schools with his son. ““These places were amazing – way better than any college I’d ever seen,”” he says. One school offered courses in Chinese and a swim team coached by an Olympic gold medalist. ““It made me want to go to middle school,"” he says. “"All I remember about middle school not being able to open my locker and fear of an ill-timed erection. And here my kid was walking into this amazing idealized version of middle school. It wasn’t fair. I wanted a do-over.””

Miller got over it once he realized that his son’s actual experience at school had very little to do with all the stuff that so captivated dad. ““He cares about skin and girls and trigonometry,”” he says. ““It might look good to me now, but middle school still sucks.””

Recalling that the actual experience of growing up is terrifying and awful in ways we conveniently forget is one of the keys to easing the envy, family therapists say. You might also try laying off the perks and think a little less about what to do for your kids and more about what to do with them. “"Switch it around,"” says Timothy Smith, a Gallup researcher in family issues, author and family coach who counsels parents in Thousand Oaks, California. ““Team up and plan stuff together—let them know about your limitations and budgets and priorities.”” Translation: if you practice Rock Band with your kid instead of sulk about his shredding, you might even be able to show him how “Through the Fire and Flames” is really done…

On a deeper and perhaps far scarier level, the trick to defusing jealousy is letting your kids off the hook for the moat of resentment that’s built up around the castle you’ve created. “In the end it’s not jealousy—it’s loss for whatever you missed that you wish you had,” says Pickhardt. “It’s sadness. Once you realize that, you don’t get angry at the kids. You can begin to appreciate that what you’re doing is providing for your kids what your parents weren’t able to give you.”

At which point you might just be able to allow them the pure pleasure of that laser tag extravaganza and settle back into a far more familiar sensation: resenting your parents for the shitty job they did raising you.

Michael Lewis book review in LA Times

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/michael_lewis_book_review_in_la_times

Pity the poor modern dad. Or at least pity poor Michael Lewis, the father of three whose half-hearted, cranky and mostly clumsy attempts to live up to the modern ideal of fatherhood is breezily but brutally described in the new memoir Home Game.

Lewis, whose previous books have dealt mainly in the business of sports, here tackles the trickier territory of fatherhood—or more specifically, what he calls “the raw deal” dealt to dads today. Drawn from diaries he published in the online magazine Slate immediately following the births of his children Quinn, Dixie and Walker, Home Game mixes cringe-worthy tales of his own failings with repeated gripes about the no-win bind fathers today face.

On the one hand, he writes, fathers are now expected to join moms shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches of childcare, changing diapers, resolving squabbles, divvying up bottles of pumped breast milk and otherwise at least appearing to share in the grunt work that previous generations of fathers shirked with mysterious impunity. But even as they pine for the days when the only real job requirement for fatherhood was a “capacity for detached amusement,” dads today are constantly reminded of their own irrelevance, incapability and essential uselessness. While the more-involved dad of today gets some credit, they’re mostly, he says, viewed with pity: “The world looks at him schlepping and fetching and sagging and moaning beneath his new burdens and thinks: OH… YOU… POOR… BASTARD.”

Lewis is a funny, frank and engaging writer and he gets a lot of comic mileage telling tales at his expense - his experiences in a Parisian Gymboree class and a Hawaiian hotel pool are just the sort of laugh-out-loud anecdotes that fill warts-and-all parenting memoirs like Christine’s Mellor’s “The Three Martini Playdate” or Sandra Tsing Loh’s “Mother on Fire.” The difference here, of course, is the parent laying out the laundry - of the multitude of recent books that purport to comically expose the harsh realities of family life, precious few have been penned by dads (which may have something to do with conventional wisdom in publishing circles that guys are as likely to buy a book about parenting as they are in the latest by Jody Picoult - i.e. not at all).

Home Game may very well be the book to bury that sad stereotype, peppered as it is with guy-friendly sports and financial analogies and jibes at the nurturing, accommodating, doting ideal of the modern dad. But it’s also strangely dispiriting - those well-intentioned pops who actually buck industry thinking and read the book will likely finish it feeling, if possible, even less equipped and more demoralized in their efforts to overcome the example set by dads of previous generations who rarely changed a diaper and wouldn’t know a Baby Bjorn from a Bugaboo.

Still, it’s refreshing to hear a dad describe so vividly the uglier aspects of the job. The birth of his daughter, which a mushier dad might observe with humbled awe, inspires a particularly intense bout of harrumphing. “No one actually cares how dad is doing,” he writes. “His fatigue, his worries, his tedium, his disappointment at the contents of hospital vending machines - these are better unmentioned.” As for the act of childbirth itself, which fathers now routinely watch unfold in its entirety and possibly even videotape: “it’s a hideous secret to be kept.”

His list of grievances continues outside the delivery room. Inspiring particular ire are the host of newfangled parenting products, services and safeguards now considered mandatory parental accessories. That commercial pressure, combined with the heightened expectations in housework, add up to what he calls “a Dark Age of Fatherhood.”

But it it really so bad for dads? It’s hard to work up much sympathy for Lewis at least, who views the care and feeding of small children as miserable work and seems so preoccupied with his own predicament that he takes little note of what many parents, even the most detached dads, view as the true dividend of raising small kids: wonder. Yes, little kids are messy and bossy and unreasonable. They’re also miraculous and fascinating and often really, really funny. These are of course harder qualities to describe in a comic memoir—your precious three-year-old daughter’s etherial specialness is a lot less funny than the humdinger of a story about the time she peed in the hotel pool. 

While Lewis makes some noise toward the end about how the dirty work of parenting forges indelible bonds—you know, genuine parental feeling. And when confronted with a family crisis like a nasty respiratory virus or his wife’s debilitating bout of post-partrum panic, he displays the sort of compassion and accommodation that dads from what he longingly calls “the glory days” would surely find hopelessly wimpy. But even so, he’s clearly not going out without a gripe. 

An Orange-Tinted Ogilvy Win

http://www.christophernoxon.com//an_orange_tinted_ogilvy_win

Just got word that I’ve been named one of the winners of the 2009 Grand Ogilvy Award, which recognizes the role of consumer research in advertising. The award recognizes work I did last year talking with adult lovers of Cheetos, which helped inform Goodby, Silverstein & Partners’ “Orange Underground” campaign. 

Just got word that I’ve been named one of the winners of the 2009 Grand Ogilvy Award, which recognizes the role of consumer research in advertising. The award recognizes work I did last year talking with adult lovers of Cheetos, which helped inform Goodby, Silverstein & Partners’ “Orange Underground” campaign. 

Parents urge kids to live on the wild side

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/parents_urge_kids_to_live_on_the_wild_side

In an era when parents agree on so little, from birthing plans to college admission strategies, we can all at least agree on one thing: safety.

Keeping our kids safe from harm, after all, is a value that transcends the usual traditional-progressive divide. It doesn’t matter if you’re a strict disciplinarian who closely regulates your kids’ moral development or a groovy “alternaparent” who pays more attention to their iTunes downloads, you don’t skimp on safety.

Hence the preponderance of padded playgrounds and bike helmets, Internet parental controls and, in perhaps the most visible sign of our collective thinking about raising kids, the scarcity of children left unattended outside to play.

But now, at last, that single remaining shared value is crumbling. Parents are now rethinking pricy babyproofing gear and school bans on tag and other “chase games.” Many are taking their cue from bestsellers like The Dangerous Book for Boys and the Daring Book for Girls and shooing their kids off the couch to go build a campfire or cut flint heads for a bow and arrow.

A few are even forgoing the usual birthday gifts of fancy gadgets in favor of - gasp - pocket knives.

Suddenly, safety is passé.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, our kids will be all the better for it. Children need risk, hardship and periodic jolts of pain to develop into self-reliant grown-ups. Parents who constantly remove obstacles and eliminate perceived dangers - from smearing their little hands with antibacterial gel six times a day to prohibiting them from going to the bathroom or the corner store by themselves - are doing their kids a deep disservice.

Most parents know this, of course. But it’s easy to forget in a time when threats are broadcast from every corner, from the partially hydrogenated oils in food to the “stranger danger” on the street. At a certain point, however, parents inevitably get worn down by the bombardment and must finally learn to prioritize their anxieties.

In other words, while fencing the swimming pool and insisting you know your teenager’s whereabouts are reasonable parental controls, there comes a time when it no longer makes sense to X-ray your kids’ Halloween candy, ban all Internet use for fear of cyberpredators or do your kids’ homework because they’re so stressed out.

Clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel was among the first to describe this modern strain of overprotection in her invaluable 2001 book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. Too many modern parents, she wrote, try to “inoculate their children against the pain of life” and end up with insecure, demanding, dependent kids.

Mogel’s prescription is a mix of old-school traditionalism and a more modern strain of compassion - she advises parents to limit the time spent worrying about kids to 20 minutes a day, treat bumps and injuries matter-of-factly, and stop attempting to shield children from the ugly and unpleasant facts of life.

The same basic spirit has fueled the runaway success of the Dangerous Book for Boys, Conn and Hal Iggulden’s politically incorrect and determinedly old-fashioned manual for mini macho men. Packed with such apparently arcane tips as how to hunt and cook rabbit and make a good go-cart, the book was a mammoth bestseller in the U.K. in 2006 and was modified for an even more successful U.S. edition last year.

It has since spawned a companion book for girls (which advises girls how to change a tire, build a fire and even press flowers) and led to a TV development deal and a bidding war over movie rights.

The phenomenon proves that kids and parents are desperate, Conn Iggulden wrote in the Washinton Post, to “remember a time when danger wasn’t a dirty word. It’s safer to put a boy in front of a PlayStation for a while, but not in the long run. The irony of making boys’ lives too safe is that later they take worse risks on their own.”

With so many families now rushing to rediscover the joys of sharp objects and sticky situations, it’s easy to imagine the pendulum swinging all the way back into the sort of perilous territory where little thought was given to such legitimate dangers as car crashes and second hand smoke. But for now anyway, our kids will benefit a lot more if we stop trying to protect them from the inevitable pain of being alive.

Adventures in Family Air Travel

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/adventures_in_family_air_travel

Please excuse me. Really, I couldn’t be sorrier.

That knocking on the back of your seat? The chewing gum smeared on your tray table? The whining and screeching and crying - the incessant, high-decibel weeping?  All my fault.

I am the airline passenger you dread most of all, more even than the religious fanatic or flatulent fat guy.

I am the passenger accompanying small children.

I’ll also take the blame for the soggy Sun Chip that landed on your cashmere sweater during beverage service and the intense little sourpuss two rows up who’s been staring at you since takeoff.

I feel your pain. I agree wholeheartedly that children and air travel don’t mix - they bring out the worst in both. With kids on board, leisurely, meditative trips become chaotic, emotional ordeals. Likewise, sweet and docile children become spastic hellions upon boarding a commercial airliner.

And it’s only getting worse. As rising fuel costs and increased competition prompt airlines to cut back on little “non-essential amenities” like legroom, food and courtesy, the kids are getting crankier.

We grown-ups may gripe and moan scrunched into a middle seat for six hours with nothing to sustain us but a Sandra Bullock movie and a bag of peanuts, but kids aren’t so easily pacified. They won’t stand for it. They act out.

And so they make everyone around them miserable. You, my fellow passengers arrive at your destination incredulous about Kids Today and the parents who let them run riot. Meanwhile we parents are exhausted and embarrassed.

Add beleaguered airline staff to the mix and nightmare scenarios ensue. Last summer on a Continental Express flight in Houston, flight attendants objected when a 19-month-old boy “started saying ‘Bye, bye plane’ over and over,” according to news reports. “You need to shut your baby up,” the flight attendant reportedly told the mother, before adding: “It’s called Benadryl.”

A big controversy followed, with critics raising a stink about the insensitive flight attendant who would dare suggest doping a child.

While the stewardess sounded tactless, I can’t say I entirely disagree with her sentiment. Let’s just say that my 2-year-old always seems badly congested just before takeoff.

Benadryl has in fact been one source of relief during an insane marathon of family travel this month, flying with three kids under the age of eight across the U.S. before taking a quick round-trip jaunt from L.A. to Denmark. At this very moment my eight-year-old son is tipping a cup of Coke dangerously close to a dozing grandmother while my two-year-old repeats the word “cookie!” again and again (and again) in hopes the next utterance will convince his mother to give him one.

And I find myself wondering, must this be so awful? After all, families represent a sizable portion of air passengers—we may be a nuisance, but we’re also a goldmine.

We shell out for family vacations, family automobiles, family restaurants - so where’s our kid-friendly airline?

Rumors have circulated for years about Disney Air or some other startup devoted specifically to families, but the closest we’ve come is Family Airlines, an upstart outfit based in Las Vegas that submitted an application to fly with the US government earlier this year.

They’re definitely on to something. Let solo travelers fly in plush recliners and Zen-like quiet - bunch us families together in mutual chaos, wherein the only people we can annoy are our own kind (i.e. those accustomed to frequent meltdowns and the more frequent spilling of beverages).

Ideally, the planes will be painted in garish SpongeBob yellow and vivid Princess pink (ancillary revenue: kid branding product placement!). On board, swashbuckling pirate pilots and plush costumed stewardesses offer passengers headsets, juice boxes and balloon animals.

It’s easy to imagine the rest: TV monitors and video games at every seat and bubble machines spurting forth at takeoff. Turbulence could be known as “wacky bumpy time,” complete with dramatic sound effects and zany music.  Passengers could do the wave up and down the cabin and bounce beach balls between rows. Little ones would be free to take a spin on the zero-gravity ride or the center-aisle zip line.

And while we’re at it, let’s steal an idea from the old movie palaces and include a “crying room.” That way bawling infants and their weary parents could huddle together and save the rest of the passengers the racket.

Sure, much of this is probably impractical. When airplane bathrooms are no bigger than a broom closet, crying rooms or zip lines are probably out of the question. But on behalf of unruly family travelers everywhere and the innocent bystanders who can’t stand them, the airline industry should get creative and stop ignoring our pain.

Instead, capitalize on it. Forget the in-flight wi-fi—where’s our in-flight bouncy castle?

Is Summer Camp Too Hokey?

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/is_summer_camp_too_hokey

It’s summertime and my freezer is filled with popsicles and mud balls.

The popsicles are easy enough to explain. It’s July. And as we all know, nothing soothes the soul on a scorching July afternoon like a popsicle, preferably lime.

The mud balls are more mysterious. Grapefruit-sized and as smooth and spherical as marbles, the mud balls began piling up the week my kids started summer camp.

Other kids fill their days at camp with archery or horseback riding, but for my six-year-old daughter, camp is all about the mud. She gets off the bus every afternoon coated in grime and cradling that day’s creation, which must be immediately transported to the freezer for safe keeping and preservation.

This is a far cry from what I imagined my daughter would be doing back when my wife and I went looking for something to fill the interminably long summer break.

Our kids are just entering their prime camp-going years, so it was a relief to discover that summer camp is as strong as ever - in the U.S., 10 million kids attend camp every year, according to the American Camp Association. The fad these days is for “enrichment programs” that give children an academic or creative edge over their recreating peers.

This means more kids are being lured away from campfires and canoe trips for computer camps, fitness camps, language programs and college prep courses. Kids with even narrower interests can enroll in camps specializing in cuisine, robotics or even entrepreneurship.

The appeal of such programs is clear enough. Looked at today, traditional summer camps can seem hopelessly hokey or even backward, relics of a long-lost industrial age when middle class parents sent their kids out of the pre-air-conditioned cities to learn crafts, survival skills and Native American hokum.

But in this highly competitive and anxious new millennium, it’s worth pausing to ask: is camp still worthwhile? Do we really need macrame bracelets, food fights and “Kumbaya”?

The answer, of course, is yes. We absolutely need those things and all the backwards and hokey traditions that go along with them.

This is especially true now, as more kids are coddled by parents, bombarded by pressures to achieve and isolated by new technology. In the words of American Camp Association President Nancy Gibbs, today’s kids arrive at camp “digitally aware” but “less familiar with the ideas of sharing their space, their stuff or the attention of the adults around them.”

Amidst all that, summer camp replenishes an appreciation for nature, play and getting along in a big group. The killjoys who would keep our kids “on track” 12 months a year ignore these deep and durable lessons.
I’d go so far as to argue that camp stands alongside free market democracy and public education as one of the great institutions of the modern world.

I say this as a grown-up whose own hazy recollections of camp include nasty wedgies, horrendous food and the night my cabin-mates stuck my hand in a bowl of warm water to see if I’d pee in my sleeping bag (mercifully, I didn’t). On a happier note, there were unforgettable letters from home, intense crushes and epic games of capture the flag.

Summer camp, in short, was both heaven and hell—or as authors Roger Bennett and Jules Shell write in their brilliant new book “Camp Camp,” it was “where ‘Fantasy Island’ meets ‘Lord of the Files.’”

In fact, I see no reason why kids should get all the benefits of summer camp. Which is why next week when our kids’ day camp year ends, our whole family is packing up and heading to the wilds of Vermont for a week in one of the increasing number of summer camps that caters to entire families.

So while the kids are busy with their fellow campers, my wife and I will be free to roam the camp and make some memories of our own.

Mud balls, here I come.

Is my son a dick, or is he two?

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/is_my_son_a_dick_or_is_he_two

Salon just posted an expanded version of my essay about the psychosis of toddlerhood. I’m trying hard not to take the 200-plus letters to heart.

Salon just posted an expanded version of my essay about the psychosis of toddlerhood. I’m trying hard not to take the 200-plus letters to heart.

Is my son a dick, or is he two?

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/is_my_son_a_dick_or_is_he_two

My son pooped on me this morning.

The pooping occurred at approximately 6 a.m. after the 2-year-old leaped into bed and suggested that he’d be most grateful if I got up, escorted him downstairs and turned on his favorite program, a quasi-educational cartoon about a bilingual girl and her pet monkey.

What he actually said was this: “Daddy, up! Dora show! Dora show now!”

On most days, “Dora the Explorer” is good for a solid half-hour of pre-breakfast calm. But not today. Today Oscar motioned to his midsection and said he “hurt.”

Woefully misunderstanding the situation, I kissed him on the head and loosened his diaper. At which point he tore off the nappy and grabbed hold of my leg.

And then he pooped on my foot.

This may or may not have been an accident. Looking up at me in the messy slow-motion moments that followed, his expression could only be described as satisfied.

I have two things to say about this. First: It is truly remarkable how tolerant of bodily waste one becomes raising small children. Before I became a dad, the news that my everyday routine would include being defecated upon would have sent me diving for a home vasectomy kit. It is some measure of how far I’ve come (or how low I’ve sunk) that Oscar’s outburst prompted little more than an exasperated moan as I backed away in search of industrial-grade cleaning supplies.

All of which is well and good—there’s no point getting overly worked up or grossed out over something so ubiquitous to family life that we parents simply call it “number two.”

The second thing I have to say is harder to reckon with. Because the truth is this mishap was entirely in keeping with the general climate of aggression, crankiness, impatience and determined messiness that has come to characterize Oscar’s personality over the last year or so. He demands. He resists. He screeches.

We’ve reached the point where I find myself seriously pondering the question: Is my kid a dick, or is he just 2?

Because you never know. As much as it goes against the current mode of progressive, project-management-style parenting, I take it for granted that some kids are trouble right out of the gate. They’re the preschool gangsters and playground terrorists, flicking boogers and insults at those they’ve identified as too weak to fight back. Just as some kids are born sweet-tempered and naturally gentle, others arrive as thuggish as HMO claims adjusters.

But heaven forbid you ever speak this basic truth among parents. Acknowledging a child’s dickishness is truly one of the last taboos of modern family life.

A child may have “behavioral issues” or “developmental challenges,” but the basic character of a kid must never be called into question. It’s always, “Cody must be tired,” or “Dakota needs a snack” and never, “Wow, Taylor’s kind of a prick.”

The trouble, of course, is that it’s exceedingly difficult to distinguish garden-variety assholery from the normal psychosis of toddlerhood.

Some naughtiness is entirely normal, I know. The pileup of parenting books on my bedside table assures me that kids between 13 and 36 months often experience “challenging developmental steps.” They’re testing limits, exploring their autonomy, learning to control their emotions.

One need look no further than the table of contents of the modern standard, “What to Expect: The Toddler Years,” to get a quick and terrifying picture of how toddlers operate. Whole sections are devoted to “antisocial behavior,” “caveperson language,” “crankiness,” “annoying habits picked up at play group,” “jealousy,” “biting,” “wall art and other destructive drawing,” “toothbrushing tantrums,” “coat combat,” “repeated ‘no’s’” and “impatience (now!)”

You’d never know it looking at him, but my son samples freely from the standard menu of misbehavior. In pictures he’s doughy and sweet with a mop of blond hair, big blue eyes and an irresistible grin. He couldn’t be cuter, really. Most of the time, especially when he’s at play, in the bath or asleep, he is by any measure the most perfect creature ever to grace the earth. Then he whacks you on the head with a spoon, laughs like a banshee and tells his mother that her new earrings are ugly and stupid.

Much of this nastiness is standard-issue obstinacy, but it mostly takes the form of an obsession with control. Control and honor. It often feels like I’m living with an embittered and incontinent samurai who must enforce his will and save face at all costs. As such, he’s ritualistic and rigid, demanding that I and not his mother unbuckle him from the minivan or that he receive one red and one purple Flintstones vitamin or that his diluted fruit juice go in the cup with the frog and not the one with the rabbit. Any deviation from the script is met with screams of protest and a flurry of little flailing fists.

We’ve tried discipline, distraction and even strict adherence to his demands, but the maddening fact is you never really know when he’s going to go ballistic. At an airport security checkpoint recently, he blew up when we removed his shoes and then found a new, more extravagant pitch of tantrum when we tried to put them on again. Later at a Chinese restaurant, he dumped his noodles on the floor and then ran among the tables, licking the tops of the Hoisin sauce containers. At a family barbecue last week, he greeted an elderly relative with a swift punch to the nuts (mercifully, he aimed left).

I wish I could say I take all this in stride, but the fact is it bothers me more than I can say. I’ve heard people without kids complain that parents have a blind spot when it comes to their own kids, that otherwise reasonable adults are only too happy to gush over the preciousness of their progeny while their little darlings run riot like English football hooligans.

I seem to have the opposite problem; instead of glossing over my son’s misdeeds (or, say, chalking them up to standard-issue tomfoolery), I latch on to them as terribly important signifiers of my kid’s true identity. Far more troubling than the chaos or general untidiness of parenthood is the ongoing agony of distinguishing passing phases from the first signs of what sort of person your child is and will forevermore be.

Never mind that his days are spent gnawing on blocks and smearing mucus across his cheek. Somehow, I can’t help feeling that he came in fully loaded, that his identity is complete and while he may get better at sharing his toys and using the potty, this is pretty much it. This is him. Behold my son, the dick.

No wonder so few parents are willing to acknowledge their own kids’ misbehavior. Doing so not only insults your offspring, it inevitably leads to reflection. For if my kid is a red-hot pig, what does that make me?

And the truth is I’m very familiar indeed with many of the despicable aspects of my 2-year-old. I too am often overwhelmed by a desire to kick and scream and punch creepy old strangers in the nuts. Like my son, I’m often irrational, hate being told what to do and cranky when sleep-deprived. But, really, who isn’t? Aren’t we all, on some deep and rarely acknowledged level, temperamental toddlers? We’re just better at hiding and managing it, thanks to helpful crutches like cocktails, reality TV and cardio boxing classes.

For now all I can hope is that my son finds some crutches sooner rather than later. He just turned 3, actually, graduating out of “terrible twos” and into a period rumored to be less traumatic and tumultuous. My two oldest kids are 6 and 8, and I like to think they’ve never been anything less than the sweet and mostly respectful darlings they are today. If I’m being entirely honest, however, I’m pretty sure I could recall a horror story or three.

None of which lessens today’s trauma. Developmental misbehavior may be a normal part of growing up, but pooping on your dad? That’s just wrong.

Cultural Jewish conversion

http://www.christophernoxon.com/appearance/cultural_jewish_conversion

While I’ve got a Jewish wife, Jewish kids and an ever-widening circle of Jewish friends and colleagues, I have stubbornly remained non-chosen. But I got sick of being merely Jew-adjacent. So in the summer of 2008, I became an official Cultural Jew, in front of a live audience at the opening of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. There was a quiz, humiliation and the downing of gefilte fish juice. My friends at Reboot have just posted audio, in streaming and podcast formats, of the whole mishigas. 

While I’ve got a Jewish wife, Jewish kids and an ever-widening circle of Jewish friends and colleagues, I have stubbornly remained non-chosen. But I got sick of being merely Jew-adjacent. So in the summer of 2008, I became an official Cultural Jew, in front of a live audience at the opening of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. There was a quiz, humiliation and the downing of gefilte fish juice. My friends at Reboot have just posted audio, in streaming and podcast formats, of the whole mishigas. 

Health insurance for nanny a political, moral imperative

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/health_insurance_for_nanny_a_political_moral_imperative

For my latest Family Life column, I get up on high horse and rail against hypocritical liberals (who, me?) who criticize the government and corporations for withholding health insurance while allowing their own babysitters and nannies to fend for themselves… It’s time to pay up, people.

For my latest Family Life column, I get up on high horse and rail against hypocritical liberals (who, me?) who criticize the government and corporations for withholding health insurance while allowing their own babysitters and nannies to fend for themselves… It’s time to pay up, people.

Health insurance for nanny a political, moral imperative

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/health_insurance_for_nanny_a_political_moral_imperative

Like most of my friends here in the cozy, progressive-minded state of California, I believe American health care is a national disgrace. I believe it’s an outrage that 50 million Americans lack health insurance and that care for the insured is so often refused, or else insufficient or just plain sloppy.

Of course this righteous indignation doesn’t amount to much, beyond feeling jealous of Canadians, justifying my Starbucks habit because I heard they cover their baristas, and cheering through Michael Moore’s “Sicko.”

So I guess that makes me a flaming liberal. But I’m also, I admit, a raging hypocrite.

Why? Because in addition to being a relatively well-off lefty, I’m also an employer; eight years ago, my wife and I hired a devoted, capable and impossibly sweet El Salvadoran immigrant to help with the kids while we’re at work.

And while I’m the first to rail against stingy corporations and slime-ball politicians for their failures to provide decent health care, I’m less likely to admit that my family’s single full-time employee is uninsured. Meaning that when my nanny gets sick or needs a checkup or gets a cavity, she’s on her own.

We’re not breaking any laws—our nanny has a green card and we pay federal and state withholding taxes. Besides, small private employers like us aren’t legally required to provide insurance.

It’s also surprisingly easy to justify something that’s done by so many. According to a 2003 survey by the International Nanny Association, 80 percent of nannies don’t receive health insurance from their employers.

But just because we can get away with it doesn’t mean we should. Any halfway compassionate parent who sees the shoddy and exploitative care available to the uninsured must conclude that they have a moral obligation to do what they can to help. The county hospital in Los Angeles looks more like a Civil War triage tent than a modern medical facility. Patients often wait six or seven hours for a cursory exam with an overworked, underpaid intern.

So it’s not that I don’t want to do the right thing. I do. But it turns out the system makes doing the right thing exceedingly difficult. Premiums are insane, tax laws are antiquated and, despite the hopeful talk from our presidential candidates, reform is unlikely any time soon.

My own insurance provider, Blue Shield, offered a quote of $975-a-month for a basic HMO policy that would cover my nanny and her teenage daughter. Prices are even higher in places like Massachusetts and New Jersey, where policies can run $1500 a month.

The picture gets even uglier when you consider the role government plays. Child care might be essential in two-income working families, but the tax code still looks on it as a luxury. So while businesses are allowed to pay premiums out of pre-tax income, families receive no such benefit. All of which means it costs well-meaning do-gooder families 10-15 percent more to insure their employees than it does business.

“It’s an outrage,” says Wendy Sachs, co-president of the International Nanny Association. “The system makes it harder for good people to act on their generosity. It drives people to pay their nanny under the table and it holds down nanny’s salaries.”

Still, many parents find ways to cover their nannies, paying medical bills out of pocket, listing them on the rosters of family-run businesses or turning to brokers who specialize in covering domestic help. Richard Eisenberg, president of Eisenberg Associates, which has been handling nanny health insurance since the mid-’70s, says his customers are motivated by far more than bleeding-heart liberalism.

“There are plenty of selfish reasons why you want your nanny insured,” he says. “You want a healthy nanny, someone who isn’t worried about themselves and can concentrate entirely on your kids.”

In short, it’s in everyone’s best interest to maintain the health of the person responsible for your kid for up to 70 percent of their waking life. So as difficult as it may be, I’m determined to find a way to get our nanny covered. According to Eisenberg, I can get adequate coverage for a third of the Blue Shield quote.

It’s still expensive, but in the end I know simply complaining about the sorry state of health care won’t make a bit of difference for my nanny or her family. It’s time to pay up.

I’m a CJ Convert

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/im_a_cj_convert

While I’ve got a Jewish wife, Jewish kids and an ever-widening circle of Jewish friends and colleagues, I stubbornly remain non-chosen. But I’m sick of being merely Jew-adjacent. So a few weeks ago, I became an official Cultural Jew, in front of a live audience at the opening of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. There was a quiz, humiliation and the downing of gefilte fish juice. My friends at Reboot have just posted audio, in streaming and podcast formats, of the whole mishigas. 

While I’ve got a Jewish wife, Jewish kids and an ever-widening circle of Jewish friends and colleagues, I stubbornly remain non-chosen. But I’m sick of being merely Jew-adjacent. So a few weeks ago, I became an official Cultural Jew, in front of a live audience at the opening of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. There was a quiz, humiliation and the downing of gefilte fish juice. My friends at Reboot have just posted audio, in streaming and podcast formats, of the whole mishigas. 

Tummy time

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/tummy_time

Righteous commentary on how kids today are spoiled and coddled became more limited but far more truthful story about how I spoil and coddle my kid.

Righteous commentary on how kids today are spoiled and coddled became more limited but far more truthful story about how I spoil and coddle my kid.

When treating kids like royalty has to stop

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/wh

My daughter is not a morning person. Neither am I, for that matter. Both of us have an exceedingly hard time getting out of bed and pretending to be civil before the hour of, say, eight.

Of course I can always part the fog with a large latte or a few Excedrin. She, being six, has no such help. Which is why weekday mornings at our house are so often filled with the sounds of shrieking, crying and complaining.

I’m on the morning shift at our house, meaning it’s my job to work through this daily trauma and get my daughter and her two brothers out of bed, into clothes and ready for school. Thankfully, my two sons are relatively easygoing when it comes to getting up and getting going.

My daughter, on the other hand, greets each day as if were her mortal enemy.

Over the last year or so, I’ve taken a series of steps I hoped would bring some measure of peace back to our mornings. At the time, all these steps seemed reasonable, small changes in our routine that would help my daughter make the transition from hibernating bear cub to attentive, obedient first grader.

But at some point, this routine spun completely out of control.

It started with the soy milk. Believing her bad temper might be a result of low blood sugar, I began gently jostling her awake and immediately offering up a sippy cup of warm vanilla soy milk. She liked this very much, but only if she could drink it while laying beside me for a few minutes of what she calls “tummy time.”

I should explain: my daughter has a thing for tummies. Ever since she was little, she’s had a disconcerting but entirely innocent habit of rubbing the midsection of any halfway-willing adult. One recent Sunday morning at breakfast, I held up a magazine to show my wife a picture of an extremely pregnant woman who looked like she was two weeks late giving birth to a Volkswagen beetle.

From across the room came our daughter’s breathy response: “Ooooh—I would love to touch that tummy.”

Tummy time made everything alright for a while, but soon my flabby middle-aged gut wasn’t enough to get her out of bed. That’s when she began complaining about the freezing conditions outside her warm bedcovers. As I helped her put on her clothes she squawked like a rare tropical bird that had been unexpectedly blown into an arctic storm.

And so I did what I believed any halfway accommodating father would do: before going downstairs to warm up her soy milk, I picked out her clothes and stuck them in the dryer for a quick tumble. That way, after tummy time was over I could hop up, grab her toasty clothes and slip them on as if she was the guest of a deluxe Mediterranean spa.

This pleased her. The howls and squawks gave way to coos of contentment. This new smooth entry into the day left her so relaxed that she couldn’t be roused out of her bedroom and downstairs to the breakfast table.

And so, for expediency’s sake, I began lifting her out of bed and carrying her downstairs then gently depositing her on her chair before a plate of freshly scrambled eggs.

This routine went on for much of this school year, long past the point where I should’ve realized how ridiculous it had all become.

Then one morning a few weeks ago, while scrounging around in her closet for a fleece sweater that would hold the heat of the dryer, I had a moment of clarity. I wasn’t helping my daughter. I was assisting a princess.  I suddenly had a vision of myself spoon-feeding her bits of pre-chewed sugary treats and carting her around in cashmere blankets, lest she ever get hungry or tired or in any way uncomfortable.

I wish I could say I immediately stopped all the coddling and instituted a policy of complete autonomy, but the truth is I took it slowly. First I stopped warming her clothes. Then I insisted she walk to breakfast herself. And then, at last, we stopped with the tummy time.

She’s complained a bit along the way, but she understands that the royal treatment couldn’t go on forever. She’ll be seven in August, old enough to deal with cold socks and early mornings and all of life’s most difficult challenges all on her own.

Minivan madness

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/minivan_madness

Latest Reuters column poses parental quandry: is the purchase of a minivan a milestone or gravestone? 

Latest Reuters column poses parental quandry: is the purchase of a minivan a milestone or gravestone? 

I promise to love, cherish … and buy a minivan

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/i_promise_to_love_cherish_..._and_buy_a_minivan

In the life of a parent, the smallest things often make for the biggest milestones—the ghostly wiggle on a first ultrasound, a baby’s first laugh, the farewell of a kindergartner on her way to school.

Sometimes, however, parental milestones are all about buying stuff.

And so it was for me, six years ago after the birth of my second child, when it became clear that the time had come to trade my single guy car—an aerodynamic, two-door Saab 900—for something with sliding side doors, dual-side airbags and a third row of seats.

It was time, in short, for a minivan. I knew it was the right choice. A minivan meant practicality, safety, comfort.

But a minivan also meant something else entirely. A minivan meant surrender. Men in minivans had settled completely into reliable, neutered domesticity.

Ads for minivans featured fluffy golden retrievers and kids in spotless soccer uniforms. No one mentioned performance or horsepower. It was all about cup holders. Raved one testimonial for the Honda Odyssey: “The 17 cup holders embarrass the competition.”

My own Odyssey was described as granite green. It was only after I took it home and peeled off the dealership stickers that I realized how I’d been misled. The granite part was right. But there was nothing green about it. My minivan was grey. It was the exact color of a tombstone.

Life as I knew it was over. I had no idea what came next, but I feared it involved a lot more History Channel, Home Depot and Ben Gay. I knew I was being silly, but I couldn’t help it. I spent the next few weeks searching for a custom shop that would paint yellow and turquoise racing stripes from one bumper to the other.

Somehow, I thought all my anxiety would vanish the moment a stranger mistook my minivan for a Hot Wheel that had been miraculously enlarged to life size.

I never did get those racing stripes, but I over time I came to terms with my minivan. it may have lacked style or oomph, but it was undeniably cushy. It was a rolling living room. Every once in a while, however, I was reminded how deeply uncool I’d become.

One morning idling at an intersection I found myself singing along to a song from the Shrek soundtrack. Throwing my head back in mid-wail, I looked over and noticed a young woman in the car next to me. Of course she was gorgeous. And of course her expression was one of complete and utter pity. Then she peeled away in, wouldn’t you know it, a convertible Saab 900.

One more kid and 80,000 miles later, my minivan was showing signs of wear and tear and, thanks to my kids’ charming habit of lodging sippy cups deep into the upholstery, had developed the permanent stench of rotten juice.

And so it came time for another milestone: the second minivan. This time, however, was altogether different. For one thing, the ads have changed. The groomed dogs and sweet kids are gone. The new Honda Odyssey campaign chugs along to an acid rock soundtrack and mimics the airbrushed ‘70 stoner van murals of warriors and wizards. The tagline: “Respect the van.”

The vans themselves have changed too. My old minivan was utilitarian on the inside and unassuming on the surface, with so many soft corners it looks like a giant lozenge. The new ones have blunted edges and aggressive, angry-eye headlights. Deluxe models come with V-6 engines, alloy wheels and speedometers that peak out at 160 miles per hour.

And the features are way cooler - new ones come with so many gadgets and gizmos you can pretend you’re doing the carpool in an advanced military transport. Last week I brought home a new model with lumbar support, GPS, XM radio, Bluetooth and a voice recognition system that lets me crank the air conditioner with a manly grunt.

Still, I’m not fooling anyone, least of all myself. No matter how sleek the styling or powerful the engine, I know it’s still a minivan. But you’d be amazed how easy it is to surrender with lumbar support.

Rats!

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/rats

Reuters just published the terrifying true story of my epic battle with an acrobatic, possibly bionic roof rat. Ewww.

Reuters just published the terrifying true story of my epic battle with an acrobatic, possibly bionic roof rat. Ewww.

Rats bring out the caveman in the modern dad

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/rats

Family life offers few opportunities for the modern dad to feel truly manly. We drive minivans, read bedtime stories, stock college funds.

We are rarely called upon to protect our homes from wild intruders.

All of which explains the weirdly intense satisfaction I got from a battle last week with a giant, acrobatic, possibly bionic roof rat.

By the time it was done I’d gone from sensitive househusband to cold-blooded cave-dad.

We’d had trouble with vermin before. One night a year ago, a rat sauntered into our living room, rose up on its hind legs and rubbed its hands together like a cartoon villain. Leaping up with a girlish yelp, I sent the rat scurrying into the basement.

I fought back the only way I knew how: I went online.

Predictably, this only added to my sense of panic. Real rats, I learned, are nothing like the witty gourmets in my kids’ favorite Pixar movie. They leave toxic droppings in pantries, gnaw through wood and wire and have even been known to bite children who leave crumbs in their beds. And they carry disease: typhus, rabies, bubonic plague.

I am not a particularly aggressive guy. I’ve been in two fights my entire life, both of them lopsided beatings at summer camp - the first inspired me to write a heartfelt poem on the futility of violence, the second came after my hippy counselors urged me to read that poem at campfire.

Ever since, I’ve been averse to the use of force of any kind, with any creature. I am just as likely to chauffeur a spider out the front door than squash it with a rolled-up newspaper.

But something happened the moment that rat looked into my eyes.

Somewhere deep inside my brain, a long neglected nugget of gray matter fired up and began pumping out a potent mix of sludgy male hormones.

And so I quickly dismissed any exterminators that seemed the slightest bit humane and settled on a service known simply as Abolish.

“YOU DIRTY RAT”

I loved everything about Abolish: their defiantly eco-unfriendly name, their garish and disgusting online photo gallery and especially Trevor, the eerily intense technician who arrived at my door with an impressive arsenal of poisons and torture devices.

Trevor may have set the traps, but I wasn’t going to let him do all the dirty work. A few days after his visit, I ventured into the attic to remove not one but three captured rats.

I felt like quite the warrior until my wife greeted me coming down from the attic in my homemade Hazmat suit of rubber dish gloves, safety goggles and face guard created by tying a washcloth around my head. I looked, she said, like a special needs Sandinista.

Still, I’d done an ugly job. Our cave was safe. I’d vanquished the intruders—Or so I’d thought.

If I’d read the literature more closely I’d have known that among their other charming habits, rats leave behind telltale trails of pheromones that attract other rats months after the initial infestation.

Sure enough, last week at three in the morning, my wife was awoken by a scratching on her back. Thinking our youngest son was making one of his frequent attempts to worm his way into the family bed, she shifted around and opened her eyes.

There, sniffing at her curiously, was a rat. It scuttled up her back, over her head and into the pillows. A few seconds later, it darted out from under the bed and into our bathroom.

Apparently, this little encounter triggered something primal in my wife as well. After handing me a broom, a box and a can of Lysol, she pointed at the bathroom and said: “One of you is coming out of there.”

What followed was a truly epic battle. Backed into a corner behind the toilet, the rat managed to evade my broom and hop into an open cabinet and behind a phalanx of shampoo bottles. After smoking him out with a cloud of disinfectant, the rat did something truly astounding: it scaled the stand of a shoulder-high makeup mirror and began running, treadmill like, on its rotating glass face.

It was a showy move, but it left him with no escape. I was able to knock him down and trap him under the box.

The old me would have been content to take him outside and let him go. But not now. This rat had been in my house, on my woman. He knew the way in. And so I did what I needed to do and filled a clear plastic container with hose water.

Now I know all sorts of useful facts about roof rats. They have grayish shaggy fur. They are excellent climbers. And they can swim - but only for about three minutes.

Perils, Absurdities of Parenting Explored in Reuters Column

http://www.christophernoxon.com//perils_absurdities_of_parenting_explored_in_reuters_column

A parenting expert I’m not. Still, I do have three kids and many crazy stories and half-baked opinions about parents and kids and the importance of snacks and the efficacy of bribery. All of which explains why I’m now writing a column for Reuters called (wait for it) “Family Life” (I objected to the super-plain title—what about “Super Awesome Parent Stuff?” or “Goofy Fun Dad”? until it was explained to me that other Reuters columns are called “The Stock Market” and “Personal Finance.” Oh.) Over past three months I’ve written about over-the-top kiddie birthday parties, the art of the “playdate dump” and the time a hippy pediatrician tasted my wife’s breast milk. I’m archiving the stories on my author site here.

A parenting expert I’m not. Still, I do have three kids and many crazy stories and half-baked opinions about parents and kids and the importance of snacks and the efficacy of bribery. All of which explains why I’m now writing a column for Reuters called (wait for it) “Family Life” (I objected to the super-plain title—what about “Super Awesome Parent Stuff?” or “Goofy Fun Dad”? until it was explained to me that other Reuters columns are called “The Stock Market” and “Personal Finance.” Oh.) Over past three months I’ve written about over-the-top kiddie birthday parties, the art of the “playdate dump” and the time a hippy pediatrician tasted my wife’s breast milk. I’m archiving the stories on my author site here.

Parents Unite! Ban Birthday Party Blowouts

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/parents_unite_ban_birthday_party_blowouts

Latest Family Life column is parental call to arms to stop the madness around kiddie birthday parties. Si se puede!

Latest Family Life column is parental call to arms to stop the madness around kiddie birthday parties. Si se puede!

Parents, unite! Ban birthday party blowouts

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/parents_unite_ban_birthday_party_blowouts

It starts with all the best intentions. You buy a birthday cake. You arrange some entertainment - a clown maybe, or one of those inflatable bouncy castles for the front yard.

Next thing you know you’re surrounded by shrieking children and an obscene pileup of gifts, wondering whether your insurance rider covers bouncy-related injuries. And that creepy guy in the clown makeup - did he come with a background check? Meanwhile your precious birthday girl rips though her presents with the grace and thankfulness of a rabid orangutan and, when the party’s over, looks up at you with icing-stained cheeks and announces, “It just wasn’t magic enough.”

Welcome to the deepest inner circle of parenting hell - the kiddie birthday party.

Who knew a simple celebration could generate so much anxiety and overindulgence? Most adults remember a time when kids’ birthdays meant ice cream and a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Today children have come to expect lavish orgies of gifts, gimmicks and goody bags.

Petting zoos and costumed characters quickly give way to karate parties, princess parties, disco parties and amusement park weekends. The most privileged kids come to expect over-the-top blowouts complete with catered feasts and stretch limos (exhibit A:  ”My Super Sweet 16,” MTV’s grotesque reality show about spoiled teens and the parents who enable them).

Some parents now host half-birthday parties for those kids for whom one celebration a year just isn’t enough. Other parents register for gifts online or specify minimum values for gifts on party invites. You’d be completely horrified if you didn’t on some level understand: they’re just covering costs. Lord knows it ‘aint cheap hiring a litter of purebred puppies or an acrobatic troupe, to say nothing of a chocolate fountain or Hannah Montana lookalike.

Clearly the only birthday parties that count these days are those that can be seen from space.

Blame lies almost entirely with parents, says William Doherty, an education and human development professor at the University of Minnesota, who last year banded together with a group of local parents to start a group called Birthdays Without Pressure.

“It’s all about the adults,” he says. “Kids start lobbying later, but this all starts because a certain group of parents desperately want their kids to feel like the most special people in the world. That’s maybe five percent of parents. And the rest of us get pulled along because we don’t want our kids feeling like they get any less.”

The solution, of course, is a party revolt, an uprising against the forces of extravagance. Think of it as a disarmament campaign. We parents can step back from the brink of insanity, but only work if we act together - unilateral disarmament (that is, one well-meaning family taking steps to simplify while others continue to go hog wild) will only serve to make us look cheap and make our children feel unloved.

So join this simple three step plan to stop the madness.

Step one: immediate and total ban on goodie bags. There was a time, not so long ago, when kids got genuinely excited by those little sacks of toys and do-dads that they routinely receive on their way out the door of a birthday party. That time is long gone. Now we’ve seen for ourselves the catalogs that sell kazoos and tattoos and superballs in bulk for less than a cent apiece. All these sad little bags do for us now is inspire worry about sweat shop labor and toxic plastic fumes.

Meanwhile our kids have taken to carting off their bags with the entitled nonchalance of a celebs departing the Golden Globes, then spilling the contents all over the back of our minivan. A ban on goodie bags will not only reduce waste - it puts the emphasis back where it belongs: the kid celebrating the actual birthday.

Step two: drastic reduction in entertainment. Petting zoos damage lawns. Bouncies encourage brawls. Magic is lost entirely on little kids; older ones think magicians are dorky. And who doesn’t yet understand that clowns are terrifying and belong in the circus where ringleaders with whips and guns can keep them under control? Better to give kids a ball or a hose and a big open space. They’re a lot better at creating fun than any performer desperate enough to work your kids’ lousy party.

Step three: consider a present-free party. Does your child really need another load of soundchip-activated playthings? Do you actually have room for them? The advocacy group Birthdays Without Pressure suggests telling guests “presence/ no presents” or “gifts are by no means necessary, but any gifts will be gratefully received on behalf of (name your charity).”

Such a move may trigger eye rolls or even hurt feelings in kids at first, especially in those accustomed to giant spectacles or bounties of gifts. But we must do what we can to bring the over-the-top parties back to earth. In the process, we may just get back some of that birthday magic.

Hear ye, hear ye! My parenting manifesto!

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/hear_ye

Latest Reuters family life column discusses rise of the Parenting Manifesto and includes a few self-evident foundational truths of my own…

Latest Reuters family life column discusses rise of the Parenting Manifesto and includes a few self-evident foundational truths of my own…

Hear ye, hear ye! My parenting manifesto!

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/hear_ye_hear_ye_my_parenting_manifesto

We hold these truths to be self-evident: parents are harried, children are hard and there is no single authority for how to raise happy, healthy, well-adjusted kids.

Nonetheless, we recognize the right of every parent to occasionally get up on their high horse and proclaim the inalienable truths of family life.

Therefore, we fully endorse the Parenting Manifesto.

While there’s never been a shortage of experts only too happy to tell you how to raise children - hi, mom! - lately the steady supply of advice has coalesced into an avalanche of manifestos.

Over the last year, hundreds have appeared online, embraced by bloggers who appreciate the similarities in form - like blogs, manifestos are best when brief, authoritative and worth fighting over.

More than a dozen, all under 500 words and representing a wide spectrum of beliefs about kids, are collected on the site of blogger Brian Reid, who goes by the internet handle Rebel Dad.
I could go on about why so many parents now feel the need to proclaim their convictions… but it’s no great mystery. We all want the right to occasionally stop the minivan, drop the diaper bag and step up on the soap box.

Herewith, then, excerpts from my own Parenting Manifesto:

* Children come in fully-loaded. As much as we’d like to believe our children’s fate lies entirely in our hands, my own highly scientific research reveals that kids are born with 86 percent of all they will become. All we can really do is to make the most of the remaining 14 percent.

* Never underestimate the importance of blood sugar. Obstinacy, unruliness or brattiness are often rooted less in deep disfunction or your in-law’s bad genetic heritage than the time elapsed since the last pretzel. Snack often.

* Children deserve voting rights. Children may be inexperienced, untrustworthy blobs whose opinions shouldn’t count for anything, but parents who reflexively exclude kids from decision-making run the risk of raising aimless, anxious, affectless offspring.

* TV is the opiate of the little people. Kids spend way too much time in front of televisions, computers and other digital interfaces. Good parents put reasonable limits on “screen time.”

* Drugs are bad, but when on long flights with little kids, Benadryl is good. Do yourself and everyone a favor: dope ‘em up.

* You will spend the first 10 years of your kids’ lives battling a cold. Kids will pick up and transmit every single runny nose/scratchy throat bug in the biosphere. And remember: a fever is a symptom, not a life-threatening disease. Don’t rush your kid to the E.R. the moment the thermometer tops 100. Chill.

* Frozen lemonade makes everything better.

* Children know and see and learn things adults do not. Einstein credited his greatest insights and discoveries to his childlike capacity for wonder. Listen and learn - that

nose-picking pest may be pondering string theory.

* Choose your battles. Don’t waste time on stupid standoffs. Sometimes when a kid refuses to put on their pants, let them go to school in pajamas. Beyond issues of health and safety, everything should be subject to negotiation.

* Never say, “Who do you love better, me or mommy?”

* Let them get their ya-yas out. Don’t coop your kids up all day in classrooms, car seats and couches. Make time for raucous, loud, messy play. Without it, kids’ innate savagery will come out in more destructive forms.

* You break it, you buy it. Whether by adjusting a blanket or yelling at the TV, parents who awake a sleeping child are responsible for getting that child back to sleep.

* What works for one will hopelessly ruin another. Siblings may share the same basic makeup and upbringing, but they are inevitably different. Never assume that what works for one - be it a school, punishment or life lesson - will work for the other.

* Bribery works. Ignore the well-meaning experts who discourage the rewarding of good behavior with treats, toys or gold stars. Yes, bribery is a cheap psychological trick. Often, that’s all we’ve got. Good behavior may be it’s own reward, but candy is sweeter.

* Give ‘em your worst. Whenever possible, share your most embarrassing stories, secret humiliations and stupid mistakes. Disclosures may be hard, but they inevitably improve your credibility and result in reciprocal disclosure. Plus, they’re good for a laugh.

* You get what you get and you don’t get upset. A magical, invaluable mantra of Montessori preschools, the most amazing thing about this saying is how it so often silences even the most argumentative kid.

* Be not afraid of grand pronouncements. Sometimes you’ve gotta get grandiose and write a manifesto of your own.

Brandweek Op-Ed

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/brandweek_op_ed

Brandweek magazine just published this editorial from me and colleague Bill Goodwin on why rejuvenile marketing so often elicits cringes among not-quite-grownups.

Brandweek magazine just published this editorial from me and colleague Bill Goodwin on why rejuvenile marketing so often elicits cringes among not-quite-grownups.

Follow the Barfing Baby

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/follow_the_barfing_baby

There was a time, not so very long ago, when age still meant something. It was a time when kids were kids and adults were adults, when kids would be counted on to be fickle and impressionable, and adults were at least somewhat settled and serious.

But today, how old someone is means next to nothing, especially when it comes to purported adults and that even slipperier concept, brand loyalty.

Oh sure, there are still traditional grown-ups, upstanding citizens whose preferences ossified into a stable State Farm-Ben Gay comfort zone the day they had kids, got married or hit 30. But these adults are an endangered species. Who’s replacing them? You’ve got your pick of monikers: kidults, adultescents, twixters and rejuveniles. They’re urban and rural, poor and affluent and, chronologically speaking, young and old. About all they have in common is a shared aversion to traditional maturity and a commitment to stay playful.

Oh yes, they have one other thing in common, too: As a demographic group, they’re almost wholly misunderstood by the vast majority of earthbound marketers.

In fairness, we can’t say we haven’t been warned about this emergent breed of not-quite-grownup. So you’d expect that marketing aimed at this new man-child hybrid ("rejuveniles" is our preferred term) would be pretty savvy by now.

Dream on. With precious few exceptions, ads aimed at rejuveniles fall horribly flat, either by regurgitating tired old clichés about childishness or mistaking garden-variety nostalgia or rebellion for rejuveniles’ complicated but ultimately hopeful outlooks. Examples are manifold; we’ll pick the worst to illustrate. It’s a spot for E*Trade starring a baby stock trader. “I just look young,” says the infant, as he pokes at a keyboard and brags about his success buying and selling equities online. “If I can do it, you can do it,” he says, before puking up a mouthful of formula.

An ad like this might elicit a snicker, but mostly it just sends eyeballs rolling. The problem is approach. Instead of looking deeper at the underlying values that drive this new breed of adult, marketers can think of nothing more to say than how wacky and unusual it is that adults are doing stuff that kids usually do. Hence, today’s consumers are treated to women playing hopscotch while wearing heels in a recent Oreo ad, or businessmen pogo-sticking and hula-hooping in Nestlé Crunch’s egregious “For the Kid in You” campaign.

How clueless can you get? People, listen please, here’s the thing about rejuveniles: they can’t stand being pandered to. They hate seeing themselves represented as starry-eyed goofballs. The remedy is simple: Aim at the starting point of a moving target and you’ll miss every time. To keep pace with rejuveniles, you’re better off ignoring surfaces and creating associations with shared values, like their need to stay playful in the face of adult responsibilities, or the impulse to buck the forces of conformity and routine, or the hope they are collectively inventing a looser, less conformist, more open-ended version of maturity.

Ironically, the brands that get it right are often the least kid-centric to begin with. Geico has found countless brilliant ways to associate a subject many rejuveniles find deeply horrifying (insurance) with a talking lizard and wisecracking cavemen—perfect juvenile spokescreatures. Apple has been widely praised for its simplicity, style and cool. Less remarked upon is how cannily the brand stirs the wondrous, tractable, preadult impulses of its customers. From the pregrunge sci-fi design of its hardware to the jungle-cat motif of its operating systems, Apple is speaking directly to the rejuvenile soul.

And all without resorting to barfing babies.

New York Speechifying

http://www.christophernoxon.com//new_york_speechif

I’m doing a presentation this week at the FUSE: Design & Culture Conference with my friend and colleague Bill Goodwin. We’ll be talking about “the rejuvenile aesthetic,” our fancy-pants phraseology for the cartoony, kiddie, whimsical, playful culture that now pops up everywhere from Web 2.0 font design to modern architecture to auto styling… I’ll also hang out to sign books and stalk my fellow presenter, Malcolm Gladwell… I’m on Tuesday April 15 at 2 pm. Registration and other info here.

I’m doing a presentation this week at the FUSE: Design & Culture Conference with my friend and colleague Bill Goodwin. We’ll be talking about “the rejuvenile aesthetic,” our fancy-pants phraseology for the cartoony, kiddie, whimsical, playful culture that now pops up everywhere from Web 2.0 font design to modern architecture to auto styling… I’ll also hang out to sign books and stalk my fellow presenter, Malcolm Gladwell… I’m on Tuesday April 15 at 2 pm. Registration and other info here.

New York Speechifying

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/new_york_speechifying

I’m doing a presentation this week at the FUSE: Design & Culture Conference with my friend and colleague Bill Goodwin. We’ll be talking about “the rejuvenile aesthetic,” our fancy-pants phraseology for the cartoony, kiddie, whimsical, playful culture that now pops up everywhere from Web 2.0 font design to modern architecture to auto styling… I’ll also hang out to sign books and stalk my fellow presenter, Malcolm Gladwell… I’m on Tuesday April 15 at 2 pm. Registration and other info here.

I’m doing a presentation this week at the FUSE: Design & Culture Conference with my friend and colleague Bill Goodwin. We’ll be talking about “the rejuvenile aesthetic,” our fancy-pants phraseology for the cartoony, kiddie, whimsical, playful culture that now pops up everywhere from Web 2.0 font design to modern architecture to auto styling… I’ll also hang out to sign books and stalk my fellow presenter, Malcolm Gladwell… I’m on Tuesday April 15 at 2 pm. Registration and other info here.

Reuters column on nightmares in babyproofing

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/reuters_column_on_nightmares_in_babyproofing

Latest column is all about how cost of raising kids has never been higher, thanks in large part to fact that parenting now means imagining all the horrible things that can happen to your children and then going out and buying some specially-engineered product that will supposedly prevent those imaginary disasters.

Latest column is all about how cost of raising kids has never been higher, thanks in large part to fact that parenting now means imagining all the horrible things that can happen to your children and then going out and buying some specially-engineered product that will supposedly prevent those imaginary disasters.

Boys, Guns and the ‘Bang Bang Gene’

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/boys_guns_and_the_bang_bang_gene

It’s a scene repeated again and again at the breakfast table of the peace-loving family. You know the sort. They’re the family with the canvas farmers’ market shopping bag, the clutter of vitamin bottles on the counter and the strict rules prohibiting the viewing of violent cartoons and the use of toy guns. No squirt guns, no ray guns, no popguns.

Then one morning, peace-loving mama serves up a slice of wholegrain toast to her peace-loving son only to discover that he’s chewed his bread into the shape of a pistol.

P-sshhew P-sshew, comes the sound effect, followed by the inevitable punch line: “You’re dead.”

You can run, peaceful parent, but you can’t hide from the toast gun.

It’s not always toast, of course. Other parents report that their kids have fashioned firearms out of sticks, stuffed animals and showerheads. One parent on the website Offsprung reports that as a boy, he made a gun out of a Jesus figurine swiped from the Christmas nativity scene.

The props change, but one thing is almost always the same: boys pull the trigger.

Many parents, particularly moms, greet such scenes with shock, or at least anxiety. Particularly in a time of wars overseas and violence on the streets, questions linger: how do such violent urges spring from innocent children, especially those whose media exposure is limited to public television shows featuring nubby-textured puppets resolving conflicts with understanding and hugs? Does prohibiting gunplay actually encourage it? Are boys who play with guns destined to grow up to be soldiers, hunters or hit men?

In short, what is it with boys and guns?

The subject has been a hot topic among parents and educators for at least 30 years. Child development experts tell us that yes, boys are more likely to play with guns than girls but no, there’s no proven link between gunplay and aggressive behavior. Even so, they report that children under 9 have a harder time understanding the difference between play and real guns; given that, most experts agree that it’s best to keep toy guns away from kids.

Many educators, even those far outside peace-loving progressive circles, prohibit toy weapons at school.

I myself was raised with a strict gun control policy by a fiercely pacifist mom. Our living room was decorated with that ubiquitous poster of the crayon sunflower and the slogan, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” Still, I loved to play shoot-’em-up. Then one day I was caught running around the front yard gunning down armies of invisible Storm Troopers with a sprinkler attachment. 

"What, this?” I sputtered. “Oh mom, this is a peace gun. I’m shooting peace rays.”

How quaint that story sounds now. A quick walk down the aisle of the local toy emporium proves how far removed peace-loving families are from the mainstream today. The “boys section” overflows with laser blasters, paintball sets and secret agent pistols. Exquisitely molded action figures sport ammo belts and bazookas. Super Soakers promise to pack as much liquid firepower as ICBMs.
Whatever experts say about kids and guns, parents clearly aren’t listening.

How could they? Their protests are drowned out by the constant din of pretend gunfire. Whether it’s an unconscious manifestation of anatomy, a function of male hormones or simply a handy way for boys to exert power, there’s clearly something deep-seated, even natural, about the bond between boy and gun.

Of course that doesn’t mean we should arm our kids. As far as I’m concerned, parents who dress their 8-year-olds in camouflage and give them realistic toy Uzis should be strapped down and forced to listen to Yoko Ono records until the next Age of Aquarius. At the same time, outright bans on gunplay are foolish at best and may even backfire, producing an even more intense attachment to the forbidden pleasure of shooting stuff.

I myself managed to grow up a mostly peaceful fellow, even if I still get a weirdly intense thrill from the occasional game of laser tag or “Medal of Honor.” All of which puts in me an uncomfortable position with my own two young sons, who unsurprisingly, love to run around the house blasting each other with make-believe weaponry. I’ve make it a point to sit them down and explain how real-life guns can do irrevocable real-life harm. When the combat starts, I wish they’d go work on a jigsaw puzzle or build a sofa fort.
But I get it. I too was born with the bang-bang gene.

So when they shoot me with the toast gun, I know the drill: save the explanations, grab the wound and fall to the ground.

Fear Fuels Baby Business Boom

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/fear_fuels_baby_business_boom

For some parents, the reality of raising kids sinks in during the first ultrasound. For others, the day of reckoning comes when they bring a newborn home from the hospital.

Me, I came to grips with the reality of raising kids during a housecall from Suzie the Babyproofer.

Before Susie, my wife and I were relatively untroubled about our prospects as parent-protectors. On this count, we felt our record was pretty good. After all, we’d had a dog for a year, and it was still alive. Babies would be a cinch.

Then came that fateful afternoon with Suzie, who arrived at our doorstep with a big toothy smile and a polo-knit shirt with the logo of her company stitched on the breast pocket - a cute cartoon baby pointing a cute cartoon finger at a cute cartoon electrical socket.

“Those stair railings are a death trap!” she said, getting right down to business.  “Little baby head gets stuck in there and, oh boy!”

She moved on to the kitchen. “Lookie here!” Suzie said, opening the cabinet under the sink to reveal an array of detergents, bug sprays and oven cleaners. “What pretty poison!” she chirped. “One little sip from baby and, uh oh!”

Suzie reached a fever pitch in the bathroom, where she gleefully pantomimed our new baby drowning in the toilet bowl, poking out an eyeball on the faucet head and suffering blistering burns in the bathtub.

This wasn’t an inspection; it was a procession of fear leading to the unveiling of a glorious selection of products expertly engineered to reduce the risks in this death trap I called home.

Did I fall for it? How could I not? I was a new dad, and while I was pretty fuzzy on all the job requirements, I was pretty sure letting my firstborn drown in the toilet bowl would be bad. So of course I bought the safety toilet lock. I also got the plexiglass railing barriers, the inflatable water fixture covers, the table top foam cushions and enough latches and locks to contain a violent criminal.

And with that, I was initiated into what might be described as the essence of modern parenting, which consists largely of imagining all the horrible things that can happen to your child and then going out and buying some specially-engineered product to prevent those disasters.

This escalation of anxiety and consumerism is detailed in a fascinating new book, Parenting Inc. Author Pamela Paul shows how companies selling everything from infant movement monitors to educational DVDs have built a booming business convincing parents they cannot trust their children’s safety or well-being to themselves.

The fact is that parents now spend more on their children than ever before. In the U.S., the cost of raising kids has risen 66 percent over the last decade, Paul says, with the so-called “mommy market” now topping $1.7 trillion. In part, this growth has been fueled by affluent parents and their embrace of “baby couture” - witness the appearance of high-end baby boutiques peddling cashmere burp blankets and $1000 strollers. Further down the economic food chain, parents now routinely shell out for chirping and scrunchy toys that enhance cognition and all manner of products designed to make our homes safer.

“We’ve come to believe we can buy a better baby,” Paul says. “We’re now convinced that if you have the exact right combination of DVDs and safety equipment, your child will emerge unscathed out of toddlerhood and go on to a top tier school.”

While not discounting all modern conveniences - “where would be we without the sippy cup?” she says - Paul says she believes the vast majority of products aimed at the anxious new parent are either worthless or even harmful. After all, she says, children who grow up in an entirely child-proofed world will never learn basic caution or common sense. “You want your kid to learn to take care of themselves,” she says. “And the fact is that if you totally baby-proof your life, your baby will get psychologically relaxed and stop paying attention.”

Paul says parents can escape this anxious strain of over-protection by soberly and methodically evaluating all new products and services. But who has time for that? It’s been nine years since that fateful visit with Suzie the babyproofer, and I’m happy to report that I’m no longer such a sucker for such obvious appeals to my fear of disaster and need to protect.

Last week, while installing a car seat for my third kid, I remembered doing the same the same job for my first son. That first time, a slight wiggle at the base sent me rushing to a fire station, and then another, to have the seat checked and double-checked by an emergency response professional. Now after strapping the seat in, I could easily ignore the fact that it shifted back and forth a little.

Three kids have a way of teaching you to accept a little wiggle.

Latest Reuters Column on Dads as IT guys

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/latest_reuters_column_on_dads_as_it_guys

This week’s dispatch from the family front asks why being a dad today so often means providing tech support.

This week’s dispatch from the family front asks why being a dad today so often means providing tech support.

Dads Grapple With New Role: Tech Support

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/dads_grapple_with_new_role_tech_support

The time has come, dads, for a performance review.

As you well know, the job requirements for modern fatherhood are highly demanding and subject to change without notice. Only by carefully reviewing your performance in key categories can you expect to keep up in today’s competitive child-rearing market.

Conflict resolution skills? Check. Unconditional support, emotional and financial? Check. Ability to safely maneuver minivan while being bombarded by sibling squabbling? Check. Management of college savings and petty cash accounts? Check. Competence in toy assembly, emergency first aid and janitorial arts? Check, check and check.

Still with us? Good for you. But now we come to what is perhaps the most important portion of the review, the make-or-break category that separates the merely competent father of yesterday with the truly good dad of today.

How fast is your home wireless network? How quickly can you resolve an e-mail connectivity issue? Blu-Ray or HD DVD? Where do you stand on the issue of childhood cell phone usage? How quickly can you free a new gadget from its bondage of twist ties?

In other words, how good an IT guy are you?

From programming the parental controls on the cable box to monitoring the use of game consoles, fathers are now the go-to guys for domestic technology. Certainly there are tech-savvy moms, but in the vast majority of households, matters of electronics fall to the father.

It’s a role many of us dads feel intensely conflicted about.

On the one hand, many of us were gear heads long before we were ever parents. We relish the chance to spend a Sunday afternoon comparing the picture quality of plasma screens and have that count as family time. We love the look of horror on our wives’ faces when we toss aside the manual and assemble a gizmo armed only with a Phillips Head and a MacGyver-like ingenuity.

After all, keeping busy with gadgetry allows us to avoid other aspects of family life. Like, say, laundry. We’re simply happier changing batteries than diapers. We’d much rather talk downloads than discipline. We’re better at electronics than emotion.

Unlike most problems in family life, technical issues have an answer. They can be resolved.

At the same time, there’s no getting around that domestic tech support is largely thankless and time consuming. To do our jobs correctly, we must spend our off-hours tangled in cords and immersed in the fine points of new technology. We can easily find ourselves relating more to the help desk operator in New Delhi than the teenager playing X-Box upstairs.

Not that you can’t learn a lot about your family by attending to their technological needs. Recently my son came home from school and asked for help setting up a website to promote a business venture he and a school chum had devised. I was instructed to set up an e-commerce system that could accommodate the sale of science fiction DVDs, warm weather clothing and “swords and other weapons.”

My son is eight years old.

Needless to say, his request raised a red flag and led to the adoption of a new family rule: No Online Arms Trading. Still, I had to hand it to him. When I was eight years old, the height of my technological expertise was putting a cold washcloth on the TV so my parents couldn’t tell how many hours of “Twilight Zone” I’d watched while they were at work.

Meanwhile my son shoots and edits short films of light saber duels and creates funk-fusion CDs from sampled instrumental loops.

Somehow, though, his multimedia dabblings have not yet translated into a willingness to help out with other technical issues.

Still, I know my reign as head geek of the house will end soon enough. There will come a day when I will not be the only person in the house who knows how to change the batteries in the TV remote. There will come a day when the kids will know more about car navigation system than I do.

When that day comes, I will not grieve. I’ll be too busy figuring out another way to avoid doing the laundry.

Please, don’t pander

http://www.christophernoxon.com//please_dont_pander

With few exceptions, ads aimed at rejuveniles evoke cringes, eye rolls and heavy sighs in the very people they’re designed to reach. A few manage to find a way to cleverly capture their fears and aspirations. But the vast majority fall horribly flat, either by regurgitating tired old clichés about childish adults or mistaking garden-variety nostalgia or rebellion for rejuvenile’s complicated but ultimately hopeful natures. 

Why do marketers have such a hard time understanding rejuveniles?

Long before social critics began fretting over “the death of the grown up,” marketers were tracking focus group findings on the quickly shifting values, affinities and loyalties of adult consumers (remember the “retro brand” craze of 2001, which relaunched everything from Converse to Radio Flyer?).

Given this early jump and expertise, you’d expect campaigns aimed at rejuveniles to be knowing, or at least reasonably on-target. But the sad fact is that, with few exceptions, ads aimed at rejuveniles evoke cringes, eye rolls and heavy sighs in the very people they’re designed to reach. A few manage to find a way to cleverly capture their fears and aspirations. But the vast majority fall horribly flat, either by regurgitating tired old clichés about childish adults or mistaking garden-variety nostalgia or rebellion for rejuvenile’s complicated but ultimately hopeful natures.

Take the current ad for Oreos Candy Bites, which features a power-suited professional looking out the window of a cab at women blowing bubbles, jumping rope and playing hopscotch. Clearly responding to research showing more adults than ever gravitating toward a brand that has always been associated with kids, Oreo can think of nothing more to say than how wacky and unusual it is. Thus we get women playing hopscotch in heels in the Oreo ad, or worse, businessmen pogo-sticking and hula-hooping in Nestle Crunch’s egregious “For the Kid in You” campaign, which reduced the entire rejuvenile phenomenon down to bubbles and hopscotch.

This is just the sort of cluelessness that causes conniptions in rejuveniles. They may appear silly, but make no mistake: rejuveniles can’t stand being pandered to. They hate seeing themselves represented as starry-eyed goofballs. Never mind that many of them are – in focus groups, many will admit that they felt goofy and starry-eyed the first time they wore a Cocoa Puffs cuckoo bird T-shirt or took a spin on their kid’s tricycle. But the novelty has long since worn off. They’re now either doing those things entirely unselfconsciously, in which case these ads seem hopelessly unhip, or they’ve moved on to another kid centric activity (like assembling Lego spacecraft, or collecting American Girl dolls).

The point is simple: aim at the starting point of a moving target and you’ll miss every time. To keep pace with rejuveniles, you’re better off ignoring surfaces and creating associations with shared values, like their need to stay playful in the face of adult responsibilities, or their impulse to buck the forces of conformity and routine, or their belief that adults are inventing a more flexible, open-ended version of maturity.

An Inconvenient Truth - Kids Aren’t Perfect (No Duh)

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/an_inconvenient_truth_kids_arent_perfect_no_duh

Often in the course of family life, a parent must face inconvenient or downright disturbing truths about children that fly in the face of what we believe about our influence as parents and human nature itself.

Before becoming a parent, for instance, I genuinely believed I could convince my offspring that Barney the Dinosaur is in fact evil and does not actually love them.

I was also convinced that my children would be the first toddlers in history to possess, thanks to their kindly father, impeccable table manners and a keen appreciation of historical documentaries, late-90s acoustic mope rock and Alaskan scenery.

On all these counts, I was forced to face facts. News flash: kids love Barney, do not generally appreciate the genius of Ken Burns or Elliot Smith and will never, ever, even if you shell out many thousands of dollars on a pleasure cruise of Glacier Bay, give a damn about the majesty of the wild when there’s a buffet table piled with cookies behind them.

Still, hope dies hard. Throughout my first years of fatherhood, I clung to some ridiculously starry-eyed and politically correct notions about children.I believed they are born virtuous and free-thinking, that meanness, superficiality and arbitrary gender norms are learned via reality TV and unlicensed child care providers. Left to their own devices, I imagined children would establish a just, happy society filled with toys and cake.

REALITY BITES

I managed to maintain this cheery outlook despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Qualities I’d assumed would come naturally to my kids—fairness, patience, civility - seemed entirely absent in my young charges. Often, they could be just plain mean.

My three-year-old son, for instance, appeared to enjoy nothing more than batting his infant sister on the head with a Lincoln Log.

Even as I disciplined him, I found a way to justify - or at least reconcile - the occasional outburst of savagery. He was, I mused, simply expressing the innate impulses of his primate forefathers.

Which also helped explain the kids’ stubborn refusal to conform to the carefully constructed gender-neutral world my wife and I had assembled for them, painting their nursery a neutral shade of avocado and providing each with unisex playthings.

We cringed when a relative, usually a grandparent, did something so gauche as give our daughter a baby doll or our son a toy steam locomotive.

But wouldn’t you know it: our firstborn son came out of the womb crazy for trains and our daughter instantly gravitated to ballerinas and princesses and to this day gripes about putting on any garment that isn’t sufficiently pink and sparkly. One militantly gender-neutral friend who had withheld dolls from her daughter says she once walked in on her daughter cooing to a toy truck she’d swaddled in a pink blankie.

OK, so children are born barbarians, boys like boy stuff and girls often fall prey to the tyranny of pink.

But none of that quite compared to the hard lesson in human nature I learned from the hot babysitter.

Allow me to explain. A few years ago my wife and I took the kids for a weekend to a fancy hotel. We planned to have a grown-up dinner and arranged a babysitter look after the kids.

When informed of our plans, the kids expressed terror at the prospect of spending the entire evening with a stranger; they whined and worried the entire day. Then the door opened and in stepped a 19-year-old yoga instructor with impossibly long limbs and the bone structure of Sophia Loren in “The Black Orchid.”

Both kids latched on to the sitter’s pantleg and looked up at her adoringly. For the two of us, they had just one word: “Bye!”

All their fears and insecurities had evaporated in an instant. I’ve since heard similar stories from other parents - even naturally nervous and clingy kids, it seems, often display an eerily natural level of comfort and security when left with comely caretakers.

None of this should be so surprising. Scientists have proven that aesthetics are hard-wired into the brain, that even infants stare longer at pictures of lovelier faces, that otherwise unconditionally loving parents lavish more attention and praise on prettier kids than goony ones.

In other words, kids are just as superficial and shallow as we adults are. Hard lesson in human nature indeed.

The Hot Babysitter

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/the_hot_babysitter

Latest Reuters column is a dinner party anecdote about a crazy-beautiful babysitter wrapped up in depressing ruminations about the basic savagery and superficiality of human nature. Fun!

Latest Reuters column is a dinner party anecdote about a crazy-beautiful babysitter wrapped up in depressing ruminations about the basic savagery and superficiality of human nature. Fun!

Parent Shmarent

http://www.christophernoxon.com//parent_shma

File this in the Playalong Parent category—some friends and I turned an essay of mine about my daughter and a gorilla head into a YouTubish video. Watch here. Then we did another one about our family’s crazy-fun winter celebration tradition.  Now we’re thinking of other episodes and maybe even a whole series of these odd little family snippets. Stay tuned.

File this in the Playalong Parent category—some friends and I turned an essay of mine about my daughter and a gorilla head into a YouTubish video. Watch here. Then we did another one about our family’s crazy-fun winter celebration tradition.  Now we’re thinking of other episodes and maybe even a whole series of these odd little family snippets. Stay tuned.

Parent Shmarent

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/parent_shmarent

So some friends and I adapted an essay about an unfortunate incident involving my six-year-old daughter and a gorilla head into a short video. Watch here. Then we did another one about our family’s crazy-fun winter celebration tradition.  Now we’re thinking of other episodes and maybe even a whole series of these odd little family snippets. Stay tuned.

So some friends and I adapted an essay about an unfortunate incident involving my six-year-old daughter and a gorilla head into a short video. Watch here. Then we did another one about our family’s crazy-fun winter celebration tradition.  Now we’re thinking of other episodes and maybe even a whole series of these odd little family snippets. Stay tuned.

Is a taste of deceit with carrots so bad for kids?

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/is_a_taste_of_deceit_with_carrots_so_bad_for_kids

Carob had its day. So did soy. Now comes the latest fad ingredient in the pantry of harried, health-conscious parents.

Deceit.

It goes by other names, of course. Stealth health. Furtive nutrition. Cookbook authors Missy Chase Lapine and Jessica Seinfeld call it “loving deception.”

Boil it all down and you’ve got the same basic recipe, one formulated to help parents get un-fried, un-sweetened, halfway-nutritious food into the mouths of children who, on principle, refuse to eat anything that looks like it grew from the ground (not that they won’t gobble up the occasional handful of dirt – but that’s another story).

If kids refuse to eat healthy stuff, why not just trick ‘em?

That, in a nutshell, is the basis of Lapine’s The Sneaky Chef and Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious, two cookbooks that detail how to hide vegetables and other healthy ingredients in foods kids actually like. Chocolate chip-chickpea cookies, anyone? How about a grilled cheese-and-flax seed sandwich?

As unappetizing as that might sound, parents are eating it up. After Seinfeld (wife of comedian Jerry) whipped up some veggie purees on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Deceptively Delicious shot to the top of bestseller lists. Lapine cried foul, claiming she’d cornered the market on loving deception six months earlier. This week (1/7/08) Lapine filed a lawsuit claiming Seinfeld stole her idea and even specific recipes.

A judge in New York’s Federal District Court will have the unenviable task of wading through the authors’ recipes for cauliflower puree. But while the food fight drags on, it’s worth pointing out that when it comes to feeding children, neither Lapine nor Seinfeld is the true and original deceiver.

My wife and I, along with about every other parent I know, have been making stuff up about what we feed our kids ever since an invisible choo choo train delivered a payload of pea-shaped coal into the mouth of our infant son. In the years since, I’ve never once had to stay up late “pureeing the night away,” as Seinfeld boasts. It’s much less labor-intensive to pawn off the daily vitamin supplement as a “candy gummy bear.” At our house, steamed asparagus spears are “green rocket ships.” I once successfully sold a plate of steamed broccoli and Parmesan cheese as “magic trees with snow.”

But my proudest lie came during a tense standoff between my two-year-old and a plate of chicken, green beans and French Fries. The fries were going fast; the meat and veggies not so much. Desperate to get some nutrition into the poor boy, I stuffed a few scraps of meat and bean into the soft part of a partially dismembered fry. Voila! Our whole family has been enjoying Trojan French Fries ever since.

Of course many may find fault with such cheap trickery. Some parents will harrumph at the suggestion that they do anything more than plop down a sensible meal and starve out the whiners. Those of a holistic bent may point out that blending vegetables into mush and serving them in cupcakes will deprive children of an honest affection for foods like zucchini, squash or kale. And ethical sticklers might suggest if parents lie about vegetables, kids may then question their credibility about more serious matters, like the tooth fairy.

To which I say: when was the last time you ate kale? I understand there may be a few adults, and even a few kids, who actually enjoy the leafiest, earthiest, most health-giving veggies. But this is America. And in my experience, even the threat of starvation will fail to move your average American child, well versed in the glories of Mountain Dew Slurpees and green apple Jolly Ranchers, to inject anything a less florescent shade of green.

The concern about dishonesty is more complicated. Parents should obviously heed their own advice when teaching children that lies are bad and should be avoided. But in diet as in all things, I firmly believe in parental privilege. Loopholes exist. I see no problem, for instance, in telling my kids that the DVD player in our family minivan only works on long drives on the freeway. I don’t see anything at all wrong with a friend briefing his son on the federal law that prohibits boys under the age of 13 from owning pocketknives. And I believe it was an act of inspiration when a mom I know told her daughter that the “Live Nude” sign near her school is in fact a French-language affirmation with a missing accent on the “e” that actually reads “live new day.”

So to those parents seeking to sneak veggies into their family dinner, I say puree away. It may be deceitful, but we parents know how raising kids can put you in some necessarily compromising positions.

I’d love to join the puree party, but I frankly I could never muster the energy for such a task, existing as I do on a diet of Jolly Ranchers and Trojan Fries.

Can Enthusiasm for Breastfeeding Go Too Far?

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/can_enthusiasm_for_breastfeeding_go_too_far

Like handbags, bikini waxes, and romantic comedies, breastfeeding is one of those things dads have always been happy not knowing much about. We might appreciate how breastfeeding boosts our kids’ immunity (and our wives’ physique), but on the whole we’ve remained blissfully ignorant about exactly what happens under the blouse or blanket at feeding time.

No more. Increasingly, dads are taking an active and involved role in all aspects of parenting. We change diapers. We learn Lamaze. We hold forth on the pros and cons of cord bank registries. I once heard a guy boast about his newborn’s Apgar Score like he’d won the World Cup.

I’m as hyper-involved as any new dad, but I never thought I’d have much role in breastfeeding, which is, I figured, pretty much entirely a mother-child transaction.

Then I had my first kid. In the delivery room, I was there to witness the moment my son latched on for the first time. I studied the La Leche League literature and kept a close watch on the nursery to guard against unapproved formula feedings. I stood by as the hospital lactation consultant performed a hands-on demonstration of proper positioning.

All of which was fine, really. Unlike my own dad and countless previous generations of fathers, I was determined to be a full and equal partner in childrearing. If that meant I had to learn first-hand about the laxative properties of colostrum or stand by as a tough Russian nurse groped my wife’s woman-parts, so be it.

But then came our visit with the groovy pediatrician.

Soon after bringing our son home from the hospital, my wife and I went to see our neighborhood family doctor, a local legend known for his celebrity daughter and affinity for holistic, alternative care. Much to our dismay, nursing was not going well. We couldn’t be sure the source of the problem- blocked ducts? nipple confusion? - but the result was that our baby wasn’t eating. We hadn’t slept in two days. Holding our weeping, starving son in the doctor’s shabby-chic waiting room, surrounded by fashionable couples and those thousand-dollar strollers that look like lunar landing modules, we looked like victims of a violent crime.

After a quick exam and quiz on nutrition, the doctor got down to business. He had my wife unbutton her shirt and instructed her how to use her forefinger and thumb to “express” a dollop of milk onto his finger.

And then he licked it. “Sweet,” he said. Whereupon he extended a finger to me.

I declined. It’s been eight years since that encounter and it still disturbs me in a way I find hard to explain. It wasn’t lascivious - both my wife and I got the distinct sense the doctor had all the best intentions and was simply taking the most direct, least prudish route possible to diagnose our problem. He was simply doing what groovy pediatricians do.

But my horror wasn’t shared by many of my Baby Bjorn-wearing, Diaper Geenie-packing brothers. One friend, an altogether sane and well-adjusted father of two, casually mentioned that he sometimes squirted a bit of banked breast milk into his morning coffee (a habit his wife didn’t exactly support - “That’s our night out!” she cried.) I’ve heard about groups of mothers who have no qualms nursing each other’s kids. Go online and you can find adult testimonials on the cancer-fighting properties of breast milk along with recipes for a beverage known as a “lactuccino.”

Another couple recently relayed a story that demonstrates how comfortable some dads have become in the finer points of breastfeeding. A month after the birth of their first child, they hired a sitter and headed out for their first date as parents. But upon pulling into a multiplex parking lot, mom found that the time away from home had left her engorged, leaking and highly uncomfortable. No way would she be able to sit still for two hours, she said. After some tense negotiation, the husband agreed to duck into the back seat of the car and relieve her distress himself.

Not only did he get to see the movie, he said, his hair had a silky sheen for weeks afterward.

Far be it from me to judge, but I think this qualifies as going too far in being an equal-partner dad. I’m ready to nurture my kids and assist my wife in any way she needs. I will sterilize parts of the breast pump and warm up bottles for late-night feedings.

But sampling the merchandise? That’s just gross.

Is a taste of deceit with carrots so bad for kids?

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/is_a_taste_of_deceit_with_carrots_so_bad_for_kids

The first piece written for my new “Family Life” column for Reuters is all about kids and food and how far we as parents will go to get something un-fried, un-sweetened and halfway nutritious into the mouths of our picky little tyrants. 

The first piece written for my new “Family Life” column for Reuters is all about kids and food and how far we as parents will go to get something un-fried, un-sweetened and halfway nutritious into the mouths of our picky little tyrants. 

Irving the Snowchicken is Coming to Town

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/irving_the_snowchicken_is_coming_to_town

Forget Christmakkah and Festivus. Our interfaith holiday involves a magical rooster who fills the children’s pants with presents… I wrote this essay on our family’s crazy-fun solution to “the December dilemma” entirely for my own amusement; it was miraculously given prominent play on Salon.com and has generated a ton of highly entertaining response (read the comments here)

Forget Christmakkah and Festivus. Our interfaith holiday involves a magical rooster who fills the children’s pants with presents… I wrote this essay on our family’s crazy-fun solution to “the December dilemma” entirely for my own amusement; it was miraculously given prominent play on Salon.com and has generated a ton of highly entertaining response (read the comments here)

Irving the Snowchicken is Coming to Town

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/irving_the_snowchicken_is_coming_to_town

I’ve never been particularly religious. I’ve got Canadian Quakers on my dad’s side and Midwestern Protestants on my mom’s, but growing up in ‘70s and ‘80s Los Angeles, whatever spiritual yearnings I possessed were satisfied via a consuming passion for “Star Wars.” My best friend Jimmy was an altar boy at a church where they prayed to a spooky guy on a cross. I was fine with Obi-Wan.

But then I grew up and fell in love with a Beverly Hills Jewess, and we got married by a cool Reform rabbi who, unlike my mother-in-law, didn’t mind that my first name began with the word “Christ.” And now we have three kids, who, by mysterious matriarchic law, became Jews the moment they touched down at Cedars-Sinai. All of which explains how I find myself a big goy surrounded by Jews. My kids go to a school called Temple Israel, where they’re drilled in Hebrew and the demands of their religious calling (nothing too major, just tikkun alum—heal the world). At school, there’s a name for families like ours: interfaith. The three kids and the wife, they’re the faithful. I’m the inter.

All of which is fine, really. Even as I stubbornly remain nonchosen, I love that my kids are part of such a deep and durable tradition. I love that they’re soaking up the high value placed on learning and argument, jokes and food. I’ve even come to love Shabbat at my in-laws’ every Friday. And while I don’t think I’ll ever understand gefilte fish, and I’ve been to a few bar and bat mitzvahs that contradicted everything I believe about decency and goodness, on balance I have no regrets about being the flaming shaygetz father figure of a proud Jewish household.

Still, the interfaith equation does get complicated. The biggest hitch emerged in our carefree pre-parenthood years, back when our fiercest arguments were over where to get takeout. Even then, we’d hit a rough patch a few weeks near the end of the year. It was like clockwork. On the day after Thanksgiving we entered the Season of the Perpetual Bicker. The particulars are too boring to detail here, but let’s just say we experienced irreconcilable differences over a holiday whose name shall not be mentioned. Turns out my lovely bride not only didn’t celebrate this holiday but kind of hated it.

She was unmoved by the irresistible aroma of fresh-cut pine and unconvinced that decorating our very own miserable/sweet Charlie Brown sapling with glass balls and paper ornaments was a cultural, not religious, tradition. She failed to see the charm in my abiding love for Claymation Rudolph or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir holiday album.

I began to yearn for the tree, the cookies, the stockings. I had vivid sense memories of tiptoeing out of my bedroom in footsie pajamas, sneaking into the living room to behold the glittering, obscene pileup. As an adult, I couldn’t write off all of that. I didn’t mind ditching Easter and had no trouble donning a kippah every Friday or spinning a dreidel on Chanukah or reading aloud from that wacky Passover booklet about pestilence and frogs. But I found I couldn’t go the extra step of abandoning the holiday whose name shall not be mentioned.

I began discussing our holiday plans with the neutrality and good cheer of a Fox News pundit. While my fellow besieged goyim got fired up in defense of God and faith and family, I felt the righteous call to defend the sanctity of superficial crap. I never gave two shits about tinsel before I got married. Now I wanted to coat our house in it.

And so we ended up where all bickering interfaith couples end up: couples therapy.

My wife picked the shrink. She told me not to make a big deal out of the fact that the shrink was Jewish. What, we should waste our time with one of the three non-Jewish psychiatrists in L.A.? And so we spent six sessions tromping recklessly through a minefield known in interfaith circles as “The December Dilemma.” Never before have the emotional dimensions of a tangerine in the toe of a sock ever been so fully explored. I demanded respect for the tangerine. She demanded respect for going to the movies and eating Chinese food.

Eventually, we arrived at our bottom lines. No matter how superficial or secular the holiday had become, she argued, it was still Christ’s birthday, and my beloved just couldn’t be party to that. No tree, no mistletoe, no Santa. I took stock and realized ... none of that mattered to me, either. I didn’t care about the trimmings—they were mostly tacky and meaningless anyway. What mattered to me, as both a grown-up and a parent, was the make-believe. When I boiled it down, all I wanted was someone magical to break into our house and leave us cool stuff.

It began, like all holidays and superheroes do, with an origin story. Late one night a few years ago, we told our children, a stranger appeared on our doorstep. It was a chicken, a Bantam rooster with pure white plumage and an impressive red crown and wattles. He was from the Snowy North. And he came with good news: He’d visit our family with gifts and good cheer every year on this night onward. All we had to do is write our wishes on a note and burn them before going to bed. He’d fly over our house, reassemble the ashes and then, while we slept, haul our goodies into the house and pack them into pants hung over the fireplace.

Every year the holiday gets more elaborate. That’s the thing about a customized holiday; since all the traditions were plucked from thin air, new ones materialize all the time. We now have a songbook of Winter Wonderday classics that includes a recording of “Born to Be Wild” with all-poultry vocals. While burning our wish lists, we now raise our voices in a song that includes a line written by 7-year-old Charlie: “Santa is fired from the job/ He gives presents like a slob.” We’ve also begun the custom of leaving out a tray of food near the pant-festooned mantle—Irving, the kids discovered, favors sunflower seeds and fruit juice. And we now go to great lengths to build a nest for Irving, the construction of which begins with a Winter Wonderhike to collect twigs and leaves, which we then stuff inside a ring of chicken wire (and which is mysteriously littered the next day with soft white feathers that look very much like they were clumsily extracted from an expensive pillow).

In recent years we’ve spent the evening with bowls of candy, frosting and cookie pieces, building entire encampments of Snowy North gingerbread chicken coops. And we’ve found that no Winter Wondereve is complete without a feast at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles, where we delight in the combination of maple-soaked fried dough and the sacrificial body of our host.

Friends and family are mostly supportive, but it has been suggested that Winter Wonderday may needlessly confuse our kids or expose them to ridicule from nonbelievers. One can only guess what the playground alpha boys and girls make of our kids’ wide-eyed reverie over the magical talking snowchicken who fills their pants with presents. I’m happy to report, however, that the kids take it in stride. To hear them tell it, our family has an exclusive contract with Irving, so it’s no wonder that other kids might not understand, or even be jealous. And instead of keeping quiet about the holiday, they embellish it—in their version of the myth, Irving works on an “ice farm” where all ice cream and popsicles are made and where he’s assisted by an army of fluffy white helper chicks. On the way to school today, my eldest son, Charlie, told me Irving selected our family over all others because he heard my wife and I bickering about the holiday all the way from the Snowy North.

Charlie is a smart, sophisticated third grader, but when it comes to Winter Wonderday, he still believes. He buried his doubts last year after obtaining what he believes is definitive proof of Irving’s existence. In the weeks leading up to the big day, we spent hours discussing plans to photograph or videotape Irving during his visit. The stakes were high, we understood. If the so-called Irving plot was discovered, our feathered friend might take back our presents and never visit us again. I rejected a proposal to stay up all night inside a hidden sofa cushion fort. Charlie accepted that we couldn’t justify the cost of a motion-activated video camera. And so we settled on a more straightforward strategy. Alongside the 800-twig-count nest, we left a note and a camera. “We want to see what you look like! We hope your feathers are sturdy enough to push the button!” And lo and behold, we awoke the next morning to discover not only a bounty of gifts but also a blurry but identifiable Polaroid self-portrait of a noble white chicken that could only be Irving himself.

The kids are 8, 6 and 2 now, and Winter Wonderday is much more than an in joke (no Festivus or Christmakkah for us!). Several other families join us each year. An old friend has even begun marking the holiday with his interfaith family all the way in Maui. And the kids have begun evangelizing to friends, pointing out all the ways Winter Wonderday is better than that other holiday. Nests are more eco-friendly than trees. Unlike Santa, who is so busy with his Coke billboards and shopping mall appearances that he often forgets presents and leaves behind a mess of chimney soot, Irving is courteous enough to enter through the (tinsel-decorated) dog door.

And perhaps, most important, pants are way bigger than stockings.

Age Norms and Orangey Goodness

http://www.christophernoxon.com//age_norms_and_orangey_goodness

Listen to sociologists hold forth on the topic of age norms and you’d be forgiven for dismissing the topic as theoretical hoo-ha with little real-life relevance. But in the course of writing Rejuvenile I became convinced that age norms are in fact an enormously powerful and woefully underexamined social force that exerts influence in the unlikeliest of places.

Take your local gas station or convenience store. Check out the snackfood display – you’ve got your adult Cape Cod Potato Chips, your teen-leaning Doritos and your kid-targeted Cheetos. What adult in their right mind would eat a snack promoted by a sneaker-clad spokescat?  While snackfood giant Frito-Lay doesn’t release market research data, it seems clear that Cheetos have become a major flashpoint in rejuvenile’s assault on age norms—adults all over are embracing the orangey goodness of Chester Cheetah’s favorite snack. Many are content to causally gobble down a bag in the privacy of their workplace cubicle. Others publicly flaunt their Cheetos affiliation, proudly displaying their stained orange fingers to friends and coworkers or posting weird online video clips as proof of their playful, mischievous spirits. Eating ‘em is just the beginning:

Listen to sociologists hold forth on the topic of age norms and you’d be forgiven for dismissing the topic as theoretical hoo-ha with little real-life relevance. But in the course of writing Rejuvenile I became convinced that age norms are in fact an enormously powerful and woefully underexamined social force that exerts influence in the unlikeliest of places.

Take your local gas station or convenience store. Check out the snack display – you’ve got your adult Cape Cod Potato Chips, your teen-leaning Doritos and your kid-targeted Cheetos. What adult in their right mind would eat a snack promoted by a sneaker-clad spokescat? While snackfood giant Frito-Lay doesn’t release market research data, it seems clear that Cheetos have become a major flashpoint in rejuvenile’s assault on age norms—adults all over are embracing the orangey goodness of Chester Cheetah’s favorite snack. Many are content to causally gobble down a bag in the privacy of their workplace cubicle. Others publicly flaunt their Cheetos affiliation, proudly displaying their stained orange fingers to friends and coworkers or posting weird online video clips as proof of their playful, mischievous spirits. Eating ‘em is just the beginning:

• Members of the fabulous a-capella drag act the Kinsey Sicks stick ‘em in their well-powdered noses.

• Pajama-clad brunette tosses ‘em, gobbles ‘em, spits ‘em.

• Talkative co-ed colors her hair to match ‘em.

• Science geeks light ‘em up, dunk ‘em in booze, then down the firey cheesy cocktail (ow!)

- Clearly understimulated Iowans celebrate ‘em as prime tourist attraction.

Tilt-o-Wheel (formerly Paydates)

http://www.christophernoxon.com//tilt_o_wheel_formerly_paydates

Safely stow all personal belongings. Be advised that management is not responsible for injuries resulting from following rambunctious recitation of rejuvenile-flavored news nuggets…

Capture that Flag. An epic five-family game of Capture the Flag over the weekend has reawakened my love for this ridiculously involving kidgame. Players aged 5-50 got completely immersed in strategizing, sprinting and stealthy sneaking for two-plus hours. Only bummer was waking up next morning to find myself sore in all sorts of unmentionable nooks and crannies. Recuperating at home, play guru Bernie DeKoven tipped me off to this newfangled urban street version. The organizers are New Mind Space, a wildly commendable art-play gang that hosts rejuvenile street event/games/happenings like last week’s light saber battle, street pillow fights and “bubble battles.” Check their website for upcoming events in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Montreal and Vancouver.

Baffling toys. Bored by Barbie? Unmoved by Legos? Maybe it’s time to graduate to a new, weirder class of plaything. How about a she-male baby doll? Or a Playmobile Hazmat crew? The online edition of that long-lost juvenile humor mag Cracked has an amazing compendium of “25 of the weirdest, most ill-conceived toys from around the globe.” I myself am now determined to get my own “toilet training tiger,” complete with sound chip that blurts “Crap! Crap like a champion!” (Thanks to “Count” Conte for the tip).

Bad-ass toys. I like to think of myself as a conscientious parent. I generally avoid battery-operated, crash-bang toys in favor of puzzles and blocks and other playthings that encourage open-ended imaginative play and so on and we’re all free, free to be you and me whatever. The point is, I avoid toys that will turn my offspring into spastic, ultraviolent little maniacs. But sometimes a dad can’t help it. Two new recent arrivals in our household have inspired mad fits of fun in both the 8-year-old boy and his 30-something dad. The first is the V-Bot, a Transformer-like robot that, with the touch of a remote, twists and folds and turns into a respectable red sports car that can zoom and careen around the house and utterly terrify the family dog (Check out YouTube clip of astonishing transformation here). From the same manufacturer comes Battle Wheels, a line of remote controlled, anime-inspired wheeled robots that bash into each other, Rock Em Sock Em Robot-style. Both toys have inspired hours of unimaginative, closed-ended and entirely awesome fun.

Wiggleheads? Really? We all know kids go bananas for Australian kiddie pop TV stars The Wiggles. But somehow I thought that even the most golly-gee rejuveniles would be immune from their super-cheery, crazy-creepy shtick (is it just me, or does the guy in purple look like the kind of fellow who circles playgrounds in tinted-window vans?). But proving yet again that literally anything kids enjoy will be inevitably taken up by rejuveniles, the group has attracted a loyal adult fanbase that calls itself (wait for it) the Wiggleheads. Amusing/horrifying Q&As with die-hard Wiggles groupies here.

Safely stow all personal belongings. Be advised that management is not responsible for injuries resulting from following rambunctious recitation of rejuvenile-flavored news nuggets…

Capture that Flag. An epic five-family game of Capture the Flag over the weekend has reawakened my love for this ridiculously involving kidgame. Players aged 5-50 got completely immersed in strategizing, sprinting and stealthy sneaking for two-plus hours. Only bummer was waking up next morning to find myself sore in all sorts of unmentionable nooks and crannies. Recuperating at home, play guru Bernie DeKoven tipped me off to this newfangled urban street version. The organizers are New Mind Space, a wildly commendable art-play gang that hosts rejuvenile street event/games/happenings like last week’s light saber battle, street pillow fights and “bubble battles.” Check their website for upcoming events in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Montreal and Vancouver.

Baffling toys. Bored by Barbie? Unmoved by Legos? Maybe it’s time to graduate to a new, weirder class of plaything. How about a she-male baby doll? Or a Playmobile Hazmat crew? The online edition of that long-lost juvenile humor mag Cracked has an amazing compendium of “25 of the weirdest, most ill-conceived toys from around the globe.” I myself am now determined to get my own “toilet training tiger,” complete with sound chip that blurts “Crap! Crap like a champion!” (Thanks to “Count” Conte for the tip).

Bad-ass toys. I like to think of myself as a conscientious parent. I generally avoid battery-operated, crash-bang toys in favor of puzzles and blocks and other playthings that encourage open-ended imaginative play and so on and we’re all free, free to be you and me whatever. The point is, I avoid toys that will turn my offspring into spastic, ultraviolent little maniacs. But sometimes a dad can’t help it. Two new recent arrivals in our household have inspired mad fits of fun in both the 8-year-old boy and his 30-something dad. The first is the V-Bot, a Transformer-like robot that, with the touch of a remote, twists and folds and turns into a respectable red sports car that can zoom and careen around the house and utterly terrify the family dog (Check out YouTube clip of astonishing transformation here). From the same manufacturer comes Battle Wheels, a line of remote controlled, anime-inspired wheeled robots that bash into each other, Rock Em Sock Em Robot-style. Both toys have inspired hours of unimaginative, closed-ended and entirely awesome fun.

Wiggleheads? Really? We all know kids go bananas for Australian kiddie pop TV stars The Wiggles. But somehow I thought that even the most golly-gee rejuveniles would be immune from their super-cheery, crazy-creepy shtick (is it just me, or does the guy in purple look like the kind of fellow who circles playgrounds in tinted-window vans?). But proving yet again that literally anything kids enjoy will be inevitably taken up by rejuveniles, the group has attracted a loyal adult fanbase that calls itself (wait for it) the Wiggleheads. Amusing/horrifying Q&As with die-hard Wiggles groupies here.

Parenting feature on Reuters

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/parenting_feature_on_reuters

Reuters just picked up my feature story on parents’ willingness to come clean about their most humiliating acts of stupidity. Read the whole uncut piece here. The piece grew out of a recent essay involving my five year old daughter, a bad case of the hiccups and a gorilla head, a story that friends and I are turning into a short web video. Stay tuned…

Reuters just picked up my feature story on parents’ willingness to come clean about their most humiliating acts of stupidity. Read the whole uncut piece here. The piece grew out of a recent essay involving my five year old daughter, a bad case of the hiccups and a gorilla head, a story that friends and I are turning into a short web video. Stay tuned…

A new game for recovering hyperparents: bad dad one-upsmanship

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/a_new_game_for_recovering_hyperparents_bad_dad_one_upsmanship

It was, when she looks back on it, a fairly routine disaster, the sort of thing parents with small children experience all too often. One late Sunday night after a long brutal weekend with her three kids, Romi Lassally found herself in the dim hallway of her Pacific Palisades home, frazzled and exhausted and staring down into an extravagant splatter of her son’s vomit.

“I just couldn’t deal,” she says. “I left it there. I hoped the dog would eat it.”

When the dog failed to oblige, Ms. Lassally was left with a grisly cleanup job and the sinking feeling she’d sunk to a new maternal low. So she did what she often does when mortified: she picked up the phone and recounted the story to a girlfriend. “She was amused and disgusted,” she says. “And I felt better right away. And at that moment I knew I was on to something.”

That something was True Mom Confessions, an online posting board for mothers to share their most heinous mistakes, misdeeds and misgivings. Since launching in April, more than 100,000 women have contributed confessions, from one-line gripes about in-laws to intimate accounts of diminished sex lives.

“It turns out we’re all riddled with guilt and ambivalence and regret,” she says. “We’ve bottled this stuff up for too long. Now it’s time to unload.”

Parents are unloading like never before. Whether posting anonymous gripes in online confessionals, penning unvarnished “momoirs” or trading horror stories at backyard birthday parties, parents now find comfort and company in tales of their own negligence and stupidity. Bucking against the outsized expectations and intense perfectionism of their Hyperparent peers, these self-flagellating breeders bond over their most intimate parental humiliations.

Parenting books once dealt primarily in pastel-hued sentiment and motherly resolve. Today they’re filled with tales of overflowing diapers, supermarket tantrums and strained marriages, each a supposedly more intimate expose of the ugly underbelly of family life. The titles say it all: Mommies Who Drink, I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids, Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay.

Of course, there’s nothing new about books that claim to finally “tell the truth” about the grim realities of parenthood. From Betty Friedan to Erma Bombeck, writers have been blasting away at the idealized myth of motherhood for a generation or more. For her part, Ms. Lassally remembers being pregnant with her second child ten years ago and reading in Vicky Iovine’s The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy about the possibility of growing hair on her nipples. “That was the moment,” she says. “I knew I wasn’t a freak.”

But what has so far been limited mostly to books by and for mothers has more recently expanded into an all-out, web-accelerated airing of grievances from both moms and dads. “Fathers came late to the party, but I think we’ve finally realized that there’s no real honor in decorum,” says writer Steve Almond, who chronicled his first paternal missteps in an essay titled “Ten Ways I Killed My Daughter Within Her First 72 Hours of Life,” which is included in his book Not That You Asked. “When we were growing up, our parents seemed to just deal and keep quiet. But we’ve got a confessional ethos that says, no, we need to talk about this stuff.”

This tell-all tic is hardly limited to self-deprecating authors; it now extends to the everyday chatter of parents. To wit: one recent bedtime, I caused a hysterical crying fit in my five-year-old daughter during an attempt to cure a case of the hiccups by leaping into her bedroom wearing a gorilla mask. Fearing I might have doomed my daughter to years of therapy, I retold the story at a barbeque a few days later. To my surprise, it prompted what can only be described as a game of Bad Dad One-Upsmanship. One dad got big laughs recounting how he nearly gave his daughter a concussion after carrying her on his shoulders through a doorway. Another confessed to leaving his toddler strapped in a car seat for two hours during a school basketball game.

All of which might only suggest that I travel in a particularly sloppy circle of mommies and daddies. But a quick online survey reveals a thriving community of parents who might not admit to such stupidity in person, but who have no trouble unburdening themselves virtually. On the new LA-based site Offsprung, users have posted stories about mistakenly dropping their kids, doping them with Benadryl and letting them “watch YouTube videos of airplanes taking off [for four days].” Over on the website Babble, one mom let readers in on her secret to maintaining composure with her irritable toddler: periodic time-outs to get stoned (“My son is none the wiser. All he knows is that his formerly stressed out mother is suddenly willing to hunker down on the rug to play Legos for an hour.”)

Amy Davis, a work-at-home mom from suburban Atlanta who posts regularly on Offsprung, says such admissions are part of a mass exercise in lowering expectations. “We’re sending a message that we don’t aspire to be perfect,” she says. “It’s like when we took a test in school and we told our friends, ‘Oh I bombed that test,’ even if we thought we did okay.”

The eagerness to tell all is most obviously a backlash against what many parents, particularly those in their late 30s and early 40s, view as the sugarcoated vision of family life they grew up with. “A lot of Gen X parents were raised with either the feminist notion that they could have it all, or that parenthood was their highest calling,” says Babble editor Ada Calhoun. “And they’re really shocked by how hard it is. As a sort of rebellion, they broadcast every bad thing.”

Ms. Calhoun estimates that 80 percent of the stories submitted to Babble are primarily negative, or at least unflattering. Which shouldn’t suggest that their authors are bad parents. “It’s my experience that the people writing about being a bad parent are usually pretty amazing,” she says. “They’re just very thoughtful and reflective and they find real value in sharing the bad stuff.”

Still, the negativity can get overwhelming. One of Ms. Calhoun’s colleagues at Babble, Gwen Watkins, was just entering the second trimester of her first pregnancy during a week in which online discussion was dominated by talk of projectile vomiting and marital strife. “Everywhere I turned all I heard about was how this was going to ruin my job prospects, my sex life, my body,” she says. “I started panicking.” It was only after posting a plea for encouragement to readers that Ms. Watkin’s worry eased. “People told me of course they love their kids, of course it’s all worth it. A lot of people said, ‘Huh, I thought that was obvious.’”

At worst, the warts-and-all disclosure can be a sly and insensitive shtick, a self-conscious exercise meant to make the storyteller feel better about their own failings (i.e. I may have terrified my daughter with a gorilla head, but at least I never had to smoke pot to appreciate the joy of Lego-building.) Elisha Cooper, a writer and illustrator who wrote about his first year of fatherhood in the book Crawling, says he’s an eager player of Bad Dad One-upmanship, even as he acknowledges that the motivations can get murky. “Sometimes it’s an attempt to gauge other people’s failures so we can say to ourselves, ‘thank God that’s not us,’” he says. “We want to know we’re all in the same boat – but we also want to know we’re on the drier part.”

Even so, Mr. Cooper welcomes the outpouring of insecurity, mostly because it affirms a truth he holds as self-evident: mainly, that the business of raising kids is messy, undignified and fraught with disaster. Or as he put it in Crawling, “so much of parenting has to do with failing. Why not remember the bad things? The first time the baby was dropped in the bath, the first time she choked on a prune. In short, why is everything supposed to be good?”

Why indeed? For her part, Ms. Lassally of True Mom Confessions says the current wave of complainers isn’t oblivious to the joys or rewards of parenthood, even if at the moment they much prefer kvetching. Beyond that, she says, even some of the most hair-raising confessions on her site are posted side by side with glimpses of unexpected hope. One mother recently confessed to kicking her son out of bed after three years of co-sleeping. “My confession,” she wrote, “is I miss my son.”

And that episode with the gorilla? My daughter may have been traumatized, but I’m here to tell you: she hasn’t had the hiccups since.

Paperback drops

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/paperback_drops

Rejuvenile is out in paperback from Three Rivers Press. It’s gorgeous, shiny-as-a-toy and at $11, cheaper than a Wii. Order a copy today and tackle a few of the deep imponderables contained therein:

• Are rejuveniles freespirited romantics or hopelessly gullible tools of a vast Madion Avenue conspiracy?

• Why didn’t rejuvenile greats J.M. Barrie, Dr. Seuss or Hans Christian Andersen ever have actual kids of their own?

• How long until Nike launches a high performance shoe system for skipping?

• Are adults who live at home with their parents forging a new interdependent family model or just suckers for mom’s lasagna?

• Is the color of Rejuvenile’s dust jacket best described as yellow, buttercup or goldenrod?

Rejuvenile is out in paperback from Three Rivers Press. It’s gorgeous, shiny-as-a-toy and at $11, cheaper than a Wii. Order a copy today and tackle a few of the deep imponderables contained therein:

• Are rejuveniles freespirited romantics or hopelessly gullible tools of a vast Madion Avenue conspiracy?

• Why didn’t rejuvenile greats J.M. Barrie, Dr. Seuss or Hans Christian Andersen ever have actual kids of their own?

• How long until Nike launches a high performance shoe system for skipping?

• Are adults who live at home with their parents forging a new interdependent family model or just suckers for mom’s lasagna?

• Is the color of Rejuvenile’s dust jacket best described as yellow, buttercup or goldenrod? 

Cheaper! Softer! Just as yellow!

http://www.christophernoxon.com//cheaper_softer_just_as_yellow

Did I forget to mention that Rejuvenile is in paperback? It is. It’s gorgeous, shiny-as-a-toy and at $11, quite reasonably priced. Order a copy today and tackle a few of the deep imponderables contained therein:

• Are rejuveniles freespirited romantics or hopelessly gullible tools of a vast Madion Avenue conspiracy?

• Why didn’t rejuvenile greats J.M. Barrie, Dr. Seuss or Hans Christian Andersen ever have actual kids of their own?

• How long until Nike launches a high performance shoe system for skipping?

• Are adults who live at home with their parents forging a new interdependent family model or just suckers for mom’s lasagna?

• Is the color of Rejuvenile’s dust jacket best described as yellow, buttercup or goldenrod? 

Did I forget to mention that Rejuvenile is in paperback? It is. It’s gorgeous, shiny-as-a-toy and at $11, quite reasonably priced. Order a copy today and tackle a few of the deep imponderables contained therein:

• Are rejuveniles freespirited romantics or hopelessly gullible tools of a vast Madion Avenue conspiracy?

• Why didn’t rejuvenile greats J.M. Barrie, Dr. Seuss or Hans Christian Andersen ever have actual kids of their own?

• How long until Nike launches a high performance shoe system for skipping?

• Are adults who live at home with their parents forging a new interdependent family model or just suckers for mom’s lasagna?

• Is the color of Rejuvenile’s dust jacket best described as yellow, buttercup or goldenrod? 

TRBB

http://www.christophernoxon.com//trbb

Robis

http://www.christophernoxon.com//robis

Frank

http://www.christophernoxon.com//frank

On the radio

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/on_the_radio

I’m set to appear tomorrow on “Jonesy’s Jukebox,” the radio show hosted by ex-Sex Pistols codger-freak Steve Jones. I’ll be one of three “guest jurors” on a two-hour segment in which he’ll play songs and we decide if said songs are “pants” (bad) or “mustard” (good). Not sure what’s up with the pants or the mustard or why I was asked to appear—must be my gig as music consultant on the Showtime series “Weeds.” Show airs Friday May 10 on Indie 103.1 FM from 12-2 pm with a rebroadcast from 6-8 pm.

I’m set to appear tomorrow on “Jonesy’s Jukebox,” the radio show hosted by ex-Sex Pistols codger-freak Steve Jones. I’ll be one of three “guest jurors” on a two-hour segment in which he’ll play songs and we decide if said songs are “pants” (bad) or “mustard” (good). Not sure what’s up with the pants or the mustard or why I was asked to appear—must be my gig as music consultant on the Showtime series “Weeds.” Show airs on Indie 103.1 FM from 12-2 pm with a rebroadcast from 6-8 pm.

Playdates (Formerly Confetti Egg)

http://www.christophernoxon.com//playdates_formerly_confetti_egg

Strap on your sneakers, pack up some snacks and get going, whippersnappers – fun awaits in London, LA and New York…

Tally-ho, U.K. Rejuveniles! Shadowy benefactor Gideon Reeling (either the name of an esteemed 71-year-old British mogul or the moniker of a production company run by a cheeky group of London theater geeks) is footing the bill for a fantastic weekend of creative fun on the banks of the Thames. The Hide & Seek Festival is the first U.K. event to showcase “pervasive games,” those gussied-up scavenger hunts and elaborate make-believe scenarios that have begun to trickle down to us plebes from the gaming elite (witness the Come Out & Play Festival in New York, which recently announced dates for its second annual event)… (onward for more)

Strap on your sneakers, pack up some snacks and get going, whippersnappers – fun awaits in London, LA and New York…

Tally-ho, U.K. Rejuveniles! Shadowy benefactor Gideon Reeling (either the name of an esteemed 71-year-old British mogul or the moniker of a production company run by a cheeky group of London theater geeks) is footing the bill for a fantastic weekend of creative fun on the banks of the Thames. The Hide & Seek Festival is the first U.K. event to showcase “pervasive games,” those gussied-up scavenger hunts and elaborate make-believe scenarios that have begun to trickle down to us plebes from the gaming elite (witness the Come Out & Play Festival in New York, which recently announced dates for its second annual event). The esteemed Mr. Reeling has assembled a roster of activities described as “all the best games you played as a kid with a grown up twist.” The games will “transform the city into a playground, make your heart race, change the way you see the world and get you playing nicely with others.” Game titles include Sheer Lunacy, Drunkpunch and Mr. Reeling’s Assistants (in which players will experience the thrill of running pointless errands for a 71-year-old mogul! Bonus round: sponge bath!)

Mighty Mamas Skate! Mother’s Day approacheth, a day of beautiful bouquets, breakfasts in bed and insane ollies on the half pipe (cue comical record scratch). For the fourth year running, Barb Odanaka (the Orange County housewife-turned-skate rat profiled in chapter two of Rejuvenile) is organizing the Mighty Mama Skate-O-Rama, a day of wicked tricks, awesome raffles and party-hearty celebration for skateboarding moms. Festivities begin at 10 am, Sunday May 13 at the Laguna Niguel Skatepark in south Orange County. More information here (click on “Barb’s Blog").

Books + babysitters + booze = awesome playdate. Parent Play, the Manhattan party planners that specialize in family-friendly weekend parties, have another great event coming up: Get Up & Giggle, a pre-Memorial Day bash that will feature a discussion with Christie Mellor, author of the seminal momoir The Three Martini Playdate, along with the usual assortment of spa treatments and gift bags for adults and supervised fun for the kiddies. You’ll have to dig deep into your allowance for this one, however: tickets are $70 a family ($80 at the door).

Crusty cowboy puppet

http://www.christophernoxon.com//crusty_cowboy_puppet

Mighty Rooster

http://www.christophernoxon.com//mighty_rooster

Tickets for LA Times Book Festival

http://www.christophernoxon.com//tickets_for_la_times_book_festival

Tickets are going fast for this Sunday’s LA Times Book Festival panel on “The New Adulthood.” You can order and downlaod tickets online for 75 cents
a pop, right here.

I’ll be tackling the question “Why Should Kids Have All the Fun?” with two very funny women, Brett Paesel (Mommies Who Drink) and Erika Schickel (You’re Not the Boss of Me). Also on Sunday’s schedule: a humor panel with friends and fellow rejuveniles Jill Soloway and Neal Pollack, an appearance by Ralph Nader, a memoir
discussion with Arianna Huffington and a faith-based conversation (rant) with Christopher Hitchens. Full schedule here.

Tickets are going fast for this Sunday’s LA Times Book Festival panel on “The New Adulthood.” You can order and downlaod tickets online for 75 cents
a pop, right here.

I’ll be tackling the question “Why Should Kids Have All the Fun?” with two very funny women, Brett Paesel (Mommies Who Drink) and Erika Schickel (You’re Not the Boss of Me). Also on Sunday’s schedule: a humor panel with friends and fellow rejuveniles Jill Soloway and Neal Pollack, an appearance by Ralph Nader, a memoir
discussion with Arianna Huffington and a faith-based conversation (rant) with Christopher Hitchens. Full schedule here.

Wha? A Dating Column?

http://www.christophernoxon.com//wha_a_dating_column

This has nothing really to do with all things rejuvenile, but I thought I’d share it anyhow: The LA Times just published my column on “what I wish I knew about dating when I was single.” I dug deep into my own humiliating record of romance and found a curious parallel with an unhealthy obsession of the moment: the Australian self-help DVD “The Secret.” Full text is on my author website here.

This has nothing really to do with all things rejuvenile, but I thought I’d share it anyhow: The LA Times just published my column on “what I wish I knew about dating when I was single.” I dug deep into my own humiliating record of romance and found a curious parallel with an unhealthy obsession of the moment: the Australian self-help DVD “The Secret.” Full text is on my author website here.

The Secret to Dating

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/the_secret_to_dating1

Here’s what I knew about dating when I was single: nothing.

Worse than nothing, actually. Knowing nothing might have made me mysterious. Knowing nothing might have lent me a neutral, doughy appeal, just the sort of thing to attract a hot control freak who’d mold me into her willing servant. Knowing nothing might have gotten me laid.

But no – I had grand notions of romance fuzzily inspired by Say Anything, the Gen X weepie in which poster nerd John Cusack wins over pouty beauty Ione Sky by… declaring his love over and over and otherwise basking in her magnificence. I actually thought the best way to find and keep a smart, attractive and interesting woman was to tell her how smart, attractive and interesting she was. I was forever declaring my affections, writing earnest appeals, staying up late with friends to strategize campaigns of sincerity waged against Suzi or Lisa or Nicole, out-of-my-league lovelies who loved hanging out but inevitably declared it’d be best if we remained Just Friends.

I was, in short, a schmuck. I learned this helpful bit of Yiddish from my wife, who might just be the only smart, attractive and interesting woman alive who actually likes being told so. I’m exceedingly lucky that when we met, I was too busy being a schmuck with someone else to screw things up with her. At the time, I was dating a rockabilly chick from Long Beach who slept with my best friend and then, three sexless months later, decided the time had come to relocate to a far-off city (I drove the U-Haul, naturally).

All of which serves as a quick object lesson in what I never understood when I was dating, a simple secret shared by the successful and denied by legions of schmucks like me. Men who know the secret have “game.” Men who don’t spend Friday nights fiddling with their X-Box.

I’d even go so far as declare that this secret applies to far more than dating – in fact, this one bit of knowledge has become a stealth weapon of success in our frenetic, attention-hungry age, explaining the appeal of everything from Lost to the nation’s number-one self-help book.

And what is that secret?

I could just tell you, but that would contradict the secret’s essential power. Better to let it emerge on its own. What do the following have in common?

New Zealand actress Jessica Rose, $300-an-hour business consultancies, W. Mark Felt, “The Da Vinci Code,” New York’s Midnight Club, Ted Williams, the Segway, Scientology, Thomas Pynchon, crop circles, British pop group The Gorilaz, and the self-help juggernaut of the moment, titled—get it?—The Secret.

All of the above garnered attention by appearing to shrink from it. Some avoid disclosure for good reasons. M. Mark Felt became Deep Throat to expose government crooks. Ted Williams declined interviews because journalists are scum (so sayeth the self-loathing journalist). But increasingly, keeping secrets – or at least appearing to hide something – is a deliberate, double-think strategy to stand out. Jessica Rose was just another struggling actress-slash-model before she became the mysterious teen blogger Lonelygirl15. The Midnight Club, like so many other nightspots I’m not cool enough to have ever seen the inside of, is famous for being unmarked and unadvertised. Members of the band the Gorilaz, taking a cue from previous rockers-in-costume Kiss and the Residents, hide their true identities and appear in videos as cartoon icons. The success of ABC’s “Lost” has spawned a whole genre of serialized dramas that tease at shocking revelations each episode, only to yank them away the moment things start making sense.

Advertisers even have a name for it: mystery marketing. It shouldn’t work—after all, we’re living in an age of unprecedented openness, of electronic everything everywhere, of celebrity secrets exposed, of full disclosure and total transparency. The very idea of discretion seems quaint in a time when we videotape childbirth, trade confessions online and happily chat about our childhood traumas or recent surgeries (I’ve been dining out on the tale of my vasectomy for months – Hot Dating Tip #1: the ladies love an anecdote about a guy in stirrups).

All of which explains why secrecy has never seemed so alluring. In an era where everything is up for grabs, what we want most of all is what’s held out of reach.

And what, preytell, does any of this have to do with dating? Plenty, obviously. If “Lost” were a guy, he’d be dating Penelope Cruz. If you’re looking for good dating advice, ignore “The Game” and “The Rules” and watch “The Secret.” (Hot Dating Tip #2: it’s free on YouTube). Ignore all the superstitious nonsense about the universal laws that will manifest cool cars and penis-enlargement if you Just Believe. Pay attention instead to the way this claptrap is presented—in the opening sequence, the “Law of Attraction” is “discovered” by wise men of yore and then passed on, “Da Vinci Code”-style, to a long line of brilliant, successful and secretive positive thinkers. “The Secret” is successful not because someone finally figured out that we all want cooler cars and bigger dicks. “The Secret” is successful because, like Freemasonry and King Tut before it, its essential ordinariness is cloaked in obscurity.

Ergo, the secret of dating: withhold. When you peel away the layers, the message is totally mundane. Play hard to get. If I were playing the field today, I’d approach each date like a CIA operative in the witness relocation program, scrubbing my conversation of all traces of actual emotion and dropping vague references to grand adventures and deep intrigue. I’d get a tossled noncommittal haircut and finally figure out how to shut the hell up about my crazy family. No doubt I’d creep out women who happened to be emotionally balanced, but I’d be intriguing as hell to the other 99 percent of the female population.

So listen up, fellow schmucks: the less she knows, the more she wants to know. Of course I possess far deeper and more profound truths, but for now I’ll keep them to myself. I’ve been sworn to secrecy.

A Dating Column? Wha?

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/a_dating_column_wha

The L.A. Times just published my column on dating and how my own rather pathetic record with the ladies relates to the self-help juggernaut “The Secret.” The Times website has the abbreviated, family-friendly version; read the full uncensored version here, in the CLIPS section. 

The L.A. Times just published my column on dating and how my own rather pathetic record with the ladies relates to the self-help juggernaut “The Secret.” The Times website has the abbreviated, family-friendly version; read the full uncensored version here, in the CLIPS section. 

LA Times Festival of Books Panel on “the New Adulthood”

http://www.christophernoxon.com//la_times_festival_of_books_panel_on_the_new_adulthood

Attention So Cal friends and fellow rejuveniles: I’ll be appearing at the LA Times Festival of Books on April 29 to tackle the burning question, “Why Should Kids Have All the Fun?”

Come hear my predictable answer (they shouldn’t), along with provocative chin-stroking from two wittier and prettier panelists, Brett Paesel (Mommies Who Drink) and Erika Schickel (You’re Not the Boss of Me). Our moderator is LA Times feature vet Robin Abcarian.

The panel is slated for Sunday, April 29 at 11:30 am in Moore 100. A full schedule for Sunday is here.

The festival is always terrific; this year’s schedule includes appearances and discussions with Arianna Huffington, Pico Iyer, T.C. Boyle, Ray Bradbury and James Ellroy. Admission is free, but you need tickets to attend certain panels and speaker sessions. Order your tickets at no charge through Ticketmaster.

Hope to see you at the festival!

Attention So Cal friends and fellow rejuveniles: I’ll be appearing at the LA Times Festival of Books on April 29 to tackle the burning question, “Why Should Kids Have All the Fun?”

Come hear my predictable answer (they shouldn’t), along with provocative chin-stroking from two wittier and prettier panelists, Brett Paesel (Mommies Who Drink) and Erika Schickel (You’re Not the Boss of Me). Our moderator is LA Times feature vet Robin Abcarian.

The panel is slated for Sunday, April 29 at 11:30 am in Moore 100. A full schedule for Sunday is here.

The festival is always terrific; this year’s schedule includes appearances and discussions with Arianna Huffington, Pico Iyer, T.C. Boyle, Ray Bradbury and James Ellroy. Admission is free, but you need tickets to attend certain panels and speaker sessions. Order your tickets at no charge through Ticketmaster.

Hope to see you at the festival!

Look, a Shiny Thing!

http://www.christophernoxon.com//look_a_shiny_thing

To those of us who enjoy the luxury of waxing theoretical, being a rejuvenile is about expressing a mindset. It’s about living a life that places more value in spontaneity and openness than traditional “adult” notions of steadfastness and seriousness.

But make no mistake: being a rejuvenile is also about being a target market. At this very moment, smart and well-compensated account execs are formulating sophisticated campaigns to sell you stuff – you the thirtysomething cubicle farmer, you the grizzled Boomer with the BMW skateboard, you the fiftysomething Arielholic.

No interest in chocolate bars laced with bits of dehydrated rice? What if it possesses the power to release “the kid in you”? Anxious about finding yourself in a tract house with kids and a minivan? Then strike back! Adorn your walls with framed Chris Ware posters, get thee a belly ring, start a garage band!

To those of us who enjoy the luxury of waxing theoretical, being a rejuvenile is about expressing a mindset. It’s about living a life that places more value in spontaneity and openness than traditional “adult” notions of steadfastness and seriousness.

But make no mistake: being a rejuvenile is also about being a target market. At this very moment, smart and well-compensated account execs are formulating sophisticated campaigns to sell you stuff – you the thirtysomething cubicle farmer, you the grizzled Boomer with the BMW skateboard, you the fiftysomething Arielholic.

No interest in chocolate bars laced with bits of dehydrated rice? What if it possesses the power to release “the kid in you”? Anxious about finding yourself in a tract house with kids and a minivan? Then strike back! Adorn your walls with framed Chris Ware posters, get thee a belly ring, start a garage band!

Not that there’s anything wrong with belly rings, garage bands, or for that matter, being a target market. As players in a highly mediated, ever-more-commercialized new century, we’re all data points in a vast commercial matrix. Pretending to be above such things is futile.

The trick is knowing the difference between what we genuinely want and what we’re being sold. None of us want our mindsets shaped by commercial forces (even if they are). As easy as it is to fall back into tractable, pre-adult neediness – Look, a shiny thing! Wait, I want candy! – we can all agree we’re far better off recognizing a pitch when it comes along and deciding consciously and deliberately whether to accept it.

Me, I reject Nestle Crunch bars and belly rings. Here, though, are a few rejuvenile-targeted goods and services I simply cannot resist:

• The Crayola Crayon Executive Pen. For the truly self-possessed executive, this brass ballpoint pen has the weight and gravitas of the corner office and the cheery playfulness of the romper room. Store it on your desk next to your Executive Set Sea Monkey set and send a clear message: you are not a Dilbert drone.

Hidden Lemonade Stand Easter eggs. Kim & Jason, the reigning rejuvenile power couple from Madison, WI are doing a cool contest in conjunction with their online store the Lemonade Stand – win prizes by locating the hidden Easter eggs nestled among childlike goodies. But be careful– you just might find yourself leavign with an “Adulthood stinks” T-shirt or a copy of their eseential how-to manual Escape Adulthood.

Perpetual Kid – Online retailer for dizzying variety of rejuvenile novelties and doo-dads, organized into categories including “office toys” (banana cell phone cover, crocodile staple remover, Buddha pencil top), “fun fragrances” (Play-Doh Cologne, eau-du-birthday cake) and “things that shoot” (marshmallow shooters, airzookas, rubber band guns).

• Big Fun toy store. A friend visiting Cleveland happened upon what she describes as rejuvenile nirvana – a cluttered and crazed collection of new and used toys, models, action figures, board games and lunchboxes. Owner Steve Presser has a thing for vintage commercial tie-ins, from the obvious (Star Wars, Care Bears) to the obscure (M.A.S.K., Mr. T). No website; visit them on your next jaunt to Ohio: 1827 Coventry Rd, Cleveland Ohio.

• “All Grown Up” image gallery – My old friend Jeff Schmidt alerted me to this catalog of commercial photographs from the The Veer Image Bank. I wasn’t aware that commercial picture services had gotten so arty and curatorial – these images are way more expressive and subtle than the highly staged, brightly lit, artificial pictures I associate with commercial photography. More impressive still is how this collection of pictures transcends the usual media stereotypes about rejuveniles – there are no wacky shots of losers playing videogames in their moms’ basement. Instead we get images of couples playing with their kids, guys playing foosball and women practicing guitar, accompanied by clever captions that suggest the anxiety and playfulness that’s so characteristic of us not-quite-grown-ups. For all those well-compensated account execs working on campaigns aimed at our demographic, this is an invaluable creative tool.

The Lemonade Stand

http://www.christophernoxon.com//the_lemonade_stand

Perpetual Kid

http://www.christophernoxon.com//perpetual_kid

Big Fun

http://www.christophernoxon.com//big_fun

Friends and Foes

http://www.christophernoxon.com//friends_and_foes

Who are you anyway? A hopeful iconoclast forging a more playful model of maturity, or a pathetic lost soul clinging desperately to fast-fading freedoms?

And here you thought you just had a thing for cupcakes.

We rejuveniles are a polarizing bunch. Defenders proclaim the benefits of cultivating childlike tastes into adulthood, casting their critics as hopelessly stodgy sticks-in-the-mud. Traditionalists counter that adulthood is about coming to grips with sacrifice, hard work and seriousness.

Such debate makes up a big part of Rejuvenile, but I’ve been surprised at how vitriolic the discussion has become in the eight months since publication. Maybe it’s the war overseas, or Bush, or the chilly weather – in any case, a slew of temperate, pull-up-your-bootstraps adults has appeared to circle the wagons and declare with phlegmatic ferocity that rejuveniles pose a real and present danger against all that is good and proper.

Who are you anyway? A hopeful iconoclast forging a more playful model of maturity, or a pathetic lost soul clinging desperately to fast-fading freedoms?

And here you thought you just had a thing for cupcakes.

We rejuveniles are a polarizing bunch. Defenders proclaim the benefits of cultivating childlike tastes into adulthood, casting their critics as hopelessly stodgy sticks-in-the-mud. Traditionalists counter that adulthood is about coming to grips with sacrifice, hard work and seriousness.

Such debate makes up a big part of Rejuvenile, but I’ve been surprised at how vitriolic the discussion has become in the eight months since publication. Maybe it’s the war overseas, or Bush, or the chilly weather – in any case, a slew of red-hot, pull-up-your-bootstraps adults has appeared to circle the wagons and declare with phlegmatic ferocity that rejuveniles pose a real and present danger against all that is good and proper.

Hands down the most hard-core Harrumphing Codger to join the debate is Ingrid Schlueter, host of the syndicated radio program “Crosstalk.” She’s been on a tear about rejuveniles since the book appeared, writing last summer that my account of adults wearing footie pajamas and playing video games has convinced her that “what this country needs is a really major economic crash, the kind where people are on the sidewalk selling pencils and their children have nothing to eat.”

Ms. Schlueter devoted a recent hour-long program to the phenomenon (audio archive here), proclaiming her horror at today’s “cult of youth” and noting its terrifying signifiers: middle-aged women who wear lowrider jeans (“revolting!”), religious leaders who declare a love for surfing, parents who share the same taste in music as their kids and, perhaps most distressingly, men who’ve forgotten the stoic heroism of traditional masculinity (Exhibit A: a reality show contestant who wept upon being booted from a dance program. “And he was wearing a leotard!” she said. “I would hope a real man wouldn’t go to a dance audition. It’s time to grow up.”)

Canadian journalist Kevin Libin is similarly hung up on “manliness,” though he’s infinitely more reasonable and eloquent, noting that “the centuries-old archetype of the master of the house… which has been the Western cultural tradition from Herod to Heathcliff Huxtable, is eagerly being cast off to make way for ‘alternadads.’” A column in yesterday’s National Post (sub required) includes a nice mini profile of a 36-year-old emergency room doctor who loves video games and comics and sees no reason why these enthusiasms make him a bad father. Mr. Libin trots out Codger mouthpiece Frank Furedi to give him the bad news: he’s just not a real man. “As manly authority declines, it’s not replaced by an alternative male authority,” Furedi says. “It’s replaced by ambiguity, where you try to basically resolve the problem by, instead of being a role model to your son or daughter, you try to be their best friend.”

I spoke to Mr. Libin last week and had a chance to weigh in on the charge that rejuevenile dads are sissy men too weak to be the sort of heroic figures that nature intended. And while my response didn’t make it into print (I’m quoted bashing my beatnik parents instead—sorry mom!), it’s worth repeating that I for one am only too glad that the Herod/Heathcliff Huxtable model of fatherhood is giving way to one that allows for more fun, flexibility and connection. As likeminded author and goofy dad Neal Pollack points out, it’s not as if playful dads don’t know what their primary job is – we all understand that we’re here to shelter, protect and provide. But why does that mean we’re prohibited from enjoying the same stuff our kids do? Why is it so hard for Mr. Libin or Ms. Shlueter to comprehend that one can be parent and pal, sometimes toggling uncomfortably between the two roles but often being both, in the same moment?

Fathers and their kids also get their due in a three-page review of Rejuvenile that appeared two weeks ago in the Weekly Standard (not online). It’s not the screed I was expecting from a neocon journal that is about as Harrumphing as they come; reviewer Susie Currie did a nice job recapping and even offers that book is “a fun read.” But she can’t contain her superiority over the rejuveniles described in the book, asking forgiveness for “thinking that if some of these people were any shallower, they’d be the Sahara.” She takes particular offense at remarks in book by Rebecca Flaugh, the 28-year-old childless travel agent who told me she never understood her father’s “death march” of responsible adulthood. By modeling her own life in terms of self-actualization over self-sacrifice, Flaugh “made my skin crawl,” Currie writes.

No doubt some rejuveniles need to grow up and get a grip on the particular demands of their adult lives. But the vast majority of people I met while working on the book were like the emergency room doctor with the video game habit – that is, productive and responsible adults who choose to spend their off-hours doing stuff their parents might find ridiculous. To them, adulthood isn’t just about fighting for one’s share in a cruel and unforgiving world. It’s about picking responsibilities carefully, taking care of family and self and having some fun along the way. As I say in the book, they are unimpressed with the virtues of hardship – to them, suffering is vastly overrated.

Happily, rejuvenile coverage of late hasn’t all been of the grumpy variety. Writer Whit Honea (keeper of this very funny blog) contributed a nice review to the busy site Dadcentric, calling the book “a comprehensive study of what makes this a movement and not just a load of shit.” Northeastern University student Jeff Miranda just published a thorough and sympathetic story on the phenomenon in his college paper. And similarly thoughtful stories have appeared in last few weeks in the Omaha World Herald and the Toledo Blade… proving that rejuveniles might get a bad rap in the Weekly Standard, but they love us in Toledo.

Television

http://www.christophernoxon.com/appearance/television

Selections from Christopher Noxon's appearances on NBC's Today Show, CNN's In the Money, PBS's Life & Times, ABC's Good Morning America and Comedy Central's Colbert Report.

Click to watch (18MB)

Selections from Christopher Noxon’s appearances

http://www.christophernoxon.com//selections_from_christopher_noxons_appearances

Selections from Christopher Noxon’s appearances on NBC’s Today Show, CNN’s In the Money, PBS’s Life & Times, ABC’s Good Morning America and Comedy Central’s Colbert Report

Pop’s Secretive Svengali, Mutt Lange

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/pops_secretive_svengali_mutt_lange

The first thing Robert John Lange says when we meet is that I should call him Mutt. Not Robert. Definitely not Mr. Lange. He may be a multimillionaire record producer and songwriter with unparalleled power in the music industry, but he’s also a regular sort of bloke, a former cover-band bassist who took his nickname from a beloved basset hound.

He welcomes me at the front door of his 19th-century Swiss château wearing his usual outfit—Hawaiian print shirt, baggy pants and slip-ons. His hair is long, blond and shaggy in a style that hasn’t changed much since his glory days of the mid-’80s—the headbanger’s ball may be long over, but at 52, Mutt’s keeping the faith, God bless him. We tour the grounds, past the stables where we run into his wife grooming one of her five horses—“Hi, Shania!”—and then he gives me the tour of the house, with its sweeping southern views of Lake Geneva. The Swiss “freakin’ château,” as the missus calls it. He laughs about that and then turns serious, his slight South African accent going soft. It wasn’t easy, he says, making the transition from the mansion in Lake Placid to the estate in Tour-de-Peliz. But hey—the taxes aren’t as brutal, the people are nice, and it’s easier to keep a low profile.

Next he leads the way to his studio, a vast spot-lit sanctum decorated with a few of his multi-platinum albums (AC/DC’s Back in Black, Shania’s Come on Over, the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium). Settling in behind his console while blowing steam off a mug of herbal tea, Mutt plays the rough mixes of a few songs he and Shania have been working on. From the first note, you can hear Mutt’s trademark—the songs are huge and regal, slinky and hummable. They’re a bit on the repetitive side, sure, with hammy wink-wink lyrics about something vaguely naughty (Mutt’s catalogue includes songs called “I Wanna Be Your Underwear” and “Velvet Tongue")—but like all his best songs, they’re carefully crafted to generate a moment or two of pure uplift coming from crappy car speakers one miserable morning on the way to work.

When the control room falls silent, Mutt settles back in his chair and closes his eyes. And then without any prompting at all, he unravels the story of his life and career, how the son of an African asbestos miner became a pop music mastermind whose manic perfectionism and easy command of rock star egos has helped produce seven of the top 100 records of all time.

And then he asks to hear me sing.

I can dream, can’t I? Robert John “Mutt” Lange is about as likely to have me over for tea and conversation as he is to launch a line of pet supplies for the extra cash. The first thing you learn about Mutt is that he’s reclusive. His friends call him private. His publicists call him press-shy. Collaborators call him a control freak. Add it up and you’ve got a Howard Hughes-scale aversion to the spotlight.

But where it counts, Mutt has all the recognition he needs. He’s widely regarded as one of the most consistent hitmakers in the music business, crafting mass-appeal records in a wide variety of formats. The best evidence of this is a wall in Mutt’s house picturing the acts he’s worked with. Featured photos include Bryan Adams, whose collaboration with Mutt resulted in two multi-platinum albums and three of the best-selling singles of all time. There are the long-hairs: Def Leppard and AC/DC. There are the pop stars: Britney, the Backstreet Boys, Michael Bolton. There are the New Wave heroes: XTC and The Cars. And of course, there’s his proudest accomplishment: Shania, who went from Nashville neophyte to international megastar after hooking up with Mutt as partner, producer and spouse.

“Mutt is a single-minded hitmaker—one of the great writer/producers of all time,” declares Michael Greene, president and CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, the professional organization that hands out the Grammies (Mutt has four). “Other producers have passed between genres, but no one has been so successful at it or gone to the extremes he has.”

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has honored Mutt in the rock, country, pop, Latin and soundtrack categories. Last October, he was awarded seven honours for songwriting and named writer of the year (for the second year running) at a ceremony in London. To no one’s surprise, when the winner was announced, Mutt was absent.

“It would be nice if he’d show up sometime,” says Todd Brabec, ASCAP’s executive vice-president of membership. “But the fact that he never does isn’t going to stop us from recognizing him.”

As much as Mutt has mastered the mechanics of hit records, he appears to have an even firmer handle on their economics. For starters, Mutt has an undisclosed stake in Zomba Recording Corp., the record company founded by his longtime friend and manager, Clive Calder. Zomba generates $800 million in annual sales and bills itself as the “largest independent record company in the world.” With guidance from Calder and Lange—who met while playing in bar bands in their native South Africa 30 years ago—Zomba now encompasses 12 recording studios and seven independent labels, including Jive Records, home to cash cows Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync. The track record has put Zomba in a league with the top five record companies in the world—Sony, Universal, BMG, Warner and EMI.

Meanwhile, Mutt profits more directly from the artists he produces, positioning himself at the receiving end of all streams of revenue his records generate. Most other producers are content to receive flat fees and a rate of around two to three “points” on records they produce—a percentage of total sales. But Mutt has always been a hard bargainer. Back in 1976—long before his breakthrough hits with AC/DC and Def Leppard—Mutt took an astromonical four points on a single from XTC’s first record.

“He made more on that record than we did,” says XTC lead singer Andy Partridge. Not that musicians or record executives are complaining. “There has always been this view that if you gave Mutt Lange a band, you didn’t have to worry,” says Alan Gregg, a longtime player in the Canadian record industry. Mutt reaps even bigger rewards from songwriting, receiving publishing fees and performance royalties on such mega-sellers as Heart’s “All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You,” Huey Lewis & the News’ “Do You Believe in Love” and all but a few songs on Shania’s last two records. The 16 songs Mutt and Shania wrote for Shania’s Come on Over, for instance, have earned the couple $18,374,803. That doesn’t take into account performance royalties based on radio airplay, which with a crossover hit like the album’s “You’re Still the One”—which spent a record 20 weeks at the top of the country music chart and peaked at number two on the pop chart—has raked in tens of millions more. Then there’s film and TV licence fees. Industry observers say Mutt makes between $100,000 and $250,000 every time one of his songs is chosen for a soundtrack—which works out well, since Mutt is also in the business of producing soundtracks (credits include Footloose to Twister to America’s Sweethearts).

None of these calculations include the income brought in by Mrs. Mutt, whose three albums have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide, more than any other female artist in history. Last year, when National Post Business added up Twain’s royalties, her share of $119 million in concert revenues, a $4.5-million endorsement deal with Revlon and other income, it arrived at a net worth of $69.5 million.

While Mutt’s private dealings with Zomba make it much harder to tally his total worth, it’s safe to assume that he brings at least as much to the party as Shania, making the pair perhaps the wealthiest couple in pop. “I don’t think any producer makes as much money or is as revered in the industry as Mutt Lange,” notes Gregg.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Mutt’s career is how hard he works to keep success from spinning into celebrity. Last year, he reportedly bought the rights to nearly every photograph ever taken of him. (He apparently prefers a soft-focus Peter Frampton-ish portrait that dates back 20 years or more.) He reportedly demands that his face be cropped out of all promotional pictures and videos. When VH1 produced a biopic on Def Leppard earlier this year, he declined to give any advice to the actor who portrayed him, Anthony Michael Hall.

Mutt’s strict policy of silence tends to feed curiosity as much as discourage it. Early last summer, I started wondering about Mutt and how he’s managed to stay on top of a market that’s seen the swell and sputter of so many trends. So I set out on a Mutt Hunt—contacting friends, collaborators, colleagues, publicists and fans, looking for answers to questions he appears eager not to answer himself. How does he do it? Why the secrecy? How did a guy reared on such ‘60s stalwarts as Van Morrison and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young end up as a king of hair metal, teen pop and glam country?

I start by faxing an interview request to Zomba—the powerhouse music company behind such mega-sellers as ‘N Sync, Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. I carefully weigh the wording, trying to strike the right balance between fawning appreciation and professional curiosity. “While I understand your reluctance to talk to the press, it would be a shame to base such a well-intentioned story solely on the perspectives of associates,” I write. I even offer to jet to Switzerland for a chat.

“Don’t hold your breath,” says George Frazer. If anyone knows the frustrations of the Mutt Hunt, it’s Frazer, a 44-year-old hospital worker, medical technician, father of two and self-described “pretend songwriter” from Owen Sound, Ont. Frazer is the world’s foremost expert on all things Mutt—under the nom-de-Web Big Bro, Frazer runs an online news depository and posting board called the Mutt Lange Zone. The site includes a full inventory of Mutt’s producing and writing credits, the reminiscences of school buddies and even a few scanned paparazzi photos from Mutt and Shania’s wedding.

Frazer got interested in Mutt after hearing the now legendary story of how he and Shania met—Lange reportedly saw a navel-bearing, hip-wiggling video from Shania’s modestly successful first record and phoned her up. Twain’s longtime manager, Mary Bailey, took the initial call, liked the sound of Mutt’s voice and passed him along to Shania, who, initally, wasn’t aware of who he was. Twain found herself complaining to Mutt about how her producers didn’t let her record more of her own music, which she played for Mutt into the phone. Soon the two started an intense long-distance relationship. Mutt recorded her voice on the phone, reworked the songs and then played them back to her. Eventually, he agreed to work on her next record.

The two finally met face-to-face in the summer of 1993 at a country music festival in Nashville. Six months later, they were married. The pairing has produced two blockbuster records and, this past August, a baby boy named Eja (pronounced “Asia"). But initially, fans were suspicious about what appeared to be a purely opportunistic match, with its whirlwind romance, long periods of separations and the 16-year difference in age. But Shania has insisted in interviews—and written in a few songs—that there is a special and easy bond between them that also happens to include a shared determination to make hit records.

But for all that Shania has talked about her private life, precious little is known about the shadowy Mr. Twain. When he set out to find out more, Frazer was surprised to discover Mutt’s name on a number of records he’d enjoyed over the years—from Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen (No More Love on the Run)” to Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do (I Do it For You).” Mutt not only produced these songs; he occasionally sang backup, shared songwriting credits and endlessly fussed over their arrangements. “I discovered I’d been a fan for years without even knowing it,” Frazer says.

He warns me not to expect much from my attempts to reach Mutt directly. After several phone calls and even a visit to the Zomba offices in Nashville, Frazer has yet to receive any direct communication. Any hope I’ll get better treatment is shattered soon enough. Two weeks after writing Zomba and hearing nothing back, I call the publicity office directly. No one returns the call. I try again every few days, leaving polite messages, official messages, annoyed messages. One day I leave a message in a silly South African accent. It makes no difference. I get it: I’m being blown off.

My luck improves when I reach Shania’s Canadian manager. While she says Shania herself isn’t available to talk—she’s holed up at the château this summer, working on her next album and preparing for the birth of her baby—she promises to get my letter to Mutt.

Meanwhile, I fill in the outlines of Mutt’s biography. Frazer puts me in touch with one of Mutt’s old bandmates from South Africa, a drummer named Geoff Williams, who tells me Mutt grew up in the copper belt of Zambia and moved to the South African town of Belfast as a teenager. At a time when Elvis was hot, Mutt was into country rocker Slim Whitman. He played bass in a succession of local bands and worked as a sound engineer at Johannesburg studios, recording radio jingles. Williams has his own theory as to why Mutt shrinks from the spotlight—and why such an apparently gifted musician has never recorded under his own name. “As I remember him, he was extremely modest,” Williams writes via e-mail. “He hates any form of hype and is definitely not one to bask in any form of glory.”

Mutt moved to London in 1973, following a pair of musician friends who had formed a publishing and production company called Zomba. (Mutt may have inherited his press-shyness from his friend Calder, who never gives interviews and avoids photos.) After a few moderate successes, producing bands like The Boomtown Rats and The Outlaws, Mutt hit it big with the rowdy Australians AC/DC, following up the 1979 hit Highway to Hell with Back in Black, a three-chord pop-metal masterwork that now ranks as the sixth best-selling record in history, one spot above The Beatles’ White Album.

Mutt’s winning streak continued, most notably with the pop-friendly headbangers Def Leppard. Mutt produced the group’s breakthrough 1981 LP, High ‘N’ Dry. A few months later, he put together Foreigner’s fourth album, streamlining and polishing a sound that had already given the group multi-platinum success. All this, of course, was but a prelude to Mutt’s top-to-bottom overhaul of the country singer from Timmins. While Shania’s success may seem inevitable in hindsight, Mutt took a big risk waltzing in from the rock world aiming to make a record that would get airplay on both country and top 40 radio, says Danny Goldberg, a music industry veteran who was chairman of Mercury Records during production of Shania’s breakthrough record, The Woman in Me. “He had a lot of respect for the conventions of country,” Goldberg says. “At the same time he has a total grasp on the pop market. He’s a certifiable genius—and there aren’t too many of those in this business.”

The theme is echoed by Thomas Dolby, the synth-pop wizard who has worked with Mutt on and off since the early ‘80s. Mutt sang backup vocals on Dolby’s 1982 hit “She Blinded Me With Science,” and Dolby later played keyboards on Def Leppard’s Pyromania and Hysteria. I reach Dolby at a high-tech music software company called Beatnik Inc. that he founded in Northern California (Zomba is an investor). Dolby says that while Mutt is known primarily as a big-sound, big-ticket producer, he owes most of his success to songwriting. “Songwriting is the gold mine in all of this,” says Dolby. “Compare the income between Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and you’ll find out where the money is.”

Mutt’s genius as a songwriter is in crafting songs especially for radio, says Nashville songwriting coach Ralph Murphy. Whether he’s composing for heavy metal rockers or country crooners, Mutt knows his ultimate audience is the same: the poor schmo listening to drive-time radio. “Mutt knows how to design pieces of music that keep you interested between the Ford commercial and the Coca-Cola commercial,” says Murphy. “That’s why radio loves him. He’ll keep you listening right until the last bar.”

Dolby remembers presenting a demo tape to Mutt and Calder at Zomba in 1978, when Zomba consisted of a small stable of musicians and songwriters on the north side of London. In addition to producing albums, including a few from Mutt’s own band, City Boy, Zomba released music for pregnancy fitness videos, theme music for soccer clubs and any other project that might turn a quick profit. “They were a brilliant moneymaking machine,” says Dolby. “Obviously, they still are.”

Dolby says he still can’t quite reconcile the Mutt he knows with the Svengali behind such mega-sellers as Def Leppard or the Backstreet Boys. He has a vivid memory of Mutt sitting cross-legged on the bed of a hotel suite in Manhattan, where he and Dolby were working on Foreigner’s record 4. “He sat there for hours between studio sessions, doing pitch-perfect covers of Van Morrison songs,” he says. “It was the last thing you’d expect from a guy who went on to do Def Leppard or Shania.”

In business as in music, Mutt carefully calculates every move. While it’s difficult to estimate exactly how much business Mutt has generated in the industry, it’s clear that Mutt is among the most well-compensated producers in the business. “He’s working all the angles,” says Mitchell Frank, a Los Angeles record industry veteran who has worked with the Dust Brothers and Beck. “Look anywhere that a producer might profit, and Mutt is right there.”

An average producer on a major label project might receive a $100,000 fee and two or three percentage points of future royalties paid out after a record company recoups its costs. A producer of Mutt’s stature likely receives upwards of $750,000 in upfront fees and in the neighbourhood of five or six points on a record, which can pay off big-time down the line.

It makes for a continuing series of great paydays for a job much less taxing than that of even the biggest pop star. “The life of a producer on that level is pretty fucking cushy,” says Gregg. “Their risk is relatively low, they don’t have to go on tour, they don’t have to do promotion—and even when they’re making a record, they get to dictate the terms of how they work.”

And Mutt has never been afraid to dictate his own terms. While other producers take a month or two to record an album, Mutt is famous for spending a year or more in the studio, methodically layering each sound and demanding endless retakes. “You play something over and over and think you’ve nailed it,” Dolby says. “And Mutt says, ‘That was great man, but in the 15th bar, the third note was a hair early.’ And you say, ‘Okay, you want me to punch in [overdub a small section]? And in his sweetest South African accent, he goes, ‘No, just take it from the top.’ You might end up playing the same part 150 times. After a while, it can drive you crazy.”

Others have been grateful to discover that Mutt is as demanding of himself as he is of those around him, says Mike Moore, a session engineer and producer who worked with Mutt on the recording of Millennium for the Backstreet Boys. Moore recalls watching Mutt hunched over a mixing board, adjusting the level of a vocal track long after anyone else could detect any difference. “He pushed that fader for three days,” Moore says. “No one works on a vocal fader for three days. But no one else has his ear for detail.”

Few can argue with the result of such meticulousness. “He cooked the shit out of us,” says Andy Partridge, lead singer of the British trio XTC, which recorded a single and B-side with Mutt. “He boiled out of us any nerves or uncertainty about the rhythm. We got to the point that we were so sick of it, we were playing it in our sleep. It was completely locked. It was painful, but when he was done, it was 80 times better than when we started.”

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mutt, says Dolby, is his ability to switch gears. “Mutt is aware of the precise placement of every single note in every single track,” he says. “At the same time, he can sit back in his chair and listen to the record like he’s a 19-year-old fan hearing it for the first time. That’s an incredible skill, and one that results in hit records.”

While Dolby, Moore and Partridge are happy to reminisce about their experiences with Mutt, I hit a brick wall with more recent collaborators and other industry leaders. Bryan Adams’ publicist at Bruce Allen Talent sends a curt, one-sentence reply: “Bryan Adams is not available for comment on Mutt Lange.” I had hoped to get a few words from Michael Bolton, but his agent at William Morris asks for a formal letter of request, then ignores it. Publicists for AC/DC and Def Leppard don’t bother responding either. Three editors at the trade bible Billboard, including editor-in-chief Timothy White, decline requests to talk. And a representative of Mercury Nashville gets back to me with an explanation for chairman Luke Lewis’ blanket no comment: “Mutt Lange is a very private person and, out of respect for Mutt, [we] have turned down this opportunity to do this interview.”

I finally do hear back from Mutt’s camp. Shania’s manager gets back to me six weeks after my request for an interview or referrals to anyone else who might be willing to talk. “Sorry for the lengthy delay,” she writes. “Unfortunately at this time neither are available for interviews. Also, the request for referrals has been declined. Thanks for your patience.”

It may very well be, as friends suggest, that Mutt’s silence is motivated by simple humility. “He doesn’t want anything to get in between the music and the fan,” says Dolby. “I think he really believes that the music is the only thing that’s important.” Unlike journalists. “Mutt doesn’t have anything to gain by talking to you or any other reporter,” says Goldberg. “Not everyone likes to be in the press—it’s a burden you have to endure as a performer, but not if you’re a producer.”

Then again, I suspect there’s a more basic reason why Mutt stays in the shadows. Mutt Lange is an epic perfectionist whose biggest successes were the result of intense labour, careful calculation and countless revisions. I imagine Mutt simply can’t stand the idea of handing control of something as precious as his own story over to anyone whose work he couldn’t then tweak, trim or redo a thousand times over. But I swear, if we were to hang out at his place, it’d be great. We’d rock.

Charlie’s rules

http://www.christophernoxon.com//charlies_rules

Ventura Blvd.

http://www.christophernoxon.com//ventura_blvd

‘Alternadad’ review

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/alternadad_review

There’s nothing particularly new about the style of parenting described in Neal Pollack’s nonetheless revelatory and very funny new book “Alternadad.” Long before today’s tattooed punks and indie-minded hipsters entered the final frontier of family life, what might be called Cool Parents have been struggling to maintain their anti-establishment cred as they faced such deeply uncool concerns as diaper rash, separation anxiety and infant regurgitation. Back in the seventies, these were the parents who dragged their offspring to Jackson Browne shows in unfortunate combinations of denim and corduroy. They were the buyers of bataka bats, the devotees of “Free to Be You and Me,” the dads and moms whose kids ran wild at late-night pot-lucks as they rapped about Carl Sagan and Nuclear Freeze initiatives.

Today’s generation of Cool Parents are no less noticeable. They’re the stubbly stay-at-home dads balancing Baby Bjorn-strapped infants and double lattes at the no-logo coffee bar. They’re the ropy-armed post-feminists who trade couscous recipes at mommy-and-me yoga groups. And they’re the expectant couples who arrive at the delivery room with doulas and organic unguents and carefully compiled mix CDs.

All of which could easily make for an amusing pop culture survey – one could easily devote a sizable volume to alternaparent-approved hairstyles (the feathered shag, the ironic mullet), clothing (Che Guerva mini-Ts, kitschy cowboy duds) and music (They Might Be Giants, Dan Zanes). And indeed, Pollack spends a good deal of this book obsessing over such signifiers, detailing for instance his campaign to indoctrinate his two-year old son Elijah in his worship for the Ramones and his disdain for that punching bag of Cool Parents and their precocious kids alike, Barney.

Thankfully, Pollack digs at least a little deeper, dipping into a deep reservoir of aspirations and insecurities that inform Cool Parents’ pop culture posturing. To Pollack, being an alternadad is about “trying to retain a shred of pre-child identity” in a lifestage other parents greet as a cultural dead zone. It’s about becoming a parent without giving up stuff you’ve always enjoyed, be it psycho polka or anime or high-grade marijuana. It’s about calling into question aspects of childrearing other parents accept wholesale, from circumcision to nutrition to whether mom or dad gets up with the little one at six a.m. after a late night of margaritas.

Pollack touches on these thorny issues in what is, as square as it sounds, a straightforward parenting memoir. This is a nice surprise, coming as it does from a former star of the McSweeny’s stable with two faux memoirs under his belt (in which he took clever jabs at rock and celebrity under the guise of “Neal Pollack, America’s greatest living writer”). Here, he forgoes the shticky alter ego and presents himself simply as a harried new dad, albeit one with the jokey cluelessness of a guy who took his nine-month pregnant wife to a Beck show in the hopes that their in-utero infant would soak up their refined musical taste. After a traumatic c-section, he followed his newborn into the hospital nursery and introduced himself thusly, “Are you ready to rock? Are you ready to party? Are you ready to have a good time with daddy?”

Which pretty much sums up Pollack’s approach to fatherhood, at least in his son Elijah’s first year. Three months after his birth, Pollack took off for a wild weekend in Amsterdam, where he got very high at a poetry conference, doused himself in a pitcher of water and delivered an ironic rant that concluded “All hail the United States of America, where literature kicks big ass.” Back at home, he found himself consumed by a never-realized rock fantasy, forming a mediocre punk band called the Neal Pollack Experience and taking off on a doomed three week tour of Northeastern dive bars.

All this will certainly come off to many others as deeply selfish and even pathetic. Even if you were raised by Cool Parents yourself, even if you think of yourself as cool, there’s something reflexively off-putting – wrong, even – about parents who cling so desperately to their own formative floundering years, or worse, who suffer from what Pollack calls “the corrosive notion of child as hip, wacky fashion accessory.” After all, kids have enough developmental milestones to overcome without having to deal with their parents’ efforts to cultivate an image of freethinking non-conformity as they buy shop for diapers at Target.

But Pollack is smart enough not to glorify his foolishness – he’s always the butt of his jokes. He cops, for instance, to the absurdity of his suggestion that he and his wife hand out yellow and red cards when Elijah misbehaves, the ultimate punishment henceforth being known as the “Penalty Box.” “I decided that ‘time out’ needed a cooler name,” he writes. “Apparently it had eluded me that punishment, by its very nature, shouldn’t be cool.” And he is self-aware enough to realize that it was probably a mistake to take the whole family to a sold-out jam-band festival in the height of summer. While he’d never admit to engaging in anything as dorky as soul searching, “Alternadad” is ultimately about the gradual acceptance and – dare one say it – maturation of a father.

That maturation ultimately takes Pollack to come unexpected places. The charming “authenticity” of his neighborhood on the outskirts of Austin suddenly appears merely scary, prompting him to spearhead a neighborhood association campaign to involve the police and drive out crime. An outburst of what Elijah’s teachers call “poor impulse control” forces him to negotiate the exquisitely complicated realm of preschool politics. But perhaps the nicest lesson he learns along the way involves his relationship with Elijah. He writes deliciously about his young son’s malapropisms and imaginary playmates, about the intense satisfaction they get joking and moshing and telling stories together. More traditional dads surely love their kids just as much as alternadads, but rarely has the bond felt more moving than it does here.

While Pollack ends his book with Elijah still in preschool and his family’s move to the equally cool ‘burgh of Highland Park here in L.A., you’re left to wonder how this story will play out over the long term. Adolescence will come knocking, and when it does, you can only guess what all those kids in their itty-bitty Doc Martens and tiny Mohawks will rebel against. Perhaps the early exposure to power chords and organic foodstuffs will reduce the chances they’ll hate their parents as teens. But it isn’t hard to imagine this generation of Cool Parents ushering forth a new wave of buttoned-down, Alex P. Keaton neo-conservatives. In other words, if you dress you kid in a Sex Pistols onesie, will they grow up Republican? Now, that would be uncool.

MC Sippy Cup Speaks

http://www.christophernoxon.com//mc_sippy_cup_speaks

A confession, in three parts.

Firstly, I am a nearly-40 dad who spends much of his time worrying about mortgage rates, school admission procedures and acid reflux. I mainline NPR. I enjoy the occasional showtune. I am, in short, deeply boring.

Part two is more mortifying: I am a former New Wave kid who spent an inordinate amount of my youth scrounging through record shops for 12” remixes by synth-dependent Britpop bands – and not just the cool ones (favorite song in senior year? “Doot Doot” by Freur.) My teen years were marked by all-ages clubs and finger-in-lightsocket hairstyles and podium dancing. I am not proud.

The third part of my confession is where it gets weird: even though I am a deathly dull adult who should know better, I still spend an inordinate amount of time loitering in the used section of record shops, going to shows and trading mix CDs with friends. Having kids has only intensified my pop geekdom – in fact, one of the happiest and most unexpected discoveries becoming a dad was the entry it gave me into whole new genres of music that I’d been too snobbish to pay any attention before. Now I make mix CDs to pass out as party favors at my kids’ birthday parties (under the nom-de-mix MC Sippy Cup), lurk on kid music websites (most notably Amy Davis’ fantastic blog) and write the occasional missive on the booming state of kidmusic.

So in the interest of staying abreast with what the Kids are Listening To These Days, here are four discs that have been getting heavy minivan rotation of late: 

A confession, in three parts.

Firstly, I am a nearly-40 dad who spends much of his time worrying about mortgage rates, school admission procedures and acid reflux. I mainline NPR. I enjoy the occasional showtune. I am, in short, deeply boring.

Part two is more mortifying: I am a former New Wave kid who spent an inordinate amount of my youth scrounging through record shops for 12” remixes by synth-dependent Britpop bands – and not just the cool ones (favorite song in senior year? “Doot Doot” by Freur.) My teen years were marked by all-ages clubs and finger-in-lightsocket hairstyles and podium dancing. I am not proud.

The third part of my confession is where it gets weird: even though I am a deathly dull adult who should know better, I still spend an inordinate amount of time loitering in the used section of record shops, going to shows and trading mix CDs with friends. Having kids has only intensified my pop geekdom – in fact, one of the happiest and most unexpected discoveries becoming a dad was the entry it gave me into whole new genres of music that I’d been too snobbish to pay any attention before. Now I make mix CDs to pass out as party favors at my kids’ birthday parties (under the nom-de-mix MC Sippy Cup), lurk on kid music websites (most notably Amy Davis’ fantastic blog) and write the occasional missive on the booming state of kidmusic.

So in the interest of staying abreast with what the Kids are Listening To These Days, here are four discs that have been getting heavy minivan rotation of late:

Gabby La-La’s “Be Careful What You Wish For.” My favorite kid CD at the moment isn’t really a kids CD, tho I can’t imagine why Gabby La-La isn’t being counted among the big new stars on the kidmusic scene (she kicks Laurie Berkner’s bland behind). Gabby is a hippie-damaged pixie from the Bay Area whose musical exoticism – she plays the sitar, ukulele, toy piano and Theremin – have landed her session gigs with Snoop Dogg and Macy Gray. Her debut disc was produced by Primus frontman Les Claypool, but it’s not the punky freakfolk you might expect – it’s bright and dynamic and embedded with the wonder and wit of childhood. She sings about backpacks and elves and fleas with the sort of wholehearted abandon that makes you forget age norms altogether… She’s the freaky aunt who your kids won’t leave alone.

James Kochalka’s “Our Most Beloved.” I first heard Kochalka on the first indispensable Greasy Kids Stuff compilation – his “Hockey Monkey” is truly one of the funnest kid rock songs ever and should, if there were any justice in the mediasphere, be a mammoth kidsong/mainstream crossover hit. Can’t you hear it on “Idol”? I finally splurged on the recent Rykodisc greatest hits disc, which includes a lot more loud, raucous, oddly sweet songs about monkeys and robots and wookies and the like. Great stuff for punk rock tots.

Milkshake’s “Play.” I was sent the Baltimore band’s latest by guitarist Miles Anderson, who responded to my Fids and Kamily essay about how so much new kids music sounds like warmed-over adult rock. Milkshake, in contrast, is meant to be “happy music for happy kids.” Indeed it is – the disc is unapologetically peppy, a colorful parade of glossy high-production pop in the tradition of the Archies and the Partridge Family. Kids dig it and parents can’t get it out of their heads.

The Brothers Comstock’s “What Do You Want?” This was another out-of-the-blue freebie from a band beloved by scraggly tots but too often slagged by cooler-than-thou reviewers. Billing themselves as a cross between Cheech & Chong and the Wiggles, the Brothers are a rough but tuneful ramshackle duo that writes songs about the glories of basketball and staying up late and watching DVDs. Interesting side note: brothers also invented a very cool rejuvenile machine known as the Margarator (perfect for mixing up slushies for kids and margaritas for the parents).

Book review in LA Times

http://www.christophernoxon.com/newsitem/book_review_in_la_times

I just reviewed Neal Pollack’s new book about struggling to stay cool in the cultural dead zone of fatherhood. Pollack is a fellow Angeleno with a distaste for Barney and an obsessive desire for his kids to appreciate good rock and roll. It’s a very funny and thoughtful book, and Pollack is keeping a great Blog about the ongoing hilarity of raising his son Elijah. Elsewhere in blogland, here’s a review of my review.

I just reviewed Neal Pollack’s new book about struggling to stay cool in the cultural dead zone of fatherhood. Pollack is a fellow Angeleno with a distaste for Barney and an obsessive desire for his kids to appreciate good rock and roll. It’s a very funny and thoughtful book, and Pollack is keeping a great Blog about the ongoing hilarity of raising his son Elijah. Elsewhere in blogland, here’s a review of my review.

Confetti Egg (formerly Strobe Lights)

http://www.christophernoxon.com//confetti_egg_formerly_strobe_lights

The shell is dyed, the hole poked, the yolk drained… now go ahead, smash this fragile ovoid and release its bounty of smallish items of interest!

Alternadads unite. The Sunday LA Times included my review of Neal Pollack’s book about struggling to stay cool in the cultural dead zone of fatherhood. Pollack is a fellow Angeleno with a distaste for Barney and an obsessive desire for his kids to appreciate good rock and roll. It’s a very funny and thoughtful book, and Pollack is keeping a great Blog about the ongoing hilarity of raising his son Elijah. Elsewhere in blogland, here’s a review of my review.

RPS goes corporate. You’ve been in meetings since dawn, you’ve just wolfed down a wilted cobb salad and you’re now facing a long afternoon holed up in a conference room with a crowd of dispirited office monkeys… only one thing will save you now: rock paper scissors. Really. The World RPS Society (the original Toronto-based league of twee intellectuals, not to be confused with the balls-out, Bud-endorsed US Rock Paper Scissors League) has just launched a service that will organize and referee RPS tournaments at conferences, office parties and other business events. A frivolous exercise in forced cheer? No way – this is an ingenious way to quickly break professional artifice and generate creativity, communication and fun. (Here’s a hint, minions: bosses throw rock.)

Harrumphing Codgers rejoice! Here’s a manifesto for cranky old men! British author and broadcaster Michael Bywater has published what sounds like a clever tho reactionary survey of the Rejuvenile phenomenon, or to quote his title, Big Babies: Why Can’t We Just Grow Up? Reviews say it’s about how government and advertising treat adults as “mewling infants who have to be told, essentially, look look shiny shiny coin coin every forlorn second of every babyish day.” There’s good reason to worry about business and government encouraging adults to drop critical defenses, but I refuse to believe the answer to that problem is a return to the rigid and overserious traditional mold of maturity. The Rejuveniles I met while working on the book were mature in many ways and immature in many others – as I say in the book, it’s possible to lead a happy healthy life that “includes charity and skateboarding, G-8 summit position papers and midnight cupcakes, long stretches of concentrated seriousness and mad fits of impulsiveness.”

The shell is dyed, the hole poked, the yolk drained… now go ahead, smash this fragile ovoid and release its bounty of smallish items of interest!

Alternadads unite. The Sunday LA Times included my review of Neal Pollack’s book about struggling to stay cool in the cultural dead zone of fatherhood. Pollack is a fellow Angeleno with a distaste for Barney and an obsessive desire for his kids to appreciate good rock and roll. It’s a very funny and thoughtful book, and Pollack is keeping a great Blog about the ongoing hilarity of raising his son Elijah. Elsewhere in blogland, here’s a review of my review.

RPS goes corporate. You’ve been in meetings since dawn, you’ve just wolfed down a wilted cobb salad and you’re now facing a long afternoon holed up in a conference room with a crowd of dispirited office monkeys… only one thing will save you now: rock paper scissors. Really. The World RPS Society (the original Toronto-based league of twee intellectuals, not to be confused with the balls-out, Bud-endorsed US Rock Paper Scissors League) has just launched a service that will organize and referee RPS tournaments at conferences, office parties and other business events. A frivolous exercise in forced cheer? No way – this is an ingenious way to quickly break professional artifice and generate creativity, communication and fun. (Here’s a hint, minions: bosses throw rock.)

Harrumphing Codgers rejoice! Here’s a manifesto for cranky old men! British author and broadcaster Michael Bywater has published what sounds like a clever tho reactionary survey of the Rejuvenile phenomenon, or to quote his title, Big Babies: Why Can’t We Just Grow Up? Reviews say it’s about how government and advertising treat adults as “mewling infants who have to be told, essentially, look look shiny shiny coin coin every forlorn second of every babyish day.” There’s good reason to worry about business and government encouraging adults to drop critical defenses, but I refuse to believe the answer to that problem is a return to the rigid and overserious traditional mold of maturity. The rejuveniles I met while working on the book were mature in many ways and immature in many others – as I say in the book, it’s possible to lead a happy healthy life that “includes charity and skateboarding, G-8 summit position papers and midnight cupcakes, long stretches of concentrated seriousness and mad fits of impulsiveness.”

All Grown Up (and Unmarried)

http://www.christophernoxon.com//all_grown_up_and_unmarried

It’s just a data point, but as stats go, this one’s a doozy: “51% of women are now living without a spouse.” So sayeth the headline of a piece in Monday’s New York Times now prompting much hand-wringing over the changing makeup of the American family.

This increase in unmarrieds may be just an uptick – the number was 49% six years ago – but it’s being greeted as a terrifying sign of social collapse among the conservative-minded – indeed, it signals a terrifying tipping point in the ever-descending path of the American family. It’s a Phyllis Schlafly nightmare: faithful wives outnumbered by swinging single gals, cohabitating girlfriends and merry widows.

So, you may well ask, what’s all this got to do with cupcakes and kickball and other childish leisure pursuits? Here’s what: beyond the demographic shifts at work in this story (increasing co-habitation, longer lifespans, declining rates of remarriage after divorce or death), it seems to me there’s a more primary force driving the change: the reinvention of the American grown-up.

It’s just a data point, but as stats go, this one’s a doozy: “51% of women are now living without a spouse.” So sayeth the headline of a piece in Monday’s New York Times now prompting much hand-wringing over the changing makeup of the American family.

This increase in unmarrieds may be just an uptick – the number was 49% six years ago – but it’s being greeted as a terrifying sign of social collapse among the conservative-minded – indeed, it signals a terrifying tipping point in the ever-descending path of the American family. It’s a Phyllis Schlafly nightmare: faithful wives outnumbered by swinging single gals, cohabitating girlfriends and merry widows.

So, you may well ask, what’s all this got to do with cupcakes and kickball and other childish leisure pursuits? Here’s what: beyond the demographic shifts at work in this story (increasing co-habitation, longer lifespans, declining rates of remarriage after divorce or death), it seems to me there’s a more primary force driving the change: the reinvention of the American grown-up. As I discuss in chapter 5 of Rejuvenile, marriage was, as recently as the mid-1960s, the single defining right of passage into adulthood. Getting married meant moving out on your own, having sex, starting a family, the lot. Today, of course, we’re free to sample all those freedoms outside marriage. Weddings are still important, of course, but today they’re less announcements of maturity than party-down pageants (exhibit A: Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings).

Times columnist David Brooks chimed in yesterday, arguing that the real problem is that marriage is too important – in essence, that women are afraid to get married because it signals an end rather than a beginning. His solution? To persuade people that marriage is “less a state of sacred bliss, and more a social machine.” One can only imagine a young Mr. Brooks approaching his beloved, bending down one knee, and uttering the sage advice from his own column: “Accompanied with the right instruction manual, (marriage) can be useful for achieving practical ends.” Oh, swoon!

My own sense is we’re not, as Brooks suggests, witnessing the disintegration of the American family. Rather we’re seeing the continuing evolution of what it means to be an adult. What was once rigidly understood in terms of familial relationships is now tailor-made, up-for-grabs, loosey-goosey. The increasing number of unmarried women are not, by and large, stunted. They’re not suffering from arrested development – many in fact are working mothers who go to great lengths to care for their kids, partners and themselves. They are, in short, grown ups – just not the sort observers like Brooks want them so very much to be.

Are Fun and Work Oxymoronic?

http://www.christophernoxon.com//are_fun_and_work_oxymoronic

Rejuvenile made a brief appearance Monday morning in the first hour of ABC’s “Good Morning America” in a story about play at the workplace.

Here’s the gist of the GMA piece: office monkeys across our fair land are fighting the daily grind with inter-department playground slides, break room foos-ball tables and other goofy innovations. Cue remark from yours truly on the importance of play and fun in the workplace and how these changes reflect the larger rejuvenile phenom.

All of which is nice enough, but I’ve got to say the story stirred the harrumphing codger in me—apparently, play at work is now synonymous M&Ms and Nerf basketball. In our interview, I tried to emphasize that too often, the merry chattering bosses who institute “playful” reforms are putting window dressing on salt mines. There is little more infuriating than having a Wacky Fun Day hosted by an employer who skimps on health insurance or restricts family leave. I don’t think there’s any doubt a genuinely playful attitude toward work can benefit both worker and the bottom line, but it’s not about bouncing balls or bobbleheads. It’s about doing our work with the same wonder and imagination and sense of fun that too many workers ditch in the name of professionalism. 

Rejuvenile made a brief appearance Monday morning in the first hour of ABC’s “Good Morning America” in a story about play at the workplace.

Here’s the gist of the GMA piece: work is boring. A few office monkeys are fighting back with inter-department playground slides, break room foos-ball tables and other goofy innovations. Cue remark from yours truly on the importance of play and fun in the workplace and how these changes reflect the larger rejuvenile phenom.

All of which is nice enough, but I’ve got to say the story stirred the harrumphing codger in me—apparently, play at work is all about M&Ms and Nerf basketball. In our interview, I tried to emphasize that too often, the merry chattering bosses who institute “playful” reforms are putting window dressing on salt mines. There is little more infuriating than having a Wacky Fun Day hosted by an employer who skimps on health insurance or restricts family leave. I don’t think there’s any doubt a genuinely playful attitude toward work can benefit both worker and the bottom line, but it’s not about bouncing balls or bobbleheads. It’s about doing our work with the same wonder and imagination and sense of fun that too many workers ditch in the name of professionalism.

For more on developing a truly playful approach to work, start by reading chapter 2 of Rejuvenile then checking out the following:

• The Play Ethic - Pat Kane’s brilliant manifesto on the end of the old protestant work ethic was published last year in the U.S. and contains many dazzling, scholarly ideas about having fun in the name of productivity.

• Adultitis - Jason & Kim Kotecki offer a free, step-by-step program of practical tips on loosening up and sparking childlike wonder in the midst of an adult life.

• You can do better than a depressing bowl of M&Ms on your desk. Check out Office Playground for the best in cubicle doo-dads. Get thee a desktop sandbox!

Emu

http://www.christophernoxon.com//emu

Eliza in hysterics

http://www.christophernoxon.com//eliza_in_hysterics

Charlie

http://www.christophernoxon.com//charlie

Masked mannequins

http://www.christophernoxon.com//masked_man

Sad dad

http://www.christophernoxon.com//sad_dad

Cacti Cutout

http://www.christophernoxon.com//cacti_cutout

Baby beefcake

http://www.christophernoxon.com//baby_beefcake

Worst job ever?

http://www.christophernoxon.com//worst_job_ever

Jellyfish

http://www.christophernoxon.com//jellyfish

Rejuvenile: The Backstory

http://www.christophernoxon.com//rejuvenile_the_backstory

First, we talked cupcakes. Now, we talk business. Rachel Kramer Bussel, whose online presence is deliciously split between a blog about cupcakes and a blog about erotica, did a very nice piece this summer on the cupcake blog about rejuveniles and food.

This week she posted an equally good, if somewhat less tasty, question-and-answer about the mechanics and practicalities of writing this book. It’s posted on the journalism webzine Mediabistro. Here’s an excerpt:

First, we talked cupcakes. Now, we talk business. Rachel Kramer Bussel, whose online presence is deliciously split between a blog about cupcakes and a blog about erotica, did a very nice piece this summer on the cupcake blog about rejuveniles and food.

This week she posted an equally good, if somewhat less tasty, question-and-answer about the mechanics and practicalities of writing this book. It’s posted on the journalism webzine Mediabistro. Here’s an excerpt:

Where did you first get the idea for The New York Times “rejuvenile” article and how long did you spend researching it? Did you have plans to turn it into a book at that time? Were there more things you wanted to explore and chronicle than you had room for in the Times piece?
?I’d been freelancing for magazines and newspapers for seven-odd years when I started thinking seriously about writing a book—I felt my attention span getting longer and was itching to tackle a big, amorphous topic. The idea for Rejuvenile grew out of questions I was asking myself, and things I saw around me. At the time, I was dividing my time between freelancing and taking care of two little kids. I discovered that caring for small children gave me license to play tag, splatter paint, eat Popsicles and do all sorts of things I was sure would be listed as felonies in the “Official Adult Rule Book.” Talking first to other parents and then to a number of other adults, I was shocked to find I wasn’t alone—grown-ups all over were indulging their inner children like never before; the meaning of maturity had fundamentally changed without much reflection or comment.

I approached a few agents with the idea but was mostly met with “call us back when you have a proposal.” Betsy Amster—a former editor at Pantheon and Vintage, who now runs an independent agency here in L.A.—was the exception. She loved the idea, helped me plan and shape the proposal, and advised me on what material to concentrate on for a sample chapter.
Hoping to turn a freelance assignment into a sample chapter, I pitched editors I’d worked with at The New York Times with a story about adults who love kiddie music—I’d just seen a band called Gwendolyn and the Goodtime Gang do a set of rock covers of “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and “Bingo” for an over-21 club and had talked to collectors who specialized in weird old kids records and thought it would make a good ["Sunday Styles"] feature. They liked the music idea, but were way more interested in the larger phenomenon, and ended up assigning a general trend piece.

After the rejuvenile story ran on the front page of the “Sunday Styles” section, I spent another month fleshing out the proposal, eager to submit it while the story was still relatively fresh. In the end, I didn’t do a sample chapter at all, opting instead to do a detailed overview and lengthy chapter summaries (which, of course, changed when I got the deal and actually began writing).

How did the book deal come about?
?To my enormous relief, the proposal was picked up within the first week. Three publishers expressed interest, though Rachel Klayman at Crown/Random House was the most enthusiastic. She made an offer within 24 hours. There was a date set for an auction but, in the end, the other publishers elected not to compete with Crown.

In your book proposal, how much of your research plans were mapped out?
?I did a lot of advance research for the proposal, referencing basic demographic, marketing sociological data that supported my thesis, and including interviews I conducted while reporting The New York Times piece. These research plans changed significantly once I started work—I altered four chapter topics, added three others and rearranged material.

Do you have any advice to first-time nonfiction authors? Is there anything you’d have done differently, either from a financial standpoint or a journalistic one? ?
It’s become a cliché, but it bears repeating: Your job is only half-done once you’ve finished the book. Your publisher or agent or publicist can be helpful with promotion but, ultimately, it’s your job to get the word out. This extra work has its benefits—it’s great to connect with readers, and hear how your ideas land in a larger market—but it’s hard to make the switch from writing and reporting to hustling and promoting.

Strobe Lights (Formerly Snackage)

http://www.christophernoxon.com//strobe_lights_formerly_snackage

You there, against the wall – drop the Dixie cup and get on the dance floor. Under the flickering lights, behold the brief items of interest!

• I took this photo a few weeks ago on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood and find myself thinking about this poor guy way too often. Beyond wondering about what goes through his mind all day long (Isn’t this how Brad Pitt started?), my question is this: isn’t $14.99 a little steep for a fart machine?

You there, against the wall – drop the Dixie cup and get out on the dance floor. Under the flickering lights, behold!

• I took this photo a few weeks ago on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood and find myself thinking about this poor guy way too often. Beyond wondering about what goes through his mind all day long (Isn’t this how Brad Pitt started?), my question is this: isn’t $14.99 a little steep for a fart machine?

• I just relaunched my author site to include a deeper archive of clips and a Flickr site of photos, doodles and found art. Fun stuff.

• The unstoppable force for good known as Kim and Jason Kotecki have done a sweet redesign of their website devoted to Adultitis, the Jason-named condition marked by over-seriousness, chronic dullness and all the other assorted qualities rejuveniles seek to avoid. Take the online intake questionaire and begin your treatment today!

• If ever there was a worthwhile political campaign for rejuveniles, this is it: preservationists are rallying to stop demolition of an amazing little playground in San Gabriel. I discovered Monster Park a few years ago while hunting for a soup dumpling joint: there, tucked beside a storm drain amidst drab suburban sprawl was a cluster of odd concrete figures – a dinosaur, an octopus, a whale – all of which you could slide and climb and scramble all over. It’s the sort of weird, wonderful, probably-unsafe-but-delightfully-so place for kids that you never see anymore. Even if you’ll never make it to San Gabriel to see it yourself, trust me: sign the petition and join the effort to stop the Man from slaying these lovable monsters to make room for another bland, padded plastic-composite play structure. (Link via Spike Brower, who used Monster Park as a principal location in his terrific short film The Fish Burglars)

• Bond goes rejuvenile: In a clever co-opting of moves that mix Kung Fu grace with Spiderman daring-do, the new Bond movie Casino Royale gets an thrilling kick from the age-norm-busting urban gymnastic known as parkour. Producers cast Sebastien Foucan, the parkour pioneer featured in chapter 3 of Rejuvenile, as Mollaka the Bomb-Maker, who leads Bond on an intense opening foot chase. Not shabby for a 36-year-old dad.

• Here’s a culinary event for rejuveniles – the Grilled Cheese Invitational, an annual meeting of gooey sandwich connoisseurs described as “part competition, part fashion disaster and part rave potluck.” (thanks to best teevee critic ever Heather Havrilesky for tip)

• Trendspotters Buzzfeed did a nice roundup on adult enthusiasm for Legos, which I write about in chapter 2 of Rejuvenile. The Buzzfeed piece links to a bunch of sites by AFOL’s (Adult Fans of Lego), including one by former JPL engineer and entrepreneur Phillip Alvelda who says Legos were a “transformative toy for me that unleashed my imagination around the realization that I could build ANYTHING.” (Thanks to reader Brian Vartabedian for the link)

Pirates & Penguins

http://www.christophernoxon.com//pirates_penguins

The recent success of the CGI movie Happy Feet proves at least three things: 1) that director George Miller has finally atoned for following the miraculous Babe with its druggy disgrace of a sequel, 2) that mash-up pop is now officially not even remotely cool, 3) that penguins have joined pirates as pop culture mascots of the moment.

Anyone else notice the recent pirate n’ penguin proliferation? They’re everywhere. Go to Disneyland expecting a meeting with Mickey, Donald & company and you’re instead marauded by packs of rum-swilling scallywags. Turn on PBS or Animal Planet and you’ll enjoy a deep catalog of wildlife films featuring waddling arctic birds. Ever since Johnny Depp channeled Keith Richards in Pirates of the Caribbean and French naturalists mined anthropomorphism for gold in March of the Penguins, pirates and penguins are the hottest thing in the non-copyrightable kid media universe.

It’s worth noting any time a character breaks out of kid media in such a dramatic way. It’s especially worth noting when the zeitgeist is simultaneously infiltrated by icons that represent such diametrically opposed characteristics. Think about it. When pirates are the most popular costume on Halloween, when the movie about dancing penguins is preceded by previews for a movie about surfing penguins, when “talk like a pirate day” becomes a national media event, when Original Penguin becomes the hottest retro brand is sportswear… it means something. It means these characters have gotten under our skin. They speak to us.

The recent success of the CGI movie Happy Feet proves at least three things: 1) that director George Miller has finally atoned for following the miraculous Babe with its druggy disgrace of a sequel, 2) that mash-up pop is now officially not even remotely cool, 3) that penguins have joined pirates as pop culture mascots of the moment.

Anyone else notice the recent pirate n’ penguin proliferation? They’re everywhere. Go to Disneyland expecting a meeting with Mickey, Donald & company and you’re instead marauded by packs of rum-swilling scallywags. Turn on PBS or Animal Planet and you’ll enjoy a deep catalog of wildlife films featuring waddling arctic birds. Ever since Johnny Depp channeled Keith Richards in Pirates of the Caribbean and French naturalists mined anthropomorphism for gold in March of the Penguins, pirates and penguins are the hottest thing in the non-copyrightable kid media universe.

It’s worth noting any time a character breaks out of kid media in such a dramatic way. It’s especially worth noting when the zeitgeist is simultaneously infiltrated by icons that represent such diametrically opposed characteristics. Think about it. When pirates are the most popular costume on Halloween, when the movie about dancing penguins is preceded by previews for a movie about surfing penguins, when “talk like a pirate day” becomes a national media event, when Original Penguin becomes the hottest retro brand is sportswear… it means something. It means these characters have gotten under our skin. They speak to us.

And what do they say? Two different things entirely.

Pirates, of course, are lawless, drunken, slovenly, wily, individualistic, brutal, unhygienic, rootless, venal, greedy, foolhardy and anti-authoritarian. They are what we’d be if we severed all ties with families and bosses and forces of civility. They venture forth, they overdo, they revel and rebel. Their popularity speaks to an intensifying desire to buck against forces of regularity and restraint. We want to unshackle our inner wench or rascal, get drunk at the office party, vomit on the boss’ shoes and make off with the buried doubloons. They are our id, our hidden libertarian, our inner rock star.

Penguins are something else. They’re communal, lovable, affectionate, noble, habitual, faceless, dutiful, familial and predictable. They are what we’d be if we gave over entirely to the rule of the crowd. They nurture their young, follow the pack, huddle together against the merciless cold. Our inner penguin urges us to carpool the neighbor’s kids to soccer practice, follow mom’s advice and vote for the candidate with the best plan to mend the social safety net. They are our super ego, our progressive-democrat, our inner social worker.

So which are you, pirate or penguin?

As a father of three who spends much of his time shuttling around in a minivan with more cup holders than horsepower, I fall squarely into the penguin pack. But as is so often the case in such polarizing red state-blue state comparisons, I’m purple. Among my favorite CDs for the grueling commute to school: Captain Bogg and Salty, a kiddie rock act that specializes in, yes – pirate songs.

Quick, Dreamworks, greenlight that treatment about a band of pirate penguins!

Sidewalk sculpture

http://www.christophernoxon.com//sidewalk_sculpture

Another spooky puppet

http://www.christophernoxon.com//another_spooky_puppet

Spooky caveman

http://www.christophernoxon.com//spooky_caveman

Menu for restaurant in Dunhuang, China.

http://www.christophernoxon.com//menu_for_restaurant_in_dunhuang_china.

Crank it up, junior

http://www.christophernoxon.com//crank_it_up_junior

Two huge events in the rejuvenile music world, or at least in the small but burgeoning ‘burgh of kids music that aims to be as exciting and inventive as music made for adults…

Firstly, a gang of smart and dedicated kiddie music connoisseurs has tabulated the first annual Fids and Kamily Music Poll, a critical survey of kid music that aims to do for the genre what the Pazz and Jop poll does for more mainstream adult music.

Next, the New York Times has swooped in with a smart and funny feature about the ascendance of quality kids music and the tension between hipster parents using music to extend their own adolescence and those make and listen to music that excites adults as much as the sippy cup set.

Two huge events in the rejuvenile music world, or at least in the small but burgeoning ‘burgh of kids music that aims to be as exciting and inventive as music made for adults…

Firstly, a gang of smart and dedicated kiddie music connoisseurs has tabulated the first annual Fids and Kamily Music Poll, a critical survey of kid music that aims to do for the genre what the Pazz and Jop poll does for more mainstream adult music. Topping the list this year is Justin Roberts’ rightfully acclaimed “Meltdown” with appearances by Dan Zanes, the Sippy Cups and Captain Bogg & Salty. The lovely and amazing Amy Davis (keeper of the indispensable The Lovely Mrs Davis Tells You What to Think) asked me to write a little essay-cum-rant to accompany the poll; I got all contrarian and took the opportunity to sound a note of cynicism. Hope I didn’t stink up the party.

As the sort of pop geek who pores over annual critic polls to find out what the cool kids are listening to as I replay the same few Wilco and Sufjan records over and over, Fids and Kamily represents a milestone, methinks, the announcement of a bonafide genre, one worth taking seriously and one ready for the attention of a much wider audience…

Which makes it all the timelier that the New York Times has swooped in this Sunday with a smart and funny feature about the ascendance of quality kids music and the tension between hipster parents using music to extend their own adolescence and those make and listen to music that excites adults as much as the sippy cup set. Freelancer Tammy LaGorce did a very nice job capturing the scene at this perilous point, quoting a number of bigwigs in the kid music world, including a Woodstock, NY record producer who cited this very blog, repeating my suggestion that the surest way to turn your kid Republican is to dress him up in a Sex Pistols T-shirt.

All in all, a good day to be a fan of music about sharing and bugs. Don’t bogart the earplugs; this is gonna get loud.

This Summer, One Formula Fits All

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/this_summer_one_formula_fits_all

AS he puts the finishing touches on ‘’Superman Returns,’’ the director Bryan Singer is thinking about bathrooms.

During a screening of one of the ‘’Lord of the Rings’’ movies, Mr. Singer noticed how many kids in the audience made a mad dash for the bathrooms during bits of dialogue-heavy exposition. ‘’It was like a stampede,’’ he said in recent phone interview. A little while later, during one of the movie’s prolonged battle sequences, he noticed adults making a similar exodus. Mr. Singer predicts a similar shuffling when his ‘’Superman’’ lands in theaters June 30.

‘’I’d like to think this movie is entirely universal,’’ he said. ‘’But I know there will be bathroom moments for the kids and bathroom moments for adults.’’

Such is the strange dynamic faced by filmmakers during what has become the most demographically challenging part of the annual film calendar: those supposedly carefree months from early May to Labor Day.

At year’s end sober-minded Oscar movies, the ‘’Capotes’’ and ‘’Munichs,’’ compete for grown-ups, while the likes of ‘’Chicken Little’’ and ‘’Cheaper by the Dozen’’ fight for the children. In the early months, once again, adult pictures like ‘’United 93’’ coexist at the multiplex with youth fare like ‘’Hoot.’’ But summer, when big studios place their heaviest bets, has become the preserve of films made for neither the old nor the young, but rather for the child in the adult and the adult in the child. That exercise is far more complex, in its way, than telling a love story about gay cowboys, or creating R-rated horror. It involves finding the peculiar spot at which couples on a date and parents who may seldom share a home-cooked meal with their children will converge, all of them, on a single experience.

Within Hollywood, the current jargon says a summer blockbuster should play in ‘’all four quadrants’’: that is, across the age spectrum. ‘’There’s got to be something for everybody,’’ explained Jeff Blake, vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which famously managed that trick with its ‘’Spider-Man’’ films.

More striking, though, is the degree to which summer films like this year’s ‘’X-Men 3’’ or Mr. Singer’s ‘’Superman Returns’’ seem increasingly to define a new kind of cultural space, in which traditional notions about age mean little.

Such pictures appear to sit comfortably with an ascendancy of adults who act and think more like kids than conventional adults. These are the not-quite-grown-ups—one could call them ‘’rejuveniles’’—who delay marriage and parenthood, the better to maintain lives of fun and flexibility, who then bond and play with their own offspring in ways their parents would find ridiculous, and whose consumer choices have expanded the market for everything from micromini cars to gourmet cupcakes.

But the films work equally well with actual children who can’t seem to ditch childish things fast enough. (Market researchers report that children who once identified themselves as children until the age of 12 are now advancing out of kiddie culture at 8 or 9.)

These groups increasingly meet, at least for two hours at a stretch, within the context of films like the 2004 summer hit ‘’Shrek 2,’’ which worked both as a broad comedy about a flatulent ogre and a parable about the trouble relating to in-laws, or ‘’The Incredibles,’’ which offered a midlife crisis story wrapped in a superhero adventure story.

‘’Superheroes are now part of our adult psyches,’’ said Don Payne, the screenwriter of the comedy ‘’My Super Ex-Girlfriend,’’ a July release that attempts to marry the superhero genre with the romantic sensibility of late-70’s Woody Allen. ‘’All of us have grown up and held onto our childhoods, even as we’ve twisted them into new adult contexts.’’

All of which has turned the production of summer movies into maddening demographic exercise, as filmmakers chase an audience that is in the process of redefining itself. The most successful examples—‘’Pirates of the Caribbean,’’ ‘’Napoleon Dynamite’’ or the movie that basically invented the form, ‘’Star Wars’’—strike ‘’an exceedingly delicate balance,’’ Mr. Singer said. Veer too far into potty humor or frenetic action, and you bore the adults; linger too long in character development or broad themes, and you alienate the children.

To play across the age divide, some filmmakers adopt the strategy perfected by the creators of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons, packing their pictures with in-jokes and asides they know will hit home with grown-ups even if they mystify kids. ‘’The 60’s weren’t good to you were they?’’ an Army jeep asks a spaced-out Volkswagen in a preview for Pixar’s ‘’Cars.’’

Others, however, reject that approach, like the director M. Night Shyamalan, who calls it ‘’bifurcation.’’ Instead of tossing out lines that appeal to either one group or another, he seeks to inject deeply adult themes into stories that otherwise seem of interest only to children. Thus Mr. Shyamalan’s ‘’Lady in the Water,’’ set for release on July 21, and billed as ‘’a bedtime story,’’ is being positioned as a sort of romper-room version of the dark, supernatural thrillers he is famous for.

And while the movie is intended for children—it grew out of stories Mr. Shyamalan told his own kids—it’s far deeper and more surreal than most such entertainment, he said. He admitted to worrying during production that it might be ‘’too whacked or scary,’’ but said he decided to follow the example of children’s authors like J. M. Barrie and Roald Dahl, whose greatest works willfully ran afoul of rules of propriety and age appropriateness.

‘’To me it was all about getting back to pure rebellion and free-spiritedness of childhood,’’ the 35-year-old Mr. Shyamalan said, in true ‘’rejuvenile’’ fashion. ‘’That’s been incredibly freeing. Since I did this, I’m a completely different person.’’

In a similar vein ‘’The Ant Bully,’’ set for release by Warner Brothers in early August, features a cast of insects voiced by Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep in what the film’s writer and director, John A. Davis, said could be read as a parable about world affairs and the use and abuse of power. ‘’I wanted this movie to echo our times,’’ he said. ‘’It’s good to push certain moral buttons, and if you can do that in an exciting story with great visuals, so much the better.’’

However thrilling their creative possibilities, though, at root such hybrids owe their prevalence to industry economics. Studio executives are well aware that the difference between a successful children’s movie and a successful children’s movie that adults also enjoy is the difference between a hit and a bonafide blockbuster.

Movies like the first ‘’Spider-Man’’ may have appealed to kids primarily, but according to Sony exit polls, 52 percent of the audience was over 25. More generally, the highest grossing films of the modern era—‘’Star Wars,’’ ‘’Shrek 2,’’ ‘’E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’’—is largely a catalog of kid-adult hybrids, notwithstanding the occasional success of a ‘’Titanic’’ or ‘’ThePassion of the Christ’’ (or the decision by Sony Pictures this year to buck the trend by releasing ‘’The Da Vinci Code’’ as a summer film).

‘’That’s what everyone is really aiming for,’’ said Bonnie Arnold, producer of the new DreamWorks feature ‘’Over the Hedge,’’ which mixes talking-animal high jinks with commentary on the politics of homeowner associations, the challenges of big-box shopping and lawn care. ‘’These movies have got to please their core kid audience, but they’re really successful when they branch out beyond kids.’’

Even if the result is a weird kind of Peter Pan movie that never lets its audience entirely grow up and never lets children be entirely young, more than a few parents prize the new hybrid film as a chance to connect with their children. The parents of the mid-20th century might have been content to let their kids enjoy Hopalong Cassidy or Howdy Doody on their own, but today’s parents expect to join the fun. ‘’There’s nothing greater than being in the same theater as your kid and laughing at the same jokes,’’ said Julia Pistor, mother of three and executive vice president of Nickelodeon Movies, which is releasing the Jack Black comedy ‘’Nacho Libre.’’

But parents with higher expectations aren’t the only adults driving the change; Mr. Blake said that about 25 percent of the audience for any hit family movie is now made up of adults unaccompanied by children. The producer Suzanne Todd recalls scanning the audience at a showing of the recent Disney remake of ‘’The Shaggy Dog’’ and noticing how many were adults with nary a child in sight. ‘’I can understand why,’’ Ms. Todd said, especially in a ‘’cynical age where we’ve lost our moral ballast. Adults need entertainment that’s fun, easy and offers 90 minutes off from real life.’’

For his part Barry Sonnenfeld, director of the family-friendly road movie ‘’RV,’’ said the growing adult audience had shaken up previously stale genres, allowing for more complex characters and potentially objectionable material. ‘’It allows you to make movies that aren’t so down the middle,’’ he said. The father portrayed by Robin Williams in ‘’RV,’’ for instance, is far more needy and self-involved than the typical Disney dad, while the movie’s central set piece involves an explosive, 100-foot spout of fecal matter. (’’And we still got our PG,’’ Mr. Sonnenfeld said.)

Still, filmmakers agonize endlessly over the precise combination of kid and adult elements. Producers of ‘’Over the Hedge’’ worried, for instance, about a character called Hammy, a hyperactive squirrel who, it was thought, might strike some adults as a too-vivid characterization of a toddler on a sugar rush. In screenings, however, the filmmakers were relieved to discover that Hammy tested well across the age spectrum. Ms. Hunt said, ‘’You have to ask yourself: ‘Is this playing too young? Are we getting too sophisticated or clever for our own good?’ ‘’

Mr. Payne said he learned how to strike the right balance while writing for ‘’The Simpsons,’’ the Fox series that has become a model mixture of broad-appeal comedy and transgressive adult humor. The trick, he said, is to bounce back quickly the moment you go to far in one direction. ‘’When you find yourself on a run about socialism,’’ he said, ‘’you know that pretty quick you’ve got to light Homer’s pants on fire.’’

Such divisions are increasingly irrelevant, however, since it’s easier than ever to please younger and older moviegoers with exactly the same material, now that children are now more sophisticated and adults more childlike (and childish). It’s now possible, Mr. Sonnenfeld said, to stay fixed on a sort of psychic middle ground.

‘’You can now make a movie for 20-year-olds, and teenagers will come because it makes them feel older, and adults will come because it makes them feel younger,’’ Mr. Sonnenfeld said. ‘’If you do it right, you catch everyone coming and going.’’

Four square for grownups?

http://www.christophernoxon.com/clip/four_square_for_grownups

I had a plan. It was a good plan, a solid plan, one I felt sure would outfox and overwhelm the champion. When the time came for our big match, I’d step forward timidly, my expression and stance a picture of submission. Maybe I’d twitch. Then with a go-ahead from the ref, I’d unleash a devastating assault.

Rock, rock, rock.

The mighty fist of rock, thrown three times to the exclusion of a single peaceful paper or crafty scissors—it was a reckless move, aggressive and obnoxious and sure to rattle the battle-hardened winner of the first annual $50,000 USA Rock Paper Scissors League championship.

That’s right: They’re now giving 50 grand to players of rock paper scissors, a kids game that’s mostly played to settle such high-stakes disputes as who rides shotgun. Ridiculous, I know. But I can’t help it—I feel an irrational attachment to any game that poses a negligible risk of injury and allows me to drink margaritas while playing it. So even though I hadn’t qualified for the tournament and had no chance of actually taking home the big money, I did the next-best thing: I worked out a deal to fly to Vegas and play the winner in a best-of-three showdown.

I’d always thought of rock paper scissors as a game of pure chance, so I was puzzled at the discovery of what is called “advanced RPS strategy.” Along with a bestselling strategy guide, self-styled RPS experts claim to possess mathematical and even spiritual techniques that can be used to read an opponent and beat the odds. “It’s like any great sport,” explained tournament promoter Matti Leshem. “When you’re well prepared and in the zone and totally focused, you can feel what your opponent is going to throw.”

Lacking the time or patience to develop the sort of Jedi oneness with the universe Leshem described, I settled for a quick primer on basic “combination moves” like the Scissor Sandwich (paper, scissor, paper) and the Fistful of Dollars (rock, paper, paper), before deciding on the balls-out gambit known as the Avalanche (rock, rock rock). He’d never know what hit him.

All that pre-game confidence was shaken, however, just before the match when I fell into a conversation with an RPS veteran who’d made it to the final eight from a field of 500. “If all your moves are set in advance, you’re fried,” advised Kristina Hartman, a 29-year-old pharmaceutical sales rep in a fetching white cowboy hat. Hartman claimed her IQ had been tested at 172, all the better for employing “profiling strategies” and “pattern algorithms.” Now the Mensa Cowgirl let me in on a secret: Any experienced RPS player would see my all-rock routine coming a mile away. My genius plan, it turned out, was a total rookie move.

I’d do better, she advised, if I made quick intuitive judgments in response to little things like my opponent’s demeanor (tense players throw rock), stance (arms held at side are a good predictor of paper), or even accent (Southern girls throw scissors). Then again, such signs might be “false tells” from advanced players who would also, by the way, be simultaneously sizing me up, running me through a “13-point inspection” described by the RPS guru Master Roshambollah, a former phone psychic and Arthur Andersen researcher whose only advice to me was, “Don’t throw paper first—everyone knows print journalists throw paper first.”

It was at that point, at the very moment when my pre-game certainty had crumbled away and been replaced by a complex matrix of guesses and second guesses that a tournament organizer approached and tapped me on the shoulder. The champion was ready for me.

By the time I got to him, Dave McGill looked like he’d just stumbled out of a heap of flaming wreckage. Which, in a way, he had—McGill had been playing rock paper scissors for six hours straight, egged on by his girlfriend and an endless supply of free Bud Light. In the sudden glare of cameras from NBC and ESPN, the 30-year-old bartender from Omaha, Neb., turned belligerent, cursing liberally and, astonishingly, dissing the game that had just put $50,000 in his pocket.

“Rock paper scissors isn’t even a sport,” he spat. “A sport is catching a football or getting punched in the face. This is ridiculous.”

Ridiculous? Was that just bravado meant to throw me off my game? And as we took our positions on either side of the official RPS referee, I watched the champ’s face harden, focusing on that small but essential quantity of skill (5 percent? 2?) that had helped him triumph through a grueling 14 rounds of play. “Engage,” called the ref.

And with that, the game was on.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The specter of 500 adults competing in a televised rock paper scissors tournament may be disturbing—one local columnist took it as proof that “the apocalypse is here”—but it’s not, in fact, all that unusual. Rock paper scissors is just one of many childhood pastimes that have been enthusiastically reclaimed in recent years by adults who should have, by any traditional standard, outgrown such juvenile nonsense eons ago.

Remember four square? That recess favorite in which you bounce a red playground ball around a blacktop grid? More than a dozen teams now compete in a New England adults-only league called Squarefour. New Yorkers now relive the glories of their window-smashing youth in one of three adult stickball leagues. Jump-rope is the specialty of Double Duchess, a California group whose members do acrobatic routines dressed in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms. Then there’s dodgeball, the gladiator contest of the schoolyard set that has, in a strange sort of media feedback loop, become a near-exact reproduction of the semipro fringe sport depicted as absurd comedy in the 2005 Ben Stiller-Vince Vaughn comedy “Dodgeball.” There’s now an International Dodgeball Federation, an annual championship tournament and talk about introducing dodgeball as an Olympic event.

Easy to mock, absolutely. What’s next: Candyland endorsement deals, ESPN hopscotch, skipping footwear by Nike? Regarded in passing, such games look kooky at best, and at worst pathetic. I mean, really: Have we become so desperate to recapture some remnant of our carefree childhoods that we’ll ditch all vestiges of dignity the moment some geek in a SpongeBob shirt calls out, Olley olley oxen free?

But I’m not sure it’s as sad as all that. To be perfectly honest, I was weirdly thrilled to learn that adults were reclaiming games I remembered from childhood, even if not all my memories were fond. One never quite recovers from the exquisite pain of waiting to be picked for P.E. and realizing it’s just you, the chubby kids and the scab-eaters.

Still, I hadn’t actually played most of these games since I was a kid, and the fact that they’ve been simultaneously revived by adults mostly left me mystified. What was going on here? What were so many otherwise reasonable adults getting out of games designed to satisfy the pint-size capabilities of children? Weren’t these games mind-numbingly easy, or else so dependent on luck that winners were mostly arbitrary? And so I set out on a mission: to fan out across the country and go head-to-head with the most dedicated adult players of a few choice kid games. In so doing, I hoped to finally understand their appeal to adults, and along the way, heal some of the schoolyard scars from my own past. After all, I wasn’t a scrawny, asthmatic kid anymore. And really, couldn’t any reasonably in-shape, halfway cunning and sporadically intelligent adult kick ass in, say, a water-gun fight? Even, say, me?

- - - - - - - - - - - -

My double life as a water-gun assassin began with the arrival of a stack of “target dossiers” from the headquarters of StreetWars, a “watergun assassination tournament” that was having its inaugural run in Los Angeles after stints in New York, San Francisco, Vancouver and Vienna. Looking through the stack, one picture stood out. It was a blurry snapshot of a vaguely Matt Damon-ish character with a smoldering cigarette. He was local. He was smirking. And his name, if the dossier was to be believed, was Lane Kneedler.

That clinched it. Must. Get. Kneedler.

StreetWars is the latest, adult-geared incarnation of Assassin, a role-playing game that combines the strategy of hide-and-seek with the soft-core violence of paintball, and which has long been popular in summer camps and on college campuses. After studying my mark’s profile, I now had three days to track down this total stranger and use the water-based weapon of my choice to take him out. I was entering the game late, admitted as a “rogue assassin” to help thin a field that had started three weeks earlier with 200 players. As such, I had the luxury of not being a target myself. But I had to abide by the same ground rules that applied to all players—I couldn’t attack my target at work, on public transportation or in a bar; among their many other charms, kid games played by adults offer a fine excuse to hook up with a bunch of like-minded adults and get loaded.

Before heading out, I sought the counsel of StreetWars’ self-proclaimed Supreme Commander, a 30-year-old securities lawyer from New York named Franz Aliquo. My choice of weapon came first, Aliquo said; he favored the Flash Flood Super Soaker, with a shooting range comparable to some ICBMs. Far more important, however, was preparation. Surprise, he advised, is key. Some players spend days stalking their victim, learning their routines and even ingratiating themselves with friends before breaking cover and going for the kill. Others take a more dastardly and direct route, such as the TV director who learned his target was an aspiring actress. One call to her agent for an “audition” and she was as good as soaked. A simple water-gun fight it wasn’t. Aliquo and his disciples had taken a kids game and amplified and complicated it to the point where it more closely resembled jumping into a summer action flick.

Not being a TV director or someone with an enormous amount of free time to devote to surveillance, I knew I had to come up with something to get past Kneedler’s defenses in a hurry. Something I could use to my advantage. Something he’d least expect.

“Use my Brain Blaster,” offered my 6-year-old son, Charlie, scurrying up to his room and returning with a nifty little water pistol emblazoned with a pulsing plastic brain. He’d won it as a prize for being good at the dentist, dear boy. The gun might come in handy. But the boy, I realized, could prove very useful indeed.

I promptly grabbed my new accomplice and hightailed it to Kneedler’s work address, where we parked the minivan for our very first father-son stakeout. Our plan was to tail Kneedler when he left work and, as Charlie charmingly put it, “jump him” the first good opportunity we got. After a fruitless few hours, we headed out for some reconnaissance, casually pumping the lunch truck crowd for information. A co-worker eventually offered up a prime piece of intelligence: Kneedler, we were told, was home sick.

A half hour later we were in front of Kneedler’s apartment with a get-well bouquet. Crouched under a staircase, Brain Blaster at the ready, I watched as Charlie marched up to the front door with the flowers, glowing like a Hallmark spokeskid. As he rang the bell, I felt my finger twitch on the trigger and my heart swell with pride. My boy was a natural stalker.

But then—no one answered the door. He wasn’t home. It wasn’t until we got home and checked the StreetWars message board that we discovered the awful truth. Kneedler had looked out his window at work, made us as would-be assassins and sent his colleagues out to feed us a line. As much as I wanted to hate the guy—what sort of paranoid loser would go to such lengths for a water-gun game?—I was just as into it. And I had to hand it to him: Not only had we been spotted, we’d been duped.

I’d like to say things got better from there, but the truth is that subsequent attacks were even more pitiful. One night after a family dinner, I did a quick drive-by of Kneedler’s place and brought my 4-year-old daughter to tears after leaping out of the car screaming, “Kneedler dies!” He wasn’t home, of course, just like he wasn’t home the morning I mistakenly opened fire on his skinny Asian roommate. And Kneedler, damn him all to hell, lived on.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

I may be a terrible assassin, but it just so happens I’m an outstanding zombie. This I learned one balmy evening a few days later, charging through a public park with my eyes rolled back in my head and arms outstretched in the classic zombie pose, picking off one competitor after another. The game was Zombie Tag, a variation of the venerable kid game in which “it” is recast as a zombie who turns everyone he touches into fellow members of the undead.

As dorky and dignity-stripping as it sounds, tag is also, it turns out, a hell of a lot of fun. Yes, there’s some cringe-inducing make-believe involved, but once all traces of self-consciousness are stripped away, all that’s left is the engrossing, primal thrill of chasing down packs of other people and dodging pursuers hot on your heels. It can even get pretty rough. After my early triumph as a Zombie, I got reckless in a game of Octopus Tag, in which tagged players sit on the ground and flail at free players. Dashing away from a 40-something videographer, I wheeled into the path of a fellow Octopus, who snagged my passing foot and sent me skidding to the turf. A short while later, in the final stages of Caramel Corn Tag, in which the “its” link arms in a giant chain, I found myself cornered by a phalanx of advancing players, all my possible routes of escape suddenly cut off. So I did what came naturally: I crumpled down into a fetal position and let out what I hoped was a mature, manly whimper.

That’s the thing about adult tag: It may be fun, but it is in no way cool. I got an inkling just how uncool when I told a friend I was planning a trip to Kansas City, Mo., to play with the Tag Institute, a club devoted to the glories of all-ages tag. His reply: “God, that’s gay.”

Tag Institute founder Kate Schurman has heard it all before, but it’s a measure of either stubbornness or obliviousness that she doesn’t particularly care. A sweet-faced 26-year-old, Schurman loves tag like she loves Oscar the Grouch, old-school Popeye cartoons and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. There’s no kitsch or self-consciousness at work; she simply never outgrew this stuff. Schurman was working as the manager of a law office when she dreamed up the institute as a sort of weekly play date for grown-ups. Finding fellow adults who shared her enthusiasm took a bit of doing—even friends in a local dodgeball league scoffed—but pretty soon a regular crowd began showing up for the Wednesday night game. On the night I played, the group numbered about 30 and included a tattoo artist named Scott, a sensible soccer mom, her 9-year-old daughter, a few wisecracking college kids, and Schurman’s 53-year-old mom.

No matter that they all look like what one player called “escapees from an asylum or rehab clinic.” During an intense game known as Cougars and Horses, I found myself galloping and whinnying like a wild colt, in pursuit of players who were leaping and growling like big cats. Pausing to catch my breath, I noticed we’d attracted the attention of a couple of women out for a power walk, a high-performance cardiovascular workout that I’ve always enjoyed stopping to sneer at. But today, to my astonishment, the power walkers had stopped to stare at me, and not at all in a supportive, isn’t-that-cute way. It’s some measure of how fully invested in all-ages tag I had become that in that moment, I had to stop myself from hollering, “I’m not the freak—you’re the freak!”

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Of all the games in my lineup, minigolf scared me the most. Less informed souls might think it unreasonable to feel anything but scorn for a sport so lightweight that none other than George W. Bush chose it to showcase his worthiness on his first date with Laura. But I knew better. I knew top players on the pro miniature golf circuit are so good they count it as a setback if they don’t hit a hole in one – on every hole. I knew that top European competitors, players like fearsome Swede Hans Olofsson and Czech wunderkind Olivia Prokopova, travel with padded humidors packed with temperature-controlled balls of various spin, bounce and firmness. To these masters of minigolf, the sport is anything but child’s play.

And now I was facing Chris Carpenter, the course record holder on what is known as “the Augusta of Miniature Golf.” Sure, Carpenter wasn’t on the level of those formidable Europeans, who favor the more rigidly standardized “putt-putt” form of minigolf, which is played on concrete and composite with nary a windmill or garden gnome in sight. In America, home of the more fanciful “adventure golf” variation, the purses are much smaller – prizes at the big competitions rarely exceed three or four thousand dollars – and the top players squeeze tournaments in between their day jobs and family obligations, staying in cheap hotels in small resort towns. Superstar Tom Dixon is a long haul truck driver who arranges his routes around tournament dates, while champ Matt McCaslin is a bartender at the Olive Garden.

Most competitors don’t mind at all that their most fierce showdowns take place in places that look like garden-variety tourist traps. The Hawaiian Rumble sits on an extravagantly tacky strip of highway 17 and features a three-story gurgling volcano, a parrot cage at the entrance and paintball target practice out back. I’d do well, however, to look past the “eye candy,” said Bob Detwiler, owner of Hawaiian Rumble and all-around booster of professional, grown-up miniature golf. I was about to play, he said ominously, the same 18 holes that punished top players twice a year at the Masters and U.S. Open of Miniature Golf.

“This is not a silly game,” he insisted, prompting solemn nods from Chris and Dominic Munafo, a “young gun” in two-tone golf cleats recruited to round out our party of four. “People don’t take this as seriously as they should,” agreed Chris. “Totally,” said Dominic. “Make no mistake: this is an incredibly challenging game.”

As I laid down my ball on the rubber pad at the first hole, I said a silent prayer that I could somehow avoid looking like a complete retard.

And then a funny thing happened. My first shot rolled down a dip, banked off a corner and dropped, unbelievably, in the hole. Even more unbelievably, none of the pros managed the same trick.

I went on to hit two more holes-in-one and a bewildering succession of par-twos, my focus undeterred by the deafening roar of Harleys over the hibiscus on hole six and the splattering of an overflowing waterfall on hole sixteen. I only had one truly terrible hole, and that I blame on Bo the groundskeeper, who really should have fixed that dislodged brick on hole thirteen that some goodamn fool child had kicked out of place. Even with that blunder, I finished one stroke behind Bob and six behind the course-record holder Chris. And I beat Dominic.

I could hardly believe it. I’d held my own against a trio of pros, and actually finished ahead of a rising young star! All of which would have been way more exciting if Dominic hadn’t proceeded to ruin my fantasy by immediately falling into a deep mope and telling me how badly he felt about his performance, then taking me back to his family’s roadside ice cream parlor, proudly showing off an autographed photo of Vana White and talking at length about his so-far frustrated dreams of riding miniature golf all the way out of this town toward bigger and better things. When I looked down at my pink-headed putter and hit a shot, it was a goof. But when Dominic took a shot, he pictured himself as his hero, fellow leftie Phil Mickelson: “Every time I’m out here I’m thinking of Phil, lining up a putt on eighteen against Tiger Woods,” he said, eyes downcast as he shared his secret passion. “I’m not really athletic, but at least I can do well in this.” To Dominic, miniature golf is a dream of greatness. And today, I’d helped diminish those dreams. “I guess I just got nervous,” he said sheepishly.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Hopes of redemption ran high on my arrival in Norfolk, Va., an unremarkable industrial port well known as a bustling Navy town and lesser known as a hotbed of adult kickball.

Here, at last, was a game I had some real experience playing. Back in the mid-’90s I fell in with a bunch of other floundering creative types who gathered on Sunday afternoons on a scrubby little league diamond to work off hangovers playing what might charitably be described as softball for dummies.

I can’t, however, pretend to be even remotely impartial about kickball. I adore the game, not only because I met a deeply funny, improbably available young hottie on one of those bleary Sunday afternoons; not only because I proposed to that woman by planting a diamond ring inside a kickball and dropping to one knee on home plate ... but also because I happen to be a goddamn decent kickball player. At least I thought so, before I was given a spot on the lineup of the Tiki Titans, one of the best adult kickball squads in the country.

The Titans are one of 30 teams in the Norfolk area and one of 1,000 in the World Adult Kickball Association, an international league with an official line of merchandise, a lineup of corporate sponsors (Miller Lite: the official beer of kickball!) and, in a final sign of its maturity, legal troubles. (WAKA filed a copyright infringement suit in February against DCKickball, one of several upstart leagues attempting to muscle into the booming adult kickball market.)

This was kickball as I’d never imagined. There were pre-game drills, rosters, umpires, team chants and a fellow on the sidelines introduced as a “kicking strategist.” My other new teammates included a scrappy car customizer, a maternal real estate investor and an earnest cub reporter for a local newspaper. Others were classic jocks and military types, but looking around at the pitcher in the yellow afro wig and the girl at first base with the feather boa, I got the sense that most were the sorts of theatrical geeks and hipsters who never much cared for high school athletics but who still had a thing or two to prove on the field. “Three up!” hollered the 6-foot-7 team captain, an airline manager named Jeff. “Three down!” came the team’s thunderous reply. It was all very gung-ho, but also decidedly goofy. This was a team, after all, that competed in the national championships with matching purple Mohawks. In a misguided attempt to fit in, my pre-game warmup included the application of a thick coat of purple fluorescent hair spray.

Sadly, my new purple do did nothing to dampen the dawning awareness that I was no longer, in fact, a kickball badass. Which was quickly demonstrated on my first appearance at the plate with a girly pop fly back to the pitcher. Out in the field an inning later, I found myself protecting second base against a runner with a crew cut and exposed, bulbous biceps. He charged at me, huffing and puffing like a bull. Then, with all the bravery I could muster, I threw my arms forward, gripping the big red polka-dot like a battle-ax, and tagged his chest.

I’d done it—I’d tagged him out! My brief moment of glory was interrupted by a lot of shouting, which I didn’t particularly understand but which had something to do with how second base had somehow, in the course of my spastic maneuver, been moved a good 4 feet away from its original position. The runner was called out, but I knew the truth, a truth all-too-vividly expressed in Mr. Biceps’ furious mug as he stabbed his finger toward me and yelled, “Dipshit moved the bag! Dipshit moved the bag!”

And just like that the goofiness vanished and I was a scrawny, asthmatic fifth-grader, cowering before a kickball bully. I felt a tremendous surge of relief, then, when a freak thunderstorm cleared the field and the crowd of 300 packed up their gear and headed for a downtown bar.

Nursing a beer while my teammates got down to a serious night of partying and flirting, it struck me that I’d learned what I needed to know about the appeal of kid games to adults. Of course kid games are ridiculous; they can also be incredibly involving and competitive, as evidenced by the number of RPS Bobby Fishers and kickball Wilt Chamberlains, die-hards whose obsessions have driven them far through the looking glass, long past any trace of irony or nostalgia. But all in all, fun is the only real point of these games. Remember fun? That’s that engrossing, anarchic thing that began seeping out of most professional sports around the time of free agent drafts, merchandise tie-ins and doping scandals, the thing that comes so naturally to kids and that adults lost sight of the moment recreation became all about competition, self-improvement and status-accrual. After all, no matter how much money and meaning we invest in our tennis serve or whether the Patriots make the playoffs, we all know that none of it actually matters. All sports are ultimately ridiculous. The beauty of kid games is how they make a mockery of all attempts to take any of this shit too seriously.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Back in Las Vegas, I considered myself blessed that a seasoned RPS vet had talked some sense into me before I trotted out my lame all-rock plan. Not that I had a better strategy, but as the game began I felt a weird surge of confidence.

Five throws later, it was over. I’d won.

All I can recall now was a moment before the deciding throw, zeroing in on the champ’s clenched jaw and suddenly recalling a bit of advice—tense players throw rock!—and in a move that briefly obscured a thousand childhood humiliations, laying down the open palm of paper.

Snackage (formerly Party favors)

http://www.christophernoxon.com//snackage_formerly_party_favors

We hear that rumbly in your tumbly; may we recommend a tasty sample plate of briefs and shorts and such? Dig in:

• First of two big events on the rejuvenile calendar this weekend: the World Adult Kickball Association holds its Leader’s Cup in San Diego, CA. This will be the first big kickball competition ever held on the West Coast; looking forward to seeing how our teams fare against Kick Asphalt, the badass D.C. crew that has been basically unbeatable in East Coast tournament play. I’ll be on hand Friday night to sign books, soak up the kickball glory and cheer on the locals…

• Meanwhile in Toronto, the World Rock Paper Scissors Society hosts its annual championship tournament on Saturday. I’m told by WRPS honcho Graham Walker that a record number of players signed up this year. They’ll employ RPS stratagems like the Crecendo and the Scissor Sandwich in their quest to bag the $7,000 first prize. Remember: tense players throw rock.

Balls, not bombs. That’s the slogan appearing on a fetching new line of apparel featuring a cartoon of George W. holding a red playground ball.

The Rejuvenile book group on the Weeds message boards is sharing some great stories about play in the workplace, favorite kidgames and other examples of rejuvenile behavior. (One member shared this amazing site for superhero supplies.) It’s not to late to join the discussion…

We hear that rumbly in your tumbly; may we recommend a tasty sample plate of briefs and shorts and such? Dig in:

• First of two big events on the rejuvenile calendar this weekend: the World Adult Kickball Association holds its Leader’s Cup in San Diego, CA. This will be the first big kickball competition ever held on the West Coast; looking forward to seeing how our teams fare against Kick Asphalt, the badass D.C. crew that has been basically unbeatable in East Coast tournament play. I’ll be on hand Friday night to sign books, soak up the kickball glory and cheer on the locals…

• Meanwhile in Toronto, the World Rock Paper Scissors Society hosts its annual championship tournament on Saturday. I’m told by WRPS honcho Graham Walker that a record number of players signed up this year. They’ll employ RPS stratagems like the Crecendo and the Scissor Sandwich in their quest to bag the $7,000 first prize. Remember: tense players throw rock.

Balls, not bombs. That’s the slogan appearing on a fetching new line of apparel featuring a cartoon of George W. holding a red playground ball.

The Rejuvenile book group on the Weeds message boards is sharing some great stories about play in the workplace, favorite kidgames and other examples of rejuvenile behavior. (One member shared this amazing site for superhero supplies.) It’s not to late to join the discussion…

Fish in the city

http://www.christophernoxon.com//fish_in_the_city