Count von Count

Recently, the man who was the voice of Sesame Street's The Count , Jerry Nelson, passed away. He had been a part of the Sesame Street family since the 1970's as a puppeteer and the voice of some of the show's characters, most recognizably the beloved Count.
The Count's crazy accent, silly laughter, and enthusiastic organ playing makes him a favorite in these parts. I'm posting a "Number of the Day" segment for all the Count fans out there....

children's caves

I am such a fan of children's homemade (and sheet-made) forts and tents that the series of photographs by photographer Björn Ewers and STUDIO314 of children's "caves" made me quite happy and eager for the time when Sweet Pea can make this kind of imaginative mess out of our living room.

{discovered via a friend and PetaPixel}

Halloween and "E.T." (but not really)

{Warning: This whole post was supposed to be about how "E.T." is such a great fall/Halloween movie and that I'd love it if it became a tradition for my little family to watch every year like "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," but that goal quickly got away from me as this post became a childhood confession instead.}

When I was seven I was obsessed with the movie version of the musical "Annie." I could not get enough of it: the music, the dance numbers, the hard-knock life. I swore up and down that movies did not get better than "Annie." It was not possible. It could not be. One of my brothers, however, told me that "E.T." (which I had not seen) beat the pants off "Annie" and I swore to him that he could not be more wrong. 

You can guess where the story goes from here.

Wanting to prove myself to be a pint-sized cinephile (and my brother to be an idiot), I went to see "E.T." with a serious agenda. Watching the movie with the rest of my family and with the unique type of stubbornness that belongs to very cranky old men (or hardheaded devotees of movie musicals) - I refused to show that the story got to me on any level: I did not laugh at E.T.'s drunken behavior, I did not express fear about the mysterious "keys" man, and I did not cry at the end when, you know... everyone cries. I sat there in my theater seat and revealed nothing. But, of course, I loved the movie. How could I not? It took everything in me to not lose it at the end of the film. While the world was falling down around me and it seemed as if everyone in the audience, including my siblings, were utterly lost in their sobs - I chocked mine down because, goddamn it, "Annie" was better. I was locked into a rightous claim and I could not get out.

Anyway, it's been 30 years and so I'll say it here. Oh my god - how beautifully done and heartbreaking is "E.T."? I'm not necessarily saying it's better than "Annie" (hello? there is not a single dance number in that Spielberg flick), but it is a really, really good movie that breaks my heart in half every time I see it.

"E.T." screenshots via Halloween Addict

Move over, Lisa Frank

Sticker set and Bernadine sticker via SarahMcNeil on etsy

When I was in elementary school, collecting stickers was HUGE! Some kids had albums and albums full of all kinds of adhesive artistry, but my collection was rather modest.

The most impressive collectors always had a lot of Lisa Frank stickers. Neon colors, unicorns, hearts and rainbows galore....honestly, I was not a real fan despite the popularity of her collection (I definitely preferred the work of Mrs. Grossman's).

If they were around, I would probably have loved these sorts of stickers. They are more unique and are true illustrations. Makes me want to start up an album again.....

Stickers via myfolklover on etsy

Stickers via sweetpeaink on etsy


Stickers via hidenseek on etsy

E.L. Konigsburg

Image courtesy of tales of a bookworm.com

Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, and indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that's why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.-From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg

In fifth grade we had to keep track of our "recreational reading" with an ongoing book list. Every month or so we talked about one of the books on this list to the class. Looking back, I think my fifth grade teacher was very smart to have this type of peer suggestion, because sometimes a classmate's recommendation carries more weight than those of a teacher or parent (particularly at that age).

Anyhow, I was nerdy competitive and read A LOT, not only because I enjoyed it, but because I wanted the longest list of course. Sometimes I would just zoom through a book without really taking much away, but other times it was as if I lived between the pages. When I read E.L. Konigsburg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, it was definitely one of those living in the book times. I remember because I spent one whole recess going on and on about it to my teacher as she tried to monitor the playground and listen to me. I had to be gently reminded my time was up when I talked to the class about the book during my recreational reading recommendation presentation. This story about a sister and brother who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and become entwined in a caper that revolves around the mystery of a statue and a peculiar old woman was probably the best book I had ever read- I am sure I touted it as such - and I think it held that title for me for a really long time.

When I graduated from college, I returned home for the summer to figure out what the heck I was going to do next. One day in May, I received a package in the mail from my fifth grade teacher with a graduation card and a copy of The View from Saturday, an E.L.Konigsburg book that had just been published. I read it immediately.

I then spent the better part of a morning telling my mother, a middle school English teacher, about it and how fantastic it was and how she should tell her class about it. I also realized that of all the classes I had taken, all the subjects I had touched upon in the last four years, there were few things as exciting and interesting to me as children's books- everything from picture books to the young adult novels. With degrees in English and Studio Art, I think I had been circling this field without even knowing it and that summer I looked into graduate programs in Children's Literature. I figure I have a couple of Konigsburg books and my fifth grade teacher to thank for the best career decision I ever made.

Ms. Konigsburg became fascinating to me because of the books that were products of her imagination. Even as I read about her online before writing this post I was impressed and once again enchanted by the excerpts I came across from her work. She has two Newbery Medals (one for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and the other for The View from Saturday) and a Newbery Honor (for Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth) under her belt. She is one of the few authors out there who can so deftly write of the humor, complexity, and curiosity of middle grade children as they struggle to define, and grow into, themselves. She is definitely someone whose work should be celebrated this Children's Book Week.

The Fledgling

Book cover courtesy of blog.patrickrothfuss.com

When I turned ten, a family friend (who happened to be a school librarian) gave me The Fledgling by Jane Langton. I had not heard of it, but was definitely drawn in by the dreamy-looking cover (hey, I was ten- the cover mattered!).

Some 25 years later, I still consider this book a favorite. It is an incredible mix of fantasy and coming-of-age story - punctuated with humor and suspense, it also manages to be an essay on Thoreau and the transcendentalists. Now, in fourth grade, I certainly would not have described the book this way. I probably would have said it was about a girl who is taught to fly by a Canadian Goose and how her family feels about it...either way, it is a truly interesting, touching story.

Middle grade fiction is riddled with literary mediocrity and endless series. It is a shame because when I think of the army of voracious readers out there in that age group, I think they deserve more books like this one (and that is the preachy librarian in me :) ).

''I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?''

Image courtesy of charlottekeiko.tumblr.com

I read in Entertainment Weekly that on March 22nd a 25th Anniversary Edition of the movie Stand By Me was released. This film, based on a Stephen King novella, not only seems to perfectly capture the feel and look of the 1950s- it has some pretty incredible performances by the four adolescent boys featured in the story of some friends traveling (by means of following the railroad tracks) to an adjoining town to see the rumored dead body found there by some older teens.

This is definitely one of those movies I can watch again and again and every time it ends in tears. Just as the reviewer Chris Nashawaty writes... "We've all been held hostage by coming-of-age stories that shamelessly cudgel us into sniffling submission. And while they might succeed in making us reach for the Kleenex, we rarely feel good about it afterward. Then there's a movie like Stand by Me (1986, R, 1 hr., 28 mins.), which gets your tear ducts working honestly."

If you are looking for a good cry....search no further.

Calvin and Hobbes' Snowmen

If there was ever someone who could make you see humor in even the snowiest, most inconvenient of winters, it was cartoonist Bill Watterson. His strip Calvin and Hobbes was great for many reasons, but his series of snowman themed comics always made me laugh....

All images courtesy of google

getmortified

There really is a site for just about every subject out there and that means there are fantastic places like getmortified.com . Getmortified.com is essentially a home for angst and awkwardness - it calls itself a "comic excavation of the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids". Adults share everything from their childhood journals and letters to the movies and photographs of their youth. (My personal favorite- reasons they deserve to marry Jon Bon Jovi)

The site also features the publications to come out of these often hilarious walks down memory lane and the live performances folks will give recounting their own mortification for an audience. I would love to catch one of these shows I don't doubt they are funny, but I also bet it feels so liberating for the participants. Imagine being brave enough to share your own special brand of teenage craziness in front of all those people?

{Image courtesy of getmortified.com}

magic lantern magic

I know I just mentioned magic lantern slides, but I stumbled on these from the late1890s/early 1900s on a really pretty tumblr blog called "Mothic Flights and Flutterings" and I just had to share. No wonder the French writer Marcel Proust was so fixated on the magic lantern from his childhood... 

"At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have to go up to bed, and to lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the fixed point on which my melancholy and anxious thoughts were centred. Some one had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come: in the manner of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window...."

"...But my sorrows were only increased, because this change of lighting destroyed, as nothing else could have done, the customary impression I had formed of my room, thanks to which the room itself, but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time." 

Quoted passage from the Overture of "Swann's Way" (1913) which is the 1st volume of Proust's 7 volume novel. The name of the entire work is  "À la recherche du temps perdu" which is translated as Remembrance of Things Past" or as "In Search of Lost Time." You wanted to know all that, right?

{Larger versions of these slides can be found here or here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.}

Aline Smithson's "In Case of Rain"

I keep going back to Aline Smithson's photo series, "In Case of Rain" (discovered on kris atomic) with its beauty and brightness on this rainy and gloomy day. Hope you fall in love with it too....

"We live in a world of technical distractions. I see my children gathered around their computers as though it's a summer campfire, faces aglow, as they peer into a world of friends and fantasy, participating in a new form of entertainment that further remove them from the childhood that I experienced.

Today's generation has lost touch with the activities that previous generations have enjoyed—reading a good book in a comfortable chair, playing board games on a rainy day, flipping through Life magazines, or sprawling out on the living room rug while listening to records and reading the backs of album covers.

And it's because of this that I have been looking at book shelves and untouched childhood pursuits with a new eye. With great sadness, I realize that these objects will someday be obsolete, at least in their current incarnations. And like a curator of antiques, I see them now as beautiful objects to be admired and preserved, if only on film.

I can only hope for rain, a heavy rain and maybe a power outage."

— Aline Smithson on her photo series, "In Case of Rain"

forts and tents and childhood

I saw "Where the Wild Things Are" yesterday and loved it to pieces. It was so beautiful and wistful and sad. It really captured the essence of the book, the mood - which is something much more difficult to grasp than mere plot points. Not a movie for children, per se, but definitely a movie about childhood.

One of the things that it brought back for me was my long lost love of forts and tents. My sister and I used to make pretty elaborate ones in our bedroom on the weekends and we loved sleeping in it (it'd always have to be done before "Golden Girls" started on Saturday night. Apparently, the experience of sitting in a fort made out of your bed blankets and sheets is only made better by the banter of the elderly).

But isn't there something so magical about sleeping in your own homemade (or bedroom-made) fort? The coziness of it. The way the light comes through. How secret and safe it feels to be inside, but yet it is so vulnerable (the structure itself, yes, but also the you inside of it). As an adult, I think there is also something so incredibly romantic about it too. There are scenes in movies like "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" that really capture that romantic aspect as well as the security and desire to have an even more inside space (more private, more yours) than the inside your own home or your own room. Anyway, here are some of my favorite images of homemade tents and forts...

image via home sweet home

image via nine kinds of crazy

image via somerset

image via somerset

image via Fifikoussout

And, yes, it is a "real" tent and not homemade, but Richie Tenenbaum's tent was still perfect:

image via ready to die

image(s) via be my cupcake

Remember that scene under the covers in ""Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"? It totally counts as a fort moment:

images via this michel gondry fan site (dialogue via imbd)

Clementine: Joely?

Joel: Yeah Tangerine?

Clementine: Am I ugly?

Joel: Uh-uh.

Clementine: When I was a kid, I thought I was. I can't believe I'm crying already. Sometimes I think people don't understand how lonely it is to be a kid, like you don't matter. So, I'm eight, and I have these toys, these dolls. My favorite is this ugly girl doll who I call Clementine, and I keep yelling at her, "You can't be ugly! Be pretty!" It's weird, like if I can transform her, I would magically change, too.

Joel: [kisses Clementine] You're pretty.

Clementine: Joely, don't ever leave me.

Joel: You're pretty... you're pretty... pretty...

P.S. In my search for fort images, I discovered the Wild Things Forts' Contest! I think it's over, but I hope they put up some more images soon.

John Hughes

image via fineartsla

It was so surprising and sad to hear yesterday that John Hughes passed away from a heart attack. I think for many of us of a certain age, his movies are are part of our history, our identity. His movies shaped and/or screwed up my ideas of romantic love just as much as the books I grew up reading ("Pride and Prejudice,"Jane Eyre"). Those stories made a certain kind of modern-day fairy tale experience seem possible (my room was as messy as Samantha's in Sixteen Candles so having Jake Ryan fall in love with me seemed a real possibility), but they were also a great comfort to watch when life broke your heart instead (Duckie dancing to Otis Redding in Pretty in Pink is pure happiness). So here's a little homage to John Hughes and childhood - sometimes it really is hard to imagine one without the other.

image via shoumi

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

image via HBO

Watts: "You break his heart, I break your face."

image via marriedandwhatnot

(Trying to get Kenny to give up his security blanket)

Jack Butler: "I understand that you little guys start out with your woobies and you think they're great... and they are, they are terrific. But pretty soon, a woobie isn't enough. You're out on the street trying to score an electric blanket, or maybe a quilt. And the next thing you know, you're strung out on bedspreads Ken. That's serious."

image via davidsdawson.com

"Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to make an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions.

But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...

and an athlete...

and a basket case...

a princess...

and a criminal...

Does that answer your question?

Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club."

image via Looking Through Mauve Colored Glasses

Andie: "If somebody doesn't believe in me, I can't believe in them."

children watching...

"Children watching cartoons in a movie theater,"San Carlos, CA, June 1946 by Charles E. Steinheimer via LIFE

Okay, this post title sounds a little ominous, but this it's not a children-of-the-corn type of post. It's just the opposite. I came across the above picture and it reminded me of when I went with my nephew to see the musical production of "The Grinch" this past Christmas. He was, at the time, just new to 3 years old and he had never seen live theatre before. We were worried he'd be restless or bored or would pull something that 3 year old boys are experts at pulling, but he was not only a gem the whole time - he was also mesmerized. He stood the entire time and, like the little boy in this picture, held the seat in front of him as if he had to anchor himself to some place (sitting in his seat was not going to do it). The musical was, well..., what you'd expect, but his face and the way he was utterly swept up in the experience was wonderful to watch.

So here are some more images of children as audience members fully caught up in what they are watching. What's interesting is that most of these are of puppet shows or plays or parades. The only one of kids watching movies is the one above and that picture was taken in 1946. It's strange that, for the most part, pictures that I came across of groups of kids watching movies or tv were so different from these - there wasn't the same array of expressions and reactions. And the pictures of audiences in 3D glasses? Really kind of strange how uniform in expression they are (creepy even, if you ask me). Anyway, these old black and whites seem reason enough to go see more live stuff with my nephew or any of my friends' children - I cannot get enough of these expressive little faces.

"WPA Federal Theater Project in New York: children watching Marionette Unit," 1935 via wikipedia

"A group of children watching the Punch and Judy puppet show," UK, 1946 via LIFE

"Children at a Puppet Theater, Paris," 1963 by Alfred Eisenstaedt via girlfriday

"Children at a Puppet Theater, Paris," 1963 (version II) by Alfred Eisenstaedt via girlfriday

"Kids watching the Christmas Parade, Raleigh, NC" (no date) via The North Carolina State Archives

still from Francois Truffaut's "Les quatre cents coups" ("The 400 Blows"), 1959

And you have to watch this clip from "Les quatre cents coups" ("The 400 Blows"). You don't have to know anything about the movie other than these 2 older boys are sitting in on a puppet show of "Little Red Riding Hood" (a perfect story to trigger many different reactions from its audience). Also, these little kids, in case you can't tell, are not acting - these are their honest reactions to what they are watching. And wait until the end of the clip to catch my favorite part: one boy resting his head on another boy's shoulder. Neither boy flinches, neither boy moves. It is completely natural and innocent. And it kills me every time.

via youtube