Beyonce and Gaga

I really like Lady Gaga. I don’t necessarily love her music, but I like that she performed “Born This Way” on Saturday Night Live and actually acted out birth, complete with water breaking on stage. Really weird. I didn’t understand it, but I enjoyed it because she is so not commercial. Someone like her shouldn’t necessarily make it, but she works hard and she’s talented, writing and singing her own music, playing the piano in a leather thong (oy vey), creating her own world, which I greatly admire….this is all to set up my one criticism. She cannot dance.

I don’t like the choreography she gets, which looks like a lot of like forearm, military gestures, but maybe they give her that because she can’t move — she does the steps precisely, but she doesn’t have that inexplicable charisma, the looseness. I watched the “Telephone” video and there’s a part where Beyonce and she do the same moves, which is a mistake, because Beyonce really can dance.

This is such a stupid point to make, because of course, I am unable to do any of the above, but maybe I’m that much closer to my dream of being a judge of So You Think You Can Dance. It’s also that I am forcing myself to write because it’s been a while since I blogged.

My main point is I really admire the pop stars who know how to move, like B and JT.

Shaun Tan

Have you heard of Shaun Tan? He’s a childrens’ book illustrator Australian dude. Among his activities is some Oscar-winning short film, which he said, he doesn’t care to repeat because he prefers working on illustrations for books. He won an international prize for children’s books illustrators that was worth about $750,000, but I don’t know that his work is children’s literature per se, not when he writes and paints about depression, despair, war, colonialism, etc. It’s not just his dark subject matter that makes me dig his work, but the surrealistic touches that reminds of Dali (who never struck me as depressed in his work) and de Chirico (definitely melancholy in his stuff.)

In particular, I recommend Tales from Outer Suburbia — check out the five-page story called “Broken Toys.” It got me unexpectedly and totally overclempt.

Baby highlights

When I hold Baby, who is fifteen months and nearly thirty pounds, I think “This must be what Refrigerator Perry felt like in his mother’s arm when he was a baby.” Baby is enormous, a hearty specimen. Fortunately, he doesn’t feel the need to battle me with every diaper change, but when he does, the result is diaper wedgie. Nobody wins with that, let me tell you.

His future
Being that large, Baby seems destined for….sports. The only one I forbid is football, on account of the high risk of concussions on high school teams and brain damage in the NFL…but I need to keep this forbidding to myself or he will be inexplicably, irresistibly drawn to it. Husband would like to also add boxing to the Forbidden List. I would like to add crossing the street until you’re thirty without me to the Forbidden List.

Milestones
Does he talk? Does he walk? Oh heck no. Not interested. At a basketball court last weekend, he did force himself up to both knees and whipped a basketball with both arms over his head to the other side of the room. (Jock-to-be, I am sure of it.) But other than a special circumstance like that, he pretty much likes to stick to the crawl. He can get himself pretty quickly across a room with a crawl that looks like a gorilla gallop.

Eating
When we eat, he insists on having a spoon or a fork. He also insists on having your spoon or fork. I just eat with my fingers now like a child.

Bonding
Lately, he has become very attached to me. I mean, figuratively attached. He tugs edge of my skirt whenever he’s not distracted by Baby Einstein. I try to buy some time before I have to lift up hefty Baby Man by slowdancing with him. I sing “I’ve had the time of my life” from Dirty Dancing, “Lady in Red,” an atrocious ballad from when I was growing up, and “May I have this dance for the rest of my life?” (what song am I thinking of?) This lasts maybe minus ten seconds, which is good because I have no memory for lyrics. I have learned not to wear summer strapless dresses. When Baby tugs, I have to hold on to the top or give everyone at day care an unexpected show.

Oh my Refrigerator Perry