Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

There’s a book we’re particularly fond of in our house: Andrew Henry’s Meadow, by Doris Burn. We love it not only for its charming illustrations and its unbeatable story, but also because it was the book that our older son first read out loud all by himself. He knew the words by heart because we’d read it to him oh, a couple of hundred times.

It’s been out of print for decades, until recently reprinted in a 40th anniversary edition. We found our copy in an old bookshop and I pounced on it at once, drawn in by the sheer verve of the pen-and-ink illustrations and the promise of the title.

As the title suggests, it’s a pastoral utopia, but it’s more than that. Andrew Henry doesn’t just find his meadow, he transforms it into a refuge for children who are, like him, artistic, quirky enthusiasts – and most importantly, misunderstood.

The book begins with a pretty simple proposition: “Andrew Henry liked to build things.” He’s a mad genius; also, a middle child of five, who rather than bemoaning his neglected status, just gets on with things. He builds all sorts of things: a helicopter, suspended from the kitchen ceiling and powered with an eggbeater. An eagle’s cage, impractically plonked in the middle of the living room. A pulley system for his ungrateful little brothers. The book is worth it just for the Heath Robinson illustrations of Andrew Henry’s contraptions.

But his family regards him and his inventions as a nuisance, so one day he quietly packs up his building gear and leaves home. Only the dog notices.

The book has a hell of a middle act: Andrew Henry finds his meadow, and sets about building his dream house – a cosy little hut, with a landing pad for dragonflies. He’s happy. But who’s this coming through the trees? It’s Alice Burden, who loves birds, even though her farmer father disapproves – birds are a nuisance. Could Andrew Henry build her a house too? Could he what! The next page shows Alice in her treehouse, which has a balcony, birdbaths, feeding stations, and a stand for her binoculars.

And steadily, like a reverse Pied Piper, Andrew Henry attracts to his meadow all the children whose parents just don’t get them and their unusual hobbies. The kid who has pet moles and mice and rabbits. The noisy musician. The boat fan who overflows the bathtub, and who dreams of a house built over a stream. Slowly the field accumulates impeccably purpose-built houses, and becomes a village of happy children.

Meanwhile, the parents are frantic. Where are the kids? A faithful dog provides a clue, and there is a touching reunion scene, where the children are as happy to be found as the parents are to find them. After all, four nights is a long time.

The book has a happy ending of sorts. We don’t see what happens to the meadow and its buildings – I guess we can assume it’s left in place, now that the parents know where it is – but Andrew Henry is granted full run of the basement to do his building in, and his family is “always curious to see what Andrew Henry would build next.”

It’s helpful to know that the book was inspired by the author’s son and his clever inventions. When the book was written, the family – with four children - was living on an isolated island in Washington State, without electricity, running water, shops, phones. You can imagine the opportunities, indeed the requirement, for kid-generated fun.

When I heard that the book had been optioned for a movie, I was thrilled. There’s a great big hole in the market for realistic and (I hate this word but it's true) wholesome movies for kids. Zach Braff (of Scrubs and Garden State fame) and his brother, who had loved the book as kids, were writing the script. What’s not to like?

And then I stumbled across a blog by the guy who was most recently hired to direct it. It’s fascinating. He seems to get the story -- right up to this bit:

“Eventually the kids must return to the town to save everyone from the monstrous company who controls it. The ending has a real action-packed climax.”

Uh, what? No no no. I understand the need for a third act climax, but this is just wrong. It’s not just that there’s no monstrous villainous company in the book. And it’s not that bringing down a monstrous villainous company isn't a fine premise for a movie (go, Wall*E!).

Rather, it’s that the enemy of childhood imagination is usually much much closer to home, and comes in a much more sinister guise: self-regarding grown-ups with a serious empathy deficit.

Witness the story of Wifflegate, happening just down the road from me in Greenwich, Connecticut. A bunch of teenagers livened up their summer by industriously transforming a neglected, weed-strewn lot into their own wiffleball field of dreams (honestly, this story just writes itself: has Hollywood optioned it yet?). They cleared poison ivy, laid out a diamond, and constructed their own version of Fenway Park’s “green monster” wall out of scrap wood.

(NB wiffleball is like baseball, but played with a light plastic ball that doesn’t break windows).

You’d think that Greenwich – a tony, wealthy, very white town, with a dinky little downtown precinct right out of "My Three Sons" (if you’ve seen The Ice Storm or The Stepford Wives, you’ve seen Greenwich) – would have been blushingly proud of these kids. Why, our boys don’t stay inside and play Grand Theft Auto, or roam the streets terrorizing old ladies and tagging fences. They’re far too busy recreating heart-warming vignettes of the good old days.

Unfortunately, these Andrew Henrys and their reclaimed meadow encountered grouchy, entitled neighbours, who pressured the city into intervening. Last Friday, sledgehammers smashed their wiffleball stadium to smithereens.

As of last report, the kids are fighting back, in a gentle, insistent way, but the city won’t budge and the neighbours are putting up surveillance cameras. Oh, the irony! There’s nothing to see but kids having fun! On a piece of land that has been used for games, on and off, since the Second World War veterans returned to town.

--

The Andrew Henry film project is currently languishing in “development hell,” according to the latest director – it’s been shopped around a lot, and has yet to find a way to the screen. So I wonder if there’s a chance to revisit the script, in the light of Wifflegate? So easy to update the story in a compelling way without wheeling in some enormous extraneous corporate bad guy: just populate the town with adult busybodies and lawsuit-shy city councilors who don’t “get” kids. Only have them realize at the last minute that they’re just jealous, and that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

--

Meanwhile, the boy in our house who would be Andrew Henry is happily engaged in a week-long summer camp at this fantastic place down the road, named for the tireless local inventor and innovator, Eli Whitney. It’s run by a gentle pirate and staffed by a phalanx of eager teenagers who have worked their way up through the ranks, starting out at five with wooden train sets and bird houses, and graduating to supervising complex electronic kits and massive constructions.

It’s paradise for a kid who likes to tinker, like our nearly seven year old. A month ago, he spent a week there constructing a wooden skyscraper with a working elevator, an underground train track, a blinking light on top to warn passing planes, and (his own embellishment) a bungy jumper attached by a rubber band to the rooftop terrace. This week, it’s all about the Netherlands: he's hard at work on a watertight table-top diorama featuring dykes, boats, and a windmill with - he proudly informs me - an Archimedes' screw.

Years ago, my Japanese host father, a talented surgeon who spent his weekends on woodworking, would talk about the "brain of the head" versus the "brain of the hands." He was adamant that you simply couldn’t think properly unless you also got busy with your hands and built things. I think he’s right. I think the scriptwriters for the film version of Andrew Henry’s Meadow need to spend a weekend on Doris Burn’s island fetching water and chopping wood, and then a week or two at the Eli Whitney Museum watching kids wield hammers -- and then go back to the drawing board.

And I think the good citizens of Greenwich need to get a grip. On a wiffleball bat. And realize what they’re missing.

I was trying to explain the concept behind Hoodie Day to my older son, who had a few questions about this sudden change in his mother's attire. Well, I said, some young people like to wear outfits with hoods, because they think it looks cool. Whereas some older people think the hoods look really dodgy and threatening.

He thought about it for a moment and then lit up.

"Oh, I get it. They think you're a dementor!"

He’s halfway through the sixth Harry Potter book and thus sees the world entirely through that lens. One minute he's worrying that his kind uncle who works in "appetizing" is basically in the business of putting Imperius curses on innocent consumers to force them to buy things. The next, he's wishing he could share his favourite antipodean treat with his class back in New Haven merely by saying "Accio Jellytips!"

So yes, it’s Youth Week, and Friday is Hoodie Day, on which I will be wearing a smart black hoodie in order to support the right of youths to not be judged by their clothing, viz., not to be mistaken for the soul-sucking cloaked wraiths who torment the prisoners of Azkaban.

I'm also very much hoping not to be judged by my clothing for the duration of this exercise in solidarity. According to Russell, in my hoodie I'm an O.G. Well, yes, but no. Although I grew up in Naenae and Papa2tothetoes, I'm about as gangsta as this chick. In my case, let O.G. stand for ‘Orribly Gormless, which is how I look in a hoodie.

See also: why there are no pictures with this post.

It's nothing to do with the garment itself, it's just something unfortunate about the shape of my head, I think, and perhaps my general bustiness. (And is it because I is old?) The hoodie I'll be wearing is a handsome example of the genre. It's a flattering shade of black, with a nifty red heart on the left breast emblazoned with the cockle-warming motto "Young at Heart."

I know, I know. Rhymes with "old fart." In the vernacular of my youth, "Shaaaaaaaaaaame!" But it also aligns me with this bunch of legends , so that’s OK. (There’s something mathematically satisfying about invoking a bunch of people more than twice as old as me acting half their age in order to support the right of people twice as young as me to act exactly their age... or something like that.)

Frankly, I’m just glad it's not Jeans Hanging Below Your Arse Day. That would be very hard for me to get behind in any meaningful way. In fact, I find it very hard to get behind anybody in a meaningful way if they are wearing their jeans hanging below their arse. It’s not pretty. I once saw somebody thus attired step on the hem of their trousers as they climbed the stairs ahead of me, and trust me, that was even less pretty.

So I'm keepin' it real here in Christchurch, where it is conveniently just about cold enough for my nice new hoodie to actually come in useful. I’ve been patrolling the streets with my two little hooded homies - the wee guy in a very unthreatening Paddington Bear duffle coat, and the bigger kid in a khaki number he insists on referring to, even in airports, as a "bomber's jacket."

By the way, Ron Mark, if you're reading this: those hoodlums rioting outside your electorate office this afternoon? That was us, taking a rather testy toilet break after a couple of happy hours in the Children's Bookshop downstairs.

I've also been watching very carefully to see who else is mooching round the Garden City in shady cowled outfits. So far, the only other hoodies I've seen were in the window of Glassons. That's pretty real, eh? And a super hot Asian guy zipping through the tram station on a BMX, but I only put that bit in for Tze Ming.

Christchurch has changed a bit since I lived here as a student. (Ooh look at that, I'm also an O.G. as in Old Girl, although of course back in the day I would have stroppily demanded to be called Woman rather than Girl, but by god don't call me Old Woman just yet because those would be fighting words.)

Anyway, amongst all the vivid flashbacks brought on by the powerful olfactory stimulus of smoky Christchurchy autumny nights, I was trying to recall what the anti-social clothing item of choice was when I were a lad, or a ladette. What did we wear that caused the old folks to cross the street? Can anyone recall?

Bovver boots, I guess. Good old cherry red or shiny black Doc Martens, imported at enormous expense from the UK. Or the budget equivalent, black netball boots. Clomping around town in those got you eyeballed a bit, whether or not the rest of your outfit was punk, and whether or not you wore them to look threatening or just so that you could hobble all the more fetchingly in your pencil skirt or vintage dress or enormous white T-shirt saying LIFE, BE IN IT or whatever else fell out of the wardrobe that morning.

Yes, I concede there was a minority ('orrible, and gormless) who used their boots for evil, but for the rest of us, it was a fashion choice. And if I say so myself, a wildly attractive one.

Also one that got you more hassles if you were a boy. Because that's the other O.G. in this equation: Only Guys. Or mostly guys. Seems to me, from my limited old woman observation, that hoodies are mainly a boy thing, or rather, that the people who look scary in them (and I mean that in both senses – those who aim to look scary, and those who are perceived as scary) are mostly youths of the boy persuasion.

And if I'm not wrong, mostly brown youths of the boy persuasion.

In other words, what we have here with The Great Hoodie Panic of '08 is not (just) clothes-phobia and generic skittishness about feckless youfs -- pick your target group and then demonise their gear -- but also a dose of good old racism in sheep's clothing. Anybody surprised?

(Which reminds me, can we talk about that weird North and South June cover story? Is it just me, or did that leak in through a time-space wormhole from 1962 or something? Maori people own houses and businesses! They go to university and sometimes even Australia! Their kids... learn the piano! Holy crap, hold the front page of The WTF Weekly!).

Back on topic, I love that you guys were all over the hood's erudite history as academic apparel in the discussion thread for Russell's earlier post -- and that you speedily nailed all of the good jokes, leaving me to come up with the dregs.

And I love the campaign slogan for Hoodie Day: "It's what's under the hood that counts." Shades of Toyah Willcox wailing "So what if I dye my hair? I've still got a brain up there." As a one-time teenage girl, I still burn with the passionate conviction that clothes maketh the grown-ups flip out, and that that is entirely as it should be.

And as a mother of sons -- white as pavlovas, both of them, but nonetheless destined to be big hairy scary teenagers at some point -- I hope my eventually lunky, looming lads will wear pretty much whatever feels good to them, although I dream that it will look good, too. Kilts, hotpants, lavalavas. Just not jeans hanging off their bums... or worse, these monstrosities.

Yeah, I know, check in with me again when they are actually teenagers -- but I hope I'll stick to my conviction that it's not about the clothes, it's about the people inside them. The kids are all right. Even if we don't like what they're wearing, we should defend to the hilt their right to wear it. Which is why I will proudly look like a total dag on Friday. Don't laugh. I'm an O.G., yo.

Ritual excuses for blog silence first: no, I haven’t been in jail, or unconscious, or on tour, or anything exciting, really. Just slowly waking up from my two year nap and attempting to establish a slender but reasonably sustainable professional life in the place where I actually live.

This precarious enterprise is held together by a couple of days a week of daycare (which a clever friend once described as a reverse kidnapping: unless you pay them a very large sum of money, they will give you your child back) and public school, which is basically state-sponsored child-care with lunch thrown in. Or thrown up, at which point, it becomes my problem again.

Which is to say, vile tummy bugs have held me hostage for a couple of months, on and off. Not me personally, which was actually kind of a bummer – who couldn’t do with a day in bed and a swift, minor weight loss? Instead I got a sick husband (the real thing, not man flu) and recurring cases of the boy flu, one of which sent the two year old to the hospital, where I spent a couple of not completely horrible days watching him rehydrate on a drip, master the buttons on the electric bed, and discover the hitherto unknown delights of 24/7 cable TV.

We do in fact have a TV at home, but we only use it for DVDs. I know, I sound like one of those people who used to say "Yes, we have a television set, but it's only black and white..." But I refuse to pay cable just to get the free-to-air channels to appear on our set. Plus my own tendency to media addiction, plus general oogly feelings about the horrible ads on the kids’ channels. But we're not opposed to a spot of mindless channel-surfing -- we just do it on YouTube. In fact, I don’t know how anyone managed family life before it. All those snack-sized moments of cultural history, tidily packaged and linked to all sorts of other delights.

Not only is it the only reliable source of hard-to-find gems like Krtek, the adorable little Bohemian mole, but you can also womble about rediscovering parts of your own childhood. Good old Mike Batt, although he did rather jump the shark with this one:

("In the middle of Manhattan"? "You'll know he's Super Womble, cos his name is on his vest"? Sorry, just, no.) I guess that was just before it all went downhill what with that unfortunate incident with Bungo and Adelaide at the Chelsea Hotel... God, they were so uncompromising, weren't they? I never get tired of this one:

Try following a vague tune from your tired old brain - Bernard Cribbins, say, singing “Right Said Fred” (original here) and before you can say “Lego Indiana Jones” you’ve arrived at this masterpiece:

Still, this may be the definitive Fred fan video - check out the special effects at the crucial “half a ton of rubble” moment:

You know Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-educated singing satirist and geek pin-up, one might say the Flight of the Conchord of his day? (And timeless - this is what Obama’s up against, this one is for recovering Catholics, and chemistry students everywhere know this one off by heart). But did you know he also penned a couple of kid-friendly tunes, which were given trippy animations by the Electric Company:

I’m always on at my sister Gemma to get her band to cover some of the righteous tunes off the 70s kids' album Free to Be You and Me. I prefer the longer version of "Parents are People" that's on the album, but this video sure is fiiiine. Harry Belafonte can push my pram any time he likes:

And if you’re short on dance moves, or indeed patterns for the sort of knitted vest my partner calls the Frank Spencer (having been on the receiving end of several of them as rather traumatic presents in his youth), you could certainly pick up a few interesting ones here:



But for sheer right-on-itude, you can't beat "It’s All Right to Cry", sung by the lovely Rosey Grier, the crochet-and-macrame-loving ex-football player and former bodyguard to RFK. This one gets me every time, thus neatly fulfilling its title.

On the other hand, if you're hankering for a spot of cartoon violence, you can’t beat the Goodies, who are a lot funnier than their lame laugh track would have you believe. Graeme Garden is an unsung genius of physical slapstick:



And then you stumble across clever little random things like this, by Dan and his editing suite, aka Dan and Dan:



Oh, it’s all very entertaining, but then I’m easily amused, and the boys certainly seem to have inherited that trait. Feel free to suggest more!

Speaking of music and memory, this may be the best book I’ve ever read on the subject, and certainly the best book I’ve read so far this year. I’ll be reviewing it in another forum, but if you were ever a girl or if you have ever loved music, you’ll need to get your hands on a copy. So that means everybody.

And finally, something I’d absolutely love to see: the new TV series New Artland. It’s directed by my astonishingly talented sister (I still can’t believe I used to kick her out of my room. Which was also her room) and fronted by the always winning Chris Knox (OMG, the new voice of Heineken beer! Great scoop, Danielle. Now I want one of the major diaper manufacturers to pounce on his song The Joy of Sex, with its insanely catchy chorus of "Baby baby baby baby baby baby baby baby").

New Artland is a nifty combination of one of those home and garden makeover shows, and a primer on the local arts scene. It’s screening on TVNZ6, but happily you can watch it online even if you don’t have the magic box decoder thingy. If you live in New Zealand.

I would love to watch it, but I can’t: a little notice comes up saying "This video is for New Zealand viewers only." I flipping well am a New Zealand viewer, dammit. Thank goodness I’ll be back in the old country next month and able to apply my patriotic eyeballs to anything that takes my fancy on the old tube.

As Obama has proven, if you want to snag the vote, get your mates to come up with something people can e-mail to each other. An uplifting, musically inspired, goosebump-inducing B & W viral video. Can it work for John McCain too? Watch all the way to the end. The guy with the paper bag was the absolute highlight for me.

Alas, Hillary still hasn't managed to capture the YouTube wave. Maybe her new campaign manager will get it? I wish I had the skillz to make a video of her best moments to the tune of Helen Reddy's "I Am Woman."

Or at least to produce some lip-synched version of her debates with Barack, using footage from Bob the Builder... with Hillary as the eminently capable but always sidelined Wendy. Only that would make Bill Bob, and ... oh it's so confusing.

I'm hugely sympathetic to the feminist arguments about how Hillary's historic candidacy is being systematically devalued via traditional and surreptitious sexism. After all, this is a woman whose mother was born when American women (in all but a handful of states) still didn't have the right to vote. The righteous fury of this piece by the legendary Robin Morgan warmed the cockles of my radical feminist heart. Amen, sister! Old school but right on! It's certainly more cogent and less omg-she-could-like-totally-be-me! than Erica Jong's similar article in the Washington Post. Lest this seem like an exclusively female meme, good old Stanley Fish covers similar ground in the NY Times (including comparing the blithe sexism and misogyny of Clinton's opponents to anti-Semitism).

It starts young, though. My older boy is a confirmed Obama fan, and ventured the other day that "African American people are just smarter at the job than women." Where to start parsing that one?? I'm so thrilled he's gotten the message of Martin Luther King day (this year he mastered the words of the song that he insisted last year was called "Martin Luther King was a silver rights leader"), but I do have to take the second half of that statement a teensy bit personally.

I think he's picked up on the either/or vibe, and formulated his answer in those terms because binary thinking is very hard to get outside of. I asked him to expand on it a little bit, and he made the cogent point that "Perhaps Obama's father from Africa taught him some different ways of thinking, from that part of the world, not like the way Americans think, so he's more smart about the world than if he was just American. Because people in Africa have to do more things from scratch rather than just buying stuff, like in America, so it makes them smarter."

There are some issues there, true, but on the whole it's a nuanced perspective I hadn't heard before and I kind of liked it.

On the other hand, this open letter (thanks permiegirl for the link) from a fellow Wellesley College alum is troubling, whatever you think of GE.

And what do you make of Shep's suggestion in the comments thread to my previous post, that Star Trek precedent suggests we'll have a woman at the helm before a black man? Highly logical, captain? Or proof that American women can run things only in some parallel universe? (Captain Janeway was British, if I remember rightly).

I don't know - all this either/or black/white XX/XY stuff is doing my head in. Somebody point me towards a paradigm for thinking about it that doesn't take into account each candidate's "first"ness but rather their fitness for office...

--

Other good stuff. Bob Munro posted a link to BagNotes which does a great line in visual analyses of the news.

And I liked Anjum's take on Obama's expedient response to rumours that he swore an oath on the Quran as opposed to the good old Bible.

I had a dream about Barack Obama the other night. No, no, not that kind of dream -- I should be so lucky. In my dream, Mr and Mrs Obama came to our house for a fund-raising cocktail party. Because, in my dreams, I’m a highly influential member of the local community (despite or perhaps because of my charming foreign accent).

Actually, that’s not so improbable: two summers ago, our street party was crashed by Ned Lamont, who was the leading contender to take down Senator Joe Lieberman - you remember him, the conservative Democrat and one-time would-be presidential candidate (as the Daily Show put it at the time, “Lieberman: for people who think George W. Bush isn’t Jewish enough”).

Trailed by camera crews from BBC America and the 24/7 politics channel C-Span, there was Ned Lamont on our street, shaking hands and kissing babies, including my own freshly minted one. I wished the man luck and said I was sorry I couldn’t vote for him as I was not a citizen.

According to politics-geeks friends who were watching the live coverage on C-Span (I know, sad!), as Lamont turned away, he shrugged and said “She must be French or something...”

Bien-sûr, c’est difficile to be a foreigner in this country sometimes. Which is why it might be nice to have a President who had not only been overseas, but lived overseas. Imagine that!

Anyway, in my dreams, the Obamas were charming company. At first. And then they started to wear on me. Every topic of conversation, every stray comment I made, was pounced on to make a persuasive argument about how Barack would do better for us than any of the other candidates.

“Nice garden!”

“Yep, it’s lovely, the boys like playing out there, and last year we planted tomatoes, and peas, and beans, and corn…”

“Well let me tell you right there, agriculture is the heart of America, and corn-based ethanol is a viable alternative energy source blah blah blah...” And off he’d go.

In my dream, he was the candidate I would love to have a beer with, because maybe it would make him just shut up for a minute.

In the dream I eventually stamped my feet and yelled “GUYS! We can’t vote for you! So let’s just, you know, chat?”

Of course my subconscious was not reflecting on the man himself - I'm sure he knows how and when to turn it off - as much as on the curious all-encompassing intensity of the US electoral system. The candidate becomes a 24/7 campaigning machine, to the point where, if the machine momentarily grinds to a halt, or churns out an unexpected answer, or goes all teary for a minute, it’s big news.

Hillary hasn’t attended any of my nocturnal fundraisers yet, so I can’t report on her imaginary cocktail party manners. I get the sense her husband would suck all the oxygen out of the room -- but if you could only get her by herself, she’d own the place.

Curiously, she was just around the corner as I began typing this, kissing babies at the Yale Child Study Center. What a missed opportunity!

Anyway, all the talk comes to a head tomorrow, US time, on Super Tuesday. There will be a polling booth in the foyer of my big boy’s school. And a bunch of parents will be taking advantage of hungry voters by holding a bake sale to raise money for the PTO. As far as I can make out, it’s not actually illegal (as it is in New Zealand) to campaign on the day, which poses the quandary: do I ice the cupcakes with OBAMA or CLINTON?

I’m bummed that I can’t vote, but a little relieved too, because how would you choose between two such different but brilliant and inspiring candidates? And both so symbolically weighted as well - each in the running to be a real first for this country. Rebecca Traister eloquently captures the dilemma in this piece at Salon.

I have to say, this awesome video (plus his great books) made me want to vote for Barack Obama. Plus, check out his amazing wife and cool sister.

And while Hillary hasn’t done so well out of the viral video thing (ouch), this interesting (but flawed) exercise tipped me back in her direction, at least for a moment.

Meanwhile, supporters of both are adamant that only their candidate could beat the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain. But who knows? Obama can presumably be counted on to get out the youth vote, but we counted on that last time, and look what happened.

By the time Tuesday evening rolls around, American time, we’ll have a clearer sense of who’ll be on the slate in November. For the moment, though, I’m savouring the feeling of optimism and hope that hovers over the whole business. I like this sense of antici......pation. It feels very different from the Tuesday four years ago when events conspired to re-elect the cowboy president. Change is in the air, no matter who comes out ahead tomorrow, and that can only be a good thing.