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posted by kanarick at 1:21 PM | Comments (0)

taking drugs to make art for other people to not take drugs to

The other day, I took my four year old and nine month old to the big summer show at the Whitney: Summer of Love: The Art of Psychedelia. My son went nuts in the room with the strobe lights and the dayglo tiled floor. The baby was Oh!ing with excitement at every turn. And you should have seen her rocking to the fuzz-wah riff in "Defecting Grey", silhouetted against an oil and water film backdrop. There were a few other kids at the show, and they were all really into it. Now and again a passerby would complain to their cohorts about it being inappropriate; drugs and sex and all. While I did stop short of the explicit Yayoi Kusama film (annoyingly enough, for me) there was nothing else in the show that felt wrong for my son to see. In fact, it seemed to be right up a kid's alley. Bright colors, great music, fun shapes… what's not to like? I've often thought that the Baby Einstein videos were oddly similar to psychedelia. I curled into a half-womb segment of Panton's Phantasy Landscape Visiona II , switched the audio tour to the Velvets and watched my kid climb crazy over the art.

It was strange to return home from this groovy wonderworld to the (very minor and possibly contrived) controversy of Babble's pot mom story . The Three Martini Playdate is a well-marketed parenting ethos, complete with a sequel. But one toke, and the pot mom gets, gotta say it, stoned by the villagers. I'm not suggesting that piece would have been any better received had she said she was taking swigs of vodka out of a flask…or maybe I am. Cocktails are the acceptable freedom of autonomous adults. Pot is for the young and irresponsible. A glass of wine or two? Of course, mommy's gotta unwind. But no one's going to say that being high around your kids is ok. We just don't live in that kind of world. But we don't live in the kind of world that people who chastise mothers who smoke talk about either, where everyone sits in lifeguard chairs waiting at the ready for a threat.

In this world, parents wouldn't be impaired or distracted in any way. No phone calls, no checking email, no cooking dinner. True, these things don't affect your nervous system. but they certainly affect your attention. And don't they affect your response time? Many of the angry mobsters railed at the idea that as a parent, you need to be ready to act at any instant. What if that instant happens while you're finally on the phone with the insurance company after twenty minutes on hold? Or while the UPS guy's buzzing, or your office suddenly needs a file that you swear was right here on your desktop yesterday? Pot may impair your reflexes, but from what I can remember from my own wild oats, whenever something scary happened while I was impaired, the buzz vanished instantly.

Although my parents were less hippies than "hippie style", there was some passing of joints around the Passover seder. Oral history has me arbitrating the order of smokers at a Tanglewood concert circa 1973.* I have not repurposed my son's preschool bossiness in such a manner and have no intention of making pot smoking part of his family experience...especially not after my just-say-no-fueled confrontation of my mom, at the aforementioned seder table.) Using drugs of any kind to "get through" something (parenting or otherwise) is a semi-questionable situation. While neither of us here at thenewmom has personally smoked pot in quite awhile, we do have a deep respect for its benefits (from a purely hypothetical/historical standpoint). There must be a reason that stoned people and children have a shared appreciation of things. Could shared appreciation lead to more attention, rather than less? They recently discovered that driving while talking on the phone is actually more dangerous than driving drunk.

So who knows?

*my mother would like you to know that she "hardly ever smoked pot". Also, she says, it was the time.

posted by rebecca at 9:23 AM | Comments (1)

male bonding

"If a group of women spend enough time together their menstrual cycles synchronize." Well, apparently men have a kind of telepathy of their own.

posted by ceridwen at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

an Oscar aside

Ok, now that we've gotten onto fashion, we can't resist the critique.

Big trends:

ponytails.
crotch gathers.
weird boobs.
split ends and flyaways.

First, we must give some post-partum props to Jennifer Garner for (almost) pulling her shit together for the event. It was nice to see someone looking exactly where they should be 3 months out of the gate–instead of the usual Hollywood hyper-shrunkenness.

We're so not on the same page with the press saying this was the fashion winner. Bisected boobs do not look good to us, no matter how lovely the woman attached to them. No. We say the standout was Michelle Williams, who took a huge risk with a crazy color and pulled it off stunningly. Screw those E! losers. Enough with the damn beige. Yes, the nude look is often flattering, but it's getting a bit...overexposed. And that flesh-colored protuberance looked a little like a pregnancy....and a little like advanced stage leprosy. We appreciated the idea of this 80's prom meets Metropolis look, but it was a little better in theory than in practice. Also, as a friend pointed out...though Felicity's looking flawless now (even in High Def) it might not be too long a leap from there to Dollywood. Where they really should start serving some fattier foods.

And what was with the frizz? Maybe it was just the improved resolution...

posted by thenewmoms at 8:48 AM | Comments (0)