In Which We Are The Parent of the Child

Take Me to the MoMA, Mama

by DURGA CHEW-BOSE

I imagine the crammed rooms at the MoMA on a Saturday afternoon to function similarly to our breathing cycle. Admittedly, I do not know much about it, about this system of contracting and relaxing, of the tray-kee-uh, the bronchioles and the capillaries. I have heard that the process of inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, occurs fifteen to twenty-five clicks per minute, which I confess, seems a little fast. And I know about the exchange of gases — CO₂, O₂ swap — but really, my modest knowledge and propensity to understand complicated systems abstractly, enlists my imagination far more than any facts, and as a result each MoMA room behaves like a lung, emptying and filling, emptying and filling. So much so that the canvases appear to curve and the rooms appear to round, simply to accommodate the weekend throngs.

But when the crowd passes and the walls exhale and recede to their usual shape, the interim moments are entirely private. I am joined by a little girl, maybe seven or eight, a stray in yellow Osh Kosh corduroy overalls, one strap tighter than the other, who seems to have been plucked from boredom or Wonderland—it really could be either—and who is following the lines of the room, walking its square shape, making sharp turns at each corner.

Arbitrarily, she stops in front of paintings, yielding to their size and colors: riotous blues, bruised purples and greys. In this room, more so than in others, the themes seem far darker and potent. A Munch hangs ominously; its figures holding their faces in anguish, the sky olive and stormy. Next to it a painting of a train station is stricken with bold, lawless, black lines. And beside these paintings, the little girl in her corduroys, with her ponytail curling like a comma, seems oddly placid. She occupies the whole of the room.

I notice something compulsive about her step but quickly appreciate that she must be playing a game in her head, something with numbers perhaps, repeated numbers, a series, a rhyme, or maybe her game is more elaborate and imagined and is one she never stops playing. I envy her absolute abandonment of the world, but only fleetingly, similarly to how I envy my childhood in moments of laziness or dramatic despair. She walks the length of the room once and starts again without the slightest hesitation or nudge back into reality. She is in no hurry to return.

It would be so easy to kidnap her. The thought surprises me. Its conception is entirely bizarre and unprovoked and I am embarrassed and shocked, but also amused by my own self. Admittedly, at twenty-three, I am quite captivated by kids, but never to the point of kidnapping them. I begin to wonder where her parents might be. Museums are not that dissimilar to parks or malls, and yet they are often scattered with unaccompanied children, wandering and wondering, both. They stumble through mazes of legs and more legs, chasing their brothers and sisters and cousins, pointing at things and people.

The parentless child at the museum is cause for little alarm: the father or mother is never too far. That’s probably him over there holding the small jacket and hat, swinging a camera in his free hand. Or maybe it’s that woman over there standing beside the string and rock sculpture, fixing her hair. Childless parents and parentless children are everywhere at the MoMA on Saturday afternoons.

With each thumb behind an overall strap, she wanders to a woman sitting on a bench in front of Monet’s water lilies spread across a single wall. There is nothing else hanging in this room. The woman, her mother I assume, looks young, yet weary and worn-out. Somehow she holds a jacket and a purse, a shopping bag and a book, an apple with a bite in it and a poster rolled up in plastic. Her shoulders droop and her hair is pulled back into a loose, unassuming braid. Her daughter will always remember that braid, its exact texture and smell.

I have learned, although only recently, that most patterns in my life are often a symptom of larger things happening to me or around me. They are projections or buried thoughts that surface in my day to day. They appear and gather, and soon connect like fated, figured constellations. Recently it’s been a veritable ‘I Spy’ of somnolent mothers and fathers.

My parents, both living in Montreal, both remarried, both visibly weary, have given everything to me and my brother. I used to hear it when we’d fight, hear that loaded everything, and I used to catch glimpses of it when revisiting those burdensome photo albums. Only in the last year have I have really noticed the wear of that everything. It lies affectionately in the deep set bags under their eyes, in the grey of his beard, in her mistakes when cooking and correcting papers at the same time. But it exceeds the visible traits of growing older, too. There is a depleted sense of something and it surrounds them with a cheerless glow. Even when we are close, sitting side by side on the couch, there is a contemplative distance I cannot yet pin down.

The girl in corduroys is bored. Her mother notices and pulls her close, squishing her into the shopping bag and jacket. Playfully, she takes her daughter’s little chin and turns it towards the Monet, ushering her to a specific part. She whispers something. The mother tries to explain the painting. She asks her daughter, What do you see, darling? Her daughter is uninterested. With her finger in her mouth, she looks around the crowded room— full and round with people. I think we make eye contact. Her mother, still sitting, pulls her daughter close once more and tries to tell her something about the lilies, the brushstrokes, the colors, Monet. She wraps an arm around her daughter and points at the canvas.

They’ve been seen like this before, perhaps on a bridge somewhere, staring off at a horizon, or a city skyline. But the daughter grows irritated and begins to sigh. She slouches and crosses her arms. She takes long, tedious breaths. Her tiny chest rises and falls, rises and falls; inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. She wants to go, right now. Mom, please. I don’t want to be here anymore. The mother playfully twirls her daughter’s ponytail. The little girl gives her a look and backs away. The mother returns to staring at the painting. She takes a long, sleepy breath. She closes her eyes, opens them and says, Darling, just two more minutes. I’m waiting for a fish to jump from the water.

Durga Chew-Bose is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

"Bunker or Basement" — Fionn Regan (mp3)

"The End of History" — Fionn Regan (mp3)

"Noah, Ghost in a Sheet" — Fionn Regan (mp3)

photo by autumn de wilde, drawing by fionn regan

In Which We Break Down The Slate of Fall TV

Fall TV Preview

by ELEANOR MORROW

June 10, 1991. It was the last day Twin Peaks aired new TV on broadcast television. Seinfeld had just replaced Night Court as NBC's Wednesday at 9 staple. Things were on their way up. Flash to whatever's left over from an era of televised brilliance.

We would never recover, and eventually we would drift from Must See TV into NBC boring us with Green Week and eliminating five hours of original programming.

NBC

Community with Joel McHale is at least one thing to be excited about on NBC's dreadful slate. They'll probably replace it at midseason with something starring Paul Rudd as a firefighter. How dreadful? The only thing they air in primetime during Tuesday is two full hours of The Biggest Loser. If I wanted to watch sad people struggle with their weight, I'd attend Rosh Hashanah with my family.

Although Joel McHale was probably better in The Informant, I am willing to watch him flick his eyes around no matter how bad the script is.

NBC is committing the cardinal sin in promoting a season by having two new shows with a similar name: Trauma and Mercy. Trauma looks hopeless, and Mercy not much better. Trauma at least appears to know how bad it is, while Mercy just features nurses working overtime in full makeup and looking like models.

traumaA kind of prologue to its long-running hit ‘E.R.’ in that it deals with young emergency medical technicians and the high-intensity medical cases they get involved in — before they reach the E.R. The show, set in San Francisco, features lots of helicopters and racing ambulances.

The Jay Leno Show could ruin as much as 10 percent of my aimless channel flipping. They should put this guy out to pasture like an old racehorse. One day there's a bullet in his hide and nobody's asking questions. This move was destined to fail because late night shows don't do primetime numbers, this is just a fact of the universe. Somewhere, Arsenio Hall is dead.

Day One won't appear until 2010, but it looks to be even more horrible than Heroes, if that is in fact possible.

ABC

ABC does a horrible job of promoting its comedies, which means there's really not any point in watching them because they are likely to die by midseason — their replacements are even listed on the schedule. It's better to roll shows out slowly instead of sticking eight programs on with a 15-person cast and hoping someone notices. Eastwick - based off a great Jack Nicholson movie - already made its premiere, and amazingly I hated it even more than Tom Shales did.

From what we can tell, Flash Forward consists of characters staring at each other from every discernible angle, often in mirrors. Furthermore it includes the actress Sonya Walger, who is now a world class surgeon. I hate to break it to you, but that's not accurate. Sonya Walger is Penny from Lost and that is all she will be. The show is based on a Robert J. Sawyer novel. It premiered on Thursday and had an OK premiere. The acting could be generously described as challenged.

Modern Family is probably the most offensive show on the network's fall schedule. It is also tremblingly unfunny. It will often be confused with Hank, which incredibly stars Kelsey Grammar as a middle class schlub, and The Middle, which airs right before it. No one but ABC knows anything about these shows. They are like theatrical productions where the actor's families are the only attending.

ABC is also premiering The Forgotten, which is amazingly not based on the movie of the same name, even those both products use the same title font. This show is ABC's attempt at a fall procedural. I am reminded of Don Draper's city mouse: "No one wants to think about forgetting when they're trying to remember to watch a show."

FOX

Fox extended a merciful stay of execution to a bunch of series that didn't deserve another chance including Dollhouse, Lie to Me, and Til' Death. At least there is hopefully no 24 in sight. In Fox's position, you should look to highlight television that is more experimental and different from the networks — seems like there would be a niche there. Go back to stretching boundaries rather than airing another half hour of Seth MacFarlane's diarrhea. My mother says Glee is good, but she also watches Dancing with the Stars.

CBS

CBS did the best job of balancing new programs with their existing slate, although it's not like there's anything to really look forward to here.

Juliana Margulies plays Eliot Spitzer's pathetic wife in The Good Wife. I would really hate to be Eliot Spitzer, although I guess he should be flattered they cast Chris Noth to play him. If my husband was Chris Noth, I'd put up with a lot more philandering than I would if my husband was Eliot Spitzer. In any case, this show was actually not terrible. Ultimately this show will struggle because no one is going to respect her for staying with Chris Noth despite his earthy good looks, and if you can't respect your protagonist, you have problems.

I still think The Good Wife will be a hit until she also cheats on her husband and everyone calls her a harlot.

I realize these procedurals make a lot of money, but I wouldn't trust these two to babysit my kids, let alone fight crime. Also, Chris O'Donnell is not even the best O'Donnell anymore.

In Jenna Elfman's Accidentally on Purpose she basically has the plot of Knocked Up, but everyone is slightly better-looking. At least CBS does a decent job introducing comedies — you should do it progressively and hype it on your central show, in this case they have the ratings dynamo of Two and a Half Men.

In trying to make a mainstream show that would appeal to everyone, they achieved the exact opposite with Accidentally On Purpose. This is a very strange world. Jenna Elfman and her friends (the incomparable Ashley Jensen and the weird-looking Lennon Parham) plot to get impregnated by a 23-year-old busboy who lives for Grand Theft Auto and weed. Then when she tells him about the baby he's totally cool with it and wants to go to her gyno appointment. I kept waiting for Judd Apatow to pop out of a box and scream, "Surprise!"

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

"Grey" — Ashley Monroe and Brendan Benson (mp3)

"Consider Me" — Ashley Monroe and Brendan Benson (mp3)

"Ballad of Pretty Baby" — Ashley Monroe and Brendan Benson (mp3)

In Which It Takes A Lot Of Fires To Make A Forest

Don't They Know It's The End Of The World?

by MOLLY LAMBERT

There is a joke that Los Angeles has four seasons; Fire, Floods, Earthquakes, and Riots. (I didn't say it was funny). It is easy to feel like the world is always ending.

Because the world is always ending in Los Angeles, we are not necessarily surprised when it does. We are also not surprised when the world keeps going on after that.

How many times has the ground collapsed underneath you? How often have the forests of your hopes been razed by the flames of unforseen circumstances?

And yet after each trial and humiliation, there is the opportunity to rebuild. Even if it seems increasingly futile given that you now know it's unstable and impermanent.

But what is permanence? Is there such a thing? Even the most stable of situations might secretly be sitting on a fault line or border an accidental brush fire.

So then why do we aspire to stability, as if stability is something we can control? Why do we try to achieve what we already know is ephemeral if not impossible?

Is it because the alternative of accepting the constant destruction and restructuring of the world around us is just too existentially terrifying? We need something to cling to.

But clinging is what hurts us, what stops us from ever enjoying the present. We are too scared to let go, to accept that the earth might open up and swallow it at any time.

The alternative does not have to involve abject terror. We cling to stability because we fear the unknown, but the unknown is rarely as bad as we fear. Sometimes it is better.

And when picking through the charred remains of your former world sometimes you will stumble upon something you miss, and feel the pangs of nostalgia and saudade.

Accepting that you will sometimes feel terrible is the only way you will ever feel good.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here.

"Only You" - Joshua Radin (mp3)

"Someone Else's Life" - Joshua Radin (mp3)

"Sundrenched World" - Joshua Radin (mp3)