In Which Your Son Spit At Me

Babysitting

by JESSICA FERRI

Babysitting teaches you that no family is the same. The very first thing you notice is the house. This family has a different house from mine, it’s bigger or smaller, messier or cleaner. Living on a cul de sac, there were plenty of families to choose from. You live on a golf course in what’s called a “subdivision.” (A subdivision of what?) Sitting at the kitchen table in one home you realize you are looking at completely different part of the golf course. How does it color your life to be situated at the tee rather than on the fairway?

I started babysitting around age thirteen. I wanted spending money for trips to the mall, CDs, books and nail polish. I had adored my own babysitter, Gretchen, with her purple hair and tongue ring. I have always loved kids. It makes sense. When you’re thirteen, the idea that someone could look up to you is a big deal.

Some mothers have explicit instructions for their children: baby in bed by 7, older kids by 9, make sure everyone brushes their teeth and says their prayers. One child pointedly asked me “Are you a Catholic?” No, I responded. I was raised in the Methodist Church. “What is that?” she wondered. I replied that it was still Christian, just Protestant. “But not Catholic?” she said. No. She seemed worried by my response. Other mothers simply bounce out the door, either disheveled or looking and smelling great, breezily chirping “Thanks Jessica!” There’s a tangible sensuality when a married couple gets all dolled-up for a night on the town, leaving you in charge of their children. You are somehow complicit in their romance. You are helping them! And then: I’ll be adult like that someday, with a husband who wears aftershave, own an SUV, birth five kids. You shake it off, though.

Fridges full of carrots, or alternatively, Krispy Kreme donuts. Diet cokes with lime. Beer, or booze that under no circumstance would I ever touch. Some parents are generous. “Eat whatever you want! Watch TV!” But I was responsible. I was the babysitter.

Infants are the easiest. You simply watch them sleep, mostly — occasionally you change a diaper or you get a bottle ready. One night I put the baby down and read all of Interview with the Vampire while she slept soundly without a peep. Another night, different baby, crawled into every room of the house looking for her mom. When she reached the middle of the room and realized mom was no where to be found she would suddenly burst into uncontrollable sobs. I had no idea what to do. I tried to pick her up, but she squirmed and struggled to get away. I tried talking to her, telling her mom is coming back, I promise. I tried singing. She looked offended. Finally I gave in and cried, too. When she saw that I was crying, she stopped.

Older children can be frighteningly aggressive. They beat their younger siblings, and you have to punish them. They don’t like this, and can say things like “you aren’t my mom so you can’t tell me what do.” One little boy actually spit at me from across the room. You then must firmly respond that you are in charge and if no apologies are made there will be no SpongeBob SquarePants. Things can go awry. Juice is spilled, pants and beds are wet. Once, in a kiddie pool we were attacked by hornets. You cannot make this stuff up. I grabbed a seven year old boy, slung him around my back, and raced indoors, both of us screaming all the way.

Then they disappear. Watching four or five at a time, you look and one is gone. Oh, Christ. You’ve really done it now. You failure! You’ve lost the child. You’ll go to prison. Everything’s over. You race around the house calling and calling but nothing. You ask the eldest child, have you seen your brother? Trying not to let the overwhelming panic show on your face. “Nah,” she says. “Who knows where he is!” An hour goes by. Mom comes home. I can’t find him, you say. I can’t find your child. But she, being Mom, knows exactly where he is. At the neighbor’s, looking at the new baby. In what seems like the most gracious gesture, she isn’t even upset with you. “Don’t worry about it!”

When the adults reappear you want to tell them you people don’t know your children at all. Your eight-year-old daughter just asked me if I was a Catholic. Your son spit at me from across the room. Your baby wouldn’t stop crying. Your ten year old daughter wants to know what sex is. Did you know all this? You want to ask them. How are you doing this every day? Exhausted, bleary-eyed, I go home, cash hot in my hands, watch late-night TV, tell my own mom about the antics, and fall into a dreamless sleep.

One morning I wake up and I’m too old to babysit. A mom calls “Can you sit next Saturday?” I can’t, I have a date, or a party to go to. I have to shop for my Prom dress. I have to apply for college. Suddenly, as I drive down the street, the children I once fed, changed, and bathed are teenagers, gangly and alien. My horror is silent, but real. They are older, I am older, and before I know it I am gone.

Much later, one of them dies. A child is dead. A child who felt your legs, wondered about shaving hers. “Do you want to get married?” she once asked. I don’t know, I said. “Why not?” Well, I’m just not too sure. “But don’t you want to have babies?” Yes, I do. But sometimes you can have babies without being married. “Well, that would be weird! Who would be the Daddy?” The grief you feel is unexpected since you hadn’t even laid eyes on her in seven years. She was seventeen. And here you are, you’re twenty-four. Where am I? You feel completely lost. But you check yourself, and you think of her mother. You are, after all, the babysitter.

Jessica Ferri is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her website is here. She blogs here and you can find more of her work on This Recording here.

"The Falling Snow" - Damien Jurado (mp3)

"Kansas City" - Damien Jurado (mp3)

"Kalama" - Damien Jurado (mp3)

In Which We Keep Doing What We're Doing

Whatever Happened to the Swagger?

by JESSICA FERRI

These days, it seems like twee indie-rock is just what people want to listen to. That, or Susan Boyle, or Lady Gaga. But really just twee indie-rock, played by dudes in sweater-vests, or dudes and ladies in sweet sweet vintage duds. Listen, I'm not a hater, I'm one of those girls and I really enjoy beautiful music. OK? I do.

Nice album, guys. Really.That said, what I've always loved is rock stars. Come home with me to my mother's house. In it you will find my childhood bedroom, covered wall-to-wall (and ceiling to ceiling) with Blink182 posters (ages 14-16). Later, in my more mature years (16-18) I was really into The Who and Led Zeppelin but mostly just how tight Robert Plant's jeans were and how you could totally see his package. At that point, I wasn't entirely sure what a "package" was, but, you know, whatever.

Whoa.Then this band came out, called The Strokes. They released an album in 2001 (16) but I probably didn't really listen to it until I was 17. My friend Amanda handed me a burned (!) copy and (full disclosure) I never bought the album. But boy I wore that burned CD-R out. As I sat in my car driving to Starbucks or to Target listening to Is This It? I wondered where these boys came from. Then NYLON magazine did a story on them and saw them for the first time. My eyes probably just bounced right out of my head: I had never seen dudes who looked like that before. I guess they were hipsters? I don't even know at this point things have gotten so complicated. But they were tall, thin, sort-of dirty, dark looking boys in tight jeans and t-shirts and converse with jean jackets with holes in them. To say I fell in love is putting it mildly.

Mm-mm good.I grew up in a place where dudes wore cargo pants. Cargo pants and fucking oversized shirts and baseball hats. They put fishhooks in their hats and wore big white tennis shoes and listened to Eminem and Dave Matthews and drove jeep wranglers and flew the Confederate flag. Be still my heart, not. The only guys worth having an actual conversation with were gay, or punk (and let's face it I was not about to bring home a guy with yellow hair and a ring through his tongue to dinner).

No offense.Luckily for my eye-candy needs I moved to New York in 2003 and I've been fine ever since. I rarely have to look at cargo pants, and that's great. Sure, there are some downsides, like almost every guy looks like a Stroke so it's hard to tell them apart, and women in New York are so fucking gorgeous and cool that's it's difficult to compete. People find me interesting because I have a weird accent, don't have a trust fund, and I like to think I'm funny.

Typical New York Woman.A few weeks ago, I went to see Julian Casablancas (former lead-singer of The Strokes) at Terminal 5 (this place is fucking huge) on his first tour for his first solo record, Phrazes for the Young. I didn't really know what to expect, how many people would be there, or if people were still obsessed with The Strokes. In my experience, everyone listens to Vampire Weekend and The Dirty Projectors and Lady Gaga. But whoa. Upon arrival at Terminal 5 it was pretty obvious that people love Julian Casablancas. The whole place filled up (I guess it was sold-out) in an odd mix of people my age (got the Strokes album at 16) and current NYU undergrads.

It was more crowded than this.Julian was surprised, too. He took the stage and immediately uttered "Holy shit, guys," and continued to make exclamations on how he couldn't believe how many people were there. "Fuck, guys," he said. "I mean, fuck, it's really good to see you."

So, news-flash: Julian Casablancas is really hot. I think I had managed to bury all of my 16-year-old obsession / hipster-crazed love mongering sometime ago, because even when Julian appeared I was like "yeah, whatever, there he is." Then I noticed he was wearing an outfit made entirely of leather that made him look kind of like Elvis. His prowess jumping on and off the stage in these ultra-tight leather pants was really, really impressive. His hair was dirty and all in his face, and he sang into the microphone like it was some combination of a phallus and a really beautiful woman's mouth. Suddenly, it was all coming back to me, there was this flush of heat and sweat and everyone was screaming and I was like, oh, so THIS is what a rockstar is. This is rockstar swagger.

YeahBecause I had forgotten — I had forgotten what it was like to stand in an audience and feel the bass and be totally in love with the dude with the microphone because he has so much fucking confidence that you feel like magnetically pulled to him. I've been to some great shows in New York, where there were dudes playing guitar and singing, and yeah, I was like oh, he has a nice voice or, that was pretty. But I was never like "I want to have sex with that dude." Julian Casablancas has it, man. He has that swagger. I don't think you have to have a dick for it, either, guys, just fyi.

Case in point. Vagina-swagger. Consider this a petition. Twee guys, keep doing what you're doing. It's fine. And plenty of ladies like sweet melodies with cardigans. But can I just be the first to say that some of us really dig the swagger? You don't even have to be an asshole. Just get up there, put on some leather, and rock.

Jessica Ferri is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She blogs here.

"How to Hang A Warhol" - Little Joy (mp3)

"Don't Watch Me Dancing" - Little Joy (mp3)

"Play the Part" - Little Joy (mp3)

In Which We Are Tortured by HBO's Bored to Death

Saving the Comedy From Itself

by JESSICA FERRI

Jason Schwartzman’s face holds so much meaning for most of us—his big beautiful mole, his undeniable Jewishiness; the soundtrack of Rushmore starts to flounce around in my head. Do you remember the first time you saw it? How moved you were by Max’s dedication to write the world’s best play? And his determination to win Rosemary’s heart? Those awkward indie days are long gone. Schwartzman has become the star of an HBO series.

The show is Bored to Death, and it was written by Jonathan Ames, who, despite his many novels and risqué one man shows, is still fairly under the radar outside of New York as far as writers go. His reputation is one of a slightly perverted funny man with great autobiographical pieces. Unsurprisingly, Schwartzman’s character on the show is lovingly named, “Jonathan Ames.” The show opens with a hang-dog looking Schwartzman, incredulous at the Israeli movers carting his beloved girlfriend’s belongings into a moving van outside their apartment. When Jonathan questions their ethnicity (Jews aren’t strong enough to be movers, right?) one responds, “What are you, another self-hating New York Jew?" And Jonathan nimbly nods his head as if to say, “duh.”

Here we’ve entered into some sort of parallel universe where jokes about self-hating Jews are awkward and unfunny. Watching Schwartzman in this strange non-Wes Anderson real world (which, thanks to a The New Yorker Talk of the Town piece we know is Fort Greene, Brooklyn) is like watching Woody Allen in a film where he plays a well-adjusted WASP. Thankfully, Zack Galifianakis, who plays Jonathan’s friend Ray, is here to save the comedy in this comedy. After Jonathan’s girlfriend takes off (with a parting kiss that’s hotter than most people get when they’re in a relationship) Ray describes his feelings after his last girlfriend dumped him."After my breakup I felt like I was wearing a falcon hood." "A what?!" Jonathan exclaims. "A falcon hood."

Like most television shows, Bored to Death is off to a shaky start. Jonathan, an aspiring writer, picks up a copy of some Raymond Chandler and decides the best way to distract himself from his post-break-up gloom is to become a private detective. The transition into the show’s premise is rushed and strange, but, okay, we shrug our shoulders and keep going. It’s ironic that Jonathan chooses the lifestyle of a private dick given the fact that his girlfriend has terminated the relationship because Jonathan apparently indulges too frequently with white wine and marijuana. Opening a bottle of white wine, Jonathan plops himself in front of his laptop and posts a Craigslist ad, saying he’s "unlicensed," but willing to help. And his rates are reasonable.

At this point, I’m not quite sure what Ames is trying to do. It feels like he’s trying to remake a less than great Woody Allen movie starring Jason Schwartzman for television. But I digress. Ted Danson, as Jonathan’s needy boss, George, the editor of some New York magazine, jumps whole-heartedly into this endeavor, greeting the audience and Jonathan with “do you have weed?” Once they’ve installed themselves in the bathroom, Jonathan wonders aloud why George is back on the pot. “Oh I’m just bored—I’m bored to death,” he whines. Danson, despite looking like a cross between Annie Lennox and Frankenstein, delivers in this scene, and in a later one where he appears in a bathrobe, desperate for marijuana and women.

Jonathan’s actual detective work in this episode, which involves locating the boyfriend of a missing girl at the request of her sister, is frankly, boring. The scene where he tries to order a whiskey in a bar instead of white wine gets more laughs. It’s obvious at this point that creator Ames has no intention of making the detective work clever or funny. The show’s potential lies in Danson and Galifianakis and their respective interactions with Schwartzman. There’s certainly something here—and Parker Posey and Kristen Wiig are scheduled as the next guest stars. While the conceit of the show is not unlike a Wes Anderson movie, if Schwartzman can keep the mugging to a minimum, we just might have something funny not starring Larry David on HBO.

Jessica Ferri is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can read her published work here, and her blog here.

"Morning Light" - Girls (mp3)

"Summertime" - Girls (mp3)

"Lauren Marie" - Girls (mp3)