September 25, 2012
My love of Billy Joel is not ironic.
I celebrate the man's entire catalog.
Read this article, watch the videos, and try to love Billy Joel.
Joel's strength isn't style, but craft and enthusiasm. He loves rock and roll, and the broader pop songwriting tradition, so a) he learned a lot about writing in those traditions, and b) he applied what he learned so that his songs deliver what he loves about them to an audience that loves them as much as he does. As such he has pretty much zero hope of ever being critically rehabilitated the way even as square an act as, say, Hall and Oates has been – Darryl Hall is a specialist who became a star because people were attracted to the thing he specialized in, Billy Joel a generalist who became a star because he offered the musical equivalent of a Chinese-food menu – the perfect iTunes artist. He'll always be out of bounds, which makes exploring his stuff so freeing.
The Key to Parenting: Not Wanting Kids
I have two stepkids of my own, ol' whats-his-face and his little sister, whats-her-face. When I first met them, they were 8 and 11, but now they're older. (I'm not sure of their ages, but I think I got a text from the boy a couple of weeks ago, so I'm pretty sure he's like an adult now. I think.) Every other weekend, they would come over to our house and eat all of my Apple Jacks and watch Nickelodeon until I took the remote and changed it to Forensic Files. I did that because:
A) It's my TV
B) They should know leftover semen is a huge tattletale, and
C) Everyone should know it's called a Blood "Spatter" Expert, not Blood "Splatter" Expert.
I never wanted to have kids, but that doesn't make me a bad step-parent; in fact, it gives me a leg-up on other parents. When you go into parenting not wanting the kids to be there, you're automatically miles ahead of the other parents. More often than not, parents "love" their kids and fawn all over them. They let them do things like talk at the dinner table, or make eye contact with them. These are all huge no-nos in my parenting book. My dad used to say, "Kids are to be seen not heard." I agree with that, but it's a dated statement. In my world, kids are not to be seen or heard from until they're 18, and they are definitely never allowed to sing. That's just insanity.
Why Kids Should Grade Teachers
Nubia Baptiste had spent some 665 days at her Washington, D.C., public school by the time she walked into second period on March 27, 2012. She was an authority on McKinley Technology High School. She knew which security guards to befriend and where to hide out to skip class (try the bleachers). She knew which teachers stayed late to write college recommendation letters for students; she knew which ones patrolled the halls like guards in a prison yard, barking at kids to disperse.
If someone had asked, she could have revealed things about her school that no adult could have known. Once Nubia got talking, she had plenty to say. But until that morning of her senior spring, no one had ever asked.
She sat down at her desk and pulled her long, neat dreadlocks behind her shoulders. Then her teacher passed out a form. Must be another standardized test, Nubia figured, to be finished and forgotten. She picked up her pencil. By senior year, it was a reflex. The only sound was the hum of the air conditioning.
Teachers in the hallway treat me with respect, even if they don’t know me.
Well, this was different. She chose an answer from a list:Sometimes.
This class feels like a happy family.
She arched an eyebrow. Was this a joke? Totally untrue.
In towns around the country this past school year, a quarter-million students took a special survey designed to capture what they thought of their teachers and their classroom culture. Unlike the vast majority of surveys in human history, this one had been carefully field-tested. That research had shown something remarkable: if you asked kids the right questions, they could identify, with uncanny accuracy, their most—and least—effective teachers.
Today's Photos:
Our cheer after badminton practice.
As an older cat, Hobbes now gets time in the yard.
He uses this time to eat the grass.
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