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Jan. 6th, 2006 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fjAn ommission in the International Declaration of Human Rights, later still not corrected in the Declaration of Children's rights, is the right of every child whose parent is an artist to not have the parent create paeans to their idealized children, and then release them publicly. It is bad enough your mum or dad has a disorted idealized view of your perfect innocence, but thrusting it into the same world where you have to make your mark, decades before you can give people an idea of who you are? If the moment of having your mother pull out your baby photos, or your infant school-play cross-dressing videotape, or any documentation of your braces and acne teenage years, when a date or friend comes to visit is bad enough, imagine those documents being thrown across literary or pop charts preceding you wherever you go as some kind of perfect frozen-in-time sweet infant.
Didn't we already see how horribly wrong this went with Christopher Robin Milne? Haley Mathers will have the joy of people playing her father's demented raps chronicleing her warped broken-home celebrity-stalked childhood, including mentioning her by name and descriptions of her side of made-up dialog of what should be private family moments, wherever she goes.
And now Kate Bush makes sure that her son Bertie will be greeted by sing-song calls of "lovely Bertie, lovely Bertie" wherever he goes, distorted renditions of his mother's love for his six-year-old self, echoed in valiant and utterly misguided attempts to hit notes in a key most humans can't easily reach. Old ladies in the supermarket, his judo teacher, his teasing classmates, the lady beind the Boots counter, the gas-station attendant just before he mugs the station to make himself less lovely, the correctional officer, the judge, the kids at reform school, his college professors, the cleaning lady, the vicar, the folks at the nursing home for his mom, "lovely Bertie, lovely Bertie..."
Didn't we already see how horribly wrong this went with Christopher Robin Milne? Haley Mathers will have the joy of people playing her father's demented raps chronicleing her warped broken-home celebrity-stalked childhood, including mentioning her by name and descriptions of her side of made-up dialog of what should be private family moments, wherever she goes.
And now Kate Bush makes sure that her son Bertie will be greeted by sing-song calls of "lovely Bertie, lovely Bertie" wherever he goes, distorted renditions of his mother's love for his six-year-old self, echoed in valiant and utterly misguided attempts to hit notes in a key most humans can't easily reach. Old ladies in the supermarket, his judo teacher, his teasing classmates, the lady beind the Boots counter, the gas-station attendant just before he mugs the station to make himself less lovely, the correctional officer, the judge, the kids at reform school, his college professors, the cleaning lady, the vicar, the folks at the nursing home for his mom, "lovely Bertie, lovely Bertie..."
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Date: 2006-01-06 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 05:57 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-01-06 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 06:02 pm (UTC)Singer/songwriter Bob Franke (unknown to the pop culture world but a key figure in certain subsets of the folkie world) wrote a song for his daughter Elizabeth when she was about 3, in which he talked about "boomerang pancakes" -- her name for the shape her father's pancakes took in the round pan (or something). I recently had occasion (it was a legitimate part of a conversation with my friend Jim) to note that I didn't know Bob Franke's daughter Elizabeth but I knew her name for funny-shaped pancakes. Jim said, with an eyeroll, "Everybody knows Elizabeth's name for funny-shaped pancakes."
Elizabeth, whom I still don't know, is now in her mid-twenties but this hasn't stopped her father (whom I do know and whom I think very, very highly of) from writing songs about/for her. When he and her mother divorced many years later he wrote a song called "Love Bravely, Elizabeth", which includes this chorus:
So love bravely, Elizabeth. Love when you're crying inside.
Hold on to your wishes, but love with your eyes open wide.
Love like your mama loved me, like I loved her when I learned to see
That the love that remains as we change is our surest guide.
I actually like the song, and Elizabeth is old enough to take care of herself (and doesn't require the child's bill of rights), but, um, yeah.
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Date: 2006-01-06 06:18 pm (UTC)"Goodnight, Little Arlo, Goodnight"
Date: 2006-01-06 07:12 pm (UTC)Re: "Goodnight, Little Arlo, Goodnight"
Date: 2006-01-06 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-07 04:56 pm (UTC)At first I thought, "Well, here's a parent trying hard to undo the damage."
Then I thought, wait a minute, I bet Arlo owns the Woody catalogue nowadays.
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Date: 2006-01-06 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 07:46 pm (UTC)Re: "Goodnight, Little Arlo, Goodnight"
Date: 2006-01-06 07:35 pm (UTC)I woke up in a dry bed, Mommy come see!
I woke up in a dry bed, Daddy hey look!
I woke up in a dry bed, dry feet and a dry head,
I am a big boy now.
For the full lyrics (slightly different than the ones my father sang) you can go here.
Yeah, there definitely ought to be a child's bill of rights.
Re: "Goodnight, Little Arlo, Goodnight"
Date: 2006-01-06 08:13 pm (UTC)Re: "Goodnight, Little Arlo, Goodnight"
Date: 2006-01-07 02:17 am (UTC)I just thought I'd share that.
Re: "Goodnight, Little Arlo, Goodnight"
Date: 2006-01-07 06:40 am (UTC)Re: "Goodnight, Little Arlo, Goodnight"
Date: 2006-01-07 04:51 pm (UTC)