My son Henry was scheduled to get his MMR vaccination next week. Unfortunately, he caught the R this week – the dreaded rubella, aka German measles. He’s covered head to toe in an itchy rash and is just about as miserable as you can imagine. We’re listening to soothing music to help him out – here are my picks for four discs that make a sad, rainy sick day a little easier to deal with.Japancakes – If I Could See DallasAthens, Georgia indie drone band Japancakes specializes in swirling, oceanic soundscapes anchored by beautiful pedal steel guitar. Their debut album is completely vocal-free and boasts eleven gorgeous, shimmering shoegaze jams. William Basinski – The Disintegration LoopsMinimalist composer Basinski’s most famous work was created when Basinski was trying to transfer old analog tapes to a digital format, but the aged magnetic tape began to disintegrate under the playhead, creating a rich, meditative audio document.Rafael Toral – Electric BabylandBrazilian sound artist Toral uses a heavily treated guitar, analogue synthesizer and music box to create these disarming, soothing experimental tracks that are equal parts drone and lullaby.Dirty Three – Ocean SongsThe Australian trio’s music can be a little challenging, but this 1998 album strikes a perfect balance between gorgeous compositions and waves of instrumental texture from Warren Ellis’ expressive violin. What are your favorite songs for a sick day?
As a parent, I’m always basically making it up as I go along. But every once in a while, I come up with a solution to a problem that is so obvious I slap myself in the big dumb face for not realizing it sooner.
Most recently, it was with my son’s sippy cup. Henry never really took to the bottle, so he has been drinking from a cup from some time. But every time I went to clean one out, I got so grossed out by the slimy black mold that aggregated in the nozzles of the thing. And there didn’t seem to be any way to get it out.
I tried soaking them, boiling them, trying to angle a sponge up in there, using an old toothbrush, to no avail. And then one day –eureka! I popped a Q-tip up through the nozzle, swiped it around, and all that ooze just came right off.
What stupid solutions to annoying problems eluded you for too long?
Mamas and papas will love this healthy baby food recipe too!
(For babies 6 months and up; yields 32 tablespoons)
Ingredients:
1 bag (16 oz.) peeled baby carrots
½ Golden Delicious or Fuji apple, peeled and diced
1 pinch ground ginger (optional)
Directions:
Place carrots in a pan with a steamer basket. Add enough water so that it just comes to the bottom of the basket. Bring to a slow boil, cover and steam for 5 minutes.
Add diced apple and steam for 10 minutes more.
Transfer to a blender and reserve the steaming liquid. Add ginger (optional) and 1/2 cup of reserved liquid; puree until smooth and desired consistency. Add more liquid if necessary.
Cool to room temperature. Divide into ice cube trays, cover with plastic wrap and freeze. When frozen, transfer to a freezer bag for storage.
Need the perfect baby shower gift or just need to beef up your Rockabye collection? Play our hide and seek contest to win More Lullaby Renditions of the Beatles, plus three additional Rockabye Baby! CDs of your choice, all wrapped in our deluxe gift box!
To celebrate the launch of our new blog we’re giving away 10, count ‘em, 10 deluxe gift boxes, so enter now and enter often!
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Sure, if your kid is already listening to the Cheetah Girls, the pageantry and magic of the American jug band tradition has probably already been lost on them. But if you catch them young enough, your little ones may be able to develop a love for the jaunty, clever music of the Kentucky hillbilly. And the best thing about jug band music is that you can make your own instruments.
Building instruments is a great way to teach your kids about how the physical principles of sound work – how stringed instruments make higher and lower sounds depending on the weight and tension of the strings, how the size of a resonator makes a drum deeper, et cetera. One of my favorite childhood jamboxes was my cigar box banjo, which my Grandfather made for me one mild April afternoon.
What You Need:
One cigar box. You can get these from any tobacconist for free or cheap. If your kid asks why it smells funny, tell them that that’s the smell of evil magic.
One yardstick
20 inches of molding. This you probably don’t have lying around, so head to Home Depot.
4 leather shoelaces. These will be the “strings” of the banjo.
A hacksaw and some glue. Probably not a good idea to let the kids use these.
Directions:
Glue the lid of the cigar box closed and cut a slit in the center front a quarter inch wide and six inches long in the front of the box.
Glue the yardstick to the back of the box in the center, so it runs along the longest side. Cut the molding into five inch-long pieces and three pieces that are five inches long.
Glue the short pieces lengthwise on the yardstick to be the “frets.” Glue one of the large pieces on the front of the box above the slit at the top front edge, and another about two inches from the bottom. They should all line up with each other.
Carve four evenly-spaced grooves in each of the two long strips. Tie the shoelaces around the top of the yardstick, above the first “fret,” and stretch them down over the body and through the grooves. Take the last five-inch wood piece and use it to glue down the shoelaces at the bottom of the cigar box. To tighten the strings, soak them in cold water.
You may have to remove the strings and trim them down to make them sound right. Remember that the shorter they are, the higher their pitch will be. Don’t try to actually tune this thing, you’ll just drive yourself nuts. Once it’s making good noises, hand it to your kid and let him go all Earl Scruggs.
I can’t remember when I first discovered that records aren’t necessarily made by a bunch of musicians in a room playing live. It was before I was a teenager, because I still have cassette tapes that I made of primitive multi-track recordings using my mom’s answering machine and our stereo, little-fingered guitar pluckings and piano doodles buried in a wash of static. It can be fun when your kid has learned about what sounds different instruments make to listen to music with them and try to isolate each one, singing or humming along to just the sound they make. For an awesome and fun visual aid, check out the YouTube mixes of Israeli DJ Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman. Sampling, looping and layering video footage of dozens of musicians, it’s funky, funny, and educational.
What can I say about Guitar Hero? I’m from the generation that grew up with video games, so I don’t see them as some kind of awful bogeyman that corrupts the hearts and fingers of our kids, but even I am impressed by the news that music games are inspiring more children to pick up real instruments.
Now there may be benefits for us grown-ups too – former Blondie drummer Clem Burke has announced a study to investigate the health benefits of playing the simulated drums in Guitar Hero: World Tour, to see if the physical exercise of jamming on the virtual skins can help treat obesity and other conditions. Sounds good to me!
Chicago residents have been grooving to Chic-A-Go-Go since 1996, and if you’re not in the Windy City well you’re just going to have to follow along from home. Featuring a daffy mix of music, puppets, and most of all little kids dancing their hearts out to all kinds of tunes, it’s a celebration every week. I sat down with the shows co-creator Jake Austen to give you the skinny.
Benjamin Dances with Shonen Knife
What is Chic-A-Go-Go?
For the last 13 years my wife Jacqueline and a crew of volunteers have been doing a cable access show in Chicago where we throw an all ages, genre-free TV dance party. It’s like Soul Train or Bandstand, except with 4-year-olds and college students and elderly people moving to punk rock, disco, blues, metal and jazz records. Though it’s not totally a kids show we do have a puppet co-host, some great kid dancers, and everything is appropriate for little kids (bands who come on to lip synch sometimes have to make special clean versions of their songs). We’ve done over six hundred episodes and had close to 2000 guests, including a number of Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famers and many of our musical heroes, including the Cramps, Cheap Trick, the Shirelles, Neko Case, Hasil Adkins, Rudy Ray Moore, the Effigies, Hanson, the Misfits, GZA from Wu Tang, Andrew W. K., the Pretty Things and the Residents!
Herc (in masks) go down the world famous El Line with their Chic-A-Go-Go friends
What were the inspirations for Chic-A-Go-Go? What was your motivation for starting the show?
My wife and I always loved dance shows, and we also are huge advocates of independent media (I program public affairs shows on a community radio station and do a zine; my wife is a scholar who studies lost and neglected films, and runs a home movie archive). We loved the idea of cable access (even though we didn’t get cable until we had a show) and were always interested in doing something.
Kiddie-A-Go-Go not only showed how amazing a dance show for kids can be, but also showed that it doesn’t have to be grueling work, or perfect. It can be raw, shambling, and error-ridden and still be just right, meaning the process can be as fun and loose as the product. That lack of pressure, as much as anything else, let us know this was something we could do.
The Storm Troopers of Dance
What band/artist were you most surprised agreed to be on the show?
I’m more surprised when someone completely refuses to do it. I guess I was really pleased and a little surprised that we got to to do a segment with Phil Cohran, an older eccentric jazz musician (he helped found the AACM and was in Sun Ra’s early band), and it was great because after we told him which of his records we were going to dance to he laughed and said we couldn’t dance to it because of the time signature, adding “I’d like to see that.” And then he saw it because our kids will dance to anything!
What band/artist were you most surprised the kids enjoyed?
Usually even noise bands or hard rock groups or freeform jazz guys or naughty rappers appearing on the show adjust to make it fun for kids, so that is rarely an issue, everyone makes sure kids will enjoy their performance. But what we love is that once the vibe gets going, our dancers will dance to anything, including Jandek, Christian Marclay and Sammy Davis Jr.
Ohio artist Charley Harper has long been a favorite in this house – his modernist, gorgeous depictions of the animal kingdom are kid-friendly while also being impeccably designed. Working in silkscreen and paint, Harper produced hundreds of amazing illustrations for magazines and science textbooks. Until now, the best way to get his work in your home was by purchasing the enormous Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life, but the $200 price tag is a little discouraging to the casual browser.
Help is here from an unlikely source – Old Navy has partnered with Harper’s estate to license his work for a number of products. Our favorite is the flash card set that features 26 unique Harper illos on the front and two huge floor puzzles on the back. And at only twelve bucks, it’s a steal.
My son Henry was scheduled to get his MMR vaccination next week. Unfortunately, he caught the R this week – the dreaded rubella, aka German measles. He’s covered head to toe in an itchy rash and is just about as miserable as you can imagine. We’re listening to soothing music to help him out – here are my picks for four discs that make a sad, rainy sick day a little easier to deal with. Japancakes – If I Could See Dallas Athens, Georgia indie drone band Japancakes specializes in swirling, oceanic soundscapes anchored by beautiful pedal steel guitar. Their debut album is completely vocal-free and boasts eleven gorgeous, shimmering shoegaze jams. William Basinski – The Disintegration Loops Minimalist composer Basinski’s most famous work was created when Basinski was trying to transfer old analog tapes to a digital format, but the aged magnetic tape began to disintegrate under the playhead, creating a rich, meditative audio document. Rafael Toral – Electric Babyland Brazilian sound artist Toral uses a heavily treated guitar, analogue synthesizer and music box to create these disarming, soothing experimental tracks that are equal parts drone and lullaby. Dirty Three – Ocean Songs The Australian trio’s music can be a little challenging, but this 1998 album strikes a perfect balance between gorgeous compositions and waves of instrumental texture from Warren Ellis’ expressive violin. What are your favorite songs for a sick day?
Need the perfect baby shower gift or just need to beef up your Rockabye collection? Play our hide and seek contest to win More 
