DADWAGON

On the day of Halloween, we took our kids to MOVE! at MoMA PS1, a weekend-long series of performances that brought together two things that don’t occupy a lot of my (limited) brainspace: high art and high fashion.

I would like to say that we did this because we are the kind of New York parents for whom each day presents a new urban adventure, that we constantly feed our children a rich diet of the Marrow of Life, that we are forever moving between art exhibits and volunteer opportunities and cultural festivals.

But that’s not really how it goes down. We would have just as likely plopped the kids in front of some cartoons and spent the morning in a half-doldrum waiting for massive sugar attack of Halloween night to come, if it weren’t for the fact that we know and love Brody Condon, one of the artists who was presenting at PS1. And I can’t even claim some distinction from knowing Brody, an esteemed artist. It just so happens that he grew up, as I did, in Key West in the ’80s, so our connection is social and not even intellectual.

But however it worked out, my wife and I did go to PS1 (with my visiting mother-in-law!), and we did take our children with us, and it was amazing. There were Terence Koh’s spacemen, Marc Jacobs’s faux runway, Cynthia Rowley’s paint-smeared models, a fake-blood-and-glitter salon called Dance/Die! that was campy and fun, and, above all, Brody’s project. I really can’t do it justice in words, but it featured robed performers (costumes by Rodarte) with identical long staffs that they needed to keep in constant contact with each other as they circled slowly around the performance space. As with a lot of Brody’s work that I’ve seen, there was something both druid and digital about it—the long staffs functioned as a sort of pixelated electrical circuit that needed to touch for the energy to flow.

The best part, though, was Brody’s unexpected excitement at having my kids, in their full Darth-and-Yoda Halloween getups, invade the performance. For those who don’t know MoMA PS1, it is not a child-centric space. It is, on the contrary, a haven for hipsters and thinkers and others looking for the kind of ethereal experiences that children, with their boorish whining, innate consumerism, and scatalogical imperatives, tend to obliterate.

Brody has no children, but he’s got the good kind of childmind that a lot of artists seem to share. He loved the chaos and contradictions of the kids giggling and chasing each other through his hushed performance. If he—or really, any of the other incredibly friendly artists and visitors—was offended by the banality of kids dressed as Star Wars characters (albeit in homemade or modified costumes that my wife put together that were pretty stunning), there was no sign of it. He actually wanted me to take pictures of Darth (as played by Dalia) and Yoda (worn by Nico). One of my favorite pictures is above—Dalia caught in the foreground, one of Brody’s performers in the background.

I am, as a parent, easily intimidated by museums, galleries, and other adult spaces (even the grocery store) and have a habit of trying to bash my children into behaving like adults in those places. Brody was basically saying, let them do their kidstuff and see how it works in the space. It’s all an experiment anyhow.

And though I may not be the arrogant bastard Matt is, I did allow myself some prideful thoughts at how much my kids took to the whole experience. They weren’t whining for chocolate milk, they didn’t ask when they could go home to watch videos. They were totally captivated. Imagine that: excited by art.

And then, headed down Queens Boulevard on the way home, Nico got excited in a similar way. “Frog, frog,” he shouted, laughing. It took a second before we saw what he was looking at: a gigantic poster on the 7 Train overpass of the Geico gecko, a character that has become beloved to our boy, that he always greets with excitement and the exclamation “Frog!”

I had a momentary ugh-thought, about how we had allowed a CGI pitchman for an insurance conglomerate to colonize my son’s imagination. But then, I tried to channel Brody. Let them do their kidstuff, reserve judgment, marvel at how it all happens. It’s all an experiment anyhow.

Of all the evil, unnecessary products marketed toward anxious parents, Life360 may be one of the most disgusting—a sign that our society deserves whatever fiery, zombie-ridden fate awaits it. At first glance, though, Life360 seems almost innocuous, maybe even useful. It’s primarily a GPS-based system for monitoring the whereabouts of your spouse and children via smartphone (Android or iPhone), with the added bonus of tracking registered sex offenders with Google Maps. In the dangerous world of 2010, this seems like a pretty smart use of technology, right?

A few news reports and blog reviews would have you think so. Says Twice the Love:

I really cannot say enough good things about this company, or these products. The customer service is phenomenal, the products are stellar and the feeling of having piece of mind is priceless. [My husband] Scott even recommends this, especially if you are going to a crowded area, like Disney. Being in security he deals with children separated from families all of the time and products like Life360 greatly decrease the amount of time a child is separated from their parent.

Look, I understand the concept of panic. Your child goes missing from your sight, and your mind instantly imagines the worst: a kidnapping, a head-on charge into oncoming traffic, a lightning-strike raid on a box of lollipops. But how often do these nightmares happen? And what effect does an extra few minutes of delay have on the families involved?

I’d argue: Not often, and not much. I say this, of course, as one who, as a child of almost-8, got lost at an amusement park in Copenhagen. As far as I can remember, it was scary and disconcerting: blond-haired and blue-eyed, I looked just like everyone else, except that I couldn’t speak the language and didn’t know where to go. Also as far as I can remember, a mom noticed I was lost and brought me to a security office, where my father eventually fetched me. Was there lasting trauma? For me, only in the sense that now, almost 30 years later, I’m hell-bent on trying to remember how that felt. And for my dad? Not that I can tell.

The point is, kids get lost and, most of the time, kids get found. The dangers we fear the most—whether because we’ve seen irresponsible news reports or read blog posts telling us iPhones can save our children—are not the things we should be afraid of. I’ve said it before: We need to chill out, and deploying an iPhone app that literally has a panic button (“You’re about to panic,” it says, and there’s a check box for “Don’t show this again,” in case you really don’t want to know you’re acting irrationally) is not the way to do that.

But look, I get it, you worry—about street crime and sex offenders and the general nastiness of the world. You want to know where your child is walking, and who they might encounter. Well, there’s one good way to deal with this: Try walking your kid to and from school one day. Look at the neighborhood and try to figure out if it’s good or bad. Consider alternate routes if they make sense. Talk to your kid about what might be potential dangers and what probably aren’t. In other words, teach your children how to understand their surroundings and make decisions for themselves, rather than relying on advanced technology (remind me again: does GPS work indoors?) and their parents to save them from any bad situations.

And if you’re still concerned about your kid falling prey to sexual monsters, remember that the overwhelming majority of victims are abused by someone they know, often a family member. I’ve seen numbers as high as 90%.

Actually, this kind of makes Life360 make sense. Don’t quite trust that skeezy brother-in-law of yours? Sign him onto the plan ($14.91 a month!), and if he goes anywhere near your kid, hit the panic button.

[Disclosure: A marketer for Life360 suggested I review the product, but I didn’t accept any comped support. He’s probably regretting his e-mail now, too.]

Lead Us Not Into Penn Station. Last week, an old friend of mine, a prominent journalist, came in from out of town to interview my governor. Chris Christie isn’t too popular around these parts—Maplewood’s got an enormous Brooklyn diaspora, and Christie looks like your garden-variety fat-headed, fat-cat Republican: wrestling with a tight budget, he trains his sights on education and transportation. New Yorkers might be dimly aware of an enormous train-tunnel project, in the works for years and already begun, that Christie just scotched. Well, it’s a big deal to us out here in New Jersey. It would’ve been our Second Avenue Subway.

My friend accompanied me to the Maplewood train station. “See all these commuters?” I asked him. “They’re waiting for the 8:31 to Penn Station.” We checked our watches: It was now 8:50 a.m. Everyone looked resigned—all those appointments, meetings, early starts to the day—all snafu’d now. But we all know the drill: We have to be at the station right on time to catch our trains. New Jersey Transit, of course, is under no such obligation to us schlubs.

Living in New York means a hop on the subway: some jostling, some drama, a whiff of menace. Living in New Jersey means a commute, and no matter how good my karma is, I know I’ll never be in transit less than an hour each way. That’s less time to see my wife and daughter, and more exhaustion at both ends of the day. I know I should view this hour as my sanctuary. Verizon doesn’t yet sell the iPhone, so I usually read on the train. I try hard to remember that I should be fully present at home—playing with Nora, being with Rachel, instead of drifting off to read or to work. I’ve already had my leisure time. I don’t have a man-cave. I have a commute.

It also means arriving and departing Manhattan through its armpit. This was how I first saw the city, at its very nadir, when my family took the train up from D.C. one weekend. It was 1977, argubably New York City’s best and worst year in history (Ramones, Talking Heads, Annie Hall; bankruptcy, blackout, riots, Son of Sam). I remember a homeless woman kicking a cardboard box down Madison Avenue. I remember my parents clutching my brother and sister and me as close as physically possible. I remember an entire city looking like Penn Station looks now.

Whenever I glance around Penn Station, waiting to be sprung from “stand-by” (or “cancelled”) status, I think two things: One, that the commuters to Westchester would never stand for this kind of shabby treatment, being forced to stand around a grubby station until we have to stampede to our abruptly announced track. And two, that it could be worse. I could be standing at the Bedford Avenue L stop. The biggest difference between the Bedford stop and that Sebastião Salgado photograph of the Mumbai train station is that the hipsters at Bedford subsist on more than 4,000 rupees a month. So I shouldn’t complain. But complain I do. Because I do, after all, live in New Jersey.