DADWAGON

This coming weekend’s New York Times Magazine story—about the tsunami of 20-somethings who are taking ages to grow up—makes me a little queasy. It’s not that the magazine has identified a fake trend, or that I’m annoyed to be reading about these silly, optimistic young people. It’s that, early on, after establishing that the phenomenon is real, the article swings away from the external factors influencing this trend and toward … psychology:

Getting to what we would generally call adulthood is happening later than ever. But why? That’s the subject of lively debate among policy makers and academics. To some, what we’re seeing is a transient epiphenomenon, the byproduct of cultural and economic forces. To others, the longer road to adulthood signifies something deep, durable and maybe better-suited to our neurological hard-wiring. What we’re seeing, they insist, is the dawning of a new life stage — a stage that all of us need to adjust to.

I guess you’d put me in that “To some” category. Why are kids moving back home, not getting married, not having kids, not advancing professionally? Um, because grown-up American life as codified by the Baby Boomers—go to college, move out, get a job, get married, have kids, get a hideous divorce—is WAY TOO FREAKING EXPENSIVE. Not to mention simply unrealistic. The jobs aren’t there, and the ones that are there don’t provide the same kind of stability our parents’ generation experienced, and the whole process of having kids is so messed up—from family leave to day care to universal pre-K—that who can imagine getting it started around, say, age 25?

And, in fact, where does this notion that these five stages of growing up are “traditional” come from? I mean, was that how it worked for anyone but the upper classes in the pre-1945 era? Once again, I get the feeling that the Baby Boomers are defining normality, and are pretending to be shocked when their children (and now, I guess, grandchildren) aren’t following the same path. AND, instead of acknowledging that their decisions have created a world where no one can have the same easy lives they had, they… they… they psychologize us.

Oh, no, it can’t be that their multitudinous fuck-ups—I’m thinking of, say, certain recent wars and banking disasters, plus too many policy failures to mention—have made their kind of lifestyles utterly unsustainable. No, that’s CRAZY TALK! Actually, kids today are different because their brain chemistry is different. Being in your twenties is special. And we all need to learn to treat these young not-quite-adults with sensitivity. Or pills. Preferably pills, because then we don’t need to think quite so much.

So, to all Baby Boomers (except, of course, my beloved parents), I say: Go fuck yourselves. Yeah, you had Vietnam, civil rights, and the Beatles, but then you grew up, got complacent, decided to mythologize your own youth, and let it all go to hell. When you’re all gone, we won’t mourn you. We’ll be too busy dealing with the mess you made—too busy, in other words, to grow up.

Dear Readers,

As some of you might have noticed, DadWagon has added a new category to the site recently: link bait. This is our sorta catchall term for posts that are really just about internet trends or stories related to parenting, but not really about our parenting lives (media, for those of you who are curious, is where we criticize other professionals).

Some highly popular posts recently written by Matt, in my humble opinion, should have been categorized under that rubric, but have failed to do so. I’m talking about Matt’s new interest in hardcore pornography (please see, here, here, and oh yeah, baby, right here). To me, if you’re writing about “adult films” on a daddy blog, you’re either making a seriously profound statement about the nature of parenting and Western Civilization, or you’re trying to drive a bit of traffic our way. More power to you, Matt, my boy–way to take ’em for the team.

Anyway, Matt’s last foray into this—dare I say it—meme (that’s right, I’m putting it in itals as if it were a foreign-language word; try to stop me!) was in his “Open Letter to Sasha Grey” (link above). Matt’s daughter shares a first name with the famous porn actress and existential philosopher, and he would like her to, I don’t know, I guess, change it?

Fine, fine, fine. All well and good. However, Sasha ain’t the only one who shares a name with a famous person. Now, the initials mean something different, but what intelligent person would fail to think of JP Morgan whenever he or she meets my son? And why not? If the shoe, metaphorically speaking, fits, then go ahead and buy the position long, short the market, and hell, while you’re at it, overthrow a third world nation (not done by Morgan, I think, but hey, I’m riffing here). To wit:

He often had a tremendous physical effect on people; one man said that a visit from Morgan left him feeling “as if a gale had blown through the house.” Morgan was physically large with massive shoulders, piercing eyes and a purple nose, because of a chronic skin disease, rosacea. His deformed nose was due to a disease called rhinophyma, which can result from rosacea. As the deformity worsens, pits, nodules, fissures, lobulations, and pedunculation contort the nose. This condition inspired the crude taunt “Johnny Morgan’s nasal organ has a purple hue.” Surgeons could have shaved away the rhinophymous growth of sebaceous tissue during Morgan’s lifetime, but as a child Morgan suffered from infantile seizures, and it is suspected [by whom?] that he did not seek surgery for his nose because he feared the seizures would return. His social and professional self-confidence were too well established to be undermined by this affliction. It appeared as if he dared people to meet him squarely and not shrink from the sight, asserting the force of his character over the ugliness of his face. He was known to dislike publicity and hated being photographed; as a result of his self-consciousness of his rosacea, all of his professional portraits were retouched.

The resemblance to my sweet little preschooler couldn’t be more clear. Oh, and as to Matt’s assertion that having the same name as a notorious public figure could lead to negative repercussions in the schoolyard, I say, JP (either one) just let ’em try! My boy will buy and sell the lot of ’em, frame their carcasses like fine oil paintings, and hang them in a museum dedicated to his ego.

Or we could just call him by his first name.

Sincerely,

Theodore

As we’ve probably mentioned before, Dadwagon is home to several mixed marriages (and, I guess, one mixed divorce). Asians figure prominently, as do Jews, with a bit of Mexican and slightly ethnic whiteness (γειά σου, Mr. Bonanos). And when I survey my circles of urbane New York friends, there’s hardly a homogeneous pairing among them. We urbanites, we like difference, I guess. We see it as a plus, because as radical intellectual communist lefties we want everyone to look and think exactly the same—sort of brownish and multilingual. Suck it, Sarah Palin!

But of all the (straight) couples I know, there’s one pairing I simply haven’t seen: a short guy with a tall girl. Oh, there may have been dates here and there—I think I even went out once with a tall Yvonne—but no lasting relationships. The converse, of course, is common. One of my dear friends isn’t even five feet tall, yet she’s married to a guy well over six feet; she calls herself a “spinner”—jokingly, I think.

So, do these couples actually exist, and in any sort of significant numbers? In a world where many of us men are happy that our wives out-earn us, where we’re happy to take on non-traditional roles like housework and cooking, where the flouting of such stereotypes is one of our great joys, why aren’t more of us involved with Amazons?

[When it comes to parenting, pornography, and Polaroids, Dadwagon’s editors are experts. But art criticism? Not so much. That’s why we called in Carolina A. Miranda, who covers art, design, and architecture for WNYC and blogs at c-monster.net, to tackle the issue that’s been perplexing us: Is the Park Slope Ghost Stroller art?]

As the New York Times reported, the Brooklyn parenting set has its Bugaboos in a twist over the highly mysterious appearance of a “ghost stroller” chained to a post on Union Street, in Park Slope—a neighborhood renowned for being New York City’s most earnest baby-making center. Is it a melancholy tribute to an infant who is no longer with us? Is it an ominous warning to parents who use strollers as traffic-abatement devices? Is it art?

What its purpose might be, I don’t know. Nor, does it seem, does anyone else. But I can report that as an artistic statement, this melodramatic monument is highly derivative. Not only does it clearly take its visual cues from Ghost Bikes— the sculptural series that began sprouting around New York five years ago in memory of slain bike riders—but it follows a long tradition of artists taking some shit and painting it white, from Cy Twombly’s all-white sculptural assemblages to Jasper Johns’s white flag to Günther Uecker’s nails on a canvas board to Robert Ryman’s pallid canvases. And, of course, there is the visual debt to sculptor Charles Long, below, whose 2003 work “Soundly Through the Noise” kinda looks like it could at one point have been a stroller chained to a signpost. (Speaking of which, this little number could be yours simply by dialing the esteemed Tonya Bonakdar Gallery.)

Even if taken less literally, the all-white motif has, by this point, been given a good work-out, incorporated into sprawling installations by the likes of Rachel Whiteread (she even has “white” in her name!) and Teutonic lair-builder Kurt Schwitters. (His stuff was pretty dang rad. Check it out.) To be truly contemporary, the stroller needs a dash of performance (à la artist Nate Hill, who is currently strolling around New York clad head to toe in white). Or it would need to have some detritus loosely arranged on top or at its perimeter, accompanied by a very long, impenetrably written statement about process. Only then, would it be ready for display at the New Museum.

As a non-breeder myself, I personally think this is less art and more of an improvised anxiety device, intended to freak out the already freaked-out. Consider it revenge for all those times you parent types have used your baby strollers as battering rams on the world’s collective shins.