Yes, indeed! Gisele Bundchen has come out heavily in favor of breastfeeding, and of course it’s made the news, because pretty much anything involving Gisele’s breasts is worth our collective time. [Ed. note: Not a joke.] To quote the interview, from Harper’s Bazaar by way of the HuffPo:
I think there should be a worldwide law, in my opinion, that mothers should breastfeed their babies for six months.
I am perfectly willing to write this off as a bit of ill-thought-out hyperbole that comes from a basically sound sentiment—”breastfeeding is a good healthy thing”—and I’m not going to bother to pick it apart. (Everyone? By law? Really? Women with mastectomies? Women working two jobs, 16 hours a day on a factory floor, to make ends meet? Ooookay.) But it does occasion a little discussion of the phenomenon of the obsessive coverage of celebrity pregnancy, which is just staggering these days. It seems to come out of the fantastically detailed coverage of starlets’ bodies. There is an entire industry, in print and on the Web, devoted to who’s eating, who should be eating, who’s bulking up, who’s flabby, and Scarlett Johansson, who is perpetually just right. (Sample blog here.)
Suddenly, with pregnancy, those same starlets look different. Some get fat; some barely grow at all. Some eat; some smoke. The bodies change a bunch over a year or so. That gives the photos variation, which is good because they tend to get boring after a while if everyone stays within a eight-pound range.
But here’s what they all have in common: a storyline. I read those tabloids and Websites, more than any intelligent person should, because I enjoy them as literary constructions. (I also like pictures of Scarlett Johansson.) You can see, week to week, as the editors construct characters and storylines out of the raw material pulled from paparazzi photos and beefed up by publicists. LeAnn Rimes is a homewrecker. Octomom is a fameseeking nutbag. Gwyneth Paltrow is a snobby twit. The stories work best when they are relatable, and nothing’s more so than a family dispute over a future spouse, which is why Kourtney Kardashian’s boyfriend has become pigeonholed as a shitheel cad. (Apparently he’s also snooty, which, in tabloidland, is worse than being a murderer.) And then come babies! One actress can’t conceive. Another one can, a little too often. Yet another is dying to have a baby, but can’t find the right guy. There you’ve got three more super-relatable narratives, right there.
This is essentially soap opera—and if you’ll notice, soap operas are dying, and I think this is why. Celebrity coverage is better, if more potentially toxic to the culture. I couldn’t write it—I’m not enough of a novelist. If you take it all together, a century from now, I wonder whether five years of Us Weekly will be equivalent, as a social document, to a fairly serious-minded middlebrow work of literature. It’s not rich enough to be the new Tolstoy, but it might squeak by as the new, I don’t know, James Michener. I hope I am wrong, but I think I am right.
JP and I are on vacation this week, visiting my mother and stepfather. It’s a good time for both of us—I get a week of round-the-clock babysitting, and JP gets seven days of blissful 100 percent attention from all the people around (not to mention about twenty desserts per day). My mother has also redone her house to tempt me and my brother to bring the grandkids to her: lots of toys, kid-friendly bedrooms, and, best of all, a pool.
Yesterday JP and I are having fun outside, swimming in the pool, and he slips and falls on the wet cement, lands on his head, and cuts himself pretty good. A bit of blood, lots of tears, some bacetracin, and all was eventually well. Today he’s going around bragging to everyone about his boo-boo, and telling all who will listen about the dangers of running around a pool.
The only issue here is that I had to discuss it with JP’s mother. Point of fact, she and I are in something of a détente phase, so it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to call her up and describe his injury, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant. No mother likes to hear the word blood used in reference to her child. She was upset, wanted to know why I wasn’t supervising him (I was), but calmed down pretty quickly.
It just served as a reminder that having kids means giving up your life in ways you might not always think of. We all know that children control you utterly—that’s a given. But perhaps we don’t always think about how much we are tied to the person with whom we have the kid, even if, as in my case, I don’t want to be. I can’t just go my own way with JP with the freedom I really want, able to make my own decisions for him. I have to find ways to cooperate with a person with whom I never managed to find ways to cooperate. It’s a challenge, and more importantly, a total drag.
JP, for his part, couldn’t care less. He was back in the pool again, not running, thank you very much, but having fun. We’re on vacation, and he’s getting away from it all.
When parents post their kids’ photos on the Internet, they often do so with a bit of trepidation, fearful (almost always without reason) that they’re inviting stalkers into their lives or, less traumatically, exposing too much of their private sphere to public view. What most fail to consider is the possible upside—that the perfect photo of their adorable baby will be adopted by Japanese Photoshoppers, who will transform it into something fascinating, mutable and alien—a meme only they understand.
This is pretty much what happened to Allen S. Rout, a University of Florida “computer geek,” who in 2000 posted on his personal Website a photo of his infant son, Stephen, with the caption “We’re really blessed. Stephen is an amazingly happy baby.” Recently, however, Allen Googled himself and found—deep in the results pages—the work of said Japanese photoshoppers, who’d turned the “happy baby” image into a bizarre, programmable graphic. Stephen had gone viral.
To find out how a family deals with such strange and sudden almost-fame, I spoke (via IM) with Allen and Stephen, who’s now 10 years old and “really, really, really” loves books.
Matt: Allen, how did Stephen become big in Japan?
Allen: Well, I had read an article talking about the prevalence of e.g. hiring committees checking one’s google reputation. It reminded me that I hadn’t googled myself for some time.
So I did so, and wandered until I was mostly encountering sports stories (‘Jim _ALLEN_ and his falcons _ROUT_ed the…’). Then I skipped 10 entries forward just for the heck of it. I noticed my name in the midst of some japanese characters, which weirded me out. I saw on the page some text that looked ripped from my old photo pages. I figured I had been scraped as filling for some anti-spam-filter chaff. Grist that looked real enough to be a real page.
But on one of the links off the page I saw that first image: the sunburst with talk bubbles around Stephen’s head. That’s the beginning.
Matt: So, some Japanese guy (or girl) was wandering around the ‘net, found your photo of Stephen, and started Photoshopping?
The original 'happy baby' image.
Allen: As far as I can tell. Successive searches have found that the same picture has been scraped by several stock image companies. Stephen currently ranks first in Google Image Search for ‘happy baby’.
Stephen: Out of thirty four and a half million!
Matt: Wow!
Allen: None of those sites credit or contacted me; his presence on them was a bit of a surprise.
Matt: Stephen, had you seen the original photo before your dad re-discovered it?
Stephen: No.
Matt: What did you think when you saw your baby-face surrounded by Japanese characters?
Stephen: I was amazed and wondering how on earth that happened.
Matt: Did you recognize yourself? Or did it seem like someone else?
Stephen: I wouldn’t have known it was me if it weren’t for the fact that Mom had previously told me that I was something of a meme, before we got home from something I was doing somewhere else.
Matt: Stephen, can you explain what a meme is?
Stephen: Uh. Someone who was mildly well known on the internet, or mildly from different degrees of well-known, I think.
Matt: Allen (and Stephen), why do you think the photo appealed to the Japanese Photoshoppers?
Stephen: I’m really not sure. Maybe they just like cute baby pictures? I must admit I do think that picture’s kind of cute. I’m not trying to be self-complimenting, it’s just an honest opinion.
Allen: I thought about that a while. I think there are just… eddies of style and opinion. It’s more or less random what catches someone’s fancy. I do think he seems almost excstatic in the shot. His joy kind of comes across. I think that’s sort of the ‘staring at mommy’ sort of joy, and since the camera was right there …. you get the full blast.
Matt: Do you each have a favorite rendition of the photo?
Stephen: I like the first version.
Allen: That’s the base one with the fill-in-the-bubbles. I like the 8-bit, and am …. compelled… by the bust statuary. I want to find out if someone is actually selling those.
Matt: Have you gotten in touch with any of these… artists?
Allen: Nope. I’ve left comments on a few of the boards. But their comprehension of my English is likely as poor as mine of their Japanese.
Matt: Allen, back when you first posted the photo, it was 2000, the dawn of the era of social networking. Did you have any idea this sort of thing might happen? Or any trepidation about posting photos of your kid online?
Allen: Pish. I’m an old fart of the internet. I cut my teeth on USENET, and was cynical about public life before there _was_ a web. I think that our current popular neurosis about kid safety is drastically overblown. Stephen is so overwhelmingly safer than I was at his age, and I ranged far afield without concern from my parents.
We are a very very safe society, and the chance that someone seeing Stephen’s picture could materially impact his safety is silly-season (In My Humble Opinion).
Matt: IMHO, too. But has Stephen’s meme-ification changed anything? What happens when a private family picture goes viral? Does the picture still have the same personal resonance—do you see Stephen the happy baby or Stephen (Memephen?)?
Stephen: No opinion.
Allen: It’s changed something… but nothing has been taken away. Christine [his wife] and I discussed this at some length over dinner yesterday, musing to Stephen about the meaning of art. Baby pictures are a particularly pedestrian variety of art, but the principles apply just the same.
When you complete a piece of art, when you release it, you let it go. At that point the “meaning” of the work is as much or more a matter of the observer than it is of the creator. And these images have gone through so many incremental transformations, so many generations of perception and reinterpretation. There is far more of “Japan Culture” in Stephen-snake-head than there is of Stephen, or Christine or Allen.
So I see the original picture as the … trunk? Root? of some quixotic, absurd structure of humor and habit. And my relationship to it is tenuous at best.
Matt: Stephen, has this made you any more curious about how Japanese culture works? Or Internet culture in general?
Stephen: Not particularly.
Matt: Have you told your friends that you’re famous in Japan now?
Stephen: A few. I haven’t had contact with very many of my friends lately because I’ve been doing a lot of stuff in the last two weeks. I’ve been doing [a local college] “College for kids” and before that I was doing VBS (Vacation Bible School).
Matt: What did the friends you told think?
Stephen: I’m not really sure. Since I’ve told them I haven’t had lots of contact with them, and we’ve been talking about different subjects.
Matt: How would you react if one of your friends told you he’d suddenly become famous on the other side of the planet?
Stephen: For a bit, I might think he’d be joking, and eventually I’d be very amazed … and wondering how it happened.
Because there’s nothing more fun than frustrating our readers, here’s a link to a video that’s entirely in German (and unembeddable): Eine Leipzigerin in New York. Why post it? Because it’s from a national German TV news report about Charlotte Richter, a German au pair who worked for friends of ours last year, taking care of three kids, one of whom is a good school-buddy of our daughter. Charlotte looked after our kids a few times as well, and is good people: on my recent reporting trip to Moscow, we met up (she moved from Manhattan au pair to Lufthansa intern in Moscow) for tea and dried horse meat at a really bitchin’ Uzbek restaurant.
The video, however, is misleading. Not because it’s false about Charlotte’s situation, but because it makes it seem like that’s what usually happens. It talks about what a sweet setup Charlotte had, living in a nice apartment on the Upper West Side, food and cell phone bill paid for, with free time to explore the city and a close relationship with both the kids and the parents of the family. It all looks attractive enough that I have no doubt that the clip will launch a thousand would-be Charlottes from their pleasant towns in Germany in search of a similar hook-up.
All I can say is, nein. Don’t come thinking you’re gonna get Manhattan. Because you’re not. You’re gonna get a room in the basement of some meth-town way outside of Cincinnati. You’re going eat McDonald’s for a year. You won’t live within 300 miles of another actual European, and your lack of a driver’s license will make you a virtual shut-in. Your biggest cultural excursion will be a trip to Glier’s Goettafest, a day of sausage-esque fun presented by the leading manufacturers of midwestern scrapple.
