DADWAGON

Via DadWagon friend @CMonstah (“the Zen master of the hi-lo” who was, as if you hadn’t heard, called one of the 9 twitterers to read out of millions), comes this spoofy impression of German director Werner Herzog reading Curious George. For anyone who has even briefly contemplated the cruelty of George’s forced expatriation to the Big City, enjoy:

One cannot help but wonder, whether a creature of the true jungle can find actual happiness in a facsimile such as the zoo. Or whether his and the other animals’ terrible nature will someday overcome the walls and attack human society from within.

If this caricature of a self-important Mitteleuropean film director seems over the top, consider that the actual Werner Herzog was much, much worse. In this classic clip, he rhapsodizes about the brutality of the Peruvian jungle on location for 1982’s Fitzcarraldo (a film whose set became so poisonous that a local chieftain reportedly offered to kill lead actor Klaus Kinski for Herzog). Here’s Werner:

The trees here are in misery. The birds here are in misery. I don’t think the sing, they just screech in pain.

As someone who once sat through Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu, I can say that Herzog knows a good deal about making other creatures, especially film-goers, screech in pain.

No, they don’t–but I will offer a compromise position if you read on.

I should begin by explaining that I am a longtime resident of Murray Hill, a neighborhood that was the epicenter of of fashionable Manhattan living around 1915. By the early 1990s, it was a little shabby but pleasant–it wasn’t decayed, just kind of old-biddy-ish. Because it was frumpy, apartments here were substantially cheaper than in the hip East Village to the south and the sleek Upper East Side to the north. Around a decade ago, because it was cheap but not culturally interesting, the uncoolest new arrivals in town started moving here: Frat boys and sorority girls, by the dozens, hundreds, thousands, all of them newly graduated and doing their brief stints in New York before pairing off and heading to the suburbs. Today, if you walk up Third Avenue in the thirties on a warm summer night,  you run a gamut of sports bars and loungey restaurants, the crowds pouring onto the sidewalk to smoke and/or vomit, the guys in banker-blue shirts and cargo shorts, the girls in handkerchief tops. All of them are saying things like “dude, I am SOOOOO wasted.”

My point being, these bars are not fit for children. Or adults. The only people who belong there are somewhere in between.

But (I hear you say) what about a nice neighborhood bar, where you can have a quiet drink in the evening with friends? Chances are, if it’s a place you want to be in New York, you’re not the only one who likes it, making it too raucous for babies. (Except at three in the morning, at which point if you’re bringing a kid in, your problems are above my pay grade.) As for the pleasant-sounding pub Matt brings up in his post, I’d say that such family-friendly places are essentially extinct in Manhattan. They’re the lifeblood of London, and in fact bringing a kid along to the pub now and then isn’t particularly out of line there.

But back to the truce I’d like to suggest: There is a point, from about 3 p.m. until the after-work crowd arrives around 5 or 6, when most bars are open but deserted.  How about we all agree to a kid-friendly hour or two, when strollers are welcome and kid-hostile people know to stay away. The plan works for everyone: Parents get to meet up and relax over a drink, their kids get the small thrill of exposure to minor adult vices, bar owners sell a few drinks they wouldn’t otherwise get to, and the grownups get the bar all to themselves later on.

Best of all: It’s not as if we new parents are staying up late anyway. May as well cede us the early shift.

Parents! The disposable-diaper world has been rocked by controversy!

Right now, Pampers is rolling out an improvement to its products, calling its Dry Max technology a revolutionary change in pee-sopping. (Briefly: More liquid-absorbing gel inside, and less papery pulp, creating a thinner diaper.) Ad Age reports that a small minority of consumers have been making a large majority of a stink over this, and goes on to note that one guy has commented on 75 sites, trashing this new product. Apparently he and a few other parents are finding the new diapers stiff and leaky.

In the meantime, Pampers has gone merrily on its marketing push, signing up a bunch of Olympic athletes in order to emphasize the product’s high-performance aspects. Or, as a corporate veep from Procter & Gamble puts it, “Pampers is delighted to give all babies the chance to be awarded for their everyday medal-worthy performance.” Those endorsers get special “U.S.A.”-printed diapers for their kids. Not available in retail stores, even.

I think P&G’s only mistake here was not to play these two situations off one another. You, Mr. Commenter With a Mission? You’re trashing our new diapers, spreading bad word of mouth around the Internet? Are you aware that America’s Olympic athletes use these, and that some of our diapers are even printed with the sacred name of our nation? You, sir, hate America. And until you start wrapping your child’s nether parts in our products, the terrorists have won.

(N.B.: For the record, my wife and I are even more un-American. We buy those unbleached Seventh Generation diapers, which are probably part of a Communist plot.)

(This is the Tantrum, in which the four Dadwagon editors debate an important, or sometimes pointless, issue in parenthood.)

In New York City, there are many ways of getting attention. Some are hard, like rescuing someone who’s fallen onto the subway tracks or spending $185 per vote to get yourself re-elected mayor. Some, however, are beyond easy—like complaining about babies in Brooklyn bars.

This happens every couple of years. A bar bans strollers, and suddenly the blogs and mainstream media become an echo chamber of uninformed opinion. This year, the kick-off comes from Park Slope resident Risa Chubinsky, who declares, “I refuse to share my bar space — the last refuge for single Slopers — with infants.” And so, into the echo chamber! Do children belong in bars?

Abso-fucking-lutely. Oh, wait, you said in bars? I thought you said behind bars! [Ba-dum ching!] Okay, but still, let’s look at the arguments against them first, pulling from Ms. Chubinsky’s piece:

• “If I go to the bathroom to correct my wayward mascara at the end of a long weekend night, I don’t want to watch a baby being wiped down on the soggy sink counter.”

This makes no sense. So what if you see a baby getting wiped down or hear a kid whining? Lots of things happen in bars that we don’t want to see or hear—makeout sessions, dumb jokes, vomiting, Brazilian models discussing their taxes (seriously, that took all the allure out of Brazilian models for me). You either tune them out, or you go elsewhere. But getting annyoed at the mere presence of something? Learn to deal, babe.

• “No matter what breeders might think, bars are not family-friendly.”

Now, I’m not really sure what she means by family-friendly. If she means that toddlers may discover electrical sockets, dark corners, dust, lit candles and other hazards, then no, they may not be not family-friendly. But those are things parents watch for. If, on the other hand, she means the presence of alcohol, and of people consuming it, then once again I’m perplexed. Or rather, driven to make an argument: that watching adults drink—and behave like adults—is a Good Thing.

Back in Amherst, Massachusetts, my parents often took us to dinner at a place called simply The Pub, and while waiting for food to arrive, I’d often wander over to the bar area, where the videogames were, and watch older people talk, drink, flirt, and play pool. I looked at the little plastic tubs of maraschino cherries and cocktail onions. I saw frothy pitchers of beer. My parents would drink too, but not get drunk. Consequently, I like to think, alcohol never seemed like that big a deal—something to indulge in, if I wanted, or just ignore. And in fact, I didn’t drink a drop till I turned 21, and have drunk (mostly) responsibly ever since.

• Ms. Chubinsky winds up the piece by imagining herself “maybe 15 years in the future, happily sipping my suds with friends at a neighborhood bar. We would be pretty much the same then as we are now — loud, maybe a little raucous, thankful for the escape from reality and happy in the knowledge that our children and their sitters were safe at home, where they belonged.”

So, I’m supposed to get a sitter every time I want to go out for a little while? Wow, okay, I’m down with that if Ms. Chubinsky can recommend someone who’s affordable and available all the time. But what if, as is often the case, it’s 5:30, the nanny has just left, my wife’s not home for another 90 minutes, and I haven’t left the apartment in 72 hours because I’ve been working nonstop?

And so, here’s the point: Just because you have children doesn’t mean you’ve exiled yourself from society. Bars are places to relax with a drink, yes, but they’re also places to feel connected to the world around you, to meet new people and share experiences. If kids, from a very young age, can see bars that way, rather than as places simply to get smashed and sob about break-ups, then maybe it’ll do something about the serious drinking problem this country has. And to that I raise my glass.

Caveats: If your kid is crying or causing trouble, take them home. If it’s after 8pm, take them home. If you’re getting too tipsy, take them home (in a cab or subway).