January 30, 2007 by info.

Today when I came home from work, Cole was playing his 24/7 Power Ranger jibber jabber game. After freezing me with his laser beam, he told me he would give me energy on these conditions: “Please don’t worry and don’t give up.”

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January 30, 2007 by info.

I’d like to start a poll of all five of you readers out there (hi, Mom!). If I get responses, I’ll run regularly. Best response wins free Mamarama temporary tattoos. Today’s weighty question:

Which heavily hyped, sort-of recent release do you find more unlistenable: Diddy’s Press Play or Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s Some Loud Thunder? Why?

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January 28, 2007 by info.

My husband is in the process of buying a new boat, a beautiful Island Pack named the Freedom Road. We’re selling our old Hunter, Waking Moment. These are used boats whose names we inherited when we bought them but kept, in part because we liked them, and in part because it feels like a name is a boat’s soul and shouldn’t be needlessly tampered with. But the name led us into a discussion of how you can get away with calling boats things you couldn’t in rock’n'roll.  

“Would Freedom Road be a good name for a song?” Bud pondered yesterday. He begrudgingly defers musical decisions to me, the critic.

“No, too corny.”

 ”How about a band?”

“No. I think there was a Christian rock band called Freedom Road that played my high school in Wisconsin in the ’70s. That’s not a good thing.”

“They played my school too!” Bud laughed; he lived in Michigan.

Today he read in the paper that the name of John Mellencamp’s new album is Freedom’s Road.

Told you.

P.S. My favorite boat name ever was on the dinghy of a sailboat in Olympia, which I pictured owned by two lovely old West Coast lesbians: “Row vs. Wade?”

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January 25, 2007 by info.

We were walking down Ocean Drive the other day, Cole in his stroller, grandparents nearby. We’d stopped to look at a table of wares being peddled as part of the Art Deco Festival — vintage this and crafty that — and someone’s dog snapped at him. “Sorry, he never does that!” the owner apologized. Except, of course, just did. Denial.

Cole had been cranky all day: woke up on wrong side of bed, tired of sharing me with my parents, or just his talent at being an asshole. Bitchy cur didn’t help.

Then we ran into a local publicist with whom I’m friendly. It was her first time meeting Cole, whom of course she’d heard all about before. “Hi there!” she said, in sunny PR voice and her very stylish hat.

“Go away!” Cole retorted in surly toddler faux-hawk. (The ‘do makes the man.)

“Cole!” I said. “Sorry, he’s a little cranky today.”

“That’s okay. I understand. I’ll go away, Mr. Cole.”

Cole looks up at her. “Why are you still here?”

I don’t know where he learns these things. But all my colleagues at the Herald want him to teach them to ward off flacks.

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January 23, 2007 by info.

Okay, a reunited Rage Against the Machine and Bjork? How could I not go to Coachella this year. The lineup proves that nostalgia for the early ’90s is firmly back in place. I relive that pivotal pop and political period in Mamarama; fellow music critic Rob Sheffield rhapsodizes about it in his memoir, Love Is a Mixtape; and I talked about in my interview yesterday with Yo La Tengo guitarist Ira Kaplan (to be published in Friday’s Herald Weekend section). Kaplan, in typical Kaplan fashion, was skeptical of such thinking. I generally don’t like nostalgia either. But it’s interesting to see a period that was perhaps little understood when we were all in its thrall/enthralled get revisited/revived.

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January 20, 2007 by info.

Today Vickie Starr — media entrepreneur, DJ (for my Miami launch party), author, rad chick, dear friend — was talking about my website and said, “I like your album cover.”

“You mean book cover?” I replied, and we cracked up over her music-head mistake.

I always wanted an album cover!

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January 18, 2007 by info.

I jokingly call myself a born-again breeder in Mamarama. But I hate parents who proselytize and recruit; not everyone should or wants to have kids. Many of my best friends are without child (said with intended irony).

At the hairdresser the other day (kudos to Tara at Aruj for rescuing me from my bleached, dry locks), a “head” (as stylists call them) next to me was going on about her son, telling Tara and her boyfriend how they should have kids, yada yada yada. She explained how she didn’t let her husband march with his friends in this year’s Mango Strut Parade: “I told him those days are over.” That’s a good way to encourage people to reproduce: Tell them they won’t get to do the fun things that have defined them for years.

Mamarama is in many ways a defense of the opposite: You don’t have to give up who you are to be a parent. Of course, your lifestyle will change dramatically. You will have to give up certain things, at least in extreme amounts (the parade’s only once a year). But you should still feel free to strut. Be a model of joy, self-expression and liberation for your child.

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January 17, 2007 by info.

I’ve spent the last month engrossed by Dave Eggers’ novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. The book is a fictionalized account of the journey of the real-life Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan: a youth displaced by that African country’s brutal war and raised in refugee camps. Eggers is author of the seminal generational memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a book I also loved (and that I consider one of the first neo-parenting accounts, a major inspiration for my own book). Here he turns his keen eye, sharp intellect, and fluid craft on a less narcissistic subject — a tremendously important one. Eggers brings us inside the news we read about Africa and refugees the world over. It’s sometimes nightmare-inducing, but it’s also hilarious and Deng is a charming, modest narrator. The kind of book that will change your life. And make you want to shake our politicians by the ear until they do something about Darfur.

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January 16, 2007 by info.

There’s a baby crying in the other room! Not mine: The niece of the friend of my daughter Kenda. Otis, the dog, is going crazy. He loves babies! I knew he loved Cole (my son, now 3), but I thought it was because Colio is family. But I guess he just loves babies. Like me, who knew?

So before I go any further, a million words of thanks to the creator of the website to which this blog is attached (www.mamaramabook.com, aka www.evelynmcdonnell.com): The fabulous Michelle Belleville. Applause, applause! She rules.

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