Elmo, meet your match...

[Typing this as I crawl back up onto my chair having virtually fallen over from laughing too hard...]



Only Ricky Gervais would dare give the eternally 3-year-old reigning prince of Sesame Street a hard time for the incongruity of wearing pajamas when he's naked the rest of the time; only he would give Elmo such a jab the poor muppet looked like he was going to fall over himself; and only a brilliant British comic would broach the subject of necrophilia on a children's show on public television.

I love Jude soooo much for forwarding this to me... :)

(via The Huffington Post)

Kidding around

Finally! After years of posting about Sesame Street and my favorite guest appearances (see here and here), in preparation for the show's 39th (!!!) season, Entertainment Weekly has put together a list of 25 Classic Sesame Street Visits. It's so awesome to see some of my favorites making the list (notably Norah Jones, James Stewart, R.E.M., Andrea Bocelli, and Feist). New ones to love- James Blunt and Telly in a melancholic duet (losing your triangle shouldn't have to be so sad...):



and Richard Pryor's expressive, irrepressible recitation of the alphabet:

Brought to you by the letter F and the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4

[Inspired by Dark Orpheus's post.]

Jude and I have long been fans of Feist and loved her performance at the Blind Pig when she was in Ann Arbor in 2006. When her video for "1-2-3-4" first came out, we were so taken by it that Jude had blogged about it here. It continues to be one of our favorite music videos, if for nothing else, the choreography, her exuberance and the fact that it was probably all done in one take. Now that's masterful...

Anyways, Feist has now joined the legion of some of my favorite artists who have appeared on Sesame Street. Her appearance is scheduled to premier in August but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the clip got leaked which is how I'm able to share with you this delightful wonder of her counting with monsters, penguins and chickens! I'm not sure how to convey the sheer awesomeness that is the video except to say that I've played it several times since this morning and my day is all the brighter for it! See if you can pick out the different points at which they've recreated elements from the music video... :)

La La La La... Linoleum

The highlight of my otherwise excruciatingly stressful day...



As always, it takes a children's show to remind you of the beauty of words and smile :)

"Sunny day, sweepin' the clouds away..."

Many people still don't believe that a large part of the work I do on my research project is to watch Sesame Street clips. Honestly though, it's not always as cute and fluffy as it sounds. There's only so much of a little red self-referential, third-person speaking muppet one should be allowed to tolerate in a day, and watching 20 years worth of Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood gets just that tad asphyxiating after about 10 hours.

There are moments of course, when I'm watching these things, and one or two of them just jump out at you, and you go, "Ok, for this, the past 4 hours of Elmo's World was worth it..." These are usually the ones that either remind me of when I was a kid, or the ones that have something entertaining for the child, but also a sly side joke for the adults watching with them (invariably featuring some celebrity guest). And that was one of the founding principles behind Sesame Street- that it would be a program that encourages low-income families to watch together. Here's are just some of my favorites:

One of my all-time favorite celebrity appearances on Sesame Street: R.E.M. doing "Furry Happy Monsters". It even has a muppet version of Kate Pierson from the B-52s doing back-up vocals for those adults craving that element of authenticity. We're using this clip to teach children about Emotions:


The letter "Y" is always a difficult one to teach children because they sometimes confuse the sound with "E". But why worry when you have chanteuse, Norah Jones to help? (the video's a little wonky in the beginning...)


This one got my entire research group roaring in laughter when we saw it. Patrick Stewart doing the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet, but about the letter "B" instead. I'm not sure how accessible this is for kids though- I think this one definitely tickles the parents more:


Ok, I have to confess, I've watched this next clip at least 20 times. Every time someone new joins our group, we make them watch it as an initiation rite of sorts. If they choke up at it too, they're ready to join the project. Until today, NO ONE who's watched this has not liked it (except maybe Jude coz he's heard me- and all my friends- talk about it to death). For you parents out there, this is a really good one to show kids just before they go to bed- I promise :)

Hey... you... guys!!!!!!!

You know those moments you have after you've watched a really good movie by your favorite director, and you wished you could just meet them in person and tell them what a great job they did, and how their movies have profoundly changed the course of your life and you would appreciate it very much if they could adopt you as their charity case? Well, it was a little like that for me today, though not the movie director and adoption part. So as some of you know, the project I'm on works closely with Sesame Street, and is also partially funded by the Department of Education and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which runs PBS and NPR). So the other people at the presentation today were producers of all these shows on PBS- like Sesame Street- who are also supported by the DOE. And guess what? I got to have lunch with the very people who created Between the Lions, Blues' Clues (they have a new show coming out in Sept '07, for all you parents out there... and are such wonderfully funny people), Zoom (the now online-only science program that Sam loved when she was younger), and get this Eric and Amy, the man who brought Thomas the Tank Engine to the U.S.!! I spoke to him actually and told him how I know a 2 year-old who would give anything to hang out in his office. He gave one of those full-bellied laughters only a man above 60 who's worked with kids is capable of giving... :)

I also met the puppeteer behind Bear in the Big Blue House and Sesame Street, and the most awesome of all, I discover that the woman I've been in contact with for the past month about this presentation used to work at Cartoon Network and was in charge of creating the Powerpuff Girls, Rugrats, and Dexter's Laboratory!! If all this means nothing to you, that's coz you don't have a sister 17 years younger than you who made you spend so many hours so many years ago plonked in front of the TV with her... These characters were such a huge part of her formative years, they were practically family.

Anyways, it was just heartening for me to learn about all the effort and care that goes into producing a children's TV show, especially ones that try to reach out to low-income children in order to teach literacy and numeracy (a certain yellow sponge was brought up disparagingly several times as being antithetical to all that these people are trying to do...) The research behind it all, the testing and trialing with the kids in actual settings (it's a little like user-testing really), we were shown storyboards of brand new seasons of many PBS shows, mock-ups, scripts- it was so exciting, I felt like a kid all over again!

But the piece of news that really thrilled the socks off me is that PBS is going to bring back The Electric Company!! For those of you not old enough to remember the Electric Company, it was conceived in the '70s by the Children's Television Workshop, building on the success of Sesame Street, but targeted at older children. It was cool, groovy, hilarious, and so much fun. And most importantly, it focused on teaching literacy skills to pre-teens who were otherwise not getting it anywhere else. That was when I first encountered Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno (she's the voice that screams, "Hey-You-Guys!!!!!"), and the Spiderman (a.k.a. Spidy) who spoke only in bubble words. It was such a big part of my Saturday afternoons as kid that when I saw some of the old footage today, I could feel my heart just swell three sizes larger :)

One of the highlights of the new Electric Company is that they've gotten the help of Freestyle Love Supreme, an improv hip-hop troupe. Their specialty is improv rap, which is perfect for teaching literacy components like rhyming, phonics and decoding. You have to listen to one of the tracks on their MySpace site where fans challenge them to come up with a rap with the word "orange". It's brilliant!

So yes, Electric Company 2.0- and you heard it first here :)

"...where is the schoolgirl who used to be me?"

The title is a quote from Joan Didion's 1967 essay, "Goodbye to All That" about her moving from California to New York, and back again after 8 years here. Apart from having gone to her reading- the circumstances surrounding which I will unload upon you in a bit- the quote also speaks to how I've been feeling working at Sesame Street these last 2 days. I lost count of how many of the clips I watched that were the very same ones I saw when I was still in primary school, when Sesame Street only came on at 1pm on Saturday afternoons because we didn't have early morning cartoons then yet. So many of the newer ones continue to capture my wonder, making me smile whimsically at how clever they are for the sake of parents who are watching with their kids, but also sweet and lovable in ways that have endeared Sesame Street to countless of children for generations. There was Patrick Stewart as Hamlet doing the "To B(e) or not to B(e)" soliloquy in order to teach children about the letter "B", R.E.M. singing "Furry Happy Monsters" in the clip on emotions (Michael Stipe's just having a whale of a time!!), and a mock school pageant with the entire muppet cast of Sesame Street depicting the changing of the seasons that made me clap out loud at the end from sheer delight. I want to believe that the schoolgirl who used to be me is still firmly anchored in there somewhere, that I'll never get too jaded by grown-up shenanigans to appreciate the simple, happy things in life, that I will never become too cynical to sing along with Ernie everytime he sings about his rubber duckie, and that in 20 years, I'll be just as enthralled by the talking typewriter as I was when I was seven.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
-Tom Stoppard

Ok, so about the Joan Didion reading: the reading itself was wonderful- frightfully sad though. I don't think it was as hard for her to read from "The Year of Magical Thinking" as it was for the audience to hear it, the grief so stridently stark that it hurt to listen to it expressed out loud. There was nothing overwrought or elaborate about the way she wrote and read about her husband's death- their earlier visit to their daughter at the ICU, the dinner she was preparing, the scotch he was drinking, the moment he stopped talking, the way her apartment was transformed into an emergency room, and the mental notes she was taking through it all- everything was described directly, plainly, austerely. And painfully.

People sat reverently silent throughout the reading, no one left even when it started to rain (I hid in futility under my waterproof map...). But I decided to leave after the reading, missing the interview portion of the evening coz I wanted to get out of the park before it turned dark and before the rain got any heavier. Knowing my luck, it was not to be of course; not only did the rain get heavier, there was lightning, I got lost twice (once from finding myself on the wrong side of the park, and the other from taking a wrong turn into a parking lot instead...), the sky was fast turning dark from the rain clouds, and as adequate as my map was in navigating me through the city, it made a lousy brolly. [Note to self: denim gets very heavy when wet, as my legs found out as they were encased in my increasingly drenched jeans.] I finally got myself out of the park onto Central Park West, walked 5 more blocks in the rain, reached my hotel room only to spend the next hour drying out my shoes and suede leather satchel... Nerve-wrecking, to say the least, but I survived :)

Will be off to a couple of street fairs tomorrow in the day before I go home. I missed them the last time we were here coz I was at the Met with Billie while Jude & Yong hung out in SoHo. I'm not expecting to buy anything, but it'll be fun to browse the markets instead of going into another store that looks like every other one anyway... I'll be glad to be home actually- after a very discombobulating foray through a very loud, very boisterous, very neon Times Square the other day, I'm looking forward to returning to the quiet green of Ann Arbor. I think I've been so spoiled by the open expanse of what we have there that the city has become just a tad suffocating. I just want to go back to where I can freely walk to the grocery store in my flannel PJs at two in the morning and no one would bat an eyelid coz they're in theirs too...

Alone in the Big Apple

Ok, you haven't seen a small hotel room until you've been to the Comfort Inn Central Park West. We're talking seriously small people, like hobbit small. It's probably only slightly wider than our kitchen... Seriously. Once you open the door, it's ONE step to the bed, and another two to the bathroom (no, I take that back, it's just one more step to the bathroom...). If I were claustrophobic, I would have collapsed upon entry. But apart from that, this hotel's actually kinda cool- comfy bed, clean bathroom, cable TV (although they sadly don't have the Food Network- what's wrong with these people?!), safe and quiet location, a skip and a hop from Central Park and Sesame Street so I don't have to deal with traffic or commuters, and best of all, FREE WIRELESS!! Did I say FREE?? :)

So here I am in New York on my own for work. Have to spend the next two days in Sesame Street watching videos for eight hours straight. I know- sounds fun you say... Talk to me again after you've watched coutless "Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?" clips and hours on end of Elmo's World... You'll be begging me to put on some serious Boris or Acid Mothers Temple just to regain some semblance of perspective and sanity...

I did manage to squeeze in some sightseeing today which was great- had the best egg tarts (yes, note the plural noun and the fact that eating counts as sightseeing for this girl ;)...) this side of the world which so warmed the cockles of my heart I thought I was going to cry. It had just come out of the oven so the pastry was all crumbly and meltingly buttery, and the custard, still warm and wobbly soft. It was sheer ambrosia... I do have to say though that the other flavors of egg-tarts that they had on display looked much less tempting- there was a Chernobyl green honeydew egg-tart, and a strawberry version that looked like someone spilled cheerleader-pink nail-polish into the custard... Walking around Chinatown was actually kind of depressing- all that glistering fresh seafood (we're talking whole fish, people, not whimpy fillets masquerading as the real stuff, piles upon piles of green Asian veggies, and luscious fruits that don't cost more per pound than premium beef. All within the budget of a poor grad student...

I finally made it to the New York Public Library which is an awesome building in and of itself. The lions- Patience & Fortitude- were suitably impressive, and Bryant Park which is just next to the library looked like a lovely place to spend the day had the weather not been so dreadfully sweltering... They're having an interesting exhibition- Poets and Artists in Dialogue- that showcases some lesser known illustrations of masters like Picasso, Manet and Chagall, and it was kinda refreshing to encounter their work in such a different context.

I'll be too busy with work the next couple of days to do see much more of the city, but I plan to check out the Columbia University campus tomorrow, hopefully catch Shakespeare at the Park (they're playing Macbeth- I'm excited...), Joan Didion's doing a reading from "Year of Magical Thinking" at the Park on Friday (which I'm afraid will be frighfully depressing, but good nonetheless), and there's the street vendors in SoHo on Saturday morning. I only wish Jude were here with me instead of in the middle of Indiana presenting his poster. Travelling's just not the same without him...

Sesame Beginnings

Ok, so Sesame Street may be about as far from MySpace as Elmo is from dana boyd, but I came across something that perhaps not-so-obliquely piggybacks off Jude's post about MySpace yesterday. Read in the NYT today that Sesame Street has produced a new DVD targeted at children between 6-months and 2 years old, "Sesame Beginnings". Apparently this has gotten a Boston-based advocacy group all huffy and puffy, and they've come out publicly to criticize what they see as the psychedelic warlordism of fluffy muppets and the larger apocalypse of The Television's terrorizing hegemony.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that all you parents out there go run and get a TIVO-enabled, cable-ready, 40-inch TV just for your little tot- in fact, the work I'm doing with Sesame Street right now isn't persuading me very much that TV alone helps children's learning...- but I do think that there's something to be said about being overly rabid and paranoid. Can't people let kids just enjoy themselves anymore? Does everything have to be about a cause, or an issue that has to be advocated and debated over? I felt the same way with the furor over Teletubbies "corrupting" children and Rainbow Brite being demonic- hello?? And I'm sure Mr. Potato Head is a actually a diabolical vegetable-only fiend in disguise, bent on taking over the world and making spuds the official food of the universe.

Yes, there is something that's definitely not right when parents use television as a substitute for human interaction and stimulation, and in replacement of other activities like reading or playing outside; but when that happens, should we point the accusing finger at the box, or should we ask ourselves why these parents think that using the TV as a babysitter is acceptable in the first place? I don't think that all children's television is good- a purple dinosaur and floating gelatinous sparkies comes to mind- but I know wonderful parents who use TV as just another tool, like books, to bond with their children, and help them develop positively, on top of other things they do together like hiking, playing at the playground, going to museums, or simply just spending quiet, quality, media-free time at home. With the right scaffolding, some children's programs can help children learn language better and faster, and also introduce them to a world their sometimes sheltered lives cannot.

[steps down from soapbox]

Ok, having said that, a particular googly-eyed, ruby-clothed muppet still annoys the heck out of me. And even worse when he starts to sing...

...this made me realize something about the experts in Boston. They were more than a little Luddite in their opposition to "Sesame Beginnings," as if technology itself — a screen of any kind! — would harm children, who ought presumably to gaze only at sunsets, shake wooden rattles and cuddle corn-husk dolls. This seemed unrealistic, to say the least, and possibly even discriminatory, like the old anti-disco edict that decreed that good music could be played only on fancy guitars and expensive drum kits. The drum machine — like the television — strikes music snobs as lazy and unwholesome. Good parents don't rely on crutches like television, which delights babies without enough parental exertion. I didn't buy it."
- Virginia Heffernan, NYT

Can you tell me how to get...

So guess what I spent the weekend doing? Research. On Sesame Street! Oh the bliss... The new project I'm on from this semester is focused on developing a literacy curriculum targetted at disadvantaged children, and Sesame Street is providing us with clips from the show to incorporate in our lessons. We might even be going to New York sometime this term to watch some of its production.

Basically, I spent the weekend going through tons of Sesame Street archived clips and materials and developing a set of criteria for what a good clip ought to be like. It was great to say the least- not just revisiting Ernie and Bert and Snuffalopagus (is this even how you spell Snuffy's real name?), but really getting into the whole job of understanding what Sesame Street was originally conceived to do- help underprivileged children learn while they were being left in front of the TV. I mean, the Muppets aren't just there to be cute (although honestly, someone should give Elmo a dose of Ritalin...), they have been intentionally designed to act in ways that not only captivate children, but also to help them develop a sound vocabulary and a sense of language mastery. I had never thought to consider this so carefully before. Analyzing each clip so intensely does take some of the joy out of watching the clips, but still, watching Sesame Street as research? I'm not complaining...

Anyway, I'm off to D.C. tomorrow for a training seminar. It's fully paid for by the National Center for Educational Statistics and they're putting me up at some swanky hotel in the middle of the city. The last time I was in D.C. was more than 10 years ago and only for a day (it was part of a whirlwind 10-city in two weeks tour where I got chicken pox in Disneyland, but that's another story...); but just my sorry luck, the seminar's from 8.30- 5.00 everyday which means I won't be able to check out any of the museums and galleries... *crap*... But the area I'm staying at is supposed to be pretty trendy so we'll see, I might still be able to see some interesting shops and soak in what I can of D.C.'s sights and sounds.