We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

A few years ago I was putting together a small kids album for my son and I asked a bunch of my friends to record some songs. As tends to happen I got about half way through before being taken away by more pressing projects. The other day I unearthed this track, which I thought might be nice to share with the world. It features a pre-Little Joy Binki Shapiro, Jason Boesel of Rilo Kiley and Mystic Valley Band fame, and James Valentine of Maroon 5 coming together to create a beautiful piece of children’s inspiration based on the Dr. Seuss classic “Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?”

What an amazing combination of people… Enjoy!

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Contest ends Friday!

As a kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Chris Van Allsburg’s interests lay firmly in the math and science camp, though he sketched a bit in his spare time. When a college admissions officer noted that the University of Michigan had an Architecture and Design department during Van Allsburg’s interview, the younger decided to hoodwink his way into the program by claiming that his art skills were too advanced for high school art classes (of which he’d taken none.) The ploy was successful.

Van Allsburg’s first illustrated work was published in 1979, and since then he’s produced 18 books in total, including all-time classics  Jumanji and The Polar Express. Van Allsburg’s illustrations have a soft glow to them, as though each image were viewed through a damp mist. His manipulations of light and shadow are super-expressive, easily conveying wonder, coziness, danger, and a host of other moods. This ability to conjure the nuances of childhood emotion is what establishes Van Allsburg among the great illustrators of his generation.

Today the author lives in Providence, Rhode Island and enjoys tennis, biking, and hanging out with his children. He can also play the recorder with his nose.

New Where The Wild Things Are limited edition shoes and T shirts are in stock now from our friends at Lakai.

You could call it déjà vu, but that wouldn’t exactly hit the nail on the head. What we need is a word to describe “nostalgia for things we haven’t even experienced”. Things like transistor radios, soda counters, and rabbit-earred televisions. Wes Anderson is a connoisseur of this sensation. No doubt the French have ten different words for it.

For those who enjoy that particular mixture of recognition and longing, there are better places in which to wallow than on eBay. Namely J. Peterman, an outfit rigorously devoted to That Feeling and offering all manner of things to invoke it: the pipe that Mark Twain toted, a leather bomber that replicates those worn by the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1927, and the kind of wool sweater that Captain Ahab likely wore before being smoked by Moby-Dick (spoiler alert?)

Best of all are the monkey socks. J. Peterman really killed it with this one. Rockford “red heel” socks are those iconic wearables found on the feet of Ansel Adams, John Kennedy and Albert Einstein, among others. Constructed from chocolate-brown heather with a cream border and that fire-engine heel, the Rockford socks could easily be the only pair of socks you ever wear.

It’s hard to imagine the unease that adults felt about Where the Wild Things Are upon its release. While so much was changing across the spectrum of society in 1963, how could a now-beloved children’s book ruffle so many feathers? To understand the climate of that time, we must consider the popular children’s books that preceded Sendak’s revolutionary work.

“Significantly there were fewer child protagonists than child surrogates in the forms of animals and mechanical personalities,” wrote children’s librarian and scholar Sheila Egoff in 1981. “But when children did appear, there was no question as to the tone of security, affection, and familial comfort that surrounded them.” The mere fact that Max was a mischievous child, rather than a monkey or a duck, represented a subtle break with the prevailing order. Egoff paints us a picture in her fascinating collection of writings, Thursday’s Child:

The picture books of the first two-thirds of this century reveal a single vision of a secure childhood and an abiding social order. So sure did the society of the time feel about its values– safe, placid, and hopefully enriching– that creators of books for very young children could depict them implicity rather than explicitly. The picture books show a gentle control, usually played out with animals as exemplars. H. A. Rey’s monkey, Curious George (1941) ends up in a zoo because of his pranks, but it is pictured as a pleasant, happy playground where George can indulge in his monkeyshines. Marjorie Flack’s duck Ping in The Story about Ping (1933) receives a gentle spank on his tail for being late. Both animals have an order to return to after their escapades: George to “the man in the yellow hat” and Pink to “the wise one-eyed boat.” The concept of order in Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline (1939)–”twelve little girls in two straight lines”–gives a feeling of reassurance and security rather than regimentation.

Above all, children were to be protected, and writers and illustrators, however different their themes and styles, were unanimous on this point. That these protectors were sincere is unquestionable, but, even more importantly, their views were reinforced by the adult world in general. This consensus was shattered in 1963 with the appearance of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and it would appear today that not “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” could restore that phallanxed viewpoint.

While the illustrations disturbed those adults who saw the “Wild Things” as ferociously threatening rather than humorously subservient to Max’s will, the extreme reaction to Sendak’s work intimated that there was more at stake than a matter of interpretation of the pictures. As it turned out, this as yet unformulated anxiety was justified. Sendak’s underlying theme that a child has unconscious needs, frustrations, and fears unsettled society’s hitherto conceived ideals of early childhood and the book itself broke the stereotypic mold that had held for almost a hundred years.

What made Sendak an innovator was that he expressed this catharsis for the preschool children through their own medium, the picture book. He also caught, very early and creatively, a general trend of society which was to rise to the fore over the next two decades: an acceptance that the very young child matures more by sharing in the real and emotional world around it than by being protected from it.

All great children’s books contain a touch of melancholy. There’s a simple reason for this: greatness stems from honesty, and any adult looking back on his youth will always, if he is honest, experience a tinge of melancholy. If said adult happens to write a children’s book, this sadness will no doubt be expressed when he tells his story.

That said, Caldecott-winning author and illustrator Allen Say inhabits sadness more fully––and with more splendor––than any other children’s author that comes to mind. Say’s tales, which he realizes in detailed watercolors, are often filled with longing and loneliness. His characters are introspective and courageous: role models of a different sort than we are used to in our kid’s books.

Grandfather’s Journey tells the tale of Say’s elder male relative as he emigrates to America and struggles with an ever-present homesickness. Tea with Milk explores the story of a young girl who finds herself caught between two cultures. Both deal with the deepest emotions available to a human being, and it is to Say’s enormous credit that he entrusts his young readers with these particular feelings.

Now that we’ve covered the question of what the wild things smell like, we turn our attention to another crucial point of odorific reference: Max.

We’ve already bemoaned the fact that theaters can’t provide accompanying “smell soundtracks” to films. There’s nothing that would make the movie-viewing experience more vivid than waves of powerful corresponding scents. Just imagine smelling the warm supper to which Max returns after his odyssey! It would be totally transformative.

Anyhow, if this were possible, Max would probably be best summoned by the scents of books (to signify the doldrums that he’s destined to escape), the smell of crayons (a whiff of creative boldness with the appealing potential for vandalism) and a slight trail of Golden Delicious apple perfume, as a reminder that good things await the adventurer at home.

Technology: make it happen!

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The contest we are running with our buddies at Crailtap will be ending this Friday. This is your last week to enter to win these. All you have to do is show us where you think the Wild Things ought to be.