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Since posting the video for “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” on Sunday night I’ve been listening to the early Elton John, particularly the songs he co-wrote with Bernie Taupin. I realize that I’ve never really paid attention to Elton John and now I’m making up for it. When I was a kid he was the silly man with the glasses singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” with Kiki Dee. We could never hear that name without being convulsed with laughter. Kids.

“Daniel”, “Your Song” and “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” were already classic rock radio staples and “Skyline Pigeon” was what one-legged one-eyed guitarists with screeching amps sang on overpasses and underpasses in Manila. (Along with “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin, which is no longer on the overpass-underpass playlist but which you can still hear live in London tube stations.) When I got my first Walkman and started buying my own music the Elton and Bernie partnership had split up and Elton was doing stuff like “Nikita” and “I’m Still Standing”. Which I did not care for. Then came “That’s What Friends Are For” (Uck) and what Ricky calls “the anthemic” stuff like the music for the Lion King. Pass.

Sir Elton’s music often turns up in movies—I remember a conversation about “Rocket Man” in Michael Bay’s The Rock. (All of Michael Bay’s movies are stupid but some I love and some I loathe.) “Your Song” was sung several times in Moulin Rouge (German Moreno staged better musical medleys than Baz Luhrmann) and “Tiny Dancer” has a key role in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. What else are you going to sing together on a bus? Crowe’s movie is also where I heard “Mona Lisas” for the first time.

In Scorpio Nights the drunken neighbors burst into the chorus of “Skyline Pigeon”, unaware of the events in the guard’s room.

Kermit reminded me of Two Rooms, the documentary on how John and Taupin worked together (never in the same room), which reminded me of that tribute album in which Sting did “Come Down In Time”. I looked up the original. Here it is.

Dammit.

We had a discussion on what the line “Come down in time” means. I think it means “Don’t be late” or “Show up at exactly the right moment.” Love, be it for a human being or a piece of music, is often a matter of timing.

“You listen in slack-jawed wonder — realizing that “Come Down in Time,” alone, could have established the legend of any lesser artist.” Read an appreciation by Nick Deriso.

P.S. “That’s What Friends Are For” is to Elton John as “I Just Called To Say I Love You” is to Stevie Wonder. Yiiiiii. Wait, Stevie co-wrote “That’s What…” As did Burt Bacharach. Aiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeee.

Arthur Rackham illustration of The Goose Girl.

Good people suffer. Bad people reign. Terrible things happen. There is ugliness in the world. Life is scary and it ends in death. The fairytales that really stay with you understand these things, and you believe them no matter how prettily Disney lies. When people say “That’s a fairytale” to refer to a story with an improbably happy ending, they must mean the Disney versions or Hollywood flicks. The best fairy tales are full of cruelty and terror, so when you hear in the end that “They lived happily ever after” you know they have paid dearly for their happiness (and you ignore that foreboding. . .).

Cornelia Funke, the author of Inkheart and Reckless, discusses her top 10 fairytales in the Guardian. The article contains links to the stories themselves. I still remember how disturbing The Goose Girl and The Six Swans were the first time I read them; what is it about girls, curses and birds?

The British filmmaker Michael Apted has a continuing series of documentaries called The Up Series. It started in 1964 when Paul Almond filmed 14 British 7-year-olds from different socio-economic backgrounds. Seven years later Apted, who had been a researcher on 7 Up, looked up those same kids for a second documentary called 7 Plus 7. Since then he’s produced a new film every 7 years, featuring as many of the original 14 participants as he can get. The latest one, 56 Up, is expected this year.

It occurred to me during the recent Bahay Bata children’s centre tour of the UK that the Up series would be a good model for covering my subjects. Clifton College, Touraid and the Philippine Rugby Union through Coach Cullen took 15 Filipino children, aged 8 to 15, from disadvantaged backgrounds, and brought them to England where for ten days they lived with affluent British families and experienced a lifestyle completely different from their own.
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Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, offspring of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother author Amy Chua, has started a blog to address questions about her upbringing.

Q: If your mother prevented you from going on play dates, sleep overs and participating in school dramas, shouldn’t you have turned out to be socially incapable?

A: Thanks for asking – I’ve wanted to address this point since David Brooks published his op-Ed in the NYT. Let me indulge my not-so-inner nerd for a second: when you spend 7 hours at school a day, 180 days a year, for 13 years, you rack up 16,380 hours of social interaction. That’s the equivalent of over 3,200 five-hour playdates. So overall, I don’t feel too deprived.

Read Tiger Cub’s blog.

Return to Ribblestrop is available at National Bookstores.

It may sound like a convenience store for frogs, but it isn’t. Ribblestrop Towers is like Hogwarts for Out of Control Youths a sneeze away from juvenile hall. They have 13-year-olds who keep guns under their pillows, chain-smoking vandals who blow smoke rings, “reformed psychopaths” with a history of arson, and kids who lace their cocoa with rum. None of the kids are physically unharmed for long, and they don’t seem to mind.

It goes without saying that I was an instant fan of the first Ribblestrop. I was wet with anticipation as I started reading the sequel, Return to Ribblestrop. Just when I thought that the magic, er, charming misdemeanor peaked in the first book, Return to Ribblestrop bulged with insane doses of that same absurd spontaneity. I was in love all over again.
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From Brewhuh: Robot earrings.

These were made by Mar-Vic.

Mar-Vic also made these paper clip earrings, to which I added bits from old earrings that had fallen apart.