Here’s a little more of the odd and fantastic: This joy+ride. Each issue features a poet, photographer or other creative, their original work, and an interview. I love it.

My current blog crush is Soule Mama. She knits, she crafts, she frolicks in the leaves with her three adorable children, she voted for Obama, and she’s got a bun in the oven. It’s my guilty pleasure for the dedicated city dweller.

Soule Mama’s latest project is Mama to Mama, in which readers can craft an item for families in developing countries. The first project is infant caps for babies in Haiti.

While we are enjoying the pleasures of the hearth, check out my Cookie article on heritage breed turkeys. Last year at a NECSC Thanksgiving I was reduced to tears when I discovered that the humongoid turkey was still not thoroughly cooked by dinnertime. (The cocktails people kept handing me sort of contributed to my emotional meltdown–but what’s a NECSC get-together without at least one emotional meltdown? I was just doing my part.) Anyway, this year it will be just the three of us and I’ll be roasting a much smaller bird, most likely an American Bronze. Cheers.

For something far from the domestic sphere, check out the documentary Lioness on PBS tonight. It’s a documentary about a group of female support soldiers who ended up fighting in direct ground combat with the marines in Iraq. Just watching the trailer gets me.

And now, here’s a little something for all the ladies of the world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We kind of skipped out on the whole kids’ music scene, and now that our son Jasper is approaching five it looks like we’ve left it behind. I know kids’ music has gotten much better in the past ten years, what with all the aging B- and C-list recording artists starting second careers once they become parents. I hear there’s some great stuff out there. But with the exception of our local favorite, Randy Kaplan, I just couldn’t get behind it. What’s the matter with our own music? It’s not like a three-year-old gets the drug references anyway, right?

Mommy, why is he waiting for the man? With $26 in his hand?

He’s waiting for the man who delivers raw milk. It’s illegal in New York City, but many people believe it’s really good for you…

So we’ve been putting together our own collections for Jasper. I have to admit, there aren’t very many. I’ve been lazy about this and have taken advantage of Jasper’s penchant for listening to the same songs over and over again. But I am particularly proud of our superhero mix based on Jasper’s favorites as well as old-but-not-moldy favorites from our own childhoods.

You can download it here.

Ben Ten by Sturmer: This show is about a boy who can turn into several different kinds of aliens depending on the situation. How can you lose with that premise? I really dig the theme song. I can’t really explain why and I will make no excuses for myself.

Wonder Woman: About a year ago Jasper was in the midst of a heavy Wonder Woman crush. He carried his little Wonder Woman action figure around with him everywhere, like King Kong hold his Fay Wray. Except he kept losing her everywhere and I was forced (forced!) to purchase a new Wonder Woman seemingly every week (you’re welcome, Mattel). We watched the theme song on You Tube over and over again and rented episodes from Netflix. I drew endless pictures of Wonder Woman flying her invisible airplane. Thankfully his passion finally began to cool by Thanksgiving, because otherwise I don’t think any of us would have survived a certain incident in which a certain DC dog chomped off Wonder Woman’s right leg from the knee down. We still have that Wonder Woman.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Batman by The Who: Batman is currently Jasper’s favorite superhero “because he has all the cool gadgets.” Batman is my favorite because of Mr. Bale.

Spider-Man by Michael Buble: I love this jazzy version of Spider Man. I have also taken the trouble to learn all the lyrics to this song. This is just one in the long list of things I never though I’d do before I had a son.

Flash by Queen: Puberty came early for me and was for the most part a menace. I still recall how menarche ruined an otherwise happy viewing of Xanadu on HBO. Anyhoo…. the one bright spot from those years was having my first inklings of lust while watching the movie Flash Gordon. Seeing that golden man, shirtless, struggling, well, even now I blush at the memory. What’s happening to my body? What’s this funny feeling? For that reason and also because the theme is sung by Queen this is my favorite song in the mix.

Teen Titans by Puffi Ami Yumi: As far as Cartoon Network shows go Teen Titans is actually somewhat enjoyable. Otherwise, as with Ben Ten, there is no excusing this song.

Fist of Fuggy by Brothers McLeod: Fuggy is the invention of Scottish illustrators the Brothers McLeod. He’s more of an anti-hero, really, but he tries so hard. Watch him train.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kim Possible by Banaroo: Kim Possible succeeded Wonder Woman in Jasper’s affections. She’s a high school cheerleader by day, kick-ass secret agent by night. And thanks to her side kick Ron Stoppable, Jasper now knows what a naked mole rat is. Jasper wanted to get the original theme song but it’s not available from i-Tunes. To tell you the truth, it’s not much better than this version.

Superman by John Williams: This one puts a damper on the pace (and Jasper always wants to fast forward through it) but I had to include Superman. We rented the original movie recently and were amazed at how long and boring the exposition is. Speaking of Superman, did anyone else catch that picture of Al Gore (Gore-Al) sending off his son (Kal-Al) in a space ship to escape the dying planet Earth in The Onion?

Transformers by Lion: No, we haven’t let Jasper see the latest Transformer movie, much to his disappointment. But we have let him see the original animated movie and let me tell you, the soundtrack RAWKS! In a Journey/Queensryche kind of way. Don’t you feel invincible when you hear this song? Can’t you feel all the passion of the dying Detroit automotive industry rumbling within?

We Are All Made of Stars by Moby: I know, I know, but Jasper loves this song (thanks to the Sonic Vision show) and he really is made of stars, dammit!

Heroes by David Bowie: This was inevitable. Like I’m going to make a superheroes mix and not include this song? Please, I am not made of steel, unlike some people.

Obviously missing from this mix is Iron Man. Anything else?

This was three years ago, when I was two months pregnant with our son, Jasper. Lane and I took our last child-free vacation to a particularly challenging locale, Mexico City. The highlight of this trip was a visit to Barragán’s former home and studio, now a museum, in the neighborhood of Tacubaya. The museum includes the adjoining garden of the Ortega house next door, where Barragán first lived, and the Gilardi House, a few blocks away.

One of the features of Barragán’s work that most intrigues me is the way he created smaller rooms within rooms, like cells in a cloister, for contemplation. In the image above you can see an example. On the landing is a painting that consists simply of gold paint on a wooden panel (possibly by his friend and collaborator, Mathais Goeritz). The light from the nearby window above sets the painting on fire, creating a flashing scene of nearly blinding glory, all while the direct light source hides just above your head. Below there is a quiet vestibule. Barragán has given the stairs tall ceilings but covers the vestibule with a lower ceiling, creating an intimate space. Similarly, he divided the library into smaller spaces through a labrynth of screens.

Space, furniture and architectural elements are reduced to their essentials not for a hard, intellectual ideal (as with many other practitioners of modernism from the same time period) but for spiritual edification. Hence a flat, reflective garden pool is softened by a parade of mis-matched planters with varying vegetation, some trailing, some spiky. A low-lying, spare sofa whose form could easily be paired with the Finnish-fetish signatures of chrome and white is here warmed by native wood and a nubbly, mustard-colored wool.

Architect Guillermo Eguiarte Bendimez puts it this way: “Barragán’s house is the most intimate manifestation of his quest to create the most appropriate setting possible in which to carry on his life. Each domestic object concentrates in itself an intense burden of reflection which confers on it an extreme specificity, charged with a singular significance.”

The Gilardi House was built around a jacaranda tree. The entrance of the house is a hall of white stucco with a series of long, deep, narrow windows with panes of yellow glass; the windows bathe the entryway with such light that it looks as if the entire hall has been painted yellow. It reminded me of the work of Dan Flavin. An indoor pool is visible from this hallway. As you move further into the house you will see the way it is subdivided by a flat, red pillar.

As an impressionable young architect, Barragán traveled to Europe and became acquainted to practitioners of the “International Style,” an approach to architecture that erased national identities in favor of spare, functional, and seemingly neutral spaces. But Barragán’s work is nothing if not specific to location, Mexican and especially, in his earlier work, Guadalajaran. He used local materials, like sabino wood and volcanic rock. And his use of color comes from the vivid adobe washes in provincial villages throughout Mexico. His use of colored light comes directly from the cloisters and chapels of Mexico, with windows made from panes of colored glass.

Barragán’s work has been linked with neoplasticism, a form of minimalism intended to erase the human, the emotional (much as Judd’s work does). And the modernists and Barragán were both influenced by the minimalist forms of Mediterranean architecture. Yet again Barragán borrows the forms of an aesthetic movement but to completely different ends. He references the human in his work, the sensory, emotional, and subjective. Though he did go through a functionalist period, his use of color and texture aimed to feed his soul. He once said, “Any architecture that does not express serenity is not fulfilling its spiritual mission. This is why it was a mistake to substitute the shelter of walls for the exposure of windows.”

Barragán’s travels to Paris brought him to a garden designed by Ferdinand Bac, and to his published works, Jardins Enchantes and Les Colomieres. Bac had fallen in love with the beauty of the square, whitewashed buildings of Morocco, especially the way they gleam against clear blue skies. Barragán, too, became enchanted when he finally traveled there, saying “The popular architecture of of the Mexican provinces, its white-washed walls, serene courtyards, brightly colored streets — there exists a profound connection between these things and the villages of North Africa and Morocco, which have also made their mark on my work.”

Barragán’s transplantation of Mediterranean forms to Mexico was more successful than the early modernists’ attempts to do the same in their native Northern European climates. The white cube looks forlornly alien under, as Buendía puts it, “the Celtic mists, the leaden skies, and the long, wet winters.” If only one could transport climate as well. John Ruskin once said, “All beautiful architecture was destined for cities under clear skies. Is it not so?”

Upon my return I wanted to recreate the Barragán spirit in my own home. (Don’t we always want to bring a bit of our travels home with us? I guess that’s what souveniers are for, though they’re always inadequate.) My family is currently under the spell of an enchanting but small, one-bedroom apartment we cannot bear to leave. We make it work because Lane and I are not collectors of stuff. There is not a stick of superfluous furniture in our home. Items not regularly used are thrown out or put in storage. The windows and ceilings are tall, so we do not feel as cramped as we otherwise might. In these ways we had already put some Barragán principles in practice.

But I cannot transplant that Mexican golden light to New York City, any more than the neoplasticists could transport Moroccan clear skies to Dusseldorf. I cannot paint my walls Mexican pink; it just looks pitiful and ridiculous in our northeastern light. How then to learn from Barragán, to borrow from his philosophy of space? How to create rooms within rooms without disrupting the fine proportions of our apartment, maintaining harmony with the ceiling and window heights? How to find locations for contemplation, spaces to dream? How do I make the chilly colors of this northern climate, greys and greens, warm enough to defrost my chilled Mexican blood?

I’m not the only one asking these questions. Here in Brooklyn I am surrounded by immigrants from warmer, sunnier climes, all trying to transplant parts of their original homes in this cold, concrete moonscape. In the winter their skin turns ashy. But we are lucky enough to be living in a climate with seasons. For in the summer, when we finally see enough of the sun, when the humidity awakens damp smells from the earth, a set of salwar kameez makes sense, the taste of tamarind is not so out of place, the scent of the Alhambra’s myrtle is not so foreign.

Images by Sebastián Saldívar and quotes from The Life and Work of Luis Barragán, Rizzoli International Publications, 1997.

No, I hear you. Think of all the cultures that have practiced polygamy, and specifically polygyny, from the ancient Mexica to the Meriam of the Torres Strait to the welfare-dependent fundamentalists of southern Utah. These cultures are/were lousy with the harshest patriarchal systems and big, gooey doses of misogyny. But what if we imagined a polygamy that actually benefits women, even if it still drags along the usual baggage? What would that polygamy look like?

HBO veterans Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer imagine a modern, liberated polygamy in their new drama series, Big Love. It is interesting to note that the creators are real-life partners. Perhaps this drama is as much about pushing the envelope on sexuality, family, and lifestyle (where do we go after Queer as Folk and The L Word?) as it is a meditation on the question of what boundaries for marriage our own culture can accept.

Bill Hendrickson (Bill Paxton) lives a lot like his suburban Salt Lake City neighbors. He runs a growing chain of home improvement stores, Home Plus (get it?), has six kids who keep him busy with basketball games and diapers, and drives an SUV. His house looks like any Western-American tract house, gray-painted wood with white trim — except that it’s actually three identical semi-attached houses. Each house has a swimming pool and a wife: the first wife, Barb (Jeanne Triplehorn), and her two teenage children, the second wife, Nicki (Chloe Sevigny), and her two elementary-aged sons, and Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin, who played Johnny Cash’s first wife, Vivian, in Walk the Line) with her toddler and infant.

Barb presides over the other two wives, trying to maintain a spirit of order, openness, and cooperation. But even in this little utopia the dream of a modern polygamist family is continually foiled by human nature. Spendthrift Nicki lives for the daily UPS delivery of catalogue goodies and flirts with financial ruin. Margene is overwhelmed by her babies and despairs that she can’t measure up. Barb wants Bill’s soul, Nicki his money, Margene his affection, and all want the prestige and security won through sex with Bill; it’s no surprise when we see him popping Viagra just to keep up with everyone’s demands.

Olsen and Scheffer deliver on the most obvious promise of a show about polygamy. It’s the same thing we want when we watch The Bachelor: female mud wrestling. Yes, the women compete amongst each other for Bill’s attention, affections, and especially his resources. They conspire against each other, spy on each other, betray each other. It’s all there. The writers use that old convenient plot device: wherever there is a trio, two can conspire against the third.

What is surprising is how similar the themes in Bill’s marriages are to any other traditional marriage. Many couples feel the strain of competing demands from spouses, children, career, and social life. Those of you in committed, long-term relationships may notice how much you can relate to in Big Love.

This attempt to normalize polygamous life saves the three wives from becoming mere mud-wrestling spectacles; so do good writing and complex characterization. We see Margene’s aching loneliness, Nicki’s gnawing, all-encompassing hunger, Barb’s struggle to maintain her position of leadership and to make sense of what she calls her “mature marriage.”

But Big Love throws in another plotline that is potentially even more intriguing — and inflammatory — than the polygamy: early Mormonism’s relativistic positions on the sanctity of human life. Mormonism began as a frontier religion with strong ties to Freemasonry. Its early leaders mapped out a theology that sanctioned murder in certain circumstances, “blood atonement” for those who harm church members and their cause. This language has since been written out of modern LDS theology, but some fundamentalist Mormons still claim it (as recently explored in Jon Krakauer’s controversial book, Under the Banner of Heaven).

In Big Love, we learn that Bill grew up in a fundamentalist polygamist sect in southern Utah called Juniper Valley. When this community exiled Bill at 14 he entered secular life, marrying a former LDS woman (Barb) and starting his own business. Family obligations keep Bill tied to Juniper Valley; so do financial ties. The community’s sinister “Prophet” (Harry Dean Stanton) has been extorting Bill for a fortune for years. When Bill tries to release himself from this bondage we know that the Prophet and his Mafioso goonies (this is an HBO series, after all) are not going to let go without a fight.

This second plotline of organized crime and blood atonement add dimension to what might merely have been Desperate Polygamist Housewives. But near the end of the second episode we see a hint of what could turn the series into an epic — a distinctly American epic. Bill returns from a family drama in Juniper Valley to the domestic dramas closer to home. After a fervent prayer in his truck Bill marches into Margene’s home to reassure her of her valuable place not just in Bill’s family but in the human family. He speaks of sacrifices, generations, and eternity. “Our family wasn’t complete before you. I wasn’t complete before you.” Margene nods and then sends us crashing back to earth: “OK, but I still need a car.”

This is the magic, seduction, and tension of polygamy, of cults, of religion: the notion that you are part of something great and awesome that will transform you beyond — and yet with — your earthly, body-bound self. Polygamy for a true believer is not about the sex. It’s about immortality. It’s about becoming gods and goddesses. It’s about future celestial worlds beyond number. The creators of Big Love grant their characters’ spiritual yearning a certain dignity and respect that raises the stakes in the drama. Will the frail human beings of Big Love find a way to reach their own cosmic goals? Will Bill be done in by all that binds him to this earthly existence? Olsen and Scheffer are banking that you’ll stay tuned to find out. My last two questions are: Do you have HBO? Is there room in your home for one more?

Big Love premieres on HBO March 12. Check your local listings for times.