The Play Ethic

Hiding from the apocalypse (in the Great Pagoda of Funn): On Donald Fagen

I fear that if I start writing about Donald Fagen/Steely Dan here, I won't stop for days… But in order to extract this particular tune from my brain, I think I'll have to do some blog-therapy (otherwise known as 'the typing cure'). 

This song – which, just to compress the argument, is the most meticulous and moving post/pre-apocalypse pop song I've ever heard – is Fagen's The Great Pagoda of Funn (lyrics), from his recent Morph The Cat album. (And thanks to the neo-comm glories of current music culture, you can hear it streamed here on Spotify. Or you can buy it, if you're that way inclined. Go on! Play capitalism - it's a cool game!). 

I'm under no illusions about why I generally love Fagen's work. For one thing, if your own deep musical conditioning is split three ways between post-be-bop jazz, organic 70's rock'n'soul, and classic Brill Building songwriting, then Dan/Fagen brings them all together for you perfectly. (You also have to trust a guy who says "my idea of a great gig is four guys on stage in cheap suits blowing away with their backs to the audience".) For another, beginning with the name – Steely Dan was a large mechanical phallus in the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch – Fagen (and his writing partner Walter Becker) give you the nod that they are going to be extremely literate and ambitious in their lyrics. 

And thirdly… well, I'm 45, and I'm pining for certain ultra-sophisticated experiences I once had in New York and Los Angeles in the 80's and 90's. And no-one does the ennui arising from East and West Coast big-city ultra-sophistication like Donald Fagen. Listening to that snarky, adenoidal whine, I am immediately returned to wise-guys, lounge-lizards and merciless conversationalists that I once knew, feared and sometimes loved, in streets called Melrose and Bleeker. 

But this song, The Great Pagoda of Funn, actually gets under my emotional plates (not an experience actually encouraged in the poised, sometimes ruthless world of Fagen's lyrics). It's best seen in the context of Fagen's solo albums over the last two decades, which are a beguiling trilogy. The Nightfly in 1982 was a dreamy, synth-jazz vision of his young adulthood (yet with some sharp satire – 'New Frontier' was about making out in your father's bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden). 1994's Kamakiriad was a sharper, funkier SF fantasy – the usual tangle of implacably mysterious women and penthouse-meets-pavement shenanigans, set in some future-topolis that sounds like it was designed by Al Gore (cars powered by hydroponics, where "the frame was out of Glasgow… the tech is Balinese"). 

Yet go forward 12 years to Morph the Cat, and the mood is much darker. The cover artwork tells the story. On the Nightfly, Fagen's having fun pretending to be a DJ at the foot of Mt. Belzoni. On Kamakiriad, he's a pouting video projection in his techno-car. But on Morph the Cat, he's sitting morosely in what I assume is his New York apartment, the light falling on him from outside the window, which he seems unwilling to look through. 

Yes, it's a post 9-11 record, very explicitly. And though many of the songs directly address the experience of living in the America of Homeland Security (state surveillance and coercion in "Mary Shut the Garden Door" and "Security Joan"; coping with a climate of fear in "Morph the Cat" and "The Night Belongs To Mona"), it's "The Great Pagoda of Funn" that's the artistic triumph for me.

Oh, it's a weary, weary song. It starts up with a compendium of Fagen's favourite musical moves – a boom-chick four-on-the-floor beat, with his usual Ellingtonian layerings of horns and chords – but the mood is very sombre, funereal. Over this stately procession comes Fagen's usual ironic squeak, but carried by a melody that's very close to the kind of elaborate construction you'd get from a Billy Strayhorn or Shirley Horn. We're deep in the shades of historic Manhattan here: Fagen's channelling the more elegant aspects of this city, as they sail through that apartment window. 

But even though "summer's over, there's a strange new music in the street". And Fagen isn't alone in this room: he's secreted there with a loved one. They're trying to do the John Donne thing, make that "one little roome/an everywhere" – because outside, in the world after the fall of the Twin Towers, all is disordered and alienated in their beloved city. The citizens of Gotham are going through the motions of normality, staring and grinning "to help maintain the state we're in". In Fagen and his lover's eyrie, they "make up their own storyline" – but it's a precarious project. The effort required to keep this "house of light" illuminated is enormous: one careless word can unravel their Decameron against the darkness.

And what happens when that happens? It's at this point you know you're listening to a master songwriter/arranger. The song soars into a pristine modulated doo-wop: they've failed, the flame's gone out, and they're now in the world of

poison skies
and severed heads
and pain and lies…

…of psycho-moms
and dying stars
and dirty bombs…

You can barely hear the semantics of this, so lovingly wrapped in harmony and sheen are the vocals: it's a desperate beauty, a hipster wrapping his taste and sophistication around the very worst, aware of how doomed to failure his efforts will be. The chorus completes on chords that (I'm sure) are deliberately trite, and on a line ("Let's build a world together/in the Great Pagoda of Funn") which neatly combines sheer sentiment, and painfully self-conscious wackiness. Fagan and his love are holding themselves together with fantasies and caresses, in their bemused, enfeebled (and enfabled) state, however many stories up in their tall, ultimately indefensible Manhattan tower. 

Around all this, of course, there is the usual Fagen-esque foliage of virtuosity - for some a vice, for me always a virtue. Soloists on guitar and trumpet get their chance to participate in the song's overall conversation, and their evident thoughtfulness and awareness of the themes they're playing to increases, for me, with every listen. 

Nothing can be solved in a pop song - but a pop song can open up the world, can at least help us to feel how important the problems are. There are a few artists who try to do that with their music (Costello, Waits, Cohen, Mitchell, Prince, Radiohead): they're the ones I return to, time after time, for sustenance in murky times. And Fagen sits on the top of the pile, like a dyspeptic, Pynchon-reading monarch. A play-ethicist supreme.  

"To play and to fight": what's half-right about El Sistema

This column in the Guardian today has jolted me into writing about the phenomenon of El Sistema, the Venezuelan initiative that uses the personal discipline and collective commitment of orchestra-playing to raise the ambitions of impoverished kids. Here's a summary of their approach taken from the website of the forthcoming documentary movie. It refers to the educational methods of El Sistema's founder, the deeply charismatic José Antonio Abreu:

According to [Abreu's] approach, musical perfection is not the first priority; instead, from the first day on, what’s important is being able to play together with others. The children are integrated into orchestras from the very beginning, and the older children pass their knowledge down to the younger ones. Abreu’s intention and philosophy is concealed behind this simple concept: for him an orchestra is first and foremost about togetherness, a place where children learn to listen to each other and to respect one another. The purpose of the work is the integration of the children into a united social structure, in which each individual assumes responsibility and contributes to a commonly achieved result.

Charlotte Higgins' column is trying to say that the British system of youth orchestras could borrow from Abreu's communitarian idealism (indeed there's two initiatives abroad already, in Scotland and England). But I'm intrigued by some of the comments to Higgins' piece, which confirm some of my anxieties about the transferrabilty of El Sistema. 

I'm completely for the union of play and craft. But shouldn't we also validate those who make elaborate journeys into sound through pop music - who use, calibrate and master their synths, samplers, turntables and software? I wonder also whether El Sistema's slogan - tocar y luchar, to play and to fight - derives its particular edge from the passion of those in the impoverished South to fight for the right to claim ownership of the European classical tradition. (And whether it's this that ensures such adulation from the likes of TED, the developed North's elite at its most expansively inclusive, as Jaron Lanier has written). 

I don't doubt for a second the positive impact that such a journey into mastery (and self-mastery) has had on the hundreds of thousands of kids that have gone through Abreu's youth orchestras: this commentor on the Guardian article confirms how magical the experience is, deep in the heart of the barrios. And I support the initiative in the UK of stern musical modernists like my countryman, James Macmillan, to make the encounter with orchestral music as ubiquitous as possible in contemporary schools. 

I've also worked with too many jazz musicians in my life - some attendees of schools like Berklee and the Guild Hall, some just obsessive practicers and fingerers - who are entirely committed to their technique, and its progress. Artistic excellence I'm not opposed to. 

But I think the lesson to be drawn from El Sistema is that we should seek to build 'systems' of social action, that can extend the collective and individual joys of cultural mastery. I just think we should be open-eyed and eclectic about where we establish those systems. 

For example: Shouldn't the compulsive gamer from the wrong side of the tracks who might want to be a compulsive games-maker also be able to find a supportive environment like Abreu's orchestras? An environment based on respect for collaborators, adherence to excellence, the transmission of knowledge down the generations? And the same for the fashion designer, the chef, the poster-maker, the social-network builder... I've always been struck by the way that hackers and free software advocates evolved a "hacker ethic" - excellence-meets-mutual-support - around their constructions, which seems as 'classically orchestral' as Abreu's vision. 

In short, let's praise El Sistema for its tactics and philosophy, but not necessarily for its content - and particularly not the idea that its content implies the philosophy, imputing some kind of higher improving power to the European classical tradition. (And again, to be clear: one of my biggest buzzes in life is to listen to a live classical orchestra - I'm not being inversely snobbish here). Abreu has said: 

Originally art was made by a minority for a minority. Then it became art by a minority for the majority, and now we are at the beginning of a new era, where art is intended by the majority for the majority.

Bravo, maestro... as long as we are suitably flexible about what kinds of elaborated cultural practices count as "art". 

Shaken in the big warm fist of leisure: the extremes of Thorpe Park

I've been to Thorpe Park – the UK's third biggest thrill park - several times now with my various children. This time I decided to sit it all out, and devote my remaining funds to my two young thrill-seekers, who each got a FastPass and thus threw themselves upon every vertiginous spiral they could find, several times each. Thanks to judicious monitoring of food input, there was no chundering or heave-ho-ing as a result, and they left the park six hours later distinctly weary, but with whirlpools faintly visible in their eyes. 

What I like about Thorpe Park, as opposed to the perfume-scented, suburban totalitarianism of the DisneyVerse, is that it's mostly about the physical thrill. There are some desultory attempts at 'themeing', all on an American-Graffiti early-fifties shtick (god knows what that meant to the Grime-listening young masses that day). And there is, of course, the Saw ride – thrill-riding for a post Abu Ghraib world (of which more later). But generally, rides like Stealth, Nemesis: Inferno or Colossus are all about being held very tightly and securely, and then being thrown around violently at high-speed.

For someone interested in play as a phenomenon, it's this precise experience that gets you. These are children, young adults and adults reliving that experience of being thrown around by their parents – the swinging round, the sudden dropping down, yet tightly controlled by a mother's or father's arms (represented by the sheer engineered solidity of the harnesses, the unfailing safety routines of the red-shirted employees). 

What's interesting is that this isn't the elemental mammalian scene of play – parents watching at a distance while the cubs test themselves out – but something much more direct in terms of power and control. The tingle here is "don't drop me daddy". And the cast-iron, road-bridge-style enormity of the Thorpe Park rides gives you security that they won't fail you, even as they're corkscrewing you at 60 mph. 

This is a precisely calibrated art, as Brendan Walker from Aerial, a 'thrill engineer' who presented at the Cambridge conference (previous post) wittily demonstrated. Walker even presented a 'thrillological' equation and graph, showing how ride designers manage the sweet spot between risk and predictability. 

But it's the deep passivity of the experience that I suppose was making me melancholic in the Staines sunshine, as libidinous teenagers cartwheeled about me (yes, that might also have contributed to the gloom). 

It's not that vertigo and great leaps into space aren't part of the play experience. This was the insight of Roger Callois, the French Surrealist-fellow-traveller, in Man, Play and Games. His games of ilinx were

based on the pursuit of vertigo and consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.

Yet compared to the street-running/parkour boys we saw doing their stuff at the South Bank in London a few weeks ago – measuring carefully (and not without some evident fear) their jumps from roofs to the wall of a walkway, with a 30 foot drop below – the ilinx of the Thorpe Park experience is scripted, almost bovine. Even with FastPass tickets round their wrists, enabling them to get four or five shots each at the scariest rides within the course of the day, my kids ended up in a state of mild ennui. Their last-minute pining for the cheap wall-climbing feature was equivalent to that Xmas day moment when the toy's ignored, but the packaging compels.

Well, go to a climbing park then, you might say, if you don't want to be spatially chucked around by the oppressively padded fist of themepark leisure. I have watched my youngest – a natural thrill-seeker – swing about 100 feet above me in Glasgow's X-Scape leisure park: she was securely harnessed, but still able to step gingerly through thin air. It got so bad to watch I had to bury  myself in half a movie while she was up there. But in terms of the government's advice that we should allow more physical risk in children's lives for their developmental benefit, I do feel like a good citizen when I see my precious youngest throw herself into tree-climbing and wall-walking – and don't over-fuss her about the inevitable injuries.

I didn't feel remotely like a good citizen when I agreed to queue up for about 90 minutes (no FastPass here yet) to get onto Thorpe Park's big summer draw – a ride based on the "Saw" series of horror movies. I'm tempramentally opposed to these movies – been hanging around with too many loving-kindness advocates these days – but was surrounded by one kid (14) who'd already seen it (it's an 18 certificate), and my daughter who is compelled, in a Grimm Fairy tales way, by anything gothic and creepy. So, we got in line, hoping that conversation and iPods would get us through the wait. 

  

I haven't been as discomfited by a leisure experience in years. Like all theme rides built on a franchised brand, the Saw ride aimed to materialise the screen experience. So we were slowly funnelled though a maze of chain-mail fences, topped with fake-but-convincing razor wire. We shuffled along our path like sports-wear-clad concentration camp victims, heading for the vast corrugated-iron storehouse that contained the ride. As we went along, we passed by seemingly random chunks of machinery – clamps, spikes, saws - sitting in stagnant brown pools of rust. "That's the stuff the evil puppet uses to torture his victims", said the older boy, sotto voce, even though my daughter was lost to Lady Ga-Ga. "Really, you don't wanna know." The musak in our ears was fragments of panicked American voices trying to get out of traps they seemed to have invited on themselves.

And over all this, screens showed images of Billy the Clown, the mode of communication for the movie's serial killer, Jigsaw, with the invitation: "let the games begin…" I've looked up the premise of the Saw franchise, and it seems to be part of a trend of movies entitled "torture porn" (I've seen the billboards on buses, and usually avert my eyes): many critics place them within the context of domestic terrorism, Abu Ghraib, the increased sense of daily extremisms generated by our Gulf Wars. Even in the queue, I began to realise Saw had a ludic premise. Jigsaw, a figure made murderous by his own losses and ailments, seeks to subject his victims to various self-mutiliating "games", all of them tied to some lifestyle or character defect deemed by Jigsaw to be in need of remedy. (And if they don't fix it, they die). 

I've mused before on how the dark-side of play – that "taking reality lightly" which allows for all kinds of possible actions, all realisations of the imagination – is startlingly visible in the Abu Ghraib photographs: the hapless Lynndie England and her cohorts, jovially making living piles out of supine and naked Iraqi prisoners. The ludic as servant to sadism was here too: as we shuffled towards the ride, Billy the Clown started to appear on a video loop, incanting his pestilential version of a play ethic (or perhaps more accurately, play homiletic). 

I was about to get grimly pessimistic about the ability of hyper-capitalist life to turn anything into a commodifiable experience - self-mutiliation, character reform, even the creative potential of games and play. I stopped when I realised I was in a queue almost entirely composed of teenagers: those constantly mutating monsters who, at the very least, have an alarmed relationship with the fleshy eruptions of their own bodies. You know, this may pre-date commercial society by quite a stretch...

I also recalled that only a few days earlier, I'd been listening to an In Our Time radio documentary about the Brothers Grimm – and how their original 'family tales' contained as much decapitation, dismemberment and grisly transformation as any torture-porn movie. Bruno Bettleheim once wrote of the "uses of enchantment": the way that these often gruesome, despairing fairy-tales gave children a symbolism for grappling with their own anxieties about being in the world. 

As I relentlessly and volubly deconstructed the whole experience leading up to the actual rollercoaster, for the benefit of a daughter getting visibly more freaked out, I was genuinely worried that the ride itself would be a trauma too far. Actually, for all of us, it was a moment of bathetic relief: one stagey animatronic of the nasty puppet, a few unexpected blasts of air and water (a la the old ghost train rides of my youth), and in the end an all-too-briefly-vertigious rise and fall in the comfy-tight cradle of our carts. 

And what did my wards think of it? Their responses have to be recorded precisely: "Totally scary… totally brilliant!!" Compared to the routine convolutions of the other rides, they'd been energised and made positively chirpy by the Saw experience. What came to my mind was Brian Sutton-Smith's latest thinking on the meaning and function of play, in the American Journal of Play:

Play begins as a mutation of real conflicts and functions thusly forever afterwards. Play was always intended to serve a healing function whether for child or adult, making it more worthwhile to defy the depressing and dangerous aspects of life.

As we gabbled away between us, walking out of this chintzy horror-fest, it was clear that we'd experienced exactly that form of play. We'd occupied our tight cradles of thrilldom, and defied about as much symbolic "depression and danger" as you could imagine. (Though there were indeed limits to those symbols - there was specific carnage churnng away in the minds of those who'd watched the movie). 

The only suitable response was to head for the ice-cream stand, and laugh about how shoogly the "scary" puppet was. And for me to quietly shake my head at this topic of mine, the sheer complexity and ubiquity of play, and how much of life it encompasses.

Taking Reality Lightly: the challenge of play to metrics of creativity

I had a deeply stimulating session with the academics at Cambridge University's CRASSH initiative the other day, discussing the fascinating topic of how much research in the arts, humanities and social sciences can really transfer over to more commercial, creative-industry areas. 

As someone who's tried to smuggle all kinds of high-theory into his pop-song lyrics for years now - even if only metaphorically (see paper in extended entry bellow) - I had quite a lot to say about this.

My thanks to Lee Wilson and James Leach, the organiser and chair of the event. The presentation below isn't exactly written according to the most disciplined scholarly standards, but I did avail myself of the university context and cavorted freely and happily in the fields of theory... So casual readers of play, be warned. (And don't worry: the Thorpe Park post is coming soon.)

Painting the kettle: more thoughts on play, protest and the G20

There was one report from the recent City of London protests against the G20 summit that really struck me. As the crowds brandished "Hang the Bankers" posters, shouted that "Nature doesn't do bailouts", and paraded their raggle-taggle Four Horsemen of the Eco-calypse, the financial workers decided to respond in kind:

Slogan of the day, accordingly, must be awarded to the sign reportedly glimpsed in a bank window: "While you are here protesting, we are repossessing your homes." We also liked the four cricket bats - a fitting choice - lined up by the door at the Bishopsgate restaurant L'Amina in a bid to deter any rough stuff, though it's just possible this was not meant as a joke.

An honourable mention, however, to the bankers spotted by the Associated Press waving tenners at the protesters from their upper windows - who could tire of that old joke? (Though you can tell we're in the midst of a credit crunch surely they used to be £50s?) The crowd, in response, shouted "Jump!" How festive.

How festive indeed. Even though the "kettling" of the crowd by the Met Police resulted in its inevitable frustrations and violence, reports like the above are trying to characterise the essentially "good-humoured nature" of the tension between protestors and their targets (as the man from the Financial Times, of all organs, was at pains to point out).

As my last post highlighted, it's a matter of principle for many of these protestors that their occupation of public space has a playful element. As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her history of collective joy, Dancing In The Streets, this is a tradition stretching from medievality to modernity – the lords and ladies of misrule doing their turns in the crowd, tipping the conventions of the world upside down to make collective action feel even more transformative and charged. (Though carnival can also be a yearly or seasonal safety-valve, a ritualised letting-go of social frustration from below).

But I also liked the comments from Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb, scratching his head a little (from his hard-left position) at the point of it all:

I'm still not clear on what the strategy is behind these mini-spectacles. It's great to see thousands of people turn out to protest against capitalism, despite all the media hysteria and off-putting threats from the police. We need far bigger protests in the future, ideally coinciding with a general strike or something. But it seems as if the idea at the moment is to have a carnivalesque parade, wind up in one spot and get penned in only to have the police mess with you if you try to have a drink or some weed. I don't want to be a negative nelly, but that's not reclaiming the streets, it's getting owned by the cops.

In terms of anti-capitalist direct action (if that's what you're looking for), Seymour is surely right that the current European (and American) wave of factory occupations is way more effective than some diddy hurling a projectile through a Royal Bank of Scotland window.

But there's something about the conviviality and creativity of these protests (which the Climate Camp maintained honourably in Bishopgate, until being rather brutally swept away by the riot police) that I think is worth preserving and developing. I kept thinking of the iconic images of sixties protest – the hippie inserting a flower in the barrel of a gun. Or even more effectively, Abbie Hoffman (the Yippie) scattering money over the trading floor of the NY stock exchange, and watching them scramble for the notes.

Short of a state of sheer totalitarianism, there is a point where authorities are vulnerable to collective ridicule and derision. Remember the experience in the Velvet Revolution of Czecheslovakia, where (as Ivan Klima recalled) the appearance of satirical cartoons and slogans in the windows of houses and shop-fronts became completely ubiquitous, subtly infusing the streets of Prague with civic confidence.

If the tools of humour and wit are prominent in a social struggle, might change come more profoundly and elementally – the possibility of change appearing more everyday and accessible, if "reality is taken lightly" (the nutshell definition of play that I've been using for some years now)? The Italian thinker Paulo Virno has elaborated this in his recent book on wit and innovation: the linguistic explosions of humour constantly remind us that we can play around with the rules of social existence. (Which explains my obession with Bill Hicks, I guess – and why comedians can often be so scary-thrilling).

Compared to the testosteronal anger that often marks labour-movement militancy, the carnivaleers against capitalism are trying to reimagine the spaces and places where intransigent power often feels at its most settled and complacent: a nuclear power plant, the building of an airport runway, the tidy streets of a financial district.

If you look at those images of the Climate Camp, and its little micropolis of tents (and doubtless passionate discussions within them), you can see them using the "tools of conviviality" to change how we might think of public space. The City of London can be more than an orderly space for carbon-burning, money-circulating business as usual – but an opportunity to demonstrate a flavour of the cooperative lifestyle changes that might be required in order to stave off eco-catastrophe. 

I don't think that creative anarchism (or "expressive democracy") like this is in any way a leading edge of change. If anything, our clear and present eco-danger reinforces the need for national and international governance. But it's incredibly important that this grass-roots passion and commitment exists. As the Americans say, someone needs to "hold Obama's feet to the fire". 

And yes, the grand irony of all of this? That a few miles away, the Community-Organiser-in-Chief himself was gladhanding and cajoling a set of bristling, well-padded leaders into the minimum set of regulations and investments required to keep their capitalist (or now, Keynesian) show on the road. Did the Barry Obama who hung around with socialists and Chicago radicals as a community organiser twenty years ago cock an ear to the street protestors? While the Climate Campers try to seed the City, Obama and his family dig up the White House lawn to grow designer herbs for their chef. 

There are some strange parallelisms at work on the stage of world politics at the moment. And although I may be the man with the hammer who can only see nails to be bashed, the ethics of play does always seem to me to be hovering around the scene.