The Play Ethic

Work, family and the dance towards a 'play ethic'

This is a piece I wrote for the charity Working Families, as part of their 30th anniversary celebration, marked by the publication of Tomorrow's World, an anthology of perspectives on work-life balance. 

Most of the pieces are well worth reading (apart from a few politicians posturing), and I decided to stay within their paradigm of the tension between "work" and "life", partly to speak honestly about my own 20 year history of balancing productivity, play and parenting. But regular Play Ethic readers will see my familiar agendas surfacing at the end... As usual, all comments welcomed. 

Work, family and the dance towards a 'play ethic'

Pat Kane

I guess I won't be the only contributor to this volume who's writing this piece under the very same wobbly conditions of 'work-life balance' that is our chosen topic.

In my case, I'm getting to grips with this piece as the school holidays begin: I'm four days over what (I hope) was a soft deadline. My daughter's been getting out of school at 12.15pm the last couple of days (was that a surprise announcement? Yes!). So I've had a few frantic mornings trying to master the inbox of self-managed tasks that face the average cultural freelancer. At the very least, this lifestyle demands clarity and efficiency when you actually do sit down in front of your interface.

After years of good and bad experiences, I've realised that I'm happiest when I can devote my energies fully to either 'work' or 'life' – however unsatisfactory those terms are - with as little overlap between the two realms as possible. Meaning that when my daughter emerges from the school gates, or after-school club, all of my affections and attentions are hers. And the best way to ensure that psychic commitment is to ensure that the anxieties of one's project-driven life are actually - or if necessary, forcibly - abated.

The necessity of a calm and tranquil mind (and heart, if possible) in the face of one's children also comes from a somewhat bumpy personal road. Post our separation eight years ago, my ex-wife and I made a binding pact to ensure that our children never had any sense of lacking access to either parent. We split our fortnight of care equally, weaving between each others' nearby households, allowing each other evenings and alternate weekends to sustain friendships and relationships (in different cities – Glasgow and London). But we've come together to ensure that none of our children ever returned to an empty house.

The Man in Our Mirror: Michael Jackson

This is a piece written 24 hours after Michael Jackson's death, and commissioned by my old newspaper, The Sunday Herald in Scotland.

MICHAEL JACKSON: THE MAN IN OUR MIRROR

By Pat Kane

Sunday Herald, 28 June 2009

THE misty black-and-white clip has been opening most of the televisual retrospectives for the last few nights, and to me it's the alpha and omega of Micheal Jackson. We're somewhere in the mid-sixties, and someone's on their knees with a camera in a murky Motown audition room. The band's cropped off at the chest, and all the universe is looking at this motion-blur of a boy. 

He's a compressed James Brown, in almost every way: the box-shaped 'fro, the tight tailoring, the carnal mathematics of the dancing (part robot, part boxer, part libertine). And that voice – impossibly percussive, a rythym section unto itself, wringing melody out of the tightest of corners. 

But in any of his early performances, you have to look closely at young Micheal's eyes. They are large brown pools of stillness, uncreased by any of the tell-tale signs of excess passion or abandonment, even as he throws out those startling extemporisations of larynx and limb that rightly took him to global fame. 

Look at this most naked of talent-in-the-meat-factory moments - with his ruthless father-exploiter Joe Jackson behind him, and the relentlessly aspirational regime of Berry Gordy's Motown ahead of him. Look at Michael. Right at the heart of this briar patch of virtuosity, ambition, brute commerce, punishing self-discipline - you're wondering who's looking out of those eyes. Is he utterly calm and self-possessed? Or is he utterly null, his soul the property of others? 

Cut to his last ever recorded interview, with an ABC news reporter only a few days ago, on the planned O2 concerts in London. "To do this you have to sacrifice your life, your childhood", he enunciates clearly, the timbred voice of a fifty year old evident through the crackle. "It's giving up your life for the medium". 

As the narrative begins to coalesce around Micheal Jackson's death – that of a weary, chronically unwell, stressed-beyond-imagining mature man, whose body finally rebelled against the regimens of performance and enhancement it had been subjected to for far too long – we need to keep in mind that lithe, strange little android, shimmying across the rehearsal tape. 

What was it like to be Micheal Jackson, from the beginning to the end? To "give up your life" – from that very tenderest of moments where his self was beginning to form, till the end of his complex, wracked adulthood – "for the medium"?

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.

Poets Day: Godard's 'Madison Dance' + Lidell's 'Game For Fools'

Poets' Day is a phrase from UK and Australia working cultures, an acronym that stands for Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday. I once wrote a song with my brother in Hue And Cry about this (hear it here, registration required). I thought a nice weekly tradition for this blog might be a bit of audio-visual joy - soulful, poignant, funny, sexy - for those who find themselves easing out of a working week. Any further suggestions are more than welcome.

Two to begin with: a clip I've never seen before from Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 (year of my birth!) movie, Band of Outsiders, called The Madison Dance. About as good an illustration of how play can invade reality as it gets:

And secondly... well, any excuse to play this really: the awesome white soul voice/musicianship of Jamie Lidell, and this film-school video made for his 2005 torch song, Game For Fools. Does that tragi-comic clown thang extremely well. Happy discombobulated 48 hours!

Idling through the recession (and beyond)

Mark Kingwell, Canada's top pop philosopher, has written a compendium on idling (on a very long publishing delay, years after the UK's leisurely prince of idleness, Tom Hodgkinson, established his own dilatory empire). There's lots of bright wit in this puff piece in the Globe and Mail (thanks George Cairns for link), for example: 

Mark 1: ...What distinguishes idling from slacking?

Mark 2: The problem with the slacker is that he is, in the very act of resisting them, wedded to the norms of work. In avoiding work, or pretending to work, or hiding from the supervisor in the mailroom, the slacker is implicitly granting the world of work a dominant position. He gives work power as that which he should be doing even as he does not do it.

Mark 1: And idling?

Mark 2: Idling establishes an independent scale of value. It's like the difference between dozing - falling asleep from overwork - and napping, which we all know is an art form. The true idler enters the moment of not-working and takes it into a new realm of not even thinking about work, of strolling away from that collective addiction of the past 2,000 years.

All very familiar. (Will Hutton's review of my, Tom's and Carl Honore's book 'In Praise of Slow' put us all in the context of Western 'soft power' - displaying a kinder, gentler, less relentlessly acquisitive image to the rest of the world). But it was this exchange between the Mark's that really piqued my interest:

Mark 1: Suppose everyone was idle, though. How would society function?

Mark 2: Think of it this way. Any market economy is a failed attempt to distribute goods and services exactly where they are needed or desired, as and when they are needed and desired. That's all markets are, despite the pathological excrescences that nowadays attach to them: derivatives funds, advertising, shopping as leisure. If we had a perfect market, idling would be the norm, not the exception, because distribution would be frictionless. Most work is the result of inefficiency, not genuine need. In other words, idling is consistent with capitalism's own internal logic, which of course implies, even if it never realizes, the end of capitalism.

Now, I guess this is some reference to a pure theory of the market of which I'm unaware. But it certainly sounds like elements of the internet - where distribution is fictionless (hey! another iPhone/Android app!), where the long-tail delivers exactly what you want (maybe not when you want, but in a few days anyway). And who can deny that, when we have a consistent experience of getting what we want from a network-enabled screen, our behaviour tends towards the intrinsic self-satisfaction of the idler? 

The other reference this sparks off is that of distributed manufacturing and local fabrication (which we're beginning to get a hint of with things like print-on-demand books in bookshops). This is the great wet-dream of the post-scarcity prophets - a state of material plenitude that would destroy economics as the management of scarcity, and indeed allow universal, beauteous idling (hello, Iain Banks' Culture). 

I was delighted to see the Star Trek end of this - "make me a milkshake in the Universal Fabricator, Deanna!" - get a run-out in Ed Regis's contribution to the World Question Centre this year. Problem is, 'molecular manufacturing' might not be possible, says Regis, due to "insurmountable technical difficulties at the chemical bonding level". Well, they said the same about Trek's communicator and the teleport machine... 

From 'playerish' to playing in the dark: Wenger and Monroe

Not often one can get a Premier League football manager, and the 20th century's greatest sexual icon, into one week's post about play... But here we go...

Firstly, Arsene Wenger, the manager of Arsenal F.C., exulting over the performance of his team in their recent victory over Spurs, and inventing a new word in the process:

It was a performance worthy of adding a new word to the footballing vocabulary. "I'm very excited with this team because - I don't know if the word exists - they are 'playerish'," said Wenger."They love to play and that is something that you feel from the outside. They love to play. Even at 2-1 they don't go to the corner flag, they continue to try to score."

And secondly, the Guardian's reprint of an interview with Marilyn Monroe in 1962, contains this unbearably poignant passage:

When I was five I think, that's when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn't like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries. It goes beyond house; you could make your own situations and you could pretend, and even if the other kids were a little slow on the imagining part, you could say, "Hey, what about if you were such and such, and I were such and such, wouldn't that be fun?" And they'd say, "Oh, yes," and then I'd say, "Well, that will be a horse and this will be ..."

It was play, playfulness. When I heard that this was acting, I said that's what I want to be. You can play. But then you grow up and find out about playing, that they make playing very difficult for you. Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I'd sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn't miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

Anthony Wilson, R.I.P (Recently Immaterialised Punk)

Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda, and Northern England's cultural magus, has just died of cancer. What a terrible, thoroughly premature loss.

I once spent a brilliant, careening day with Tony in Manchester in the late eighties, when Hue and Cry were being featured on one of his crazed late night music-and-culture shows, called The Other Side of Midnight. Hell, I think he even gome to present one of them, pairing me up with Shere Hite, the Titian-curled feminist (who I remember being as flirtatious as all hell, but that could be tricks of the memory..)

What a complete force of nature Tony was - obviously supremely intelligent and informed, but with a genuine punk energy inside him that didn't just seek confrontation and dialectic, he loved it, embraced it. Everything - from politics to pop, history to theory - was love or shove it, essential or detritus... I tried to match him 'tude-for-'tude, as a brash young Scottish post-punk, but of course I couldn't keep up.

In the middle of the day he drove me round Manchester, showing off the scientific and cultural glories of his beloved city, baiting me endlessly as a Glasgow man from a 'surely second-rate regional sub-tropolis' (or words to that effect). I remember he shoved this tape into the car deck. Kind of whiny, regional dub-funk it sounded like to me... 'You'll know all about these guys in a few years. The Happy Mondays'. Great name, I thought, and went and looked it up.  'Happy Monday's' turned out to be the medieval tradition where the workers rebelled against their work-regimes, and decided to extend their weekend for fun, love and intoxication. Of course: how Tony - cutting-edge music, yet referencing an English history of rebellion-from-below which he has always been sensitive to (particularly as a chip-shouldered Manc, and particularly from his lofty perch as the North of England's Walter Kronkite in local television).

Musically, there's no argument - one of the greatest ever A&R men. Business-wise? Well, his idealism about music meant he was never going to do anything else but dig large holes and just about fill them in again. But if you ever wanted to create a genetic fusion of Greil Marcus and Ahmet Ertegun, you'd end up almost certainly with Tony Wilson. Great taste, and a great mind, and a great big ball of energy inside to dynamise them both.

I thought he would beat the fuck out of this cancer. He had probably the most interesting rock biography ever to write, and I was sure that no metastasis of errant cells would get in his way. But as his old punk show put it, referencing Kurt Vonnegut (literate as ever), So It Goes. My condolences to his family and friends. One of the great players is off to complete the infinite game.

(PS: A classic mid-eighties interview from Tony).

Bergman: the true artist is the child

A beautiful obituary of Ingmar Bergman from his relative (and detective novelist) Henning Mankell, with some insights into his genius that all players will recognise and glory in:

Music, I believe, was always one of his main sources. The other I understand to be his childhood. Or, rather, his childlikeness. To me this is a highly positive quality. I believe that the true artist is the child. When we grow up, before school starts reproaching us if we show too much trust in imagination and fantasy, when reality's letters and mathematical formulas must rule, we lose a lot of what we had by nature before. We lose that unfettered faith in the forces of fantasy and imagination. But not only because it could help us in building inventive wooden huts or rafts, or making pirate ships out of pieces of bark. We need fantasy and imagination to deal with the difficulty that so often comes with life.

Swedish literature is enriched with many illustrations of children who have used fantasy to avoid being swallowed up by a complicated, depraved and dangerous world of grown-ups. If, later in life, having - hopefully - made it through school, you wish to become an artist, then you must recapture what you had as a child. Humanity would not have had access to fantasy and imagination unless we needed it to survive. We are rational beings; fantasy and imagination are in our genes. I have met many significant artists in my life, and not one has denied that it is precisely in the exploits of childhood that the cornerstones for all future creation are to be found. Later in life, that becomes supported by experience, acquired knowledge and political or moralistic convictions.

Gwen Gordon: Play Magus

It's a delight to bring Gwen Gordon's new site to your attention. Gwen is a play advocate, life-trainer and scholar operating out of the Bay Area in California. Gwen has a fascinating history - she started out designing and building Muppets for Sesame Street! She branched out from there and has established a practice that does personal, group and organisational consultancy, using all the dimensions of play to revivify lives and enterprises.

I deeply admire both her practicality, and her searching, spirituality-meets-science approach. Some of the academic papers she has recently published on definitions of play (What is Play? Toward a universal definition, Integral Play, and Are We Having Fun Yet?, all PDF's) are ground-breaking, in my view. She's beginning to point towards the idea of developmental levels of adult play - play that gets more capacious, more complex, more ethical - which I've begun to talk about in some recent presentations, particularly at the BBC Digital Futures event at the beginning of the year.

For those of you Enlightenment, neo-Calvinist Brits who can't quite cope with Californian optimism, suspend your scepticism, and dive in. As Martin Buber says on the cover: "Play is the exultation of the possible".

Bye Dad

Just to let you all know that John Kane, my father, died suddenly on Saturday 9th March, 8.50pm, from an attack of pneumonia, aged 77. We buried him yesterday in Coatbridge, the town of his birth and life. He leaves Mary Kane, his wife, myself and my two brothers, Gregory and Garry-John. If you want to know a little of what our Dad was like, pages 27-30 of The Play Ethic book will give you a flavour (but only a flavour) of him, and his influence on me in particular. I have posted the funeral eulogy to my father below, in extended post, if you want to know more.

Gregory and I wrote a song for him about 16 years ago (here's the clip). It was occasioned by his retiral day, in 1987, from British Rail as a long-term administrative worker (and when he left, first-rung manager). Bye dad, we love you.

WHITE COLLAR

Hero of the lucid memo
Rest your fountain pen
Office grace is giving way to glassy eyed young men
Champion of compromise
The world has changed for you
No need for the gentle touch when a rabbit punch will do

So rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck
So rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck

There were times when class and class had known the same stairwell
These are times when hatchet men are shuttled up from hell
Leaving Day was thick with jokes and how they knew you well
Friends and enemies agreed you were more than personnel

So rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck
Rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck
Rest your head, rest your weary head

Seems like we've begun again on the same side of the street
I have found this happy man when the system let him be

So rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck
Rest your head upon a White Collar snapped around your neck
Rest your head, rest your weary head
Rest your head, rest your weary head