The Play Ethic

Rewind: The Company We Keep, for the Guardian Weekend, 25 May 1996

Doing some personal archiving, I found this piece I wrote for Deborah Orr at the Guardian's Weekend supplement, on management culture - and part of the pre-reverberations before the New Labour victory in 1997.

In retrospect, I'm struck by how it sparked my interest in the cultures of work, business, creativity - and then play - which have obsessed me ever since. And rather movingly for me, I'd forgotten my late dad - a low-level British Rail manager - made a closing appearance in it, with probably the only dialogue of his I had ever transcribed. And whatever happened to Jack Black? Hope you find it interesting.   ---PK

 

THE COMPANY WE KEEP

Pat Kane

The Guardian, 25 May 1996

The gurus of management culture predict that `intuition is the master skill of the next century'. As a clarion call to Britain's wealth-makers, it has a nice ring to it. But at Asda HQ in Leeds, they find a toy dustbin does the job just as well

 

THE psychic bullets are flying everywhere. Three hundred palms rise from grey flannel suits and cream silk blouses, all eager to receive little pellets of positive energy from the guru on the stage who's cocking his fingers like a cowboy on the draw. He bends into the radio mike. 

`Many of you will have come with me on this journey of the imagination,' booms Jack Black, the UK's number one Motivational Speaker For Businesses And Organisations. `Did you feel those bullets?' From the general rustle of sighs and soft giggles that sweeps through the hall, oh yes, yes, they did. 

The advert on the business pages merely promised `another way to inspire your workplace team'. By brunch-time on the first day, I'm sharing a shimmering New Age moment with Edinburgh's pen-pushing finest. What is management culture in the Nineties getting up to?

Within this £350-a-skull, Next-tailored ashram, anything it wants would seem to be the answer. Jack Black, Easterhouse social worker turned business evangelist, has a whole circus of mind tricks for his audience today. 

Hulking great project managers are sapped of their strength by `negative thinking'. A bottle of Perrier is sloshed over the first four rows to illustrate how we `waste our precious daily energies'. Invisible bell-jars drop over heads (to the sound of the Thunderbirds theme tune), so that their wearers can `screen out moany-faced gits'. We salivate at imaginary lemons, we cleanse our minds in spring showers, we practise office meditation, all between morning and afternoon tea breaks. 

Poets' Day: the Mike Wallace Interviews

On this Poets' Day (that's Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday), I want to share one of my guiltiest Americana pleasures: the Mike Wallace Interview archive at Texas University. Pointed this way by Boing Boing, it's a webcast video collection of mid-50's interviews by the legendary news anchor Mike Wallace - who until recently plied a wrinkly trade in the current 60 Minutes show on CBS, but here looks like a stunning candidate for the lead role in Mad Men. 

What is truly bizarre about this show is the combination of the fabulously precise questioning of Wallace, the weird all-culture spectrum of guests - from Aldous Huxley and Kirk Douglas, from Diana Dors to Erich Fromm - and, most head-wrenchingly, the cigarette-sponsor endorsements that Wallace has to painstakingly perform at the head of each show. It's a bit like watching David Dimbleby getting gussied up and shilling for MacDonald's every week at the beginning of Question Time (yes, I know you'd pay good money for that).  

No embed function, I'm afraid, but go there and enjoy yourself hugely. For me, in any case, it demonstrates that there's always been a profound seriousness in the Republic, that the Obama era - see this amazing photo slide from New York Times on their team: all colours, all sexes - might well unleash again. Have a good weekend.

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!