Producing Fun

A great and kindred spirit, Bernie De Koven, is writing with his usual depth and directness about his theme of deep fun - as committed to the profundity of play, and in particular games and creativity, as any man I know. His point here is that fun consumed may not be as valuable as fun produced: "As consumers of fun, we become dependent on the vast, impersonal market forces that create it for us. As producers of our own fun, we become free".

Bernie is putting this into practice with his new book, Junkyard Sports (available here), which is a guide to street sports that arise from whatever lies to hand - cans, sticks, socks. I'd love Bernie to meet the crazy situationist kids from Inventory, just to see what they'd come up with:

Inventory are notorious for trying to stage a football match on The Mall in London, using Admiralty Arch as one goal and the gates of Buckingham Palace as the other.

Their self-styled brand of "fierce sociology" included urging visitors to a gallery to evacuate London immediately and a piece called Coagulum, in which, huddled together in a scrum, they formed a human clot and held up the pedestrian traffic on Oxford Street by spinning to Dixieland music until they came a cropper at the hands of a security guard.