Play Journal

The Play Ethic and the Toy Industry

A fascinating morning recently, delivering a keynote speech to the Toy Industries of Europe 'Toy Safety' conference in Brussels. The toy industry has had its troubles to bear in 2007 - many safety recalls of toys from major manufacturers, largely located in their Chinese factories (80% of all toys in Europe are made in China, 95% in the US). As I said to the audience at the conference, with books like Eric Clark's The Real Toy Story being published (which tries to do for the toy industry what Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation does for convienience food), they are an industry which risks a lot by not lining up their ethical business practice, with the trust that parents put in them to provide safe, ethically and sustainably created products. But if they extend 'play ethics' throughout their business - from labour conditions in China to the nature of the toys they produce - the opportunities for their business (exemplified by the turnaround in Lego, whose CEO Jorgen Knudstorp delivered the other keynote) are major, given the general shift of social values in a 'play-friendly' direction.

NOTE: I'm using the embedding function of Slideshare for the first time here - if you go through to the actual link, you can download the PPT of the presentation with extra notes.

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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.

Loving the alien called David Bowie

Sorry, all, for tardy posting - been a bit consumed with things Scottish and musical, now establishing an equilibrium over all projects. Apropos of completely nothing - other than a search round the databases, and a wee bit of pridefulness - I post a 1997 review of a David Bowie biography that I did for the Times Literary Supplement, my only ever commission there. It's in full on extended post below, but here's an excerpt:

With the flotation of his name as a corporate entity on the New York Stock Exchange, Bowie has become even more of an abstracted "earthling" than ever before. In interviews, however, he remains as soaked in suburban affability as he ever was: the "good average" who can discuss postmodern art, and the latest laddish pleasures, with the same slightly stagey enthusiasm. It is this vaudevillian cast to David Bowie which both of these biographies, in their diligence, finally reveal. Like all great stars, Bowie has been a showman of his selves; and where the empty core behind the display has driven contemporaries to either madness or blandness, Bowie has used his fractured identity as a spin of the dice, an openness to the next cultural turn. The "coldness" remarked upon by so many of those interviewed in these books is probably the cost of this opportunistic fluidity; a matter of "loving the alien", indeed.

Don DeLillo on Today

Had to share this little Real Audio ram clip from the BBC Radio Four flagship news program, Today, interviewing Don DeLillo, my favourite modern American novelist. The occasion is the elevation of Underworld, his epic novel of 20th century American sport, politics and art, to the status of a Penguin Classic (which of course just gives me the opportunity to read it all over again, while I'm brewing up my own novel at the moment). Opening line: "I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind..."

Play Ethic @ BBC 'Digital Futures'

Sorry for belated posting to all those involved, but here is my keynote presentation (in Powerpoint) to the BBC's third annual Digital Futures design conference,  It was a truly fascinating day, with a chance to meet some wonderful peers (including Colin Burns, John Thackera, Kelly Goto and Erik Spiekermann). I hope to write a blog about the day, and its issues for the BBC, over the next week or so, for the Guardian 'Comment is Free' website - watch this space. (Incidentally, all the clips in the presentation are available on YouTube, just keyword search the page titles. I've also been promised an AV clip of the session, which I'll also post here).

Prince of Prodigality

Just discovered that my long piece on Brian Morton's new critical biography of Prince made the cover of the Scottish Review of Books, a long overdue version of the London, New York and Boston reviews, edited by Sunday Herald colleagues Alan Taylor and Colin Waters. Quite happy with it, delighted at the prominence, but they seem to be a bit worried about net readers taking away from actual sales of the publication, so I can't give you a link to the piece. But I do have it here, in extended post below.

And for those of you so minded, here is the wee man in glorious action on YouTube, with another member of the R'n'B pantheon, Beyonce.

Incidentally, I discovered it when I saw the Review sitting in piles at Glasgow's new literary festival, Aye Write, where I attended two great events from Will Hutton (on the myth of an all-powerful China) and John Tusa (on the power of the arts).

So Long, Mr Brown

It's slightly freaking me out that I keep being asked to write 'my day with [soul/jazz icon]', as they all expire before our eyes. That means we're all getting old... Last time I had to do it was with Ray Charles, who I opened for twice as a solo performer in 1997. This time it's James Brown, who me and my brother Greg (as Hue and Cry) opened for in his first visit to Scotland in 1993, at Aberdeen. The Sunday Times grabbed me and got me to write this reminiscence (also in extended post below) of a brief day spent with him and his band. I'm a complete fan-boy about James Brown - as the above picture of our meeting with him shows - and it was a delight to recall the day. Before the Play Ethic, there was always the Funk Ethic. Or as Mr. Brown would put it: people people/you got to get over/before you go under.

Big Babies, Rejuveniles and the limitations of 'growing up'

The Independent just published a version of my review of Micheal Bywater's Big Babies: why don't we just grow up (Granta). I had so many problems  with it, as a thesis, in its stylistics (never mind the barely suppressed patriarchalism-blending-into-misogyny). The newspaper version is a little cut-down, so I'm putting the original review in extended post below.

As an alternative to this 'Grumbulist Manifesto' - apart from The Play Ethic - let me point you to Christopher Noxon's growing empire around Rejuveniles. And for a youthful, creative, playful sensibility given its proper infrastructural due - rather than slagged off as consumer narcissism - I'd strongly recommend Charles Leadbeater's coming book, We-Think. I read his article in the FT this morning, and I half-thought I'd written it myself...