Play Journal

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

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...

Kanecast: Sunday Live

Very pleased to be part of my first ever video podcast, courtesy of STV's Sunday Live, a newspaper-review and current-affairs show, produced by an old Scottish-self-government activist pal of mine. (Not sure how long it'll be up for, so here's a directly downloadable clip - beware, it's about 54Mg).

For those of you who aren't that aware of my geographical locus, it might be a bit of an insight: it's definitely (as the clock at the top left of this page would have it), an example of 'Glasgow Time' - 11 year olds on heroin, Muslim outrage at Mohammed's cariacature, sexual harrassment in the workplace, and a documentary on Neo-Nazi rock bands. This is nothing if not a politicized culture...

Largs Elegy

In the midst of a New Year's computer tidy-up, I keep coming across pre-edited copies of old newspaper articles of mine. There's so many of them, and I'm proud enough of them, that I'm going to start posting a few pieces - play-ethic related, if only tangentially - on this site.

First up is an essay I did for the Scottish edition of the Sunday Times in August 2003, about my experience and memories of family holidays in Scottish seaside towns (in extended post below). My theoretical dislike of the work-leisure/work-life dichotomy (I prefer the notion of a play-care continuum) doesn't blind me to the richness of holidays. This piece is closer to Tom Hodgkinson's idea of the vacation as a space of idleness, a chance to re-evaluate the structures of our productive, useful life. And also, to do that most restorative of play activities: be present with one's children, fully and unreservedly.

Sue Perman's Big Christmas

Many thanks to old Coatbrige pal Mark Millar for this Xmas clip, (Quicktime, 1.18MB) whose transhumanist sentiments I entirely endorse. (If you pick up the Ian Dury reference in this posting, you win a bag of ludobeans).

And thanks to all of your for contributing, commenting and reading over 2005. The Play Ethic, as memes go, has its own nice little virulence - and hopefully, when the book is released in 2006 in the US (March), and I do my keynotes in San Jose and Brisbane around that time (more later), it'll be even healthier. In between that, I have the next step of my resurgent music career, and maybe another book to kick off, and a 42nd birthday to process (post-punk middle age, hells bells...).

Anyway, have a great season and a fertile 2006. Peace and love, PK

My books of the year

This may be of interest - my books of the year, as requested by my old paper, the Sunday Herald:

Pat Kane, writer and musician

Afflicted Powers: Capital And Spectacle In A New Age of War by the Retort collective (Verso, £9.99) is the most intelligent, holistic and well- written leftist critique of our current world disorder that I’ve ever read. The collection Islam, Race And Being British, edited by Madeleine Bunting (Guardian Books/Barrow Cadbury Trust, £9.99) is a vital toolbox for building harmony on these islands. And all not-yet- entirely-jaundiced hacks should read Peace Journalism by Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick (Hawthorn Press, £25), a new paradigm for reporting. For fun, I virtually inhaled Chronicles, by Bob Dylan (Viking, £7.99).

Dearie me: given 100 words to fill, the inveterate old activist comes out... I should also mention Geoff, The Buddha and Me, A Hacker Manifesto, Ulysses (again!?), and Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. The rest of the Sherald list, like all these year end things, makes fascinating reading (and is very useful for Xmas).