An hour with Michael Chabon

from the kansas union at the university of kansas as a father raised on a hearty diet of crap i can we have crap macaroni into kbr presents an hour with michael semple i'm kate mcintyre wrestle all the time with its role in my own kids' lives are just so damn crap macaroni and cheese with spongebob shaped pasta michael schoenbaum won the pulitzer prize in two thousand won for his novel the much of it now crap tv shows crap movies crap joyce crap nodules all of it interlocked and cross referencing amazing adventures of cavalier and clay other celebrated works include wonder trading cards crap videogames crap flash animations and kraft with breathtaking care and thoroughness i wouldn't worry about it so much i guess of i boys and the yiddish policemen's union this lecture is part of the macaroni and cheese with its exit my son actually thought that was a brand name felt my kids have the space in their own heads and especially in their own physical humanities lecture series sponsored by the hall center for the humanities and was fined worlds to lay it all out and make it their own five thirty five to thirty five and now fear they do to be here lawrence kansas that some i wish i had more time to stay in and get to see more of this historically so fascinating to see i got asked a lot this evening if i've ever been here before and i never have been tortured for having to kansas before my father was living in until very recently in kansas city on the kansas side along in overland park and he didn't we would before

that and thomas soon as he found out i was coming here until lawrence to do this event today he moved he does every time every single time i have a speaking engagement wherever he happens to be he moves announcing his ears and coming he knows that i want my own first series star wars action figures back and this committee pounding until it gets into it took two years to find out what the facts so so you probably know that on and in big time for iraq obama it's been a very exciting period and an other say you might infer from that that that means a done correctly you and for that i am a liberal i am a liberal with my my brain with my might

end with my heart all my heart that i think in my soul and maybe a conservative maybe that's what it delivers about brock about when i first encountered him because i felt like i saw something like i'm into this talk i'm getting a really has nothing to do with any of that it's not a political talk in any way but i suppose in a sense of this kind might call for deregulation is called conquering the wilderness imaginative imperialism and the invasion of lake the land when i was growing up our house back onto a words off in two acre remnant of a once mighty wilderness this was in a maryland city where the indictment planners had provided a number of such lingering swaths of green they were tame as can

be are words and yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows and the winter really deep in snow and seemed to absorb to swallow whole all the ordinary noises of your body and your world scary things could still be imagined to take place in those once was a please into which the bad boys fled after they exit your windows on halloween and left your pumpkins pulled in the driveway there were no indians in those words but there had once been we learned about him in school and taps go indians they've been called swift straight shooting silent as dear gone but for their lovely place names to talk tim wicomico patuxent a miner but undeniable are of romance was attached to the history of maryland my home state there were stories of the founders of refugee catholic englishman cavaliers and ring roads and

rocks there are pirates battles the sack washington to the star spangled banner harriet tubman antietam there was benjamin van acker the genius who was born a slave and when he went out into those woods behind our house well you could feel on that all their history those battles and dramas and romances those stories you could work it into your games you're imagining you're lonely flights from the turmoil or torpor of your life at home my friends and i spent hours they're brave as crusaders commandos losing in grace are the wilderness of childhood as any kid who could attest who grew up like my father on the streets of flatbush in the forties had nothing to do with trees or nature i could lose myself on fields and playgrounds in alleyways and the

wah wah and the neighbor's yard that was kind of goes over people's head of the maryland delaware pennsylvania are avid skier the seven eleven while law means wild goose the sunnis to say you know cartons of the future i could lose myself anywhere in short that i could reach on the bicycle mine was a nineteen seventy ish when typhoon coke can read with a banana seat a sissy bar and a painter handlebars i mean i covered the neighborhood in a regular route for half a mile in every direction i knew the locations of all my classmates houses the number pets and siblings they had a brand of popsicle they served the potential dangerousness of their fathers when i outgrew that like i switched to a ten speed and tripled my range one of my favorite life is how comic strips of migrating the classic mac grain strippers the one

that took the form of a map of bongos neighborhood was like a twisted version of something you might find in the pages of highlights for children magazine at one end of a street that wound among yards and houses stood bongo the little one year grant blog at the other studies mother about to blow our stack barco was late for dinner again between mother and son lay the hazards labeled angry dogs roving gang of hooligans girl with a crush and bango of any journey through the farthest deadly animals antagonistic humans looters and snares of course since this was grinning not even home was really safe bongos mom was standing there at the bottom of the cartoon waiting for him with their arms crossed and saying when that little monkey gets home using for this painting of his life

i thought it was funny but what made it great was a way to acknowledge the mental maps of their worlds that children are endlessly revising and refining childhood is a branch of car talk great stories of adventure from the hobbit to the seven pillars of wisdom all come furnished with a map that's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape of inter relationship between human beings or how thats as the case may be she and park if we think about it think of your favorite adventure story treasure of sierra madre a perfect storm the man who would be king each is impossible unthinkable without a particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course literally of the tail but i think there's another deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps and pages around the end papers of an adventure story whether it's factually or imaginatively true we

have this idea of armchair traveling of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism in danger in unknown half legendary lands that he or she could never hope to find it in life this is a mistake a notion in my view people read stories of adventure and write them too because they have themselves being adventurers childhood is or has been or ought to be the great original adventure a tale of provision courage constant vigilance danger sometimes tragedy for the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map mark here there be tigers and new kid with an air rifle and here she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune

bedtime reading and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children a striking feature of literature for children's the number of stories many of them classics of the genre that feature the adventures of a child more often a group of children acting in a world in which adults and particularly parents are completely or effectively out of the picture think of the lion the witch and the wardrobe of the railway children stories are rendered kipling spock improves health or peanuts for that matter philip pullman's recent his dark materials trilogy presents a chilling version of this world and its depiction of cheated as a city whose adults have all been stolen away then there is the very rich vein of children's literature featuring ordinary contemporary children navigating an adventure in through a contemporary non fantastical world that is nonetheless at least some of the time to avoid or let's say beyond the direct influence

of adults i'm thinking of books i liked when i was a kid like the encyclopedia brown books the great brain books the henry reed and homer priced books and stories of the mad scientists club a fair share of the early works of beverly cleary i was extremely fun as a kid of a series of biographies largely fictional i'm sure they dramatize the lives of famous americans washington jefferson kit carson henry ford thomas edison daniel boone when they were children boys for the most part though i do remember reading one about clara barton one element that was almost universal in these stories true or otherwise was a vast amount of time these famous historical boys were alleged to have spent wandering alone with him doesn't companions with friendly indian boys or a devoted slave through the once mighty wilderness the wilderness of childhood entirely free of adult supervision

though the wilderness available to me had shrunk into a mere scrap of its former enormous mess though so much about chowder that changed in the intervening years between the days of young george washington's and venturing on his side of the potomac and my own suburban exploits on my and there was still a connectedness there a continuum of childhood eighteenth century virginia twentieth century maryland tenth century britain narnia neverland the day it was all the same wilderness those legendary wanderings of boone and carson and young daniel bier and the father of the boy scouts of america those games of war an exploration i read about those frightening encounters with genuine menace far from the help or interference of mother or father they seemed to me at the time and i think this is my key point when i read

them in books they seemed absolutely familiar to me the thing that strikes me now when i think about the wilderness of childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure they're a very grave very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then the wilderness of childhood is gone the days of adventure a past the land and moved by children to which kid might exile himself or at least some portion of every day from a neighboring kingdom of adulthood has been taken over co opted columnist and finely absorbed by the neighbors a traveler soon learns that the only way to come to know a city to form a mental map of it however provisional and again defying his arrow his or her own way around it is to visit it alone preferably on foot and then become as lost as one possibly can i've been

to chicago maybe half a dozen times in my life on book tours and yet i still don't know myself from my near north side is every time i visited i didn't pick it up and driven around and taken to see the sites by someone far more verse that i had the cds wonders and hazards state street the loop hosted street to me it's all a vast jumbled lot of speech sets and backdrops passing by the window of a car this is that kind of the door to door all encompassing escort service that we adults have now contrived to provide for our children we schedule their encounters for them driving them to and from one another's houses so that they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between we send them out to play if they're lucky in the backyard where they can be safely fenced in an even in extreme cases monitored with security cameras when my family moved on to

our street in berkeley california the family next door included a nine year old girl she's in high school now in the house two doors down the other way there was a nine year old boy her exact contemporary unlike her a lifelong resident of the street they had never met the sand lots and creek beds the alleys and wouldn't have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations chuck e cheese the jungle the discoveries own jolly internment centers matt and planned by adults with no blank spots only doors more staff only when children roller skater ride their bikes they go fourth armoured as for battle and their parents typically stand nearby but this kind of on the veil and all inclusive mediation is not limited to the realm of children's play

not that long ago i took my kids to see the latest family movie the latest computer generated piece of animated crop can i say crap and doesn't talk about crop please don't ask me to revisit the experience of this film even long enough to name it let alone described anyway you know the word i mean said in a stew or in a forest or on the farms or under the sea or in africa or in an effort to fully hilarious storybook land where magic wonder and make believe our ironized unmarked except that those moments when they are tentatively invoked to move units i believe that i am not prepared to swear that the lead in this weekend's version may have been a neurotic lion

or a neurotic bear or neurotic rat or interact chicken but i know for certain the thing featured penguins right now they all feature penguins naturally there were the legally required five point five incidences of humor simulating flatulence per hour of running time a raft of bright pop punk tunes on the soundtrack alternating with familiar numbers called with art and cruelty from the storehouse of parental nostalgia creativity idiosyncrasy and the fertile rebelliousness of romantic dreamer were invoked and glorified without recourse to use our display of any of those three and marketable commodities as a parent and as a former child i have nothing against scrappy art and the ancillary crap that inevitably attends it extruded action figures and books of un peeled all stickers

and rubber transfer stiff and underpants first of all because what smells strongly of crap to one generation victorian penny dreadful is the music of the parties the lone ranger radio show blacks publication films of the seventies so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration veneration and study for those to come meanwhile certified great and we're the art molders and fades on its storage rack giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of mothballs what's more i've experienced the power of mass art to transport and then reached the imagination of its consumer i saw a lot of lousy movies and watch a time of crappy television and read a bunch of other the forgettable books and comics and listen to hours of joke music as a kid and i'm still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasures are stored up in those years

but the acceptance and even the glorification of crap implies no universal obligation even without the benefit of generational hindsight there are distinctions to be made among the varieties of crap to that end if i myself thinking back to a saturday afternoon thirty years ago more now and i spent playing planet of the apes about a movie nor any of its four increasingly baroque sequels and certainly not the pierre boulez unlawful confusingly replete when you tried to read it with a meaty french you know my friends and i were obsessed for the moment with the short lived cbs television series of which thirteen episodes were aired to low ratings at the end of nineteen seventy four as with many forgotten tv series all the episodes of planet of the

apes are now available on dvd but i haven't ever gone back to look at them but i remember about the show are the elements that formed the basis of our play the setting and the world a farce and grassy hill the peculiarity that unlike in the films the humans though degraded any pies were capable of speech and above all perhaps a steady presence in every episode of adventure on horseback or a day of my friends and i inhabited our planet of the apes a hill a stream a small wooden bridge behind a townhouse at the ragged edge of columbia maryland where bill planted gave way to open space according to principles implied but never articulated by the tv show we named ourselves and fitted ourselves with weapons and history his invented characters and questions and dark secrets i'm sure that at least as much time was spent preparing to play conferring and arguing and revising the parameters of the game as actually playing it

eventually it got dark it was time to come inside time for me to return to my own secure some know vastly empty your house there's no doubt that the planet of the apes tv show was crap yes the makeup was a decent for its time and the shows tried in the beautiful manner of early seventies post star trek pre star wars television science fiction to address weighty issues of prejudice and tolerance and the meaning of human but it remained indeed it depended for its brief existence aren't being a knockoff of a knockoff the sequel to sequels worked up by veteran tv hacks to fill up the spaces between park in margarine that's what's more it was crap that flopped canceled after only four months but the show had the powerful quality of being open ended vague and its borders and to its simple template of horses and apes and humans of

quest and pursued across a simplified landscape a kid could easily project himself in the world he lived in and it's very incompleteness born of a lack of budget believes bigger rex picaresque structure and even cancellation itself it hinted at things beyond its own borders there is room for you and your imagination and the narrative map of the show the cgi animated movies that remain in the theaters today to work out why these films operate more like classic sitcoms like the erotic adventure stories for which they try to pass the contours of the worlds they depict feel as backless as flats as the walls and doors of mary richards newsroom or the huxtables living room i like a good sitcom as much as anybody but did any kid ever tried to get up a game of murphy brown

and the same time the ample budgets large cruise and generally high levels of technical prowess boasted by even the most acceptable of these films enable their creators to employee the prevailing star wars inspired aesthetic of packing every seam every frame with incident and delivery without the can comment open ended structure that made the early star wars films at least a likely locus of fantasy play both for children and in the form of fan fiction for adults these films i like but to issa butlers of the imagination like modern parents ready to serve a child every imaginative need or desire as it arises they don't leave anything implied unstated incomplete there's no room in them for children i see the early nineteen seventy three wacky packages

craze as a pivotal moment in the history of american chow and around this time at the age of nine or ten along with all my peers i had assumed custody of a vast repertoire of wonders we discuss the material gross or sick humor was then as now as ever a fundamental mode of children's discourse dead baby jokes songs about vaughn that it's not diarrhea and other forms of excrement anecdote is an urban legends of cannibalism copper a figure brain eating your wings it was also and this is crucial a secret language a subterranean culture it was a kind of code of these are ghost spoken only went out of your shot of adults who've one knew if i'm faith if not through painful experience would never have permitted or approved of it in fact i've understood it

songs about bloggers and vomit or transmissions in a frequency that to be adult year would sound only like in if you're eating squawk annoying static and that was their point along with the unwritten rules and nuances of byzantine games played in vacant lots of alleyways gross humor was a principal means by which children signaled and celebrated the absence of adults in the immediate vicinity we were a generation may be the last full generation that adults at least sometimes left alone singing a disgusting song or telling a cruel riddle for example would you call a man with no arms or legs when you throw em in the ocean thank you during one of those ripples was like running up and insurgents flag in a neighborhood where for the moment the occupier had been driven back at

the same time the gore and mayhem the amputations or fatalities the abomination is described by growers humor an anecdote also constitute a way of acknowledging the implicit danger of living in a world avoid of adults and have the protection they theoretically afford it wacky packages followed hot wheels and proceeded pet rocks as one of the great commercial fans of my childhood for about a year i call my friends i collected wacky packages treated them stuck them to my three ring binder inside of my locker my bedroom wastebasket they were so popular and ubiquitous that tops chewing gum incorporated the manufacture of wacky packages several times literally ran out of paper to print them up just before the fat petered out wacky packages were featured on the cover of new york magazine my parents had a subscription which used them and the fad for collecting them

to diagnose me and my supposedly cynical wised up skeptical generation the typical wacky packages card featured a peel off sticker that marked the appearance and name of some well known brand of household product grocery item or staple of the drugstore a bottle of faded looking salad dressing labeled this bone a phone mouth dark on the label of a can of rabid shaved shaving cream a busted finger candy bar with a big swollen finger poking through the upper a bar of vials soap a checklist car team in every package along with a square of tubal pink cellulose and every few every few months tops would bring out a new series tops car designer art spiegelman and his colleagues among them the great pulp magazine cover artist norman saunders and underground comics stalwarts kim dietz bill griffiths jay lynch bob stewart well and the spiral of mockery

so tight that the fourth series even featured a cartoon depicting wormy packages were manifested trading stickers intended like wacky packages themselves like all the products and advertisements they mocked like everything by implication that you saw heard or paid attention to every moment of your young media saturated life to pry loose a nickel from your pocket but any kid who had picked up a copy of mad magazine during the previous twenty years there was nothing new about the flavor of mockery to which wacky packages subjected the features of the american brands keep the salient novelty of wacky packages was not there a reference point copywriter cliches or their subversion of the in avoid ability of brands and logos but they're free and at the time startling use of course humor the first few series of cards employed

images such as lace poisonous dog food expose brains putrid kat chow maggots toe corns less peeled away by dengate strips and a powdered blood that breakfast drink for vampires pain and saliva the shock value of wacky packages have nothing to do with the content they depicted a reef or to nothing that i had not imagined rhymed about disgust drawn or even seen for myself what was so shocking about wacky packages was that they were a production of the adult world adults had conceived and painted them adults had managed the rotating drums of the printing presses in the machine that wrapped each package two cards in waxed paper adults had truck to the wacky packages to the drugstore were you handed over your five cents to an adult who

perhaps most shocking of all would allow you to buy them it was as if your mother suddenly decided to encourage you to play with your food or your father handed you his expensive german shortwave radio and a screwdriver and told you to go right ahead and figure out how the damn thing work the adults who sold us wacky packages spoke the secret language they entered boldly into the preserve or magic get out of childhood under the insurgent flag i remember how it felt at the time to open those first packs of wacky packages stickers delicious incredible pleasurable in the way that only something truly wrong kennedy because in the long run wacky packages and the cultural trend of which they turned out to be the leading edge where bad for children i don't mean bad in any kind of easy moralistic way children must learn to mock capitalism

and the uses to which it seeks to put them as early as they learn how to swim and i wouldn't care i'd secretly applied it if my kids wasted every free moment they had creating taxonomies of vomit by child genius and color it's just that they now have so few moments that can truly be said to be free in any sense of the word so much of their culture that compound of lore and play is now the trademark product and property of adults the men who sold us wacky packages were like those traders in hudson's bay blankets good warm blankets whose stock gradually drove out the native product and sent the traditional weaving craft into decline we sold out our liberty and gave up control over our ancient heritage of vulgarity for the thrill of seeing it done up in four color of the fiber feed transferable to a notebook or a classroom desk scented with the sweet

dust of bubble gum after wacky packages came slime a first disgusting toy in nineteen seventy seven and garbage pail kids stickers making eighty five and the advent of fart jokes and what disney cartoons the lion king making ninety four and that masterpiece of the confectioners art sour flash acrid sweet powder that comes packaged in a miniature plastic toilet to be damned and consumed by means of them we sent end of an edible plunger and then one day children looked around and saw that there was no corner know alleyway no space anywhere in their lives that was free of adult supervision adult mediation adult control all sports are organized sports trick or treating takes place in school gymnasium

and parents to send their children out to play where i used to play in the street in this street court well publicized tragedies such as abduction and intervention by the meanings of child protective services and captain underpants champion of flatulence and bodily fluids is a mainstay of the scholastic book club if the captain underpants book had been around when i was a kid i probably would've loved them too but knowing that doesn't make it any harder for me to wish captain underpants away i see my disapproval of captain underpants as a drawing of a line between my son and me dream his world and mine between adulthood and childhood as a small feeble attempt to re establish the contours of a boundary that in the greater culture has grown vague disregarded abused if i withdraw my approval of captain underpants that withdraw creates a gap a small

and chanted precinct of parental disapproval within which he can curl up for a minute for the time it takes to eat a crass vibrant silly one hundred and twenty page book with big print when they paid for himself and thrilled to the deep furtive pleasure of knowing one's father there's no way to draw that line to recreate that boundary without engaging in hypocrisy without condemning questioning or diminishing the importance of the things from altria sugary bubble gum to trans fatty snacks to humboldt county's in simian that once stood at the center of my way of loving the world that's what sucks about being an adult adulthood has always carried a burden of self denial of surrendering pleasures of leaving childish things behind maybe that's why around thirty years ago adult started trying to get out of the adult business

and into the business of selling childhood i mean it's just that self denial surrender and four swearing are a lot harder to package for retail it could be that our procedures such a toxin that our society is better off without even if that means in federalizing adults with late night programming on the cartoon network or merchandising children's wants autonomous quarterback to them in shrink wrapped packs but it's hard to think of anything that would be more hypocritical than the selling to children whose lives we control and regiment down to the quarter hour of brightly colored confectionery visions of children who were still subject to creative neglect still free to engage in the most profitable of human activities wasting time making up a crass vibrant silliness that is all your own sometimes they don't seem to be able to

operate at all in an imaginative world when we go to maine in the summer which you do for a few weeks every summer we opened the back door and step aside and wait for them to fly out into the grass and the sunshine acres of woods and wildflowers butterflies and streams but tame waterfall a waterfall and hours of freedom from rules of parental control and they just stand there on the doorstep it in one another shuffling from foot to foot in the omnivore's dilemma michael pollan describes the disillusioning reality of the lives of chickens so there's free range he explains that these birds are raised like all commercially farm chicken and the dense confinement of industrial and houses for the first six weeks of their lives at the end of that period not long for the chickens are to be slaughtered the doors of the henhouse are rolled open giving un to re regulation patch of open range the chickens come to the door and

look out at the world of green grass and worm worms and fresh air they're being offered and then they go back to the cramped safe remainder of their lives with their needs and desires attended to as the siege of a sleek as by any but there are animation studio they are afraid to go outside it's not a world they know or know how to explore and in fact the farmers don't really want them to go out and explore it far too many diseases they might catch and protected by antibiotics as they are my kids are free range children in all the stark reality of the term apart from the part about being eaten if like before pregnancy children two boys and two girls like my own family of the lion the witch and the wardrobe they were sent off to the countryside to avoid the blitz my children might well have to be marched under protest to the room with the old wardrobe and

shoved in among the coats it would be hard for them to see how a house filled with unknown rooms and corridors might become a world of unlimited play they would never be able to do the half board half and chanted wandering through the variable but never changing spectacle of the neighborhood that enables the children in edward eager is wonderful half magic defying the talisman that grants half of every wish so that one must learn in value ugly to wish twice as hard i guess that's why i spend so much time worrying about as much time worrying about the crappy my kids imaginative die as i do fretting over their eating habits three space free play and a sense of control over a world that is vague and discoverable and its edges these acts as a kind of filtration system enabling kids not to work the crap out of their minds right believe unreservedly of paradoxically in the

splendors and goodness of crap entertainment but to compound that with an alloy of their own imaginations into temperate against the hard edges and rough spots of the physical world all great crop is open ended but only if it can literally be carried by a child right out into the open or otherwise kids get trapped within the flats of the vivid in convincing set that we've constructed for them terrified to go through doors that lead nowhere staring through a cgi window of a pastel and pixel view of the world they're afraid to or have forgotten how to reach content i was tempted to end it on that note but in spirit of brock obama and the idea of trying to come to some kind of a new reality beyond receive categories maybe think about a little harder to see what i can come up with some maybe the question is more complicated than i made it out to be

maybe the frontiers of imaginative play have not been breached so much has reconfigured maybe a new kind of creative disorder is beginning to emerge through the cracks in the total icing apparatus of adult co optation adult mediation and commodification sometimes as i tried to show the conqueror adopts the ways of the conquered but sometimes the fruit of cultural imperialism is a creole a pigeon unimaginative yiddish if you are capable of thrilling feats of subversion and art i started to sense this kind of new possibility sometime after my return following a long absence to the latest fear for a long time i used to look askance at the fabulous variety to be found our days in a box of lego bricks square is and that's what we have squares

rectangles and wheels with chile gray rubber tires sloping red roof bricks of which there never seem to be enough to cover house trees shaped more like real trees then that schematic denver it get now windows and doors with snapping glazing more squares rectangles six colors basic red white blue yellow green and black and that was it light blue i've been reading all orange purple more routine gold silver plan pink pink legos and many shades of grey each of the regional primary and secondary tones has at least five various enabling the builder of sage i was sent crawler model to recreate this deepening of rust and corrosion in the same colors whole of airing

his palette of reds and grace i still get a funny feeling kind of tiny spasm of moral revulsion when i pick up a teal or lilac lake as for sheep bricks were left behind in the or fontina world years ago for a strange geometry of irregular polly guards a vast best year in hybrid pieces custom pieces blanks and converts careers and pearl lessons freaks that have their little raised dots rather little gripping to join more than one side of the time and then there are other people many fakes as they're known among quake i'll go first frankenstein monsters american indians get a night's and pizza chefs medieval cross bowman and vikings deep sea divers and bus drivers spiderman harry potter allen

iverson the range of personalities and occupations to be found among the denizens of the lakers fear is so wide an elaborate that perhaps only the brain of an eight year old could possibly master i remember the sense of disdain i felt toward the cylinder headed little humbled july when many figs first began to be introduced around the time that my original interest on legos was waning they didn't have that little painted faces back then their heads were shiny yellow voids their arms and legs couldn't bend and there was something of the night marriage something named about them what i'm most resented about the mini figs was the scale they imposed on everything you built around like le corbusier is human centric modular scoured the empties the truly a man a mini figs as they proliferated became the measure of all things weapons must fit their rigid great

doorways accommodate the tops of their heads cockpit accommodate their snap on passes it was this sense of imposition of pre determined boundaries and contours of a formal area of play that i found i most resented when legos return to my life around the time my oldest child turned three she's about to turn fourteen she was into indians are other indians especially tiger lily we bought her a fairly complicated lego set with were painted many fakes horses tb is a canoe a rocky cliff but along with the giddy proliferation of shapes and colors that had taken place during my long absence from the lakers for the underlying purpose of the toys also appeared to have changed when i first began to play with them in the late nineteen sixties legos retained a strong flavor of their austere progressive scandinavian

origin abstract minimal pure informant design they echoed the dominant mid century aesthetic with its emphasis on utility and human perfectibility they were of real descendant of friedrich for both famous gifts the wooden stacking blocks that influenced frank lloyd wright as a child part mathematics part pedagogy a system it was called the lego system by which children could be lead to infer complex patterns from a few fundamental principles of interrelationship and geometry they also made and make it to this day a stronger claim on the kids' sense is snapping together and coming apart with a satisfying joint appeal to the year and the fingers they presented the familiar objects one made from them airplanes houses cars aces and a quirky greeted the world dissolved over simplified into big chunky pixels of color and there are limited

repertoire shapes the absolute even cruel set of axioms governing the way they could and couldn't be arranged legal structures emphatically did not present and in playing with them you never hope for the appearance of reality a lego construction was not a scale model it was an idea was issued an approximation your best version of the thing you were trying to make any house a town built on legos with its airport and tram line and marlborough trim the chimneys and grades of grass automatically took on a certain socialist democrat it this event sterility one of the notable qualities of aqua light you'll be tidying spy ring the material from which lego bricks are made is that it is still orderly functional utopian half imaginary abstract primary colored when i visited helsinki a few years back i felt as if i recognized it and we recognize a place for my dream

by the late nineties when we bought that first indians at obstruction was dead a full blown real awesome reign supreme in the latest beer makers were sold in kits that enabled want to put together at find scales in detail made possible by that wild array of odd shape pieces precise replicas of ferrari formula one racers pirate galleons jet airplanes me go provided not only the standard public domain play environments supplied by children supply to children by toy designers of the past fifty to one hundred years the wild west the middle ages jungle and farm and city street but also the line of unlicensed star wars kid it's the first of many subsequent ventures into trademarked conglomerate owned pre imagined environments derives from movies and other media instead of the printed booklets i remembered featuring suggestions for the kinds of

things one might want to try to make from his or her box of squares and rectangles the new kids came in covered with fat abstruse wordless manuals laying out panel after numbered panel and page after page steps that must be followed if one hoped and after all why else would you know that your dad into buying it for you to arrive in the end as a land speed or just like luke skywalker it's only smell where lego building had once been an open ended exploratory kind it now have far more in common with puzzles solving a process of moving incrementally toward an ideal pre established solution i resented this change and my son i would finish putting together a tight interceptor or not to fight are usually after several weeks of struggle a half the

rains searching for one tiny black slip of sterile styrene the size of his pinky nail and two or three bouts of prolonged despair the resulting object was so undeniably handsome and our investment of time in building it's so immense that the thought of playing with it let alone ever again disassemble ng it was anathema but more than the inherent difficulty which after all is an important aspect of puzzle solving or the shift in focus from exploration to reproduction i resented the authoritarian nature of the new lego though i admired and enjoyed the film toy story thinking maybe five the film has always been tainted a little for me by its subtext of orthodoxy it's implied assertion that there is a right way and a wrong way to play with your toys kevin young hero of toy story

uses his toys or less in the way that manufacturers intended cowboys are cowboys used to pertain ahead do you quip with his angry eyes is a suitable mustachioed villain well the most telling sign that we are to take c ended because i psychotic neighbor kid as a bad boy is that he hybrid isis and breaks the rules of orderly play equipping an erector set spider for example with a stubbly doll's head city is moving cruel heartless crazy you can tell because he put his wrestler of all an address a similar orthodoxy a structure of control implied obedience to the norms of the instruction manual and of the implacable exit and seas of realism itself seem to have been unleashed like the dark side of the force and the once bright republic of lego

but i should have had more faith in my children and in the saving power of which they partake of a lot less imagination like all religions lego real ism was doing more or less to fail here and part of his failure was an inevitable result of the quirks and limitations inherent in the lego system with its raised dots and gripping tubes and right angles the distortions that its various techniques of interlocking create edition of painted faces an elaborately modeled head gear weapons and accoutrements ultimately did little to diminish the fundamental silliness of the mini fig as with cgi animation the technology falls down at the human form in depicting people it makes compromises that weekend the intended real as i'm of the whole but the technical limitations are only part of the greater failure of real islam of accuracy of

precision of peacefulness to be that experience to live up to the disorder the unlikely illness and a recombinant impulse of imagined experience kids write their own manuals in a new language forged from an alloy of the things we give them and the things that come from the peculiar wiring of their heads the power of lego now is only revealed after the models have been broken up or tossed half finished half abandoned into the drawer you sit down to make something start digging around in the drawer are container looking for a particular brick car axle and the legos go around in the tour with a peculiarly loud crunching noise sometimes you can't find the peace you're looking for a big year or clear orange corn or a little horned home it catches your eye time after time playing legos with my kids i would fall under the spell of that old

familiar crunching it's a sound of creativity itself of the inventive mind at work making something new out of which you have been given by your culture which you know you'll need to do the job and what you happened to stumble on along the way all kids the good ones to have a psycho tinge of sid of the maker of hybrids and freaks my son's have used aerodynamic streamlined bits and pieces of a dozen star wars gets mixed with lego dinosaur jaws they go along with a good dublin's they go to be as to devise improbably beautiful spacecraft far more commensurate been george lucas is with the mysteries of other galaxies an alien civilization recently my older son brought home one of legos knew monk inspired figures and announced that he was figuring out a

way to equip it with lego tics yes or flippers meanwhile my little guy likes to put a glow in the dark a bed sheet styled lego ghost costume over of lego green goblin mini fig seat him and su horse army with a light sabre and making do battle with a mini fig darth vader mounted on the black horse armed with a bow and arrow that is the aesthetic at work in the legacy or now not the modernist purity of the early years or at the total rising vision behind a dark empire of modern corporate marketing but the aesthetic of the lego drawer of the mash up the pastiche that destroys its sources at the same time that makes use of and reinvents time you turn around in the drawer and pull out what catches your eye bits and pieces drawn from movies and history and your own fancy and make something new something no one has ever seen or imagined

before you've been listening to michael say vong winner of the two thousand one pulitzer prize for his novel the amazing adventures of cavalier in play his other books include when the voice and the yiddish policemen's union is michael shaven was recorded october twenty seven few thousand eight in the kansas union it was a presentation of the hall center for the humanities and was recorded by katie you media services i'm kay mcintyre k pr prisons is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas says an actor he's been

disbarred