A couple years ago, I wrote about Ken Feit's remarkable sound poem, The Romance of Sound and Senses. Ken was the "holy fool" who taught me about the Frog of Enlightenupment. His sound poem is another example of his amazing wit, profound sensitivity, and endless creativity.
When I was in Fairfield I met a storyteller, and in telling her about Ken's sound poem, I realized how important it was to me that she knew about it, and that you knew about it. So I decided that maybe I needed to write yet another post about this amazing work, and to publish it again, in perhaps a more accessible format.
She explains how she remembered the hours she spent with Waldo books, searching endlessly for his image, and made the connection between her childhood pastime and the delight she takes looking through Google Earth.
It is a brilliant connection. Coles creates a remarkably effective translation of a familiar, well-loved, print-based activity into the endlessly complex realities of the virtual world, adding a new layer of fun to our global vision.
As you know, my interest in Improv Everywhere has been high ever since I first heard about their playful public theatrics. Most recently, Improv Everywhere launched a new, shall we say, play, which very well might prove, as they themselves describe it, to be the Best Game Ever.
Start here, with a video of the event. Then read about it. Then ask yourself what it would be like if you had actually been there, been one of the parents, or better yet, one of the kids.
This Best Game Ever is right on the edge of art, theater, and social comment. It wouldn't succeed if not for the playfulness and sensitivity of the Improv Everywhere company - the people who conceived and staged the event. It could have proven insulting to both parents and players, it could have proven upsetting, been perceived as an act of ridicule. But apparently the event stopped short of being ridiculous, just at the point of being almost entirely believable. If not because of the believability of the actor-spectators, then because of the player's willingness to belive. If not by the actuality of the giant scoreboard, then most definitely by the blimp. Why don't we do this for all kids, everywhere - invest great effort and expense, yes, but, for the kids, and parents - to give them one random hour, of sheer, magical, transformational fun. Beyond game and sport. A theater of total participation.
Fantastic fun. The fun of fantasy fulfilled. Ah, delicious.
Once I learned to see the connections between theater and children's games, I began to understand the wisdom contained in their playful dramas.
Once I started sharing this wisdom with adults, it became the thing I liked to do best - more, even, than designing games or reviewing games or writing about games and fun and stuff. I first discovered this when I was leading a workshop for teachers at the Durham Child Development Center in Philadelphia, and rediscovered my joy in ths at the Games Preserve and at the Esalen Institute.
I play with grown-ups, especially playful grown-ups. We play a kids' game together. I talk a little about the theater of the game - the play and interplay of roles. And then everyone talks about the "drama" of the game, as if the game were really some kind of theater piece - especially about the drama they experienced, personally. Not so much about their own, personal drama, but about about the drama of the game itself, about relationships, about the way of things in gameland.
I like what happens as we play and talk, play and talk - some kind of healing, playful, loving wisdom starts manifesting itself. Because we are grown-ups playing these games. Because of the growing honesty and openness and depth of sharing we are capable of, just the act of playing each game reveals to us a depth, a drama more profound, more personal, a truth more mutual, more freeing.
"I have learned to see children's games as scripts," I write, "for a kind of children's cultural theater. I see them as collective dreams in which certain themes are being toyed with - investigated and manipulated for the sake of sheer catharsis or some future reintegration into a world view. They are reconstructions of relationships - simulations - (myths) - which are guided by individual players, instituted by the groups in which they are played or abstracted by the traditions of generations of children."
I like to do this best. Teach people to see this. The artistry, the clarity, the wisdom of games.
And frankly, I'm hoping that by telling you about it, I'll get to do this more.
In an article in the New York Times, Alexander McCall Smith describes what can only be called The Really Terrible Orchestra. He begins: "WHY should real musicians — the ones who can actually play their instruments — have all the fun?" A profound question that set this particular funsmith's heart conceptually aflutter. He continues: "Some years ago, a group of frustrated people in Scotland decided that the pleasure of playing in an orchestra should not be limited to those who are good enough to do so, but should be available to the rankest of amateurs. So we founded the Really Terrible Orchestra, an inclusive orchestra for those who really want to play, but who cannot do so very well. Or cannot do so at all, in some cases."
Similar in spirit to Adam Sandler's Opera Man, The Really Terrible Orchestra completely avoids the question of "good music" by providing its audiences with very human performers who are having a great deal of fun making music that isn't really that terrible.
Smith concludes: "There is now no stopping us. We have become no better, but we plow on regardless. This is music as therapy, and many of us feel the better for trying. We remain really terrible, but what fun it is. It does not matter, in our view, that we sound irretrievably out of tune. It does not matter that on more than one occasion members of the orchestra have actually been discovered to be playing different pieces of music, by different composers, at the same time. I, for one, am not ashamed of those difficulties with C-sharp. We persist. After all, we are the Really Terrible Orchestra, and we shall go on and on. Amateurs arise — make a noise."
Cacophonic fun. But of course. Related, but not to be confused with, Musical fun.
I, myself, am somewhat of a virtuoso on the Cacophone...since I was in elementary school band, and discovered that if I played quietly enough, I could pretty much play anything.
The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra exemplifies at least 5 flavors of fun: cooperative, sensual, serious, silly, and transforming. Allow them to explain:
"The Vegetable Orchestra performs music solely on instruments made of vegetables. Using carrot flutes, pumpkin basses, leek violins, leek-zucchini-vibrators, cucumberophones and celery bongos, the orchestra creates its own extraordinary and vegetabile sound universe. The ensemble overcomes preserved and marinated sound conceptions or tirelessly re-stewed listening habits, putting its focus on expanding the variety of vegetable instruments, developing novel musical ideas and exploring fresh vegetable sound gardens."
Transforming fun, because they are playing on vegetables, for godsake. Silly fun, for pretty much the same reason. Serious fun, because these are serious musicians, and the music they are making is actually musical. Sensual fun because they clearly are enjoying the vegetables as much as the music - the color, texture, smell, feel.... Cooperative, because they are an orchestra, and it's about what they are creating together.
One of the "products" of the Games Preserve (of blessed memory) was an official "Notice of Appreciation" card. Which led us inexorably to the official "Notice of Disappointment" card. A clever concept they were, especially in the days of sending things by post. Large cards, they were. Clearly notifying the recipient and the recipient's postal workers of their appreciation- or disappointment-worthy status, written in the form of a lightly-veiled meaningful Madlib which led me, inevitably, to share with you my personal delight and sense of shrewdness in my discovery of the Bureau of Communication and the Formal OBSERVANCE OF HOLIDAY notice.
It could have led with equal inexorability to the Official AIRING OF A GRIEVANCE notice, as well as several other official notice opportunities, but, being the kind of guy I am in the time I find myself, the holiday notice seemed most appropriate.
It is for fun. A certain kind of fun, emanating from that often, upon retrospect, genuine, actual, deep need to give for formal notice.
Optical illusions are what you might call "visual puns." They tickle the same funny bone - confusing us in a most delicious way. They are, however, far more difficult to create, and require something on the order of the visual equivalent of the humor of Gilbert and Sullivan and the drafting skill of an M. C. Escher.
Dark Roasted Blend has recently released the third in its wonderfully comprehensive series on optical illusions, demonstrating, and demonstrating again the wealth of the connections between art and play.
A couple years ago, I wrote about Ken Feit's remarkable sound poem, The Romance of Sound and Senses. Ken was the "holy fool" who taught me about the Frog of Enlightenupment. His sound poem is another example of his amazing wit, profound sensitivity, and endless creativity.
The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra
