P'unk Avenue Window

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For several years, I taught a Game Design course in the Multimedia department at UArts. To give this course more intellectual heft, I would say that play is essential to humans. I went so far as to say that when humans stop playing we are either sick or near death.

Sadly, sometimes I forget my own advice.

I don’t let myself play enough. I love hanging out with my kids. I love watching them play, and even went so far as to move to a new home that would allow them more space for free play.

Thankfully, though, my play history is pretty rich. Watching the above video of Stuart Brown talking about Why play is vital — no matter your age made me very thankful that I grew up playing… a lot. Our basement and garage were filled with tools and parts. My siblings, neighborhood friends and I would spend all nice days outside playing and tinkering. We would take our bikes apart and create new bikes out of parts. Build treehouses. Build ramps. Make up a new game and play it until we tired of it and then create a new one. Whenever there was a school project that required building something, my friends would come over to find parts in our basement and use our tools to put it together.

One of the most powerful quotes from Stuart Brown’s talk speaks about the importance of playing early in life in order to be a good problem solver:

Now JPL and NASA and Boeing, before they will hire a research and development problem solvers, even if they are summa cum laude from Harvard or CalTech, if they haven’t fixed cars, haven’t done stuff with their hands early in life, played with their hands, they can’t problem-solve, as well. So play is practical and it is very important.

Listening to this as I rode the hi-speed line on the way home I had one of those moments where I was infinitely grateful to my parents. For all the things that all parents do wrong, sometimes parents get something so right.

I am very thankful that colonial era architecture exists in Philadelphia. The materials, the scale of the rooms, and the original lack of indoor plumbing tell a story. These buildings embody an historical spirit that you can feel when you visit them.

However, I really dislike it when people build facsimile colonial homes today. They lack heart. They tell no story.

Authentic art, design and culture should reflect the time it was created. It should reflect our time. Our situation. Our realities. It should tell the human story of now.

That is why I love the dance company Chunky Move. The video above is of their Mortal Engine piece. I was tipped off to it by a post from Live Arts Fringe and have thought of it frequently since. It is moving, intense, beautiful and it haunts me, but most importantly it is of our time.

It is hard to imagine this piece being made at any other time in our history. Yes, for technical reasons, but also because of it speaks to current issues, our issues. Organic, yet mechanical. Human. Computer. Individual. Swarm. Death, and yet affirmation of life. I don’t know, but it hits me in the gut.

I have been reading Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody. The early chapters talk a lot about how new web tools are lowering the cost for self-organization. As a result, we are able to solve problems that a profit-driven market would not be incentivized to tackle. It also means that we can self-organize for other goals that would typically also not be supported by the market.

One of those unsuppoted goals is joy. I am a huge fan of using web tools to bring people together and to increase the joy per capita ratio in the world. Improv Everywhere has been doing a great job of this since 2001. I wish them many more adventures and I hope that more people are out their scheming about how to put a smile on a stranger’s face.

For about 6 years I lived next door to P’unk Avenue. A few weeks ago, I moved to Collingswood, NJ. It is fresh enough that my daughter still refers to the place I work as “next door.”

This move has inspired me to think about the proximity of home to work.

I structured a lot of my life around not having a long commute to work. My father was a short-commute role model to me. He would often come home for lunch since he worked about 3 local-road miles from our house, and he rarely was late for dinner at around 5pm.

We all probably know a person that commutes three or more hours to work. We know about how people can spend years of their lives commuting, and we know it can have impact on family, community, the environment and finances. Most people acknowledge the negatives of living a long distance from work, but what is too close? Is there a sweet-spot commute?

It is much too early in my personal exploration of this issue to have any authority in my conclusion, but my early findings lead me to believe that a short commute can be a good thing. By short, I mean about 15 minutes to a half an hour. That is the time it takes me to traverse the 7.9 door-to-door miles between where I live and work. It gives me time to decompress, listen to a podcast or some music, and get ready for my responsibilities as a father.

The view out of my window when I am home is not the same view at work. For some reason, I think this helps me clear my mind of work-related issues and to really relax at home. This separation has improved my state of mind, and I feel more focussed and refreshed in both locations.

I report this with a couple of caveats. Collingswood is the equivalent of a streetcar suburb that is serviced by the PATCO high speedline (light rail) 24 hours a day. This makes the commute easy, guilt-free and it lets me get my money’s worth out of the iPod part of my iPhone.

Another caveat is that I suspect that this appreciation for a short commute is related to my stage in life as a father of young children. I know that seems counter-intuitive, since when I worked closer to home (next door) I could be home much faster and spend more time with them. Also, I could pop in and see them throughout the day, if I wanted. This was certainly an advantage when they were newborns and up to the time they started attending school, but over time I started to see the return on that decreasing and I felt like the time with them outside of work hours was impacted by my lack of ability to distance myself mentally from work.

Probably the biggest and most ironic part of this story is that many of the choices I made in my life revolved around getting to a place where the work I did for a living was all encompassing and interesting to me. The kind of work you do even if you are not paid to do it. The kind of work you love. Like when I used to design zines with friends, play in a band or edit films in graduate school. Hours would go by without me remembering to eat.

I am fortunate enough to be in that place now. The work I do is satisfying, it fully captures my attention and I love it. I have trouble turning it off, but as a father, I want to turn it off.

In 2008, I identified three priorities: family, my work at P’unk Avenue and my health. When I made that determination, I had no idea that a few months later I would also determine that the best way to honor each of those priorities would be to physically separate two of them. Life is certainly an interesting journey.