Showing posts with label Playground. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Playground. Show all posts

19 March, 2012

THE DRUNKEN ELK

We do what we must to keep life interesting.




A typical night out on the forest, I was lurking lazily in the cliché sunset searching for my delicious autumn treat: apples. This fruit is nice and mature after summer, with a noble taste of rot and an appropriate smell of shit not quite appreciated by the masses.

I had my dose of apples, and one thing led to another, one unstable hoof in front of the other. I ended up alone and bitter, stuck at an afterparty the shape of an asshole. I was rather drunk, but instinct convinced me there was even more booze to be consumed at this sorrowful sight. Nobody else was there to do the job, so I took the offer. ”Säkert,” I thought. ”Skål!”

I did feel the subsrcibed stomach ache accurately arriving and telling me to get out, but I couldn't really move. Bored,  I OD'd. I climbed even higher into the party venue, an ancient apple tree that reached the sky.


I passed out with some random stick tickling my private parts and woke up with my raisin eyes all dried up and my sweaty body shaking like a bad egg dough still in the mixer. I honestly thought I'd climbed a long way last night, but now find myself almost on the ground. I am stuck, but not in the sky; in something that only just qualifies as a bush. With Beethoven's Sonata No. 8 playing repeatedly in my sore head, I am currently in the process of welcoming the familiar cocktail of sticky post-nutrition making its way, with pressure, out of my battered figure.

Still, it was fun.



Please also read the true story of the drunken Swedish elk. 
















18 December, 2011

PLAY – ORGANIZED AND ORDERLY

Play is practice. 
Play is simulation. 
It aptly activates children's brains, 
but it is not innocent.

 

Games, toys and children's equipment are designed to incorporate and promote certain skills. The little girl nurtures her piece of plastic and dresses it in pink, while the child in blue is caught up in a simulation of war or the act of driving his 3-inch metal car.
 

Fortunately, gender-neutral modes of play do exist, too. The outdoor playground, with its jungle gyms and monkey bars, originates from Germany and is in use worldwide today. The playground is, ultimately, a version of the man-made park: nature reconstructed in city space, tamed, shrunk and adapted to the needs of us humans. It is safe and restricted, usually fenced and physically differentiated from other public spaces. In all its ostensible freedom and good-willed simulations of nature, it is still a venue of control.

When childhood is understood as a passing chapter in life, it is appropriate to shove this short, mental play phase into physical areas of acting out needs and developments necessary for leading a successful life. Let us cage and control the conformist little monkeys! Let's program them to learn how to climb an aluminium igloo in the city centre, to try rock climbing on an apathetic mini mountain made of small square stones. Most importantly, let us Keep An Eye On Them.

”City streets are unsatisfactory playgrounds for children because of the danger, because most good games are against the law, because they are too hot in summer, and because in crowded sections of the city they are apt to be schools of crime.” (Theodore Roosevelt, 1907.)
Play, isolated and categorized like this, is sadly separated from adulthood and from inspiring public spaces not designed exclusively for it. Thus, play is accidentally deprived of important forms of freedom and healthy anarchy. It begins to lack life. 



Amsterdam 2011

Amsterdam 2011

Helsinki 2011

Amsterdam 2011