Pegasus Games: Madison's community fun resource & WORT underwriter

Song from the 1920s

"A [person] only plays when, in the full meaning of the word, (s)he is a [person], and (s)he is only completely a [person] when (s)he plays."  - Friedrich Schiller, "On the Aesthetic Education of Man"

Pioneering Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga argues in Homo ludens (Playing Human, 1938) that play is primary to - indeed it's a necessary (albeit insufficient) condition for - the generation of culture itself. In other words, playing is the ultimate non-profit, unproductive, yet freedom-inspiring activity human beings engage in.

Huizinga (1872-1945) outspokenly opposed the Nazi killjoys who occupied his country during World War II.  That was not a good time for fun and games in Europe. Things improved after the war, of course, when America went crazy for group-participatory board games.

Hobby gaming, including role-play games, remains a popular way to play in our increasingly digital-electronic age. Madison offers many opportunities to play and thereby generate positive culture, including those offered by one of WORT 89.9 FM Community Radio's loyal underwriters, Pegasus Games.

Named for the mythical winged steed created by Zeus for his son Hercules to fight Hades, Pegasus Games was created in August 1980 in a converted house off State Street in downtown Madison by three friends.

That store closed in 2002, due mostly to changes in gaming habits among college students, according to Pegasus Games official Boss Lady Lory Aitken.

In 1991, Pegasus opened a store on Madison’s west side (at Market Square Shopping Center on Odana Road). The business has thrived, expanding in order to provide space for players, who throng there evenings and weekends.

I observed a group of six guys playing Champions in the back room at Pegasus Games on an early March Saturday afternoon.  The shop is fun to peruse, with its diverse gaming miniatures (don't call them "action figures"), marble chess sets and games like Zombicide filling the shelves.

I recently posed a few questions to Pegasus Games co-owner Lory Aitken.

Joe Crawford Mrazek (for WORT): What do you mean by the Pegasus Games motto "Games You Never Outgrow"?

Lory Aitken (for Pegasus Games): Games are not just for children!  Play is good for humans at ALL stages of life.  Science has proven it!  Not only is PLAY of any sort good for stress levels, using our brains is good for staying sharp as we age.

WORT: How do you think tangible (i.e. board & role-play) games will evolve in the future, especially in a culture already cluttered with digital/electronic games?

Pegasus Games: There's a strident backlash against electronic games, mostly on the parts of parents and grandparents who want to see more of the (grand-)kids than the tops of their heads as they bend over their electronics.  Games are GREAT for socialization, too!  Young professionals also seem to enjoy actually engaging with humans, when they're not at work dealing with electronics.

WORT: Why does Pegasus Games support WORT 89.9 FM Community Radio, given the fact that you already reach potential customers statewide through your underwriting at Wisconsin Public Radio?

Pegasus Games: We assume that the same folks who enjoy local radio are people who enjoy both using their brains and sharing the company of other human beings.

Pegasus also means "poetic inspiration."  Get inspired to play more by visiting WORT Underwriter Pegasus Games! Tell them you appreciate their support for WORT while you're there.

motto:  Games you never outgrow

http://www.pegasusgames.com/

Chantal Akerman (1950-2015): The Passing of Time on Film & in Life

Chantal Akerman in 2012 (photo by Mario De Munck) 

Reviewing:
I Don't Belong Anywhere:  The Cinema of Chantal Akerman - documentary, directed by Marianne Lambert  (Belgium, 2015, 67 minutes); and 
No Home Movie - documentary, directed by Chantal Akerman (Belgium, 2015, 115 minutes)

The death of experimental filmmaker Chantal Akerman, an apparent suicide, on October 5th was a personal tragedy for her sister Sylviane Akerman, the sole surviving member of their immediate family.  It was also a major loss for world cinema & the art scene in general.  You should get to know Ms. Akerman, if you don't already, especially now that she can't produce any new work.

Viewing No Home Movie & I Don't Belong Anywhere at the University of Wisconsin's Cinematheque in Madison last weekend moved me.  They not only gave me a deeper appreciation for avant-garde film, they also left me with a profound sympathy for a woman I'd only vaguely heard of before.  

This Jewish lesbian, the elder daughter of Auschwitz survivors, was a vital humanist who made just one mainstream "commercial" movie in English, the romantic comedy & box-office bomb A Couch in New York (1997), starring Juliette Binoche & William Hurt.  

Her esteem among cinephiles & adventurous critics is based primarily on a film released when Akerman was 24 years old, a mesmerizingly minimalist 201-minute study of a middle-aged woman. Bearing the prosaic title Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), it concerns a Holocaust survivor who eventually murders a man who pays her for sex.

This weird feminist masterpiece, structured in long steady takes with soft ambient sound, even influenced such notable male directors as the Austrian Michael Haneke as well as Americans Gus Van Sant & Todd Haynes.  In it, Akerman used images to suggest that "the domestic lives of women are the stuff of art," according to critic & devoted fan Richard Brody (see http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/postscript-chantal-akerman.)

In his New Yorker tribute, Brody claims that Akerman's early films prove that "the pressures of women's unquestioned, unchallenged, and unrelieved confinement in the domestic realm and in family roles is a societal folly that leads to ruin, a form of violence that begets violence."  Throughout her career, she disrupted the escapist tendencies of film, a la Bertolt Brecht's "alienation effect" in theater.  

Akerman was an enfant terrible, a film-school dropout who acted in her apocalyptic first short film (Blow Up My Town) at age 18.  After moving to New York at age 21, she joined the circle of experimental filmmakers loosely led & sustained by Jonas Mekas.  Akerman remained a determined & clever iconoclast throughout her life.  

During an extensive series of interviews for I Don't Belong Anywhere - conducted in New York, Europe & (apparently) Israel - Akerman shares several revealing, provocative thoughts with fellow director Marianne Lambert.  She asserts, for example, that the line between fictional movies & documentary film is necessarily fluid. 

"As soon as you create a frame [for a cinematic shot], it's a fiction," Akerman points out.  She always aimed "to make people feel the passing of time" in her films.  The static effect can be boring, even excruciating in its refusal to tell a conventionally entertaining story.  But the result rarely seems contrived or intentionally dull, as in the experimental films of Andy Warhol.  Hers ring eerily true to life.

We see Akerman's theories demonstrated perfectly in No Home Movie.  A poetic melancholy documentary about Akerman's affectionate relationship with her ailing mother Natalia, who died in 2014, the film drained the director emotionally.  By depicting mundane conversations (some via Skype) with her beloved "maminka," Akerman gently bonds the audience to them both.  Lengthy interspersed shots of landscapes, some through the window of a car, offer respite from all the understated mother-daughter drama.

Following a hostile reception after the press screening at the Locarno (Switzerland) film festival, Akerman took her own life, according to a report in Le Monde (see http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/arts/chantal-akerman-belgian-filmmaker-dies-65.html?_r=0).  Sylviane Akerman said that her gifted sister had been hospitalized for depression in Paris shortly before attending the Locarno event.

Acting on firm principal, Akerman refused to participate in film festivals dedicated only to works by gay, Jewish or female directors, regarding them as ghettoizing.  She considered herself a nomad, as reflected in the ambiguous title of her final film, No Home Movie.  In fact, she embodied the modern Jewish diaspora in microcosm by maintaining simultaneous residences in the United States, France & Israel.

Here's a sample of the sensitive, provocative voice of Chantal Akerman, from a 2011 online interview (see http://www.lolajournal.com/2/pajama.html) prompted by the release of Almayer's Folly (2011), an "ecstatic, hallucinatory yet trenchantly political" (per Brody) adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel of the same name, shot on location in Cambodia:  

"To make ‘art’ is usually wonderful. The art market is another thing. It’s often tied to power, to the phallus – but not always.

"In cinema, when you make a film, even for four people, anybody at all can enter the darkened theater; it’s democratic. In the art world, there’s an elitism that reigns sometimes that’s tied to capital. Fortunately, not always. In the Renaissance, the Medicis let Michaelangelo make revolutionary work like ‘The Slaves.’ Claude Berri, who, like my father, was a small Jew who came from leather and fur, would get up and say he was looking at his Yves Kleins. They were his. What was he really looking at, the painting or its value? Both, without a doubt; I don’t know. Ultimately, it’s touching.

"My father also started to buy paintings at the end of his life. Bad paintings, but he liked them. I find it very moving."

[© 2016 by J.C. Mrazek]

Links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUStWsegZ0k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chantal_Akerman

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/06/chantal-akerman-pioneering-belgium-film-director-and-theorist-dies-aged-65

We Shall Overcome: Gov. Walker's Hypocrisy on Display this MLK Day

Martin Luther King Jr. under arrest in 1958

In the ornate Wisconsin capitol rotunda last Monday afternoon, divisive Republican governor Scott Walker finally faced a political foe that he could not possibly vanquish:  the ghost of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The official annual state ceremony celebrates the inspiring life of that uncannily eloquent American, abbreviated simply MLK, who led the civil rights movement into the promised land of overdue voting rights & the abolition of inhumane racial segregation in the South.In his capacity as chief executive of state government, Walker was obliged to attend, but the irony of that union-busting enemy of public education presiding at the event was hard to ignore.  He opened the tribute with some uninspired remarks, a sharp contrast to the moving a capella    
gospel song that followed.

The baritone performer of that number was ethnomusicologist Dr. Jonathan Overby, executive producer of the ceremony as well as its diplomatic master of ceremonies.  Overby is also the longtime host of the Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR) show Higher Ground.

Throughout the nearly two-hour ceremony, broadcast live via  WPR & WORT-FM Community Radio, religious & patriotic music alternated with appeals to God & mostly empty political rhetoric.  All the while a greybearded silent protestor in the gallery held up a stencilled sign asserting that "WAR IS AN ENEMY OF THE POOR."  Indeed, the ceremony was rather marred by militaristic tributes - one guest given special recognition was a black female Army general.  The anti-Vietnam War activist King would have grimaced.

It was dangerously cold outside, with below-zero wind chill temperatures, yet warm sunlight poured in through the skylights & windows surrounding the gold-leafed mural high in the dome overhead.  As full of contradictions as American society itself, the program featured the Kenosha Tremper High School Wind Ensemble performing "America the Beautiful" one minute and, the next, a speaker citing Mississippi activist Fannie Lou Hamer's outrage at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

"Is this America?" Hamer wondered aloud, after party officials denied her integrated group their rightful place at the electoral table.

The diversity & forbearance of the audience, however, encouraged me.  Nowadays it's rare to see so many children & adults of all ages & races attending a public event with a noble purpose.  It's even rarer to see people keeping their smartphones out of sight for so long.  I didn't notice a single person checking email or Facebook during the long MLK tribute.

"I've decided to stick with love," said the elderly African-American minister who gave the invocation, quoting Dr. King.  "Hate is too great a burden to bear."

Later, as the multi-racial University of Illinois Black Chorus led the singing of "We Shall Overcome" I nearly believed that the mean-spiritedness of self-serving politicians such as Walker would be as transitory as the hateful racist tactics of Alabama governor George Wallace proved to be in the 1960s.  That resonant anthem of the civil rights movement still engenders hope in a cynical dreamer like me.

On cue, a group of protesters draped a banner from the third-floor railing that read "JUSTICE 4 TONY."  It referred to the shooting of an unarmed mixed-race 17-year-old named Tony Robinson by a Madison police officer last March.  The small group stood silently throughout "We Shall Overcome" with arms raised in the black-power salute that has been in vogue again since the Black Lives Matter movement gained national traction in recent months.  Several white teenagers in the audience gave the salute in solidarity.

Perhaps the most salient speaker of the day was Aja Brown, 34-year-old mayor of Compton, California.  Brown appealed to young people, urging them to take political action now.  She noted that youth have always ignited historic change - far more often than their cautious elders.  Dr. King, for example, was just 25 when the Montgomery (AL) bus boycott started in 1955.  She suggested that responsible adults mentor young people who lack positive role models in violence-plagued communities.

"Do you plan to die with the baton in your hands?" Brown asked, decrying older leaders reluctant to cede power to the next generation of activists.

The MLK ceremony concluded, as most similar events now customarily do, with the recitation of a passage from Dr. King's August 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech.  This year the statewide honor went to precocious 12-year-old Zaria Roller, a budding actress, singer & pianist who attends Verona H.S. Exploration Academy.

Gesturing as she intoned the familiar prophetic words, Roller embodied well the theme of this 2016 MLK tribute ceremony:  Stand Up & Stand Out.

Scott Walker wore the bland mask of white male privilege as he issued an official proclamation declaring Monday (January 18, 2016) THE REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY throughout the state of Wisconsin, further "commend[ing] this observance to all of our citizens."  He seemed to be unaware of - or unconcerned by - his own hypocrisy in doing so.

"Power is the ability to achieve a purpose," explained Martin Luther King Jr.  In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, King closed by paraphrasing the words of poet John Keats:  "Beauty is Truth / Truth Beauty."

Combining Mahatma Gandhi's moral force of non-violent resistance to tyranny with his own radical vision of an American society based on human need rather than corporate greed, Dr. King was a tragic hero who casts a long shadow over US history.  We ignore his message at our peril.