The Plot Against Magic and Curses

I thought this essay was going to go into The Brutalitarian, but lo and behold, here it is on Welcome to the Interdome. Who knows why.

And once again I was on the Internet and reading the article in N+1, “The Calculating Critic” and once again, we return to the subject of plot. They always want more plot—not N+1 in particular, but these readers out there, given voice by the critics and the editors. You want it easier, more fun, smaller, shorter, flatter and more ergonomical, easy to grasp. Because this is what plot is, when it comes down to it. Plot is not the story, not the characters, not the language, not the voice—plot is the part that can be described easily, summed up, abstracted, and repeated as a mandra and motto to guide the reader through the words themselves.

“And what happens in the book?”

“Well, this is a book about X.”

Repeat these questions to yourself, this mainstream, modern mainlining mantra, and better yet, choose a book constantly repeating them for you, and if you like the experience, the reading is fun. Fun—because books are entertainment, after all. This is what we look for in life, and in our books; we wish to separate the work from the play, and do the former for that much more time with the latter. Light and dark, good and bad, salt and pepper, black and white.

It does have something to do with teenagers, doesn't it? The “the majority” always seeks easier books, in these terms “young-adult” books, is because they put reading in the category of fun, as opposed to work. Every young adult hates Shakespeare, because it is “dull, uninteresting, hard to understand, old,” and so on. Not every person felt this way in their youth of course, not about Shakespeare, nor Homer, nor Plato, nor reading in general, but this is what the majority may feel, because the majority is an entity that separates work from play. Work is what goes on in school, and play is what I want. Satisfy my base desires, and let me squeak through work as easily as I can. But for some reason, some of us found base desires easier to satisfy with certain substances and activities, during or after which it was highly pleasurable to pick up one of these classic books. Bong hits and The Illiad, for whatever reason. Shakespeare and heavy petting. Not just Romeo and Juliet either. What sort of person gets a little aroused by Lady Macbeth? Boil and bubble, teenagers in trouble. For whatever reason, our play seemed to keep crossing over into that artistic stuff, that stuff that everyone else said was supposed to be work.

If only life were flatter and easier to grasp. Not so many obstacles and more straight lines, direct passageways from one point to the next. Life can be made to mean more or less, depending on what you do with it. Push and pull it around how you want, arrange it in even rows, whatever. Words, on the other hand, will not mean more or less. However, you can still push them around. They are building blocks. Children may build castles and houses and railway stations with their blocks, but nobody is upset if they don't reflect local building codes and engineering specifications. It is a pattern with which to play. We play with the words, as we write and read them. Maybe they look like things, maybe they don't, but it is overwhelmingly odd to get angry at them if they don't take us anywhere, or fulfill our desires. They are words after all—not life itself.

But if they are not just work or play, then what are these words to me? What is this strange power, tugging on the exposed parts of my teenage desires like magic? Magic blocks of some kind. And a good magic is hard to find. 616 is the other number of the beast, you may or may not know, the unlisted number, never dialed, and never spoken. No meaning here, nothing that you would recognize. Hidden desire and more power, or so I like to tell it. Less speaking of truth and more fuel to power. Oh—that we all enjoyed speaking fuel to fire, the cold evaporative quality of gasoline on the skin, but in words of course. But we don't really want them all in here. Not those crowds of angry, sexy youth on TV. The magic is more potent when it is spoken softly, in the dark, over pure silence, over a single naked stranger in the dark. All magic has to be a little secret.

Of course for those of us engaged in the endless war of pouring words out onto the ground, hoping they somehow, some way worm themselves into someone's ear, we often wish we could use a funnel. Shouting out our magic into the cold air off the edge of the cliff is its own catharsis, but everyone wants a little love. Some even want cash. Some care about the “health of the industry”, whatever that is. Goodness knows they've never seen a day inside the gloom of a factory in their lives. But still, we invest. So we make it into little rhymes. The easiest poetry is that which rhymes. Only so much can fit into it.

Got a bit
Of plot to spit
Meaning's little
Elementary shit.

Young folks like rap music too. Draw yourself another straight fucking line. Often about sex, drugs, cash, etc. Desires of course, set to the hard beating bop of the pounding-fuck music, and some synth on top like whipped cream on a go-go dancer. Desire satisfied, at 120 beats per minute. Don't hate the plot, hate the game. Hiphop may not be goin' out, but you sure don't see KRS-One on MTV.

The magic of youth is impressive; and I mean those teenage years, not the forgotten and repressive childhood. When the desires first start to loosen those bonds, is when we decide whether the magic is going to be the broadcast, megawatt, culture hearth, or whether we're going to listen to the empty frequencies, where we swear we hear secret agents reciting magic spells to pervert the bosses. We hang out at the reservoir at night, hoping someone is going to put acid in the water supply. We scribble in the margins of Harper Lee and Salinger, and look between the pages of our birthday present copy of On The Road, wondering why there isn't more here.

And then we grow up, at least a little bit, and we discover the secret library. Or we wish it was, and treat it like it was, sharing only with our friends, and with our imaginations. We imagined ourselves discovering Borges' fictional libraries. We looked deep into Pynchon's books for the missing footnotes, and the sourceless references. We sifted through Derrida's scattered and mistranslated postcards, looking at the pictures, if nothing else. We laughed at Heller's endless hilarious jokes, which are so funny because people actually died all throughout. We poured over Deleuze and Foucault's incomprehensible diagrams, which at least we could all agree were beautiful, and so we hung them as art. We felt the urge to listen to Glass' repetitions on repeat, or if not Glass, then perhaps at least Sonic Youth, and if not them, then certainly Joy Division.

And we didn't stop there. We revisited, and looked back, trying to find more evidence of magic through the centuries, even though we knew very well it didn't strictly existence. Because what does? When the most meaningful magic is what is secret, erased, discarded, mislabeled, untranslatable, and hard to fathom, who is to say there isn't magic anywhere there isn't a strict, straight, plotted line of meaningful existence? And so we fell in the void. We invented religion within Nietzsche, and made the biblical prophets, and Dante into science-fiction authors. And in learning about farce, we learn about tragedy. We handed out placards of deep meaning to Artaud, and to Schreber, and to others whose diagnosis and suffering was not so defined, but whose madness we minted into coin. We appointed positions within this madness, our own conquering angels in Pollock and again, in Nietzsche. We allowed the violence of every male artist or musician to ever hit a woman to be tragically beautiful, pondering rather than condemning. We did the same with Heidegger, Grass, Celine, and other tragedies of history. We elevated the drugs of Charlie Parker, William Burroughs, and Bukowski to be sacred and holy transubstantiations, which we may have sampled, or only handed off to these sacrifices. And we never wondered why Beckett, Cortezar, Ginsberg, Sartre, DeLillo, Ballard, and most of the rest all happened to be men, as if it were a total accident.

And mistakes were made, and they'll be made again. This is magic we're dealing with. This is heady, dangerous stuff, that none of us really understand, though we've got the books to back it up. We have to press forward, away from the path of plot, and keep heading on there. Keep writing secrets in our little black books, and keep our own teenage desires wrapped up in the dark. Can you blame us? What else should we do? Get a job, join the army, find a spouse, make some children? Forget any magic there ever was lurking in the corners, and pop on the radio, turn up TV, open a microwave dinner, go to the movies? Blast the silence out of us with advertisements? Blank space is wasted time, and wasted time is unrealized profit, after all. Draw the text straight, make the lines even, keep the text under 80K words, and the vocab below the level of the New York Times? Write and read topically, directly, and keep it pure and fun? Is this any better? Are we happy yet? Is it art? Is it marketable? Have we won?

Fuck that, and keep it punk. Punk was commodified, but it was the same idea. Turn up the incoherence, raise the middle finger, and if they wanted to stay, then let 'em. It was commodified, or it died. Same difference I guess, when you're crawling around in the dark on the floor, covered in something, looking for something to put in your mouth. It stopped moving around in the dark and left the room, so forget it, and if you leave this room right now, I guess I don't want to talk to you either.

And so let 'em take drugs, and let 'em fuck boys, and let 'em turn it up, or down, or play it twelve times on repeat, or backwards, distorted to hell and back, and fuck it, let's pray to hell for a change, and see who sticks around. Let them join the Nazis or the Stalinists I guess, and if they aren't killed on the back of that motorcycle maybe we'll still buy their next book. Or maybe we'll buy it only if they are killed. And I would have an intervention, but do you think he's ever going to stop using until they cut his arms off? And maybe we could send him somewhere, but would that really make him better? And maybe she should leave him, maybe they all should, but that's her decision I guess, and she still hasn't even after all the times. Maybe she should write a book. How come she doesn't? I'd buy it, as long as it doesn't come with plot.

I shoplift all my books anyhow. I steal them off my friend's nightstand, when he doesn't finish them. I accumulate late fines from the library as if it were income tax. I sure as hell don't buy them at the mall. I sure as hell don't buy them online. I have all these needs, you understand. I have to tell you want it's about. I have to understand what it's about, even though I haven't read all those magic spells. I've just got to, you understand, I need to. I got to turn away that mob, I got to fuck over the media, I got the subvert the spectacle, I got to sift a vanguard from those majoritarian masses. I got to turn those steeple bells upside down, and bury these upturned caldrons in my dark, basement pit, all of it on the right cosmological day I found referenced in this text, I got to bang in the cover of night, man, I got to play the new sound, the oldest music in my short teenage history. I got to find the forbidden, the beyond, the baddest bitches brew of them all.

And if you are still with me, still in the room, motherfucker, than you know it doesn't have fuck all to do with plot.

Hey, Look--a Shell!

Due to my recent post, which somewhat surreptitiously worries about my own negativity, I am fulfilling a self-promise to only post about things that I like--nay, enjoy so much that I would be willing to share them in writing. Surprisingly enough, this seems what most people are doing on their blogs. Who knew?

But I'm not most people. As we know.

Most of the things I feel likely to write about in admiration and curatorial awe, are probably media oriented. I spend an awful lot of time throughout the day absorbing with the brain. Again, we are approaching the scope of many blogs out there. But nothing really unifies my tastes, other than that singular pencil point that is my consciousness. I don't like this or that music, sort of book, movie, or food. I like a lot of things.

So what you gain here (maybe?) is my own personal interpretation of these things you could certainly already know about, or otherwise find much more factual information on the topics elsewhere. You get the scrawling of that pencil point, in somewhat legible, digitally syndicated form.

Megan, my partner, has this interesting habit of dragging me to cultural events, without telling me what they really are. Now, it wouldn't be dragging me if she told me, because she always takes us to good stuff, and it wouldn't be dragging anyway because I know this, and know whatever she has in mind is going to be good, except that she refuses to tell me what it is, and says something along the lines of, "you are going to this whether you like it or not, even if I have to drag you." Hence the dragging.

But it's always awesome, and probably something I would really want to see, if I knew what it was, but she says, "oh its just some art/dance thing, I forget what it is." But she knows. I think it might give her some pleasure to to the whole drag/surprise thing.

Anyway, one of these events was going to the see the band, Bat For Lashes. This was a couple of years ago. "We're going to see this band," she said. "I don't care if you want to go or not, you're going because I want to go and you will accompany me." "What's the name of the band?" I asked. "Bats-or-something, I can't remember. Its some folklore art thing."

Actually she'd seen them written up in Paper or some indie magazine, and knew they were good. She told me this afterwards, when he memory was magically restored.

But regardless of the cute shenanigan's in our private life, Bat For Lashes is a great group.

I was a bit skeptical, when I saw the crowd, and as the band took the stage. It was at the Doug Fir, which is a pretty hipster-posh Portland club/restaurant. Lots of wood, Lucite and velvet--you may know the type of place. So the crowd was, well, accordingly. The band as well--dressed in fairly standard hipster attire for 2007/8: sequined headbands, large sack-like blouses.

But as the music started, I was fairly easily won over. I am a sucker for strong female vocalists, especially fronting their own band. So many bands have a male singer, when it is perfectly obvious the sound they are going for would be better with a female. You know what's better than falsetto vocals? A voice that's actually a couple octaves higher. Natasha Khan also owns the stage, without over powering it. A big beef I have with many indie bands is that the art of leading a band on stage seems to be lost. We are lost between shoegazers, microphone clutchers, and then the manic over-extendedness of artistes so often. But Khan's serene gaze, clear voice, and powerful hand claps perfectly match her music's aesthetic.

The aesthetic, is hard to describe, but sort of a nature-queen ballad crossed with dark antique anthem. Serendipitously, while searching for images for this post I stumbled across one posted on a music blog entitled, "beach goth". While a clever name, and a rift of another sub-culture with easy identifiers, it may work for the music of Bat For Lashes. I'm thinking of the mysterious AI-generated art boxes from William Gibson's Count Zero--dark handcrafted wood, animal remains leaved in non-precious metal, bones, feathers, and beads. The electronics of the synthesizers mix well with the archaic sounds of her harpsichord and autoharp, creating this sort of mythology-by-way-of-misunderstood future. Sort of an Indian motif perhaps with animalistic architypes found underneath the pavement, (or at least Khan herself appears so, with her Asiatic dark features and thin, stereotypical hipster-moon-goddess physique) but as far as the music goes, I am more reminded of the subtle beauty of storm-washed jetsam upon a cold beach, sun-bleached and of mysterious, yet natural origin. The silence of putting your ear to a hole dug in the sand. It's a popular thing right now, kind of thriving in the border zones around steampunk, but for the naturalists; or outside of found-art, for those who still don't like consumer packaging even after recycling. Beach goth, therefore. Maybe driftwood-gore, but it doesn't quite have the same ring to it. As resident of Oregon and a frequentee of the Pacific Coast, I can totally dig it.

The lyrics are of a similar, "oh but the feelings are all around us in the dirt already" vibe. I have only listened to the first album, Fur and Gold, and not the newer one. My favorite song, "Trophy", contains these lyrics:

The trophy that I made for us
In fur and gold
Got into the wrong pair of hands
In truth was sold
They bought it for oh so much less
Than it was worth
And every man that touched it
Found a heaven on earth

Now imagine you and a special someone, holding each other on the edge of a giant forest, and, feeling the mist drifting over your heads, you both simultaneously look down at the moss-covered humus, and between your filthy bare feet, you discover a perfectly-white shrew skull. The meaning of this particular occurence decidedly obvious, you carefully wrap the bone in a cloth, bringing it home with you to place inside a glass cloche, among your most prized and meaningful possessions on a scarred, mahogany dresser.

Okay, yes, a sappy bit of fantasy, way more obvious than the more sublime lyrics preceding. But you get the aesthetic I'm thinking of here? Yes? Good.

Now, this is the point where I would normally swing my blogpost around into the wind, and fire off a surprise (or sometimes not a surprise) salvo connecting my current place in the post with the objective, hinted to in the beginning, more whimsical introduction. But I'm not going to do that here. Not because I don't think Bat For Lashes is an important contribution to Arts and Culture, but because I'm simply not going to describe it. I merely suggest you listen for yourself.

Figments of the 80s Imagination

Until the age of five, I lived in Florida, only about an hour from Disney World. Back then we had some sort of off-season Florida-resident family pass, combining all the savings of time shares, economy packs, and in-state college tuition into one laminated, photo ID'd badge. I'm certain nothing like this exists anymore. In those days ('82-'87) there were no theme hotels except for the Riverboat one, and everyone was looking forward to the NEW MGM Studios park. Pretty much we went went to the Magic Kingdom, and then spend one afternoon over at Epcot.

I loved Epcot. And not just because I think the only thing more fun than amusement park rides is science, and multicultural theme restaurants. Epcot was my favorite because it was the home of Figment, to whom I imagined I was partially related.

"Who the fuck?" you say? Why, this guy:



No? Perhaps more recognizable in cartoon form?



Hmm. Well, there he is. He was the mascot of the "Imagination Pavilion", so I gather, though I knew it only as the Figment ride. 'Figment of your imagination..." get it...?

I had a stuffed Figment, which was "my" stuffed animal among all the others (you understand), and I carried him everywhere. I wish I could find a picture of him to show you, but all the plush Figment's on the Internet are NOT the right one. I remember he had hard plastic eyes, felted horns (on head and tail) and a yellow shirt with a velcro strip down the back so it could come off and on. I'm not sure why--perhaps there were other costumes. However, it no doubt gave me my first unconscious Othering experience with nakedness, allowing me castration transference as I dressed and undressed this horned purple dragon. But, we'll leave that exactly where it is.

I didn't watch TV much as a kid. Just Electric Company, Seasame Street, Mr. Rodgers and other such educational and PBS staples. I certainly knew of other shows, from friends houses, sick days, and etc. Transformers, Smurfs, Care Bears, ThunderCats, and all are definitely in the back of my clogged brain, probably still rubbing stardust and plastic missiles into my aesthetic zones as we speak. Like the other millions of children growing up in front of an 80s TV set (I loved the way those RCA buttons clicked), in my adult life I am still hobbled by a need to spend good, hard-earned money on animation and its characters, toys with folding spring-loaded parts, and video games which allow you to pretend that you in fact are any of these things.

Have we all been brainwashed? Yes. But I wonder how--it strikes me there is a very definite aesthetic in these sorts of characters and programs, that we don't see in material targeted for a similar age group today. Will children of the 90s remember Mighty Morphin Power Rangers with the same fondness? Harry Potter? The books perhaps: but what about the slew of plastic shit slung along with it? Will the Harry Potter toys captivate these child-zombies' cultural pre-conscious? Will people line up at college parties to play the Power Rangers' video game? Normally I always pick three examples with these sorts of rhetorical comparisons, but I can't even think of a third thing from the 90s perhaps affecting a similar age range. Do they exist, and I am just of a decade earlier?

I think there is something about the pixelated, LiteBrite, stardusted 80s cartoon world that speaks outside of its own consumer catagory. There's something about the absolute ridiculousness of creatures mining starbits, of a village populated by little blue men and only one blue woman, of a war fought with weapons that ARE toys, and in which no one ever dies, ever. It's just so zany, so obviously fake, it takes the uncanny valley and flips it inside out, dragging it back around to cover over reality, painting it all yellow, red, and blue and covered in stars, making horrible things like the Reagan years, and the Bush years (when all of this stuff miraculous became hip again) disappear and seem as unreal as cheaply-animated children.

But that sort of cultural analysis is all after the fact, of course. A five year-old doesn't know anything except what's on the playroom floor. So there is something else, something aesthetic, something even a child can understand because, it seems, only children (or adults who act like children) understand it.

Look at Figment's shirt. What the hell is up with the yellow sweater? (My stuffed animal's shirt did not have his name on it, I don't think.) A purple dragon isn't too far out of whack--not so far from the horrid purple dinosaur of the next decade. (There's my third example!) But dressed in a yellow sweater with red piping... hmm. Why dress him at all? He wore other costumes in the Disney attraction, yet he still maintains the "I may be an anthropomorphic magical being, but I'm not naked, and don't you dare mention my lack of pants."

Let's see what other cartoons were sporting in the 80s.



The Care Bears are a good place to start. The rainbow colors, the symbols, the cute and cuddly animals bearing (ha) almost no resemblance to real animals are all of note. In the show, they would often use a lot of bogus gadgets, like "crystals of caring", and speciously designed robots. The bizarre, greeting-card simple world-view goes along with the rainbow colors; everything equally represented along a arbitrary color wheel of a plot, thought very cute.



Rainbow Brite is very similar to the Care Bears in its use of Rainbow Colors, appropriate, color-specific characterizations, and also the greeting-card plot, not insignificantly because both Rainbow Brite and Care Bears were originally conceived by greeting card companies (American Greetings and Hallmark respectively) before they became toys, shows, and all the rest. Rainbow Brite is perhaps more interesting because of its tendency towards a very colorful "lolita"-esque sexual fetish, especially in latter day interpretations. Of course, the "furry" sub-culture (whether sexual or not) could be said to have strong roots around the Care Bears as well. What is it about these simple characters, over-emphasizing a simplistic, ecumenical Good such as "caring and feelings" or "bright colors and friendship" that drives the mind towards sex? Is it a childhood spent exploring a new body on the floor of the playroom in front of the TV, or is it the fantastical innocence? A play world of bright colors, no AIDS epidemic, consistently cute and cuddly personalities, and overflowing and unrejectable friendship sounds like a pretty awesome sexuality to inhabit, come to think of it. I would be in favor of such characters teaching sex ed to teens, even graphically. Who wouldn't listen to a Care Bear telling you that while you can't get pregnant from oral sex, you can still get herpes? If Rainbow Brite told me to wear a condom, you bet I'd wrap it up. Is that twisted? Maybe. But sexual role models as good and caring as Care Bears and Rainbow Brite don't come along every day, or... ever.



So, perhaps the Voltron Force is not the best place for kids to learn about sex and gender roles. Sure, the princess can drive the Blue Lion, but she is also eye candy for the rest of the team. I'm pretty sure the translations are not accurate--I'd swear Hunk makes a poorly-translated masturbation joke at her expense at one point. And I don't even want to take on the subject of Nanny. But we do see the color theme represented again (I never could figure out why their uniforms don't match the colors of their Lions).
But what I think is really interesting is the Force's street clothes. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a picture, but they seem to wear anything they want, even though the rest of the planet wears archaic garments, and other planets wear downright historical garb. Its a very casual feeling, whether you think about it or not. One of them is wearing a race car uniform, another a cowboy suit! It is Japanese, so perhaps there is something I'm not picking up on. But regardless, they wear loose fitting, not uniform, casual looking clothes when their not forming Voltron. This is a new thing for children's TV; clothes rarely look so natural on their wearers, instead they look as if picked to be normal, not natural.



Teddy Ruxpin--the cyborg toy culture forgot. I've spoken about his analog-robomorphic weirdness elsewhere, so instead let's focus on the oddity that is this friendly bear's tunic. It seems the cartoon was designed to look like the toy, which came equipped with a velcro shirt, as easily removable as my Figment toy. Before we start asking questions about why any child would want to force-strip a bear reading him/her a bedtime story, let's set that line of inquiry aside; it was NECESSARY to access the toy's battery and cassette compartments. But the clothing does usher in a similar feeling of casualness. In imaginary worlds populated by anthropomorphic animals, nakedness is really not a big deal. Naturally, one must be clothed or have fur--but this clothing is more representative of one's characteristic color or of a general casual nature, rather than any standards of society. Tunics: why not? If we're going to be building a giant airship, we might as well be comfortable. What are you wearing there, little child, while you watch? Pants? A skirt? That's cool, I guess. But why bother? A simple band of cloth with arm holes and convenient velcro closure is all you really need in this world. If it's not bright colors, it might as well be comfortable.


Link has the tunic thing down, and Zelda is... merely instructing him on how a belt maintains the tunic's stasis in the "down" position? ...showing him who wears the pants in the kingdom, despite who has the sword? ...simply making everyone, including Link, uncomfortable?
This picture might be a fan construction, I don't really know. Actually, the only thing I know about this show is that Link keeps trying to earn a kiss as a reward for saving the princess, and never gets it, though receiving many cold buckets of water on the head, and other such sobering dismissals. Like, a belt tightening. I guess.
Okay, what is really interesting here is that a game with a pixelated, 8-bit character spawns a animated series, which in turn makes kids want to wear tights and tunics for their Halloween costume. Of course, they were probably much more interested in the sword, but they would still suffer tights for the chance to smash ghosts with light beams in real life.

And after all, isn't that what children's programming is really about? The educational programming has its own agenda, but these sorts of sugar-cereal Saturday specials were focused on initiating play--that is, buying the toys associated with the show. Lots of shows do this, but now they are focused on things like action, or kid-centric humor, or other crap. Watch an episode of My Little Ponies, and you'll see what I mean. There is NOTHING there, no content at all. Each episode is twenty minutes of your favorite toys moving, talking, and looking beautiful on top of waterfalls and galloping down rainbows. It is meant to occur in the background, while you're playing with the toy. Perhaps it is the first shot at "interactive" programming, putting thoughts in your head while toys are in your hand. I guess Howdy Doody did the same thing in its day, but this is a whole new level of interactivity.

My rambling through the bizzare world of 80s children's programming has sort of lost its direction, and necessarily so. The post itself is getting a bit disoriented, so lets sum it up. From what we've seen, 80s cartoons bring the following to the table:

A) A disorienting, utter-fantastical world.

B) Bright, rainbow colors, increasing deorientation, and creating dazziling light patterns on the screen.

C) A wholy casual world-view, based upon abstract costumes, plot, and characterizations, doing little else than to wrap the view in a warm blanket of obliviousness.

D) Perhaps an undercurrent of prepubescent eroticism.

E) A play experience, involving a simulated feedback interaction with an actual toy object, enveloping the child into the world of play with both the toy and the media on the screen simultaneously.

All of this is very heady stuff. The toy companies probably only saw an opportunity to brand their toys, and this is why the 80s cartoon aesthetic dropped off: they just kept selling toys, without thinking why it was working. But a generation of children found their daily play opening a new dimension within their minds--a dimension of fantastical, disorientating (from the "real" world) pure play, where their imagination was reflected in their eyes and their hands simultaneously.

This imaginative, hand-eye coordination is ridiculously important. I won't go into the depths of the somatic unconscious, and I will spare you all the Freud. But let's just say this: the children lifting up Rainbow Brite's skirt and putting Raffi tapes in the Teddy Ruxpin? Ten years later, they would discover the Internet. Think it's unrelated? Think there isn't a Voltron porn out there on the Internet, somewhere?

I don't know if all of that is inherent in Figment's shirt. I actually never watched the TV show based on the character, though I did love the ride at the park, but mostly because I liked the stuffed dragon. But the shirt is bright, bright yellow. Why?

I can say this: during the same time period, I had an imaginary friend who was a dragon. I invented this imaginary friend's death, including staging a funeral for him. I also used to play while watching TV. A lot. Now I listen to music, blog, and read the news and philosophize all at the same time.

Go ahead, watch a few episodes of Rainbow Brite. Better yet, do something else while its on. See how it feels.