Manhood for Amateurs

To the Legoland Station

Squares and rectangles. That’s what we had. Squares, rectangles, and wheels with chewy black rubber tires. Sloping red “roof” bricks of which there never seemed to be enough to cover a house. Trees shaped more like real trees than the schematic dendrites you get now. Windows and doors with snap-in glazing: more squares and rectangles. Six colors: basic red, white, blue, yellow, green, and black. And that was it.

Light blue, aquamarine, orange, purple, maroon, gold, silver, plum, pink — pink Legos! — and many shades of gray: Each of the original primary and secondary tones now has at least five variants, enabling the builder of, say, a Jawa Sandcrawler model to re-create the stippling of rust and corrosion in the Sandcrawler’s hull by varying his palette of reds and grays. I still get a funny feeling, a kind of tiny spasm of moral revulsion, when I pick up a teal or lilac Lego. As for shape, Lego “bricks” left behind the orthogonal world years ago for a strange geometry of irregular polygons, a vast bestiary of hybrid pieces, custom pieces, blanks and inverts, clears and pearlescents, freaks that have their raised dots or their gripping tubes on more than one side at a time. And then there are the people — minifigs, as they’re known among Legographers: Frankenstein monsters, American Indians, Jedi knights and pizza chefs, medieval crossbowmen and Vikings, deep-sea divers and bus drivers, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Allen Iverson — the range of occupations and personalities to be found among the denizens of the Legosphere is so wide and elaborate that perhaps only the brain of an eight-year-old could possibly master it. I remember the sense of disdain I felt toward the cylinder-headed homunculi when minifigs began to be introduced, around the time when my original interest in Legos was waning. They didn’t have the painted faces back then. Their heads were shiny yellow voids. Their arms and legs couldn’t bend, and there was something of the nightmarish, something maimed, about them. But what I most resented about the minifigs was the scale they imposed on everything you built around them. Like Le Corbusier’s humancentric Modulor scale or Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, the minifigs as they proliferated became the measure of all things: Weapons must fit their rigid grip, doorways accommodate the tops of their heads, cockpits accommodate their snap-on asses.

It was this sense of imposition, of predetermined boundaries and contours, of a formulary of play, that I found I most resented when Legos returned to my life, around the time my eldest child turned three. (She was into Indians, or rather, “Indians,” especially Tiger Lily; we bought her a fairly complicated Lego set with war-painted minifigs, horses, tepees, a canoe, a rocky cliff.) But along with the giddy profusion of shapes and colors that had taken place during my long absence from the Legosphere, the underlying purpose of the toys also appeared to have changed.

When I first began to play with them in the late 1960s, Legos retained a strong flavor of their austere, progressive Scandinavian origins. Abstract, minimal, “pure” in form and design, they echoed the dominant midcentury aesthetic, with its emphasis on utility and human perfectibility. They were a lineal descendant of Friedrich Fröbel’s famous “gifts,” the wooden stacking blocks that influenced Frank Lloyd Wright as a child, part mathematics, part pedagogy, a system — the Lego System — by which children could be led to infer complex patterns from a few fundamental principles of interrelationship and geometry. They also made, and make to this day, a strong claim on a kid’s senses, snapping together and coming apart with a satisfying dual appeal to the ear and the fingers. They presented the familiar objects one constructed with them — airplanes, houses, cars, faces — on a quirky grid, the world dissolved or simplified into big, chunky pixels.

In their limited repertoire of shapes and the absolute, even cruel, set of axioms governing the way they could and couldn’t be arranged, Lego structures emphatically did not present — and in playing with them, you never hoped for — the appearance of reality. A Lego construction was not a scale model. It was an idealization, an approximation, your best version of the thing you were trying to make. Any house, any town, you built from Legos, with its airport and tramline and monorail, trim chimneys and grids of grass, automatically took on a certain social-democratic tidiness, even sterility (one of the notable qualities of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, the material from which Lego bricks are made, is that it is sterile).

Orderly, functional, utopian, half imaginary, abstract, primary-colored — when I visited Helsinki a few years back, I felt as if I recognized it, the way you recognize a place from a dream.

By the late nineties, when my wife and I bought that first Indian set, abstraction was dead. Full-blown realism reigned supreme in the Legosphere. Legos were sold in kits that enabled one to put together — at fine scales, in detail made possible by a wild array of odd-shaped pieces — precise replicas of Ferrari Formula 1 racers, pirate galleons, jet airplanes. Lego provided not only the standard public-domain play environments supplied by toy designers of the past fifty to a hundred years — the Wild West, the Middle Ages, jungle and farm and city street — but also a line of licensed Star Wars kits, the first of many subsequent ventures into trademarked, conglomerate-owned, pre-imagined environments. Instead of the printed booklets I remembered, featuring suggestions for the kinds of things you might want to make from your box of squares and rectangles, the new kits came encumbered with fat, abstruse, wordless manuals that laid out, panel after numbered panel and page after page, the steps that must be followed if one hoped — and after all, why else would you nudge your dad into buying it for you? — to end up with a landspeeder just like Luke Skywalker’s (only smaller). Where Lego-building had once been open-ended and exploratory, it now had far more in common with puzzle-solving, a process of moving incrementally toward an ideal, pre-established, and above all, a provided solution.

I resented this change. When my son and I finished putting together a TIE interceptor or Naboo starfighter, usually after several weeks of struggle, a half-deranged search for one tiny black chip of sterile styrene the size of his pinkie nail, and two or three bouts of prolonged despair, the resulting object was so undeniably handsome, and our investment of time in building it so immense, that the thought of playing with it, let alone ever disassembling it, was anathema. But more than the inherent difficulty — which, after all, is an important aspect of puzzle-solving, or the shift from exploration to reproduction — I resented the authoritarian nature of the new Lego. Though I admired and enjoyed Toy Story (1995), the film has always been tainted for me by its subtext of orthodoxy: its implied assertion that there is a right way and a wrong way to play with your toys. Andy, the young hero of Toy Story, uses his toys more or less the way their manufacturers intended — cowboys are cowboys; Mr. Potato Head, with his “angry eyes,” is a suitable mustachioed villain — while the most telling sign that we are to take Sid, the quasi-psychotic neighbor kid, as a “bad boy” is that he hybridizes and “breaks the rules” of orderly play, equipping an Erector-set spider, for example, with a stubbly doll’s head. Sid is mean, cruel, heartless, crazy: You can tell because he put his wrestler doll in a dress. A similar orthodoxy, a structure of control and implied obedience to the norms of the instruction manual and of the implacable exigencies of realism itself, seemed to have been unleashed, like the Dark Side of the Force, in the once bright Republic of Lego.

But I should have had more faith in my children, and in the saving power of the lawless imagination. Like all realisms, Lego realism was doomed. In part, this was an inevitable result of the quirks and limitations inherent in the Lego System, with the distortions that its various techniques of interlocking create. The addition of painted faces and elaborately modeled headgear, weapons, and accoutrements ultimately did little to diminish the fundamental silliness of the minifig; as with CGI animation, the technology falls down at the human form. In depicting people, it makes compromises that weaken the intended realism of the whole. But the technical limitations are only part of the greater failure of realism — defined as accuracy, precision, faithfulness to experience — to live up to the disorder, the unlikeliness, and the recombinant impulse of imagined experience.

Kids write their own manuals in a new language made up of the things we give them and the things that derive from the peculiar wiring of their heads. The power of Lego is revealed only after the models have been broken up or tossed, half finished, into the drawer. You sit down to make something and start digging around in the drawer or container, looking for a particular brick or axle, and the Legos circulate in the drawer with a peculiarly loud crunching noise. Sometimes you can’t find the piece you’re looking for, but a gear or a clear orange cone or a horned helmet catches your eye. Time after time, playing Legos with my kids, I would fall under the spell of the old familiar crunching. It’s the sound of creativity itself, of the inventive mind at work, making something new out of what you have been given by your culture, what you know you will need to do the job, and what you happen to stumble on along the way.

All kids — the good ones, too — have a psycho tinge of Sid, of the maker of hybrids and freaks. My children have used aerodynamic, streamlined bits and pieces of a dozen Star Wars kits, mixed with Lego dinosaur jaws, Lego aqualungs, Lego doubloons, Lego tibias, to devise improbably beautiful spacecraft far more commensurate than George Lucas’s with the mysteries of other galaxies and alien civilizations. They have equipped the manga-inspired Lego figures with Lego ichthyosaur flippers. When he was still a toddler, Abraham liked to put a glow-in-the-dark bedsheet-style Lego ghost costume over a Lego Green Goblin minifig and seat him on a Sioux horse, armed with a light saber, then make the Goblin do battle with a minifig Darth Vader, mounted on a black horse, armed with a bow and arrow. That is the aesthetic at work in the Legosphere now — not the modernist purity of the early years or the totalizing vision behind the dark empire of modern corporate marketing but the aesthetic of the Lego drawer, of the mash-up, the pastiche that destroys its sources at the same time that it makes use of and reinvents them. You churn around in the drawer and pull out what catches your eye, bits and pieces drawn from movies and history and your own fancy, and make something new, something no one has ever seen or imagined before.

The Wilderness of Childhood

When I was growing up, our house backed onto woods, a thin two-acre remnant of a once mighty Wilderness. This was in a Maryland city where the enlightened planners had provided a number of such lingering swaths of green. They were tame as can be, our woods, and yet at night they still filled with unfathomable shadows. In the winter they lay deep in snow and seemed to absorb, to swallow whole, all the ordinary noises of your body and your world. Scary things could still be imagined to take place in those woods. It was the place into which the bad boys fled after they egged your windows on Halloween and left your pumpkins pulped in the driveway. There were no Indians in those woods, but there had been once. We learned about them in school. Patuxent Indians, they’d been called. Swift, straight-shooting, silent as deer. Gone but for their lovely place names: Patapsco, Wicomico, Patuxent.

A minor but undeniable aura of romance was attached to the history of Maryland, my home state: refugee Catholic Englishmen, cavaliers in ringlets and ruffs; pirates, battles, the sack of Washington, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Harriet Tubman, Antietam. And when you went out into those woods behind our house, you could feel all that, all that history, those battles and dramas and romances, those stories. You could work it into your games, your imaginings, your lonely flights from the turmoil or torpor of your life at home. My friends and I spent hours there, braves, crusaders, commandos, blues and grays.

But the Wilderness of Childhood, as any kid could attest who grew up, like my father, on the streets of Flatbush in the forties, had nothing to do with trees or nature. I could lose myself on vacant lots and playgrounds, in the alleyway behind the Wawa, in the neighbors’ yards, on the sidewalks. Anywhere, in short, I could reach on my bicycle, a 1970 Schwinn Typhoon, Coke-can red with a banana seat, a sissy bar, and ape-hanger handlebars. On it I covered the neighborhood in a regular route for half a mile in every direction. I knew the locations of all my classmates’ houses, the number of pets and siblings they had, the brand of Popsicle they served, the potential dangerousness of their fathers. Matt Groening once did a great Life in Hell strip that took the form of a map of Bongo’s neighborhood. At one end of a street that wound among yards and houses stood Bongo, the little one-eared rabbit boy. At the other stood his mother, about to blow her stack — Bongo was late for dinner again. Between Mother and Son lay the hazards — labeled ANGRY DOGS, ROVING GANG OF HOOLIGANS, GIRL WITH A CRUSH ON BONGO — of any journey through the Wilderness: deadly animals, antagonistic humans, lures and snares. It captured perfectly the mental maps of their worlds that children endlessly revise and refine. Childhood is a branch of cartography.

Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only in terms of the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life. This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure — and write them — because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map — marked HERE THERE BE TYGERS and MEAN KID WITH AIR RIFLE — that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

A striking feature of literature for children is the number of stories, many of them classics of the genre, that feature the adventures of a child, more often a group of children, acting in a world where adults, particularly parents, are completely or effectively out of the picture. Think of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Railway Children, or Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy presents a chilling version of this world in its depiction of Cittagazze, a city whose adults have all been stolen away. Then there is the very rich vein of children’s literature featuring ordinary contemporary children navigating and adventuring through a contemporary, nonfantastical world that is nonetheless beyond the direct influence of adults, at least some of the time. I’m thinking the Encyclopedia Brown books, the Great Brain books, the Henry Reed and Homer Price books, the stories of the Mad Scientists’ Club, a fair share of the early works of Beverly Cleary. As a kid, I was extremely fond of a series of biographies, largely fictional, I’m sure, that dramatized the lives of famous Americans — Washington, Jefferson, Kit Carson, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Daniel Boone — when they were children. (Boys, for the most part, though I do remember reading one about Clara Barton.) One element that was almost universal in these stories was the vast amounts of time the famous historical boys were alleged to have spent wandering with bosom companions, with friendly Indian boys or a devoted slave, through the once mighty wilderness, the Wilderness of Childhood, entirely free of adult supervision.

Though the wilderness available to me had shrunk to a mere green scrap of its former enormousness, though so much about childhood had changed in the years between the days of young George Washington’s adventuring on his side of the Potomac and my own suburban exploits on mine, there was still a connectedness there, a continuum of childhood. Eighteenth-century Virginia, twentieth-century Maryland, tenth-century Britain, Narnia, Neverland, Prydain — it was all the same Wilderness. Those legendary wanderings of Boone and Carson and young Daniel Beard (the father of the Boy Scouts of America), those games of war and exploration I read about, those frightening encounters with genuine menace, far from the help or interference of mother and father, seemed to me at the time — and I think this is my key point — absolutely familiar to me.

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors.

The traveler soon learns that the only way to come to know a city, to form a mental map of it, however provisional, and begin to find his or her own way around it, is to visit it alone, preferably on foot, and then become as lost as one possibly can. I have been to Chicago maybe a half-dozen times in my life, on book tours, and yet I still don’t know my North Shore from my North Side, because every time I’ve visited, I have been picked up and driven around, and taken to see the sights by someone far more versed than I in the city’s wonders and hazards. State Street, Halsted Street, the Loop — to me it’s all a vast jumbled lot of stage sets and backdrops passing by the window of a car.

This is the kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived to provide for our children. We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another’s houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between. If they are lucky, we send them out to play in the backyard, where they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with security cameras. When my family and I moved onto our street in Berkeley, the family next door included a nine-year-old girl; in the house two doors down the other way, there was a nine-year-old boy, her exact contemporary and, like her, a lifelong resident of the street. They had never met.

The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations — Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked STAFF ONLY. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armored as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.

There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness. This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of stranger abductions in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children’s lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.

The endangerment of children — that persistent theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years — resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children’s imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it — nowhere that I was willing to let her go. Should I send my children out to play? There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let her ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying herself an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with her thoughts? Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn’t encounter a single other child.

Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted — not taught — to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Hypocritical Theory

I hate Captain Underpants.

I’m not saying that the books in the popular series, featuring the adventures of two potty-minded fourth-graders, written and illustrated by Dav Pilkey, aren’t lively, well crafted, and snappily designed. Nor am I saying that the books’ unrelenting, quasi-Tourettic aesthetic of poop, boogers, and toilets isn’t rooted in an authentic moment of childhood — of boyhood, at any rate. I’m just saying that I hate them. I feel obliged to hate them, even though hating them makes me a hypocrite. I’m a father. Being a hypocrite is my job.

Proof of my hypocrisy can be found in my ancient devotion to the drugstore cult of Wacky Packages. Wacky Packages followed Hot Wheels and preceded Pet Rocks as one of the great commercial fads of my childhood. For about a year, like all my friends, I collected Wacky Packages, traded them, stuck them to my threering binder, the inside of my locker, my bedroom wastebasket. They were so popular and ubiquitous that Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., the manufacturer of Wacky Packages, several times literally ran out of paper to print them on. Just before the fad petered out, Wacky Packages were featured on the cover of New York magazine (my parents had a subscription), which used the fad to diagnose me and my supposedly cynical, wised-up, skeptical generation.

The typical Wacky Packages card featured a peel-off sticker that mocked the appearance and name of some well-known brand of household product, grocery item, or staple of the drugstore. A bottle of fetid-looking salad dressing labeled Fish-Bone, a foam-mouthed dog on the label of a can of Rabid Shave shaving cream, a Bustedfinger candy bar with a big swollen finger poking through the wrapper, a bar of Vile soap. A checklist card came in every package, along with a square of chewable pink cellulose, and every few months Topps would bring out a new series. Topps card designer Art Spiegelman and his colleagues (among them the great pulp-magazine cover artist Norman Saunders and underground-comix stalwarts Kim Deitch, Bill Griffith, Jay Lynch, and Bhob Stewart) wound the spiral of mockery so tight that the fourth series featured a card depicting Wormy Packages, worm-infested trading stickers intended (like Wacky Packages themselves, like all the products and advertisements they mocked, like everything, by implication, that you saw, heard, or paid attention to, every moment of your young media-saturated life) to pry loose a nickel from your pocket.

To any kid who had picked up a copy of Mad magazine during the previous twenty years, there was nothing new or generationally distinctive about the flavor of mockery to which Wacky Packages subjected the features of the American brandscape. The salient novelty of Wacky Packages was not their irreverence toward copywriter clichés or subversion of the ineluctability of brands and logos but their free, and at the time, startling use of “gross” humor. The first few series of cards employed imagery such as lice, poisonous dog food, exposed brains, Putrid cat chow, maggots, toe corns, flesh peeled away by Band-Ache strips, a powdered-blood breakfast drink for vampires (Fang), and saliva. What made that kind of imagery so startling was not the humor itself. Gross or sick humor was a fundamental mode of children’s discourse. Dead-baby jokes; songs about vomit, snot, diarrhea, and other forms of excrement; anecdotes and urban legends of cannibalism, coprophagia, brain-eating earwigs — at the age of eight or nine, along with all of my peers, I had assumed custody of a vast repertoire of wondrously disgusting material. The shock value of Wacky Packages had nothing to do with, in this sense, their content. They depicted or referred to nothing that I had not imagined, rhymed about, discussed, drawn, or seen for myself. What was so shocking about Wacky Packages was that they were a production of the adult world. Adults had conceived and painted them; adults had manned the rotating drums of the printing presses and the machine that wrapped each pack of two cards in waxed paper; adults had trucked the Wacky Packages to the drugstore, where you handed over your five cents to an adult who, perhaps most shockingly of all, allowed you to buy them. It was as if your mother encouraged you to play with your food, or your father handed you his expensive German shortwave radio and a screwdriver and told you to go right ahead and figure out how the damn thing worked.

In retrospect, I see the early-1973 Wacky Packages craze as a pivotal moment in the history of American childhood. Prior to this, gross humor was a kind of code, a thieves’ argot spoken only when out of earshot of adults, who — one knew it on faith if not through painful experience — never would have permitted or approved of it. Would not have understood it, in fact. Songs about boogers and vomit were transmissions in a frequency that would sound to the adult ear like infuriating squawk, annoying static. And that was their point. Along with the unwritten rules and nuances of byzantine games played in vacant lots and alleyways, gross humor was a principal means by which children signaled and celebrated the absence of adults in the immediate vicinity. We were a generation — maybe the last full generation — that adults left alone, at least sometimes. Singing a disgusting song or telling a cruel riddle (Q: What do you call a man with no arms or legs when you throw him in the ocean? A: Bob) was like running up an insurgent flag in a neighborhood where the occupier had been driven back for the moment. At the same time, the gore and mayhem, the amputations, the fatalities, the abominations described by gross humor also constituted a way of acknowledging the implicit danger of living in a world devoid of adults and of the protection they theoretically afforded.

The adults who sold us Wacky Packages spoke the secret language; they entered boldly into the preserve or magic ghetto of childhood under the insurgent flag. I remember how it felt to open those first packs of Wacky Packages stickers: delicious, incredible, pleasurable in the way that only something truly wrong can be. Because in the long run, Wacky Packages, and the cultural trend of which they turned out to be the leading edge, were bad for children. I don’t mean bad in any kind of easy, moralistic way. Children must learn to mock capitalism and the uses to which it seeks to put them as early as they learn how to swim. And I wouldn’t care — I’d secretly applaud it — if my son and his friends wasted every free moment they had creating taxonomies of vomit by chunkiness and color. It’s just that they now have so few moments that can be said to be free in any sense of the word. So much of their culture — that compound of lore and play — is now the trademarked product and property of adults. The men who sold us Wacky Packages were like those traders in Hudson’s Bay blankets — good, warm blankets — whose stock gradually drove out the native product and sent the traditional weaving craft into decline. We sold out our liberty and gave up control over our ancient heritage of vulgarity for the thrill of seeing it done up in four-color lithography, transferable to a notebook or a classroom desk, scented with the sweet dust of bubble gum.

After Wacky Packages came Slime, the first “disgusting” toy (1977), and Garbage Pail Kids stickers (1985) and the advent of fart jokes in Walt Disney cartoons (The Lion King, 1994) and that masterpiece of the confectioner’s art, Sour Flush, acrid sweet powder that comes packaged in a miniature plastic toilet to be dabbed at and consumed by means of the moistened end of an edible plunger. And then one day children looked around and saw that there was no corner, no alleyway, no space anywhere in their lives that was free of adult supervision, adult mediation, adult control. All sports are organized sports, trick-or-treating takes place in school gymnasiums, and parents who send their children out to play where I used to play, in the street — in the street! — court well-publicized tragedies such as abduction and intervention by the minions of Child Protective Services. Captain Underpants, champion of flatulence and bodily fluids, is a mainstay of the Scholastic Book Club. The reading of the books is not only condoned but encouraged by teachers and librarians, grateful that boys are interested in reading anything at all.

In detesting, disapproving of the Captain Underpants books, I am not trying to disparage my son’s taste in fiction, to belittle his choices, to withhold my approval of him. God knows I have nothing against boogers. This is where the hypocrisy comes in. I loved Wacky Packages. I knew every foul verse of the classic anthems “Suffocation” (Suffocation, mental retardation / Suffocation, the game we like to play) and “Diarrhea” (later made famous in the film Parenthood). If Captain Underpants had been around when I was a kid, I probably would have loved him, too. But knowing that doesn’t make it any harder for me to wish Captain Underpants away. The irony of the series is too painful. George and Harold, the young protagonists, enjoy the unscheduled time and freedom from adult supervision that I (and no doubt Dav Pilkey) once took for granted. The boys imagine, create, and draw their own superhero adventures (including those of Super Diaper Baby) within the context of an old-fashioned adult world that still disapproves heartily of boys’ taking pleasure from talking about pee and poop and snot. George and Harold’s teachers, one comes to realize, would never allow them to read Captain Underpants books, let alone help win free copies of them for their classroom by placing book-club orders with Scholastic. The original spirit of mockery has been completely inverted; it is now the adult world that mocks children, implicitly and profitably, speaking its old language, invoking its bygone secret pleasures.

I see my disapproval of Captain Underpants, therefore, as a drawing of a line between my son and me, between his world and mine, between adulthood and childhood, as a small, feeble attempt to reestablish the contours of a boundary that in the greater culture has grown vague, disregarded, abused. If I withdraw my approval of Captain Underpants — if I tell my son I will gladly supply him with good books and comics but that if he wants to read those damned Captain Underpants, he’ll have to pay for them himself — that withdrawal creates a gap, a small enchanted precinct of parental disapproval within which he can curl up, for a minute, for the time it takes to read a crass, vibrant, silly 120-page book with big print, one that he paid for himself, and thrill to the deep, furtive pleasure of annoying one’s father. There is no way to draw that line, to re-create that boundary, without engaging in hypocrisy, without condemning, questioning, or diminishing the importance of the things, from ultra-sugary bubble gum to transfatty snacks to Humboldt County sinsemilla, that once stood at the center of my way of loving the world. That’s what sucks about being an adult. Adulthood has always carried a burden of self-denial, of surrendering pleasures, of leaving childish things behind. Maybe that’s why, around thirty years ago, adults started trying to get out of the adult business and into the business of selling childhood. Or maybe it’s that self-denial, surrender, and forswearing are a lot harder to package for retail. It could be hypocrisy is such a toxin that our society is better off without it, even if that means infantilizing adults with late-night programming on the Cartoon Network or merchandising children’s once autonomous culture back to them in shrink-wrapped packs. But it’s hard to think of anything that would be more hypocritical than the selling, to children whose lives we control and regiment down to the quarter hour, of brightly colored confectionery visions of children who are still subject to creative neglect, still free to engage in the most profitable of human activities: wasting time making up crass, vibrant silliness that is all your own.

The Splendors of Crap

At least once a month I take my kids to see a new “family movie”—the latest computer-generated piece of animated crap. Please don’t oblige me to revisit the last one even long enough to name the film, let alone describe it. Anyway, you know the one I mean: set in a zoo, or in a forest, or on a farm, or under the sea, or in “Africa,” or in an effortfully hilarious StorybookLand^TM where magic, wonder, and make-believe are ironized and mocked except at those moments when they are tenderly invoked to move units. I believe but am not prepared to swear that the lead in this weekend’s version may have been a neurotic lion, or a neurotic bear, or a neurotic rat, or a neurotic chicken. Chances are good that the thing featured penguins; for a while the movies have all been featuring penguins. Naturally, there were the legally required 5.5 incidences of humor-simulating flatulence per hour of running time. A raft of bright pop-punk tunes on the sound track, alternating with familiar numbers culled with art and cruelty from the storehouse of parental nostalgia. Creativity, idiosyncrasy, and the fertile rebelliousness of a romantic dreamer were invoked and glorified without recourse to the use or display of any of those three unmarketable commodities.

In principle and in many instances, both as a parent and as a former child, I have nothing against crappy art and the ancillary crap — the extruded action figures and rubber-transfer-stiffened underpants and books of unpeelable stickers, sold separately — that inevitably attends it. First of all, what smells strongly of crap to one generation — Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies — so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene.

More central to my regard — in principle, at least — for the artistic possibilities of crap is my lifelong personal experience with the power of mass art to transport and enrich the imagination of its consumer. I saw a lot of lousy movies and watched a ton of crappy television and read a bunch of utterly forgettable books and comics and listened to hours of junk music as a kid. And I’m still drawing profitably in my own art on some of the tawdry treasure I stored up in those years.

But the acceptance and even the glorification of crap implies no universal obligation. Even without the benefit of generational hindsight, there are distinctions to be made among varieties of crap, and to that end I find myself thinking back to a Saturday afternoon thirty years ago when I went over to the Megginsons’ house to play Planet of the Apes.

There were four Megginson children: Peter, Caroline, Andrew, and Jane. Caroline and I were classmates and Peter, a year older, was my best friend. They lived with their mother in a modest three-bedroom town house at the other end of the Village of Long Reach, in Columbia, Maryland, my hometown. Peter and Caroline each had a room, and the younger pair shared; Mrs. Megginson slept, not without a certain mysteriousness, in a semi-secret basement lair. She was a calligrapher, and the house was filled with the wise sentiments of the revered minds of the day rendered in Mrs. Megginson’s handsome hand. My parents kept a tidy house, but Mrs. Megginson’s laxity as a housekeeper was a point of pride with her, and visitors were cheerfully advised to wash the roach shit from cups and plates taken from her kitchen cabinets. The Megginson father was missing and rarely mentioned, the family budget extremely tight, the car an orange two-stroke Beetle named Agnes (it said so in adhesive calligraphy on her doors). There was always a faint air of possible trouble in the air, a sense that Mrs. Megginson, in her ongoing, hitherto successful efforts to raise four good children on her own, was operating just outside the bounds of accepted suburban-Maryland practice, with financial calamity a real if not quite imminent possibility. I suppose, looking back, that the Megginsons lived nearly as much in bohemia as in Columbia, and these were my first visits to that precarious kingdom.

Through some alchemy of the mother’s artistic nature, the openness of the household, the unfettered nature of American childhood during that time and the sheer mass of children in the house, there was always something afoot at the Megginsons’. When you walked in the door, you would get drafted into whatever large ongoing collective enterprise was under way — making that year’s Halloween costumes, re-creating in card stock and glue a shot of Camelot from a panel in Prince Valiant, writing a rock opera, helping to cope through pie, sauce, and butter with a rapidly spoiling surfeit of apples gathered at Sewell’s Orchard. Usually, some book, TV show, or record album was passionately in vogue around the house, with all play activity — drawing sessions, outdoor adventuring, dinner-table confabulation — focused narrowly around Norse Gods and Giants or Space: 1999 or Queen II. And like one of the progressive rock bands then in their heyday, the Megginsons were busy, all the time, not only with those big double-sided concept albums but with all manner of side projects and solo albums and one-shots: Caroline was learning to read Tarot cards; Peter had found a way to make cool-looking spaceships out of the cap from a Bic pen and the plastic clip from a bread bag snapped in two; Andrew was immersed in the epistemology of Tintin; Jane could not stop talking about Ginnungagap.

On this one Saturday morning, the Megginsons were all about Planet of the Apes. Not the movie nor any of its five increasingly baroque sequels, and certainly not the Pierre Boulle novel, confusingly replete with witty Frenchmen. No, the Megginsons and I were obsessed with the short-lived CBS television series, of which thirteen episodes aired, to low ratings, at the end of 1974.

As with many forgotten TV series, all the episodes of Planet of the Apes are now available on DVD, but I haven’t ever gone back to look at them. What I remember about the show, albeit vaguely, are the elements that formed the basis of our play: the setting amid a world of forests and grassy hills; the peculiarity that, unlike in the films, the humans, though degraded in ape eyes, were capable of speech; and above all, perhaps, the steady presence in every episode of adventure on horseback.

For a day we inhabited our Planet of the Apes: a hill, a stream, a small wooden bridge behind the Megginsons’ disorderly and productive town house at the ragged edge of Columbia, where built land gave way to open space. According to principles implied but never articulated by the TV show, we named and fitted ourselves with weapons and histories. I can’t quite remember who was a sensitive chimpanzee, who a questing astronaut, who a noble savage, who a brutal and potent gorilla warlord, but I know that nobody wanted to be one of the characters from the show. It was always part of the game to make up your own character. Maybe we all wanted to be astronauts and left the marauding and enslaving gorillas to be played by the heavies of our imaginations. I am sure that at least as much time was spent in preparing to play, in conferring and arguing and revising the parameters of the game, as in actually playing it. Eventually, night fell; it was time to come inside, time for me to return to my own neater, more secure, vastly emptier house.

And now I have four children of my own, two girls and two boys. There is a lot going on in my house, and sometimes it seems to echo or reflect the fertile chaos in the Megginsons’. But somehow it is not quite the same. I’m not sure what the reason for that is. We don’t let things get as messy around here. My kids have a lot more homework than I ever did. But there’s something lacking in their lives, and I see it in their relation to the variety of crap that now dominates the mass-art landscape, a variety well represented by neurotic-farting-penguin movies.

There’s no doubt that the Planet of the Apes TV show was crap. Yes, the makeup was decent for its time, and the shows tried, in the dutiful manner of early seventies post—Star Trek, pre—Star Wars television science fiction, to address weighty issues of prejudice, intolerance, and the meaning of being human. But it remained — indeed its existence depended on it being — a knockoff of a knockoff, the sequel to sequels, worked up by veteran TV hacks to fill up the spaces between Parkay margarine ads. What’s more, it was crap that flopped, canceled after only three months.

But it had — crucially, to my theory of what makes great mass art — the powerful quality of being open-ended, vague at its borders. Onto its simple template of horses and apes and humans, of quest and pursuit across a simplified landscape, a kid could easily project himself and the world he lived in. In its very incompleteness, born of lack of budget, the loose picaresque structure, and even of cancellation itself, it hinted at things beyond its own borders. There was room for you and your imagination in the narrative map of the show.

The CGI animated movies that dominate in the theaters today don’t work that way. With their fixed sets of characters, each giraffe or squirrel resembling in its carefully designed variation not a recognizable person or type so much as a brand identity, these films operate more like classic sitcoms than like the parodic-adventure stories for which they try to pass. The contours of the worlds they depict feel as backless as painted scenery flats, as the walls and doors of Mary Richards’s newsroom or the Huxtable living room. I like a good sitcom as much as anybody, but did any kids ever try to get up a game of Murphy Brown? At the same time, the ample budgets, large crews, and generally high level of technical prowess boasted by even the most execrable of these films enable their creators to employ the prevailing Star Wars—inspired aesthetic of packing every scene, every frame, with incident and filigree, without the concomitant open-ended structure that made the early Star Wars films, at least, a likely locus of fantasy play both for children and, in the form of fan fiction, adults. The new studio-made CGI products are like unctuous butlers of the imagination, ready to serve every need or desire as it arises; they don’t leave anything implied, unstated, incomplete. There is no room in them for children. And so they never form the basis for my own kids’ games.

As a father raised on a hearty diet of crap, I wrestle all the time with the role of crap in my own kids’ lives. There is so damn much of it now — crap TV shows, crap movies, crap toys and crap trading cards, crap video games, crap Flash animations and crap macaroni and cheese with SpongeBob-shaped pasta nodules, all of it interlocked and cross-referenced with breathtaking care and thoroughness. But I wouldn’t worry about it so much, I guess, if I felt like my kids had the space in their own heads and, especially, in their own physical worlds to lay it all out and make it their own.

Sometimes they don’t seem able to operate in an imaginative world. When we go to Maine in the summer my wife and I open the back door and step aside and wait for them to fly out into the grass and the sunshine. Acres of woods and wildflowers, butterflies and streams, a tame waterfall. A waterfall and hours of freedom from rules and parental control. And they stand there on the doorstep, eyeing one another, shuffling from foot to foot.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan describes the disillusioning reality of the life of chickens sold as “free-range.” He explains that these birds are raised, like all commercially farmed chicken, in the dense confinement of industrial henhouses for the first six weeks of their lives. At the end of that period, not long before the chickens are to be slaughtered, the doors of the henhouse are rolled open, giving onto a regulation patch of open range. The chickens come to the door and look out at the world of green grass and grubworms and fresh air they are being offered. And then they go back to the cramped, safe remainder of their lives, with their needs and desires attended to as assiduously as by any butler or animation studio. They are afraid to go outside; it’s not a world they know or know how to explore. The farmers don’t really want them to go out and explore it; there are too many diseases they might catch, unprotected by antibiotics as they are.

My kids are free-range children, in all the stark reality of the term except the part about being eaten. If, like the four Pevensie children (two boys and two girls) of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, they were sent off to the countryside to avoid the Blitz, my children might well have to be marched, under protest, to the room with the old wardrobe and shoved in among the coats; it would be hard for them to grasp how an entire old house, filled with unknown rooms and corridors, might become a world of unlimited play. They might never be able to engage in the half-bored, half-enchanted wandering through the variable, never-changing spectacle of the neighborhood that enables the children (three boys and a girl) in Edward Eager’s Half Magic to find the talisman that grants half of every wish, so that one must learn, invaluably, to wish twice as hard.

That may be why I spend as much time worrying about the crap in my kids’ imaginative diet as I do fretting over their eating habits. Free space, free play, and the sense of independent control over a world that is vague and discoverable at its edges: These act as a kind of filtration system enabling kids not to work the crap out of their minds — I proclaim for all time the splendor and goodness of crap entertainment — but to compound it with the alloy of their own imagination, tempering it against the hard edges and rough spots of the physical world. All great crap is open-ended but only if it can be carried by a child right out into the open. Otherwise, kids get trapped within the flats of the vivid and convincing set that we have constructed for them, afraid to go through doors that lead nowhere, staring through a CGI window at a pastel-and-pixel view of a world they fear or have forgotten how to reach.