This week, Pieces spent too many hours playing annoying computer games. Shame on us for getting hooked on something so unproductive, when we could have been outside in the sun, doing cartwheels and picking daisies. Or something.
Speaking of picking small flowers, watching one too many old movies this week got me thinking about little things that fill childhoods. Sliding down slides, falling off climbing frames into piles of bark chips, digging around in sandpits filled with greying sand – all pretty typical kiddy things. Except that hardly any children growing up today will do any of these things, because something about childhood is gently changing under our noses…
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a big rant about how kids grow up too fast nowadays, and ooh isn’t it awful how we dress our children in little versions of adult sexy clothes and my-goodness-gracious-why-not-just-let-them-be-kids. That’s all been done. I’m talking about the little things that seem to get ignored by the typical rants, because it’s assumed that they have stayed the same in the face of some all-encompassing shift. We may well force young people to wear mini-Topshop monsters, but they still have playgrounds where they can swing on swings, right? And they still eat ice-cream and accidentally dribble it down their shirts in that awww-it’s-so-cute way. And cmon, they might be exposed to sex and money and swearing much earlier than in my day, but they still. Right??
Well, yes and no. this train of thought began as I was walking past an old childhood haunt, a playground that used to be filled with half-rotting wooden ladders to climb and a massive sandpit filled with anonymous brown lumps that mothers always seemed to be nervous of (can’t think why). All of these wonders have been ripped out and replaced by a state-of-the-art twenty-first century grey-and-black streamlined…thing. And it looks amazing. Best thing to play on, ever. No slide, but still – climbing studs, really soft-looking crash mats to land on, poles to navigate and climb up. Perfect. But charm? Sadly lacking. I’m not exactly a stickler for old-fashioned anything, but there’s definitely something a little…sterile about it all. There’s definitely something very unnatural about it all, it’s all plastic and flashy bits of metal. Not a single bark chip ANYWHERE. Scandal. Maybe this means our children are going to grow up not knowing what a tree looks like, or where bark comes from, or what wood can be made into apart from Primark bags and bog roll. But hey, at least the kids still have somewhere to run around and play, right?
So yes, lots of children do still technically have a lot of the things that supposedly ‘make’ a childhood. But I can’t help thinking that the tokens that are left are being changed in ways that influence the ways they’re growing up in ways that are just as profound as the whole Daily-Mail-shock-horror-twelve-year-old-dad bag.
And finally, just in case there were any suspicions, none of this has anything to do with the Pieces song Playgrounds. Definitely not a subliminal plug. As if we’d Children ever do Of something Fire like that.
And so to Piecesounds, which this week is remarkably bouncy. Apart from the slower songs. And the jazz. And the frankly astonishing fragments that make up Tzigane. Remarkable.
As always, click on the link below to hear all of this in your very own ears.
1. Animal Collective – Peacebone
2. Dr. Octagon – A Gorilla Driving A Pickup Truck
3. Sonic Youth – Tunic (Song for Karen)
4. The Flaming Lips – It Overtakes Me
5. The Neon Philharmonic – Brilliant Colours
6. Talking Heads – Love = Building On Fire
7. Jane Birkin/Feist – The Simple Story
8. Jett Brando – The Centre Of Gravity (Sit Right Down)
9. Yo La Tengo – Damage
10. Joni Mitchell – Car On A Hill
11. Maurice Ravel – Tzigane
12. Django Reinhardt – Night And Day
http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/24l8bl8dDcqpv840IJFd4H
Stay here. And there. Until next week.
Pieces x
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