Blog Archives
All Hail King Ludd
What recourse is there for the public when their leaders will not listen, their employers have broken the compacts that bind society, and their bellies gnaw with hunger?
If two examples are sufficient to draw a motif, that seems to be the recurring question at the center of Yoni Goldstein’s work. Last year’s Chicago ’68 was a refreshing look at civil disobedience in the streets; now Goldstein and the Dietz Foundation are publishing The Nights of King Ludd, which raises similar questions about resistance and state repression despite being translocated across an ocean and 150 years.
The Whole World Is Watching
It’s a rare board game that asks you to locate yourself in history. To do more than merely visit some remote decade but to recognize your place within it, the ways it has accompanied your country, your family, your self all the way through to today.
Yoni Goldstein’s Chicago ’68 is, as the title indicates, about the Democratic National Convention of 1968 — fifty-six years ago this very week — when protests against the escalating Vietnam War flared into a riot between demonstrators and police. Its anxieties are our anxieties. War or peace, one nominee or another, racial tensions that remain with us still. We’ve played protest games before, but Chicago ’68 is the crispest example yet, neither abstracted like Bloc by Bloc nor given the bird’s eye view of Votes for Women.
Most of all, it has a profound, sickening familiarity that both of those titles lacked. This is play not only as history, but as a mirror.
