LEGO: A Love Story author (and Pitch food blogger) Jonathan Bender is having a good month. With a promotional tour under way and sales of his fine, funny book -- part ode to the world's greatest toy, part valentine to his wife and their young daughter -- building on Amazon, he's set to become KC's latest literary success.
Ahead of his appearance at the Kansas City Central Library next Thursday (make reservations for the free event here), he answered a few questions for us, including who he hopes will play him if Hollywood turns his book into a movie.
The Pitch: When did you figure out the metaphor that building with LEGO pieces shares with building a family?
Bender:
It's a weird thing to begin playing with a child's toy at the same time
that you're attempting to start a family with your wife. And it went
from being something we didn't talk about to something I explicitly
wrote about, if only because both building with LEGO and building a
family proved more difficult than expected.
The book was initially going to be about competing on the LEGO circuit, although I quickly learned that the adult fan community is focused more on collaboration than competition -- that and I still have the building chops of an 8-year-old.
For me, playing with LEGO bricks is also intrinsically wrapped up in my concept of my family -- I still rank building a model LEGO Sears Tower with my dad among my happiest memories of childhood. And so as I thought about becoming a father, it made me think about the idea of having a child to share similar moments.
How has the Internet weighed on the all-important idea of "purity" in the LEGO culture?
From a purist's perspective, the Internet has opened up an entire
culture of customization -- one of painting and cutting -- that seems
indicative of short cuts. For a non-purist, this is, quite simply,
awesome. And without the Internet, purists could never have access to
exclusive sets or products that have never been made available in the
United States. I don't think "purist" equals provincial, but I do think
purists are aghast at the idea of someone taking a soldering iron to a
LEGO minifigure in order to insert an aftermarket LED light to create a
miniaturized Iron Man. No matter how cool the pictures look online.
How do you rank LEGO people in the obsessives matrix against, like, comics nerds and Trekkers and your garden-variety hoarders?
I'd rank the obsession at the top -- but you're talking to a guy with several thousand LEGO bricks taking up the back half of his office. I think LEGO-heads should be given the nod because this is a hobby that is about using what you acquire creatively. Moreover, LEGO fans build superheroes and Star Trek sculptures that other obsessed fanbases covet. While there are collectibles and collectors, most LEGO fans would rather crack open a box and get to building. This is one hobby that thankfully is almost entirely devoid of clamshell packaging.
Going back to purity for a minute, where do you stand on tie-in LEGO products as a force for good or ill? Are Star Wars LEGO kits an inevitable bit of fun or would we be a more imaginative community if people building with LEGO pieces still started with a more generic idea of form?
Smart intellectual property partnership is a large reason that LEGO is in business and thriving today. Star Wars LEGO sets debuted in 1998 and have brought a huge influx of fans to LEGO. The intersection of Star Wars and LEGO fans might just be at the top of your obsessives matrix -- I'd like to see a Venn diagram on that.
When I talked to the licensing group at LEGO's headquarters in Denmark, they were very conscious about picking partners that reflected the values of the company: creativity, play and imagination. While some people might feel hampered by a picture on the box, most of the time, bricks from a bunch of different sets end up in a tub, and whether they came from a Star Wars or a SpongeBob set doesn't really matter. They can all be bricks for my LEGO dinosaur.
Who would you cast for the movie version of your book?
I'd want Michael Clarke Duncan to play me. If he's unavailable, Sean Astin or Elijah Wood could fill in nicely.
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Incredible!, i thought this was a premier quality post. The theory is that I would like to create along these lines too - spending time and true effort to make a reasonable post... on the other hand what can I say... I put things off loads and don't seem to get something executed
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