Completely thrilled be a part of this great reading series next Thursday, 5/6, alongside a bunch of quality poets. Come, drink wine, relax in the confines of beautiful Rogue Buddha Gallery, soak up the spoken word, and catch a free film in the process! (Yes, “How to Live Better” lives on!) Your Thursday is hereby planned.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
7:00pm – 9:00pm
Rogue Buddha Gallery
357 13th Ave. Nordeast
Minneapolis, MN
Item of interest: Children Draw and Tell: an Introduction to the Projective Uses of Children’s Human Figure Drawings. By Marvin Klepsch and Laura Logie. New York: Brunnel / Mazel, 1982.
Observation (of item): CDaT, as advertised in the title, is filled with psychological analyses of children’s drawings, almost all of which are unfailingly blunt: ”… motor problems…” “… in need of security and support…” “… terror of nurse and/or needle…” “… feels intellectually inadequate…” “Overall Impression: Insignificance, shyness, smallness….”
Observation (of self): The above causes me to think: (a) “This is completely sad and heartbreaking.” (b) “I’m thinking of my own son right now, hoping to keep him from harm.” (c) “I don’t even want to consider the complications of this, I just want to love him, that’s all.” (d) “It’s sad enough that small children face the entire range of adult emotional anxieties, but why does it also seem sadder that children’s drawings ‘leak out’ their innermost feelings, and that these drawings can then be examined clinically?” And, subsequently: (e) “Why should that bother me?”
Additional, barely-related thoughts: (a) “I wonder how often innermost feelings leak out of adults?” (b) “Maybe a lot. Or maybe very infrequently. It’s probably hard to tell and depends on the person anyway.” (c) “Personally, I had to lose a lot of poker hands before I realized that, for me, the answer is: ‘a lot.’”
Sequence of observations and excerpts (random, of item):
children’s pictoral depictions of human beings (either of themselves or others) are significant enough in the world of psychology to rate a special term: Human Figure Drawings. They can also be called HFDs.
HFDs (according to CDaT) first attracted attention from psychologists in the early 1900s. Since then, the study of HFDs has yielded many different kinds of psychological tests, all with special names: (1) the “Goodenough-Harris Draw-a-Man Test”; (2) the “House-Tree-Person Test” (Koppitz, 1968); (3) the “Gesell Incomplete Man Test”; (4) the “Evanston Early Identification Scale” (EEIS); and (5) one part of the “Denver Developmental Screening Test.”
“A three-year-old typically draws a person as a head…” (14).
“Four-year-olds make tadpole-like drawings…” (14).
“At five years of age, most children will draw a body and a head. The head will contain eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and arms and legs will emanate from the body” (14).
Promotional blurb on back of a VHS case for the movie Sodom and Gomorrah. (Found at: video & seminar room, Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.)
Sodom and Gomorrah. Two cities built on barbarous cruelty and ruled by unspeakable vice. Sweeping off the pages of the bible, and brought to life by a cast of thousands, this breathtaking, epic production paints a vivid and shocking portrait of the cities too wicked and sinful to survive. It’s the story of Lot (Stuart Granger) who led the Hebrews out of the desert to these twin cities of sin, and into temptations no man or woman could resist. From bloody battle and sadistic torture to savage passion, it’s an action-packed story of shameless corruption of the flesh and spirit that leads to an awesome climax, as God’s fury is unleashed in one of the most gripping cinematic sequences of destruction ever created. Directed by Robert Aldrich in 1963, the star-studded international ensemble features Anouk Ami and Pierre Angelli. One hundred forty eight minutes, color, nineteen sixty three.
From Drinking and Intoxication, edited by Raymond G. McCarthy; The Free Press; Glencoe, Illinois: 1959.
Much interesting work was done on [drunkenness] in the 19th century, and quaint theories persisted even then. Robert McNish, a member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, in 1835 in a book Anatomy of Drunkenness, discussed the peculiar phenomenon of spontaneous combustion of drunkards, a condition which, he claims, is well documented and in which the whole body, starting with the viscera, is burned in a few hours by a combustive process which for some reason does not even singe the surrounding furniture.
Here is a book highly recommended for fans of Weirdness and/or The Flyover Country: Not Normal, Illinois — an anthology of surreal, irreal, gothic or deranged stories about the Midwest.
I’m happy to have a story of my own included here (”River Dead of Minneapolis Scavenged by Teenagers”), and it was nice to see the whole collection earn a favorable review last weekend in the Star Tribune.
What’s interesting is the article’s lead, which alludes to a study asserting that reading Kafka — more specifically, exposing yourself to absurdist moments, or even arguing against the fact that you are composed of a single, unified self — actually improves your ability to learn patterns.
Cool psychology term of the day: surrealist narratives, non-sequiturs and attacks against your own self-unity are called Meaning Threats.
Before these gems started popping up on the net, the only way to catch them was by lucking into the odd screening or digging through the Minnesota History Center’s video library… and then burning them into your memory by making hasty notes and pencil sketches (old samples at bottom of post).
The sound is scratchy and the video is degraded, but you won’t regret watching this incredible footage.
This post is firstly an open thank-you to the extended family of Twin Cities film-goers who came to see “How to Live Better” in all its incarnations this year: at the Minneapolis / St. Paul International Film Festival, Bryant Lake Bowl, Square Lake Film Festival, Stevens Square Park, Rogue Buddha Gallery and more. From the entire cast and crew, we appreciate your support!
For those who haven’t seen the award-winning “How to Live Better,” December 2009 is your month. It will be screening at all of the following venues and times:
Sunday, December 13 @ 10 p.m. — Appearing on Twin Cities Public Television as part of the MNTV short film competition on channel TPT 2
Saturday, December 19 (time TBA) — At the Corner Bar in Seven Corners, Minneapolis (downstairs in the Comedy Corner Underground), along with local actor and comedy impresario Gus Lynch.
And rolling into the new year, “How to Live Better” starts a standing gig at the Walker Art Center: it will be showing continuously on the Walker’s Best Buy Film/Video Bay from March 2010 through August 2010.
We’ll see you at the movies… and in the meantime, here’s some selected photos from this year’s screenings. Thanks for coming out!
I was last punched in the face on a street in downtown Minneapolis two years ago, and what’s funny to remember are the little things:
actually saying the words “Cold-cocked me?!?” seconds after I had been cold-cocked
the paltry sound of his fist on my face – a non-Hollywood, very faint plip sound – in contrast to the blow itself, which was not paltry and sent me sprawling
post-fight: cops on the scene… cherries twirling… assailant in cuffs… I was pumped so full of adrenaline I could barely conjure the fine motor skills necessary to hold a pen, but somehow a police report shoved in my face (resurgent sense-memory from the essay-tests of my school days? A blue-book flashback?) elicited from me an outpouring of legalese:
“I was sitting in the vehicle (west-facing) when the assailant approached the car (driver’s side), on foot, with trousers pulled down/low/off and pressed his buttocks region (naked) against the window (d. side, same). As I was, at that time, angered, I stepped out of the car to confront/chastise him. His companions (approx. 5 to 8, one female, rest male) then surrounded me in a semi-circular fashion….”
I have retold the story many times, and the retellings are of course substantially different. But I would like to use this moment to very briefly discuss The Fight Story as a narrative form at large.
Variations on a Theme
There is an essay I admire by Richard Ford called “In the Face” that is, essentially, about hitting people. One of its passages (although not the thesis entire) goes like this:
Where I grew up, in Mississippi and Arkansas, in the fifties, to be willing to hit another person in the face with your fist meant something…. It [...] meant you were brash, winningly impulsive, considerate of but not intimidated by consequence, admittedly but not too admittedly theatrical, and probably dangerous. As a frank, willed act, hitting in the face was a move toward adulthood, the place we were all headed–a step in the right direction.
But I also admire the fight stories of Ron Lyke of Anoka, Minnesota, and appreciate the time he spent with me several years ago talking about his boxing gym. I pestered him then about old times – street-fighting in Nordeast – and while I sensed that he considered these war tales strictly B-roll (I had a microphone; he seemed conscious of “speaking for the record” and made repeated attempts to downplay the tales), I would not relent. I confess now that these stories interested me the most.
Here is Ron delivering a discursive mini-essay about fighting, which might be called “No Ability But a Ton of Heart”:
Here is one called “The Cracker Box Incident”:
Here is another called “Look at That Bubble Come Out”:
And finally, here is a short essay about the craft of boxing itself, a sub-lesson called “A Body Shot Is Better Than a Punch to the Head”:
(I would like to thank Ron for speaking with me that day several years ago, and for his generosity in stories. For those interested in boxing as an art unto itself or as an outlet for competition, I would highly recommend Ron’s most excellent gym: Lyke’s Anoka-Coon Rapids Boxing Gym. Ron is wearing a t-shirt on the home page that reads JAIL SUCKS.)
Phraseology of the Fight Story… and Grandpa Bill
Two other stories, in brief:
I once worked with as a bar-back at a restaurant called Billy’s, and my shift partner was a friendly and gregarious ex-con from Chicago named Terry. Terry had a talent for riffing, and nothing seemed to release this gift more than the fact that I would eat lunch on my break. It was, in his eyes, the height of absurdity. The riffs poured out in the form of giant, improvisatory lists: “Yeah, I see you standin there, slackin, eatin yo slacka lunch… lookin at yo slacka clock… thinkin bout that slacka convention up in Amsterdam… buncha European slackas, cookin up them slacka schemes, findin all kinds of ways for slackin….”
He came to work one day and said he’d been mugged.
“Jesus, Terry,” I said. “That’s awful. You feelin okay?”
“Took my hat. Took my wallet….” And here a great smile spread out over his face and he said: “But I caught up wit that man. I broke him proper!”
*
Finally, I would like to recognize the cherished sequence of family stories passed down to us from my grandfather, Bill, who spent most of his adolescence in Iowa fighting people – either as a matter of circumstance (”Hey, Mister. You Iowans don’t grow half as much corn as we do. And at that… it’s only half as big.” A fight ensued.) or by profession as a bouncer in the Star Beer Garden in Charles City.
Bill has many stories about fighting people, and all of them, unfailingly – no matter the setting nor the characters nor the mechanics of the fight itself – end with the phrase: “And then I beat the piss out of him.” The line is delivered almost apologetically, and is preceded by a long, grave pause.
Recently I heard a variation on the fight stories heretofore unknown to me. We were driving down from Minnesota to visit his wife’s grave (one of the last such trips we’ll make; each physical action for him these days – showering, walking, climbing into a car – is more difficult than the last) and the appearance outside the car of the northeastern Iowan landscape – the gently and almost imperceptibly rolling plains; the water towers marking our progress: Mason City… Rudd… Floyd… – woke in him a visible passion. He was home again. He began telling story after story, and one he told was this:
“Clayton Miller and my sister Amelia come get me in the night out to the Lion’s Field. And there was a lot of men up there. All of em waitin to fight. And so a man up there beat the piss out of Clayton Miller. And Amelia beat the piss out of another man. And a man come up to me, and he had a dog. And you know what? I had my dog. And you know what then? My dog… beat the piss out of his dog.”
The moonlit battle… the field littered with casualties of all species and genders… the weird appearance and martial behavior of the dogs… I was enjoying the bizarreness of the scene so much that I was honestly surprised when he paused and then delivered the de facto amen – the time-honored line we loved, and which marked the story as authentic and true.
