There’s some fine and noble scavengers out there on the web––junk seekers with an eye for beauty. Some of our personal favorites include Draplin Design (file under “Vintage,” and “Extra-Tuff”) and Marc Fischer’s amazing archival project, Public Collectors. And the online lit-mag DIAGRAM, true to its name, features vintage and obscure diagrams in every issue alongside its poetry and prose.

New Carriage isn’t immune from the junk bug… so please enjoy our small contribution––the first set of which can be found on flickr––and we’ll promise to post more discoveries in the meantime. Cheers to all you junkers out there.

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….”

A selection of digitized images from the item: they can be found here on the New Carriage photostream.

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.

More here….

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.

(The study itself can be found here.)

This movie — a documentary about the now-vanished Skid Row in Minneapolis, featuring footage and narration from flophouse owner “Johnny Rex” (John Bacich) — has been on my mind for a long time… and I’m happy to report it’s now on the web.

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:

Saturday (tomorrow!), December 5 @ 4:30 p.m. — Minneapolis Underground Film Festival – “Short Film Showcase I” with filmmaker Q&A. (The festival is held at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and directions are here.)

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.

Sunday, December 20 @ 8 p.m. — Appearing on Twin Cities Public Television as part of the MNTV short film competition on channel TPT MN.

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!