A Bird Can Spit

You scared? Imagine that face glaring down at you at the end of a bar. Of course if you saw it, you'd deserve it, and you'd shit down both legs because he'd ram his bottle of PBR right into your forehead. That is Harry Crews. The crown prince of MFA fiction writing classes. He's still alive, and its not like he was trying too hard to stay that way. But that is a frame from the pseudo-documentary called Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. The premise of the film is simple enough. Southern singer goes back to the deep South to find where his music came from. Essentially this film explores the violence and faith of the most depressed areas of the country. Parts you'd rather not see, and that Harry up there, with his dead gray eyes, wants to tell you more about.

What makes that movie such a treat is that Harry retells some of the more memorable passages from Childhood: Biography of a Place in this movie. He doesn't read'em out loud, and there are some discrepancies from the text, but it's interesting to listen and see him just tell the stories, just like his Daddy's friends told him stories when he was taken around in the South in A Childhood. Oh, and you have to watch the DVD version because in one of the deleted scenes he tells about when he fell into the scalding hot pig water and the flesh of his arm just rolled off like water over rocks.

What makes that movie so goddamn enraging is that so much of what I would like to say in my thesis -novel (still moving along at a crippled-snails pace). Yeah, backwater inevitability is nothing new, but that damn movie shows it so well, even if the movie could easily be confused with a 90 plus minute music video for banjo-roots music.

And the miraculous thing about this film is that it is not funny. You'd think after seeing the epitome of Southerness crawling in it's depravity, that it'd be funny. Like watching Napoleon Dynamite where you are just laughing at the fools. This movie....creeped me out. Maybe it hit a little too close to home even though I'm no where near that Southern, though I do have my roots, but they only go into Tennessee, not true deep green Southern, like Mississippi or Georgia. But I know that type. I know those people. But damn, I can't even pretend to understand the depths people feel this, especially those locked into it and are oblivious.

So, go watch that film. You'll have to get on Netflix. While you're there, check out Stevie. Another documentary, but this one was made in Carbondale's backyard, more or less where my thesis will be set. Stevie is another gut-wrenching story about how everything can fail a person who needs help. It was directed by the guy who did Hoop Dreams.

I want to end here with a few more Harry Crews pictures from the film, but Blogger won't let me. Let me assure you that there are times where Crews' face is nothing but black sockets and the years of hard livin'.

And one last Harry Crews note. I am a former student of MSU graduated Mike Magnuson. He was in the last class Harry Crews taught at the University of Florida. Mike told us once that Harry would sit in front of the class and shake pill bottles at them and say things like, "I like the blue ones" and he would be completely incomprehensible until the pills wore off by the end of class. Oh, and Harry used to read the class unpublished Crews works. One story Mags mentioned involved a midget inside a medicine ball being tossed around by two female body builders. How can something that crazy not find a published home somewhere?

VIVA EL MUSTACHE!!!!