Jiu-jitsu | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Aug

like a star that can’t wait for the night

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

This past Saturday, I audited the oral exam for the newest class of jiu-jitsu instructors. It took just over four hours to get through twenty students. Each student got two five-minute segments: one to teach a technique of their choosing, one to teach a technique that our sensei assigned. As an instructor, I kept score on every student, though my score won’t be the deciding factor.

The certification exam is graded on a 20-point scale, where 17 is passing. Of those 20 points, only 2 come from teaching the correct technique. Everything else is about presentation. Can you capture a crowd’s attention? Can you break a complex process down into manageable chunks? Can you find metaphors or good images to help a student remember the steps they need? Do you speak loud enough to be heard? Do you remind the students of what you’ve told them initially?

(As a credit to the energy of the current class: the test did not feel four hours long)

I bring this up in reference to my post last month about Casey Anthony. I wrote about how hard it is to get people to focus on something long enough to learn about it.

But the first thing that came to mind was: damn, this is why kids keep failing classes! It’s the rare nerd who is genuinely curious about the cotton gin, Silas Marner or the quadratic formula. Some kids have parents at home who’ll supplement the rewards/punishments treadmill, so that helps. But the vast majority of kids show up at school not just unknowing, but uncaring, of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

I’ve spent the past six months living a productive life full of competing interests, wonderful friends and work that requires a lot of concentration. To breach those defenses to plant the seed of Casey Anthony awareness in my mind has taken (A) millions of dollars of media coverage and (B) the uncoordinated effort of dozens of unconnected friends. Not just deliberate effort, but order emergent from chaos. My bare minimum knowledge is a result of both immense planning and unplannable mass action.

Even that hasn’t inspired me to learn more. But if you asked me to write an essay about her, I could get a C-minus.

If it took that much effort just to instill awareness in me, what chance does Eli Whitney have?

Educating someone is hard. Getting someone to learn something – not just sit there and hear it, but take it in, turn it into a concept, develop it into their own – is hard. You can’t teach a skill by mastering it (though it helps) and you can’t do it by yelling louder or making them repeat it more. You have to find a way to make the student care, engage them in a way they recognize and then encourage them to keep practicing until they become good.

This goes just as much for activities outside of formal schooling. No one has to take jiu-jitsu (except 15th-century samurai). Everyone who shows up to a class paid money to learn a martial style. But that doesn’t mean everyone who shows up is engaged at the same level. Some people are afraid of their own bodies and take halting steps. Some people are gung ho, with their own preconceptions of how strong they are. Some folks had a bad day at work, or spend a lot of time in their own head trying to replay what they just heard. And some people just aren’t meant for jiu-jitsu, but they haven’t figured it out yet.

The goal of an instructor should be to present each new process in a commanding, exciting way that will engage as many students as possible. This takes months to learn and years to master. I’ve sat through two oral instructor exams now – three if you include the one I took. I’ve been teaching on and off for seven years, more regularly in the last few. The first students I taught are on the verge of becoming instructors themselves. And I still have a lot to learn.

To add to the growing list of things I’ve learned from jiu-jitsu, competency takes effort. When we’re teaching someone a new skill, we often rush through the material and hope they’ll figure out the rest on their own. “I’m available if you have any questions,” we say, and we mean it. But teaching someone a new skill means teaching them how to think a new way. We’re literally folding new wrinkles in a person’s brain. Even the most committed student can’t reinvent the wheel. It’s our job as teachers to find students who want to be here and to meet them halfway.

(Incidentally, this is why I fear for the future of public education. For one thing, mustering the energy to teach a dozen students tires me out. Genuinely teaching two hundred – not just getting them to spit back a textbook, but making them think about the material – seems impossible. And while I believe that it’s possible, I don’t believe that two million teachers can do it consistently. And most of the public school teachers I know have told me that you have to work with the kids you can reach. Not everyone is equally gifted.)

May

come talking that trash and they’ll pull your card

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Ilkka recommended the following blog post about hacking the status game a few weeks back. The “status game” in question is an improv exercise, in which every player takes a playing card and puts it to their forehead, face out, without looking at it. Their status corresponds to the value of their card. The object of the game: to guess your own status based on other people’s reactions to you.

Almost every person correctly guessed the number on his or her forehead, or was off only by 1! Could this mean that it wasn’t a game we were playing for the first time? Could it be that we’re playing that game over and over every day?

We went to that stage preconditioned to accurately guess how we stack against others based on how they spoke to us and treated us. And that random number that we were holding on our foreheads didn’t just change how we deal with others, it changed how we perceived ourselves when others reacted back to it.

What was equally fascinating was when I decided to go against my guess, and acted as higher status than the other person no matter what their status was. A person who was confident he was an king and went around stage acting like one, started yielding when I consistently used a high posture and tone of voice during the conversation. Another who was a 5 suddenly started taking advantage of the situation when I lowered my voice and avoided eye contact.

The author goes on to talk about the ways we visualize status in work and relationships: posture, eye contact, tone of voice, and the like.

I imagine most people who read that article (including Ilkka) (no offense, man) took away the idea that smart players can hack their own status. Just walk around all day like you’ve got an Ace plastered on your forehead and the world will fall into line behind you. It’ll take some coaching, perhaps: staring at yourself in the mirror with a deck of Bicycle cards in your hand, soundtrack to the latest Guy Ritchie film blaring from your Macbook. But eventually you’ll be able to bulldoze the betas and get the 9s and 10s falling into bed with you, right?

I took something different. To me, learning that you can hack status means learning to esteem yourself.

The sorry news: you will not be the Ace in every situation. You can surprise people with confidence, perhaps. But there are times when existing hierarchies, the current circumstances and what you had for breakfast that morning will keep you from rising to the top. If you’re going on a sales call with a new supplier and you’re the junior executive – the least necessary person in the room – rolling in all flash will confuse more people than it impresses.

Or let me give you a more concrete example:

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I haven’t been down to jiu-jitsu as often as I’d like. My technique has been slipping. Everyone can sympathize with this. If you don’t go to the gym for a few weeks, your body feels mushy and stiff. Dried Play-Doh. But add to that the fact that my “workout” at the “gym” consists of black-belt level material. Counters to techniques I learned four years ago. Advanced grappling. In the hands of a samurai these things take years of practice to master. And I was a clumsy enough child that I got my hand shut in a car door, through sheer absent-mindedness, twice. So I’ve got work to do.

Last week I made it down. I found myself with a rare opportunity to get some detailed coaching from the ranking senseis on the things I need to see. This was after I’d read the Khella article above. I realized I needed to shed my pride, admit I needed work, and ask the stupid questions. I needed to watch these techniques with the wide-eyed wonder of a brand new student.

Tonight, I thought, I’m going to be a 6.

Seriously. I visualized the six black clubs held up to my forehead. And my night improved as a result.

I’m convinced that status messes with people not because they don’t like their position, but because they don’t know what their position is. Nothing’s scarier than uncertainty. You show up at a new job: what sort of behavior are these people cool with? What’s expected of me? How soon can I kick back and show my “true self”? It’s the uncertainty that kills you, not being new. Being new isn’t a mystery. You know you’re new. That’s what it says in your e-mail.

So the next time you find yourself lost or confused in a social scene, pick a card. Any card. Pick a status and own it. If you want to be humble, be humble. If you want to be proud, then strut. But don’t fake it. Everyone can tell a phony. Commit to a character (to bring this back to improv advice) and enter the scene.

May

when they grip the mic, it’s like, come on kids, let’s say good night

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

One thing I’ve learned from teaching jiu-jitsu is that telling someone not to make mistakes doesn’t help.

Nobody wants to make mistakes. That’s why they’re called “mistakes.” People approach their work with different levels of engagement. Some are quiet and diligent, some are loud and enthusiastic, and some just want to get through the day and go home to their families. But nobody wants to make mistakes.

And if someone’s new enough to a skill, they probably don’t know that what they’re doing is a mistake. This is especially true with jiu-jitsu. Wrist locks are not intuitive. Applying a nidan wrist submission requires tightening the victim’s forearm and torquing the wrist through a couple of different angles. Getting it at all is tricky. Getting it in a way such that the opponent can’t pull out of it is even harder. And once you’ve mastered it, it’s even harder to explain the principles behind it.

If a student is frustrated with a nidan, the worst thing I can say to them is, “No. Try again.” Or even worse, “That was okay; just iron some of the mistakes out.” I need to tell them what they’ve done wrong and how they can correct it. The best way to do this is to watch them do the technique all the way through. I’ve taught jiu-jitsu for long enough that I can usually anticipate what the error’s going to be – incorrect angles in the wrist, trying to leverage the wrist lock from the wrong angle, improper grip – and have a correction in mind. And if I don’t know already, I can puzzle through it with them.

This sounds obvious in jiu-jitsu. Bbut I still hear and read about managers whose idea of correcting a direct report is, “Keep an eye out for mistakes in your work.” Well, okay. What is the correction? What should the employee be doing different? Do they need to work slower? Do they need to allocate some time for QA? Do they need to write more things down as they hear them? A mistake can come from several different sources: inattention to detail, miscommunication between parties, typos, or the limits of human memory. Identifying the source of the mistake will lead to correction. Ignoring the source will lead to frustration.

This is one of those things that studying how to break wrists for a few hours a week will teach you.

Jul

let him feast; my heart is big

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Buses remain America’s strongest link to the past. Sure, technology has dragged them forward some distance: you can pay for a bus ticket with a credit card, many buses offer seat-back outlets and WiFi, etc. But you can still show up at a bus terminal fifteen minutes before departure, buy a ticket, board the coach, and arrive in a new city four hours later. Try doing that at an airport. In a few years, it’ll be impossible to do that at a train station. But buses remain proletarian.

A stocky young man in line ahead of me crooned Italian opera while we waited. He was either singing into his Bluetooth headset – soothing an abandoned child back to sleep, perhaps – or keeping in practice. He spoke in a thick New York accent, however. “You dropped something,” he said to the man behind me – a man of sagging face and faded jacket, seventy at least, fumbling through his wallet. A folded scrap of looseleaf with a name and a 212 phone number had fallen out. “You dropped something,” the tenor repeated. I stooped, picked it up, and handed it back to the old man. He nodded his thanks. He would drop this scrap of paper at least once more while we waited in line.

(You wouldn’t think opera singers need to take the bus. But I know at least one soprano, and the money’s not great)

Greyhound and Peter Pan have merged services. Peter Pan buses have outlets; Greyhound buses don’t. I got a Greyhound bus, luck of the draw, so I only had as long as the laptop’s battery to work on my writing during the ride. I spent the rest of the time watching TV shows on my iPod (more on those later) and reading. The bus stopped at a Roy Rogers in northern Connecticut. The bus driver got out to negotiate with the manager, pointing at his coach and indicating the number of people aboard. They reached a compact, as the driver returned and told us we had fifteen minutes. I bought a sausage egg and cheese sandwich, which came with a “homestyle” biscuit, and a bottle of water. Carbo-loaded, I dozed until we rolled into Harlem.

Our sister dojo in Manhattan sits underneath the corner of Broadway and Bond in NoHo. There’s an expansive open mat where students practice American jiu-jitsu and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, plus a studio off to the side where more esoteric arts are taught. There’s a counter where you can buy bottled water or an official dojo T-shirt. There are locker rooms with showers and an on-site laundry service. There’s air-conditioning. I wandered around, introducing myself to the other instructors and marveling at their Manhattan opulence, until the time came for the test.

Michelle, one of our students in Boston, trained to brown belt in New York before moving. She returned to New York to test for her black belt promotion. I’m proud that the Boston dojo sent about a dozen members to watch Michelle’s test and support her. I’m also proud of how Michelle performed, demonstrating her techniques with confidence, skill and intensity^*. And, on a personal note, I was proud to stand and watch the test with the other instructors. I never forget that I’m a black belt, but it’s only when I stand up there with O’Sensei Joe Puleio that I remember that I’m representing a tradition that’s bigger and older than I am. These other people with black belts, whom I’ve never met, all took the same journey that I did.

And now Sensei Michelle’s one of us.

photo courtesy of Emily Y. using my camera

* Even after she broke her foot near the end of the test. Fortunately, the only things she had left were groundfighting and ki demonstrations.

Jul

you know the escape. you know the escape.

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

The best forms of exercise almost never come in a gym. This is because you really have to work to master them.

Sunday morning was the monthly black-belts-only class at jiu-jitsu. We ended the class with some freestyle grappling: start off mounted, then reverse your opponent. Once you end up on top, switch roles. After five minutes of this I was completely drained. I was soaked through to the skin in sweat; my arms and legs hung like rope. I drove to the nearby BSC to take a shower before I offended anyone with my stench. Once I got to RJ’s for our weekly Burning Imperium game, I flopped onto his couch, a glass of iced tea before me and a whirring fan on my right. I was loose and calm.

I’ve never been to a hammam, but I understand Turkish massage is somewhat similar. You warm up first by lying on a heated marble slab until everything’s loose. Then a burly Moroccan rolls you onto your stomach, stands between your legs, and lifts you by your wrists until your spine cracks. The combined stretching and heating loosens your shoulders. I apply a similar pressure when I’m cranking on a juji gatame, only I’m not as nice and I don’t charge you money.

You couldn’t offer grappling as an eight week, 8-hour class at the fitness center, though, and expect the same benefits. It’s taken me almost ten years of training to get to the point where I’m sort of competent. I know some holds and escapes, I know to keep my center of gravity low, and I can use my freakishly long limbs to post out like a pavilion tent. But I’m still mastering the chessboard mentality of grappling: the feint within the feint within the feint. Anyone who did 4 years of high school wrestling could still make me look foolish.

My point: when a 240-pound man kneels in your armpits and sits on your stomach, the natural inclination is to just give up. It takes a trained grappler to realize that you have escapes from there – several, in fact – and to work for them. The process of working for an escape builds your core, arms, legs and cardio conditioning. I can’t think of anything better for it. Swimming, perhaps, or a yoga routine executed with force and precision. Kickboxing. Carrying a 40-lb backpack and a rifle up a hill.

It takes years of practice to learn how to effectively work your body as a whole unit, however. The body isn’t meant to be sculpted in isolation, one muscle at a time. That’s not evolutionarily useful. And anything which takes longer than a 12-week class won’t make it at the local gym.

Jun

did our boy do something rash?

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

We worried about rain, but it was still clear out when Sylvia and I showed up at Joe’s place in Watertown. I’d picked up some snacks and beer at the Shaw’s around the corner. Joe’s dad was grilling in the backyard; friends and family circled around. We weren’t alone, but we were some of the first people there. “Joe’s out back,” someone said. “Throwing knives with his brothers.”

Here’s the trick to knife-throwing:

Get knives made for knife-throwing. These are flat, metal blades that don’t have a separate hilt: they’re just blunt on one end. They’re not even very sharp.
Don’t stand too far from the target on your first go. It’s hard to throw a knife at all, much less throw it a good distance.
Don’t flick your wrist at the target. Keep your wrist straight. Bring your forearm back, then release the blade just before your arm reaches zero degrees.
Don’t throw it too hard. The weight of the knife will stick it into the target.
And for devil’s sake, don’t throw a knife at someone to hurt them. If you miss, you’ve just thrown away your knife.

knife-throwing

My best inning for the afternoon was two hits out of eight throws. I would have given up sooner, but there’s a particularly satisfying thunk that a thrown knife makes when buried into a stump. Especially when compared to the flat KLAY-AY-ANG a knife makes when it bounces off the target in a random direction. Roll d6 for scatter; take 1d4+2 damage.

The most important thing about knife-throwing (as Sylvia brought up later) is to be cool about it. Joe’s a cool guy: he works in film; he approaches his passions with intensity but is otherwise laid back; he’s got a good sense of humor, etc. If he does something out of the norm, it becomes an interesting experience. “Knife-throwing, huh? Sure, I’ll give it a try.” Whereas if a stringy-haired guy in a patchy Army jacket sat next to you on the bus, reeking of Old Crow, and started talking about how good he is at throwing knives? You’d start wondering how much damage your purse could do if swung.

So if you’re wondering how to make your fringe hobby more appealing – like D&D or macramé or libertarianism – get a shave and a haircut.

May

hold your blindfolds down

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Saturday was the black belt test at my dojo for Senseis Danio and Dennis, promoting to fourth-degree black belts. Nick, the master sensei at our school, has never promoted someone as high as fourth-degree before (he’s a fifth-degree, but his brother administered that test, with O’Sensei Joe Puleio supervising). The senseis demonstrated while blindfolded, with one arm immobilized, against three-person simultaneous rushes: a wide variety of material. Danio and Dennis are two of the kinder people you’d ever buy a pint for outside of the dojo, but they carry death in both hands.

I brought my camera with me, as I often do to these tests, and snapped a few pictures from the back row. I didn’t take as many pictures as I have in the past, however. The effort of framing a shot and fiddling with exposure settings takes too much concentration. I lose all appreciation for the fluidity and intensity of the technique. At the same time, if I don’t document what happens in some way – whether by photo or by writing about it – I won’t remember it. I don’t have Proust’s gift for details. That’s why so much of this blog is devoted to picayune recollections of What I Ate This Weekend; I’d never remember otherwise.

Better photographers than I were present, so I might be better off cozying up to them for pictures. One of the newer yellow belts had a sophisticated looking lens and snapped shots from several different angles. Another student (also a newer one) had a GoPro HERO, a video camera the size of a box of matches that can shoot 720p at 60 frames per second. It’s meant to be mounted onto a frame: the edge of a surfboard, the side of a ski-helmet, the edge of a car. Sam was filming by hand, however, crouching near the mat to catch Danio and Dennis executing reverse shiho nage throws. I thought about what it’d look like to strap the camera to a headband and attack someone.

gopro-hero

Apr

I save coupons from packets of tea

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

Tuesday was a marginal evening: if I’d felt any worse, I would not have gone to jiu-jitsu. As it is, I still ended up taking an open-handed biff to the head and a shot to the gut in the course of scrapping that evening. Not to mention the eight to ten chokes that were demonstrated on me in various positions, plus one cross-collar strangle that I had to take an aspirin for the next morning. But the beauty of our school is that when you take a slap to the head, the attacker immediately asks, You all right? And I was, and I said so. My own fault anyway, not putting up a block. Plus – I learned some key stuff that I needed for defending against multiple attackers. So the class was definitely worth it, as they usually are.

Anyhow, forty minutes earlier: I’m in my apartment, munching some snacks to boost my energy and staring into the open cabinet I’ve just taken them out of. I’m reading the ingredients on the loaf of Multigrain 100% Whole Wheat Bread that I’d bought at the Shaw’s five days earlier, because I have a busy mind and my eyes needed something to occupy them. Whole wheat bread, the kind I use four slices of to make sandwiches for lunch every day. Multigrain; more than one grain; grains being Good For You, as every American student of the food pyramid could tell you. Probably the best cheap bread I could buy in a chain supermarket.

food-pyramid

Shaw’s Multigrain 100% Whole Wheat bread has 100mg of sodium per slice and contains high fructose corn syrup. God damn it. So with four slices in two sandwiches, not counting what goes between them, that’s already 400mg. And high fructose corn syrup. Damn it all. I don’t eat greasy corn chips, I have maybe one soda a week, I drink water or milk with most meals and I still can’t get away from high fructose corn syrup. It’s not the health implications that bother me – I’ve been ingesting it for years and I’m fine – so much as the feeling of being stalked. I don’t feel that I need to cut HFCS out of my diet. But I’d like to know that I could. I’d like to know that the greasy fingers of Archer Daniels Midland aren’t stroking my hair as I wander the aisle of my favorite chain supermarket, steering my head towards its preferred breads, baked goods and gelatins. I’d like to know that, if the doctor told me tomorrow to expel HFCS from my life, I wouldn’t be limited to an index card worth of food. I fear an unlikely future of asparagus, rice cakes and apple sauce with a farmer and a sunrise and some synonym for Promise on the can. I’m all lost in the supermarket; I can no longer shop happily.

Mar

it doesn't matter; put your fists up and instigate it

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

Every night after jiu-jitsu, as I stagger into the tiny curtained room that two dozen men change in, I play the where-am-I-bleeding game. We practice at a kids gymnasium; our practice space is four inches of foam rubber, atop flexible plywood, atop another four inches of foam rubber, the whole affair covered by a thousand square feet of cheap blue shag. As a workspace for advanced judo (tomoe nage, hane goshi, harai goshi), it’s almost decadent, a far cry from the thin mats on the basketball court of our BC days or the packed dirt of Nagoya rice paddies. But you have to deal with rug burn. So, as I strip off the heavy cotton gi, I check the backs of my hands to see where I’m bleeding.

It’s never bad, of course: a scratch, a few light scrapes. But after I have a few drinks with the other students, I go home, wash my hands and then apply bandages. A gangly adolescence taught me to ignore scrapes on my hands – which live something like a mile away from my head and thus my brain – on the presumption they’d eventually go away. But they no longer go away. And while no one dies of a scrape to the knuckles anymore (in the First World at least), it hurts. Every time I reach into my pocket it hurts. But there’s no good way to bandage the knuckles or the inside of your finger so you’re left with beige tape crossing your hands at jagged angles: your drunk uncle Ben taping up your Christmas presents.

And these aren’t rough, intimidating scars either. If you’re looking for someone who’s been in a lot of fights, look at their knuckles: they’re flattened and misshapen, broken from repeated forty mile-an-hour impacts against other people’s jaws. Mine are still whole knobs rising toward the front of my hand like cliffs, dotted with pinpoint scars. There’s the one from the sharp tip of a fake wooden knife. There’s the friction burn from the sleeve of my own gi. The two newest ones – which will become scars no matter how long I bandage them or how much bacitracin I apply – on my left major ring knuckle and the middle of my left pinkie, from when I stopped grappling for position with a man who has sixty pounds on me and just lay atop him, dead weight and sprawling limbs, breathing like a furnace with my left hand pinned to the blue shag, shifting from half guard to full mount an inch at a time. Not resting, but advancing with care (UPDATE: that entire last sentence sounds unwittingly pornographic; not at all what I intended; leaving it as written because, hey, what is a blog if not a history of first drafts)

Mar

where, only there; when, only then

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 10:36 am

Two blocks from the school where I study (and teach) jiu-jitsu is a bar called 21 Nickels. It’s built in the low, narrow style of urban bars: bar running from entrance to bathroom, row of bar stools, aisle and a row of tables. This makes sense in the heart of a city, where square footage is at a premium; less so in the Watertown suburbs. But architecture is a language; the space evokes a type of bar, just like the high ceilings and faux ranch construction of an Outback Steakhouse evoke a type of restaurant. Realizing that occupancy counts more toward rent than ambiance, however, the owners added a side car. Literally: a dining car, rolled up on the long-rusted tracks that used to bisect Watertown, welded onto the side of the bar and connected via two sloping walkways. The dining car’s windows, which look out onto the wild grasses between a clapboard tuxedo rental outlet and the local Armenian lodge, are framed with imitation velvet curtains.

The jiu-jitsu class goes there at least once a month, typically after the belt test and promotional on the fourth Thursday. The owner recognizes us and goes out of his way to accommodate our size and post-workout stink: grouping tables in the back, firing up a preliminary order of nachos before we even have to ask, pouring out pitchers’ full of ice water. Last time we were there he kept the kitchen open late. We migrated from our usual exile in the dining car (don’t mind us) to take over the front bar, which was empty save for a middle-aged Mediterranean romancing a bottle blonde with a tan like a Camry’s driver seat. Every time we’re there we order vast quantities of food and streams of beer, then try to split the check six or seven different ways. And they always oblige. Not that Watertown’s a bad neighborhood, but most bar owners would consider being known as “the bar where the jiu-jitsu school drinks” a sound business investment.

I can’t hang like I used to – I could never really hang – so I’m usually one of the first to go. 21 Nickels is covered in sports memorabilia, old press clippings and iconic photographs, like every local bar in every suburb in America. As I exit, I note one that strikes a subsonic chord in my gut every time. Google Image Search isn’t helping, so I’ll have to describe it; this’ll be a good exercise for me.

A white man – not just white, but white – in a turn-of-the-last-century suit and tie, chin at his chest, eyes closed, mouth curving into a smirk’s imitation of a smile. He hovers over the State House like a giant ghost rising out of the earth; it’s visible through his torso. Hundreds of hands reach up from the bottom of the illustration, clutching the air through which this titan passes. A vague limning along the top of the black-and-white drawing, perhaps meant to convey a halo over the hovering figure, suggests nothing so much as a slow dawning horror, especially as the rest of the picture is chiaroscuro black. The entire drawing invokes nothing so much as a Lovecraftian terror – Nyarlathotep, perhaps – and the listless hordes drawn toward him. “THE MAYOR OF THE POOR,” the caption reads. “ELECT CURLEY.”