MIKKELISMS (1995)
Welcome back to the Mixed Media with Mikkel YouTube channel. It’s the first of the month which means we’re back with whatever video idea I have concocted and because my birthday is tomorrow at the time of this video’s posting, we’re doing our annual super introspection this time with a full reading of stuff that I came up with when I was four.
This is MIKKELISMS, a scrapbook project my mom made in September 1995.
It was initially planned as a Christmas gift material but with… someone’s surgery, my mother decided to stress herself and accelerate the time time table for this project so the intended recipient (my paternal grandparents) could have it as light literature. I do not know the circumstances in which it was returned.
The opening quote from this book is from my father “We are not your servants, Mikkel. We cannot write down your every sentence. You are not yet president of the United States.”
Well, they wrote a whole bunch of them.
The subtitle of this book is “A Quilt of Stories and a Mosiac of Paintworks.”
“The art for this project was prepared in color using nontoxic kid’s paint that [I] applied on several scraps of bend paper with paintbrush. My mother cut out recognizable shapes from these materials after the paint on paper had sundried.
An effort was made to preserve as much of mine original brushstrokes into the final illustrations; when this could not be achieved or proved to be too difficult to carry out, reasonable shapes in mosaic were then contrived.
The front and back cover designs however were completely cut out of construction paper.”
The editor’s note is a whole page written in cursive. I have adjusted some words to make sense for my reading of it.
“MIKKELISMS, a quilt set of bizzare stories was generated by me in the afternoon of July 24, 1995, with a span of 30 minutes or less. I dictated these narratives rapidly while playing with my mom, after refusing to take a walk, an occasional post-dinner ritual with my dad. This is a maiden collection that may herald, even force, the evolution of a new level of literature, given a full public pardon of its pervasive grammatical distortions. We are the future.
Like fables, these stories rely heavily on animals for characters, with a couple of exceptions being the robot and a monster in some play-segments. If there is any significance to these aberrations, it is of course obscure, or maybe trivial.
Unlike fables, MKKELISMS as stories do not pontificate and are without any moralistic pretense. These are no overlays of symbolism and there are no hidden agendas; instead these are simply explicit, nearly exquisite images, scenes of complete stasis or frantic outbursts of motion, and abrupt, rather empathic, anticlimactic dissolutions.
Editing this collection had been limited to connection of my many errors of articulation that the speech therapists on both coasts of the continent refuse to label pathological. I said for example “no-wing” for “nothing” and “emepen” for elephant.” Such mispronunciations have been edited purely for graphic intelligibility; my vocabulary was my own; no word was supplied or injected into the stories. Otherwise, the structure and sequence of these stories, the tense disagreements, the quasi-supernatural plots, and very decisive endpoints (“THE END!”) are my alone.
I dictated more stories than what are included here. In fact, I demanded that later vignettes be written down emergently: “I have another story; write it down, now. I need you to write it down, right now!” My ‘secretary’ (my mother) was subsequently unable to comply any further—momentarily incapacitated by collateral domestic emergencies, such as breastfeeding one squealing six month old infant who will not be an alternate priority to a silly string of words. My brother, the precious baby, certainly deserves an apology—for what amount of discomfort he had to endure while his mother attended to the incubating artistic ambition of his older sibling.
so: in the splendor and magic of its beginnings, here is the initial salvo of Mikkel Snyder’s experimentation with, exploration, manipulation, and elaboration of the world world of imagination. These are the charming inventions, interpretations, and really funny revelations of a four year old dinosaur-dominated mind that is probably gradually (already) shredding this margin of innocence.
This may not be entertainment at its most supreme yet, but consider this an honest effort anyway. Have fun.”
Wow, I really did take after my mother.
Once upon a time, there was a bear and a rabbit. The bear and the rabbit played together. Then a big, giant bear monster appear. The bear and the rabbit got scared and they swim, and swim, swim, swim in the water. The bear and the rabbit went home, to a spooky house. The end!
Rabbit and bear Once upon a time, there was an alligator and a dinosaur. They are friends and they ran away together. The end!
Alligator and Dinosaur This is a story about a lion and a horse. This is a true story. Once upon a time, there was a lion and a horse. There were friends. They did nothing. The end!
Lion and Horse I got a story about an elephant. Once upon a time, there was an elephant. He was big and strong. He want to a restuarant. “Flip-flop. Flip-flop. Flip-flop. Flip-flop. Flip-flop.” He and and ate. That’s what he did. The end!
Elephant I got a story about a butterfly. A dinosaur ate him up and the dinosaur was very happy. The end!
Buttery and Dinosaur Once upon a time, there was a robot who broke his head. The end! NO. His feet. I mean. He broke his feet. Once upon a time, there was a robot who broke his feet. The end!
Robot Once upon a time, there was a robot. Once upon a time, there was a monster who wants to eat a robot. The robot ran away in a spaceship-boat to a place where he hide. He hide and hide and the monster, “knock, knock. This is me. Don’t be scared.” There were going to be friends and they were very happy forever and ever. The end!
Robot and Monster Once upon a time, there was a race-bird. It race and race and fly up. The end!
Race-Bird
And apparently my mother and I share a fondness for multiples of four.
So that concludes this reading of MIKKELISMS and a look back to what I was doing twenty… oh god, thirty years ago…
Anyways. This is also completes what has become a post-2020 kinda year tradition of documenting my past. So there’s that.