“Curious George Gets Into the Ether” from Curious George Gets a Job by Hans Augusto and Margret Rey.
George encounters a bottle of ether. He yearns to taste it and becomes progressively more ‘drunk’ until he slips into a blackout. One describes a range of young children’s perceptions of the symptoms of drunkenness. The page does not appear in recent printings of the book.
“Well, I have a theory of art: set up an arbitrary set of rules and then follow them slavishly. Documentary can be anything–that’s what I love about it. However, there has to be one underlying intention, one underlying goal–to find out something about reality.” – Errol Morris
As the study of drunkenness is most often the study of alcohol and alcoholism, published work typically focuses on the drinker. The resources listed below work from that perspective, which is not the subject of DRUNKEN. They are included here because in some way they help turn attention back towards the watcher, and towards a child’s point of view.
Table of Contents:
Downloads
Books
Memoirs
Articles
Movies about Drunkards
Archives with Early Cinema and Amateur Film/Home Movie Collections
Blogs
Scientific and Academic Studies
Maine-specific Articles and Statistics
Advocacy, Sponsored Organizations, National Organizations, Educational Programs
Early Liquor Bottles
Downloads
Drunken: Short Treatment (pdf)
Maine Per Capita Alcohol Consumption (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) (pdf)
Top 25 Alcoholic Beverages Purchased in Maine, 2011 (Maine Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages) (pdf)
Adriaen Brouwer, The Bitter Drink, c. 1630–1640.
“Old Fezzigiwig’s Christmas Ball”
Charlie Chaplin in “One A.M.”
Eric Zelz for the Bangor Daily News.
The YouTube Genre of Drunken Behaviour
Today we find continuing evidence of the American fascination with, and denigration of, the impairments of drunkenness: YouTube has a genre of videos documenting extreme drunkenness as “found comedy.” People have been laughing at, and looking past, the behaviour of drinkers for a long time.
Books
“I refuse to lie to children, I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”
– Maurice Sendak
MacAndrew, Craig, and Robert B. Edgerton. Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation. Clinton Corners, NY: Percheron Press, 2003.
Heath, Dwight B. Drinking Occasions: Comparative Perspectives on Alcohol and Culture. ICAP Series on Alcohol in Society. London, England: Routledge, 2000.
Murdock, Catherine Gilbert. Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940. Gender Relations in the American Experience. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
Powers, Madelon. Faces Along the Bar: The Workingman’s Saloon, 1870-1920. Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 1999.
Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an Industrial City: 1870-1920. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Wilson, Thomas M., ed. Drinking Cultures: Alcohol and Identity. London, England: Berg Publishers, 2005.
Douglas, Mary, ed. Constructive Drinking: Perspectives on Drink from Anthropology. MSH: International Commission on the Anthropology of Food. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Okrent, Daniel. Last Call, The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. New York, NY: Scribner, 2010.
Rotskoff, Lori. Love on the Rocks: Men, Women and Alcohol in Post-World War II America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Barrows, Susanna, and Robin Room, eds. Drinking Behaviour and Belief in Modern History. Berkeley, CA: Univ of California Press, 1991.
Aries, Philippe. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York, NY: Knopf, 1962.
Mitchell, Alice Miller. Children and Movies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1929.
Staveacre, Tony. Slapstick: The Illustrated History. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 1987.
Denzin, Norman K. Hollywood Shot by Shot: Alcoholism in American Cinema. Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2004.
The University of California, Berkeley has published a large number of studies on drinking, temperance, regulation.
Memoirs
Burden, Wendy. Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir. New York, NY: Gotham, 2010.
Moehringer, J. R. The Tender Bar: A Memoir. New York, NY: Hyperion, 2006.
Articles
“Sugar Plant Hunting is a deceptive and partial source. While this partiality is inherent in all media, the film has particular omissions, which are a by-product of it’s makers’ self-aggrandizing intentions, as well as the needs and perceptions of the institutions which funded the project. However, brought alongside the Expedition members’ photographs, ethnographic collections and texts, one can begin to read the film (and indeed these other materials) ‘against the grain’, revealing their silences.”
– excerpt by Joshua A. Bell
Bell, Joshua A. “Sugar Plant Hunting by Airplane in New Guinea.” The Journal of Pacific History, June 3, 2010.
Link: http://si-pddr.si.edu/jspui/handle/10088/11291.
Gladwell, Malcolm. “Drinking Games: How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it.” The New Yorker, February 15, 2010.
Link: http://www.gladwell.com/2010/2010_02_15_a_drinking.html.
An article reviewing 2010 BBC Newsround study conducted by Childwise: BBC. “Third of Children ‘Scared’ by Adult Drinking.” BBC News. Last modified July 4, 2010.
Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10491057.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. “The Mad Men Account.” The New York Review of Books. Last modified March 24, 2011. Accessed June 27, 2012.
Link: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/feb/24/mad-men-account/?pagination=false.
“This, more than anything, explains why the greatest part of the audience for Mad Men is made up not, as you might have imagined at one point, by people of the generation it depicts—people who were in their twenties and thirties and forties in the 1960s, and are now in their sixties and seventies and eighties—but by viewers in their forties and early fifties today, which is to say of an age with those characters’ children. The point of identification is, in the end, not Don but Sally, not Betty but Glen: the watching, hopeful, and so often disillusioned children who would grow up to be this program’s audience, watching their younger selves watch their parents screw up.
….. it occurs to you that this is, after all, how the adult world often looks to children; whatever its blankness, that world, as recreated in the show, feels somehow real to those of us who were kids back then. As for the appeal: Who, after all, can resist the fantasy of seeing what your parents were like before you were born, or when you were still little—too little to understand what the deal was with them, something we can only do now, in hindsight? And who, after having that privileged view, would want to dismiss the lives they led and world they inhabited as trivial—as passing fads, moments of madness? Who would still want to bash them, instead of telling them that we know they were bad but that now we forgive them?”
– excerpt by Daniel Mendelsohn
Movies about Drunkards
Booze Movies: The 100 Proof Film Guide. Reviews, News and Features from the World of Soused Cinema.
Link: http://www.boozemovies.com.
Garver, William. “Soused Cinema.” Modern Drunkard Magazine.
Link: http://drunkard.com/issues/01_06/0106_soused_cinema.htm.
Speiss, D. J. “Top 14 Movie Drunks.” Fermentarium. Last modified August 10, 2007.
Link: http://www.fermentarium.com/random-news/top-14-movie-drunks/.
Watercutter, Angela. “Drinking about Movies: The Best Boozers in Film.” Wired, October 28, 2011.
Link: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/10/film-best-boozers/.
Archives with Early Cinema and Amateur Film Collections
Northeast Historic Film:
http://www.oldfilm.org/
https://vimeo.com/northeasthistoricfilm
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Northeast-Historic-Film/245631044493
https://twitter.com/#!/oldfilmarchives
Lobster Films:
http://www.lobsterfilms.com
Footage File:
http://www.footage-file.com/
Blogs
Hepburn, Ned. “A Guide to Drinking Like a Goddam Man.” Ned Hepburn (blog). Entry posted May 13, 2011.
Link: http://thoughtcatalog.com/2011/a-guide-to-drinking-like-a-goddam-man/.
Dobbs, J. T. “Every Day is Repeal Day.” American Drink (blog). Entry posted December 7, 2010. Accessed June 27, 2012.
Link: http://americandrink.net/post/2133139012/repealday10.
fuckyeahchaplin (blog). http://fuckyeahchaplin.tumblr.com/. Personal blog devoted to an extensive collection of Chaplin portraits/films stills.
Scientific and Academic Studies
National Institute on Alcohol and Alcoholism (NIAA)
2000 NIAA study finding one in four children exposed to family alcohol abuse or alcoholism. Grant, B. F. “Estimates of US children exposed to alcohol abuse and dependence in the family.”
American Journal of Public Health, PMC1446111 ser., 90, no. 1 (January 2000). Accessed June 27, 2012.
Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446111//.
Summary of the above study:
NIAA Press. “One in Four Children Exposed to Family Alcohol Abuse or Alcoholism.” FindArticles. Last modified December 30, 1999. Accessed June 27, 2012.
Link: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_pnih/is_199912/ai_2861525616/.
2007 NIAA study on “how many gallons of alcohol are consumed by the average person in each state, and how many cans of beer (16 oz.) and bottles of wine (25 oz.) that translates to.”: NIAA, APPARENT PER CAPITA ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION: NATIONAL, STATE, AND REGIONAL TRENDS, 1977–2007, Rep. No. 87 (2009). Accessed June 27, 2012.
Link: http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/survelliance87/CONS07.htm.
Look up your state: scroll through the slide show of the “Drunkest States in America” illustrating the 2007 NIAA study.
Link: http://www.mainstreet.com/slideshow/lifestyle/drunkest-states-america.
Office of Substance Abuse of Maine. Defining Substance Abuse in the Sudanese and Cambodian Refugee Communities. By Scott Gagnon and Amanda Lonsdale. Report. N.p.: n.p., 2006.
Link: http://www.maine.gov/dhhs/osa/prevention/community/spfsig/documents/subpops/camsud.pdf.
Maine Rural Health Research Center, Muskie School of Public Service. Substance Abuse Among Rural Youth A Little Meth and a Lot of Booze. Report. N.p.: n.p., 2007. Accessed June 28, 2012.
Link: http://muskie.usm.maine.edu/Publications/rural/pb35a.pdf.
Office of Applied Studies, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services. Underage Drinking in Rural Areas. N.p.: The National Survey on Drug use and Health Report, 2004.
Link: http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/2k4/ruralyouthAlc/ruralyouthAlc.htm.
“Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health, 2011.” WHO Report: lists alcohol consumption statistics for every country on the planet, not only examining how much is consumed, but breaking down what types of alcohol different countries consume.
Center for Disease Control – many studies on alcohol use and minors.
Maine-Specific
Bill Trotter, Bangor Daily News, writes often about consumption of alcohol statistics in Maine. Here’s a link to his excel collection sheets:
Most recently:
Trotter, Bill. “Allen’s coffee brandy sales slip but remain No. 1 in Maine.” Bangor Daily News (Bangor, ME), June 28, 2012.
Link: http://bangordailynews.com/2012/03/28/business/allens-coffee-brandy-sales-slip-in-maine/.
Maine Bureau of Alcoholic Beverages. Top 25 Alcoholic Beverages Purchased in 2011. N.p.: n.p., 2011.
Link: http://www.maine.gov/dafs/bablo/alcohol_bev/top_brands.htm.
Fahrenthold, David A. “A Bittersweet ‘Champagne of Maine’.” The Washington Post (Washington, DC), January 9, 2006.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/08/AR2006010800808.html.
Advocacy, Sponsored Organizations, National Organizations, Educational Programs
National Institute on Alcohol and Alcoholism (NIAA)
“Brain Power” program for grades 2-3. National Institute on Drug Abuse; National Institute on Health.
“Talking With Young Children About Alcohol” April 1998. Dr. Laura DeHaan, Assistant Professor/Child Development Specialist, North Dakota State University Agriculture
Alcohol Education Project, Hobart and William Smith Colleges. (Primarily college-age student drinking and perceptions of drinking.)
FCD Educational Services; provider of substance abuse prevention programming to schools, K-12.
Child Trends, Alcohol Misuse Prevention Study (AMPS)
Protecting You, Protecting Me. Alcohol use prevention program for children. Developed with Hazelden and part of MADD’s National Elementary Schools project.
“Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking” – study from the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC)
Early Liquor Bottles
Historic Glass Bottle Identification and Information website, run by Bill Lindsey