Robert's St. Paul, MN

Minneapolis, and St. Paul are known as the Twin Cities of Minnesota and are on opposite sides of the Mississippi River. Since the early 1800's the two cities had been bitter rivals up until the 1960’s when the Minnesota Twins baseball team was created. All's well that ends well.

While in St. Paul we stayed at Dennis’s daughter's place. A time for work, doing research, conducting interviews, plugging away at the website, and do our Indiegogo Crowdfunding Campaign video. Word of advice to the wise which we did not follow definitely do not launch your crowdfunding campaign if you don't have a significant social media footprint. Just saying!

Personally, I’m more of a behind the scenes type of person and I don’t like my picture taken, let alone being on camera. Aha-sure, good luck with that now that being a filmmaker forces you to be a public person! I found it a bit challenging doing my on-camera bit for the Indiegogo video but after a few tries, and Dennis’s magic editing powers, it worked out well. When we thought the video was acceptable, we shared the results with some friends and supporters. Eh? What? Static? Our friend, Tina DeWeese is a contemporary artist and her parents are Bob and Gennie DeWeese who are prominent in the book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (ZMM). She’s been keeping up with our progress and process, and was an excellent critic by pointing out things she liked and did not.

So with some good feedback it was back to editing and make the 3 minute video less talking heads and more dynamic.

As part of our research we went to the VA Hospital where Robert Pirsig was a patient after having a total mental breakdown in 1962 and was court-ordered to receive 27 Electroshock Therapy Treatments at the Minneapolis Veterans Hospital. We had a fruitful meeting with the Public Relations Liaison at the VA and got some leads to a couple of retired doctors who may have worked there during the late sixties.

On a more positive note relating to the ‘Zen’ in the book title, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) is that Robert was key in bringing Zen Buddhism to the Midwest. 

The Minneapolis Zen Meditation Center (MZMC), a multi-story building located in a great neighborhood by the shores of Lake Calhoun was financed in large part by the first royalties of ZMM. Robert often practiced zazen (sitting meditation) there.

We interviewed MZMC's Guiding Teacher, Tim Burkett, a long time student of both Suzuki Roshi, and Katagiri Roshi. Zen Master Katagiri was also Robert's teacher and the Roshi that he persuaded to come to Minneapolis back in the early 70’s. Tim said that, “If it were not for Robert Pirsig, we would not be here today.”

We also learned that back during the heyday of ZMM in the mid-70’s a journalist discovered that Pirsig meditated there and tried to corner him for an interview. Pirsig refused and thereafter never returned to the center.

Pirsig eschewed the personal attention and celebrity status that his famous book brought in its wake. Rather, he chose to live a reclusive, reflective and a quiet lifestyle. Yet this attitude is contrary to a long held ambition of having his philosophy, the Metaphysics of Quality be broadly disseminated which his celebrity status would have helped.

Remember about his ECT treatments and Robert's memory loss?

In ZMM Robert writes about regaining some of that memory when he returned to Montana State College in Bozeman where he had taught English and Rhetoric to Freshman student from 1959-1961.  

ZMM ------- But the print, Feininger's ``Church of the Minorites,'' had an appeal to him that was irrelevant to the art in that its subject, a kind of Gothic cathedral, created from semiabstract lines and planes and colors and shades, seemed to reflect his mind's vision of the Church of Reason and that was why he'd put it here. All this comes back now. This was his office. A find. This is the room I am looking for!

The original painting is at The Walker.

It was from The Walker on June 15th at 3 pm that we launched our Indiegogo Campaign. What a momentous occasion. That was for us because that was the first collaborative visual project we did together, and that 3 minute video was tons of work to put together.

Hunger has landed! Time to celebrate by splurging a bit and eating at a restaurant. The mood in the air was for some Indian food so we put Google to task.

Now we are ready to start our scouting trip.

We head to St. Paul and Ottis Ave where Robert used to live. It was from there where he, his 11-year old son Chris, and his good friends John and Sylvia Sutherland started the now famous July, 1968 motorcycle trip so interestingly written about in ZMM.

From here we will travel to visit the stops described in ZMM and do our due diligence to scout out where and how we intend to shoot the documentary. Their first stop was just outside of Minneapolis and that's where we're heading.