Video Find of the Day
I first saw Mon Oncle (France, 1958) on a weak local channel afternoon movie program, ca 1967. It mesmerized me. It was amazingly slow and laid back, and I was not doing drugs or pot, in spite of the times, but yet I was mesmerized. Soul will do that to you. If you can harness soul, you can do anything.
Mon Oncle (1958) [dog scene in opening]
Showing posts with label dogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dogs. Show all posts
Friday, October 3, 2008
Friday, June 29, 2007
Lost
The dog Koko had a friend. There was another dog that was allowed by his owners to run loose. It was a big gangly thing, half again as big as Koko, who was the size and coloring of a miniature Schnauzer. The two of them played together every day. They had the run of the neighborhood.
Having been rejected almost to death by my parents, and now feeling relegated to being an animal by the ones I thought were there to rescue me, I felt I had more in common with the dogs than anyone else I knew.
There was a child about a year older who was willing to hang out with me. I'll call him Jackson. Jackson was the adopted son of military parents. His adoptive parents were white, he was Puerto Rican. But he identified with Hawaiian natives. Maybe because of the common color. He was doing what my Father thought I was doing, picking up Pidgin from the other civilian workers.
Jackson was mean. He frequently hit me and insulted me. He hit me on the head with sticks. He kicked me. Until I fell out with Lani and Lono I didn't think I needed Jackson enough to put up with the abuse. But afterward he was about the only company I had.
One insult sticks out in my memory. There was some greenish dog shit on the ground, and he called it honowā. I didn't recognize that as the hawaiian word for shit, I'd learned a different word. He said, there's different words for different kinds. Honowā is the kind that when you step on it, it won't come off, and it stinks the most. Then he said, "You're honowā." A little later he said all white people were honowā.
In spite of a constant flow of insults like that I followed Jackson around and took part in his activities. One of his activities was to sneak into houses. It was pretty easy since almost nobody locked their homes at Schofield Barracks, even when they went away for the day. So it was all entering, and no breaking.
One day we were snooping around inside a house and one of us knocked over an open bottle of writing ink. Did I mention this was 1952? People used fountain pens in those days, so every house had an ink bottle out in the living room somewhere. Usually people would think to close it. These people didn't.
There was ink all over the living room table and all over the carpet. Now, part of Jackson's routine was to leave things exactly the way we found them. He wasn't a thief, he was more of a 4 year-old voyeur. He got off on peeking at and touching things he wasn't supposed to. But he didn't want to leave evidence. So we tried to wipe up the ink with towels.
Naturally, that just spread the ink around, and now the towels had ink on them. Then I got a brilliant idea. It was black ink right? The opposite of black is white, right? So let's get some milk and cancel them out.
We were pouring milk all over the ink when the owners of the house came in. My parents and Jackson's parents were called, and all stood around arguing about whose parenting caused this mess, and my parents ended up agreeing that they should pay for a new carpet, and there was yelling and a spanking when I got home.
Then, they put me to bed, and I heard them laughing for hours about my brilliant idea.
Having been rejected almost to death by my parents, and now feeling relegated to being an animal by the ones I thought were there to rescue me, I felt I had more in common with the dogs than anyone else I knew.
There was a child about a year older who was willing to hang out with me. I'll call him Jackson. Jackson was the adopted son of military parents. His adoptive parents were white, he was Puerto Rican. But he identified with Hawaiian natives. Maybe because of the common color. He was doing what my Father thought I was doing, picking up Pidgin from the other civilian workers.
Jackson was mean. He frequently hit me and insulted me. He hit me on the head with sticks. He kicked me. Until I fell out with Lani and Lono I didn't think I needed Jackson enough to put up with the abuse. But afterward he was about the only company I had.
One insult sticks out in my memory. There was some greenish dog shit on the ground, and he called it honowā. I didn't recognize that as the hawaiian word for shit, I'd learned a different word. He said, there's different words for different kinds. Honowā is the kind that when you step on it, it won't come off, and it stinks the most. Then he said, "You're honowā." A little later he said all white people were honowā.
In spite of a constant flow of insults like that I followed Jackson around and took part in his activities. One of his activities was to sneak into houses. It was pretty easy since almost nobody locked their homes at Schofield Barracks, even when they went away for the day. So it was all entering, and no breaking.
One day we were snooping around inside a house and one of us knocked over an open bottle of writing ink. Did I mention this was 1952? People used fountain pens in those days, so every house had an ink bottle out in the living room somewhere. Usually people would think to close it. These people didn't.
There was ink all over the living room table and all over the carpet. Now, part of Jackson's routine was to leave things exactly the way we found them. He wasn't a thief, he was more of a 4 year-old voyeur. He got off on peeking at and touching things he wasn't supposed to. But he didn't want to leave evidence. So we tried to wipe up the ink with towels.
Naturally, that just spread the ink around, and now the towels had ink on them. Then I got a brilliant idea. It was black ink right? The opposite of black is white, right? So let's get some milk and cancel them out.
We were pouring milk all over the ink when the owners of the house came in. My parents and Jackson's parents were called, and all stood around arguing about whose parenting caused this mess, and my parents ended up agreeing that they should pay for a new carpet, and there was yelling and a spanking when I got home.
Then, they put me to bed, and I heard them laughing for hours about my brilliant idea.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
The Walks
Here's a recent satellite image of the area of Schofield Barracks where I would find Lani and Lono. North is up. It doesn't look like much has changed.
I met up with Lono the first day at Canby Field to the west. This image shows about two-thirds of the field, which is altogether almost twice as long and twice as wide as a football field. We met at a point beyond the edge of this image. Later I would learn to look for them at the northern end of Morris Road, or a little further northwest from there along Leilehua Road, somewhere between the points marked with the Xs on the map. Leilehua was the avenue my Mother taught me not to cross. We lived a few houses off it on a side road about five or six blocks southwest of the meeting point, about a third of a mile distance.
Much later I learned that with my little legs that third of a mile took me around twenty minutes when I hurried. I'm sure I didn't hurry much on the way home though.
As green and pretty as the neighborhood was with all its plantings and fields, the walk was not always a pleasure because there were mean older children who would push me around and threaten me. Also many people at Schofield let their dogs run free and a few of them were threatening.
As I learned Hawaiian the walk transformed. The world changed for me. Hawaiian is very different from English in many ways. For one, words are run together. In English, words are clearly separate in speech. In Hawaiian, it can be hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins. It creates a feeling of all things being connected.
Adding to the sense of connectedness is the fact that so many words have multiple meanings, making it a more context dependent language than English..
Also, there's no verb "to be". "Is" is understood. A thing is, if we're talking about it. This means it is less natural to imagine emptiness. The world is full everywhere you look. It also helps prevent mistaking predicates for identities. Qualities of things don't become the things and take them over, so there is more room for more qualities. In English, once you say the barn is red, you can easily be fooled into thinking you're done. That's what it is, right?
As I started thinking in Hawaiian, colors became brighter for me, and things around me swirled and tangled with one another. In English, there were things and not-things, good and bad. In Hawaiian there were things and more things, good and different good, and the boundaries were not straight lines.
Gradually, those times when I was alone and not being threatened, my walks became richer. I noticed, and I was grateful.
I met up with Lono the first day at Canby Field to the west. This image shows about two-thirds of the field, which is altogether almost twice as long and twice as wide as a football field. We met at a point beyond the edge of this image. Later I would learn to look for them at the northern end of Morris Road, or a little further northwest from there along Leilehua Road, somewhere between the points marked with the Xs on the map. Leilehua was the avenue my Mother taught me not to cross. We lived a few houses off it on a side road about five or six blocks southwest of the meeting point, about a third of a mile distance.
Much later I learned that with my little legs that third of a mile took me around twenty minutes when I hurried. I'm sure I didn't hurry much on the way home though.
As green and pretty as the neighborhood was with all its plantings and fields, the walk was not always a pleasure because there were mean older children who would push me around and threaten me. Also many people at Schofield let their dogs run free and a few of them were threatening.
As I learned Hawaiian the walk transformed. The world changed for me. Hawaiian is very different from English in many ways. For one, words are run together. In English, words are clearly separate in speech. In Hawaiian, it can be hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins. It creates a feeling of all things being connected.
Adding to the sense of connectedness is the fact that so many words have multiple meanings, making it a more context dependent language than English..
Also, there's no verb "to be". "Is" is understood. A thing is, if we're talking about it. This means it is less natural to imagine emptiness. The world is full everywhere you look. It also helps prevent mistaking predicates for identities. Qualities of things don't become the things and take them over, so there is more room for more qualities. In English, once you say the barn is red, you can easily be fooled into thinking you're done. That's what it is, right?
As I started thinking in Hawaiian, colors became brighter for me, and things around me swirled and tangled with one another. In English, there were things and not-things, good and bad. In Hawaiian there were things and more things, good and different good, and the boundaries were not straight lines.
Gradually, those times when I was alone and not being threatened, my walks became richer. I noticed, and I was grateful.
Saturday, March 3, 2007
William Wegman Rocks
I was looking over my YouTube posts and was astonished to find the video below listed as "related" to one of mine. This is amazing to me, not only because I can't see what the relationship could be, but because the artist ultimately responsible for the so-called related video, William Wegman, has always been one of my favorites, and it's like YouTube knew that and was trying to make me feel loved by telling me that I remind them of him.
If you don't know who William Wegman is click on the YouTube logo on the video image and read the description by the posting collective zimmerfrei. All I'm going to say here right now is, here's some of that Fey I was talking about, and William Wegman does it.
If you don't know who William Wegman is click on the YouTube logo on the video image and read the description by the posting collective zimmerfrei. All I'm going to say here right now is, here's some of that Fey I was talking about, and William Wegman does it.
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