How My Brain Works

Video Find of the Day

I see this:

SNL: Sarah Palin & Hillary Clinton (Tina Fey & Amy Poehler)



I think this:

Jerry lee lewis - Put On Your Red Dress & I Believe In You

Taipei

Taipei, Taiwan, was immediately red to me. That was the sense I had of it. Red, red, red, with smatterings of yellow, and only wisps of blue and green, except for the trees.

I loved Taipei from the first. The pier we docked at was a working pier next to warehouses full of cargo waiting to ship out or be trucked off. It was crowded with workers. There was no effort to put on a pretty face for new arrivals.

My Father met us at the gangplank. We had to wait for Koko and his crate to be lowered to the dock. There was some passport checking at a booth out in front of the warehouse. Then we were chauffeured off by Army staff car to our new home.

We passed through downtown Taipei along the way, and, as I said, that was red. Almost every store was decked out in Chinese red, with red banners, and red or yellow awnings, covered with large chinese writing.

Remember, this was the Fifties. Back in the US, beige was the king of colors. Mute was master. People who wore bright colors were shunned and ostracized, if not committed. People who painted their houses in bright colors were sued or evicted by their neighborhood associations. So the contrast to home was enormous. But there was also the fact that red was especially meaningful to me. It was the color of the i'iwi and the sacred color that gave rise to all colors. I felt like I was at the beginning of the rainbow.

The house we arrived at was in a middle class neighborhood at the outskirts of the city. One of the main highways out of the city passed a block away, leading to a hillside cemetery a mile or two beyond. You left the highway onto a side road that was paved for only fifty yards and then swung left parallel to the highway as a dirt road with walled middle-class chinese-style houses on either side for several blocks. After the road turned, our house was the first you encountered on the right side. The house directly across the street from us was, it turned out, the home of a Republic of China (ROC) general.

[Above: I've repeatedly tried and failed to find our house on satellite images. So here it is from memory. The houses were more rectangular than depicted. The stream was probably wider. The railroad is totally out of scale. Our house, in reality, was maybe 25 feet in front by 35 or 40 feet. The dirt road was narrower than shown. I was just trying to show where left and right was.]

If you went the other direction, swerving right when the road swerved left, you had to get out and walk. Rather than roads there were walkways through a warren of shops and shanties. We lived across the street from a poor people's bamboo village.

If you didn't swerve right or left but continued straight past the side of our house you crossed a stream, about 8 yards wide, which fed the main river that emptied into the sea and was also our sewer, and the place that our poorer neighbor-women did their laundry. There was then a little bridge you could drive over the stream. A few yards further and you were crossing a railroad track.

So much in one place! Life, death, commerce and cemeteries, poverty and wealth, dirt roads, steam engines, concrete walled homes alongside bamboo shacks. How can you not love a place that has all that?

Nagasaki - Not!

Video Find of the Day

First, Puccini set Madam Butterfly in Nagasaki. Then this song, "Nagasaki" was written, in 1928:

Hot ginger and dynamite
There's nothing but that at night.
Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo.

The way they can entertain
Would hurry a hurricane.
Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo.

In Fujiyama you get a mommer
And your troubles increase.
In some pagoda she orders soda
The earth shakes milk shakes ten cents a piece.

They kissee and huggee nice
By jingo it's worth the price.
Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo.

-- This is not about the city we bombed. It's about our own fantasies of the exotic, and as always, the exotic is about us.

I Become Racist

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened late July or early August, 1955, after my 6th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

After Bible School there was a period of great summer childhood, with nothing particular to do day after sunny balmy day on an army base surrounded by ten acres of well kept lawn and isolated trees, except to run around barefoot trying to make friends with the other kids that would have it, and meanwhile watching clouds glide over the whole thing.

Oh, yeah, and the Davy Crockett craze was in full swing, so I had to have a coonskin cap. There was a lot of Injun killing involved. Nobody wanted to be the Injun that got killed, so we had to all take turns at it.

Now that's odd, because I was accustomed to thinking of myself as white on the outside but red on the inside. Hawaiian Natives, I don't remember if I already mentioned it but I should have, may look golden skinned to the white folk, but in their own minds they're red. Injuns, on the other hand, were always red, in everyone's book. So why would I mind being an Injun?

Well, it's obvious isn't it? Injuns were a fictitious and/or historic race that were always the bad guys on TV and in movies. They only existed to me as villains.

That's not racism. That's just innocence. I got out of that mindset as soon as I got to know real Native Americans.

But one day I had an experience that made a real racist out of me. I was wandering around by myself and I encountered a Black kid my age. I had seen Blacks before. There were Black girls in my Kindergarten class. But I could not believe how black this kid was.

I'd been taught not to stare at people who look different from me. So I didn't say anything about how black the kid was. We introduced ourselves to each other as kids do (Hi! My name's Wes! What's yours? I think he said Jackson), and then we found some game we both liked to play, and it was cool.

After an hour or so my new Black friend said he wanted me to meet his Mom and Dad and his brothers and sisters.

I should have said, this was a Sunday afternoon. Fort Devens had a strict rule that no one should drop in on anyone's house on Sundays, and no one should invite anyone over. The idea was, people who needed a day of rest from socializing wouldn't get it, by being too nice to not invite people over. The base commanding general himself ordered that people stay out of each others houses on Sundays, for there own good.

It was a very good rule, as was proved in the breaking of it. I went to my new friend's house precisely for the reason that the rule was devised, namely, to not hurt the inviter's feelings. Besides, Jackson already broke the rule by asking me, so I didn't break it first.

So we waded into Jackson's living room. They were all as black as he is! There were tons of them! It was like the Mother Nest!

Nobody said anything about the No Sunday Socializing Rule. I enjoyed talking to Jackson's parents. They were nice fun people. I was really happy to meet such good friends.

Later, when I got home I told my Mother I found a new friend, and he was really, really, black, and he took me to meet his family and...

And she said, "AND YOU WENT? HAVEN'T I TOLD YOU NEVER TO DO THAT?"

I thought she was being a little crazy. So I didn't argue with her. I just nodded and said, yes Mommy, I shouldn't have gone to see them. I knew I broke the Sunday Rule. I promised never to do it again.

The next morning I woke up with crease marks all over my chest. You know how when you sleep on wrinkly sheets you get crease marks all over where the wrinkles were? I had that. Only I'd never noticed having it before.

Suddenly it dawned on me! That's why my Mother got so over the top about me breaking the Sunday Rule! It wasn't the breaking of the Sunday Rule that had her upset, it was that they were black!

It's contagious!

Giving Voice

I have a special memory of being told creation stories. I remember only a few details of the creation stories themselves. I can try to reconstruct it. What struck me in the telling wasn't so much the actual stories but the way Lani and Lono took turns at telling them.

I think Lono started it by telling the Christian story of genesis. Lani countered by saying that other people had a different idea of what happened, and he told of how all there is sprang out of the primordial god Kanaloa.

Rather than argue which of the two of those ideas was right, Lono said there were still others who had a different idea. He told another story from the tradition, how the sky god Lani and the earth goddess Papa made love and Papa gave birth to the other gods and eventually Kane, who made people from rocks.

Rather than argue which of those three ideas was right, Lani said that there was another view, that was like that, but said that Kane made people out of clay.

Lono said that there was widespread agreement that men were made from clay, which was why the red clay was sacred, as well as the color red, but actually there was another view, that it wasn't men who were made from the clay, it was the taro plant, and men later descended from the tarot plant over many generations.

Pretty soon the words, "but other people say" had me in stitches every time I heard it.

I understood the joke. Anyone who says they know how the world began is wrong. Nobody was there to see it. But that doesn't prevent us from talking about it. The real creation is the recreation that happens every time you tell it a new way.

Whenever I hear Creationists and Evolutionists debating I remember that conversation, and laugh all over again.

More Te Fare

Three more videos of Te Fare O Tamatoa, from Seattle Folklife, Memorial Day, May 28, 2007. First is one with the ladies in patterned blue gowns. Blue is alright. I don't care for green, but I can live with blue.



Next, drums, by teachers and students.



Third, the ladies are back in red skirts. Red is my favorite. I was taught by Lani and Lono that red was the first color, all the other came from red, that red was the most sacred color, because it's the color of a human soul.

Red Is Beautiful

Красный цвет красивейш

These days this sort of thing has been subsumed into camp. But red will always be my favorite color.