Forbidden Zone Clip

Video Find of the Day

One of several videos that are on YouTube that show scenes from Forbidden Zone, my all-time favorite movie. There are probably fewer than ten movies that I've seen more than three times. I've seen The Third Man & Dr. Strangelove each maybe 20 times. I've seen 2001, a Space Odyssey about 10 times. But I've seen Forbidden Zone at least 50 times.

It's a musical directed by Richard Elfman that incorporates quirky old music from the 20s and 30s using recordings and performances by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo into a cheesy operatic story of childhood sexual ignorance and crudity meeting adult lust and crudity, as one character after another ends up passing through a basement door leading to the Sixth Dimension. All the children are portrayed by adults, as you'll see in the clip. The young woman to the left in the beginning of the video is one of the best performers in the film, the amazing Marie-Pascal Elfman, who at the time was Richard Elfman's wife. She was also the set designer.

The King of the Sixth Dimension is played by Hervé "Dee Plane!" Villachaize. A rather heavy Susan Tyrrell, seen in this video laughing in the foreground just before Villachaize appears at the end, played the Queen. She was also prominent on the poster and video cover.

The film was marketed as having something to offend everybody. It has a vomiting scene, silly examples of cartoonish blackface, yiddish vaudevillian humor, mild above the waist nudity, adults pretending to be children dry humping, highly non-graphic absurd depictions of anal sex, violence, involving the use of some raw hamburger, loads of fart sounds and fart references, a cross-dressing character, and uses of the word fag.

So if you've been following my memoir posts at all you know why I like the movie. It speaks volumes to my life.

It could have been worse. Writer Matthew Bright, who is both the cross-dresser and his/her brother in the film (credited as Toshiro Boloney), would have had one of his characters castrated in a scene, but Richard Elfman cut it. Ha!

Wikipedia has a good article about the film here.

Video Find of the Day

First Video Find post.

Wait for the dancer. She's going to pick up a coin with her eye, backwards.



By the way, expect Video Finds every day from now on. Today I discovered that YouTube limits users to 500 favorited videos, by trying to favorite a 501st. So to be able to play new favorites I am going to be embedding them and viewing them here.

Confirmation

I was looking through my archive of photos and could not resist trotting this baby out into public view. I've had a beard since 1997 and even those people I know now who knew me before the beard include no one who has ever seen me in a suit.

Also, none of my current acquaintances have ever seen me attempting to pass as Catholic either. Yet here I am in 1982, at the age of 32 (the exact same age my Father was when he ran me over, by the way) being confirmed as a convert. I'm at Blessed Sacrament Church in the University District in Seattle. The Catechism was directed by Father Anton, seen at your far left. I believe that's the former Bishop Hunthausen in the middle who performed the confirmation ceremony, who was Archbishop of Seattle from 1975 to 1991. I don't remember, but it looks like him.

I'm wearing, minus the jacket, the only suit I ever owned, a navy blue three-piece number I bought in Ithaca, New York, in 1977, when I was an easy to remember American size 33 with 33 inseam = metric 84 with 84 inseam. That was also the only tie I ever wore properly.

I'm not ready to explain what a dictionary-pagan is doing getting confirmed Catholic in this picture, except to say that the first Catholic mass I ever attended was at the little chapel that was still called the "Berrigan Church" on the Cornell campus 4 years after Daniel Berrigan stopped being involved with it. They didn't have any wafers my first visit, so they broke up hamburger buns and consecrated them.

It speaks to a point I've been planning to get to, that people could be a lot more sensible about religion if only they stopped thinking of religions as sources of doctrine that everyone has to accept, and started thinking of them as mistresses (or if you're female you might prefer to say bed partners, or friends with privileges.)

One of the most rigid doctrinarian men I know in all matters is a man about 60 who never married and only briefly ever loved a woman. It has occurred to me that there is a connection. If he had spent more of his life loving he might know by now how to love his own beliefs and opinions without feeling the need to whore them out to everyone else.

These Label Thingies

Keen observers of this blog, both of them, have noticed my frivolous attitude toward labels, AKA tags. I have been treating the labels at the end of these posts as just another chance to exercise my low regard for all things serious. When Anitra sees my posts, she often shrieks, "That's not what labels are for!" I've laughed and laughed.

But lately I've been wanting to find all these memoir posts I've been doing without having to wade through every other random post here. And, what do you suppose, but I solved that problem by adding the label "wesmem" to all of them. So all I have to do is go to one of them, scroll down and click on the "wesmem" label, and all the others pop up for me.

I just told Anitra about this cool discovery. She shrieked, "That's what I've been telling you labels are for!" I laughed.

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.

More Shahrazad at Folklife

I had this all ready to upload yesterday, then accidentally deleted it. Fortunately I hadn't cleared the camera yet. You can hear both Anitra and me on this one. I'm the guy saying, "Oh man... I gotta get them all in this. Somehow." She's the one at the end hollering "yahoo."

Belly Dancing at Folklife

I got two pieces by Gypsy Caravan Dance Company (music by Mizna). Unfortunately the sound is worse than usual for the second. Not my fault! Stupid speakers.



The program had "Rags Serpentine -- Modern Dance Meets Bellydance" for the next one.



Nashita does Tribal Fusion Bellydance:



This next is the Shahrazad Middle Eastern Dance Ensemble.



The show ended with performances by Zaphara's Middle Eastern Dancers, Egyptian Cabaret Bellydancing. Here's one I got before my cheap camera told me it was full.

Technorati Sucks, Week 10

My Adventures in Bloggery blog has thus far been ignored by Technorati for 118 days, while this one has been ignored by them for 92 days.

Today I googled "Technorati Sucks" and got 1,340,000 hits. I thought I would be on the first page for sure, maybe down a ways on the first page, but surely in the top ten.

No, but I made it to #18 with last week's comments on worm fucking and buffalo shit, and how oh by the way Technorati sucks.

I was also on page 3. My Technorati Sucks, Week 6 made it to #29, probably because it had "does not work" in French, German, and Japanese. The foreign hits may have given me a boost.

At #27 Is Jim Belshaw's New England, Australia blog, which has been ignored by Technorati for over a year.

At #23, at onlinejournalismus.de, Fiete Stegers began a post with, "Die neue Version von Technorati, die seit einiger Zeit online ist, gefällt mir überhaupt nicht," which I think is a very polite way of saying Technorati sucks in German. Also the post was titled "Technorati sucks."

White Space edged my Week 9 out at #17 with an April 7 post titled "Technorati sucks" which reports a "last updated 377 days ago" after pings to Technorati went ignored.

GetSheila posted a list last January of ways Technorati "still sucks," making it to #15.

#13 is going to be hard to beat if he or she gets going. The blogger goes by the name "technorati sucks" as well as calling the blog itself Technorati Sucks. My only hope in passing this one is that there appears to be only one post up, for now.

Way back in September of 2006 Gadgetizer was saying, "Technorati is the biggest search engine for searching blogs. Too bad it sucks." Clearly Gadgetizer is benefitting from long-term exposure to make #9.

Jim Belshaw, seen at #27, reached #8 with a Technorati sucks post to his Personal Reflections.

Speaking of long-term exposure, #3 is a post on white pebble dated September 17th, 2005, containing an open letter to Technorati telling them why they suck.

The #1 hit when googling technorati sucks is a post by Jason Kottke on kottke.org proving the early bird gets the google hit: Mr. Kottke said So long, Technorati already on August 19, 2005.

Oh, and by the way, Technorati sucks ass without a straw.