I love all kinds! I don't care who does it! Here's an Egyptian belly dancer, Tito, dancing with what is either a kid or a very unusually proportioned little person, Mimo, both on and to drums. It is something everyone should see.
Here's an Australian, who calls himself Jamil, doing it!
I think this instance here is called Tribal Fusion Dancing:
Whereas this one might be straight Tribal:
Then there is this fellow, who just might be in a class by himself (when he's dancing!)
I love them all!
Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Omega
When I tell people I lived three memorable years in Hawaii they often ask me how I liked the beach and the palm trees and the sand. I was in Schofield Barracks most of the time, which, as I've said, looks like a low-income suburban housing project. It's situated almost at the center of O'ahu, miles from any of the beaches. There was very little that would seem exotic to a lower forty-eighter, apart from the beautiful hills in the distance.
The only thing that I remember about Schofield that really separated it from anywhere I've been on the continent is the soil. The soil was amazingly red clay. It was very soft, almost muddy, and it had a strong smell that most people didn't like.
I'll describe my first birthday in detail.
It was late in the afternoon. The sun was still out. My Mother had been drinking on the porch. I had been under the house, possibly for most of the day. For some reason I decided to come out into the sun for a bit, and coincidentally I was out crawling around on the front lawn as a staff car drove up and delivered my Father to the curb.
As soon as he stepped out of the staff car it was driven away. My Father was holding the present, a dark brown teddy bear. It had a bow around its neck.
I remember the front yard being small, with maybe no more than thirty feet from curb to porch. There was a public sidewalk that ran next to the road and a narrow private sidewalk that ran from the main sidewalk to the covered porch. Saplings had recently been planted along the public sidewalk in the adjoining yards. The porch had a big chair, with my Mother in it, and a table to hold my Mother's drinks.
Just as my Father was being delivered to the curb by staff car, I had to have a bowel movement on the grass.
When I saw my father I was thrilled. I'd thought I'd never see him again. My Mother had been awful to me. But I didn't think about that. I was just happy to see my Father after missing him for six months, which was half my life.
My Mother's first reaction to seeing that my Father had arrived and that I'd left a deposit on the yard was to start laughing loudly and say, "Look at that! He made a present for Daddy! He saw you coming and he made a present for you!" (I'm reconstructing dialog from the sense I got of my memories of it later. I don't recall the exact words of most of this.)
My Father looked confused. Then my Mother said to me, "Go on, show Daddy your present!" She was smiling. I thought she was happy for me that my Daddy was back. I didn't know what her words meant, or that she was being cruel.
Suddenly I had a realization though, that the sound "Daddy" referred to my Father.
That's one of the most painful things about this whole event. It is hard to believe the amazing convergence of circumstances that happened that day. I arrived at the idea that words have meaning just then as my Father approached.
My Father was by now right in front of me. I had understood that he was Daddy, and all of the sudden I also figured out what my Mother had meant all along by "You made a present for Daddy!" So I picked up my shit and held it out to him, to show him what I made for him.
At that point my Mother was standing right behind me and roared with laughter. My Father turned bright red. My Mother laughed all the more. She said to me, "tell Daddy who your present is for!" And I said my first word, "Daddy." My father dropped the teddy bear and started screaming at me, "What are you doing?! How dare you!" or something like that. As he reached for me she snatched me up and told him he was stupid.
He grabbed me out of her arms and slammed me head first onto the concrete walkway. The top of my head took all the impact.
For a few seconds it seemed like my eyes were spinning in my head. I would try to stand and fall and try again and fall again. There was shrieking from my Mother. Then laughter again. She said "Ha, ha, you said you wanted a genius son, now you're going to be taking care of a basket-case the rest of your life. And he just said his first word! Instead of being proud you broke his head for it!"
When my Father said I had it coming for what I had done, my Mother told him he was an idiot. "He's only one year old today, he doesn't know what it means. And anyway I taught him to do that."
She then shouted out to him a long invective about how she never wanted a kid anyway and how miserable she'd been being stuck with me those six months, and gleefully described the toilet training ritual to him. She said she was going to leave him and HE'D be stuck taking care of the basket case. IF I didn't die.
About then it started to sink in to my Father that I could have been very badly injured. But when he suggested calling an ambulance, my Mother said, "What about your career?"
That led to a heated debate about whose fault my injury was. My Mother said it was my dad's fault, obviously, he'd done the deed. But my Father said it was my Mother's cruel joke that led him to do it. My Mother said what he did still wasn't right. My father said they'd see what a judge thought about that.
At that my Mother said they had to bring me inside to talk about it in private. No neighbors had intervened, but it was always possible some were watching from cracked curtains. They took me in and laid me on the kitchen table. My Mother was by now panicking. The more they threw accusations back and forth, the more they seemed to convince each other that I would die. My Mother convinced my Father that they were both going to be charged with murder. They argued some more about whose fault it was, then my Mother said they had to finish killing me to put me out of my misery, at least, and then worry about who was to blame.
My Father actually bought the mercy killing idea. He was also losing his head by this time. My Mother brought him a pillow and he held it over my face. I started to lose consciousness. Then there was screaming, "Stop, stop, I can't stand it!" My Mother called it off because she couldn't stand seeing me turn blue. My life was saved for the first time that day by a phenomenon of blood oxygenation and light reflection.
After that they left for a while. It turns out they drove to a bar in nearby Wahiawa to discuss the situation over drinks. They came up with a plan there to finish killing me by running me over with the car. The idea was that with the drinking they could pass it off as an accident. They supposed the damage from the previous injury would be lost in all the new damage to me. No one would guess that there had been two traumas, if they got their stories straight and stuck to them. I learned all this much later from eavesdropping on my parents while they recalled the sequence of events and rehashed accusations.
By the time they got back it was getting dark outside. I had passed out. I woke up to them leaning me up against one of the saplings next to the road. Then there was a last minute argument in strained whispered voices, which I only heard, about who would drive. My Father lost the argument and got in the car. The car started up. I heard a thump, which was probably the lead right tire jumping the curb. I have no memory of my head being hit, but I remember being suddenly on the grass.
My life was saved for the second time that day by the clay soil. The lead tire rolled over my chest. There were cracking sounds. All the air was squeezed from my lungs. But I didn't die because the soil yielded to me. The car pushed me deep into it.
My Father came out of the car and squatted down in front of me. I couldn't see him very well at first because blood was pouring over my eyes. My Mother was screaming in the background. First she screamed, "Oh my God he isn't dead! It can't be!" Then she said, "Don't you know what that means? If that didn't kill him, that means the other thing wouldn't ever have killed him!" Then she said, "We've done it now, you have to finish him." She screamed at my Father to finish killing me with a punch.
I could see a little better as my father made a fist and drew his arm back. As he did, I had a vision. It was a flashback to the I'iwi, the Red Bird I had seen the day he left for Korea six months earlier. It was triggered by seeing my Father's pained expression as he looked at me. It was just like the expression he'd had that day just before I had seen the Red Bird.
As the vision proceeded, the Bird's song filled my head, then I heard the sound of my Father saying, over and over again, "Say Goodbye Daddy." I still didn't know what it meant but for some reason I mimicked the sound anyway. Maybe I guessed that the reason all this happened was I hadn't said it before. I said "Say Goodbye Daddy."
My father immediately started crying and shouted to my Mother to call for an ambulance. I was saved for the third time by a vision.
**********************************************************************
[Left: Me by a garden on Tripler's grounds. First picture after the coma.]
The ambulance arrived at 9:05 PM Hawaii time. They thought I had to be dead when they found me because a third of my skull was swinging loose on the right side. Then I opened my eyes. Saved again.
On the ride to the hospital or infirmary the oxygen revived me. I heard them talking about how my parents' account didn't add up. They called my parents noho. They were natives. Noho means crazy.
The doctors' report specifically mentioned that the ambulance attendants had said that I was found in a depression in the grass. I know that's where they found me because I can still close my eyes and smell that clay. But the doctors dismissed the ambulance attendants' account because I had two head injuries, one consistent with a blow to the side of the head by the car front bumper, and one which they said must have occurred when I was subsequently thrown to the pavement striking the top of my head.
After all, who are you going to believe, a white officer of the US Army and his wife, or two Hawaiian natives?
So my Father got a DUI. The sentence was suspended because he had suffered enough already, having run over his precious only son. Years later my Father would often brag that he had a perfect driving record all his life and my Mother would start to say, "Well, there was that one DUI... " and he'd say, "SHUT UP!"
What I got, according to the doctor's report, was cracked ribs, one punctured lung, a dislocated shoulder, tire tracks over my chest, severe damage to about half the right cerebral surface, less severe damage to the top of the cerebrum, and, just as the ambulance was dropping me off, severe shock. The doctors said I would have died if I'd got there a minute later. Saved again, by fast driving.
The sapling was destroyed. It had to be replaced.
I don't know where I was treated initially. I didn't read that part of the report. But I know I woke up with bandages over my head in a ward in Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu. I had no sense of how long I was in a coma, but heard "four months" repeatedly from my parents when I eavesdropped.
Before I woke up in the hospital my mind was increasingly active. I ran through my memories of the preceding year of my life many times. As I did I applied the idea that words meant things to all the sounds that I remembered. So by the time I was conscious I knew what "Say Goodbye, Daddy" meant, and I knew better what "You made a present for Daddy" meant.
The Doctors had assured my parents that, as my left temporal lobe had not been damaged, my speech development would be unaffected. My Father was sure they were right since I'd spoken to him after being run over.
It turns out I'd been one of the exceptional cases that was developing language on my right side. The damage hadn't stopped me from mimicking my Father, but after the shock and the coma I couldn't make the sounds I had managed to make before. I had to learn how to babble all over again.
But outside my window, which was on the second or third floor, there was a birds' nest, and as I became conscious I awoke to bird song.
My parents were called in, and they sat by me and tried to get me to speak, while a doctor and nurses watched.
I whistled the bird song of the bird that was outside my window!
My Mother almost fainted.
Here I am outside on the grounds of Tripler, the day I was released, wearing shoes on loan from one of the nurses. The bird's nest was in the tree behind me in the picture.
By the way, I hate that teddy bear forever.
When they let my parents take me I felt betrayed. I had believed that the people at the hospital had rescued me from my parents. That hurt. Not being able to make speech sounds hurt.
What hurt the most was I missed who I had been. I didn't feel like I was the same person anymore. I felt like the original Wesley was taken away and replaced with me, and I was lost, and I shouldn't be here.
That's why I call the end of that first year the Omega. It was more than the end of a year. It was the end of a person.
[Hell of a post for a Mother's Day, wasn't it?]
The only thing that I remember about Schofield that really separated it from anywhere I've been on the continent is the soil. The soil was amazingly red clay. It was very soft, almost muddy, and it had a strong smell that most people didn't like.
I'll describe my first birthday in detail.
It was late in the afternoon. The sun was still out. My Mother had been drinking on the porch. I had been under the house, possibly for most of the day. For some reason I decided to come out into the sun for a bit, and coincidentally I was out crawling around on the front lawn as a staff car drove up and delivered my Father to the curb.
As soon as he stepped out of the staff car it was driven away. My Father was holding the present, a dark brown teddy bear. It had a bow around its neck.
I remember the front yard being small, with maybe no more than thirty feet from curb to porch. There was a public sidewalk that ran next to the road and a narrow private sidewalk that ran from the main sidewalk to the covered porch. Saplings had recently been planted along the public sidewalk in the adjoining yards. The porch had a big chair, with my Mother in it, and a table to hold my Mother's drinks.
Just as my Father was being delivered to the curb by staff car, I had to have a bowel movement on the grass.
When I saw my father I was thrilled. I'd thought I'd never see him again. My Mother had been awful to me. But I didn't think about that. I was just happy to see my Father after missing him for six months, which was half my life.
My Mother's first reaction to seeing that my Father had arrived and that I'd left a deposit on the yard was to start laughing loudly and say, "Look at that! He made a present for Daddy! He saw you coming and he made a present for you!" (I'm reconstructing dialog from the sense I got of my memories of it later. I don't recall the exact words of most of this.)
My Father looked confused. Then my Mother said to me, "Go on, show Daddy your present!" She was smiling. I thought she was happy for me that my Daddy was back. I didn't know what her words meant, or that she was being cruel.
Suddenly I had a realization though, that the sound "Daddy" referred to my Father.
That's one of the most painful things about this whole event. It is hard to believe the amazing convergence of circumstances that happened that day. I arrived at the idea that words have meaning just then as my Father approached.
My Father was by now right in front of me. I had understood that he was Daddy, and all of the sudden I also figured out what my Mother had meant all along by "You made a present for Daddy!" So I picked up my shit and held it out to him, to show him what I made for him.
At that point my Mother was standing right behind me and roared with laughter. My Father turned bright red. My Mother laughed all the more. She said to me, "tell Daddy who your present is for!" And I said my first word, "Daddy." My father dropped the teddy bear and started screaming at me, "What are you doing?! How dare you!" or something like that. As he reached for me she snatched me up and told him he was stupid.
He grabbed me out of her arms and slammed me head first onto the concrete walkway. The top of my head took all the impact.
For a few seconds it seemed like my eyes were spinning in my head. I would try to stand and fall and try again and fall again. There was shrieking from my Mother. Then laughter again. She said "Ha, ha, you said you wanted a genius son, now you're going to be taking care of a basket-case the rest of your life. And he just said his first word! Instead of being proud you broke his head for it!"
When my Father said I had it coming for what I had done, my Mother told him he was an idiot. "He's only one year old today, he doesn't know what it means. And anyway I taught him to do that."
She then shouted out to him a long invective about how she never wanted a kid anyway and how miserable she'd been being stuck with me those six months, and gleefully described the toilet training ritual to him. She said she was going to leave him and HE'D be stuck taking care of the basket case. IF I didn't die.
About then it started to sink in to my Father that I could have been very badly injured. But when he suggested calling an ambulance, my Mother said, "What about your career?"
That led to a heated debate about whose fault my injury was. My Mother said it was my dad's fault, obviously, he'd done the deed. But my Father said it was my Mother's cruel joke that led him to do it. My Mother said what he did still wasn't right. My father said they'd see what a judge thought about that.
At that my Mother said they had to bring me inside to talk about it in private. No neighbors had intervened, but it was always possible some were watching from cracked curtains. They took me in and laid me on the kitchen table. My Mother was by now panicking. The more they threw accusations back and forth, the more they seemed to convince each other that I would die. My Mother convinced my Father that they were both going to be charged with murder. They argued some more about whose fault it was, then my Mother said they had to finish killing me to put me out of my misery, at least, and then worry about who was to blame.
My Father actually bought the mercy killing idea. He was also losing his head by this time. My Mother brought him a pillow and he held it over my face. I started to lose consciousness. Then there was screaming, "Stop, stop, I can't stand it!" My Mother called it off because she couldn't stand seeing me turn blue. My life was saved for the first time that day by a phenomenon of blood oxygenation and light reflection.
After that they left for a while. It turns out they drove to a bar in nearby Wahiawa to discuss the situation over drinks. They came up with a plan there to finish killing me by running me over with the car. The idea was that with the drinking they could pass it off as an accident. They supposed the damage from the previous injury would be lost in all the new damage to me. No one would guess that there had been two traumas, if they got their stories straight and stuck to them. I learned all this much later from eavesdropping on my parents while they recalled the sequence of events and rehashed accusations.
By the time they got back it was getting dark outside. I had passed out. I woke up to them leaning me up against one of the saplings next to the road. Then there was a last minute argument in strained whispered voices, which I only heard, about who would drive. My Father lost the argument and got in the car. The car started up. I heard a thump, which was probably the lead right tire jumping the curb. I have no memory of my head being hit, but I remember being suddenly on the grass.
My life was saved for the second time that day by the clay soil. The lead tire rolled over my chest. There were cracking sounds. All the air was squeezed from my lungs. But I didn't die because the soil yielded to me. The car pushed me deep into it.
My Father came out of the car and squatted down in front of me. I couldn't see him very well at first because blood was pouring over my eyes. My Mother was screaming in the background. First she screamed, "Oh my God he isn't dead! It can't be!" Then she said, "Don't you know what that means? If that didn't kill him, that means the other thing wouldn't ever have killed him!" Then she said, "We've done it now, you have to finish him." She screamed at my Father to finish killing me with a punch.
I could see a little better as my father made a fist and drew his arm back. As he did, I had a vision. It was a flashback to the I'iwi, the Red Bird I had seen the day he left for Korea six months earlier. It was triggered by seeing my Father's pained expression as he looked at me. It was just like the expression he'd had that day just before I had seen the Red Bird.
As the vision proceeded, the Bird's song filled my head, then I heard the sound of my Father saying, over and over again, "Say Goodbye Daddy." I still didn't know what it meant but for some reason I mimicked the sound anyway. Maybe I guessed that the reason all this happened was I hadn't said it before. I said "Say Goodbye Daddy."
My father immediately started crying and shouted to my Mother to call for an ambulance. I was saved for the third time by a vision.
**********************************************************************
[Left: Me by a garden on Tripler's grounds. First picture after the coma.]
The ambulance arrived at 9:05 PM Hawaii time. They thought I had to be dead when they found me because a third of my skull was swinging loose on the right side. Then I opened my eyes. Saved again.
On the ride to the hospital or infirmary the oxygen revived me. I heard them talking about how my parents' account didn't add up. They called my parents noho. They were natives. Noho means crazy.
The doctors' report specifically mentioned that the ambulance attendants had said that I was found in a depression in the grass. I know that's where they found me because I can still close my eyes and smell that clay. But the doctors dismissed the ambulance attendants' account because I had two head injuries, one consistent with a blow to the side of the head by the car front bumper, and one which they said must have occurred when I was subsequently thrown to the pavement striking the top of my head.
After all, who are you going to believe, a white officer of the US Army and his wife, or two Hawaiian natives?
So my Father got a DUI. The sentence was suspended because he had suffered enough already, having run over his precious only son. Years later my Father would often brag that he had a perfect driving record all his life and my Mother would start to say, "Well, there was that one DUI... " and he'd say, "SHUT UP!"
What I got, according to the doctor's report, was cracked ribs, one punctured lung, a dislocated shoulder, tire tracks over my chest, severe damage to about half the right cerebral surface, less severe damage to the top of the cerebrum, and, just as the ambulance was dropping me off, severe shock. The doctors said I would have died if I'd got there a minute later. Saved again, by fast driving.
The sapling was destroyed. It had to be replaced.
I don't know where I was treated initially. I didn't read that part of the report. But I know I woke up with bandages over my head in a ward in Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu. I had no sense of how long I was in a coma, but heard "four months" repeatedly from my parents when I eavesdropped.
Before I woke up in the hospital my mind was increasingly active. I ran through my memories of the preceding year of my life many times. As I did I applied the idea that words meant things to all the sounds that I remembered. So by the time I was conscious I knew what "Say Goodbye, Daddy" meant, and I knew better what "You made a present for Daddy" meant.
The Doctors had assured my parents that, as my left temporal lobe had not been damaged, my speech development would be unaffected. My Father was sure they were right since I'd spoken to him after being run over.
It turns out I'd been one of the exceptional cases that was developing language on my right side. The damage hadn't stopped me from mimicking my Father, but after the shock and the coma I couldn't make the sounds I had managed to make before. I had to learn how to babble all over again.
But outside my window, which was on the second or third floor, there was a birds' nest, and as I became conscious I awoke to bird song.
My parents were called in, and they sat by me and tried to get me to speak, while a doctor and nurses watched.
I whistled the bird song of the bird that was outside my window!
My Mother almost fainted.
Here I am outside on the grounds of Tripler, the day I was released, wearing shoes on loan from one of the nurses. The bird's nest was in the tree behind me in the picture.
By the way, I hate that teddy bear forever.
When they let my parents take me I felt betrayed. I had believed that the people at the hospital had rescued me from my parents. That hurt. Not being able to make speech sounds hurt.
What hurt the most was I missed who I had been. I didn't feel like I was the same person anymore. I felt like the original Wesley was taken away and replaced with me, and I was lost, and I shouldn't be here.
That's why I call the end of that first year the Omega. It was more than the end of a year. It was the end of a person.
[Hell of a post for a Mother's Day, wasn't it?]
Saturday, May 12, 2007
East & West, and Not So West
A couple more great videos from YouTube. The first is a folk performance posted by vicissitudes at Xinjiang Normal U. By the way I've read that Xinjiang is Chinese for New Frontier, or New Domination. I don't think the Uyghurs like having their homeland called a New Frontier. I'm sure that it's only a reminder to them that their land joined China by conquest. Repeatedly. They were conquered in 1759 by the Manchurians, were briefly free to be reconquered by the Manchurians with British help, then briefly free in the 1930s and 1940s to be reconquered by China with Soviet assistance.
The next one is not Uyghur but shows the travel of Gypsy music, by way of the Classical interpretation of Sarasate, toward the Far East. Zigeunerweisen played by Chinese erhu master Xu Ke (who now lives in Japan.) It's out of this world. Thank you, stevenckcheung.
The next one is not Uyghur but shows the travel of Gypsy music, by way of the Classical interpretation of Sarasate, toward the Far East. Zigeunerweisen played by Chinese erhu master Xu Ke (who now lives in Japan.) It's out of this world. Thank you, stevenckcheung.
Calm Before the Storm
Here's my Father, now Captain Browning, in Korea outside a tent, being a Sentinel of Security (Vigile Salutis!) for the Army Security Agency. This probably was taken before the war broke out in June 1950. I guessing it was too hectic for this kind of thing during the two weeks between the North Korean invasion and my Father's departure.
While Dad was getting the light bulb shot out over his head, I was back in Schofield Barracks with my Mother in a little two bedroom shack in the officers' housing. The officers' housing area looks like a low-income suburban housing project. Here's a shot of the base of one of the neighbor's house that was taken a couple of years later. I'm showing it now because it's the only shot I have that illustrates the ample crawl spaces under the houses. There are no basements. I think it's because of the monsoons.
The weeks before my father came home there were no heavy rains. It was very hot. My Mother drank a lot and ignored me, allowing me to crawl around outside in a shirt with no diapers so she wouldn't have to ever change me. Just hose me off at the end of the day. To escape the heat I learned to crawl around in the space under the house. It was dusty but cool. I remember it being a huge relief whenever I could get in there, and I didn't mind that I wasn't near my Mother, except when I was hungry.
I don't remember it but the story is that I couldn't handle my Mother's milk and a doctor advised filling bottles with warm papaya juice, which I loved. What I do remember are solid food feeding sessions in a high chair filled with cursing and yelling.
Back before the heat wave when my Mother kept me in diapers in the house there were attempts to toilet train me. One feature of this early toilet training that stands out in my mind was that whenever I completed a bowel movement my Mother would say, "Look, you made a present for Daddy!" At the time I didn't know what the words meant.
With the heat wave the tension was reduced, thanks to neglect. My world almost collapsed into the shady world of the crawl space. It was like a return to the womb. Maybe I didn't miss my Mother because I'd rediscovered her in the earth. There were grubs and cobwebs growing in her, but I didn't know I was supposed to mind.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Technorati Sucks, Week 7
The new insult from Technorati is in the new way they signal to me that they still suck. It used to be that when I brought up "my" home page at Technorati they told me that my blogs had "no links yet." This was false, therefore they were still sucking, as demonstrated by putting that particular false information out. Now the false information takes the form "No authority yet."
Note the "ping" links. Here is where the problem with Technorati primarily lies. I click on the "ping" links and I get this sort of thing:
No problem I think, the pinging hasn't had a chance to take effect. I'll wait. And I wait. See where it says there's been no change in Adventures in Bloggery for 97 days? There's been change every pinging week! That's what the pinging is for! It's to tell them about the changes! 97 days is almost 14 weeks. That's at least 13 pings that have had no effect at all! I'm so fucking polite I didn't even complain about it for the first fucking 6 weeks that they did nothing! I only started complaining 7 weeks ago! Don't you wish you had me for a neighbor? I wouldn't bitch about your loud fucking parties with your loser trailer trash yahoos until the parties ran 6 fucking weeks! Only after listening to your dickwad buddies puke their guts in my nasturtiums for 6 fucking weeks, would I knock ever so gently on your door, and six days later, when you condescended to answer the door during a lull in the party, say, "Excuse me kind Sir or Madam, but would you mind please turning the volume of your stereo down? Please? I would be most appreciative."
That's how fucking nice I've been about this. Here's your Ping, assholes.
Note the "ping" links. Here is where the problem with Technorati primarily lies. I click on the "ping" links and I get this sort of thing:
No problem I think, the pinging hasn't had a chance to take effect. I'll wait. And I wait. See where it says there's been no change in Adventures in Bloggery for 97 days? There's been change every pinging week! That's what the pinging is for! It's to tell them about the changes! 97 days is almost 14 weeks. That's at least 13 pings that have had no effect at all! I'm so fucking polite I didn't even complain about it for the first fucking 6 weeks that they did nothing! I only started complaining 7 weeks ago! Don't you wish you had me for a neighbor? I wouldn't bitch about your loud fucking parties with your loser trailer trash yahoos until the parties ran 6 fucking weeks! Only after listening to your dickwad buddies puke their guts in my nasturtiums for 6 fucking weeks, would I knock ever so gently on your door, and six days later, when you condescended to answer the door during a lull in the party, say, "Excuse me kind Sir or Madam, but would you mind please turning the volume of your stereo down? Please? I would be most appreciative."That's how fucking nice I've been about this. Here's your Ping, assholes.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
The Red Bird
Two weeks after my first Christmas, around a week into January 1950, my Father had to go to Korea. The Korean War hadn't started yet but it was already a hot spot in the Cold War. My Father was apparently assigned to a cryptanalysis unit that was trying to decipher coded messages in the field to and from all the parties. I say apparently, because he took his oath of secrecy seriously and never told me or my Mother what he actually did there, except that he was in a tent typing a lot and got shot at after the war finally did break out. The sniper missed my Dad but shot out the light bulb that was hanging inches away over his head.
At the time, I knew nothing at all from wars or armies. One day my Dad drove us down to Honolulu and my Mother sat down with me in a downtown park, while my Father said his goodbyes, with a camera up to his face.
At first I was too cold to care. Hawaii is usually warm but it can get chilly sometimes and this was one of those days. It was January after all. My Mother put a hat on me to warm me up and I could pay more attention to Dad. Just then though, a red bird landed on a branch above me. He's just out of sight in this next picture, about 4 or 5 feet above and to your right. I heard the fluttering of his wings and looked up in time to see him land on the branch.
My Father didn't show any awareness of the bird. I was mesmerized by it. First it danced from one end of the branch to the other, then danced back again. I was starting to think I recognized my self in the creature, as if I was looking in a mirror, when he began to sing. When I heard his song I was sure that I had finally met someone who was like me, like what I was meant to be.
[Click the I'iwi to hear him sing. ]
All this time my Father was saying, "Say 'Goodbye Daddy', Goodbye Daddy!" over and over again as if he actually thought that I was going to say my first words at exactly that moment, and they were going to be precisely the words he commanded me to say. And I only heard him as an annoying background noise to my glorious new life's model. But I did hear him, somehow, and that would turn out to lead to salvation.
Finally, a khaki Army staff car drove up. Dad put his camera away and left.
As soon as he was gone my Mother shooed the bird away. "Stupid fucking bird, get out of here! Why'd the fuck you have to show up then? And you! You little filthy BRAT! Why couldn't you just say 'Goodbye Daddy'? Once! Creep." And she put me in our car and drove me back to the house in Schofield.
At the time, I knew nothing at all from wars or armies. One day my Dad drove us down to Honolulu and my Mother sat down with me in a downtown park, while my Father said his goodbyes, with a camera up to his face.
At first I was too cold to care. Hawaii is usually warm but it can get chilly sometimes and this was one of those days. It was January after all. My Mother put a hat on me to warm me up and I could pay more attention to Dad. Just then though, a red bird landed on a branch above me. He's just out of sight in this next picture, about 4 or 5 feet above and to your right. I heard the fluttering of his wings and looked up in time to see him land on the branch.
My Father didn't show any awareness of the bird. I was mesmerized by it. First it danced from one end of the branch to the other, then danced back again. I was starting to think I recognized my self in the creature, as if I was looking in a mirror, when he began to sing. When I heard his song I was sure that I had finally met someone who was like me, like what I was meant to be.
[Click the I'iwi to hear him sing. ]
All this time my Father was saying, "Say 'Goodbye Daddy', Goodbye Daddy!" over and over again as if he actually thought that I was going to say my first words at exactly that moment, and they were going to be precisely the words he commanded me to say. And I only heard him as an annoying background noise to my glorious new life's model. But I did hear him, somehow, and that would turn out to lead to salvation.
Finally, a khaki Army staff car drove up. Dad put his camera away and left.
As soon as he was gone my Mother shooed the bird away. "Stupid fucking bird, get out of here! Why'd the fuck you have to show up then? And you! You little filthy BRAT! Why couldn't you just say 'Goodbye Daddy'? Once! Creep." And she put me in our car and drove me back to the house in Schofield.
My First Christmas
I was 5 and a half months old for my first Christmas. I have a very clear memory from it. At the time I was generally put to sleep after dark in a crib in my parents room. One night my Father came to get me and set me down on the floor of the living room with the lights out. So I was crawling around in the dark. Then my Mother plugged the Christmas tree in. They had set it up when I was in their room, so I'd never seen it before. I'd never seen a lit up Christmas tree before. The resulting look of amazement was recorded on film by my Father. I had actually been set down directly under the tree so the lights were all above me. I remember dazzling tree over me, followed by a blinding flash, and loads of laughter.
Later my Dad would admit that he had read about setting up such a shot with your baby in one of his photography magazines. It hadn't been entirely his own idea. This was supposed to prove that he was a hack. The lesson I took from it is, you can get good ideas from magazines.
Here's a happy moment from that time.
Later my Dad would admit that he had read about setting up such a shot with your baby in one of his photography magazines. It hadn't been entirely his own idea. This was supposed to prove that he was a hack. The lesson I took from it is, you can get good ideas from magazines.
Here's a happy moment from that time.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Xenomania
Why are these people happy?
I don't know!
I am Xenomanic. I take sick perverse pleasure in subjecting myself to things I don't understand. Before my last bout of homelessness I had a large collection of awesome books in languages I couldn't read which I bought at cut rates from a guy who saved them from dumpsters. There were books in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Yiddish, Hungarian, and some kinds of African and Indian languages, plus some books in German and Spanish.
After having to sell those off in desperate need of cash and before the rise of non-English Wikipedias which I now use to satisfy my sick impulses, I had to indulge my appetites by searching for incomprehensible books at libraries.
I also looked for books and audio tapes with incomprehensible foreign titles at used book and music stores. Half Priced Books had a bin where they threw tapes that came in that no one in the store could make sense of. I could afford handfuls of them.
One tape I got my hands on was a tape of samples of folk music from the autonomous regions of China. It included a couple of selections from the Uyghur peoples of Xinjiang Province. [Click to see a xenomanic-friendly map.] Not knowing who the Uyghur peoples of the Xinjiang Province are made the music irresistible to me. I had to go to Suzallo Library at the University of Washington to find anything about them.
Here's what I found out at the time. The Uyghurs are modern settled descendants of certain Turkic tribes of Central Asia, which may or may not have all been formerly nomadic. They are namely the remnants of those tribes which made up what in historic retrospect is now called the Uyghur Empire, which stretched all the way from the Caspian Sea, maybe, to Manchuria, for sure, and was a dominant power in the region for a couple centuries until the year 840, when some other Central Asian people you hadn't heard of, the Kirghiz, as in Kirghistan or Kyrgyzstan or Kirgizistan, overran them. For the last millennium or so the Uyghur have been mostly Islamic and mostly living in Xinjiang Province, using an Arabic script, although there are Uyghur communities elsewhere that use Cyrillic and Roman alphabets.
Prior to the establishment of the aforementioned empire, the ancestors of the Uyghurs were most noted on the world stage for having been a part of the Hunnic empire and having quite possibly made up most of the mercenaries who formed the Hun invasions of Europe in the 5th Century. The Magyars of Hungary may be more Uyghur than Hun. Anyway, "Hungary" supposedly comes from a turkish word that means ten, as in ten tribes, not from "Hun", and nine of the ten tribes may have been Uyghur, for all anyone knows.
Hearing the music on the tape inspired me to create one of my theories. The theory is that the Gypsies, who are not Uyghurs, nevertheless came by Uyghur music in their travels in the region of Hungary, where it had taken root in the form of a variety of Hungarian folk music. While I am sure Gypsy vocal music has its roots in the area of Northern Indian where Romani originates, the theory is that the instrumental and dance music that is thought of as Eastern European Gypsy stems mainly from the Uyghurs, by way of the Attila connection. I'm not saying it didn't get changed in the process. As usual, I don't care if the theory is true, so it isn't important to disprove it. If I thought it was true I'd lose interest in it. That's how Xenomania works.
Here's a supposedly Uyghur song I don't understand that I think makes the theory seem plausible.
I don't know!
I am Xenomanic. I take sick perverse pleasure in subjecting myself to things I don't understand. Before my last bout of homelessness I had a large collection of awesome books in languages I couldn't read which I bought at cut rates from a guy who saved them from dumpsters. There were books in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Yiddish, Hungarian, and some kinds of African and Indian languages, plus some books in German and Spanish.
After having to sell those off in desperate need of cash and before the rise of non-English Wikipedias which I now use to satisfy my sick impulses, I had to indulge my appetites by searching for incomprehensible books at libraries.
I also looked for books and audio tapes with incomprehensible foreign titles at used book and music stores. Half Priced Books had a bin where they threw tapes that came in that no one in the store could make sense of. I could afford handfuls of them.
One tape I got my hands on was a tape of samples of folk music from the autonomous regions of China. It included a couple of selections from the Uyghur peoples of Xinjiang Province. [Click to see a xenomanic-friendly map.] Not knowing who the Uyghur peoples of the Xinjiang Province are made the music irresistible to me. I had to go to Suzallo Library at the University of Washington to find anything about them.
Here's what I found out at the time. The Uyghurs are modern settled descendants of certain Turkic tribes of Central Asia, which may or may not have all been formerly nomadic. They are namely the remnants of those tribes which made up what in historic retrospect is now called the Uyghur Empire, which stretched all the way from the Caspian Sea, maybe, to Manchuria, for sure, and was a dominant power in the region for a couple centuries until the year 840, when some other Central Asian people you hadn't heard of, the Kirghiz, as in Kirghistan or Kyrgyzstan or Kirgizistan, overran them. For the last millennium or so the Uyghur have been mostly Islamic and mostly living in Xinjiang Province, using an Arabic script, although there are Uyghur communities elsewhere that use Cyrillic and Roman alphabets.
Prior to the establishment of the aforementioned empire, the ancestors of the Uyghurs were most noted on the world stage for having been a part of the Hunnic empire and having quite possibly made up most of the mercenaries who formed the Hun invasions of Europe in the 5th Century. The Magyars of Hungary may be more Uyghur than Hun. Anyway, "Hungary" supposedly comes from a turkish word that means ten, as in ten tribes, not from "Hun", and nine of the ten tribes may have been Uyghur, for all anyone knows.
Hearing the music on the tape inspired me to create one of my theories. The theory is that the Gypsies, who are not Uyghurs, nevertheless came by Uyghur music in their travels in the region of Hungary, where it had taken root in the form of a variety of Hungarian folk music. While I am sure Gypsy vocal music has its roots in the area of Northern Indian where Romani originates, the theory is that the instrumental and dance music that is thought of as Eastern European Gypsy stems mainly from the Uyghurs, by way of the Attila connection. I'm not saying it didn't get changed in the process. As usual, I don't care if the theory is true, so it isn't important to disprove it. If I thought it was true I'd lose interest in it. That's how Xenomania works.
Here's a supposedly Uyghur song I don't understand that I think makes the theory seem plausible.
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