Octopussy, the “Amazing Eight Legged Cat” is owned by Shawn Clemons (Wheeling, USA) and though Octopussy died shortly after birth in 2001, its preserved body is exhibited by Clemons as a curiosity when he travels on business; it has also become the logo of his business “Eight Legged Cat Enterprises”. The Eight Legged Cat (kitten) has one torso, but nearly every other physical feature is duplicated. It has four ears, two tails and eight legs. Clemons was house-sitting for friends when their pet cat gave birth to several healthy kittens plus a black kitten twice the size of its littermates. It suffocated during birth, but Clemons was permitted to preserve the kitten in a bottle. Some people find the preserved the Eight Legged Cat fascinating, others find it disgusting and call for it to be buried.
THERE’S a very short, practically subliminal sequence in Melvin Van Peebles’s new film, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” in which a jaunty black shoeshine man polishes the shoe of his white customer by riding it with the seat of his pants. With his rear end more or less pointed at the face of the customer, the shoeshine man glides, half-dancing, back and forth across the toe of the shoe, mocking the shoe, his customer, himself, the conventional gestures of joyous sexual transport, and about 400 years of American social and economic history.
The shoeshine man grins the traditional good-darkie grin and the customer laughs, mostly with embarrassment. The white man knows he’s being made a fool of, and yet his shoes are being shined. The black man is completely aware of the spectacle he’s creating, but he’s performing the service for which a contract was made, while maintaining a franchise, ever so shaky, on his own sovereign independence.
“Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” however, is not about the shoeshine man. The film, which Van Peebles dedicates to “all of the black brothers and sisters who have had enough of The Man,” is about a black man who refuses to go on role-playing, who, quite literally, stands up to assert himself. Sweet Sweetback (Van Peebles), having been raised from childhood in a black, Southern California whorehouse, is the establishment’s Lucky Pierre, the indefatigable star of its nightly exhibitions who, through no fault of his own, is forced to beat up a couple of white cops and then escape to the Mexican border.
The Devil is a tireless predator. He tries hard to pluck lives from this world before they have the chance to make their peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ. This is the reason why he is referred to in the Bible as a thief” who’s come to steal, kill and destroy. Satan has been a killer of men and a stealer of souls for thousands of years. The Scriptures also describe him as both a” wolf” and a “roaring” lion.
And with these things in mind, I am writing today’s journal entry in memory of my friend, Edward Glowaski. Eddie died on or about March 15, 1982. His death occurred as the result of his being shot by a resident whose house he tried to break into. An elderly gentleman by the name of Fred Hammer, whom I believe was in his 70s, caught Eddie in the act of burglary and shot him with an unlicensed handgun.
The incident occurred at 37-68 97th Street in the Corona section of Queens, New York. Mortally wounded, Eddie was then rushed to a nearby hospital. He was shot around 10 P.M. and died the next day at approximately 2:30 A.M. Eddie was only 24-years old.
I met Ed Glowaski while we were both confined to the Kings County Hospital’s jail ward, which was located on Clarkson Avenue on the top floor of the building. This was in Brooklyn, New York, in 1977.
In Planet Simpson, Chris Turner quotes Bart’s revelation to Lisa that he sold his soul to Milhouse for five dollars and used the money to buy sponges shaped like dinosaurs. After Lisa criticizes Bart for selling his soul, Bart responds: “Poor gullible, Lisa. I’ll keep my crappy sponges, thanks.” Turner comments “Here Bart is the epitome of the world-weary hipster, using the degraded language of modern marketing to sell off the most sacred parts of himself because he knows that some cheap sponge is more real, hence more valuable, than even the loftiest of abstract principles.”
The Otebi Fire Festival in Fukuyama, Japan involves teams of young men carrying large bundles of burning sticks up to a temple. During this lengthy trek they swing the burning sticks around rather haphazardously in front of a large crowd of spectators who narrowly miss having more than their eyebrows singed! Each team chants and sings as the onlookers douse them with protective water.
The town of Shingu in Wakayama Prefecture also holds similar a fire festival on 14th July every year, where twelve mikoshi (portable shrines) are purified by fire under the spectacular Nachi waterfall, near Kumano Nachi Grand Shrine.
The Oasis (Oasis of Mosquitoes) The guard dog is guarding the adjacent plot quite normally, and then still unpaid, this section of track. Presumably, because the hole in the fence. The dog was always overshadowed by the heaped gravel track and watched as a hole (dig that it all appears to be on the hunt for some animals even had). When the dog was not there again, xxxxxx crawled into the hole and got stuck there. Hescreamed in panic and we pulled him out on his legs again. He said he had so cried because he remembered that the dog stuck in the same could occur again. He reported a bigger always be black. He said: “This is actually a dog-hole course on a space under the tracks!” Even if we did not really believed him, we helped the dogs dig holes to grow. He was right. Yes! We put another fence in front of the hole in the fence and fortified with iron rods in the ground. From then on, the dog was forever barred from the tracks. (One year we had let ourselves from terrorizing the dog, until we came up with this idea.) We dug a correct input (later also an output). We chillten and smoked from then on as always. And next spring, the hole was filled with running water. Over time, the inputs and outputs are always bigger and the water is always more. Soon, we called it not “hole” but “oasis” and then “mosquito haven.” Berlin 1997
You may have thought they’d staggered off for good some seven years ago, but Edina and Patsy are tottering back on to the telly, sweeties – with the expectation that they’ll be boozier and bitchier than ever, if such a thing is possible. Now in their 50s, age is unlikely to have mellowed them…
…And that is perhaps the problem with resurrecting the blithely hedonistic party girls. Like Men Behaving Badly, Absolutely Fabulous was a product of its time; of boozy all-day lunches, designer labels and general excess. As Saffy said to her mother, “I’m sorry, mum, but I’ve never seen what it is that you actually do.” Eddie: “PR. I PR things. People. Places. Concepts …”
Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco and spent his first few months in a boarding house in Chinatown with members of the Mandarin Theatre (his father was one of their comic actors). Another now dimly remembered fact about him is that just over a decade ago, Time put him on its list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, alongside such iconic company as Muhammad Ali, Che Guevara, and Mother Teresa. And what many of us never knew at all is that Lee honed the skills and philosophy that secured his place in history right here in the Bay Area.
Without specifically aligning himself with the region’s counterculture, Lee embodied many of its early-1960s ideals. Over the course of just a few years, while still in his early 20s, Lee challenged traditional authority within the Chinese community, joined with progressive-minded martial artists twice his age to spur the evolution of their craft, and had the legendary fight that drove him toward the supercharged street-fighting style and mindful, self-disciplined way of being that jolted the world to attention. “More than any other place,” says Lee archivist David Tadman, “the Bay Area was essential to the person that Bruce was.”
US Navy freighter USS Federal with dazzle camouflage, photograph likely taken on 16 Nov 1918
Dazzle camouflage, also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle painting, was a camouflage paint scheme used on ships, extensively during World War I and to a lesser extent in World War II. Credited to artist Norman Wilkinson, it consisted of a complex pattern of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other.
Miró created Still Life with Old Shoe in Paris over a four-month period of intense concentration, working from life for the first time in many years. The painting eschews simple categorization. It is both a still life and a landscape: the irregular back edge of the tabletop can be read as a horizon line. The objects are not to scale, and they are isolated in discrete cells, creating a formal rupture that calls to mind Miró’s work in collage. The color is acidic, highly saturated, and dissonant. For Miró this painting captured a “profound and fascinating reality.”
Life in Japan is certainly not a constant whirl of sushi, sumo, and tea ceremony, as many foreigners expect it to be. Everyday life is very different for the Japanese people and their overseas guests. How to define that life is the common problem faced by most cultural experts, with some coming close and others missing the mark completely.
When Figure 8 Productions started discussing a possible documentary about the bosozoku motorcycle gangs, one particular author came to mind: Karl Taro Greenfeld, who wrote “Speed Tribes”, a collection of short stories about young people living in the “real, sexy, gritty Japan”. The title of the book is a translation of the word “bosozoku” and, to date, the most fitting. It encompasses the gangs’ love for modified motorbikes, cars, and trucks, and the feeling of belonging that this common interest creates. The tribes of young men and women tell the story of a Japan that is never seen in the country’s tourism brochures. It’s a story that most adults brush off as youthful exuberance, as a fad, and yet the phenomenon persists to this very day. Not a month goes by without some mention of the bosozoku in national or local media.
Chan Hung’s brother is brutally paralyzed after a Thai boxing match when his opponent becomes incensed over losing the fight. Chan journey’s to Thailand to avenge his brother shame. Once there, bizarre occurrences lead him to a Buddhist monastery where he discovers a curse on his family. Chan is linked to a dead monk who, in the process of becoming immortal, lost a duel of magic with an evil wizard, who wanted him dead for killing one of his evil disciples. Chan must now take up where the previous monk left off and only if he defeats the dark magician will the monk attain immortality.
Hong Kong horror extraordinaire, Kuei Chi Hung directs the wildest horror movie of his long career as a director which began back in 1973. An assistant to the famous action director, Chang Cheh, Kuei co-directed the gritty and grimy modern day action tragedy, The Delinquent in 1973. From there, Kuei embarked on his own turning out some truly despicable motion pictures such as the exploitation classics, The Bamboo House of Dolls (1973) and Killer Snakes (1974).
