The littlest colonialist

Well, I'm making my first attempt to post a picture to LJ. We'll see how well it works.

This is a picture of me and some neighbor kids in the Government Compound on Yap in the '60s. I'm not sure which year, but I appear to be closer to six than to ten, which was my age range out there. I turned six a few months after we moved out there in the summer of 1966.

These neighbor kids were not Yapese. They were Belauan (or Palauan, in those unreconstructed days.) Theirs were the first uncircumsized penises I had ever seen, although I didn't know that until I finally figured out at age eighteen that I was circumsized. I just knew theirs looked different from mine. Well, what does that matter when you have a gun in your hand?





(Click the picture for a larger version, if that's not obvious.)

Where the tattoos come from

Two more photos from Yap below the cut. My dad, brother, and I visit a faluw -- a men's house. I was completely fascinated by this guy's full-body tattoo. Is this why I ended up getting tattoos decades later? Nah, that was just me being a trendy grunge rocker dude. Still find his tattoos utterly fascinating and beautiful, even in a bad photo.

These are obviously later than the other one, because I'm browner and blonder. The effect of the tropical sun, in both cases.

Yapese men no longer get tattooed like this. It was part of an elaborate, lifelong initiation process that is now a thing of the past. In fact, it was already a thing of the past when these photos were taken. None of the Yapese of my age have tattoos like this.

( Two dark, blurry snapshots from yesteryear ... )

Now with added blade runner

Or reduced replicants, as the case may be. I saw the "Final Cut" of Blade Runner at the Cinerama today. It looks and sounds amazing there. The differences seemed to be more in the way of corrections than changes. It seemed very much the same movie as the old Director's Cut. They corrected the number of replicants Bryant says are loose at the beginning from five to four -- that sort of thing.

This is the fourth version of the film I've seen on the big screen. I once saw the workprint at the Egyptian when it was shipped by mistake instead of the Director's Cut. That's the one they showed to a couple of test audiences before they decided to add the narration and happy ending to the original theatrical release.

Anyway, great to see it at the Cinerama. The soundsystem there really brought out the imaginative way that sound is used to shape our perception of what's happening. I'd never noticed the sound of buzzing flies when Roy Batty chases Deckard through the Bradbury Building at the end -- evoking his decaying body? Hm, maybe that was one of the changes ...

It's a limited showing at the Cinerama in advance of a DVD release in December. Well worth seeing, if you're a fan of the movie or have never seen it before. One of my all-time favorite movies.