| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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i enjoy it anytime. it is easy to please. right now i am listening to "tigermilk" soon i will put in "if you are feeling sinister." i can't say no. it makes me think of grocery store entryways. don't know why. |
my special friend put that on one of the tapes he made for me. kissing just for practice "I don't think you could be dealing with the situation very well you take a lover for a dirty weekend that's ok when it's over you are looking at the working week through the eyes of a gigolo oh-oh-oh" we're seeing other people, at least that's what we say we are doing |
i love that song!! there is another good one on there called "me and the major." with a nifty harmonica riff goin' on. it makes me want to sort of wiggle around. "you're kissing your elbow, you're kissing your reflection. and you can't understand why all the other boys are going for the new tall elegant rich kids. you can bet it is a bitch kid. but if they don't see the quality than it is apparent that you're gunna have to change, or your gunna have to go with girls. you'd be better off at least they know what they're doing." story of my life. |
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sorry, but i just gotta know... |
there was definately a negative condentation with my milano baby. if that is what you are asking. i can't spell, Swine. i can't do it. i don;t know if i really want to deep down or what. i know that when i typed that i was trying to think of the word. but i knew it couldn't be condensation cause that is like evaporated water or something. and in case you were wondering my milano baby is in the pantry. |
it's just that sometimes you remind me of that eddie murphy skit, so i feel obligated to bust your balls. not that i'm insinuating you have a pair of balls or anything... cuz, y'know, if ya did... that'd be okay, too. i need to do something about my blood sugar levels. in the meantime, check this out. |
and if i did indeed have balls, i don't know if we would be having this conversation. heck i don't really think i would be doing any of the things i have done with my life if i indeed did have said balls. maybe i would be a star and be doing porno. one thing is for sure, i wouldn't let you bust them. my career would go down the drain, i would no longer have a hook. just some kinky black girl. that isn't exciting. and about the site. i hate that crap. like when i would ask my mother how to spell something and she would say look it up. from the things i have done and said here, you can imagine where it comes from. i blame my mother. look this up! |
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if you like belle and sebastian, check out looper. |
their name is synonymous with their music. only a three piece yet on some songs they have as many as 11-12 guitar overdubs.....good brit,space noise rock they disbanded in the late 80s, so their stuff is kinda rare, but Wax and Facts in L5P should have plenty of vinyl copies and cds |
I think you messed up the very best line in the song. it's about two gay guys who are pretending they're not in love or whatever ("we're seeing other people, at least that's what we say we are doing"). "or you're gonna have to go with girls -- you'd be better off, at least they know what they're doing" but I think that last part really goes: "at least they know WHERE TO PUT IT" anyway, I hope that's what he's saying. because that part always made me laugh. back when I could listen to that tape, WHICH IS FULL OF LIES. he knew goddamn well how meaningful a compilation tape is. shithead. sweetheart. |
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that is a cute name i think. i would like to date a guy named Nicolas, Sebastian, Patrick or James. those names roll off my tongue nicely...as would he. |
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there was this semi retarded half-japanese kid in my elementry school named patrick. i remember him crying because of all the violence in treasure island. when you're in 6th grade pirates are supposed to kick ass. someone's mom fucked someone up. |
My nostrils are 2mm thick. |
you would have to recall the retarded/shortbus/kid story wouldn't you? i am not an animal |
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i had a first date yesterday with a guy named Patrick. he bought me lunch in a breezy lunchy thai food joint on the edge of chinatown in the heart of honolulu. we ate behind the restaurant, in a courtyard oasis with ficas trees and grass and folding chairs. we kissed. and he called me before i even made it back to my office to tell me he had a great time. he left me his email, so i wrote and told him the same. i told him about stopping at starbucks on the way back to get a piece of chocolate. his response: i like the way you kiss, too. how's that for getting it? and he wrote he wants to see me again tonight. so we're going to see each other tonight, hopefully. if he gets my message. he's out today shooting an independently produced black and white film project he's working on, and i have paddling practice after work. on my lunch hour today i bought new sheets. i'm looking ahead a few weeks, yes. but it made me happy that i felt i could look ahead. jersey sheets, too. white. |
my middle name has proven to be quite dynamic. kim, kym, kymberli ann, kymsi, kymmi and everyone's favorite kymical. but my first name was just a disaster. i think only people familiar with french are able to pronounce it. and when people hear it they can't spell it. kind like a catch 22, tho not really. everyone is surprised that i go by my middle name. what is that all about? do most people go by their first name? this is something new to me. that and finding out that some gay men like female breasts. everyday i learn more. i had a friend named patrick. he was cute. he had long hair. he is in my band. turns out i have known him for over 10 years. that is my longest friend to date. |
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There's really two sounds there: there's the "uh" sound, which is like the schwa; and there's the "w" sound. Well, that takes two characters. In my language, every character is only one sound. The long "A," for example: that would be like an "e" and a "y." So I have two characters representing that. Now, take short vowels, like "a," "e," "i"-those are single sounds and I have single characters. So I have more vowels represented in my language than most languages. And also, sounds like the hard "th" sound-that's one character in my language, not two. And there's a difference between the characters for a soft and hard "th," or "ch." But anyway... that's kind of the idea. All the vocabulary words are, obviously, created by me. They're not derived from anything else, but they have a logic to them. If you were learning colors, for example, let's say the suffix to colors was "e," and then the alphabet, let's say, went from "A-Z." The first consonant, therefore, being a "B," would be the lightest color. So, in that case, "B"-"Be" would be white. You would know, before you even know my language, what does "Z" mean? It would be black. So if you heard "Le," you know that's somewhere in the middle, maybe that's like orange. And like, "De," for example, would be like yellow. It would go in order of a prism. So everything has a structure to it. If it were states, it could be geographically, north to south, east to west, largest to smallest-there would be some kind of order to every grouping that exists. Let's say "je" was "I," and "ej" was "you." Well, "jej," the combination of those two, would be "us," or "we." That's not actually the case, that's just an example. That's how the language itself is structured. And the numerical characters-it would take me two minutes to teach you in arabic numerals how to write 1-9, because they all have weird things and you have to memorize the shapes. In mine, there's no memorization at all; I could show you once, it'd probably take you 15 seconds to write down my numbers 1-9, and you'd never forget it because there's a perfect logic to the shape. It's just an incredibly, ridiculously, logic approach to a universal language. And even the sounds: you have fricates and plosives and liquids and all of this. The Japanese, for example, have trouble with the two liquids, which are "l" and "r," so that's taken into consideration in my language, as well. Or sounds like "zh," which is not even really a sound, specifically, in the English language. It's more a French sound. I mean, you do get it in the English language from time to time. [Like "jejune."] Right. These are actual sounds that are very easy. So even though they're not in our language, they are in my alphabet, they are in my universal language. So that's it, sort of in a nutshell. [So this is just a project of yours?] Yeah. That will be completed. And my friends, at the very least, will end up learning my language. So, I'll have somebody to speak with. And I also speak backwards, you know, with each word. Like "Can you talk backwards" would be "Nac uoy klat sdrawkcab." "If you can, then start talking": "Fi uoy nac, neht trats gniklat." So, sounds, characters, things like that, I've always had an affinity for. It's something that's ongoing. But I can't wait till my whole language is completed and my friends and I are able to communicate with one another in this private, cryptic way. But I hope it gets bigger. I mean it'll be published in a book, I'd love for people to actually buy the book and learn the language and learn how simple and logical it can be. Who knows, maybe there'll be a huge following, since it will be so simple. Maybe there will be a huge following of speakers. |
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Have you ever heard of Esperanto? I think there is a lessonto be learned there. |
Now, Indonesian is considered one of the most simple languages ever created. I went to live in Indonesia, actually, for six months, and I'd learned the language -- I was fluent before I left. So when I got there I could speak and say anything. And actually, it is an amazingly simple language. If there's a plural of a word, like bicycle -- "cepeda" -- you just say the word twice: "cepeda cepeda." And you don't have past perfect or future perfect tenses. You say "I go to store." I go to store before, I go to store now, I go to the store later. It's that simple. |
James Ronald Whitney turns the camera on his darkest secrets in a stark new documentary By Andrea Basora NEWSWEEK Jan. 25 — The hardest film to watch at Sundance this year, far outweighing the horrors of “American Psycho,” is a quiet little documentary entitled “Just, Melvin.” First-time filmmaker James Ronald Whitney has turned the camera upon his own family in order to tell the searing tale of a child molester — his own grandfather. HE DOCUMENTS in vivid and horrifying detail the pattern of abuse carried out by Melvin Just and how it devastated the lives of his children, step-children and grandchildren. As the result of years of abuse, Whitney’s own mother was suicidal for much of his youth; most of his aunts have turned to alcohol, drugs or prostitution. Ron Whitney himself survived by moving in the opposite direction, becoming a relentless overachiever. When he is not making documentaries, playing his piano or composing music, Whitney works at his day job as vice-president of a large Wall Street firm. What motivated Whitney to take on such a sensitive and personal project? “The bottom line: You don’t mess with a boy’s mother, because one day the boy’s going to grow up, he’s going to be a man and he’s going to kick the ass of the person who messed his mother up,” Whitney says. “I had this hatred for Grandpa Just, and I wasn’t doing anything about it. Nobody believed my aunts and my mother when they told their neighbors, friends, counselors, teachers, [and] the authorities what happened. People just wanted to look the other way. It was a small town, Grandpa was the local mechanic, he had the junk yard with all the scrap metal, so nobody wanted to create any waves.... So this [film] gave them an opportunity to finally tell what Grandpa Just did to them, to get those dirty little secrets out of the closet. Since the criminal justice system was not going to try him and convict him the way we wanted, our family had to do it. We got to serve as the witnesses and the public gets to serve as the jury, so to speak.” “Just, Melvin” goes into the particulars of the abuse in relentless detail. It is hard not to flinch when Whitney’s Aunt Pambi, who was born with no knee joints or hip sockets, tells how Melvin crushed her crippled legs while molesting her, or when another aunt recalls how their mother took her baby sister June’s diapers off before putting her in bed with Melvin. LIFE, HOWEVER DYSFUNCTIONAL, GOES ON Advertisement Quick Gifts Swimwear Books Music & Video Computing Electronics Toys & Games More . . . Despite its brutal subject matter, “Just, Melvin” has moments of fun and humor. There are campy clips of Whitney in ’80s garb dancing on “Star Search” and winning game shows -- his own way of distracting himself from his problems. And there are scenes of the aunts cracking jokes around a picnic table and turning cartwheels on the lawn, demonstrating that, however dysfunctional, life does go on. While making the film was about working through family issues, Whitney hopes it will serve a more far-reaching purpose, sensitizing people to the issue of child abuse and the dangers of looking the other way. “Three children die each day from parental mistreatment,” Whitney says. “It’s not the children who are going to change that statistic, it’s the people in the audience that become sensitized, that realize, ‘this might be going on with my next door neighbor — I should do something about it.’ But selfishly, I got to bring Grandpa Just to trial.” And the examination is extraordinary. |
the guy is crazy-brilliant. he used to be a dancer and an actor, and he's also a composer, and a documentarian and a filmmaker, plus he's vice president of some wall street brokerage, a self-made millionaire, a former game show and star search whiz kid, plus in his spare time he's creating his own language and numerical system. I mean, goddamn. |
[my friend: Do you think we need a universal language?] JAMES RONALD WHITNEY: I don't care, quite honestly. We certainly need a lot of other things more. But that has nothing to do with my motivation. I love sound, I love linguistics, I love languages in general. And I dislike the exceptions to them. My least favorite thing about learning a new language is memorizing the exceptions. Why do we have them? So, that's my goal, anyway. It's no different from doing a crossword puzzle or a game show. A puzzle is a puzzle. This is a huge puzzle. [My friend: Have you ever experienced a moment of self-doubt?] JRW (long pause): Well, if your question is, 'can you recall one off the top of your head?'... I would have to say, certainly I've experienced that, but-- be more specific. [my friend: You radiate such self-confidence both in the film and on the phone. You do so many things...] JRW: I think the short of it is: most people have this incredible respect for society. Some even try for status quo. But other people, just in general, they care what society thinks. I don't give a damn what society as a whole thinks; I actually don't have that much respect for society as a whole, a) because I don't know them, so there's nothing personal with this unknown, huge, vast entity of foreigners to me. There's no relevance to what society thinks. And also, in my mind, society -- for the sake of an example -- represents the grade of "C" on a bell curve. I never looked at a "C" as a respectable thing anyway. A "C" would've been an embarrassment to me. A "B" was not an acceptable thing to me. And the people who get "A"s, when you look at a bell curve, are this little tiny minority. That typically -- and this is just for the sake of an example -- that typically represents the same ratio of people for whom I probably have this incredible amount of respect. It's a very small group. My standard for respcting certain people vs. others, there's really not a lot of consistency to it. I don't talk to many people about a lot of things to get a lot of opinions about a lot of things, because I don't respect most opinions I would get from the average person. So when I do seek out an opinion, it's from somebody for whom I have an incredible amount of respect, can't wait to see what they think or feel about an idea I'm throwing their way -- I really care about it. A lot of your questions have been, you know, "are you concerned with what people may think...?" No. I don't know "people." Am I concerned with what my friend Julie may think? I'm not concerned with it. At all. If I'm doing something it's what I feel conviction for. Am I interested in knowing her opinion? Absolutely. Even the movie critics -- I'm glad they're saying nice things about the film, because from a marketing standpoint, it helps. But I don't particularly care, one way or another. I don't feel any better or worse about a project I'm involved in because of other people's opinions. Has little to no effect on me, in the end. I mean, if nobody learns my language, for example, that's ok; I'll know it. And I'll just talk to myself. Also, I don't fear anything. I absolutely love failing. It's great, because first of all, you're going to learn from failing, and secondly, it shows that you're doing more than you can really handle. It's like going down a ski slope: if you don't fall from time to time, you're just there for pure recreation. Not challenge. I don't live life for recreation, whatsoever. That would be so boring to me. I live by and for challenge. Even when I travel. I don't go on "vacations." I go to Third World countries. I go to Bangladesh and live with the poor for a while. Or India, Afghanistan. Iran and Iraq, I went during the Iran-Iraq war, just because I'd never been to war. That's like challenging, incredible stuff to me. I mean if my leg had gotten blown off, that would've been horrible. But you know what: I would've had this unbelievable experience as well. So, ultimately, if you're kicking ass in life, you're making all kinds of mistakes and getting all kinds of limbs blown off. So there you have it. |
My bad. Apologies for coming off like a dick. "So, ultimately, if you're kicking ass in life, you're making all kinds of mistakes and getting all kinds of limbs blown off." There's an apt description of life if I ever heard one. Perhaps JRW should go to, where was it, Guatemala, Panama? where deaf children back in the 70s made up their own sign language, without exposure to ASL. I saw a report on it on either "60 Minutes II" or Dateline. There's probably something to learn from them. Should study the various creoles in the Carribean as well. |
I wonder is JRW would love to learn languages so much if they were all as simple and orderly as his own. what would be the challenge in that? |
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EVERY TIME YOU TURN on a TV or enter a book store, you can find someone confessing a sordid tale of childhood abuse. We're so inured to the horrors of other people's lives (to say nothing of our own)--the clamor of voices trying to shock us into pity and fear--that very little can legitimately be called shocking anymore. James Ronald Whitney's documentary Just, Melvin, which chronicles the legacy of sexual abuse across three generations of his hyper-extended American family, is, in fact, profoundly shocking. As each of Melvin Just's nine daughters and stepdaughters (Whitney's mother, aunts, and cousins) tells her story of constant molestation, each more unimaginably horrible than the last, a critical mass accretes: How can this possibly have been allowed to continue? And as we learn the hows and whys--and hear more evidence of Melvin's evil ways (including a compelling argument that he was a murderer)--we are confounded, disturbed, destroyed. All the women have been thwarted, but all have survived--some better than others. Though the youngest is nearly 40, and at least half of them are drunk, high, or homeless throughout, it's clear that every day of their lives is spent in reaction to the unshakable (and heretofore unacknowledged) events in their childhoods. Sordid though the content may be, what distinguishes the film as a work of art is its versatility of tone: Whitney cuts from victims' tearful revelations to campy footage of himself winning obscure game shows and dancing on Star Search. This absurd disjunction seems irresponsibly flippant at first, but as the film progresses (and as I watched it a second and third time), it takes the shape of a necessary intrusion of hope--in a peculiar form, perhaps, but hope nonetheless. Along with footage of the women laughing and clowning around, theseinterludes show that the dominant intent of the piece is not to generate pity, but to reveal honesty, and to redeem the struggle of muted human beings who've spent a lifetime trying, one way or another, to speak. I interviewed director James Ronald Whitney by phone as he was preparing for the first SIFF screening of Just, Melvin, which was to be attended by the women chronicled in the film. For all but two of them, it would be their first time seeing the film. Are you at all worried about what their reaction is going to be? Do you worry that they might think the film is exploitative? Not at all. First, I don't worry about things in general. My heart and soul was in this. [The daughters] had one huge concern, and that was that it was going to be a film that ultimately could help other kids, that could be sort of an awakening, a wake-up call to society. This is so far surpassing what they ever thought they'd be doing to help out other people; they'll be thrilled to death. I mean, we're going to definitely have some fights around the dinner table... "Why did you put that in the film?!" And I hope so. Otherwise, it's not as incredibly honest as I needed it to be. And they're also very resilient people. They've gone through so much, obviously. The fact that something positive can come out of that mess.... I think they're going to be excited about it. These are the most intensely personal things that people can talk about, even in private, much less in front of a movie camera. But their candor is totally shock-ing. Did they go along with the idea of the film right away? For my family, it wasn't James Ronald Whitney, director, they were talking to--it was their cousin or nephew, Ronny. I think in the back of their minds they were thinking, "this is a wonderful project for him, but probably not going to amount to anything." Also, because they're typically not sober people, they always kind of live in a fog. So a lot of the emotion you see there is their everyday realities--their real foggy emotions. I knew that when I was filming them, I just wanted them to be themselves. I didn't want any kind of control. I wanted it to be horribly honest. |
A jackhammer gut-punch of a documentary, James R. Whitney's confessional feature is a family album from hell starring his own dynasty of dysfunction. Imagine a V.C. Andrews horror paperback inbred with David Lynch, John Waters, and Luis Bunuel. Rape, murder, suicide, addiction, incest, genetic damage, karaoke, auto mechanics, and TV game shows. Whitney's once-lusty grandma, now withered, bedridden, and possibly tortured by her, uh, caregiver, was married five times (but "only four different guys," she assures). One of the prizes she brought home was Melvin Just, junkyard owner, Bible reader, and avid child molester whose sick appetites engulfed their extended Pacific Northwest family beginning in the 1950s. Authorities were unable or unwilling to interfere, and now Just's relatives and casualties litter the region, drunk in trailer parks, turning tricks, and/or fantasizing about different ways to kill the man who rotted the family tree. James and his mother escaped the worst, the boy into show business, appearing repeatedly on "Star Search" and now wielding a movie camera, the weapon by which he hopes to Get Even with Granddad. |
James Ronald Whitney: director/screenwriter/co-producer/co-composer/co-executive producer Now living in New York City, James Ronald Whitney was born in Las Vegas in 1963. In his formative years, Ron was a competitive wrestler, golfer, racquetball player and gymnast; an instructor of martial arts and dance; and an avid skydiver who raised three monkeys as he backpacked through more than 80 countries. During Whitney's travels, he learned to speak Indonesian, German, Esperanto, and bits of other langues, and he is presently creating his own universal language, alphabet and numerical system. At a young age, Whitney began his first career as a professional dancer which later included shows such as the popular "Fame," the campy "Dance Fever" and "Star Search," and the unforgettable "Chippendales," where he danced for a number of years during the 80s. This career was interrupted for a few years when, at 17, Whitney was awarded an appointment to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, where, as a cadet, he joined both the cheerleading squad and the gymnastics team. He left the Academy for Arizona State University with a full scholarship in economics. While on that cheerleading squad, he became president of his fraternity, opened a dance studio, earned tens of thousands of dollars as an undefeated CBS game show contestant while writing two game show treatments -- both of which he intends to one day host -- and resumed his career in the entertainment industry. At 21, Whitney married the tightrope walker from the "Cirque Du Soleil." They met while she was starring in "CATS," and they eventually became dance partners. Ron then opened up an enormous store called "Oscar's Wilde," where, as his customers shopped, he and his wife walked the tightrope over the patrons' heads, and performed routines on the trapeze he had mounted twenty feet up in the air. Eight years later, they divorced. For nearly a decade, Whitney has served as Vice President at a Wall Street firm, while -- after market hours -- working as a playwright and composer. He recently completed his first musical, "Yesterday's Tear," and the treatment and score for his second musical entitled, "Hoods." An accomplished musician, Whitney has composed more than fifty songs, and has a film-scoring company called "DID YOU SCORE?" with his music-writing partner. They recently completed the soundtrack CD for Whitney's first feature film, "JUST, MELVIN." "JUST, MELVIN" is Whitney's directorial debut. After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival 2000, it won the "Best Documentary Award" at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2000, the runner-up "Best Documentary Award" at the South by Southwest Film Festival 2000, the "Best Documenatry Award" at the South Beach Film Festival 2000, and the "Best Documentary Award" at the Newport Beach Film Festival 2000. In addition to directing and co-writing the music, he is also the screenwiter, co-producer, co-editor, and co-executive producer. In May of 2000, HBO bought the U.S. broadcast rights for "Just, Melvin" and this world premiere will air sometime before Spring of 2001. Ron is currently in production with two more films. The first (working title, "Love, Sharon") involves his long-time friend and former business-partner, Sharon. During her eight-year relationship with another woman, Sharon had a son. He is now four, and they live with her boyfriend, Pat. As a couple they are now involved in the "amateur adult" cyber-sex industry. His other film, "Dad," has already been mostly shot, and chronicles Whitney's father's side of the family. Whitney's father ran off with the best friend of Ron's mother and became a Hell's Angel when Whitney was only nine years old. He had not seen his dad for two decades, until last year when Ron sought him out for participation in "JUST, MELVIN." |
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