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In a rare poetic urge, I jotted this down a while ago while I was waiting for a train on a blustery autumn day, and thought I’d send it out into cyberspace…
a lonely bench on an autumn peninsula overlooking cool rippling waters watches a warm sunset painted across warms the horizon but the bench remains chilled and solitary contemplating visitors past |
| Untitled, © Juli Kobayashi 2007 |
Note that “Juli” is written in bold blue between ABBEY & ROAD – that’s my name, but I swear upon George Harrison’s and John Lennon’s souls (may they be rockin’ on in peace) that I did not write it!
This picture was taken in 2001, when I was on vacation, or shall I say, on holiday, in London. Since I’m a Beatlemaniac, I gleefully went on the London Beatles Walk, guided by Richard Porter (who’s been guiding Beatles walking tours for 15 years and was named “The Beatles Brain of Britain” twice in the early 90’s).
There was, of course, a stop on the tour at Abbey Road Studios so everyone can walk down the famous road and take pictures. The Abbey Road sign gets replaced a few times a year since devoted fans muck it up with graffiti and sometimes even steal it. When I went up to the sign, I was shocked to see my name, “JULI” already on it, spelled the way I spell it, without the “e”, in bold blue letters, smack dab in the center of the sign! A chill ran through me. An utterly absurd thought ran through my mind: What does this mean?! Was I meant to come here at this point in time?
Alright. A boring explanation is that there are plenty of other Juli’s without an “e” out there and one of them just happened to be there before me. There is no cosmic connection between the Fab Four and me. It was just a funny coincidence…
But what if there are no coincidences? Cue The Twilight Zone theme music!
Here is a video of me at a recent horse jumping lesson, riding the sweet, smart, hardworking, and sometimes fresh school horse, Cosmo. I love him so much I hope to have the means to buy him when he retires so I can feed as many carrots as he wants during his golden years.
When I was little, I loved horses so much that I dreamed of becoming a horse trainer and dressed up as a jockey in third grade. But, sadly, I never had the opportunity to learn to ride properly until I started English riding lessons about a year and a half ago. What prompted these lessons is an incident in Scotland. I went for a hack (hack=a slow pleasurable ride) with my friend at the Cairnhouse Riding Center on the Isle of Arran, thinking I knew how to handle a horse from trail riding years back. I was having a grand time, largely unaware that I was riding the horse so terribly that the hack leader finally stopped and said the horse “wasn’t used to being ridden like that” and that she didn’t think I’d “quite survive the rest of the hack.” She promptly radioed two girls to fetch me and lead me back to the stable with my tail tucked between my legs (my friend had to come with me too as she was not up to the leader’s standards either). Definitely one of the most humbling moments of my life. Although I still need a lot of improvement, I am now confident that if I go back to the Isle of Arran, I can hold my own! So here’s the short video of my jumping course:
If you can’t see the embedded video, please click here.
A brief self-critique/commentary for you equine enthusiasts: I am still struggling with my pacing, I need to sit straighter and arch my back more, my hands move too much and need to stay down, my heel position needs work, and my legs shouldn’t slide so much. Also, I tend to bounce off the saddle and my arms flop during the lead changes – disgraceful! And that’s just a start. But I have come a long way, and I’ve only had three falls that were painful/scary, but each time I got right back on and redid the jumps.
To watch a much more exciting video of show jumping, check out this breathtaking winning round from the 2005 World Cup Grand Prix at the Royal Winter Fair.
Lastly, my plug for the riding school that I love…If any of you are in the Newburgh, NY area, Gardnertown Farms is an excellent stable which offers English riding lessons, polo, summer riding camp, horse shows, and boarding. For more information, visit http://www.gardnertownfarm.com/ or call 845-564-6658.
I just had a dentist appointment and a crown put in, blech. On one hand, I consider myself lucky that the closest to torture I’ve ever gotten to is in the dentist’s chair. On the other hand, there’s never been any information I could give up to make the torture stop; I just have to sit there until they’re done with whatever they’ve got to do. I’ve spent quite some time at the dentist over the years, being rather unlucky with dentistry.
My earliest dental nightmare occurred when I fell on my face when I was a kid as I was hanging upside-down on the monkey bars, and both my front teeth were pushed back – yowwza! Thank God they were my baby teeth. And then came the braces for many years, oral surgery, and so on and so forth. I just think of Dustin Hoffman’s Marathon Man and tell myself that it will at least never come to that (knock on wood that I’m not ever kidnapped and tortured for information I don’t have by a crazy Nazi dentist!)
Oh, the horrors…that suction device with the horrid sound that never quite sucks up all the spit, the horrible tastes and that oh-so-spine-chilling electric drill. And to add insult upon injury, I had to shell out so much for this procedure that I could have bought 2-3 pairs of Manolo Blahnik’s for the price of one fake tooth — aka a crown. (And I don’t even own one pair of Manolo’s…is that fair?)
Alright, in all things being equal, I love my dentist. She’s very skilled, no-nonsense & fast, and I appreciate that she doesn’t make inane small talk and expect you to reciprocate when there are ten tools stuck in your novocaine-numbed mouth. So for being a sadist, she’s pretty cool.
After the tooth-drilling fun today, I decided to gather a mouthful, er rather, handful, of tooth related things in my post. I ended up reading way more on teeth than I ever wanted to know, but here’s a selected list for you, dear reader:
- The earliest known toothbrush dates back thousands of years. Known as a “chew stick”, this brush was made by chewing or mashing small twigs or tree roots until the fibers at one end became loose enough to form a rough brush. The cleaning surface had much the same effect as chewing the end of a toothpick. Some native Australian and African people living traditionally still clean their teeth with chew sticks. source >> (Hey, that’s just like in Clan of the Cave Bear – the book, not the movie — guess Jean M. Auel did her research)!
- False teeth date back as far as 700 BC. The Etruscans designed false teeth out of ivory and bone that were secured into the mouth by gold bridgework. Read more about the history of dental hygiene on about.com >>
- Disgusting news hot off the press – am I thankful I read this after my dentist visit: Dentist guilty of urinating in surgery sink >>
- Tooth Fairies: The tooth fairy seems to have originated in American folklore in the early 1900’s. I never believed in the tooth fairy. My brother and I were led to believe that our teeth magically transformed into quarters underneath our pillows…that’s perfectly logical, right? Santa comes down the chimney with gifts, and fallen baby teeth morph into money. No tooth-gathering fairy flying into our bedrooms for us, thank you… that’s just unrealistic. To check out the history of the tooth fairy, check out The Straight Dope.
- Elephants have the largest teeth in the world. An elephants’ tusks are actually modified incisors. Click here for an exhaustive list of sometimes-gross, sometimes-interesting oral trivia compiled by a dentist if you dare.
- Searching for a gift idea for the person that has everything? Do you just want to really freak someone out? I stumbled upon a site that sells “Bone Clones: Osteological Reproductions” where you can pick up a complete set of Megalodon Shark (prehistoric shark) teeth replicas for only $1600. They also sell replicas of all kinds of bones. Hey, to each his own.
- Funniest evil dentist in a movie: Steve Martin in Little Shop of Horrors
- Scariest evil dentist in a movie: Laurence Olivier in the aforementioned Marathon Man
- Most unappealing movie title ever (I can’t bring myself to watch this film despite its critical acclaim): The Secret Lives of Dentists
Finally, what about future developments in dentistry? Here’s my bet:
THOMPSON’S TEETH: The only teeth strong enough to eat other teeth!
CRUNCH cRunch CruNCH. The above is one of the commercials from the brilliant animated series Futurama. (It’s one of my all-time favorite shows…and there are new episodes coming to Comedy Central in 2008, I can’t wait!!) Of course, on wikipedia, someone has compiled a complete list of Futurama products if you’d like to peruse it.
OK, I’m done. I vow to NEVER write about teeth again on this blog.
This may seem extremely pretentious, to post a poem as my first post. I’ve chosen this, as this poem represents the beginning of my so-called creative career. I won’t say how many years ago this was (too many for my liking), but to get into film school, I made a film on my parent’s crappy 8mm camera (not even Hi-8!) – a visual interpretation of the following T.S. Eliot poem which I had written a 10-page paper of for my English class.
I slaved over this little short film, enlisting everyone from my mother as a driver/makeshift dolly operator as I hung out of the moon roof to shoot street lamps to my friend who stood in a skimpy slip in the snow to be the moon personified as a woman. I lost a boyfriend over how much time I spent on this little film, or rather, a supplement to my college application, but I see it as gaining a career.
What drew me to this poem was its imagery…mainly the moon, which is an image I still use often today. So here it is without further adieu. T.S. Eliot’s “Rhapsody On A Windy Night.”
Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.”
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.”
The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.
– T. S. Eliot
