Being There
Playlist of Being There
After death, I believe, we all go to the same place, where we were before the birth, and none of us is able to take anything from here to the other side, not even the consciousness: May 5th, 1821, and April 30th, 2945, were and will be all the same day to me, but how different was yesterday from today, because I am alive. Has the daily physical pain killed my soul and transformed me into a renegade who only hopes for a good death?
What's happiness? Is it only a brief moment of relief from the pain? In that case I shall be very happy as soon as I die. However, before that glorious day I wanted to catch a glimpse of a my real mother in this world. In 1992 I, as a penniless student, worked in an ice cream factory in order to save some money. After a couple of months I had enough capital to travel to Los Angeles from the other side of the world. I rented a wreck and, accompanied by a calif, drove on the roads of Malibu, but I didn't find her. Besides, she probably wasn't there for it was the spring of riots and curfews. Between two curfews I cycled from Santa Monica to the mountains and back, and when I eyed the scars of America's most costly and worst single riot with suspicion, I wondered if all this was just another Krystalnacht, The Night of the Broken Glass? There are millions of dropouts living in the ghettos. Half-Mexican, half-Afro-American LA is no exception. If the government organized a little controlled riot or even small war abroad, those little suckers would think that they had their fun and won't cause any real trouble. If I had spent travel money on then cheap shares in Nokia company, I would have become a millionaire by now.
From 1978 to 1989 I lived with my foster mother on a suburban island of Helsinki called Lauttasaari or Ferry Island. On the left at the bottom of the montage below you can see the map of my former home island, isn't it small Africa in shape? I have marked the place, where we lived, with a black arrow: that would have been somewhere in Somalia in this miniature "Africa", and the slaves of Punt don't need any Moses to lead them across the Red Sea, for several bridges join this rock to the mainland - a spot on a horizon is not a flying saucer but the water tower of Lauttasaari. Actually, it wasn't before in the early 1990s when I saw my first "nigger" in the streets of Helsinki after they received few thousands refugees from Somalia which had been plunged into anarchy. Before the Somalis, a Gypsy was the closest equivalent to the "nigger" in Finland, and häjyt from Kauhava were synonym for hooliganism, but now those in Finnish authority want to expel some of Somali refugees as hooligans.
In the Pygmalion-like comedy "Princesse Tam Tam" (D: Edmond Greville, 1935) Josephine Baker is a Jean-Jack Rousseau's mischievous but natural shepherd girl whose charm is polished by educated gentlemen. In real life "Miss Baker" wanted to create a "rainbow family" by adopting children from various races. A blond boy from Finland called "Jari" was one stripe in her "rainbow tribe". These French know how to integrate different people into them, or do they?
I am not a racist: I wouldn't categorize anybody's personal bad qualities with colour codes. Your body wouldn't produce enough vitamin D in the North if your skin was too tanned, and nowadays they add vitamin D to milk. However, there is something fundamentally wrong when a mother abandon her own children and adopts substitutes from other race just in order to look more "progressive".
My parents suck. When I was just ? years old they drove my
brother and I out to the country and just dropped...dumped us off.
I ended up being raised by a pack of wild dogs, now I wear an electric shock
collar.
My brother had it even worse. He was raised by a pack of cigarettes, now he has
cancer.
Mom, Dad, wherever you guys are, you suck!!
Mars Attacks! (D: Tim Burton, 1996) & Dumpy's Happy Holiday: the cars are burning in Paris, and it's the holiday season in Apple Harbor, and in the spirit of giving, the Barnes family -- Charlie, Pop-Up, and Farmer and Mrs. Barnes -- launch a charity drive for children in need. As always, Dumpy is ready to help, and soon his dumper is filled with gifts. But what starts as a local effort soon becomes an adventure with international impact. Free spirits--gifts? Now, what kind of attitude do these kind of stories teach to all those corrupt government officials in the developing countries?
In the bottom left-hand corner above you can see me, Marje, her sister and infant nephew by the Christmas tree. My foster mother and -aunt are like night and day: while Marje's life has been a complete mess, her little sister's life has always been in perfect order. In the middle below you can see the same nephew 15 years later, and he was still growing. I don't know what they have fed these people, but I'm still one inch shorter than Marje. Could it really be so that if you were weaned from your mother too early and given away like a puppy, your growth would be disturbed? On the other hand, I wasn't any regular beefeater, and when a new diet containing more protein was introduced into Japan from America after 1945, yellow fishermen's average length increased dramatically during one generation - no more just rice and fish heads. What would Marie Antoinette have answered if the common people had complained that they have no milk for the children? "Let them eat milk chocolate!", perhaps? Well, on the right below there was plenty of milk and glorious soup for me.
On the left below you can see a butcher who is Ari, my maternal foster uncle. He was the most stimulating person of my childhood. Ari is more light-coloured and taller than Anni's other children, and he probably is a seedling in our secret celebrity nursery garden. Same old metamorphosis again: mother of many, but father of few?! I have already compared my foster uncle with Attila the Hun in the chapter of Pain, but does Ari resemble Charlton Heston, doesn't he? At least Charlton's chin seems to be stronger than Ari's one, but is it just the fact that both men are very tall and muscular like the Nazi statue of a hero which makes me suggest that there must be certain resemblance between them? Some of Charlton Heston's movie characters have been Moses, Chinese Gordon and President Andrew Jackson. Heston-Hessen-Jackson-Jack: these names sound familiar to me, but a short guy like me (5ft 10in) should rather identify with President Martin Van Buren (5ft 6in).
In the bottom right-hand corner above Michael and John Darling are playing with the lost boys swords , and next to this "battle scene" I am wrestling with "Uncle" Ari like a crazy baboon although I don't obviously have any fair chance against young Charlton Heston - I must have seen "Planet of Apes" (D: Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968). "Cousin" Mika could give odds, but he's only watching. No, komiat pärjää aina vaikka isompiaan vastaan! I must say as a tribute to Ari that my childhood would have been really boring time without him.
Top right below you can again see Ari with his elder brothers. As you can notice, Ari does differ from other half-brothers. Same mother, different fathers? Below uncles you can see Ari with his wife, son and daughter. Ari's wife Hilkka strangely resembles President Clinton. Young Ari had been extremely charming and open-minded, but then he became a living-in son-in-law and now--well, I guess that petit bourgeois neurosis and dull daily chores would put down anybody. In East Bothnia they have a tradition of making bonfires at Easter in order to keep the witches away. In the middle below you can see a such bonfire on the field of Ari's farm, and doesn't Anni, who sits on a hay seat in the Easter field, bring to your mind our new Pope Benedict XVI? Maybe it is just the German blood in both of them that makes me to feel so.
Most if not all of us think that we have to hide our little failings behind lying and pretending, and when this little façade tips over under pressure, we simply get into a panic. Markku, Hannu and Ari, my maternal foster uncles, nearly pushed me over the edge in winter 2007. They accused my modest site of disparages the name of Yli-Pelkonen and threatened to sue me. Let's take a closer look at these brothers. Even a blind bat could see that Hannu (middle below) is Jaakko Yli-Pelkonen's grandson; it's rather ironic that Hannu has been regarded as the black sheep of the family, although he seems to be the most genuine Yli-Pelkonen. Charlton Heston is Christopher Leiningen in "The Naked Jungle" (D: Byron Haskin, 1954). Mr Leiningen's plantation is literally eaten by ants, his "heirs", as he bitterly describes these insects. Since "ari" means "ant" in Japanese, does this all mean that Uncle Ari is Mr Heston's heir? There is also very strange resemblance between Markku (left below) and Orson Welles. It's a pity that Markku doesn't have any beard that would make comparison with Mr Welles much easier. Although something like short and fat Pentti Jack is more like a Mexican type, tall Charlton as a Hispanic hero is confronted with Orson's corrupt police character in "Touch of Evil" (D: Orson Welles, 1958).
There is an ocean between Cornwall and New York, but only the man-made boundary line on the shallow river separated the Karelian Isthmus from St. Petersburg and Finland from Russia until 1944. In the middle below you can see two of my "Finnish cousins" from Uncle Markku's lot and two young Russian officers. Kjyllä, any difference is hardly noticeable! What is the meaning of this strange coincidence? Is somebody hinting that gentlemen occasionally want some privacy, but they don't need any borders? We are still little men who are afraid of alien invasion from Mexico, Russia or outer space, but for the being they are still only observing us, knowing our most intimate secrets...
...Sipoon sudet ja Äyräpään äpärät, perkele! The Finns executed everybody who couldn't pronounce "Äyräpää correctly" as a Russian spy during the Second World War, but nowadays only Helsinki City has boundary disputes with Sibbo, her rural district neighbour.
The Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance
Judges 12:1
The Ephraimites then mustered, crossed the Zaphon, and said to Jephthah:
Judges 12:2-3
Jephthah said to them:
Judges 12:4
And Jephthah mustered the men of Gilead and fought the Ephraimites.
Judges 12:4-5
The Gileadites defeated the Ephraimites and captured the fords of the Jordan.
Judges 12:5
Whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, 'Let me cross,' the Gileadites would ask, 'Are
you an Ephraimite?'
Judges 12:5-6
If he said, 'No,' they would say to him, 'All right, say "Shibboleth".'
Judges 12:6
If he said 'Sibboleth' because he could not pronounce the word correctly...
Judges 12:6
They would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan.
Judges 12:6
42,000 Ephraimites were killed on this occasion.
Orson Welles first gained wide notoriety for his October 30, 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Adapted to sound like a contemporary news broadcast, it panicked a large number of listeners who thought that the actual invasion from Mars was in progress. Maybe I am vain, but Tuomari (Judge) Nurmio's song Punainen Planeetta (Red Planet) connects the cosmic visions to the Finnish country life in a way that makes me thing that there is something personal in these lyrics:
Anna anteeksi eno että katosin
Forgive me uncle that I disappeared
sanomatta sanaakaan
without saying a word
en tahtonut navetan piikaa
I didn't want the maid of cowshed
syliini kikattamaan
on my lap to giggle
en sietänyt silakan hajua
I couldn't stand the smell of herring
ja koirien haukuntaa
and the barking of the dogs
en jaksanut lypsää lehmää
I wasn't able to milk the cows
viideltä aamulla
at five o'clock in the morning
navetan piika
the maid of cowshed
kikattaa liikaa
giggles too much
ja nukahtaa heti
and falls asleep straight away
jos ei sitä kutiteta
if you don't tickle it
minä valvoin aamuun asti
I stayed up to the morning
ullakon kamarissa
in the attic
ja katselin putkeni läpi
and observed through my tube
punaista planeettaa
the Red Planet
otin käskyjä vastaan kaukaa I received
orders from faraway
viisailta olennoilta
wise creatures
jotka käyttävät vaivattomasti who easily use
valtavaa energiaa
huge energy
minä painoin mieleen kaiken I
memorized everything
unessa opetetun
that was thaught in a dream
alusten aikataulut
the timetables of the ships
reitit ja asemat
routes and stations
baarit ja käyntikortit
bars and visiting cards
tullit ja valuutat
customs and currencies
eno hyvä meitä kutsuu
dear uncle, the Red Planet
punainen planeetta
is calling us
siellä tyttöset laulavat lalalaa there
the girls are singing lalalaa
vaikene kaikesta tästä
be silent about all this
ja pakkaa tavarasi
and pack your bags
me lähdemme yhdessä matkaan together we take a trip
kohti punaista planeettaa
towards the Red Planet
Well, I guess that it was also written in the movie-stars that "Uncle Arkadin" will sue me. Finnish legislation would undoubtedly provide plenty of tsarist decrees if my tormentors "legally" wanted to oppress their victim onto the verge of despair. I'm so frustrated. Do they, who started the greatest conspiracy show on Earth, still wait until their experiment will justify itself? First I am practically kidnapped, and then they will wait that "the law" will get the kid?! Now I feel like being a captured rat in a small cage where other rats try to gnaw me. Maybe I should break out, buy a one-way ticket to the Middle East and take a long walk to the desert in which a man might disappear, come to nothing and never to be seen again. Today's world is not any more for the hermits: sands would probably drink my blood and vultures eat my flesh. When I was poisoned and very close to my own death in the winter of 1991, I became conscious that the violent end of a healthy body is always horrible. Whether you die of hunger, mutilation or poison, the death throes are never a comfortable moment before you fall into sleep: you just desperately count your every deep breath and try to take hold of anything that might keep your heart beating. It would be a lonely and miserable end, but is the continuation of this pig-headed idiocy any better when exposed conspirators won't confess anything? When the truth is not on you side, you can always morally try to destroy your opponent with the coercive measures and/or involuntary commitment. We have a long and shameful history of that kind power-hungry behaviour here in our beloved DDR of the North.
Top below you can see the barracks of Helsinki-Malmi Airport. They demolished the building that had been our home in the early 70s: I can remember how the dishes were dropped onto the floor by the blows of sledgehammer, because we were still staying in the one end of the barracks when they were already pulling another end down. We keep sleepy pet badgers in Finland, and a barracks are like a badger dog in shape. As the result of spring riots in Helsinki, May 2006, a badger dog like condemned store house was burnt to ashes when winter storms had given way to Maytime. I went to photograph this spectacle since I was here, and a drunken hooligan, whose name was "Pekka", spat at my camera on the scene. Although I could have offered a hellish horse kick with my docker's reinforced boots, I didn't allow myself to be provoked to do something foolish. After all, Pekka didn't spit at me, and his sober friends separated him from me more tactfully than any cop ever could. Besides, policemen on the spot were mainly worried about their own safety.
While climbing the stairs of Kasbah, a drunken bastard is tormented by the little chasers of FN--LN top left below. Our little "family" lived in Panelia Street for the last six months before Pentti and Marje Jack's divorce in 1976. I regard my early years as the member of the Helsinki-Malmi airport-community as the happy period, because I was surround by the company of friendly children like me, but the new street address made the others to disappear. How lonely and unhappy child I was suddenly and I am still irrationally afraid of dark, because I was regularly left alone at a gloomy house, but the worst was to come later at the mercy of the company of bullies. In the bottom left-hand corner below you can see the staircase to the local pub near "Paneliantie".
After school Max and I got a same kind of student's cap. Before reading my next far-going conclusions, can you find my face in the crowd of all Johnsons on the right below? Just a free association: Max und Moritz--von Hessen?
What would be Easter without chocolate eggs! Top right below you can see again the soap bubble party on the Malmi staircase in my happy days, and three fair-haired children are Tiina, Petri and me. Top left below you can see Max von Sydow with his cousins. When I take a look at both top pictures, I start to think that maybe I am not genetically so isolated as I have thought. What Julie and Max were doing in Hawaii few years before I was born? Do I have big half-sister and -brother who could be opposite-sex twins if Tiina wasn't one reproduction season older, or did Julie have time to become pregnant three times before the cock crowed in the busy 1960s? Mad-Max, Ti(i)na Turner and the lost children in the middle of Australian desert at Midsummer, but how could we survive without the Aboriginals' ancient skills or candy machines? This is already getting too wild or should I say Skåne goose chase! However, it would be much safer to be Julie's second-born rather than first-born son in the presence of pestilences like the bird flu. Only God and conspirators know how many elder half-brothers and sisters I have if any. However, if we were truly Julie's triplets, we were put up for adoption separately into the far corners of the Disneyland.
Hmm--Max von Sydow doesn't have any known brothers or sisters, but he does have a lot of cousins, and he has said if you don't exactly know who you are or what you want, you will probably end up as an actor. On the left below you can see a young boy who is officially one of my country cousins. His name is Tero. A "stork" brought him from somewhere and dropped here in 1985, when Julie Andrews was 49 years old. I think that he is actually my little half brother: we have the same mother, Julie Andrews, but different fathers, and I must say that he is the spitting image of our mother - see her as a "performing violinist" below. Although his father, Ari, is also my foster uncle, Julie and Ari are not genetically any close relatives, and Julie's boys are like Caligula and Gemellus, equally brothers and cousins. Tero's official birthday is September 9th - and that happens to be the national day of North Korea as well. Since the science of medicine was already advanced enough from Dr Mengele's days, Tero probably wasn't delivered to this life in a basket but he might have been a test-tube baby, who spent first months of his life in a foster mother's womb, although the egg cell had come from Julie's ovary.
There is a 49-year-old prima ballerina in a movie called "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (D: Billy Wilder, 1970). The ballerina wants to retire into private life and become pregnant before it's too late. Only the suitable father candidate is missing, and she offers a priceless violin to Sherlock Holmes as a reward for his services. Does this sound familiar? Yes, Julie Andrews has a brief affair with Liam Neeson and she also wants to give a violin to her lover in "Duet for One" (D: Andrei Konchalovsky, 1986).
On the left below you can see Tero again: he has also become a big brother, but his four years younger sister is almost as tall as he, because Ari's wife, unlike Julie, is a very tall woman.
Top left below you can see Tero with his little half-sister and brother again when they are older. But who is that man between them? His short & fat body and even ugly face resemble "old Pan", and "old Pan" was a nickname for Friedrich I, Landgraf von Hessen-Kassel, König von Schweden. Yes, it's me today. The reunion of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy has happened again, but look who is fat this time: I must try to lose some weight!
Well, does Tero resemble Julie now when he is older? Yes he does!
My life has been a strange card game: I try to pick up the right cards in order to get the original combination from which I was cut off right after I was born. When I play this "identity game", I must first free my mind and use imagination. Maybe this time I have struck amiss, but it was very stimulating to think for a while that "a man from Nazareth" (Max von Sydow in a George Stevens movie "The Greatest Story Ever Told", 1965) could be a kind of stepfather to this little Hessian fly. I must already sound more enigmatic than Dan Brown, but just look at the pictures and use your own intuition. Just consider missteps a harmless fantasy if this little Dartmoor pony occasionally leads you astray in his personal hell, where, in the middle of all manipulation and control, you have to discover and verify everyday self-evident facts like who is really related to whom. Sometimes I simply go too far in my speculations and this is one of those occasions for you to shout "nuts!", for I am not only desperately trying to convince myself that not only have I a younger brother for certain but also a "Hawaiian" possible half-big-brother and -sister through the same mother, and therefore, after all, I myself am also "Uncle Buck" (D: John Hughes, 1989) although a kind of half one.
The tissue of clues and puns wouldn't be perfect without somebody whose last name is Andrews and who is officially related to me: on the left below you can see Eric Andrews who is officially my half-American paternal second cousin. On the right below Robert Andrews from San Diego sits at the table with me before his son Eric was even born. As far as I know, Robert is not anyhow related to "Miss Andrews's'" stepfather, and once when still very young Eric saw Julie Andrews's movie poster, he was genuinely shocked and cried out: "Why does that woman have our name!?"
I have used over ten years old picture of me in the middle above below "Julie's family tree" in order to demonstrate resemblance. I again photographed my present face this morning, on the 18th of June, 2006. See the result on the left below. Is that old Pan really me? Has aging changed me so much? I can hardly believe that I am related to younger me. It is a pity that I don't have any DNA sample from younger me in order to make sure that they haven't change me.
All right, seriously, let's carry out a little experiment on few faces of my life. Below you can see three vertically grouped pairs of different faces. The question: does each pair belong to the same person? What do you think?
If you think that the two faces in the middle are the same person, you are right, but two other pairs are four different persons. Below you can see the picture of class of '76. I am the first boy from the left standing in the back row. Next you can see--
-- below the picture of class of '77. This time I am the second boy from the right sitting in the front row. My blue jumper wasn't really embellished with a rabbit: I added it, because I look like an ugly rabbit in this picture. However, I guess that Mr and Mrs Edwards's unborn bastard would look like that little rodent: if that was the case, the Hessian connection in my case would be some kind of manipulation and I wouldn't really be related to one of the oldest families in Europe, but my real father - whoever he may be - would be just a jester who is always riding a jackass behind his king's horse.
In the third grade I had a class mate who was almost identical to young Max von Sydow as you were able to see when you compared his face with the black and white photo of Max. I cannot even remember this double Max's name any more, but below he stands in the back row (the first from the left). At this point there wasn't anything strange in the first boy from the right in the back row, and when I moved away with Marje, I thought that he would disappear from my life, because different school was waiting for me near new place of residence.
Below, behold! The class of 80': different school (not any more the primary school of Rekola but Myllykallio) and different faces except me ( I am the third person from the right in the front row). But doesn't the boy who holds the sigh resemble my class mate from the third grade so much that they could be the same person? Nevertheless, they are not. There was something very strange in this guy: he was my best mate and the worst pain in the neck at same time: we laughed at all kind of lies/jokes that different Marxist governments from all over the world were spreading as "official truths", but every time when I told him that there is also something strange in my personal history, he categorically denied everything as if this little bully calf was already kept informed of certain secrets.
Well, is my life some kind of reality soap opera, where real persons can disappear and return under new identity--status--mother--father--half-brother--half-sister--class-mate--somebody? Is my task to try to figure out that who is really who? All this is so crazy that I should REALLY be more careful with this kind of wild speculations in my present situation! Either due to insufficient data or my low IQ, I couldn't simply get everything right, but I would be a complete idiot if I still believed all that bullshit they have told me. Either am I too stupid or too smart for all this.
There seems to be a connection to my case in every Tim Burton's movie. The latest would be "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". What could be the common denominator in this time? My foster mother feeds city squirrels in her apartment. Her tame balcony rats might come to knock your skull if you didn't offer peanuts. Or can we find the connection through George Orwell's "1984":
"The next night, in the room with Julia, Winston tells her about his mother and sister. He confesses that sometimes he feels that he had symbolically if not physically murdered his mother. After his father had been vaporized, his mother had struggled to feed Winston and his sister on her meagre earnings. With the selfishness of childhood, Winston had tried to grab whatever was available, often refusing to listen to his mother when she told him to share with his sister. He had justified this by telling himself that he was hungry and that gave him a right to be selfish. One evening when they got a small piece of chocolate, he snatched the whole thing and ran away. He remembered seeing his mother hug his sister to her as he ran. He had never seen either of them again, when he came back they were gone. He did not know if they had gone away or were taken away and vaporized. And he had lived with that guilt for years. But as Winston tells Julia, what really stayed with him was his other’s instinctive gesture of clasping the child to her. A refugee woman in the war propaganda film had done the same with her son when their boat was bombed. It would not save the children, but it was a gesture which asserted maternal love."
Below you can see one of Marje's squirrels on my left knee. No brothers, no sisters, just a lonely guy who shares his peanuts with a fellow rat of the race. But who speculates on your needs?
Baking plum pies--
--or swastikas? Do you recognize the little Indian in the photograph? She is Jackie, future Mrs President.
