Permanent Citrus

When you're breathing music

2010-07-16T14:50:00.005+09:00

After just recently finishing reading "This Is Your Brain On Music" by Daniel J. Levitin, I've constantly been fascinated throughout my days by the notion of music, and more generally, sound, irreversibly surrounding us and filling the air in all the spaces we navigate through, and enacting huge impacts on our survival as a species, and our understanding of the places around us. The sound in the air triggers innumerable neurochemical reactions in the brain, on multiple levels, in a dynamic fashion. Music excites our brains electrically. Music makes our brains flutter with connections and transmissions of energy and information.

And then there's THIS article by the BBC that is about sound/music having the very real and dangerous potential to cause your lungs to collapse. Wow:

"It is thought that the intense pulses of low-frequency, high-energy sound causes the lung to rupture because air and tissue respond differently to sound."

Apparently a 23 year old non-smoking man had one of his lungs collapse on him while he was just "standing quietly near to several large loud speakers” at a pop concert.

Now the concept of sound/music permeating the air surrounding us in every space is even more serious when music has the ability to literally take your breath away.

you are truly breathing music, and drowning in music, and receiving music through your skin and your chest and your bones.

this is definitely the word

2010-06-28T14:08:00.004+09:00

Jungftak: A Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing on the right side, and the female only one wing on the left side; instead of the missing wings, the male had a hook of bone, and the female an eyelit of bone, and it was by uniting hook and eye that they were enabled to fly. Each, when alone, had to remain on the ground. (Webster's unabridged dictionary 1943)

Apparently, map and dictionary publishers sometimes include fictional entries as a preemptive strike against competitors who might copy and publish stolen content as their own. A sort of watermark of fabricated information and meanings.

Think about it, for would be copyright infringers these fictional entries are: landmines of the imaginary.

Also: what if the fictional entry enters into usage? Then it no longer becomes fictional...

In dictionaries and encyclopedias these fictional entries are called "mountweazels." On maps they are called "trap streets" and "paper towns."

I found out about "jungftak" because this dude called up a linguistics podcast called "A Way With Words" and confessed that he had been haunted by this one word for DECADES. That is what I'm talking about.

You can laugh with me if you wanna do

2010-06-11T13:09:00.005+09:00

Holy shit. Over the course of nearly two and half years I bacame under the impression that Korean pop music videos are largely a let down for me. Until now.

happy to be consumed

2010-05-25T10:59:00.007+09:00

A lot of Korean restuarants have signs above their doors displaying happy cartoon versions of the animal that they specialize in serving. Happy cows, happy squids, happy chickens wrestling with happy ginseng roots. It goes beyond animals even. We were driving through this town that is famous for red bean dumplings and the town mascot was a large cartoon statue of a red bean dumpling who was holding a platter with a big smile that was piled high with smaller red bean dumplings. The thing that eats the thing that eats itself and serves itself to be eaten. Perhaps this is to send out a message that the animal (or food object) is happy when it's alive and even happier when it's cooked and chewed and devoured by humans. I saw what I take to be a direct effect of this form of advertising on one of my kindergarten students just a few minutes ago. We were learning about the letter O, and in the coloring and tracing worksheet I gave them, there was a happy cartoon octopus wearing a baseball cap and juggling some oranges for them to color. He colored it all in red and then I heard him say in Korean that it's red because it's a spicy thing to eat, as if it was covered in chili paste. And I realized that not even silly looking cartoon animals are safe from the Korean child's appetite. Nor I guess should they be. Once when I showed a slideshow of cartoon animals I noticed that while looking at every new slide and repeating the English name I said, this one tiny girl in the class would say the animal's name followed by either "gogi" or "guee". Gogi means meat and guee means a form of preparing and cooking the meat in a marinate.

not seeing Korean weddings

2010-05-11T13:29:00.014+09:00

The science research school office worker girl invited me to her wedding last Saturday. I'd heard horrific things about Korean weddings, so I was half excited and half dreading going to it.

It was held at the Sun Town wedding hall in town. It already looked like a madhouse while Lindsey and I were walking up. Luckily I had called Elvis to get some pointers on how to deal with the wedding gift and everything and he ended up waiting in the parking lot for us amidst the crowds. Koreans don't do wedding gifts usually, just cash. 30 thousand won minimum. Although I've heard with the new 50 thousand won bills in circulation, the minimum is soon to raise. Apparently the cash makes the wedding double as a bit of a fundraising event, depending on the wealth of the couple tying the knot I suppose. The cash helps pay for the cost of having the wedding. This idea of fundraising was pretty much the only part of the event I liked. I think big weddings are a total waste of resources for families that aren't wealthy already, and cash seems to be just as impersonal as choosing something off a wedding gift registry at Bed Bath and Beyond, but seems more useful to the couple getting married. And it definitely helps better to counteract the exorbitant cost of having one's sacred union in love made into a massive public spectacle.

Once Elvis led the way for us through the shoving crowds and up the stairs we put our 30 thousand won into an envelope which the wedding hall provides, had Elvis mark it with the appropriate information (since there's multiple weddings going on simultaneously), and gave it to one of the people manning the cash donation desks. Upon giving the money, we each got a ticket for the buffet.

People's attire ran the gamut from formal wear similar to what you would see at weddings in the States to traditional Korean hanboks to just a hoodie, sneakers and jeans. It seemed like none of the children were dressed up for the occasion. I also liked that part of the wedding.

There were at least three weddings going on simultaneously that day, maybe more, but the mass of people and lack of time made if difficult to tell. I can only imagine what train wrecks transpire in those 5 storey monster wedding halls I've seen in Seoul. And all the people from all the weddings were eating off the same food at the buffet. All things considered the food wasn't that bad, and they had cold king crab legs.

After about 25 minutes or so of sitting awkwardly at the table that my elementary school staff had occupied and not really talking to anyone but Lindsey, I asked her what she thought the bride and groom were doing during the buffet, since it was going on before the wedding and it seemed like it was taking the place of the wedding reception, since there wasn't going to be any social event after the ceremony.

Finally, Elvis got my attention and asked if we wanted to go view the ceremony. All the teachers left at the table and Lindsey and I got up and followed him up the stairs to the room where the ceremony was happening and I saw the bride standing on the platform with her husband and around 20 other people, posing for a group photo. Elvis said something in Korean to some of the school staff, they all nodded, then he turned to me and told me, with his usual slight half-embarrassed grin, that the ceremony was finished.

Apparently Lindsey and I, along with the entire school staff attending had missed the ceremony because we were eating too long at the buffet. And they didn't seem concerned about it in the least. At least I had an answer to my question about where the bride and groom were while everyone was eating: they were getting married.

Judging from what time it was at that point, the entire ceremony had lasted less than 15 minutes. And they were taking group photos of different combinations of family and friends for around 20 or 30 minutes. They even staged the throwing of the wedding bouquet by choosing which woman was going to catch it, so they could capture the perfect "looking" moment for the photo album to be filled with other documentations of fabricated moments that had never been truly lived, from an event that had hardly even taken place, past the appearance of it. Everyone spilled outside, past the display of a long row of identical rental bridal gowns, and into the parking lot, and then we all dispersed and went home, all in just under an hour. I remember feeling like I'd been spit out of a tube of some sort, not even really sure what kind of event I'd witnessed (or not witnessed, for that matter). I asked where they were going for their honeymoon and only one person present seemed to know that they were going to Jeju Island. A teacher asked why they weren't going abroad, and another teacher gestured a hand across her belly and said it was because the bride was so pregnant.

It dawned on me that many Koreans are satisfied with having the "appearance" of having a wedding ceremony and having the images of having a wedding ceremony, and seemingly unconcerned with the emotional value and actual quality of the content of the ceremony itself that they actually have. Although, I'm assuming this only applies to the majority of Western style weddings in Korea, which unfortunately is the norm. I've never attended a traditional Korean wedding ceremony, but from what I've read or been told they seem a lot more involved. And some couples have a smaller traditional wedding ceremony after the larger Western one finishes.

I've been reading a lot of Marshal Mcluhan lately and he once defined the word tradition as "the sense of the total past as now." If that is the case, then maybe it makes sense that Korean Western style weddings seem so impersonal and devoid of many of the emotional subtleties and gestures one would expect in a wedding if they grew up in the States. What I mean is that Koreans have borrowed this style of wedding ceremony from the traditions of a different culture that lives across an ocean. Perhaps if they attempted to fill in all those subtleties and parts of the ritual that are missing, the wedding ceremony would seem a lot more phony than it already does, because they would be attempting to live out the sense of a total past that they themselves have never lived. I'm sure it would look just as silly or awkward for an American couple to be sitting on the floor in Korean traditional robes trying to mimic the gestures that take place during a traditional Korean wedding.

The wedding photography really fascinated me as well. Mostly the fact that documenting the event in photographs took a good deal longer than the actual event itself. The girl who was married had even shown me wedding pictures of just her and her husband in wedding outfits that she had had taken a couple of weeks before the wedding. In that case, it would be visual documentation of an event that had not yet even taken place.

More emphasis seemed to be placed on the images of the event than the event itself. They staged the throwing of the bouquet (they had the bride practice a couple of times before they took the final shot), and had groups of extended family and friends posing together with the bride and groom for pictures on the same platform that the marriage had just transpired on. But those groups of friends and family had just been an audience, and it was not a documentation of any interactions they were having or had just had with the newly married couple. In other words, the photograph was their interaction, by being the catalyst for them all to be standing next to each other, and at the same time, acting as a documentation for their togetherness. Yet, due to the sheer brevity of that wedding, it's very possible that had those people not been urged to stand close together for the group photo, they never would have interacted that much in the first place.

Wedding photography in the States displays many of the same oddities, just to different degrees. I've seen wedding photographs of the wedding ring on the bride's finger and wondered why they didn't just use the magazine advertisement image of the ring for their wedding album. I've never understood why so many people are happy with their wedding photographs looking like staged commercial advertisements for an idealized wedding which didn't actually happen in real life. It may be the fault of the education system, which is not required to make people fully image-literate that partly causes this general lack of concern about the way images represent them.

A good analogy would be to imagine a couple who is getting married and is really into reading books a lot more than photography, so they decide to have one of their professional writer friends create a written description of their wedding instead of hiring any photographers. But then their friend shows up two weeks before the wedding is going to take place and hands them the finished work. When the couple asks how that's possible, the friend says that he simply observed one of the rehearsals, and decided to adapt that to a description of the most ideal wedding they could ever possibly have in real life, with all the bells and whistles, so when they look back on it, it'll always be perfect. Of course the couple would be offended by such a gesture because it seems almost psychotic to have a mostly fictional written description of their own wedding for posterity. But on the other hand, most people will not even bat an eye at a set of obviously staged or exaggerated photographs that show idealized moments that function more like a series of wedding cliches than actual wedding moments. Many people will not think twice about having fictional photographs, because images don't have to represent the same continuous and consistent idea of reality as the written word does. Even a wedding videographer would have to be much more casual and unedited in his or her approach than a wedding photographer. Viewing a staged or overly exaggerated video of one's wedding will come across as fabricated and uncomfortable as a fictional account of it in text.

new personal information gathering centers

2010-05-03T10:25:00.012+09:00

I'd never heard of facebook until I arrived in Korea.

There's a really interesting thing that happens with facebook when used by people who are socially connected while living abroad: a lot of people connect socially more on facebook than in real life. In fact I've been asked before why I didn't come out some night, and after I explain that I was never invited I'm asked, "Didn't you see my facebook status?" Then I learned that it was completely normal for a night out to be planned and executed without even a single text message, email, or phone call. And it's actually pretty common. Someone I met here once told me that they hated emails because they take "way too much commitment."

What interests me is how does this affect the essential nature of real life conversation? I don't really know that answer, but I have made some observations about how real life conversation is unavoidably altered. Sometimes I meet people in neighboring cities or provinces in the country who are facebook friends with people from where I live. When those people come to visit, or I just happen to meet them in non-virtual life, I find that they know incidental things about me that I have never told them. I've never told them because I've never known them. So when my first conversation with them occurs it is unquestionably different from a conversation I would normally have with someone who I have just met for the first time.

I'm really curious about how this is going to affect the nature of conversation of future generations. If most of your information about someone has already been gathered from an online source (social networking sites, blogs, websites, etc.), than what are people really going to talk about? I think our generation is still not fully comfortable with this new form of personal information gathering (i.e. it feels a bit too much like our now probably antiquated definition of stalking), but as future generations grow up with this technology, they will most likely lose or never have the discomfort that exists now.

Here's two examples of mechanisms I've observed people utilize to defend themselves and others from the discomfort that can follow someone's realization that they've been the victim of online personal information reconnaissance missions. Both of these mechanisms demonstrate that people still feel like it's much more natural for people to find out personal information about others in person:

1. the confirmation: when you meet someone for the first time and they know certain information about you, they'll usually bring it up in conversation as a sort of confirmation: "And you just got back from vacation in Thailand, right? Those were some amazing pictures you posted!" Of course this fact doesn't need to be confirmed, because both parties already know it's true: the person that went to Thailand knows they just returned from there and posted the pictures, and the person confirming has already seen them. But, it seems like when it's brought up into a real, non-virtual conversation, it makes it less strange that a person you've never met before knows sometimtes intimate details about you. Once they've confirmed the information in a real conversation, the information is freed into real life, in a way. And then if the person mentions it later, out of the blue, you won't be that weirded out, because by confirming a piece of information, it was almost like you told them in the first place. Something that scares me is if this trend persists, what proportion of conversations will just be a series of confirmations of things that are already known by both people involved?

2. the confession: Another mechanism I've heard used a lot is someone just coming out and confessing that they've been stalking people online. It's usually said as a joke (although I can't think of any reason why it would be taken as funny), and other people usually laugh after it's said, although I assume only because they don't really know that the fuck else to do. Example of the two machanisms used conseculatively: "And you just got back from vacation in Thailand, right? Those were some amazing pictures you posted! Sorry, I was bored at work so I was online facebook stalking all day." For some reason, this is not a creepy thing to say to someone in our culture, I assume only because facebook exists and so many people are "facebook stalking" themselves. But people obviously still feel guilty enough for it that they need to confess, even if in a half-joking manner, that they've done something that can be construed as wrong or unnatural, and that they know personal information about people, even though they've not had any real, non-virtual contact with them.

The most expensive photograph in the world

2010-05-03T09:22:00.005+09:00

Here's a list of the world's most expensive photographs

99 Cent II Diptychon by Andreas Gursky
The photograph sold for $3,346,456 in February 2007 at an auction at Sotheby's London.

I've been thinking a lot lately about this stunning irony: The current most expensive photograph in the world is an image depicting some of the cheapest goods a city has to offer (the interior of a 99 cent store). This demonstrates an extreme disconnect between a photograph and its image content. The world of photographs as objects for fine art investments of millionaires and the world of photographs as a visual means of expression and communication are perhaps farther apart than they have ever been since the invention of photography.

Another way to put would be: count every single product shown in Gursky's diptych and estimate a dollar value if you were to purchase everything in the store. Then add that value of all the products to what it would cost to purchase the entire 99 cent store building, along with the land that it sits on. It's entirely possible and very likely that it would cost MORE to purchase one photograph of the store's interior than to buy the entire store and all of its contents.

And even another way to understand this photograph is to consider how many people on the planet currently live on less than a dollar a day and then consider the products in the store in relation to that fact. Currently about 1/5 of the Earth's population, or 1.1 billion people, live on less than one dollar a day. In that sense, how many full days of work would it take to purchase every product in the store? For over a billion people in the world, all of the cheap products shown in that photograph would resemble objects of inaccessible wealth in colorful packaging, each one requiring a tremendous or even impossible amount of sacrifice and labor to acquire. And the photograph of these objects? It translates to at least 3,346,456 full days of work, as long as someone could save every penny they ever earned.

legally mandated visual representations of your insides

2010-04-29T09:45:00.007+09:00

According to some new legislation that has just been enacted in Oklahoma, before a woman has an abortion within the state limits, she is obligated by law to have an ultrasound and listen to a doctor give her a description of the fetus inside of her. The massive implication of this to me is how much power and influence images and visual representation are assumed to have on the general public, and how a bible belt government would use this assumption to legally mandate an all out visual-audio assault on women to deter a medical procedure that is in itself, perfectly legal. If a woman closes her eyes and covers her ears during the ultrasound screening and verbal description given by her doctor, is the abortion still legal? Or are they going to put in place some Clockwork Orange headgear, blocking the women from closing their eyes while they stare at the visual representation of the organism moving around inside them? And what about a blind and deaf mother, do they just slip through some loophole, or will they still be forced to have an audio description of a visual representation of their fetus translated to them in morse code taps on their skin? That is such a wild concept, that the state passed a law which makes it mandatory for women to view visual representations of inside their bodies, and listen to another person give an oral description about their insides as well.

This could be an interesting trend, though, if the same type of legally mandated viewing of visual representations is applied to other areas of law. Maybe before a bank forecloses on a house and evicts its occupants, the bank worker who would sign the official paperwork could be legally obligated to sit and watch a screening of the family's home video archive or photo album and hear stories about their lives before that bank employee could legally ask them to leave their home.

Or before a soldier is sent into a combat zone, there has to be a photo or video reconaissance mission, afterwhich the soldiers will view visual and audio footage of a sample of the civilians living in that area, and hear stories about their day to day lives.

365 with a vein of gold

2010-04-28T11:03:00.003+09:00

new mix:

365 with a vein of gold

get it here

literate visual fragmented freedom

2010-04-27T09:59:00.002+09:00

Perhaps the quote of the month (at first it read to me like an indecipherable mis-translation from an online translator):

"Eating people is wrong. Even grafting people into the ulcer of a big corporation seems wrong to anybody brought up in a literate visual fragmented freedom." --Marshall McLuhan

The truth of a place

2010-04-09T16:41:00.002+09:00

I've been reading this autobiography of Prince Modupe a little bit recently. He was this West African, born into a tribe, and then ended up crossing an ocean and landing in America. He writes about his experience and the the polarities between vastly disparate modes of thought and perception he encountered. The part that really got me was when he was describing how his father (still leading the tribal life) felt about maps and what they represented:

"Maps are liars, he told me briefly. The things that hurt one do not show on a map. The truth of a place is in the joy and the hurt that come from it."

fixity

2010-03-29T09:45:00.003+09:00

It was photography which showed that the bird flies because of the stillness of its wings, not its movements.

the oldest living things on the planet

2010-03-29T09:32:00.002+09:00

A project by Rachel Sussman...here's a link to more images from this project.

Man, I would be ecstatic if I could go to all these places.

Tasting the light creeping through windows

2010-03-19T11:04:00.006+09:00

Here's the first volume of the companion mixes (I was going for a couple of low-key mixes perfect for editing and sequencing photos):

Tasting the light creeping through windows

get it:
here

Licking the memories creeping through light

2010-03-19T11:02:00.003+09:00

Here's the second volume from the companion mixes:

Licking the memories creeping through light

get it:
here

Bold commitment of sentiment

2010-03-19T10:57:00.005+09:00

So I've been seriously lagging on posts. The new semester started, and my classes are spaced out in a wack way, so I have a bunch of short gaps between lessons instead of the usual larger chunks of free time. And everyone knows how that goes: if you have a long break where you're at work and still being paid you need at least half an hour or longer of vegetation time, and then you can start being productive...but if you only have 45 min. or an hour, by the time vegetation time is over, it's already class time and next to nothing has been accomplished.

In any case, so I'm upping three new mixes. Two of them are companion volumes, which can be ascertained by how their names relate to one another.

This first one is titled:

Bold commitment of sentiment
here

1.26 microseconds went somewhere with Chile

2010-03-03T12:12:00.002+09:00

Scientists are saying that the earthquake in Chile was so powerful that it slightly shifted the Earth's axis and shortened the length of each day by 1.26 microseconds. So it seems like whether we like it or not, everyone is losing a little bit of sleep over it.

combined operation and my second kid

2010-02-24T11:19:00.002+09:00

When you climb to one of the peaks of Taebaek mountain you reach an area with trapezoidal stone-stacked altars where shamans still worship the sky and ring bell drums and chant and hold various animistic beliefs. When you look over the landscape you can see the military base and airstrip and sometimes hear the sounds from the bombs and weapons proving ground there. It really adds a level of interest to the landscape, as you scan it and realize it's punctuated by a mix of abandoned and still functioning coal mines, rivers, two thousand year old trees, a military base and weapons testing area, buddhist temples and shaman altars.

We ended up having some beers with a couple of US airforce dudes the other night who crashed our table at the bar along with a couple of Korean special forces soldiers. They were doing a "combined operation" for a few days at that military base. The quote of the evening must have been when one of the airforce guys was praising the great health care that the military provided him:

"Especially like...my fuckin' second kid...like I didn't have to pay shit for him!"

When he said that it really made me feel like there was something entirely different going on in his mind than there was in mine.

If filmmakers directed the superbowl

2010-02-24T11:14:00.002+09:00

The Wes Anderson one is so true to form it's hilarious.

Place Is Collapsible

2010-02-19T10:35:00.012+09:00

I'm working on a new project with Stefani that involves diptychs in the most random, regenerative, and expansive sense of the word:

Place Is Collapsible

C H E C K I T O U T

Here's some of my current favorite combinations:

inna single instant

2010-02-09T13:12:00.005+09:00

inna single instant mix:

listen:
part 1
part 2

This one is a real treat, I think. It starts out with blind blues singer Paul Pena who won a throat singing contest in Tuva at one point in his life (check out one of my all time favorite documentaries Genghis Blues). Then there's some Malay pop and Thai pop and K-pop, French new wave, Korean disco, guitar music from the western Sahara, Congolese gospel funk, some New Orleans funky R&B, Bollywood steel guitar, a Joy Division cover in bossa nova style, some newer electronic cuts along the way, and of course a brief dose of blow-your-mind-apart Brazilian mellow earthy psychedelic rock, not to mention Thomas Mapfumo "The Lion of Zimbabwe", got him on there too.

Been really feeling the new Four Tet album. It really takes me back to some of his stuff with Fridge, kind of like a way more mature and refined working of some of those same ideas. Quite beautiful from start to finish.

Day eight to eleven

2010-02-04T09:41:00.009+09:00

On Saturday we flew into Kota Kinabalu and it was raining. And it rained all day and night and the weather report said it could potentially rain for the next 10 days in a row. Out of the desire to insulate ourselves against steadily forming premature depression over the state of the weather, Lindsey and I purchased one bottle of spiced rum and a bottle of vanilla coke and retreated into the depths of our tropical bird themed hotel room with HBO and the colored light reflections bouncing around the window from passing by cars. It stopped raining the next day.

On Sunday we checked out the bustling street market on the same street as our hotel. It was filled with strange fruit usually piled in bright colored plastic baskets or cardboard boxes covered with wet spots soaking through. There was also the standard cheap souvenir shit, as well as live birds, fish and furry animals in cages and aquariums, kept in pitiful states of confinement and filth. There was one old man who was sitting in the street with some foot and a half long dead slimy lizard or salamander creature with an oversized tail laid out on a plate in front of him. It looked like a miniature version of some lost prehistoric creature, and there was an old yellowed scrap of a newspaper story held in place under the plate with a picture of the same creature. I couldn't tell what it was, but it seemed like he was selling the extract of that creature to ingest for health reasons of some sort. If it was Korea it would most definitely be sold for the purposes of male stamina in the sack, but I didn't know what was big in Borneo in terms of folk apothecaries. The highlight for me was this group of 3 guys rocking out with an old cheap casio synthesizer like I had when I was eight or nine. They had one of those simple cheeseball pre-programmed tropical rhythms playing and filled in the gaps with a guitar and some mishmash percussion instruments and one of the old guys was singing almost incomprehensibly into a scratchy mic. I could have listened to that music all day. When people don't focus on the deficiencies and limitations of their instruments and just let loose, it usually sounds better then anything made with large production budgets. We walked up Signal Hill and heard a massive beastly dog barking at us behind a fence on a narrow steep residential street. As we took a couple of steps closer we noticed that the dog was only behind the fence voluntarily, and started chasing us down the hill at full speed. I banked on the assumption that it was trained to just guard its territory and wouldn't attack so I told Lindsey not to run and just walk slowly away with me. It got pretty close to nipping at our heels, sensing our fear like a shark, but it refrained from attacking as it noticed that we were moving away the house it was guarding.

On Monday we went on a boat cruise down a river, on safari for those bignose proboscis monkeys found only in Borneo. We saw them. Only the males have big noses. Then Pat's plane landed later that night. Knowing his lighthearted yet severe distaste for "America's hat", I made a sign that said "Canada Forever!" and Lindsey made one that said "Canucks Rule!". We held it out next to all the Korean tour guides waiting to pick up their crop. The Zimbabwe sign I made in Bangkok worked better last summer I think.

On Tuesday we ate two breakfasts, which was excessive, but less excessive than the three dinners Lindsey and I ate in Kuala Lumpur. First breakfast: Chinese bbq pork steamed buns. Second breakfast: Chinese bbq pork noodles. In the afternoon we hired a private boat to take us to three islands off the coast and to check out the Filipino stilt village. The islands were idyllic. The beaches were idyllic. The ocean was idyllic. On the first beach I took a walk and found two Malay workmen standing watching a giant bearded boar tear apart a fallen coconut to eat.

This toast-making instrument

2010-02-03T09:32:00.003+09:00

One day I was sitting at Elvis' apartment after dinner. He was sitting next to me at the table silently, suddenly with a look of deep concentration. This usually happens when he is trying to express something complicated for him in English. He turned to me while pointing to the toaster and asked "What is the English name of this toast-making instrument?"

Day one to seven

2010-02-02T10:00:00.014+09:00

Lindsey's memory list of our vacation. Day 1 is actually day 2, since day 1 our flight landed in the evening and we didn't do anything but have dinner really.

day 1, disaster walk
day 2, bird park
day 3, towers, caves, fireflies
day 4, melaka
day 5, bed and breakfast
day 6, off to KK
day 7, gaya market, signal hill, explore KK
day 8, monkey cruise
pat
wait
yeah
that's right
day 9, tuesday, explore, islands
day 10, kuching, walk around
day 11, kayaking
day 12, ummm....
me: bako
lindsey: thank you
day 13, late start, drive to sibu
day 14, drive to bintulu, almost die
day 15, bintulu, similajau
day 16, drive to miri
day 17, drive to brunei, water village
oh yeah, day 16 had limbang hills, too
day 18, cross all the borders, end up back in KK
day 19, shopping in KK, return the car
come home

This is my attempt to condense my travels in Malaysia, Malaysian Borneo, and Brunei into the shortest amount of text possible. I want to see if I can remember what happened everyday and decide what is important to describe and what is important to omit.

total stamps on passport: 16
total images recorded: circa 14,000
total miles driven across the island of Borneo: around 1100
total trips to hospital emergency rooms: one

Day one to day seven:

Our flight landed in Kuala Lumpur in the evening and we jumped on the express train to the central city. Palm oil plantations stretched out to the horizon everywhere, housing complexes and other types of developments were extreme, the air was wet and thick, some of the soil was reddish, the sky looked and felt like it weighed a million tons and everything was green and lush and constantly growing and always warm. We stayed at Hotel Citrus, of course.

Kuala Lumpur was the most relaxed capital city I've been to in Southeast Asia so far, except for the gaping holes in the sidewalks and the inability to really walk anywhere in the city of considerable distance without crisscrossing or walking on highways. It became clear that Malaysia was a country of immigrants, which brought me back to a lot of areas in L.A. There was a heavy Chinese and Indian influence apparent throughout all the areas of the city we visited. Many restaurants serving Malay and Chinese style food also had a clay oven to make Indian bread on the side, which I thought was especially genius. We had trouble finding traditional Malaysian food for a while, and we wanted to eat Laksa, which is a national dish of Malaysia but couldn't find it anywhere for a while. Every place that had it said they were out of it when we asked. We thought that was bizarre, but then we found out later that it was a dish prepared only for breakfast, and we were always too late in the day.

The second day we tried to walk to the point of convergence of two muddy rivers that represented the center of the city geographically and symbolically, as well as the meaning of the name of the capital (Kuala Lumpur = muddy confluence of rivers). We became distinctly lost and our way was constantly blocked by highways and overpasses which obliterated any sidewalk we were on abruptly. It started to rain so we found a taxi to take us the rest of the way. He was amused at how far we'd walked out of the way from where we had wanted to go. We found out later that my compass had somehow reversed itself, so north was south and east was west. Lindsey searched on the internet how that could even conceivably happen, and I still have no idea. Maybe it was all the airport xrays? For lunch that day we went to an Indian restaurant near the confluence where everyone was eating with their hands, soaking up and scooping up bits of extra-thick curry with a small bit of rice with their fingers. I ordered a banana leaf lunch which was a giant banana leaf laid out on the table with an array of small piles of various curries and spiced and pickled vegetables. Not sure where that lunch has been all my life, but it should have been there far sooner, and I only wish it was available where I live. I saw this younger Malaysian dude selling fruit and wearing a "Napalm Death" T-shirt. I haven't thought about that band since just after high school probably, when I was still heavily into death metal and similar music, but I never thought about it in a Southeast Asian context. Although Malaysia never had the napalm problems of further north in Vietnam, it still seemed like the meaning of that shirt was just a little too close to home in that region; and I wondered if the guy wearing the shirt had ever thought about what the name of the band was actually referring to.

The next day we went to the lake gardens and saw the bird park and butterfly gardens and the beautiful landscaped grounds. If there was ever a region of the world for parks it's the tropical regions. So many fascinating native plants and flowers that just grow there anyway, with next to zero maintainance. Incredible. On the way there we had the most racist taxi driver I've had to date. He told us some of the inequalities he faced as a Hindu Indian living in an Islamic country. Those that can give a muslim greeting to the police don't get fines, those of other religions do. Basically the point he reiterated the most was "Don't take muslims taxi!" Although he was nut ball over the top and pretty much a loose cannon I felt fortunate to get a glimpse into that side of the culture. I think it's important to really see the dirt and filth of a place and its people to get a good feel for it.

On Wednesday we hired a private taxi who would take us to see the fireflies two hours north of Kuala Lumpur along a small river in Selangor province. We didn't leave with him until the afternoon so we checked out the KL tower and the Petronas tower and the large mall near there beforehand. As we approached the taxi stand to go back to the hotel I noticed our driver had a crazy long beard that went down to his waist, which was strange because he was pretty young. When he got into the car he put his fake beard onto the seat next to him. I just had to ask why he carried around a long fake beard, and he just said it was some fake hair that a woman and her baby left in the cab that day. Weird. Batu Caves, the tranquil Hindu cave temple, was under construction, and you had to narrowly avoid large caterpillars on your way up. Monkey's lined the stairway, jumping along the fence and occasionally stopping for a lightning quick fuck. There were two huge pythons casually lying on a plastic patio table to the right of the entrance that you could pay to have your pictures taken with. There was a sign painted on the cave wall that said "NO STICK" that I still don't understand. There was a lot of water dripping from the ceilings and more long tailed monkeys jumping around, and the place made me feel really happy to be there. Later, after seafood along a river we climbed into a row boat with some unpleasant Australian women and saw fireflies everywhere in the trees lining the river, like constellations and christmas trees, they were so tiny and they blinked so fast and many times and were synchronized. The Australian women kept joking that the blinking was morse code for SOS and "help us!" and whatnot. I kept wishing there was some way they could fall out of the boat without us falling with them.

On Thursday we took a bus to Melaka. Melaka is a town with a deep colonial history. It was founded by a renegade Indian pirate prince, then it was colonized by the Portuegese, Dutch and British. They say there's even some people living there who still speak with a creole Portuegese/Malay language of their own. The architecture ther was interesting, but the sheer extent of new development was unsettling. The laksa in Melaka is supposed to be some of the best in Malaysia, but we couldn't find it. Near dusk mobs and mobs of birds swooped down and filled the trees, power lines, and antennaes and gave of a loud interwoven and chaotic cacaphony of calls that shredded the air wide open and made me feel so excited and extra alive to be there listening to it. Lindsey thought the noise was a little bit awful.

On Friday we just decided to take our time in getting back to Kuala Lumpur since we were flying to Borneo early Saturday. We stayed at a bed and breakfast near the airport. It ended up being owned by this African American retired marine from Washington DC. He married a Malay woman and bought a huge house in a terribly bland looking gated housing development an 8 minute drive from the airport. The guy was sort of a trip because he still held onto the residue and structure from his years in the service, and he ran a tight ship in his house -- when he asked us to "sit down and just relax I'll get your complimentary refreshments" he said it with a certain misplaced urgency that I got the impression we shouldn't be moving or doing anything else but sitting right there. He convinced himself that someone was tailing us while he was driving us to his house from the airport, and he drove past the driveway to his place and down the street until the car behind us stopped. He said his military training died hard. He had everything broken down into neat time increments: 6 minute drive to the nearest restaurant or a 12 minute walk, and an 8 minute drive to and from the airport under ideal conditions. He told us "We'll go ahead and kick off breakfast at oh-seven-hundred...that shouldn't interfere with anyone else's schedule."

way to go mom

2010-02-01T15:51:00.002+09:00

My mom recently put up a song she recorded with some of her friends. Gotta say it rocks.

Listen to it here.

off to the muddy confluence

2010-01-09T11:32:00.002+09:00

I'm leaving in about 10 minutes to take a train to Seoul and then a plane in the morning to Kuala Lumpur. In Malay, the word means muddy confluence. The city is named after the converging of rivers, so I'm pretty down with that on a purely conceptual basis.

I might not blog till I return in February, so I'm leaving you with a taste of Milton Nascimento, from his album Milagre dos Peixes, which means "The Miracle of the Fishes." There's one mind blowing thing about this album for me: At the time it was recorded Brazil was being governed by the military and censorship was rampant. Being connected with the Tropicalia movement, Milton Nascimento was informed by the government that the lyrics of his album were too controversial and he should change them or not record it or it would be banned. The record company told him to record a new album, and he was like "FUCK that", and just recorded the album without lyrics and used his voice as an instrument instead. The result is pretty awesome. Until I return from the jungle.

milton nascimento - Carlos, Lucia, Chico e Tiago
milton nascimento - Cade
milton nascimento - A Ultima Sessao de Musica
milton nascimento - Pablo

With only a shit-knife in hand

2010-01-08T13:34:00.004+09:00

I was watching a video of Wade Davis speaking about the tragedy of disintegrating tribal cultures around the world, and he recounted a handful of stories he picked up while living with various tribes over the years. I have to retell this one story he told, even if badly, just because I've never heard anything like it, and it's something you could never make up if you tried.

In a remote area of Canada a while back there was a family of Inuits that were told by the Canadian government that their land was being repossessed for some bullshit reason or another. Everyone was packing, but the old grandfather said he was holding his ground, and not moving off his land. The rest of his family was really worried about him because he might be killed or jailed by the Canadian government. But since they couldn't force him to go with them against his will either, they just decided to take all of his weapons and belongings away, so that he could have them back as long as he followed the rest of his family. Undeterred, the old man walked outside into the arctic cold, pulled down his pants and began shitting into his hand. While the shit immediately started to freeze, he molded it into a makeshift knife. He then sprayed his saliva all along one edge of the knife to make a sharp edge of ice. Then he took his shit knife and slaughtered a nearby dog. He took the dog's rib cage and various other parts and fashioned a makeshift sled. Then he strapped the sled up to another nearby dog that was still alive and disappeared into the distance where no one saw him again.

This is a link his full lecture, if you're interested.

some-formed uttering triangles, really

2010-01-08T13:25:00.002+09:00

In the process of speaking, the average human utters 6 metaphors a minute.

Metaphors are synaesthetic re-combines of ideas if you think about it. Like triangles -- giving a thing a name that belongs to another thing to produce a more vivid understanding of both things, and itself.

I think metaphors are also rooted in misrecognition, as when you see shapes and things in shadows or on rockfaces, or mis-hear words, or recall things from things that aren't there: invented nostalgia from nonexistent memories.

Quite an exquisite location

2010-01-08T13:09:00.006+09:00

I was watching this thing on Roni Horn and she was talking about an 8x8 grid (like a chess board) of black and white photographs she made about the architecture of a locker room area of a swimming pool. She described the architecture: "It was like a mathematical equation punctuated by a sexual act."

I also started listening really intently when she started talking about the mysterious nature of the Arctic Circle and like "places." You can find the Arctic Circle on the map all around the world. So it is visible on maps and people talk about it and talk about going there. So it has all the characteristics of a real place, yet it is entirely invisible. Except in concept and geographical diagrams, it doesn't exist.

Photographing the invisible...invisible landscapes.

As for music, you should now notice a gray and white play button on the lower left of the blog...got a new playlist player going so I can select the top 5 tracks from each mix I put up, especially for your fat faces and hungry ears, if need be. The cool thing is that the playlist will compile and compile as long as I add to this page, so selections from various mixes will organically reorder and recombine into a new mix altogether.

To shake together

2010-01-06T16:31:00.002+09:00

Cogito = I think.

The etymology of cogito is Latin co-agitare, to shake together. I love these beautiful accidents of etymology.

Or were these verbs intended to be linked? The act of thinking is to shake together.

As for Descartes: I shake together, therefore I am.

Forgot one

2010-01-06T13:29:00.000+09:00

Forgot one Porchia quote that really haunts me. It really has a lot to do with art and science:

"We tear life out of life and use it for looking at itself." -Antonio Porchia

Antonio Porchia

2010-01-03T18:15:00.005+09:00

I can't seem to ever get this quote out of my head:

"Everything is like the rivers -- the work of the slopes." -Antonio Porchia

Actually if I think about it there's always a handful:

"Nothing that is complete breathes."

"We are chained to the world to pay for the freedom of our eyes."

"The cold is a good counselor
but it is cold."

"I too once had a summer
and I burned myself in its name."

Giraffes are giraffing and people are peopling

2010-01-03T17:51:00.008+09:00

New mix: Giraffes are giraffing and people are peopling

dl:
part 1
part 2

Loving that song by The Go-Betweens Too Much Of One Thing:

"nothing in these days is constant, come home to chance"

I was listening to a podcast by Alan Watts and he was going off on the restraints of language. He said that many Eastern languages don't have such a strong distinction between parts of speech, such as nouns and verbs. Even in Korean, there's so many nouns and verbs that are the same word, and you can turn most nouns into a verb by just altering the ending slightly (by adding the "to do" verb stem).

In fact, he said that in the overall recorded history of languages, Western languages probably maintain a thin minority in the way that its speakers create and forge brutal divisions between grammatical structures. This unnecessary categorization of language into isolated parts (such as nouns and verbs, where some words are strictly "agents" and others are strictly "operators"), introduces a multitude of limitations on the way we can use language.

What he suggests, and what I have to strongly agree with, is the notion of how free-flowing and limitless language could be once these restraints are taken off it. He imagines a world where "Giraffes are giraffing, trees are treeing, stars are starring, clouds are clouding, rain is raining, and people are peopling."

And yet as much as I support this idea, so many times I feel like if I don't place a set of arbitrary constraints on myself for a particular art project, I feel so listless and unable to produce anything at all. Weird.

I have some unavoidable reasons.

2010-01-03T17:26:00.003+09:00

I received a birthday text from my friend Mark in town. After the happy birthday part he said "how bout make a chance to see after 10th. i have some unavoidable reasons." I'm still unclear if he means he has some unavoidable reasons to see me after the 10th, or if he has unavoidable reasons of why he can't see me until that time. But the text sounds cryptic and severe for some reason whatever the case may be.

But in any case, my twenties are now officially buried and no more. I am now in my thirties.

Walking cemeteries

2010-01-03T16:53:00.005+09:00

I found out that a great majority of nurses in rural areas in South Korea know how to say the word "push" in a variety of Southeast Asian languages. Since most females of marrying age move to the cities so they can attend universities and find careers the men who stay sometimes don't have any option but to search abroad for companionship. I once saw this large banner on the outside of an apartment building that translated something like "virgin maiden Vietnamese bride" above a phone number. I don't think I translated it exactly right, but the idea was there. The problem is that Korea is far from being a country of immigrants, and with even less foreigners living in rural areas, there's not much available in the way of Korean language classes for the immigrants that do end up here. So the Southeast Asian brides looming about might not learn some essential vocab before babies start popping out of their bodies.

Something else entirely unrelated: I just finished reading this book called "The Chronicles of the Guayaki Indians" by Pierre Clastres. It's by far one of the saddest and simultaneously beautiful stories I've yet had a chance to read. The author is an anthropologist who lived with the tribe for a year. But he writes with a poetry and compassion that is so intense, especially when he tackles their ritual practices of infanticide and cannibalism. The tribe's entire population dropped by about 25% in the time that he was there, and within a short time after the entire tribe ceased to exist. Their language, culture, myths, and rituals pretty much died with them.

All the people in the tribe were "passionate cannibals", but they never killed people for the purpose of food or sacrifice. They ate their dead. Every member of their tribe who died, they ate every part of. This was as much for the practical nutritional purpose of not wasting food products, as it was for their religious purposes. In their tribe, the myths behind rituals ran parallel and fed into all of the practical reasons for them. The two were inseparable in a way. In this case, the tribe ate their dead to make certain that their souls would not come back to kill them. They needed to devour their bodies to keep the deceased people's souls in the world of the dead and out of the world of the living. In this way, the entire tribe became walking cemeteries and supreme masters of recycling, since the consumption of each dead person was the burial and the feast at the same time.

Not with standing.

2009-12-20T15:12:00.008+09:00

I put together a new mix. It's called:
Not with standing.

Listen to it:
part 1
part 2

Lots of jazz on this one, interspersed with some Brazilian obscurities, one beautiful African high-life track, as well as an instrumental track from Taj Mahal's collaboration with the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar. And then you have maybe the thesis statement track From the Lonely Afternoons, which is Wayne Shorter teamed up with Milton Nascimento, an amazing Brazilian musician who solos with and uses his voice like a jazz instrument, which goes head to head with Wayne Shorter's saxophone. Enjoy.

"the magic method of contracting space"

2009-12-18T13:36:00.006+09:00

So I gave my 6th graders an assignment to make an informal book about their schedule everyday including stick figure drawings and all that. Each page was to have one sentence about the usual stuff: "I get up at seven-thirty everyday" or whatever.

So this girl Ui Ju who is the highest level English speaker in the entire school (including teachers), basically filled the book up like an essay. Which is cool, because in the odd spaces smashed between poor translations, her crazy awesome level of intelligence and growing understanding of the world, and her crushingly monotonous daily life here and how she deals with it, always produces some AMAZING sentences. She's the same girl that wrote me the letter where she asked me whether I liked sloths or tadpoles more from an earlier post.

Whenever I give a writing assignment she always writes literally pages more than anyone else in the class. It is her main and almost only method of communicating with me. She's still just a little too shy to talk to me around school in the many times during the day I'm not teaching, and she feels awkward or embarrassed to speak in class because she has an innate understanding of how it will make all the other students feel bad about how little English they know themselves and either jealous or angry at her for showing off. So it took me nearly a year to find out that she even had the English ability that she did and how intelligent she is, and how unique her outlook on the world seems to be for her age.

When I come home at night I sometimes see her jump-roping outside of the entrance to my apartment. It's always a bit of an odd scene because she never really says hello unless I do first, and her mother is always there, standing eerily still, in the shadows watching her daughter jump-rope silently. She lives on the first floor of the same building I live in and actually used to live in the very apartment I live in now, which adds another wrung to the ladder of bizareness about certain aspects of my life here that I haven't found any way to express in words. I found out from her book about her day that:

"I exercise at eight. I jumprope 2000 times a day. My record is 2012. I was surprised."

"I eat lunch at the cafeteria of my school.
I don't have any story to write about lunch."

"I eat dinner at six. I also watch TV when I have dinner. My mom and I always watch American TV shows, such as 'American next top model', 'The biggest loser'. At first, only I liked the TV shows, but now, my mom enjoys them, too."

"I go to school at eight forty. Few years ago, I used to go to school too late. I had to wake up earlier or walk faster. I decided to walk faster to be on time. As you know, my school is located on a hill. And that is because my legs are developed. Nowadays, I am said to be the 'virtuoso of the magic method of contracting space.'" [emphasis added]

"I go to bed at ten or ten thirty. I used to go to bed at eleven. But I realized that eleven is too late. I have decided to go to bed earlier so that I can be taller."

a mean while

2009-12-16T10:58:00.000+09:00

Been meaning to up some posts, but I have this photo class coming up, so I've been pretty busy. But I have a bunch of tidbits and music and image gems to post soon, so hopefully this weekend I'll get around to it. Until then.

Man, this is a small town

2009-12-11T15:07:00.003+09:00

So I thought the thing with the other Dave that punched the dude in the face was long over, but apparently one of Lindsey's co-teachers told her that he received a call from his friend who told him that her boyfriend punched some other dude in the face while he was "very drunken" at a bar. Man...I think those lame cops must have spilled to someone.

17 million won

2009-12-09T13:08:00.004+09:00

I had a meeting about my photography camp I'll be teaching this month yesterday. I really like be involved with meetings in Korea when the education office supervisors are there. They're so detailed and precise with everything and with the gestures and modes of their speaking. And Koreans are always dressed to the nines for official meetings like that complete with shiny shoes and shimmering suit jackets. The supervisor would close her fist inward slowly as if she was gripping an imaginary sword in slow motion as she was explaining the details about the plan for my class. The three other teachers there were younger female teachers, so they were sitting there still bundled up in their jackets because the heat wasn't working well, one had a flu mask covering part of her mouth, and all three of them had this tense energy about them like they were ready to jump out of their seats so they could be the first to catch the drift of the supervisor's words in mid air as they wafted across the table. I was really impressed because for the location of the camp they were letting me use a brand new school up a little ways towards Taebaek mountain that had a computer room with 30 computers (one per student), which they were going to install editing programs on, with another classroom right across the hallway with large tables for the students to share while watching my slideshows and lessons and doing activities. The supervisor even had it broken down to how many students will be sitting at each table. And they're funding the camp with almost 17 million won. Wow. I was without words. I just can't get over that quite a few months ago I gave them just a few sheets of paper with a plan and an idea for teaching Language Through Photography, and now there's a 17 million won budget, 60 kids from all around Taebaek attending, and each student being picked up from and dropped off at their home by a private bus every day.

There's only one Dave in town...and that's me.

2009-12-08T09:25:00.010+09:00

I never thought of my name as unique or uncommon before. But something happened two nights ago that burned the fact into my mind that I am definitely the only person by the name of Dave to live in Taebaek, with a population of around 50 thousand, and maybe even within a good size perimeter around Taebaek, as well.

Elvis told me last night that I had to go to the police station and apologize to the Korean man who I punched in the face over the weekend while I was a belligerent, drunken mess at a bar in town.

I had just finished a lesson for his son and daughter and a couple of kids in the neighborhood and I was literally in the process of putting on my shoes to leave when Elvis' wife handed me the phone. It was Elvis and he asked with a hint of urgency if I could stay there until he arrived. A little alarmed, I asked him why and he said the police called him and he began to explain while he was driving to no avail, and then told me he would explain it when he got there.

At first I was mostly convinced that he was going to tell me that Lindsey and I owed some money for a couple of speeding tickets we thought we'd gotten when we rented a car a couple of weekends ago. We weren't sure if we'd gotten speeding tickets, but we thought we engaged a couple of speed cameras when we passed under them (there's so many in Korea, and everyone has a GPS sensor for them on their navigation systems that starts screaming at you when you're getting close, so you can speed as much as you want in between them and know when they're coming up), so we were half expecting a ticket in the mail. Since speeding tickets were only 30 dollars or so here, I wasn't that worried.

But then when Elvis arrived he asked me if something had happened a couple of days ago. I said nothing that would concern the police, and he asked me if I was fighting in a bar and hit a Korean man in the face. I told him I was in Seoul, so that would have been a little bit impossible. Then he told me that the man who got punched in the face was at the police station and he said that someone named Dave hit him. Then he said I need to go to the police station and apologize to him. Then I was like wait a minute, slow down, I'm not going to the police station or apologizing to anyone because I didn't hit anyone. Then Elvis asks me if I know any other Daves, and of course I had to admit that I didn't know anyone else by the name of Dave that lived in Taebaek or around Taebaek (but why should that matter again!!??). And then Elvis said he didn't know who else it could have been, implying that because I was the only person by the name of Dave that he knew of, it was impossible that it could have been anyone else that did the drunken belligerent punching in the face of the Korean man.

So I told him again that I was in Seoul and that I can't apologize for something I didn't do, and would have been impossible for me to have done because I wasn't physically present in Taebaek, but that I do know for a fact that there are many people by the name of Dave that probably live elsewhere in the country or work for the American military, an NGO, or just happen to be travelling through. So he told me that if I didn't go to the police station they would file a report about me and it would become a bigger problem. So I told him I could get at least seven people in Seoul, not including motel owners that could be contacted if need be, to all confirm seeing me over the weekend. At that point the police called back and said they had a picture of the Dave that did the punching, and I should come to the police station so they could compare it to me.

I said I still wasn't willing to go to the police station unless I could be assured there was an English speaker there to translate in case I needed to explain myself. Maybe I'm paranoid by nature, but there were a already few tragic scenarios playing out in my mind: for one, there are a couple of crazy people in town that know my name (only being one of 21 foreigners, a lot of people do), and one particular drunk crazy old man that always hits me (aggressively but never hard) on the shoulder and then gets in my face and pulls his fist back like he's going to punch me. I always have to pretty much just stand there staring at him, because let's face it, even if the old man was trying to tear my nose off with his teeth, if a 6ft white guy beats a tiny crazy old man to the ground, it's ALWAYS going to be my fault. There's one other guy in town who I met when I first got here because his English was really amazing and he would talk and walk with me when I was out and about town. We exchanged numbers before I found out that he was a Jesus-loony stalker-type and monumental space invader while he's talking to you (leaning into me and almost literally pushing me off the sidewalk into the street without even realizing it). When I decided to stop answering his phone calls or talking to him because he would just make the conversation incredibly uncomfortable by talking about Christ continuously and not letting a word in edgewise, he actually showed up at my school unannounced while I was working and walked into the teacher's office naturally, as if he worked there. He leaned over my desk and actually started ruffling through my papers in front of me and leaned down so close to me I could feel his breath as he wanted to see what I was doing on the computer. Even when I almost shouted at him to get the hell out of my space and over-gestured with both arms towards the door, he kept asking when he could have my "permission" to meet with him. I told him never. In any case, I was thinking it could be completely plausible for one of those people to tell the police that it was me that assaulted them, either because they mistook another foreigner for me, or just because they were demented and couldn't quite distinguish reality from what goes on in their minds.

Another scenario, I was worried that the police might have some tiny, low resolution picture of the other Dave, taken at night from a distance, which they would confuse for me themselves. It ended up they did have a tiny picture, taken at night from a distance on a small LCD screen of a camera.

So, I was trying to explain to Elvis that there's no need for me to waste my time going over there unless he could go with me, or there was a guarantee for a translator, or even at all, because there's 7 or 8 people that could confirm seeing me in Seoul, at least three of which are Korean, and do they even have this guy's last name? Then the police called him back and said they were just coming there to Elvis' home, where we could meet in the dark playground just outside the apartment building, where they could compare their picture of Dave with me.

We waited 20 minutes, and they finally arrived, and Elvis finally started believing that it wasn't me, and his wife was almost irate, and the only thing I could make out her saying was that she was repeating over and over again that she thought this was making me feel so bad. Finally the police got there, we went out to meet them, and right as they got out of their car, I could see on their faces that they knew they'd mistaken me. They sauntered over to Elvis and showed him the bad picture on the digital camera LCD screen, and I popped over his shoulder so I could get a look (and I swear I could smell alcohol on their breath). It was a picture of some heavy set dude, dancing debaucheresly in the middle of the street with some big boned Korean woman, holding a red hoodie. He had really short hair and dark skin, and didn't even vaguely resemble me. They asked if I knew him, I said no, then they said his name might not even have been Dave at all but "Bin Dave" (?). So that was that. But I really wonder why when the police called the vice principal at my school and called the other administrator they didn't just ask what I looked like before wasting everyone's time along with the possibility of defacement and embarrassment? Bunch of wackos, really.

the civlized man's commodity

2009-12-02T16:15:00.003+09:00

new mix: the civilized man's commodity

get it:
part 1
part 2

The title is from a Korean commercial that I saw. Sometimes I feel like Korean advertising is so transparently fake that I can't call it bad, but mostly humorous and sometimes interesting.

I've been listening to a lot of ambient drum and bass music from the 90's while working on editing photographs. It really takes me back to that period of electronic music that reminds me simultaneously of 80's horror movies and breakthroughs in the fields of subatomic and astro physics. In terms of 80's horror movies, there's just this creativity and experimentation that's not afraid to be considered cheesy and just work through a complete idea without the benefit of a large production budget. In terms of physics, this type of music was simultaneous slowing down and speeding up the sounds and rhythms and portions of sampled drum loops and usually seemed to have an underlying floating in space vibe. The slowing and speeding up of various overlapped samples ends up spreading all the sounds out and opening up a lot of space in the track.

In 1997 there was an experiment conducted where they shot curiously interconnected but independent photons 7 miles apart and studied their movements. They found that even at a distance of 7 miles apart, when one photon began spinning in one direction, its sister photon, which was not connected in any observable physical sense, simultaneously began spinning in the opposite direction. I'll link to some information on this study later, but just not right now. But for some reason, ambient drum and bass makes me think of that inexplicable interconnected subatomic spin.

Burial has been my editing soundtrack lately as well, and his music is so beautiful, I can't get over it. Makes tedious hours at the computer float by.

Divola, John - As Far As I Could Get

2009-12-01T15:10:00.007+09:00

Just stand the camera up on three legs, engage the self timer, and run. Man, this is so simple and awesome.

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

There's so much more on his site.
Been loving the Zuma Series too. He just occupied this place, and then it changed as he changed with it, and then he changed it sometimes himself, and imprinted all these images of the moments between all those transitions.

ggachee bap

2009-11-27T15:48:00.005+09:00

This is called 까치밥 (ggachee bap), which means "magpie rice". During autumn, persimmon trees become LOADED down with persimmons. They almost look comical when this happens because all their leaves fall, leaving them as barren tree skeletons, filled with countless sweet bright orange spheres. When they are harvested, one persimmon, or a few persimmons, are left on the trees as a symbolic (and very practical) gesture to the magpies. It's a really nice sentiment, I think, to consider the magpies. They're probably my favorite bird in Korea. They're the first bird I noticed when I arrived, and whenever they land on a branch for a moment, or a do a fly-by they always seem like they're just on their way to do something really important.

I almost forgot about The Disentegration Loops

2009-11-25T14:16:00.009+09:00

"I started a joke, which started the whole world crying
but I didn't see that the joke was on me...oh no...
I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing
oh, if I'd only seen that the joke was on me..."

William Basinski was trying to preserve some of his old tape loops from 20 years ago and realized that the safety window had been long past and it was too late. The magnetic material on the tapes began to flake away as they played and the sound began to fade away and decay with the tapes and change drastically in character as the tapes were played over and over again. So he just let them play over and over again, until the sound decayed into almost nothing and recorded this process. These recordings are so beautiful because the slowly escalating destruction of the sound, as it plays out, changes the loop each time it repeats itself, making what would be identical cycles become constantly (d)evolving ones. The sound of the disintegration of the music creates a fascinating music itself. I've never sat and listened to the process of a physical/analog recording disintegrating into nothing before, but I'd do it again any day. This is the sound of music dying in the physical world and making its transition into the digital one. It can never go back.

Here's a cool review on Pitchfork.
And you can get the whole thing here.

Ballen, Roger

2009-11-25T13:45:00.006+09:00

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

I happened upon a few of these images by a random link through an unremembered chain of connections, and then, mystified, I had to research their origin and felt compelled to know more. There's not many composed/staged photographs that really hit me viscerally, but some of these definitely do. They appear obviously set-up as you look at them, but then after a while they also seem loose and free-formed and there's some tense spontaneity about them. The black and white tones bring me back to Weegee and Diane Arbus and photographs from the Great Depression. The square format, the shadows and lack of them from the harsh flash, the degradation of people and animals hiding amidst the surroundings, the flattening of space, the sometimes beautiful arrangement of objects, and the one word titles that stick in my memory and bring out an interesting interplay of ideas when paired with the metaphors going on in the pictures.

What's crazy is that the place in these photographs actually exists:

"Eventually we reach the crux of the matter, upon learning from the text that this quite extraordinary place which Ballen has felt compelled to photograph over the last few years and calls the Boarding House, far from being a figment of his imagination, really does exist. Very remote and hidden amongst enormous tailings from gold mines near Johannesburg, it is in actual fact a three-storey warehouse building which has become a neighbourhood unto itself. The interior is crowded with the poor: entire families of workers, transients, criminals hiding from the law, even witchdoctors who attend to the many diseases within this unsanitary and overcrowded environment. Few rooms are separated by walls, most of the spaces, as in a shantytown, being partitioned by rugs, blankets or metal sheeting, and each being self-contained. There are no visible windows or open doors. Each doorway, although closed, seems to lead to an inner sanctum. One, surrounded by a giraffe hide, belongs to a sangoma, or South African witchdoctor. Another, with a picture of Mary and the infant Jesus, leads to a makeshift church. A third, more ominous doorway is the entrance to the Ghost Room, where long ago the managers of gold mines were reputed to have violently punished recalcitrant miners, sometimes even starving then to death. This lawless yet strangely enthralling location has served as the focus of Ballen’s photographic work over the last four years." --Richard Pinsent

There's a lot more of his photographs at his website.

Oceanic frequency

2009-11-24T16:49:00.003+09:00

Also, a side note I learned about the sound of ocean waves: they have a frequency of about 12 cycles per minute which is coincidentally about the same frequency of the sound of a sleeping human. So ocean waves have the undeniable resonance of rest. That's probably part of the reason it's so easy to be sucked into them, like a camp fire.

Casting the die down the coast

2009-11-22T20:05:00.012+09:00

I played another aleatoric photographic game this past weekend. This time the rules were simple: drive in one direction (south), and roll a die to see how far you drive before stopping to make a photograph (each dot on the die stands for 3km). The element of chance defines the points of stillness carved out from the trajectory where light is recorded.

Lindsey and I rented a car and winded our way through the long narrow valley down the mountain, and then down the east coast with the ocean to our left. We drove through squid towns, where squid lined the sides of the road like fences, their drying bodies being hung up by the elderly and covering countless rows of metal bars. Squid was hanging on rooftops and on drying racks originally intended for the drying of clothes, and the sun was glinting through transluscent squid flesh so it appeared luminescent. We drove through crab towns, where restaurant after restaurant served nothing but crab, where overflowing aquarium tanks were bulging full of large crabs with their spiky bodies trapped together like jigsaw puzzles, and where restaurant owners physically jumped out in front of our car and shouted at us while gesturing with their white gloves to pull into their parking garages to eat their overpriced crabs. There was a crab bridge and crab cartoon mascots on the light posts and a small harbor side park with crab benches and crab statues.

We stopped for Chinese food and their kimchi tasted like apricots.

We drove inland, and got stuck in Daegu because cities aren't in grids here and roads align themselves devoutly on Nietzsche's writings on the concept of eternal return.

We stayed at a love motel in Changpyeong next to a freshly sliced half-mountain and a road that was less than 20 ft long and led to mounds of dirt and heavy machinery at it's unfinished end up a hill. The town seemed dreary and incomplete and slightly unwelcoming. All of the motel options had parking areas without lights and seemed set up for illicit transactions of money to occur within the rooms. We ate at a small gimbap restaurant where they gave me a plate of rice covered with ketchup. They asked me if it was delicious as we were leaving. When it became day again in the morning the town didn't look that bad. It was just the darkness and being lost for two hours in Daegu and hunger and fatigue that mostly led to our bad impression of the place.

Our final destination was the largest swamp in Korea. It seemed like we were spotted driving in, and the director appeared in the parking lot by the side of our car before we even had time to step outside(they don't see too many foreigners apparently). He gave us a short private guided tour of the wetlands information museum. He was a really nice person and showed us a TPR (total physical response) dance move for how we should remember that a wetland is classified as a large body of water less than 6 meters in depth. He showed us another dance move for remembering how the four seasons are "absolutely...DIFFERENT!" They gave us some malfuntioning 3D glasses and were told to watch a wetlands animation which was mostly incomprehensible because it was all in Korean without subtitles.

I noticed the water in the small fountain there was thinly iced over, and I could shatter it with my knuckle and watch beautiful formations of shadows develop underneath it across the dirty sky blue tiles as the light shined across the edges of the cracks I made in the ice.

The place was peaceful and there were large amounts of ducks and snowy white egrets and magpies and other migrating birds hanging out.

We ate a sweet and spicy Prussian carp stew that had the very slightly sour and tangy flavor of lemon grass. I'm not sure if it actually was lemon grass or just some fresh mountain herb they collected in the area, but it was delicious and reminded me of the flavors of Vietnamese food, which is awesome because Korean food never has those flavors. They threw in two whole fish (who were moments ago swimming around in an aquarium tank), heads and all, in the stew pan which was set on a portable butane burner in front of us on the table, which boiled with the broth and the onions and radish chunks and the greens, so the sharp tiny bones spread profusely throughout and gouged the roof of my mouth frequently and one got stuck in Lindsey's throat for maybe half the meal. I think there's something to be said for food that is dangerous, or food that you have to work for. But I could've handled the absence of those needle-like bones.

Thomson, John

2009-11-20T10:11:00.007+09:00

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

John Thomson was a Scottish photographer who worked during the later 19th and early 20th century. He interests me a lot because he was one of the first photographers to live and travel in Southeast Asia and China. He's also considered to be one of the first social documentary photographers. I was thinking about his photographs a lot when I was travelling through the Cambodian countryside. I remember being struck with the realization that most of the houses and roads and landscapes look, today, exactly like they do in Thomson's photographs of that part of the world, which were made over a hundred years ago. The only difference was the occasional piece of delapidated farm equipment or motobike sitting around. Besides that, it was as deep and complete of a timewarp as I've ever experienced.

2009-11-18T14:25:00.002+09:00

Guatemala, Kenya, Colombia, Panama - It dawned on me the other day that every morning I drink a little bit of the third world out of my cup.

By the way: my dream is happening (at least a little bit)

2009-11-16T13:07:00.002+09:00

Well, it's not exactly the same thing, but Nouvelle Vague made a cover of that Joy Division song Love Will Tear Us Apart with a Brazilian singer in a bossa nova vein.

THERE WILL BE DOING AND PEELS

2009-11-15T13:23:00.012+09:00

This is the new find for me: folk and pop music from Sumatra. Listen to the vocals and the reverb and how the sound overlaps and mashes into itself and floats along...so beautiful. This music is crane.

I guess what grabs me about this type of music is that it breaks so many of the rules and formats and production sensibilities and scales and melodies and patterns and rhythms of contemporary music, but without being conscious of trying to do so. The music breaks the rules and sounds experimental only because it comes out of an entirely different tradition. No experimental music that consciously breaks all the rules can ever sound as experimental for that reason alone.

I put together a new mix yesterday. It's called THERE WILL BE DOING AND PEELS.

THERE WILL BE DOING AND PEELS

get it:
part 1
part 2

The title comes from an instant message I received on my computer from the vice principal of the elementary school I work for. Right after I arrived in Taebaek last year, the school put me up in a motel while they prepared my apartment. The day it was ready to move in, I received this bizarre instant message that I was convinced the vice principal had just inserted his Korean into babelfish and sent me exactly what came out. The beginning said "Korea does a moving in party" which made sense, but then the last part I'll never forget: "There will be doing and peels." I looked up after I read it, because the vice principal sits directly across the room from me in the staff room, but usually his face is hidden by the back of his computer monitor. When I looked up, I noticed he was peeking at me around the side of his monitor and nodding rapidly with the most beaming and excited expression, and it was so beaming and excited that I felt like I had to pretend I understood what was going to transpire that evening after work. I know we ate barbecued duck and the teachers brought me gifts for my new apartment, but I still don't have any idea what "doing and peels" was supposed to mean, and I think it's better that way. It's interesting that bizarre translations and things people say that I mishear stick out in my memory more than straight normal communication.

There are a bunch of highlights on this one, most of them, I have to say are tracks I pulled from various Sublime Frequencies compilations. I really have to give it up to those guys because they've been blowing my mind for a good while now. There's a couple of tracks from their compilations of folk and pop music from Sumatra, a track of slidy Bollywood steel guitar, some guitar music from the Western Sahara, and a song from Ethnic minority peoples of northeast Cambodia. There's also two really interesting cuts from one of John Zorn's Naked City albums. The thing I like most about them is that they are actually able to replicate, by playing live, the sound of turning the nob and switching stations on the radio -- short bursts of different types of songs and rhythms played in quick succession.

THRASHICALIA!

2009-11-12T07:40:00.009+09:00

Here's a mini-mix which is a soundtrack to my dream. Here's a link to download it so that perhaps you will be listening to it at the same time I am, or even while I am dreaming it: LINK

I had the strangest dream last night that the metal band Slayer put out an album with an unmistakable tropicalia feel to it. They were able to seamlessly blend the sounds of speeed-thrash metal with mellowed out tropicalia and samba grooves from 1960's and 70's Brazil. In the dream I thought this was so brilliant that I was urged into action by moral pressure to catch a flight to see their latest live show in a different country. But then when I actually saw them playing the music, I was horrified and ashamed for them because their fashion sense and faces looked just as serious and demoniacal as when they were playing their hardcore speed-thrash metal music. It just made it too comical to be good, and I was a little sad about it, because during the dream, I was building up in my mind for the next big thing in music: a collective revival of hardcore metal bands from the late 80's and 90's shifting to tropicalia. I was initially so excited for a comeback of bands like Megadeth, Exodus, Anthrax, Kreator, Sepultura, Celtic Frost, or especially Exit 13, Primus, and Nocturnus, and they would all be bringing a new intensity to Brazilian jams and the tropicalia fad in indie rock. Now that I'm awake and thinking about it, it actually sounds like a pretty good idea. At least one album of metal bands playing tropicalia adaptations and covers is in order, I think. The song flow above mixes and matches these two styles of music, so you can hear their interplay. Oddly enough, some of the thrash metal tracks really seem to blend well amidst the tropicalia songs.

I guess the next step would be to figure out a way to convince these metal bands to do it, and then find a record label that's weird enough to fund the project.

Here's two videos back to back, one is the story of thrash metal and the other is a BBC documentary on the history of the tropicalia movement in Brazil. This is only the first of seven parts of the tropicalia documentary that you can see on youtube. Or better yet, you can just find the torrent and download the full thing, which I just did and plan to watch STAT.

AND: I left Lindsey's place this morning and it was cold and rainy. It was raining when I got on the bus and started listening to my audiobook of Cradle to Cradle. When I started getting depressed about society building a cancer in the world and all that, I decided to throw on my Lake Effect mix (a mix for when rain turns into snow).....I'm not even exaggerating, but the very moment the first song started playing, the rain turned into snow. A wild coincidence, I know.

AND #2: Check out this video. They're invention is beautiful. It almost makes up for the dude's hair. But making rhythm and music by human touch....amazing.

I like to eat your heart

2009-11-11T14:49:00.007+09:00

There's a Hungarian expression that translates to "I like to eat your heart." You say it to people who do something generous or selfless. That's beautiful.

The other night there was a discussion on the train happening between mostly Brian and Lindsey about lake effect. They've both lived in areas that brush up against the Great Lakes and have been subject to how those bodies of water affect the climate. Never having lived anywhere near a lake that large, lake effect is something I've never thought about in my lifetime until I was listening to that particular conversation. But it definitely sounds pretty awesome to me now.

I just finished a another mix influenced by the plummeting temperatures. Highlights on this mix are definitely a couple of tracks I pulled from a compilation of music from Ghana which was recorded between the 60's and early 80's. There's also a pretty cool Korean hip hop song that I found on a torrent of the top 100 K-pop songs right now. What's pretty funny about this song is that the chorus translates to "Because the rain falls down, I'm thinking about soju and sam gyeop sal." Depending on their character, some Koreans call soju "Korean water" while others call it "Korean whiskey", and I guess if you really think about it, soju is right in the middle of the two, if you add a load of chemical aftertaste. Sam gyeop sal is thickly sliced pork belly that you barbecue in front of you before usually dipping it in salted oil and then placing it in a lettuce or cabbage wrap with a chunk of raw garlic and fermented soybean paste mixed with hot chile pepper sauce (how can that NOT be incredible, really?). So basically the chorus of the song is "Because the rain falls down I think about Korean liquor and barbecued pork belly."

In any case, the mix is called:

The Lake Effect (a mix for when rain turns into snow)

giver a download:
part 1
part 2

*also: let me know if there's any problems with downloading the mixes or anything since this is only the third one I've upped. They're all perfect size for a packed to the max 700mb CDR, which is a temporal limitation I really like, and brings me back to one of the only good things about those long commutes in LA.

Feeling the deciduous vibe of late

2009-11-10T11:19:00.013+09:00

The Green Oranges of Vietnam

Not having much experience with living in a place with actual seasons, I really can't get over all the transitions that trees go through during the course of a year.

When I was in Vietnam last winter there were a lot of green oranges being sold in the markets and on roadsides that were actually incredibly ripe beneath the surface. I didn't know why until recently, but apparently citrus fruits contain many of the same chemicals that cause deciduous leaves to become nuclear and piercing and explode in a spectrum of brilliant death colors in autumn (Their colors become most deep and beautiful right before their fall). So the citrus fruits, a late autumn and winter ripening fruit, respond to the lengthening of nights and chilling of the air by slowly cutting off the chlorophyll I.V. drip to their extremities (to shrivel and cringe away from the chill and protect themselves from freezing), allowing for the sugars and chemicals in the plant to crystallize and the dyes in certain chemicals to finally express themselves in a magnitude of reds, oranges, yellows, and browns.

Going back to the green oranges of Vietnam, the tropical areas closer to the equator don't have a strong change of seasons, the nights don't shorten as much and the days don't become chill. So many species of citrus plants don't ever receive the signals from nature to necessitate cutting off the chlorophyll drip, and they stay green throughout the year, even as its fruit becomes ripe and delicious.

Also: a volleyball game over the unfinished wall across the U.S.-Mexico border.

The idea of an expensive and tall-walled, exorbitantly maintained land border stocked with searchlights and helicopters and weapons is so jenkem, and a game of volleyball being played across it just tips the scales. It says in the video that the dangers involved in hiking through the sometimes harsh wilderness to illegally cross into the U.S. illegally has been compared with scaling Mt. Everest.

There's a new special education teacher at my school who just finished his military service in town. He's pretty cool and was telling about the trekking he did in the Himalayas and the 5 months of backpacking he did across India, and how his dream is to work for an NGO, probably in Africa. He just walked into the staff room, though, and said "Shiksa ha say yo?" to whoever might be listening, which means "Did you eat a meal?" But if you don't raise your intonation at the end the words change into a demand: "Eat a meal!" I never thought about it before, but the formal polite verb-ending for a question (하세요, ha say yo) is identical to the imperative verb-ending for a polite demand. That means that polite questions in Korean are just a subtle intonation away from becoming a demand. Maybe this helps explain the underlying urgency that seems to permeate daily activities in this culture.

And in a Korean workplace, or just being in the presence of older Koreans, I will hear them ask each other or myself about whether meals have been eaten or not at least 6 to 10 times a day. It seems like eating food is what Koreans are most preoccupied with, almost all the time. My kind of culture, really. I had to actually stop eating dinner with Elvis' family after I finish the evening class I do there, primarily because his wife would just shove so much food in front of my face I didn't know what to do with it all, and I felt bad wasting any of it because of the thick and deep guilt she would lay on me. Both her son and daughter are pretty chubby for their age, and every dinner she would snap at them to eat their food, and whenever there was a lull in the pace of their consumption she would ask them why they weren't eating. Whenever I finished the rice in my bowl, her unease was tangible in the air, and without a doubt she would eventually either ask me if I wanted more rice or just scoop more food into my bowl against my will, as if her actions were entirely out of her control. And even now, before I leave her home, she always asks me worriedly if I plan to eat dinner after I finish teaching. And I don't mean that she asks me if I will eat there, she asks me as if she's nervous I'm just not planning on eating dinner at all, or if I will go hungry. I think it's basically confirmed at this point that her inescapable goal in life is to be surrounded by fat faces, preferably ones that are stuffing themselves. And if they're not fat faces, she'll see to it that they stuff themselves until they get that way. That's all she wants to see around her are fat faces.

Even when Lindsey arrived in town, I remember her telling me that the nice woman in charge of her apartment would always ask her about food and whether or not Lindsey was eating enough of it. And even once told Lindsey genuinely: "I worry you starve."

Speaking of verbs in foreign languages and also the Himalayas, Lindsey found this post on a forum she reads about the verb "to be" in the Tibetan language. I can't exactly vouch for the truth or correctness of this because the linguist studies student who wrote it exhibited that horrendous and stupefying false sense of expertness and authority that is no where more ridiculously displayed than in what people write in internet forums. Nonetheless, the idea here is fascinating.

Tibetan has six verbs 'to be' -
one, if you're equating something with something else and you're not involved.
two, if you are directly and/or heavily invested in something,
three, if something's surprising or you've just realised it,
four, if you're stating that something exists in a specific manner or place and it's a general fact,
five, if you've witnessed it, and
six, if you're personally invested in the existence of something.

I don't quite understand the distinction between number two and number six, but it's fascinating to me that Tibetans have to be continuously aware of how personally involved they are with anything they talk about, and how this degree of personal involvement will always be reflected by their verb choice.

style chaynjee

2009-11-04T10:21:00.004+09:00

This is a picture of me right after I got a haircut at a Korean beauty salon. Besides the hair stylist not cutting off half as much hair as I wanted her to, everything was going fine, until she uttered the famous final words "style chaynjee", and started applying the gunk and swirling my hair around in bizarre ways. Afterwards I realized that I've never looked quite so Korean.

THE TASTE OF WIDE OPEN SPACES

2009-11-02T09:15:00.008+09:00

I just received a text from one of my Korean friends in town that read: "It snows heavily." I'm sure he either thought I might be indoors with the curtains drawn or he was just confirming with resoluteness the frozen white particles falling and swirling by outside by the millions.

So this is my mix for the now resolute transition of fall into winter. It's called "THE TASTE OF WIDE OPEN SPACES"

The author of the history of Citrus book I'm reading used these words to describe the flavor of a particular type of orange. I really liked it because it's a very synaesthetic idea. Also, I don't get the chance to visit that many wide open spaces in Korea. It's a mountainous country, most areas are encircled and closed off by mountains, especially in Gangwon province and especially where I live in Gangwon province. I miss feeling the vast expanses of the desert.

Here's the tracklisting, download links are below it.
THE TASTE OF WIDE OPEN SPACES

get it:
part 1
part 2

Also, there was a CNN article by Bob Greene on the subject of time that I thought was really fascinating, specifically this part about how social networking sites have significantly altered the concept of time during actual non-virtual social events. What fascinates me most is how the way and rate in which we are compelled to document and share the visual residue of these social events in images has accelerated to some mind boggling degree. One of my friends who lives in a city about an hour north of me once told me over the phone, "I've seen that you've been hanging out with Lindsey and Pat a lot lately." Being new to facebook at the time, this really struck me as an odd thing to say, since in reality I hadn't seen him or anyone he was hanging out with, and I assumed he wasn't spying on me. In fact, just a few years ago, this would have been a completely impossible thing to say unless I was a public figure or celebrity where everything I did ended up in magazines and on TV, or he actually was stalking me.

It was then that it dawned on me that virtual online reality and tangible physical reality had started to irreversibly merge. While before, terms like actual reality or real reality would have been redundancies, I think now they are necessary as terms of contrast, since in actual reality my friend had not seen me, but because other people I know publish images on facebook, he had seen me in a reality that now includes this virtual online social realm.

Here's the part of the article that talks about it. I love the last sentence about "proactive nostalgia for something that hasn't finished taking place yet."

"'What's new?' has ceased to be a casual pleasantry, and has become an urgent demand. Indeed, the word "new" itself has lost its punch; in marketing campaigns, the adjective "new" has increasingly been tossed aside and replaced by the adjective "next." "New" now seems somehow old.

At family gatherings and get-togethers of friends, something is happening that would have seemed outlandish even a few years ago. People at the parties are posting photos and videos of the events on social networking sites even as the parties are still going on.

Thus, friends and acquaintances around the country and around the world are looking at the party pictures and videos and evaluating them before the party is even over. And people who are at the parties themselves, checking in on the same social network sites, are looking at the publicly posted pictures of the party they are still attending. It's like a bizarre form of proactive nostalgia for something that hasn't finished taking place yet."

Breaking symmetrical expectations and the history of nothing

2009-10-30T09:16:00.011+09:00

So my school has been undergoing a massive restroom beautification program, which includes brand new doors, new stall doors and dividers with floral patterned wallpaper, some large fish and sea creatures stickers that appear to be swimming along the wall, nature photos with motivational quotes, some general rearrangements, and they even rigged up a speaker to pump in ultra-cheesy tranquil light classical music. The ultimate mind boggling aspect of this beautification project is that there's been a paper towel dispenser in the bathroom that has literally been empty for the past 15 months. And I don't mean it's usually empty, I mean, that, to my knowledge, there's never been one paper towel in there. And after all the work they've done in the bathroom, yesterday I still had to walk out of there to the light classical music with dripping wet hands. And today, in order to "fix" the problem, I found they just removed the towel dispenser all together and hung up some dirty mops in its place. The thing that I love about Korea is the same thing that I find most baffling about its building practices. At the outset, many structures and interior design appear to be organized and similar to buildings you'd find in the states, but then there is always one or two elements that completely destabilize this appearance.

All over this town there's these narrow, meandering dirt and rock paths running between buildings and gardens and fences. The paths look as if you're surely walking through someone's private property, but it's actually just a shortcut.

I really like this aspect of Korea's building practices, it just has so much more of an organic feel to it, as opposed to how master-planned everything has started feeling in the states. The structures here always seem to be incomplete in one manner or another. Our eyes always form expectations about the constructed spaces and natural spaces in our surroundings. We create a logic with which to anticipate visual patterns and the way we are supposed to move through the spaces, understand the intentions of the original builders, and grasp the area's various functionalities. In constructed spaces in Korea, so often all but one or two things support this equation. But there is always that one area that confuses my perception a bit. Something that doesn't quite add up and I can't quite understand the intentions that were behind it during the building process.

Speaking of the idea of the incomplete and way structures are built, this morning I was watching this TED talk lecture by Marcus Du Sautoy which was about symmetry in nature, design, art and architecture. As an artist, I think about symmetry a lot. Our minds and perceptions are designed to be attracted to symmetry. Whenever I look through the lens of my camera I always feel this pull to frame these really symmetrical compositions. It kind of sickens me actually, and it's something I fight with every time I'm making photographs. Because in many cases, something that's so symmetrical will become visually stale so fast. It just doesn't contain anything to keep you coming back to it.

Seeking out the symmetry is a completely natural thing to do, since apparently the more symmetrical an organism is, the higher its ability to reproduce. So people that are more symmetrical are usually seen as more attractive, and as more desirable mates. This is also the reason that viruses can spread so quickly and can be so dangerous: virus particles tend to be extremely symmetrical.

Marcus Du Sautoy said something I thought was really interesting which relates to that idea of artists fighting against symmetry: "Artists set up expectations for symmetry and then break them."

I can be down with that.

And another thing I've been pondering all day since I heard it this morning was what he quoted from these Japanese essays written by a monk in the 14th century called the "Essays in Idleness": "Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished."

I really have an affinity for that idea. Art that is too complete, symmetrical or slick and over-produced just gets tired so quickly. I want to look or listen to something that makes me feel like I need to keep coming back to it to fully grasp (I guess the only problem is that most people don't want to make half that effort, hence why the best art is left underappreciated).

Here's a link to his lecture if you're interested.

I learned about another thing that I've never really thought about before that is the origin of the number zero (coincidentally perhaps the most symmetrical of our number symbols). By that, I mean the concept of zero and nothingness in the collective consciousness. At least in recorded history the number zero never had a symbol until halfway through the 7th century. I guess no one really talked about nothing. When you think about it, zero and the idea of nothing is a really abstract concept, which is most useful only in terms of mathematics or philosophy. Many ancient civilizations only used numbers for counting and keeping track of their herds of food-animals and whatnot. Apparently, like many scientific and mathematical disciplines, zero was brought to Europe from the Arabs, who themselves learned it from people in India. "The history of nothing" has a nice ring to it. Here's a couple of links about the history of zero:
one
two

Furthermore: television snow. Rather than trying to explain it myself, here's three links which explain how about 1% of television white noise is actually the microwave radiation emanating through space from when the universe was created. After the big bang, there was energy expelled in the form of a microwave afterglow that is consistent everywhere and in every direction. Wow.
info 1
info 2
info 3

And lastly, a documentary about Tibetan Buddhism by Werner Herzog called "The Wheel of Time" got me thinking about what it would be like to measure the circumference of the world with my body. The film is about this huge Buddhist ceremony that hundreds of thousands of people make a pilgrimage to every few years when it takes place. Some extreme devotees walk hundreds or even thousands of miles there by praying and lying fully prostrate for every. single. step.

They attach wooden boards to their hands so they're not destroyed by the journey. This old monk from a remote area of China was interviewed who had travelled in this manner for 3000 miles. It took him somewhere around 3 years to make the entire journey. He said during the interview he didn't want to make a big thing about it, even though nodes had grown on the bones in his wrist from praying so much and lying prostrate across the ground. When they asked him about the distance being such an incredible feat, he just said yes, he knew how big the world was because he measured it with his arms, his legs, his head, and his body. He measured and felt every step. That's intense.

Here's the part of the documentary that shows their pilgrimage. This version is not in English though, but you can see what I'm talking about.

Allegience to the pickled cabbage

2009-10-26T13:07:00.002+09:00

I swear sometimes I feel like I'm in some weird kimchi cult since I've moved to Korea. Kimchi is not just a food, but a religion. For most Koreans, a meal cannot even be considered a meal unless it includes rice and kimchi. And just like certain things that cults do in their eating habits or behaviors, it'll make the other members real nervous if you aren't participating. Today I was eating lunch at the teacher overflow table (where teachers sit when the main teacher table is full). It was just the school nurse and myself. There was a heaping bowl of kimchi in the middle of the table between us that I intentionally avoided helping myself to. There's a certain point in the year when they've just kept the kimchi in the fridge WAY too long. It just starts tasting stale. I love kimchi when it's fresh, or even sometimes when it's super fermented, but never when it has that stale flavor from having been trapped in sealed tupperware containers in a freezer for the past 6 months or so. I noticed immediately the nurse getting nervous because I didn't take any, so without saying anything she pushed the steel bowl closer to my tray. The comical thing about this impulsive gesture was that the bowl was already like 6 inches away from my tray, so cleary close enough for me to reach it; she pushed it to the point that had it been any closer it would have been touching my tray. Although, I still silently refrained from taking any kimchi out of the bowl. I could totally notice her eyes peering over at me throughout the meal nervously, agitated, every so often. It felt like the type of look you give someone, completely out of your control, that has their fly unzipped or some huge green vegetable fiber caught between their teeth, but you don't feel like you know them well enough to say anything.

Then after I was almost finished, perhaps as a desparate gesture to try and remind me that I STILL hadn't eaten any kimchi, the nurse made a soft grunt and placed more kimchi on her own tray, when it was obvious she still had a healthy pile she hadn't finished yet. What was funny was that she carefully placed the tongs back into the bowl so that they were obviously facing me and nudged the bowl even closer to my tray.

No matter how many days I don't eat the kimchi at school, this type of occurance is common. The older male staff like the ping pong coach, the groundskeeper and the principal will actually pick up the bowl and pass it to me saying "David-uh-kimchi!" in a sharp low voice. I love observing those inexplicable culturally driven impulses in behavior. I always wonder what odd cultural behavior we display when we're viewed by foreigners.

I suppose it makes sense, though, to think so highly of kimchi, as it did allow an entire country to continue eating vegetables during the cold winter months, before more advanced farming methods were invented. And kimchi contains enough vitamin-C to prevent scurvy, and enough other vitamins to prevent other illnesses that can occur from lack of vegetables in the diet.

My heart is chilled by your cold noodle

2009-10-26T12:23:00.011+09:00

There's this song that's been going around for quite a while now. And in Korea pop music permeates so thoroughly. If a song is a hit, you will hear it sometimes 4 or 5 times a day, on TV, commercials, radio, EVERYWHERE. And just when you think it's finally over, burned out to the ground from tragically intense repetitive comprehensive media assault, it'll creep back again in the form of a remix or something. This song is called "Naeng Myeon," which means "cold noodle" in Korean. Naeng myeon is a bowl of very chewy, cold buckwheat noodles, either with soup broth or without, and sometimes with chunks of ice in with the mix to keep it at a near freezing temperature. Scissors are a must, because the noodles can be so chewy that they're tough to cut through with your teeth, and if they're not cut first, you can actually feel like you're choking at times while eating them. There's usually thinly sliced cucumber or pickled radish, a chunk or two of dried fish or beef, sesame seeds, and chile sauce. It can be pretty spicy, and you're encouraged to add a bit of vinegar, sugar, and chinese spicy mustard (the kind that gets up in your nose) to it, which really gives it a unique flavor: a mix of sweet, spicy, and sour.

Although the song is ultra-cheese, the lyrics are pure genius once they're translated into English. They even have this dance move that goes along with it that makes them look like they are eating out of a bowl of cold noodles. Check out the video it's so classic. Here's a translation of the chorus:

So cold, So chilling
My teeth are chattering
from your cold noodle, cold noodle, cold noodle
My heart is chilled
by your cold noodle, cold noodle, cold noodle
If I see you, it's too much. Even if I see you again, it's too much.
It's ice cold.
My body's trembling
from your cold cold noodle, cold noodle, cold noodle
It’s tough, it's too tough,
your cold noodle, cold noodle, cold noodle
Still I love you.

Feeling up the page

2009-10-25T22:50:00.003+09:00

A braille edition of Playboy magazine (photograph by artist Taryn Simon)
This edition features no advertisements or images.

There was actually a lawsuit in 1985 won by the blind about the braille version of Playboy. The government had banned the library of congress from printing further braille editions of Playboy, and a judge ruled that this was a violation of the first amendment. The baffling question that I am left with is why the braille edition disturbed the government more than the one with naked pictures in it.

It's also kind of odd to think about the idea of blind people using their sense of touch to bring erotic visual information into their minds.

Braille, in itself, has always fascinated me, because it involves a shifting of the senses normally used to intake written information. I've always wondered how some of the basic nature of language changes when words and books become purely tactile objects in space. For a reader of braille, every letter and every word has a distinct 3-dimensional shape and form.

In the case of porn, this shifting of the senses towards the tactile is an even stranger notion, because, usually, when people view porn images they are tempted to create a tactile/physical fantasy about them, as sex has so much to do with the sense of touch. But for the blind, they need to use the sense of touch to actually feel out this erotic information across the page.

Wow, that's actually kind of creepy to even think about.

FRESH FRESH LOVE TOOTHBRUSH

2009-10-25T22:09:00.002+09:00

Gotta love the incomprehensible text on Korean T-shirts. Here are some random ones I thought were worth looking at. It'll really be sad the day that the Korean government's English language learning initiative becomes successful and shirts become so much more grammatically correct and boring.

And she crushed her knees on the barnacles

2009-10-25T18:49:00.013+09:00

So I think I finally figured out a way of posting my mixes up here without a tremendous amount of time being spent on my part, and so I can now post tracklistings especially for your tremendous music-devouring face-pieces, on your part. Wow, I have to say that upload speeds in Korea are insane and I must give thanks to the most wired country on the planet for assisting me in this process.

In any case, let me know if there's any problems since this is the first and latest mix that I'm posting.

mix title: And she crushed her knees on the barnacles

download:
part 1
part 2

Because the post just before this was about the idea of places emitting memory and the music that comes out of struggles against oppression, this post will be about the idea of words being colored with memory and how certain South African music recorded during the 1960's and during full force apartheid blends so well with breakfast on Sunday mornings. I was watching a documentary a few weeks ago called Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony that illustrates how integral the use of song was for the South African Africans to begin taking their country back into their own hands. There were some older Dutch colonial police officers interviewed and they were saying that even loaded down with riot gear and weapons it could be incredibly terrifying to watch a huge group of African protesters coming towards them because they were all singing powerfully, in unison. And the Dutch cops couldn't help but remember the songs of protest -- because the music got under their skin.

Here's some songs off a compilation called: Mavuthela: The Sound of the Sixties
(The way the voices are used in the first song blows my mind)

(you can get it here)

As for words, I was listening to this podcast called Podictionary that can be pretty interesting. It covers word roots, and there was an episode on the word columbine. Pretty much whenever you hear the word columbine it's fair to say that the high school massacre will almost undoubtedly come into mind (or Michael Moore holding a bowling ball painted like the globe). It's a real trip if you go to www.wordnik.com and search the word columbine. On that site they surround the definition with twitter feeds that feature the word and also image results from Flickr. It becomes really twisted and fascinating when you consider that columbine is a flower (the state flower of Colorado) and its latin root means "dove." What's even more strange is that the title "columbine massacre" was used once before in Colorado during the year of 1927 when coal miners were on strike and authority figures somehow decided that machine guns would be the appropriate tool to gain control over the situation.

It mystifies me that a word that is the name of a flower and has a root meaning of a bird that symbolizes peace has been colored with the memories of a tragedy.

Compelled to chill

2009-10-24T22:13:00.011+09:00

Music: side one of an LP put out by Sublime Frequencies called Group Bombino, Guitars from Agadez Vol. 2
(Agadez is a city in northern Niger that is in midst of a violent struggle called the Tuareg rebellion. There is only one road that connects this city to the rest of Niger and land mines are strewn across it, thereby leaving it functionally isolated. This music comes out of this struggle and was recorded live in 2007, amidst the dunes and stars of the desert surrounding Agadez. I'm not sure what it is about music that forms directly out of the burning embers of violence and oppression, but it emanates such a heaviness to its sound, I might as well be submerged in a blanket of warm tropical waters when I hear it, or in this case, sliding down the side of a desert dune while my body is covered with sun-baked sand. It must be that when so many of the luxuries and basic necessities for life and freedom have been stripped away from people and yet they still create music to energize their spirits, this music necessarily has a quality carved out of the core of existence. Because when everything else is stripped away, bare existence is all we have, and the music that stems from this must contain a certain piercing quality, since it aims to inflame or calm the emotions caught in the fire of massive personal struggle or loss.
(you can get this music here)

Last weekend I went on a cultural field trip designed by the local education office for all of the foreign teachers in town. We visited two different Confucian academies, a soju and food museum, a traditional village where we slept (apparently in the same house that George Bush the 1st slept in when he visited there), a ginseng festival, and a temple stacked up a mountain that is the second oldest structure in Korea.

At the second Confucian academy (in images above and below) there were these beautiful trees plush with Chinese quinces and this wooden platform, raised on pillars, constructed for rest. While sitting and resting there, leaning my back against one of the wooden pillars, I became interested in the idea of whether a place can emit a memory. By this, I mean that for 400 years Confucian scholars et. al. have been chilling on this wooden resting platform, and, at least for me, the moment I shedded my shoes and stepped up onto it I seemed to feel the full weight of the deep history of relaxation that the place had. And I don't mean this in any supernatural sense, but in the natural process by which our minds interpret information we have about a place and then how that information helps us to behave in ways that befit those places. For instance, we behave one way at a library and an entirely different way at a house party because we know what type of behaviors are socially acceptable or expected because of our memories from past experiences at those places. And although I don't really have any memories from past experiences at Confucian academies, I felt sucked into the energy of the place so that, I too, like scores of Confucian students and scholars for 400 years previously, was compelled to chill.

"the lemon fell on the ground, the juice into my heart"

2009-10-22T08:34:00.008+09:00

Music: Francis Bebey: Akwaaba (1985), from Camaroon
(Kalimbas are so beautifully simple and vanveen)

(you can get it here)

I've been reading this book on the history of Citrus by Pierre Laszlo and he includes a citrus-related quote at the beginning of each chapter. I'm gonna go ahead and list them here, because a lot of them are pretty rad. It seems like the Spanish had a preoccupation with citrus fruits and applied its metaphors to many folk songs, proverbs, prose and poetry, and other expressions of common wisdom.

"Sour and sweet like the orange is the taste of life."
--Spanish proverb

"The elements once out of it, it transmigrates."
--Shakespeare

"Love and the orange
resemble one another
however sweet
it always remains a little sour too."
--Folk song from Argentina

"I came by your house yesterday
you threw me a lemon
the lemon fell on the ground
the juice into my heart."
--Latin American folk song

"Garlic, onion, and lemon, and you can drop the injections." (their ingestion will keep you healthy)
--Spanish proverb

"A Persian Heaven is easily made;
'Tis but black eyes and lemonade."
--Thomas Moore

"From the orange and the woman, take what they have to give."
--Spanish proverb

"If God has given you lemons, apply yourself to making lemonade."
--Spanish proverb

"Conspicuous like and orange for display."
--A common phrase in Argentina

"The nun
sang from inside the grapefruit."
--Frederico Garcia Lorca

"Rare fruit of all kinds...to draw from life."
--Joachim Von Sandrart

"An orange, in the morning, healthy, at noon, heavy, at night, 'tis a killer."
--Spanish proverb

"Lemon juice, juice of perdition."
--Spanish proverb

Love is Love and other matters

2009-10-21T13:01:00.016+09:00

I just can't fit enough of these songs onto my mixes, so I felt like I should post the entire compilation here. It's called Love Is Love and the 12" is available on Dusty Groove. The music is from a wide variety of African countries, recorded at various times between the 50s and the early 70s. It's definitely up there with my desert island albums. THIS is the music. (and you can download it here)

In other news:
1. This is fairly amazing and conceptually mind blowing to me, but the president of the Maldives and 13 other politicians held a cabinet meeting 11.5 feet underwater, at the bottom of a lagoon in the Indian Ocean. They trained for two months and used hand signals and white boards as a means to communicate. Being the world's lowest-lying nation on the planet, they have day and night concerns about climate change. If the ocean rises a matter of inches their country will become uninhabitable and, hence, cease to exist. What interests me is that because the people of the Maldives don't have the riches or the global power to make their voices heard by conventional means, they have to rely on human ingenuinity and cleverness. What could easily otherwise be a conceptual art project is instead a practical means of gaining international acknowledgement of their country's situation.
more here

2. In France, the mayors of two towns in the suburbs of Paris helped make a road that leads only into itself. The mayor of one town is conservative and the mayor of the other town is Socialist. The mayor of one town decided that there was far too much traffic coming through his town because of commuters, so he made the road a one-way street pouring into the neighboring town. The neighboring town's mayor, being of a conflicting political ideology, made his part of the road another one way street, but going back the opposite direction. So while two politicians were battling and making decisions based on their intangible ideological conflicts, they were sending motorists on a dead on course towards very tangible, head on collisions. Why is it that real news is sounding more and more like cartoons?
more here

3. And lastly, my friend Kevin just turned me on to the idea of Jenkem. A few years ago there were several reports that children in an extremely impoverished area of Zambia, some of them AIDS orphans, collect raw sewage from the open sewers and let it ferment in bottles before inhaling its fumes for mind numbing, euphoric and hallucinatory effects. Apparently the idea of American teenagers huffing poop got over to Fox News et. al. The idea that this news segment not only exists but was actually aired on network television is so baffling by itself that I'm not sure I can even write anything about it. What I can say is that I think I'm going to start using Jenkem as a nice slang term to encompass things that occur that are so ridiculous and filled with obvious contradictions and fabrications. Like a large part of American politics: "That shit is so jenkem!"

The next aleatoric photo session

2009-10-20T23:31:00.004+09:00

I finally got around to editing and putting a grid together for the second photo game of chance: the color game. This time I rolled for the amount of time I'd walk around before making a photograph and then rolled two dice to decide what color would be the focus of that image.

Start: Taebaek market
End: Lindsey’s place

Rules:
1=walk for 30 sec, then make a photograph
2=walk for 1 min, then make a photograph
3=walk for 1 min 30 sec
4=walk for 2 min
5=walk for 2 min 30 sec
6=walk for 3 min

Roll two dice for color

2=frame an image with as many different colors as possible
3=red
4=orange
5=yellow
6=green
7=blue
8=purple or pink
9=brown or tan
10=white or gray
11=black
12=frame an image with as many different colors as possible

Results & remarks: Last time I noticed myself being broken down a bit by paying attention to all the confused and suspicious looks I was getting. I knew that it had prevented me from making some photographs I had really wanted to, and I’m never quite sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing to be that sensitive to my surroundings while I’m photographing. This time around, largely to avoid being deterred by the multitude of stares I know I’d receive, I went out with my ipod and walked around making photographs while listening to a rad mix. I was making an image of these beautiful colors the peeling cracking paint had made on a wooden door. This old man came out of nowhere and started asking me angrily and suspiciously in Korean what I was doing. The smell of soju on his breath was distinct. I told him I was making pictures, and that seemed to make him more upset. I could only understand a little of what he was saying, but he lived right next door, and it seemed he knew the owner of whoever lived behind the door I was photographing, and he kept trying to open it. At first I just kept telling him in Korean that I didn’t understand. This is one of the great fall-backs that I’m allowed by living in a foreign country: I can always pretend I don’t know what people are saying. This behavior has a great history of getting me out of a lot of trouble or awkward situations when people or authority figures just don’t feel like spending the time to deal with the language barrier. But this time, it just seemed to have the opposite effect, as it became apparent that he was undeterred. So I told him, in the best broken Korean I had, that Taebaek was where I lived, and I was making a photography book so my family and friends could see this place because they missed me. I told him that the door was beautiful. I started naming off all the colors on the door to fill in the gaps in my Korean, and told him that the pink and yellow and white were beautiful too. I told him that I thought this place was beautiful and all places around here were beautiful. At that point he cut me off, put his hand over his heart and told me he was deeply sorry in both Korean and English, over and over again. He grabbed my hand, and walked me over to his house. So then I was sitting on the floor with this old man in his kitchen, and I realized he lived in a Buddhist dwelling. There was the Buddhist sign on the front and a prayer room in the next room. We were sitting by the animal food. He said a lot, and I felt bad I could understand almost nothing, except that he wanted to know if I’d eaten lunch. And I had had cold buckwheat noodles an hour earlier, so I didn’t join him, even though I wanted to. But I would have been late for frisbee later.

I thought it was a total shift, where last time I was under the impression that photography had put a distance between me and the place I lived, this time it brought me closer. At least, if I hadn’t looked completely ridiculous to that old man by taking a picture of a disintegrating door, he probably would have never interacted with me.

Also, I kept rolling blue over and over again for a while.

Business is better now because of the Nats

2009-10-06T23:37:00.014+09:00

The music above is from a compilation called "Music of Nat Pwe". It is from spiritually driven festivals that are a tradition in Burma (Myanmar). These rituals stem from belief systems that were in place long before Buddhism was introduced to the country.

In Burma (Myanmar), the spirits of those who died tragically or led great lives before passing are roaming wildly, and it takes the madly escaping energy of those playing music and those fully submitting to this music in trance states to appease these spirits. The spirits are called Nats. The music is jarring at first. The music is pummeling and cacophonous in an unconscious and organized fashion, and it's so easy to get into, and I can understand how people can be taken over by it.

The music makes me think of the sound that spiritually infused carbonation would make if it was flowed through people brandishing instruments. It simply kills me how much life there is in it.

This music also makes me think a lot about the shot at the beginning of the documentary (below) of the mirror that is swinging left and right, that my mind kept telling me was a swiftly panning shot of the crowd, even though I was fully aware that it was just the reflection in motion, swinging back and forth, and not the camera, which was generally still. A strong and simple tension between movement and stillness that is simply always present. And this tension between movement and stillness is the foundation of all music. The still space between sound and vibration encapsulates a particular music's character -- the still space defines it. It makes me think a lot about sparse minimalist music and experimental music where they were playing with the notion of what even defines music. For instance, if you play one, unceasing tone for half and hour that never changes pitch or volume, could that even be considered music? Although if we focused on and listened to a single unceasing tone for half an hour, our flawed human perception alone would fool us into thinking that the tone would go through changes of intensity and character. This would argue perhaps that the exquisite flaws in our own sensory mechanisms have a big part in what defines music from ambient noise.

Repetition, also: The same short musical phrase repeated over and over again until it's character is changed, again only by our perception would provoke the question of whether it could be considered music (or torture for some, probably).

But in reality, at least for me, I think all these questions were answered long ago by musical pioneers delving into these same ideas: if you really think about it, there is no separation from every sound you hear around you right now and all the music recorded in some form or being played live right now somewhere. It is only our focus and attention that makes one music and leaves one as ambient background noise. Different groups of humans or individuals are the only ones that can draw the defining line. The steadily deadening eardrums of noise-core enthusiasts from willingly lining up year after year to be sonically punished by musicians on stage blasting amped power tools and the like are proof enough of that alone.

Conclusion: music is better now because of the Nats.

One connection after another, perhaps towards ultimate implosion, or a giant lizard, or taking off your clothes

2009-09-30T15:08:00.017+09:00

I randomly downloaded this music from a blog called Big Head Stevenson from a band called Lucky Dragons from their album called Dream Island Laughing Language. It sounded kind of sliced up minimal experimental ambient electronic with a hint of glitch. I was pretty into it, so I decided to find out their story. It said in their bio that they borrowed the name of their band from a Japanese tuna fishing boat named Lucky Dragon 5 that was inadvertently caught in the fallout from a nuclear bomb test the U.S. was conducting on and around the island of Bikini Atoll, one of the Micronesian Islands. The ship was later laid to rest on an artificial island the Japanese created for the purpose of dumping trash. They named it "Dream Island", perhaps the most tragically ironic name a landfill has ever had the privilege of holding. The Lucky Dragons took the name of their album from that island. It really works, in a way, to play one of the youtube propaganda films below while the music above is still going on. Try the second song "Desert Rose" with the very bottom film playing. Then play the third song "Mirror Friends" while the first video is on at middle volume level. It is SPOOKY how well it fits over, especially when you hear the U.S. soldier telling the Bikinians "Alright now James, will you tell them that the United States government, now, wants to turn this great destructive force into something good for mankind."

The 23 crew members of Lucky Dragon 5 suffered from bleeding gums, pains in the eyes, nausea, and other complications from acute radiation syndrome. I could find no mention about their tuna. So a massive scandal ensued in Japan. Out of this scandal arose the mutant creature of Godzilla, and the film. Inspired by the incident, in the story of Godzilla, the monster was said to be mutated and awakened by the detonation of this hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in 1954.

In the West, knowledge of the nuclear tests happening on Micronesia inspired the bikini swimsuit. The name of the bikini was taken directly from the island that only became famous because it was massively assaulted with H-bombs. The first model of bikini was named the Atome, after the smallest particle of matter (that someone could wear on the body without being considered naked). They were also hoping that the explosion of excitement caused by scantily clad women suddenly running around on beaches all around the world with this new form of swimwear would match the energy of a nuclear blast, ostensibly in terms of monetary return.

The indigenous inhabitants of Bikini Atoll lived a simple life eating fish, shellfish, bananas, and coconuts before they were "relocated" so the U.S. could blow the FUCK out of their island to perfect a bomb that could blow the FUCK out of the world. They probably would have never dreamed that women would be wearing clothes named after their island to cover their breasts and crotches. Nor would they have imagined that their tiny lands and waters would be the birthplace of a gargantuan city-consuming lizard dead-set on demolishing Japan.

The coconuts and bananas and other food crops sprouting out the ground are now still very much contaminated with radioactive residue.

"And thus the natives expressed to the people of the United States their welcome. Despite the fact the the island of Bikini may be utterly destroyed come July the 1st. But to the natives, in their simplicity, and their pleasantness, and their courtesy, they're more than willing to cooperate. Although they don't understand the world of nuclear energy ANYMORE THAN WE DO (emphasis added). And though they have no way, of understanding what the test is all about." --from propaganda film below

The Great Cross-Country Weaving Ghost Highway Ride

2009-09-27T17:50:00.006+09:00

I was looking at some sets of rare photos of North Korea posted by the BBC, and one really struck me: ghost highways. They have these massive highways connecting the more urban areas of the country that are virtually empty because almost no one can afford vehicles to drive on them. Therefore it's common to see people weaving back and forth across the entire multi-lane channels on bicycle, fearless of ghost motorists.

So I propose: open up the border at least once for the Great Cross-Country Weaving Ghost Highway Ride of North Korea.

UNDERLYING STRATA

2009-09-27T14:28:00.006+09:00

I haven't been listening to that much new music lately, because I've suddenly been overwhelmed with the obligation to extract more information about places, events, and peoples that are transpiring right now or have transpired at some point in the past, all around the world. Congruencies, unexpected links, surprising transparencies, dreamlike absurdities and mystifying successes and creations -- there are so many events running parallel to us right now, it's baffling. And that doesn't even include all that's to be learned from events in the past that help elucidate what built up to what is happening right now. I have to get started fast. For instance, instead of listening to music on long bus rides, I've been listening to nonfiction books and documentary podcasts from the BBC or elsewhere that I've loaded up on my ipod.

I once used to fairly compulsively compile a list of various facts and news items that bothered me about the world. I called it "The End of Humanity." I guess due to the narrow focus on negative and tragically humorous entries, my disenchantment with the list was inevitable. But I think now I can return to collecting various pieces of information in a more balanced way, and then distributing a few of them that fit perfectly under the auspices of Permanent Citrus.

Photos: Jaap Berk of The Netherlands

A few decades ago Libya started working on a project called the Great Manmade River. The project is overseen by a group with the really odd sounding name: The Great Manmade River Authority. Below parts of the Saharan Desert in Libya they found water trapped deep in the underlying strata. The water is said to have been trapped there during the last ice age. Depending on the underground pocket, the water is 7000 to 38000 years old. And up on the surface is one the top 10 driest places on the planet. So underway is potentially the world's largest irrigation project, and the largest network of underground pipes and aqueducts. Libyan leader Gaddafi calls the project the "8th wonder of the world." The supply of water trapped in the underlying strata is estimated to last anywhere from 100 to 1000 years. But, wow, think of the ruins that will be left behind once the water is used up! This could be the unintentional foundation for a vast Saharan subway system or highway. Great way to get around the dunes while avoiding the heat. Maybe longest underground inner-tubing event in history?

Ruppy the bioluminescent beagle(s)

2009-09-13T17:31:00.006+09:00

I learned about something this weekend that blew my mind to an incredible degree:

bio-luminescent beagles.

Apparently a Seoul National University professor named Lee Byeong Chun led a team of scientists who genetically engineered four cloned beagles which glow in the dark and under ultraviolet light. All four of them are named Ruppy, since they're all the same, and also because they emit a ruby red glow (Ruby + Puppy = Ruppy)

Wow.

So not only are they further along the road to curing genetic diseases, but now pot smokers who live in the prairie will never be bored at night. Just let their newly purchased Ruppies off their leashes, take out the binochs and watch them glow.

ABCD & a great dane whose name was ostensibly Monkey.

2009-09-04T15:34:00.003+09:00

A piercingly odd thing happened to me right when I got back from vacation, which in many ways was more odd than everything I experienced in Thailand, which makes it even more strange because Thailand is a place where oddities are fairly commonplace, I thought. Vacation was finally finished and when I finally got on the bus from Seoul that would take me back home to Taebaek it was almost 9 at night. That would put me in Taebaek around midnight, which wasn't exactly ideal, but since I didn't write the bus schedule I didn't have much to say about it except that. From the bus terminal in Taebaek it's a 20 or 30 minute local bus ride out to where I live in the countryside. Unfortunately the last local bus leaves the terminal well before midnight, meaning that I would have to take a taxi, which usually costs anywhere between 9 and 10 thousand won. That's never usually a problem, except that while I was on the bus I realized that I'd forgotten to take out money from the ATM at the bus terminal in Seoul before I'd left and I only had 7 thousand won in my pocket. That's never usually a problem either, since 24 hour ATMs exist here, just like anywhere else in capitalist economies in the developed world. However, ATMs in Taebaek attached to banks in Taebaek have a tendancy to stop dishing out cash at around 11:30 or so. This always struck me as bizarre and unreasonable for three main reasons:

Number one, it seems detrimental, if not contrary to the goals of a capitalist economy, to prevent people from access to their spending money at any time. Under the banner of progress, shouldn't people be encouraged to submit to the spending impulse and make purchases at any hour of the day or night?

Number two, it is MY money afterall, and why should a particular branch of a bank have the authority to dictate when I can withdraw it (furthermore from a 24 hour ATM machine!).

And number three, if they are going to stop dispensing cash at a certain time of night, why then do they leave the lights on and the ATM doors open for 24 hours? Why are the machines still running if they're essentially useless? Just in case I have the sudden paranoid impulse at 3 in the morning that someone has stolen all of my money I can rush out to the ATM and do a balance check to calm myself before going back to sleep? For someone who desparately needs cash at midnight so he can take a taxi home to get some much needed rest, these 24 hour ATMs are like beacons of hope. Of course I'm going to try all 3 machines they have multiple times, and think that the "It does not become the transaction" message it continues to show me is not a bad translation for "You're fucked", but some oversight, some absurd mistake made by the bank staff. I mean, are other Koreans able to take money out after 11:30? Is that why the rooms are open and the machines are running? Is it just a rule for foreigners to make our lives inconvenient? Or worse, is it just a rule for me? Did I accidentally check some box in Korean when signing up for my account that I can make a call right now and take back?

These were just a few of the thoughts that were going through my head while I was pacing back and forth in the ATM room after I couldn't acquire the funds I needed for my taxi. I'd been up for over 24 hours, badly in need of rest and solace after almost a straight month of travelling, so this difinitively false and deceitful 24 hour ATM machine, this failed beacon of hope at midnight, was having the same negative effects on my condition as if I had been stranded in the desert and found a clean and sparkling drinking fountain secured on a concrete platform on the sand, only to find, in horror, that I had arrived past the hours of water distribution services. The bank managers must know they're causing some people this great inconvenience, and they must have good reasons for it, and I hope someday to find out what those reasons are.

In any case, I walked out of the ATM room defeated, but not without hope. I figured I would just take a taxi to my apartment, and then when we arrived I would explain to him in Korean that I had more money upstairs and I would be back in a minute and he could keep the meter running. And then I would just hope that I'd have enough spare change lying around that I could scrounge up to give him. And if I couldn't, he didn't know which apartment I lived in anyways, and I'm sure he wouldn't search all 15 floors just to collect 2 thousand won.

But just as I stepped out of the ATM room I see this giant great dane, without leash or collar, prancing around on the sidewalk in front of me. As Korea is not a place where you see large dogs, this was BY FAR the largest dog I've seen in the country, to date. So that was odd. Not only is it odd to see huge dogs in Korea, but it's even odder to see them prancing around on the sidewalk at midnight in a town as sleepy as Taebaek. It looked really friendly, so I wasn't concerned, plus I must have seen a hundred stray dogs in Thailand (many of which definitely didn't look friendly), so being as tired as I was, the sight didn't even register as truly bizarre until afterwards and until after what happened next happened.

About 50 feet up the street I notice the dog' owner shout "Monkey!" and the dog immediately ran joyously to his side. The owner was a middle aged Korean dude in a light blue T-shirt and dark blue running shorts. He was wearing a pair of common house slippers.

I was watching the scene in a sort of sleep deprived daze, as the man approached me, and after giving a sharp grunt to show surprise at seeing a foreigner in front of him, immediately hurried his step, stopped close to me and asked "How are you?" I said "I am great." And then he walked closer with his arm outstretched awkwardly straight in front of him to shake my hand and said "A-B-C-D!" with some sort of indefinable relish at verifying the fact that I am a native English speaker. I could smell a hint of soju on his breath. I responded to his greeting in Korean fashion saying "Pan-gap-seum-ni-da" (nice to meet you in Korean), bowing slightly, and shaking his one hand with my two hands.

At this point the great dane was prancing around a little more excitedly on the sidewalk. She was jumping up high into the air and coming down on her front legs, which seemed also like part of the way that a horse would behave. Not really knowing what to say at that point, I just pointed to the dog and asked him in Korean if it was his. The man just pointed to the great dane purposefully and said "Monkey!" loudly. Almost immediately the dog squatted down and started peeing all over the sidewalk. It almost seemed like saying the word monkey and pointing was some strange command he had invented to tell the dog where and when to create a small river of urine whenever he wanted one. But, at the time, it definitely seemed more plausible that he was just telling me the name of his dog. Now even more confused about what I should say, I just said "ah-ju-keo-yo" which means "It is quite big." Immediately after I said this he gave another sharp grunt in acknowledgement of something still quite indefinable to me, took out a small roll of 10 thousand won bills and handed me one. Having had placed the exact amount of money I needed for a taxi ride home into my hand for potentially no reason at all had the predictable effect of my mouth dropping open slightly out of surprise and my eyes becoming wider out of confusion. Both of these facial gestures happened out of my control and prevented me of even uttering one word of thanks or more importantly "why?" as I just watched him continue walking around the corner with his great dane, ostensibly named Monkey.

The end of the earth and 7 songs from Brazil

2009-07-24T13:37:00.012+09:00

It's the last day of "work" for this semester, before summer vacation. I was sitting at my desk, wearing shorts and sandals and eating some mango ice cream that one of my Korean co-teachers gave me while listening to some Brazilian music from the 70's. Wow, the stress of this job is really starting to kill me. I have to say that life is pretty damn good.

When I return from Thailand, I'm planning on spending a few days seeing some parts of Korea that are too far to get to on weekends. When I return to Seoul I'm probably going to jump on the bullet train down to Gwangju, and then bus it from there to the extreme south, until I reach the end of the peninsula. There's a place there called 땅끝마을 which means "The village at the end of the earth."

In any case, if this will potentially be the last post until I get back from traveling to the end of the earth, then I feel the best way I can leave it is with these 7 songs from Brazil.

These sultry months

2009-07-23T12:01:00.008+09:00

We went up to Samcheok on Friday night a couple of weeks ago. We spent the night in downtown, and then went to this incredible beach called 초곡 해수욕장 (Chogok) on Saturday. It is surrounded by pine trees and a few small cliffs. There was a Buddhist temple to our backs constructed on the beach and the sun was to our backs while we swam and while we chilled. I did a couple rounds of snorkeling and spotted the largest sea slug that I've ever seen. Must have been two feet long or so. There wasn't a striking amount of sea life, but it never gets old dipping my head in the water with a mask on and seeing this parallel dimension of plants and animals. Life just exists so much differently underwater. It grows and moves with a rhythm set by the tides and the currents. There's this sheer multitude and variety of living things that we just don't even fully understand, because we can't live underwater. Everything looks so unfamiliar because we didn't grow up there; we see trees and bushes and flowers and other land plants and animals since we are old enough to understand we have eyes, but we don't see any sea plants or sea slugs, so the way they move always looks strange. And I think that's why no matter how many times you swim around with your head dipped in the ocean with a mask, it never ceases to look fascinating in some way. It's a cool split when your head pops up, too, because then everything looks right the way you know it: you can breathe without a plastic tube, and you are suddenly just at a beach swimming in the water with the sun dipping down and reflecting sharp glares against your mask so you can't see anything without it being blurry - and then you dip under again, and it's a parallel dimension of this crazy complex ecosystem that you can never be a part of because sadly, you can't breathe water. You pop your head up - this familiar world of air and primarily non-floating movement - you dip your head down - this unfamiliar underwater world where you can be happy slowly floating aimlessly around and observing, maybe forever.

There were all these dead puffer fish strewn about the beach next to piles of drying seaweed, pine needles, sea urchin skeletons and sea shells. I don't really understand why there were so many of them, but it was interesting. A lot of them really looked like birds.

The other day at school the office supervisor asked me if I knew the schedule for the day. I had heard from Elvis last night that we were going hiking but "not really hiking" in a valley in Gyeongsangbuk-do province which is just a little south of where I live, so I told him what I'd heard. He confirmed that it was "not really hiking," but he didn't know the English word for it, so he said "maybe a ceremony...a little, and taking fish, and a party." The other teachers were all bustling around actively, speeding like ants in and out of the staff room to my left and bringing in boxes filled with soju and beer and bags of fresh lettuce and mountain greens and onions and bags of fresh and strong smelling garlic from Jeju Island, and I noticed earlier the fridge was packed with bags of fresh and thick-sliced pork belly. I'd get out of teaching two after-school classes by joining them, so I said I was in for sure.

We drove in two vans down the winding road which follows the small river for 40 minutes. After 30 minutes they even stopped at a rest stop and sat for a while under umbrellas drinking instant coffee from vending machines that cost 300 won each, which I thought was unnecessary, but nonetheless relaxing.

The place we stopped was at this perfect bending point of the rocky river, behind this Chinese restaurant tucked away on the side of the road. Some of the administrators and teachers had taken me to the restaurant a few months back, and it was delicious. The place is known for handmade black bean noodles, which they were stretching out the dough for while we ate. We drank this ridiculously cheap bottle of Chinese liquor that was 67% alcohol and tasted like a crude blend of multiple cleaning fluids with warning labels. It made the 6th grade teacher howl like a wounded animal and scratch the wall beside me so he could show me without words how much it burned our throats going down and made us laugh a lot.

Right when we arrived, the principal got to work with his fishing pole while all the female teachers started preparing the grill we brought to cook the pork belly on. I noticed there were a ton of flat stones strewn about that were perfect for skipping, so I skipped them on the river along with a couple other teachers and found out that the word for skipping stones in Korean means water-birds. Because that's how the stones behave across the surface of the water.

I felt like I really connected with the staff of my school there. It was so peaceful and I was sitting on rocks in a circle with some teachers, and I was smiling as I looked around and all the other groups of teachers were smiling and laughing as well while a couple of children were running around and Elvis was placing a fish trap in the river between some boulders. This part of the culture I think found mostly in the Korean country is so beautiful: to be able to just stop work for half a day to have a bit of a ceremony and barbecue and fishing outing and drink together in a valley on some stones along a river. We collected flat stones to make tables with and larger tree stump-like stones for seats. We watched together with great interest as large ants infiltrated our food and carried away pieces of dried squid that were 10 times their own size.

I was listening to this soothing sounding EP by Atlas Sound called "Weekend." I really liked the first song, the song titles, and the album artwork. Later I wrote this poem:

Our ankles flowing free in the current,
warm and blurry and black everywhere
around us,
eyes wide open and
noticing glistening edges
and soaking in the way
other people writhe and sway,
balancing the madly escaping energy
together
wrapped up tightly
in our softly capsizing bodies,
and timidly dipping our feet
into moments of water,
into untarnished moments of existence,
shuddering deeper
towards curious
sweet and vast empty spaces,
stretching out feelers,
in-between everything with the same forces that make gemstones.

very summery

2009-07-22T14:56:00.005+09:00

My friend Andrew showed me this new track from Atlas Sound called "Walkabout." It's such a summery tune. I've been listening to it a lot as I get stuff going for Thailand. On Sunday, by 3 in the afternoon Lindsey and I will be on a tiny tropical island named Ko Tao.

I've been collecting a few tracks and I'm planning on making a compilation of nothing but the most summery of songs. I haven't thought of a title for the mix yet, but I have thought of three words I like that all end in ry which help encompass this summer:

summery
sultry
tawdry

I'm hoping to finish two more posts before I head out to Southeast Asia on Saturday. We'll see what we see.

4th of July

2009-07-09T16:07:00.004+09:00

We travelled up the coast by train to Jumunjin, and went to Namae beach on Saturday morning. The sand was very fine and it made these squeeky sounds when you stepped on it with bare feet. The beach was mostly unpopulated, which was awesome. The ocean there stays shallow for a good way out, but there was also a sand bar that went out even further, and we could walk a few hundred feet out before we had to stop walking and start swimming.

Then we discovered that the sand bar was also a fertile home for hundreds and hundreds of small clams. So we collected a few dozen of them in a bag and later cooked them over a wood charcoal fire next to a pier in a small grill I purchased.

There was only one small mart near the beach where this ancient ajuma worked. She was sleeping in her brightly colored floral patterned clothes. And when we tried to get our drinks out of the cooler she stirred loudly and started muttering incomprihensibly in a sharp high pitched tone. She made it clear that she wanted to get the drinks for us by hobbling out fully doubled over, nearly on all fours to rummage through the cooler for our drinks. It was so awkward because we could have gotten them so easily ourselves. I think she was also disappointed that we didn't purchase any of the dried fish or squid hanging on the wall that she pointed out to us. I wonder if she became that doubled over by hunting for clams in the shallow waters so many days of her life.

Government sponsored

2009-07-09T15:33:00.005+09:00

Wednesday, school fieldtrip for Korean public school teachers in Taebaek: we packed into a bus at 6:20am. We went to Yongin, which is a little outside of Seoul. We went to a traditional folk village and saw many different roof styles. Some had dried rice, some had oak bark, some had slate, and some had wood planks. We also saw an old man walking a tight rope and telling everyone he was sad we weren't clapping and cheering enough for him. We also saw a traditional dance and drumming performance. It was really hot all day and everyone sweat a lot. Before 7am the coordinators of the trip gave everyone a clear plastic sack of potato sticks, dried seaweed, orange juice, and beer. They gave us more beer as we got out of the bus at the traditional folk village. Then they gave us rice wine with our lunches. On the way back the bus became a noraebong (kareoke) vehicle, with multicolored lights, a heavily reverbed microphone, and a lot more beer. There was a lot of singing along going on and dancing in the narrow, narrow aisle. The most impressive idea I took from all of this was that the beer, the noraebong bus, the dried seaweed and the entire trip were all sponsored by the Korean government.

A NOVE SILKY

2009-06-23T17:09:00.001+09:00

GOOD DAY
AND GOOD WAVE

THE SURFACE
OF THE WATER
LIKE A MIRROR
THE SILHOUET OF
A BATHIN
WOMAN A NOVE SILKY

sublime as well

2009-06-22T22:42:00.006+09:00

These two songs feel a lot like the area in Korea where I live. They're both a little sad, but sublime as well. Things layer on top of each other and with each overlap they grow a little bit warmer, and more connected, but still tossing shavings off to the side which glitter a bit. And this punctuates them with reflection.

Human-faced fish, 이물고기 엄청 보고싶어요.

2009-06-20T13:13:00.003+09:00

Well, this is pretty interesting.

One of two 19-year-old fish with human-like facial features in Chongju, about 140 km (88 miles) south of Seoul on January 10, 2005. The hybrid species fish were born between a carp and a leather carp in the pond of a personal house in Chongju. Each of the two female fish is 80 cm (32 inches) long and 50 cm (20 inches) in circumference. The owner of the fish said on Monday that their faces have begun to look more and more human over the last couple of years.

Incomprehensible yet moderately poetic English text on a Korean T-shirt for the day:

2009-06-14T21:43:00.004+09:00

AGAIN BE
Light Source
2

also:

and furthermore:

2 methods of sustainable agriculture that I've been really feeling lately:
1 - In certain terraced rice fields in China they introduce koi fish into the field when it's flooded so that when it's time to harvest they can eat rice and fish.
2 - Growing a sun-loving vine-like crop on a raised structure over crops that need shade so they both get what they need and grow way better as companions, and then in the end there's more to eat.

Games of chance and aleatoric photography

2009-06-10T22:44:00.017+09:00

Music: Savath + Savalas. Assorted tracks from the album "La Llama". I guess you could say when Psyche-folk-rock meets downtempo electronic glitch.

Guillermo Scott Herren must be one of my favorite music artists. It would seem like when you integrate glitch into your sound it would end up sounding gimmicky sooner or later, but somehow he always makes it work, and his sound opens wide up everytime and gets deeper. My friend Alex and I sometimes use the word van veen to describe music, poetry, or art that really grabs us, or hits at the center. Van Veen is a type of claw machine that is dropped all the way to the ocean floor to collect a sample of sediment or something. It really scrapes bottom and lifts something fascinating back up to the light. Vanveen music is the type that I really want to listen to most often.

I began an aleatoric photography project with Stefani again. Only this time, it's intercontinental. Alea means dice in Latin. For background please check out:

Aleatory wikipedia
Aleatory music wikipedia

and the blog Stefani and Chrissy started

I'm pretty excited about it. Personally, I think it's amazing what kind of results the element chance will bring to art, and it's a tradition with strong roots in experimentation of all kinds. Accidental photography, and images made through processes of indeterminacy.

Here's the rules and resulting images for one game played by both Stefani (in California) and myself (in Korea). Hopefully the rules will start to mutate and evolve for many further games to come:

roll die:
1 - walk 10 steps
2 - walk 20 steps
3 - walk 30 steps
4 - walk 40 steps
5 - walk 50 steps
6 - walk 60 steps

stop. and roll die again:
1 - make a photo of something in front of you
2 - make a photo of something behind you
3 - make a photo of something to your right
4 - make a photo of something to your left
5 - make a photo of something below you (maybe not specifically "down" since it will most likely always be just ground, but anything in a downward direction)
6 - make a photo of something above you (maybe not specifically "up" since it will most likely always be just sky, but anything in an upward direction)

after photomaking:
1 or 2 - go right
3 or 4 - go left
5 or 6 - go forward
**(if any of these directions are blocked or impossible to pass, then roll the die again until you are given a direction that is possible to traverse)**

then roll to see how many steps you walk and begin again. Repeat as many times as necessary.

start: Family Mart, Jangseong-dong, South Korea
end: my home, the Hongik Apartment

results & remarks: At the outset, I became aware of certain geographical restrictions that I did not foresee while making the rules for this game. The area of Taebaek that I live in is essentially one main road that runs down the length of a narrow valley, so I could not readily proceed in left or right directions without excessively climbing up trail-less mountains or frequently hopping over a fence into a river. Due to these factors, I was forced to modify the game by eliminating the third dice roll completely. So the game became more like: walk straight down one road, and roll to determine how many steps you take before stopping to make a photograph. In many ways, I think this works even more nicely, as you end up covering a lot of ground along the way, and there's no danger of the dice leading you in circles. Furthermore, about three-quarters of the way into the game, I decided to play a bonus round and add one-hundred steps to every roll of the first die (so a roll of 6 would be 160 steps and so forth). This way I could cover even more ground and keep playing the game while walking the rest of the way back to my home. There were also many instances of blatant rule-breaking behavior that transpired openly. Many times, things would catch my interest while I was still walking the number of steps dictated by the die. And I still photographed them anyways. I decided to leave a few of these images in, indistinguishable from those made while exactly following the rules of the game. It seems like these games of chance are intended to be a catalyst for art-making, so in this situation, all rule-breaking behavior which leads to further or excessive production of images should be encouraged, if not applauded.

misc. findings: The images made so far through aleatoric photography seem to be very reductionist in nature. It's cool that it forces you to make photographs where and when you normally never would. So the games end up also becoming exercises in the act of revising or altering (involving reconsideration and modification of what you see in front of you by means of a camera). It's really different and interesting working in grids because the images lose their individuality, in a sense. Individual pictures only matter so much as they relate to and affect everything else around them, and so you have to give up your attachment to them, in a certain sense.

during photographing: The area of town that I live in is pretty low-income for Korea, and a lot of my students' parents are coal miners, since there's still an operational coal mine nearby (along with a handful of closed ones). I noticed while photographing that some people even live in makeshift shacks up on a hill by their small, almost terraced field of crops. Being the only foreigner to live in this part of town, I felt a certain distance form between myself and the place I live by photographing it indiscriminately. I gained more piercing and confused stares than usual, and I'm sure a tall American dude walking around making random photos and randomly throwing dice down on the sidewalk didn't help their confusion. An elementary school age kid, that I noticed staring at me earlier and making a disapproving face, came up to me while I was photographing a badly aging apartment complex and told me in polite Korean that I shouldn't take pictures. When I asked him why, I didn't understand his answer, except that it had something to do with "not seeing". I think it might have been the apartment complex where he lived that I was photographing at that time.

suggestions: Buy a stopwatch and integrate that into a similar type of game next time instead of counting steps. That way, it'll be easier to walk and observe the surroundings without thinking about counting up numbers all the time and often losing track.

Here is Stefani's grid:

Upwards and onwards, expansive and circuitous

2009-06-06T19:35:00.026+09:00

Today I woke up in half-dream to a shrieking air raid siren. The sound shot straight through both sides of my consciousness, one in dream and one half-awake, pierced and shattered. For some reason, still mostly asleep, the idea gained control of my mind and body that this was it: the North gone mad, chemical attack, nuclear strike, war, having no control over it, nowhere to go, not me, not us, this couldn't possibly happen now. Adrenaline filled me, my body shot straight up in a sitting position, and Lindsey said I was even making some strange noises (not quite shouts or screams) and had a look of indescribable terror on my face. And she said if there had been a real attack, chances are my face would still not have displayed an expression to that degree of primordial terror, I imagine like that of a child who first experiences thunder and lightning, having no understanding of the forces behind it and why it does not put them in actual danger. I don't really remember all of this, because strangely, the episode passed and I lied back down, heading again towards sleep.

When I first looked out the window I saw no one, just a neighborhood emptied out of it's people. But then I saw this old ajuma woman walking down the street with her cane as if at that moment there was not a screaming siren sound filling the air at all (or at least she wasn't bothered by it). Damn. That was embarrassing.

I kept thinking of the last scene in Antonioni's L'Eclisse. Perhaps one of the all time worst ways to wake up in the history of my life. I think waking in the middle of the night as a child and finding that my room and bed had become a plane hitting turbulence in a storm because there was actually an earthquake happening is the only time I can even remember waking up close to that piercingly and that terrified, and that was a real event. This was not. And that speaker must have been so close to Lindsey's bedroom window. And why would they pick 10 in the morning on a Saturday for an emergency siren test?

Even though I felt silly after waking up that way, the feelings I had lingered with me pretty intensely all day. And strangely, even now when I think back on it, I can feel the residue of waking up, I can feel the terror of that dream memory indistinguishable from other real memories I have, as if the source of my fears were real and not imaginary. The mind has such awesome forces. It can really take hold of everything inside us, in one fell swoop, and spit us out after it's over and done with.

On another note, the world has a lot of colors for me right now. As far as my perception, saturation and vibrancy are high. I realized that I've been watching these mountains around me change for almost an entire year now. I saw the bright green foliage of last summer curl up into sleep and shed into a harsh brown during the winter, where the green's absence appeared complete. And now it is growing and becoming lush with such force, perhaps partly because it has such a short period of time with which to grow and shoot up into the air and intermix and wind itself around everything like some prolonged asphyxiation fetish. It only has one go at it, so it doesn't hold anything back.

On Sunday we hiked to the source of the Han River, where it's waters just bubble up from this spring incessantly and, with the help of confluence later on, pick up enough speed down the way to split Seoul in two parts with a shit ton of bridges, all the way on the other side of the country. There were meadows along the way and near the summit of Daedeok Mountain with all kinds of plants growing into each other, colliding and interweaving. One of those places where you just want to sit down and chill everywhere but you don't have enough time.

I've been listening to this Scottish band called Orange Juice. They're from the late 70's and early 80's. I guess "post-punk" or early "neo-pop" whatever those words really mean. But I like them. And I realized it's one of the only things in name that directly relates to the title of this blog, so none too soon. I put up all the songs I like from their album "You Can't Hide Your Love Forever". But my favorite one is Tender Object. I really like how the electronic sounds come in right near the end.

Below is a re-up of a video that Stefani once sent me that I have not forgotten, and I think most eloquently expresses the idea behind Permanent Citrus, which, admittedly, is an expansive and circuitous idea to express. I'll write more on this video later, but I can't think of many better ways to blend art and music with the natural elements, all at once, in what is essentially a celebration of living life in its purest form:

Hermeto Pascoal - Sinfonia do Alto Ribeira

Looking way up

2009-06-02T13:11:00.006+09:00

My friend Alex sent me this CD in a small package that arrived today. The album is called Morning Song, by Don Menza Septet. Recorded in Munich, 1965. This song is called Devil's Disciples.

My slippers reappeared mysteriously in the same place I left them yesterday when I took them off to leave work. No explanation. Fishy.

On top of that, I just got a letter and some gifts from Alex, sent from Taiwan. He's the type of person who will bring you a gift not only when entering your home for the first time, but literally everytime you hang out just so he doesn't "leave you empty handed" as he told me once.

He included a notebook with this written on the front: "Concentrate on a single delight: a sound, and experience or concept- you are well on the way to experiencing the pleasure of it."

There's always a lot of quotes in Alex's letters, my favorite one this time round is also the one without a name attached to it. So I'm not quite sure who said this:

"I WANT NO MORE than to speak simply, to be granted that grace.
Because we've loaded even our songs with so much music that they're slowly sinking
and we've decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold
and it's time to say our few words because tomorrow the soul sets sail."

I'm really connecting with the speak simply and concentrate on a single delight parts right now.

one shot one kill

2009-06-02T09:31:00.014+09:00

Korean T-shirt with English text of which it is most likely the wearer does not understand for the day: In Seoul I saw this short middle-aged woman walking with her husband and family wearing a baby blue oversize tee with bold rainbow colored block letters that said
"ONE SHOT
ONE KILL"

Also: This is a sign for a restaurant in Hongdae. For those of you who are tired of the real thing, or just for some reason like two degrees of imitation better, here's an "American style Japanesse Resturant" in Korea.

Futhermore, This morning at school I had to sit for 20 minutes with no shoes, only socks. Apparently, someone stole my slippers. This is a little bit of a tragedy, since I had to go all the way to Emart to purchase them, and they don't often even have slippers of my size there. I felt lucky to find those ones. You can't wear shoes in school, you have to change into slippers of some sort, it doesn't matter what kind (in winter, kids wear huge puffy stuffed animal and rabbit and wolf and sponge bob and hello kitty ones). At first I thought this was at least partly to keep the wood floors nice, but they don't care if you wear the slippers while walking around on dirt outside and come back in. So this makes it seem like it's simply the traditional act of changing footwear that they care about and enforce. Although, as this is a formal academic institution, walking around without slippers and only socks is not cool either. They'll offer me some guest slippers that are insanely too small, and when I tell them it's much more comfortable to just wear socks than have the back third of my feet hanging off the slippers, they'll just keep coming back in displaying generously with their hands different pairs that are all also WAY too small, until I finally cave and say I'll wear one of them just so they stop. So I found my old pair that are comfy, but held together by a thread. So when these ones go, if Emart doesn't have my size, it's gonna be sock time, and that's all there is to it.

Three mound grids and a song and a picture

2009-06-01T14:01:00.037+09:00

A couple of times, about a month back, I believe to celebrate the advent of spring, the administration decided that the entire student and teacher population of my school should do a short hike in the mountains behind the school grounds. I noticed several off shoots from the main trail, and so the other day after work I decided to explore them. I walked off the path into a more heavily forested area of tiered hills interspersed with clearings, and found myself in a cemetery, of sorts. There were a series of small burial mounds, and they extended everywhere and in every direction. I got lost among them. This wasn't a cemetery in the maintained or organized sense, it was more like what you would find in the Appalachian Mountains: a random series of clearings that families made to preserve in dirt and stone their own sense of memory and their history. I started making photographs, and then I couldn't figure out which way was out, and realized I kept circling about and finding the same grouping of mounds that I had found earlier. Here's three grids of images I put together in chronological order from left to right and top to bottom, so you can get an idea of my movement through the space. And above is a song from the African Pearls compilation featuring music from Senegal.

I was researching burial traditions in Korea a little bit and here's what I found:

The eldest son of the family is the one responsible for preparing and cleaning the burial mounds of the most recently deceased ancestor. The corpse is traditionally buried standing upright and should either face south or toward an important spiritual part of the landscape. Many times, they are set to face mountains, since mountains are said to be the homes of the spirits of the land and the sky. The coffin is made from six planks of wood. Four of the planks represent the four cardinal points on the compass. The fifth one is for heaven and the last one for earth.

"fresh chestnuts gathered from the forests are cut into jewel-like shapes, for easy stacking. Stacking things, whether stones or food, is a form of prayer."

"And they carry out a very formal and artistic exorcism..."

2009-06-01T12:46:00.003+09:00

Maybe it's the constant arpeggios played in the background which remind me of pracicing piano when I was younger, but, for some reason, this song got me thinking about metronomes. Every musician uses some form of metronome at first, at least during their formative studies. But once they get it down, they just have this internal clock, ticking away, while they play, blindly if necessary, or as a group, with their internal clocks ticking away, clicking together, filling in everything around the abyss of the repetitions.

It is music in its purest form that exorcises. It is music that is formed from the most basic of repetitions, and it creates trance, it creates ecstacy, smiles, laughs and cries. It comforts death and the grievers at funerals. It is the centerpiece at ceremonies, the necessary background or foreground for so many rituals. It mimics every sound and rhythm and pattern in nature, and at the same time that sound and rhythm and pattern in nature is music itself. It follows oceans while oceans are following it. It breathes on its own and it breathes with us, together. It fills in the gaps.

I was thinking that I live in a country where, sadly, I lack the pleasure of being able to eavesdrop. I can't understand the great majority of conversations around me. Furthermore, I spend most of my time listening to music sung in a multitude of foreign languages, which I can't understand either. I wonder what has led me to fill my audible world with so much incomprehension.

Fumbling about in the dark

2009-06-01T09:30:00.014+09:00

Been listening to the African Pearls compilations. They're all pretty fantastic. These songs are from the one that's called "One Day on Radio Mali"

On Saturday morning, Lindsey was fiddling around with her hiking boots in the shoe-shedding chamber of the motel we were staying at in Seoul, and she said "I feel like I spend a lot of time in Korea flailing my arms around trying to keep motion sensor lights on."

It never really dawned on me until that point how much time I really did spend dealing with motion sensor lights. The main problem is the lights always stay on for an amount of time just short enough to never let you finish what you need to do before being left fumbling around in the dark. Just like elevator and subway train doors in this country, they are pretty much unforgiving. Motion detecting lights are usually the only thing lighting up hallways in most apartments and motels, so if you don't modify your behavior a bit in various ways (i.e. flailing your arms about wildly) you can easily be left fumbling about in darkness quite often. In the apartment building where I live, for instance, I know that if I come home at night, I have to get my key out of my pocket and get it ready for action before I exit the elevator on my floor. Otherwise, the light will turn off right after I get the key out and at the exact moment I need to see the key hole in my door. Energy efficiency gone harshly off-course.

Another thing is the sheer lack of incandescent light bulbs. Try finding one in the city I live in. It's actually pretty tough. I understand that fluorescent energy is a lot more efficient and good for energy conservation, but I would kill to sit under incandescent lights for just one day. People do have their limits.

I went to Seoul over the weekend because my friend Ashleigh was leaving Korea on Sunday (for good), so there was a night out at Big Mammas to see her off. Lindsey and I stayed in a love motel called the Grand Prix. Most of the midrange options for motels in Korea are love motels. They are ever-present everywhere. It's very common for Koreans, especially women, to live with their parents until they are married, so there are a lot of "alternatives" made available for couples in this situation, such as love motels or DVD rooms (for the less expensive and more brief meetings). It's not that the rooms have any overtly erotic themes or anything, but there is usually some sort of mood lighting available, a couple of terrible porn channels (really Korean porn must be the worst in the world), and the occasional vending machine distributing some hilarious and surprising accessories, as well as the complimentary condoms next to the complimentary hair products(?) and brushes.

What's interesting is that it's fairly commonplace for families to stay in these motels, because in some areas, it's the only option available if you don't want to upgrade to the Hilton or something. So I asked Elvis how Koreans usually deal with the more adult elements of the place when they bring their children. And apparently, they just ask the motel worker to prepare the room a little differently and to disable the free porn channels. Simple as that. Multi-purpose, you have to appreciate that.

The rooms do a great job of keeping the daylight out though, so you can really blast the AC and sleep forever. On top of that, sometimes the showers come with these crazy mist jets, or there's even a spa tub, maybe shaped like a shell with free packs of bubble bath powder. So they can be pretty nice places to stay, and it's always fun to find out what odd surprises they've supplied or modified the room with.

All motel rooms in Korea have a shoe-shedding chamber, which at times is a closet sized room with tile floor where you take off your shoes before going through another, completely extraneous door before entering the room. Sometimes this door has another set of locks on it, so I guess this can function as an added security to the room, although this couldn't be more unnecessary anywhere than in Korea.

Wow, I had this terrible dream last night that I woke up in the morning and had this long weird mustache with a part in the middle. Where did that come from?

Intangible assets

2009-05-28T17:16:00.022+09:00

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at a "cultural experience program" designed for foreign English teachers living in Korea. We went up the coast to Gangneung for the Danoje festival. This is a festival of shamanic origin, where they have this awesome and hypnotic mask dance, and they march a tree and fire through the city to a designated location with a long line of lanterns following, each one with a wish paper attached. The lanterns are placed in a river where they float downstream together and are collected apparently by paddle boat and people in rubber overalls. The wishes are burned so that they might come true. I walked in the parade with a large group of other English teachers from all over Korea. We all wrote our wishes down on the wish papers. My friend Luke and I both wished for English teachers in Korea to not be assholes. I really hope this wish comes true because sometimes I feel ashamed to be associated with a lot of people who end up teaching in this country. Not that there aren't a decent amount of good people, but jesus christ sometimes it feels like they're few and far between.

The festival was pretty fun, overall. And there were half a dozen booths with Turkish people serving Turkish kabobs. They were delicious.

We watched a video as an introduction to the festival and the narrator kept talking about the "intangible cultural properties" of Korea. I thought this was a fascinating term to use to describe shamanic activity and beliefs. And later, I ended up being interviewed for television (I've learned it's fairly common to be interviewed by local television news people if you are a foreigner wandering around a festival in Korea). They asked me what my favorite part of the Danoje festival was, and I told them that I definitely found the intangible cultural properties a lot more interesting than any tangible ones, and that I had a personal interest in Siberian shamanic activity and it's dissemination across the Korean peninsula.

We stayed in a traditional Korean dwelling near Gyeongpo lake, which is a very peaceful lake located near Gyeongpo beach. Gyeongpo beach is very popular on the east coast, and it has a long strip of fresh seafood restaurants, with tanks of big and small crabs, fish, shellfish, and all manner of undefinable sea creatures (It's like one giant, edible aquarium, really; all you have to do is point and say "I want, I want"). It also has tons of small marts where you can purchase roman candles and other fireworks to go light off at the beach. I've spent many a fine night there having a few beers with friends and lighting off roman candles over the ocean and watching the sparks bounce off the sand. Last time we found a huge piece of plastic pipe about 20 feet tall that we played a couple rounds of caber toss with.

But the traditional Korean house was really beautiful, there was a lotus pond with a grass island, and houses with grass roofs. We were sitting under some trees until late at night and I had a really good conversation with one of the Korean coordinators of the culture experience program about the idea of family structure in Korea vs. much of the West. She said it was a very important part of life to live together, with family members of many generations; not just your parents and your siblings, but your grandparents, and perhaps even your own children. In this way, she said you are able to learn from all these people so many lessons about life and how to behave in society and whatnot. I do agree that Western culture places too much emphasis on getting away from the nest as soon as you can support yourself, and sleeping in a room with a door that locks. This comes at the consequence of making people who live with their parents until their late-twenties or later feel genuinely insufficient, and I don't think this is entirely right.

However, I do feel there is something to be said for the idea of individuality, occasional and much needed moments of solitude, as well as falling on your face a few times and making some mistakes on your own until you figure things out rather than just listening to your elders all the time. Many Koreans do not believe in or place the same value on this idea of individuality. It is a very collective culture here. Everything is meant to happen in groups and teams. Many restaurants do not have single serving portions available on the menu, and you will receive strange looks for walking into restaurants alone. It just isn't meant to happen. And I really like the communal nature of many elements of this culture. But this collectivity has the potential to inhibit one from becoming a free-thinker as well as restrict one's ability to transgress, and these are two freedoms in life I feel to be very important. So I don't know which way of life is ultimately better, I can only say which one I prefer.

This idea of collectivity in Korean culture flowed into another conversation about consumer buying patterns and the ways that corporations and chain stores function differently in Korea. Something that really hasn't caught on yet in Korea's consumer culture is the interest in anything vintage or secondhand. They have secondhand goods, but they're much more rare than in the States. People dump a lot more stuff here, in general. It's also rare to see older cars on the road. There's definitely not a car culture in the same sense. The vice principal at my school is part of a car club, but they just like Mercedes Benz and other new model luxury cars. I asked the coordinator what she thought about that, and she had a view point I hadn't really expected. Koreans tend to collect goods that are produced in Korea, and she said that if you buy secondhand, you are not contributing to the production of these goods, and doing something bad for the economy.

Wow, I thought that was pretty intense, because I've never even considered what I might be doing to the economy when I buy secondhand, I'm just happy to save a little money when I can. I really wonder how common this type of thinking is in Korea.

But it seems like, in general, Koreans think about how their actions affect other Koreans a lot more, since the culture is so much more collective in nature. And I never thought about how this might make their buying patterns different. Except with clothing trends, as it's impossible to miss how thoroughly something like this one beige Burberry plaidlike fabric pattern has taken the country by storm for some reason. I wonder if it's because this population is so much closer genetically that trends spread and homoginize so rapidly.

Before, I just thought that the interest in secondhand and vintage goods was just a natural evolution of consumerism which hasn't occurred yet in Korea. Since their graduation into a culture of capitalist slap happy purchase excess happened so recently, I just figured it would be a while yet until the idea of thrift stores and thriftiness takes hold, and then an offshoot of this causing the vintage trend and the collecting of used and old goods. But perhaps this isn't the case at all. In any case, who am I to say?

The plot thickens

2009-05-25T23:54:00.004+09:00

Man, I just downloaded the complete Ethiopiques discography. 25 albums of Ethiopian jazz and grooves to sort through. The plot thickens. I'm in trouble.

Saturday & Sunday

2009-05-25T16:38:00.011+09:00

I am now officially lost in African music. It was a slippery slope and I have a long way to crawl out before I'm finished, I'm sure.

On Saturday I took a train up the coast with friends to Donghae. We walked across a good part of the small city, from the inter-city bus terminal to the beach, through downtown and up to the odd Russian area near the train station where we went to a Russian karaoke restaurant called Texas to eat. Luckily there was not karaoke transpiring. The food was excellent there, minus the blood sausage which wasn't worth writing home about, even though technically I'm writing home about it. I had a bowl of borscht for the first time with sour cream. My friend Andrew and his sister ordered meat and potatoes, and they weren't kidding, it was just a very generous serving of pork and mashed potatoes, no vegetables, and by that I mean not even a parsley flake to be found anywhere near the plate. The Russians definitely know how to eat.

While we were at the Russian joint, these Russian ladies were laid out on the couch watching a DVD of Eurovision 2009. Greece was so hilarious I had to attach the youtube for it below. You really have to see it to believe that there are people doing things you would never even imagine in places around the globe who actually have international followings. This is just one of those cases of someone going way, way, way too far. Enjoy, and remember: this guy is serious.

This video reminded me of this gem of the 80's that Korea, of all places, introduced me to: Modern Talking, the German band that some might say time should have forgotten long ago but instead is still going strong in obscure music video request bars named River Phoenix down narrow bar stacked and neon laden alleys in Shinchon, South Korea. But for maybe the same insane and inexplicable reasons that made the dude above famous, Modern Talking has a seemingly strong international following. So here they are. Head to head. Like a bunch of raving keytar playing and open chested megalomaniacs from across the span of almost three decades: Sakis Rouvas VS. Modern Talking. Who would claim victory in this epic clash of bands we can unfortunately only speculate, be cause if they did actually play together everything human and decent might actually implode in one violent convulsion.

aaahhhhhhh

2009-05-22T13:23:00.024+09:00

aaaahhhhhhh!

When I listen to this music I feel like nothing can be that wrong as long as this music continues to exist.

When I think about this type of music being played during funerals in Congo, sometimes lasting more than 4 days, I only wish I could have a funeral this incredible.

When I hear this song at three minutes and twelve seconds into it, I am so into it. I think this is one of the best middle of the song change ups I've heard in recent memory.

When I read some of the back story behind the Congotronics albums, I am blown away.

Some musicians from the Congo countryside came to the city and the city noises around them were too loud for their traditional music to be heard properly. So they used what was around them to enhance their sound. What was around them were car parts and other such leftovers from the Belgium colonization. They amplified their music, but DIY, so it sounds very experimental, because it is.

I've been thinking about L.A. a lot recently, but specifically what my life would be like now if I had stayed. I've been thinking about the art shows I may have participated in and what type of art I would be making there. Sometimes I think it was a mistake for me to leave, since I spent so much time and money to finish art school and I'm not really around any artists here. But other times I am really glad I have the challenge to live this way, as a person living a life first and an artist making art second. When I listen to this music, all the pressures of loans and careers dissipate and I realize how simple and lucid the act of making something and sharing it should be:

1. Work with only what is directly in front of you.
2. Don't complicate it with "isms" or concepts that you didn't invent yourself.
3. Get things out of your head through any material that makes the ideas flow the best.

Sloth or tadpole?

2009-05-21T14:16:00.016+09:00

I've been listening to this Van Morrison song from Astral Weeks. The lyrics are so beautiful:

"We shall walk and talk
In gardens all misty and wet with rain
And I will never, never, never
Grow so old again."

Walking and talking in gardens all misty and wet with rain is EXACTLY what I want to do pretty much all the time.

Also: "And I'll be satisfied not to read in between the lines." Man, that is an ideal and a half.

So it was Teacher's Day last week. Last year I was literally showered with gifts from my students. Some things I got included an expensive bottle of cologne, a large traditional scroll with a painting of a tiger and a dragon, a bouquet that was actually soap and every petal was a thin piece of soap, a bottle of wine, and a hundred-thousand won gift certificate for the Hyundae department store, among other things. However, I was teaching students with very rich parents in a very rich area in Seoul at the time. So I could tell the gifts probably came from the students' mothers for the most part, not that I wasn't VERY happy to receive them. This time around, I just got about 15 letters from my students, many of them with small folded paper origami flowers. In many ways, I actually appreciated these letters more than the lavish display of wealth thrown at me in Seoul, because they were actually from the students' hands, and their parents aren't paying heaploads of money for them to study English with me, and I could tell the students probably decided to write these letters on their own.

There's one letter in particular, though, that I feel really begs to be shared. It's potentially the best letter I've received from a student EVER. The girl who wrote it is probably the best English speaker in the entire school, although there's only 110 students where I teach. Regardless, her English ability is still extremely remarkable. Apparently she reads English newspaper articles and discusses them over the phone with someone from America.

Her vocabulary is crazy. Most of the other teachers took a crack at reading her letter and none of them, including Elvis who has extensively studied English for more than 20 years, could fully understand it. They all said the English was too difficult.

As a person this girl is so reserved and introverted though, and so it took forever for me to even find out that her English was this good. But here's the letter in full:

"Dear David.
I write you this letter to celerbrate teacher's day.
I feel sorry about day before yesterday. I wanted to greet you when we met by chance in front of our apartment. but I didn't want to use English because it was outdoor. I'm not as confidence as Hee-mang. So, let me use Korean when we meet at the outdoor.
David. Which animal do you like more? a tadpole or a sloth? I like tadpole more. I don't have any information regarding the life of a tadpole, but it is cute! There are many tadpoles near here because Taebaek is a rural area. In fact, tadpole is my nickname and sloth is my sister's nickname in my home, because I became potbelly when I eat much food, and my sister is such a lazy girl. I disliked my nickname at first, but I am acceptable it now.
Today is teacher's day in Korea. It is a day that is made to express thank to one's teacher. I want to express greatful to you, and I'm glad I am one of your pupils. I really enjoy talking with you and
Thank you very much David.
-from Ui-Joo (or Stephanie. this is my English name.)"

As for the question regarding my preference for the sloth or the tadpole (the most important part of the letter), I've put a little bit of thought into it before I write back to Ui-Joo with my answer. I immediately took the question as which animal would I want to be if I could permanently change form or begin again in a new life rather than which animal I just thought was more interesting. And I would definitely rather be a tadpole over a sloth.

When I was a young child my mom bought one of those books on 50 or 100 waterfalls around Los Angeles. She got it in her mind to take me to as many as she could. She even took me tadpole catching once. Rock hopping up all those creeks and streams I always thought it'd be so awesome if people were the size of tadpoles and we could live underwater like that. Some small dirty brown puddle in a rock crevice would be a palatial playground, a vast landscape for us to swim around in and explore while swinging our tails around.

Although lounging about in trees eating leaves day in and day out sounds like it would be pretty sweet as well. And it would be a sort of rude awakening to start losing your tail and then all of a sudden start uncontrollably start hopping around, making weird noises with your throat and flicking your tongue out at flies all the time. Perhaps the ideal situation is to be a tadpole that metamorphosizes into a sloth once adulthood is reached. That would be awesome.

Ajuma party on the rocks

2009-05-20T11:01:00.021+09:00

The other week Lindsey's sister Laura was visiting and I was showing her some real beautiful spots around where I live. We travelled northeast about an hour by train to a coastal city named Donghae. The town is pretty interesting because it has a healthy Russian district known as Little Odessa because of all the Russian shipbuilders working around there. But there's also a place called 무릉 계곡 (Mureung Gyae Gok), that means "Paradise Valley". There's a a spot at the beginning where you can choose one of the two dozen some odd restaurants to eat a bowl of san chae be bim bap (mountain vegetables over rice with spicy sauce and a fried egg). We ate sitting on bamboo mats on the floor of a wooden platform that extended out on stilts a little over the river. They had a a special type of dong dong ju we drank, which is a very traditional milky rice wine. It comes in a big pot with a ladle you use to fill the bowl you drink out of. There were groups of ajuma (old Korean women) on both sides of us at adjacent restaurants tapping their stainless steel spoons and chopsticks and clapping while they sang together. Some of them even got up and danced and slowly waved their arms around in the air dressed in their colorful blouses. At first it was a cacophony, since they're old and drunk, so never quite on beat or in key, but the longer you listened, the cooler it sounded. I mean they were putting those of us like Laura and myself,who are in our twenties, completely to shame. All of these ladies had decades on us, some of them definitely tripled our ages, and they still had so much life inside of them.

After the mountain vegetables and rice and rice wine, we followed the trail by a temple and continued hopping rocks up river until we hit the twin waterfalls. So awesome and peaceful. That particular day was Parents Day, so there were heaploads of Ajuma plopped down on old newspapers they placed on rocks by the river. And the soju was running strong. Laura (Lindsey's sister) and I were invited to sit down with one group and share in their festivities. They told us they were celebrating Eomani Nal, which means mother's day. I guess their way of celebrating it was getting blasted on soju in the forest with their friends. They definitely picked the right place to do it as far as the scenery goes.

An 아주마 (Ajuma) literally translates to aunt, but it's generally how Koreans refer to women of age with respect. They also say there's three sexes in Korea: male, female, and ajuma. It's because many of these women are products of pretty hard lives. Sometimes bowlegged and bent over, they often have this strong wide legged squat, colorful and flowery attire, and smoke and spit and drink in public like it's going out of style. In contrast, at least in smaller country towns like the one I live in, it's very common for younger women to only smoke in restrooms or in private rather than risk harsh judgement from others. But for some reason, once a woman has become an ajuma, she transcends these constraints. In Korea, women are still definitely supposed to take the submissive role, not drink as much, and be more respectful and obedient to males. It's getting a lot better, especially in the larger cities, but I've seen many examples of this inequality in the area I live in. I've witnessed domestic violence a few times, which I've heard to be fairly commonplace, and you can tell that, glass ceilings firmly in place, the business world is set up for men, almost exclusively. They say an ajuma is the third sex because they literally don't give a fuck what anyone thinks about the place a woman is supposed to take in Korean society. And, in truth, they don't need to. They've already had their kids and watched them grow, or if they haven't had them, they're not going to and they've accepted it. In effect, there's no one else they need to impress. They are free. Free to plop down on the ground anywhere they like and drink and smoke while spitting watermelon seeds out right on the ground all over the place. And in most cases, no one is going to say a damn thing against them for it, as they shouldn't. I only hope that I can execute the same freedoms when I grow that old.

Some ajuma sell vegetables and half live half dead sea creatures on the streets. And I can't count the times I've been waiting in line for a bus ticket or something (usually on a time constraint), and a 4ft 9in ajuma shoulders me aside and walks up to the ticket counter before me like I wasn't even there. Either they're empowered from living a lifetime in an overtly male dominated culture or they just don't care. I don't know which. I've always wanted to do a photo series on ajuma. A lot of them REALLY don't like having their picture taken though, especially by a tall white man. Although I think I'm just never that motivated to make photographs of people that often though. The images are just always so loaded. But I hope another artist will someday do a series on them. It would make a strong statement on the expression of womanhood and female empowerment in Korea. Or, if nothing else, be pretty fascinating visually. I'd buy the book, at least.

In any case, these women we joined passed over some newspaper pages for us to sit on, and offered us paper cups first to share soju and mango juice chaser, then after the alcohol customs were out of the way, we could fully sit and they gave us rice cakes and hard boiled eggs and fruit slices.

Generally Koreans are very generous and warm people to foreigners in my experience, but after soju, their generosity really goes beyond measure. There's a VERY common custom in Korea in which you give your glass or cup to another person at your table using both hands, and then fill it for them with soju (or a non-alcohol substitute). Once they drink it, they're supposedly obligated to return it to you and also return the filling favor with fresh drink. Go germs! When my principal took me out for BBQ pig belly the first week I arrived in town he told me to give him my glass, and then told me to fill it with soju for him. After he drank it he gave it to the person sitting next to him and told me "This is not your glass. This is OUR glass." The glass eventually came back to me after doing a full circuit of the table. I really like that part of the culture (even though it may be the reason I get sick so often here...)

These ajuma had mouths filled with fillings and gaps and golds and blacks and browns and purples. So of course one of the ladies held out her paper disposable cup for me to accept and drink from it. However, the cup was by this point a little more than half-crushed by her badly calloused ancient death grip hands and sopped wet and half-gummed by her badly aged and mangy grill. I definitely wasn't overjoyed, but I accepted it anyways, tipped my head back and gulped down the soju as quick as I could without looking or thinking about it and then offered the cup back to her.

I wanted to stay longer than just half an hour with them, but the sun was dipping and valleys tend to get dark fast. It was cool to sit with them while they were singing and clapping and laughing.

I was looking at a picture of the last time I was invited to an ajuma party, which was on a mountain trail in Seoul.

There's a little more money in Seoul, so these ajumas were a lot better outfitted for their climbing club. But man, I've gained a ton of weight since then! I sit at my desk so long during the day here like a sack of potatoes. So I'm thinking of buying a folding bike. Never imagined myself owning a folding bike before. But my friend Aaron has been researching this company named Montague who makes these bang up folding bikes. One particular model is called the Paratrooper. It's named so because it has apparently been used by the special forces and dropped out of planes on the back of soldiers while on various covert ops. So it's a full size 24 speed mountain bike that folds up to 3ft X 3ft and is light enough to strap on my back. It'll be perfect for throwing in the storage area in buses and trains so I can hit cool riding spots all over the country. here's a description from the Montague website about it:

"The Paratrooper® is a full size, 24 speed mountain bike designed to endure any terrain at high speed in silence with no heat signature. In addition to the high performance feature, the bike folds simply without the use of tools.

By turning one quick lever, the Paratrooper® folds in less than 30 seconds into 3' x 3' pack that can be dropped from a plane, strapped to the side of an LAV or thrown in the back of a trunk."

What can be better than riding around knowing that you are emitting ZERO heat signature? I'm not even fully sure what that means...

Well, apparently, I just found out what it means -- a guy from a bike website (see comments) was kind enough to expand on/correct the bike-related addendum to this post. And even more fascinating, I thought, was what he wrote about the Paratrooper actually being used in active missions on the DMZ.

water is forever

2009-05-14T15:46:00.021+09:00

Alex, one of my best friends (Familiar Stone!), showed me this crazy and fascinating relationship between two Chinese characters. It was quite a long time ago, but since then it keeps reoccurring in my mind. The character on the left means water and the character on the right means forever. And I mean it's pretty obvious that it's no coincidence they are so close in shape. Chinese characters are at many times pictographic and they tend to have a close resemblance to how the word would look if it were not a word at all, but a picture. Here's three more examples:

What made the ancient peoples who invented these characters decide that forever was an extension of water? The written language of China is said to go back 5000 years. And 5000 years ago, it was more than probable that most people, when standing on an ocean beach, would really have had NO idea what was beyond the horizon. That massive bowl of water would have, at least in their minds, gone on forever.

I've also heard that panels of experts do agree that most life on land, including humans, originated in the oceans. Did the ancient Chinese have a natural inclination or insight to believe this? Just think: once we were fish.

Well, enough of that, here's a jammin song from western Africa in the 70's:
Orchestre Poly_Rythmo de Cotonou - Mi Ni Non Kpo

Paradiso

2009-05-14T14:18:00.008+09:00

Man, this song is so very very dope. Been listening to it on the bus lately while hopping around the country. Amped and electified thumb pianos? Are they serious? Genius. And the distortions and those harmonics created by the amplification blending into each other to create further polyrhythms. I'm glad they called that song paradiso.

So perhaps the sudden advent of spring sweeping across the landscape here is the main catalyst for the revival of this blog. In any case, it is so green, and becoming so lush, and flowers are coating the ground all the way up Taebaek mountain to its summit. There's just so much that was not there before that is there now. And the transition was also so fast and mind blowing. I feel very privaleged to live here and look out my window every morning at the green mountains. Taebaek rests in a narrow valley, the mountains are never out of sight. Living in LA, it's so easy to take the green for granted. It's so easy to forget about things like foliage and leaves when they're mostly there all year. Just like in most other aspects of life, temporary absences bring so much more attention and focus. When something has returned that was away, the wake of it's absence creates so much more impact.

"You are up and down."

2009-05-14T09:33:00.011+09:00

I was just remembering another example of culture clash in the cafeteria. Quite a few months back. There were about 5 or 6 other teachers and administrators sitting at the same lunch table as me, and I noticed they were all having a conversation about me in Korean. It's never hard to tell when this is happening, since they always end up saying "David'uh-shee" over and over again for some reason (the "shee" being an attachment to indicate respect, almost like "Mr."). I couldn't understand their words, but by their gestures and completely unveiled finger pointing, it seemed like they were talking about my stainless steel food tray. I hadn't even noticed until then, but mine was upside down.

School lunch trays have two sides: one side with three small bowls meant for panchan (korean side dishes), and the other side with two larger bowls for soup and for rice. The soup and the rice side is always and at all times supposed to be closest to you. Deviation from this apparently causes a great stir at my school. Check out my friend Andrew's blog: http://taebaek.tumblr.com/ He has a picture of one of the trays.

As soon as I realized how much my deviation stunned and confused the other teachers (and made some of them chuckle), I really felt good inside. This was kind of liberating and this was an awesome thing for them to observe. It became clear to me that it was very possible none of these teachers or administrators had ever eaten with their trays turned the other way. Or at least since they were admonished for it early on in childhood. And until that moment, I hadn't even realized that this was a trangressional or backwards thing to do at all.

I could tell that Elvis (the school accountant) was trying to formulate and connect the right English words in his head to explain what I was doing wrong. He always looks down at the floor and appears to be concentrating very hard when he's doing this. He finally looked up at me and pointed to my tray and said "You are up and down." Wow. What I was doing sounded so much cooler when he put it like that. I told him I was OK. I preferred to be "up and down" today. Because I didn't show any embarrassment or even hint at wanting to flip my tray around, he took that as my misunderstanding of what he said. So, failing to think of a more accurate English expression he actually reached over and started to turn my tray around for me. No way was this happening, I thought. So I stopped his hands and told him I liked it that way. And again told him, with a little more force this time, I was OK. Now they never say anything when I eat with my tray is "up and down."

Sometimes I just like the side dishes way better. Panchan is my favorite thing about Korean cuisine. Every dish comes with a multitude of small dishes of all sorts of pickled or unpickled vegetables, meat, pancakes, or whatnot. And if you want more, all you have to do is ask. So they're like bottomless little bowls of delicious (and occasionally things like raw clam or snail salad that I don't like). And so when I turn my try around it is because I am focusing on the panchan, rather than the rice and the soup. It's definitely not a purposeless deviance. It's just sometimes they serve things like "fish bone soup." What would be a psychotic health hazard in any elementary school in North America is commonplace here, they couldn't find a fish with more tiny bones, or have figured out a better way to make sure more bones end up in the soup. Not one piece of fishmeat left untarnished. And I can't mix it with the rice either that way, so there's really nothing for me on that side of the tray except plain rice and mouthfuls of esophagus piercing fishbones. And that's why I flip it around sometimes.

Sometimes the cafeteria offers sights to remind me that I'm living in a place that is really different from where I grew up. After living here for over a year, it's really easy to start taking things for granted, day in and day out. But the other day we had pig bone soup, and there wasn't much meat on the bones, although it did have a good flavor. I looked up and saw this third grade girl with no front teeth trying her best to dilligently suck all the marrow out of one of the pig bones. You would definitely not see that in a cafeteria in the States that often.

Eat everything Wednesdays

2009-05-13T21:06:00.018+09:00

Today at lunch I realized too late that one of the lunch ladies was scooping a suspicious looking salad with red sauce onto my tray. The salad was at the end of the line, but usually greens are somewhere in the middle of the line of steel food tubs. And when I sat down and started poking at it, I noticed some even more suspicious globs of slimy dark colored not-vegetable or salad-worthy possible unidentifiable raw sea creature parts floating about. It just looked very suspect of something I might not eat. When the school nurse noticed my uncertainty, I asked her in Korean what it was and she said "gol bang ee." Damnit. Cold snail salad. Man, I eat a lot of strange food, excessively strange foods. I've covered Korean specialty cuisines to an extent that I'm sure would satisfy those guys from No Reservations or Bizarre Foods. In fact, I've had a chance to try more barely edible oddities than they did in their respective South Korean episodes. Of course, I do live here, and also, I live in the countryside where you have to eat these types of things sometimes by default, or just not eat at all or face looking like a weirdo for not eating them. But in the middle of the average work day I don't normally get the urge to eat cold snail salad.

I'm usually able to spot things like this and just tell them in Korean to withhold it to save the troubles at the end of the meal. Today was a "no waste day." Every Wednesday at the elementary school I work for everyone is supposedly obligated to finish every last speck of food off their stainless steel trays before leaving the cafeteria. The lunch ladies place an upside down steel tray over the hole we usually throw our unfinished food into to help make sure we follow this barbaric custom. I learned this a while back when one day I was placing my tray down on top of the stack with maybe one-third of the plain rice left uneaten (that day there was nothing to mix it with, and eating plain rice is another barbaric custom in any culture in my eyes): as I placed the tray down a third grade girl, who usually follows me around school and calls my name over and over again, reached both her arms out in some pleading shock gesture and said "teacher!", as if to tell me that I had accidentally stabbed her mother or something. At this same moment the head nutritionist was just walking out and saw what I had done. She shook her head at me like I was a disgrace to everything she cherished in life and muttered a Korean expression of exasperation under her breath as she walked by. She would have confronted my outright defiance more strongly but we already had a confrontation similar to this one last semester, and I made it abundantly clear to her that they would have to deport me from this country if they wanted to make me finish food I didn't want to eat.

At first I was sort of taken aback by this behavior, but now I really enjoy this type of conflict when it happens. And sometimes (although I don't normally admit it) whenever I have food left over on a "no waste day" I even try to time my exit of the cafeteria to when the nutritionist is walking out to clean up the excess trays left by the other students. That way she may see my food that I did not eat and realize that she is powerless in this situation to stop me. She is powerless because of certain freedoms in my life that I not only embrace but choose to freely execute at every chance possible. I am an adult. We are forced to eat all manner of foods we don't want when we are children, and one of the great things about being an adult is that we don't have to do that anymore. The other teachers who follow this barbaric custom and shovel unwanted food down their throats are choosing not to execute some of the basic freedoms that come with adulthood, and sometimes this bothers me. Although it probably happens in every institution in every country in the world. But, in any case, the mindset of Koreans living in the countryside being largely conservative and traditional, I feel it's important for the ladies in the lunch room as well as the other teachers to observe my defiance sometimes. I am in this country not only to teach English, but to teach my culture. And culture has a lot to do with how a language is shaped and how it flows. And being able to choose freely what I will eat or not eat or waste is a part of my culture.

There is a fine line, somewhere, though. I don't agree with the mindset of wasting freely and openly and excessively just because you can, or just out of apathy. And that would not be the part of my culture that I would want to spread, or give the impression that I am a part of. I guess I just don't want to eat cold snail salad or feel bad about wasting it some days. That's all.

What's also interesting is that Koreans would sooner leave half a steak behind than not finish nearly every grain of rice served to them. I mean rice is what has kept this culture from starving when it was going through hard times, so it's not surprising that they look at it this way. I have heard people in the states who grew up during the depression with poor families behave in similar ways (although they might go for the steak before the rice). In fact, you don't ask someone "How are you?" in Korean, you ask them "Have you eaten rice?" Although to them, the word "rice" is synonymous with meal. So they're actually just asking each other whether they've eaten or not.

gotta love

2009-04-30T23:35:00.002+09:00

those 7 dollar rooms in Southeast Asia. Save on the furniture, when here you can have your refreshments, your entertainment, and your decorations all in one go.