on decay

I'm still struggling to understand the disconnect between my awareness of Korea's "beauty" and my complete lack of appreciation for it.

I'm ready to give up on some grand explanation, and instead focus on the details... (small differences, if you will.)

1.

Something is wrong when i can't tell the difference between a modern bathroom...

...and the ancient palace complex it is meant to "compliment."

Thanks, but no thanks. I can see the same thing at Epcot. (which i have. its actually kind of interesting.)

When you juxtapose the True Past with a modern duplicate, you complicate matters of authenticity and value. And unless we're dealing with something truly awe-inspiring and unique (like the pyramids or the alps), authenticity is really all that something old has to offer.

When you build a bathroom as beautiful as the adjacent site, you're just reminding me that the site itself isn't unique.
And once you negate the mystique of uniqueness, you point out the secret that any encounter with the Ancient is illusionary, and is inevitably wrapped in the historical process that has carried it to the present...

2.

When you erase decay, you undo meaning.

Decay is an inevitable and important part of historical sites. It is the scars and beauty marks that separate man from mannequin, real from reproduction.

But in Korea, decay at historical sights is viewed with the same disdain as decay in the home - an embarrassing blemish that distracts from the 'true' beauty and significance of the site in question.

But Travel is not about recapturing the past the way it once existed, that's what time travel is for. Travel is about viewing a process, a continuous and eternal cycle of growth and decay.
Sometimes we travel to see the breadth of the process as it has effected one site. Turkey is a remarkable layering of cultures spilling over each other, a living museum to the triumphs and failures of both the West and the Middle East. Other times we travel to see a single point in the decay/growth cycle. We see a modern technophile Japan or a starving Cairo, and our own lives serve as the reference to 'normalcy.'

Because in the end, travel is ultimately about understanding the old as it relates to us now.

In Egypt they leave one Past in the context of the many Pasts that followed. Statues remain toppled, ancient graffiti is ubiquitous. And it is this accumulation of pasts that gives meaning to Places, that makes them historic. But in Korea one Past is singled out and preserved to the detriment of all others. Cultural sites have been swept clean of narrative, of the inevitable expansions and re-appropriations that history has wrought.

Would (could?) Shelly have written Ozymandias if the Egyptian government had restored or removed all the fallen statues? Could we ever understand our own place in history if all we saw of the past was it's leaders desired projections of excellence?

All This doesn't mean you should leave the 5000 year old layer of grime over king Tut's golden crown. It just means you shouldn't confuse the 'Past as an object' with the 'Past as a narrative'. We may delight in viewing the Past's objects - but truth, beauty, and meaning inevitably come from observing it's narrative...



I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Chekhov's Gun

"If a pistol appears in a story, eventually it's got to be fired."
-Colonel Sander's summary of Chekhov's Gun from Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

It's troubling to me that this idea carries weight.
In a perfect world, it should be nothing more than a wry observation about the formulaic nature of literature; a truism equivalent to "the good guy always gets the girl." - relevant to fiction, irrelevant to reality.

But that's not really how it works. I feel like i spend a good part of my life waiting for Chekhov's Guns - trying to identify and assemble the future meaning of seemingly innocuous events. No object is acceptable as arbitrary - its meaning is only concealed, its purpose yet to be unveiled.

To give a very extreme example, In a strange way i take comfort in the fact that i am starting to bald. it's a Gun that points to continuity - why would i start going bald if its not leading somewhere? The trigger has not been pulled, which means there has to be an act three in the making.

Of course, this isn't foolproof. And when a gun doesn't go off - when a conspicuous prop proves irrelevant - it ruptures the assumed narrative flow of our lives. It forces front and center a feeling of pointlessness usually kept at bay by the 'purposefulness' of coincidence.

It would seem then that a belief in Chekhov's guns is part of the unspoken fate component to Sheilaism.

(Sheilaism is religion without doctrinal authority;it is a patchwork of personal pseudo-religious convictions that make up each of our individual "secular" philosophies. It's religion without orthodoxy - because it is 'ours,' it is without accountability to tradition or a larger body. Hunches and compulsions act as a source of meaning that in a past era would have been explained with reference to the church.)

I'll have to spend some more time thinking about the other components...

volleyball in oman

um...

i can't decide if this is serious or a very very complicated attempt at humor.
I also can't decide which way makes it better.

Also, i'm bartending tonight.

i played blackjack for about 6 hours with this guy on saturday:



it almost made up for the fact that i had just spent 3 hours on a fruitless quest for redbull through the back streets of nampodong.



If my homesick hankerings had involved Skippy, Tylenol, double mint, old spice, or Campbell's soup, i would have been okay. But no such luck.

So instead i ate odang, which is kind of like hot gafilda fish on a stick.

It's pretty much my favorite food here.

Also, it would be criminal if i spent all this time in korea and never posted a photo like this:

technomythonoia!

Koreans don't flush their toilet paper.
And yes, I know this is not an entirely unique practice. In Costa Rica it was the same, as in most parts of Egypt. But that was because these countries have an aging infrastructure that was built on a third world budget.
In Korea, they have plasma TV's in their elevators, and I'm pretty sure nothing is more than 5 years old.

I'm not even kidding. This is the wikimapia view of my house. The satellite image must be a little outdated, because its just a giant field. Which means there is no way that the pipes can't support my toilet paper. And yet, my boss and landlady both warned me that if i flushed, i would absolutely clog the pipes. (my landlady warned me by punching me multiple times in the arm, but I'll save the violent vibrancy of aged Korean women for another post.)

So why won't Koreans flush their toilet paper?
Although i can't come up with an accurate name for the phenomena, (technomythonoia?) I'm willing to bet it's somehow related to fan death.
(fan death, of course, is when "an electric fan creates a vortex, which sucks the oxygen from the enclosed and sealed room and creates a partial vacuum inside.")

This isn't to say American's don't' suffer from some form of the same ailment - i would literally run out of the room after turning on the microwave before i went to college. But I am struggling to find an American equivalent at the same level of absurdity as fan death.

And i am similarly struggling to figure out why the multitude of warning signs needed by a technologically paranoid society have to be animated.
(I am using animated here in both senses of the word. Yes, we use 'illustrations' in our warnings, but they are almost always passive. If you look closely, you can see little cartoon tears (sweat drops?) flying off the people in the second and third panel of the earthquake warning.)




Life's mysteries know no limit...

wtf

Have I been away from home too long? Or is this some sort of joke? Seriously, i don't recognize a single word on this list, and only 1 of them (lolcat) even refers to a 'phenomena' that i am aware of. fuck. i better come home.

No outside drinks or squids.

gaming

It is 40 degrees in Gimhae right now. And yes, these kids are playing street fighter outside of a convenience store.

They should really be at home watching one of Korea's TWO tv channels devoted to starcraft:

Korean elections - can i take your order?

I am woefully (willfully?) ignorant about Korean politics...

However, it's got to say something about a country's faith in their electorate when they start assigning numbers to the candidates.


Sure, I guess its a sign of robustness when you have 12 candidates running instead of 2, and for all i know other parliamentary democracies do the same thing...
but, still,
When a conversation about the political leadership of your country can begin with the question,
"i went with number 6, how bout you?" - something is wrong.

And seriously, you've got to feel bad for whoever gets assigned the number four.

i'm an artist

rock on china...

Chien-min Chung/Getty Images

It's hard to explain exactly what i find discomforting about this photograph.
Ineloquently:
the framing of the exuberant, animated (focused) American rockstar by bored, suspicious (blurry) Chinese security is brilliant.

Without mentioning our assumptions about China, it innocuously reaffirms them. This is a concert. There were tons of Chinese fans there. Why show this?

I feel uncomfortable talking about something i know nothing about, but...
the brilliance of photography is that it lets you discover things naturally... When someone preaches in a film it is glaringly apparent, but in photography the sermon hides inside the framing...

blogging about Barthes... sort of. well, not really.

Natalia Kolesnikova/Agence France-Presse--Getty Images


Lets start by saying that i know next to nothing about photography, and what little I do know is entirely related to Barthes ideas on Semiology. However, I've been meaning to start regularly blogging observations on the New York Times headline photograph, and today seemed as good a day as any.

So to begin, what sort of significance ought we draw from the lines on Putin's forehead fading into the ruffles of his shirt?

Aquarian Age Alternative...

Japan may not have had redbull (wtf?) but they did have this game...



It's like Magic cards, but without your imagination... or someone else in front of you.



Man japan is cool.

gal sone... i love you.

via japan (i.e. Betsey)



she's so cool that she got her own music video...



(basically, she can eat a lot and never gains wait, so they put her on Japanese TV shows where she single handedly out-eats an entire boy band, etc.)

the dark side of K-pop

What drives a culture to develop a sub-genre of music videos devoted to making 13 year old girls cry?

Is it the strange paradox of living in an absurdly safe country that has the specter of a nuclear neighbor hanging over it's head?

I'd post more, but that video's long enough... and prototypical.

small differences (linguistic - neurological edition)

I'm very interested in how the brain "translates" accent into understandable speech. Are Engilsh speakers, with its infinite accents, better at this? Furthermore, is the way we learn our first language reflective of our general way of thinking?

In Egypt, people were often baffled by the slightest mistake in accent. I lived near a street called tram street, which in Egyptian Arabic should be pronounced ahhh- taahh-rehhm. There is a very slight rolling of the R in there. Although my general arabic accent is quite good, this one word was impossible for me.

One time, I sat in a taxi and tried to explain to the driver what street I wanted. We agreed that there are three main streets that run across Alexandria. We agreed that we were at the moment on one of them, and it was not the one that i wanted. We agreed that I didn't want to be on the sea. In my mind, this alone should have been enough, but he began to rattle off all of the smaller streets, until finally i was able to pronounce tram street correctly.

Another time i was in McDonald's, and said i wanted my meal a cahm - bow. (As in Combo. With fries and a drink. I actually forget what they call it in America now, but in Korea its called a "set.") I was met with a blank stare. What i meant to say was cum-bow. There was no mental training to search for similar words, to do internal interpretations of meaning. The language was an all or nothing deal, where you either hit a bullseye of meaning, or grazed the target as gibberish. The fact that there was literally no other similar word i could have been trying to say in that situation was entirely besides the point.

While I was in Egypt and bitter and angry, I interpreted this as a clear sign that Egyptians were retarded. Now I'm beginning to realize that it has a whole lot more to do with how we are taught to learn language.

So now in Korea...

i sort of lost it yesterday. I was teaching little Bennie and Angie phonics stuff out of there phonics book, and there's a page that has

P + ark = Park.

That's it though. The book doesn't follow through with the whole Electric Company thing, it just moves on.
However, i have about 20 minutes of material that i have to stretch to fit a 45 minute class, so i thought i'd build on it.

wasn't going to happen.

They could read "ark"
and they could read "park", because they already knew it. But when i switched to an "M", i met blank stares. It's not that the kids didn't know what sound an M makes. (And furthermore, its not like there written language isn't phonetic either.) It's just that they're trained to memorize, not to problem solve.

I wrote "ark" "Mark" "Park" and "Hark" on the board, and had them repeat the pronunciations of each.

Then i added "Gark." (again, meaning isn't important here, this is a phonics class.)

One of the girls said "gorilla."

She knew the letter g, but the way her brain was wired to learn, she had to say a word that she already knew.

I was ready to cry.

small differences (korean edition)

Koreans squat like this:
(not my picture)

heels flat on the ground.
Not as easy as you might think.

Koreans don't do 'pull my finger.' Instead its a maneuver like setting off an old fashion detonator wherein the hand goes from 'thumbs up' to 'closed fist.' This can also be reversed à la opening a can of soda.

The mother of all differences is dong chim.
(not my picture again... unfortunately.)

It is translated as "poop needle," although kids are more than happy to perform a frontal version of said act. A wikipedia search redirects you to a sight on the Japanese equivalent called kancho, although the URL betrays its true origins. I'll put up my own pictures of this soon, but for now, you can experience a simulation here.

Also, yesterday was pepero day. You know, because 11/11 looks like 4 sticks of pepero.

But oh man, I can't wait for Black Day so i can "commiserate [my] singledom."

day at the races

war as comedy

I visited a giant POW memorial in Geoje a few weekends ago, and it was...

...interesting.

I just can't imagine what purpose is served by portraying war in this way.
My understanding was that these things (btw, what the hell are they called?) are more appropriate for, say:

...corn.

I suppose there's a lot to be said about the general disinterest in war memorials in America. When people do talk about war memorials in America, they usually think of the Vietnam one, and even then its most likely discussed as a work of art.

But war memorials are huge in Egypt and Korea. And aside from singlehandedly supporting the diorama industry, they probably say something about the countries. (maybe.)

In Egypt the war memorials/museums were intense, sprawling places with poorly made figurines and large plaques with phrases like "the defeat of the invincible army." (I still can't decide whether the 'invincible army' is the Egyptian or the Israeli.)



But in Korea they're like bizarre theme parks.

How travel made me less liberal.

I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but haven't really found the right way to approach it...
This pretty much sums it up I guess.
But yeah, before I lived in Egypt I was perfectly happy to give it not just the Benefit of the Doubt, but really much more; I wrote my thesis on Islam as an "alternative and cohesive telos and worldview."
And yet... after 7 months in Egypt I couldn't believe how disillusioned I felt. I've touched on it before... how everyone middle class just wanted to get the hell out of there. How it felt like the clash between "Islam and the West" was based on the fact that they desired literally everything Western, which led to a natural problem with the "Islam" part. (not the religion per se, but the economic, political, and cultural stagnation that because of the holistic nature of Islam, is hard to attribute to anything other than Islam, or it's deterioration due to Western influences.)

I went to Egypt open-minded, and I left with the same opinion that a lot of egyptians have:
(to quote an Egyptian i was particularly fond of )
"Egypt is fucked"

So how does one deal with the fact that liberalism is better served by theorizing than by experience? Would i have been a better "scholar" if I'd stayed at home?

Speaking to people who study the Middle East from afar, i literally feel tainted by experience.

next time someone wants to complain about the short attention span of children, i'm going to let them listen to "eye of the tiger" on repeat with some korean 5 year olds for 3 hours. thanks.

when did this blog become about bugs?

high on the list of important papers i will never write is the one on the special insanity that only bugs can instigate. At first i thought it was just me, but research has demonstrated that the personification of bugs is a normal reaction.

This is my favorite: (via craig's list)

Open Letter to the Roaches in My Apartment

---

Date: 2007-09-23, 2:08PM EDT


Good afternoon, you scuttling bastards.

I tried to be reasonable with you. At first, we had a stable relationship. I knew you were there, and every now and then I'd see one of you, but in general you kept quiet and had the good sense to scurry for hiding when I turned the lights on. One of you periodically stepped out of line, and had to be squashed, and then everything went back to normal. If you had just continued in that manner, we could have lived this entire year in peaceful coexistence.

But no, you had to get greedy. I began to see you more frequently, and in larger numbers. Your lights-on scurry grew slower and slower and became more of a relaxed trot, then a walk. Eventually, you had the audacity to sit right where you were and shake your head feelers at me. You had gone too far. It was time for war.

I began periodic sweeps of the apartment, armed with paper towels, and squashed anything that moved. I removed every possible food source from anywhere you might be able to reach it, even adding extra layers of wrapping to items in the fridge, just in case one of you somehow managed to make it inside. A couple of times, I even turned the lights off and stood motionless for five minutes, then flicked them back on and rained horrible death upon whichever of you had been lured out. I really thought this would have been enough to make my point.

However, you continued to defy all logic and reasoning, and to multiply and grow bolder. Three of you ran across my foot once; I killed two, but left one alive (but severely maimed) to tell the tale... clearly, you were beginning to affect my sanity, and I needed to up the ante in order to regain the upper hand in the battle for control of my apartment. So, I added the roach spray to my arsenal. This had little effect and made my apartment smell extremely questionable; I guess you vermin won that round.

I notified the management company, who has always been very responsive to any problem I have had with the place. There was some vague talk of fumigating or spraying or some other unspecified pest removal solution; somehow it kept falling through the cracks, and nothing ever happened. Well, I'm not sure who you bribed or threatened for that little stunt, but it was time to show you little 6-legged thugs that I wasn't afraid of you, no matter what kind of "connections" you had.

I had no alternative, I had to buy the roach poison traps. The way these are supposed to work is this - the cockroach smells the tasty poison/food, wanders into the trap, eats, returns to his/her hiding place, and then dies. The practical result is that they should appear to vanish from your home like magic. However, you at my apartment had grown not only bold, but complacent. After eating, you all just kinda decided to hang out for a while, and as a result died in an odd sort of corpse constellation across my kitchen floor.

The destruction was horrific. Some of your dead were being carried off by those who survived, almost like soldiers dragging the wounded into foxholes. Many of you were still twitching, apparently writhing in agony from the effects of the poison. The ravages of war are never pretty, and being a gentle person, part of me felt a little bit of remorse.

But now you know that it is, as they say, "on", and I'll push you fuckers all the way back to apartment 601 if I have to...


Sincerely,
Fellow Apartment Dweller/Agent of your Doom

That last post was whiny and inarticulate, so let me try again...

In Korea i feel nothing,
like when you kiss someone and it means nothing
Korea is kissing me
(or I'm kissing it)
and i feel nothing
and it makes me question love [of traveling].

There is i think a very strong connection between these two impossible mysteries of life - love and travel - but it feels like so much more has been written about the former than the later. Or more specifically, I've read about understanding love through its loss, but never about travel in the same way.

What does it mean to 'lose' Travel?
Will I chase Travel as the girlfriend you feel drifting away...
I have been infatuated with girls, only to discover at a kiss that my heart had decided otherwise. but travel has always been purer. Even the insects that tainted egypt did little to dampen the underlying impulse...

Meta-travel writing always seems to focus on the difference between the 'tourist' and the 'traveler'. (a Traveler moves because of passion towards uncomfortability and the Unknown, whereas a tourist moves to justify and reify his pre-existing beliefs, while Relaxing in the process.)

This is easy stuff, and makes for good back-patting and pedantics, but it strikes me as both condescending and juvenile. Like when you're 13 and the world is miserable except for you; because you and you alone know the true meaning of love: Surely those fat complacent yuppies down the street only think they know love - just as the cargo-shorts-wearing tourists only think they've seen Egypt.

But suddenly this all feels besides the point. In this congratulatory dualism each side is defined and appreciated as static and recognizable. (although admitedly it is congratulatory only to the intellecutal half.)
In Korea i am neither tourist nor traveler - I am not sheltered and insular, but nor am I challenged by the Other; the preconceptions I've had to re-exam are called forth by an emptiness that i recognize only through comparisons to other travel experiences; they are internal and epiphenominal.

Is there a dialectic approach to travel? I mean one that addresses the traveler as individual, and not in some Edward Said-ian cultural context? Will someone please write one for me?

loss of innocence?

I went to Geoje island this weekend...


um...
I am slightly overwhelmed by just how underwhelmed i am by korea, if that makes any sense at all. Objectively, it is beautiful. And not just run-of-the-mill beautiful, but actually pretty 'stunning.'
But it doesn't do it for me. I love traveling, but what korea has taught me is that i only love traveling under very specific conditions. From what i can gather, i must be either
a) impossibly lonely (oman)
b) impossibly broke (europe)
c) impossibly uncomfortable (egypt)

In Korea, i am none of these things, or at least not realistically any of these things.

So i'm going to quote a book i haven't read since 5th grade, but thanks to amazon, i was able to find instantly... (also, wtf is with having quotes from kids books in my head)

"But this isn't how it works," Brian said. "it isn't this smooth and easy. You don't just fly in and get set on a perfect lake and have all the food you want and have it all come this easy. It isn't real."
Derek leaned back, put his hands in back of his head, and looked at Brian.
"there's not a thing to make it rough... nothing wrong. In a real situation, like when I was here before, there were things wrong - going wrong. The plane didn't land and set me on the shore. It crashed. A man was dead. I was hurt. I didn't know anything. Nothing at all. I was, maybe, close to death an now we're out here going la-de-da, I've got a fish; la-de-da, there are some more berries."
'Tension." Derek said. "It lacks tension."

so this is obviously more dramatic than my situation, but it seems relevant to me...

whatever. here are some more pictures that feel like they were taken by someone else...

ack, i promised myself i would write at least every other day, but i have to go here with my boss for the weekend. I'm not really complaining, it looks beautiful.

so...
seeing how i have to give new korean students "english" names... should i start naming kids after...
a) childhood friends
b) peanuts characters
c) archie characters
d) something brilliant i haven't thought of.

I eagerly await your response, Alison, the sole commentator of my life.

culture is easier to talk about via music videos

This video is popular here.
(Although its a different sort of popular than in egypt, because i've never seen it on TV, only on phones and mp3 video players etc.)

First, "she was pretty."
I'm assuming this is a korean translating thing, because it happens all the time. For example,
Question: "How are you?"
Answer: "I was fine."
I don't know whether this a confusion about how to use the "be" verb, or whether they only describe people in past tense.

Second, the flasher. Apparently this is fairly common in Korea. I know this is anecdotal, but it's at least common enough that an 11 girl in my class was "so - so" after a flasher had been prowling her building all weekend. She was trying to explain to me what a flasher was when my boss walked in and started giggling and then faux flashed me with her coat. Everyone laughed.

Finally, i think it's pretty great that hot asian school girls are apparently not an 'exotic fetish,'
since this video was made for purely domestic consumption. (Unless of course they've internalized the exoticism that the West created, in which case its FUCKED UP)

On a related note, god bless youtube.




(did you know they use the english words for gay and lesbian here?)

(Burj)eois Modernity

I don't know if it counts considering my duress mixed with secular exodus-ism and nostalgia, but flying into Dubai airport was the closest I've ever had to a religious experience.
This was pretty much entirely thanks to seeing the new burj dubai.
(not to be confused with the original burj, which apparently they are now calling the 'mini burj.' - Burj just means tower)



Seriously, it's even more mind boggling in person. I have always had a thing for tall buildings, and i couldn't be happier that they're cool again.

On a related note, could this commercial for the new burj be any more phallic?

oh, darwin

Darwin's first journal entry with a sketch of evolution has the words "i think" sprawled across the top. I have nothing to say except that this makes me happy.

Children on a trampoline

Happy Saturday

dalki=desire

"These standard advertised wares - toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters - were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom."
- Sinclair Lewis (From Babbitt, 1922)

...and yet...

I can only assume that when God sat down to draw the world, he did it with a Dalki pencil case set. What else can be said?
I've read (somewhere) that consumer culture can be traced to our evolutionary need to hunt and gather...

But what about this desire to organize?

I want everything i own to be Dalki brand. I want a Dalki lifestyle with Dalki underwear and Dalki sheets and toothpaste and Dalki cookie cutters so my sandwich's can be Dalki-shaped too.

I don't know where this comes from... or where it fits with all the other things that i think make me happy. Would a perfect life be a dalki backpack with a dalki sleeping bag and dalki hightops on a desert path in Kazakhstan? Or are these desires mutually exclusive?
Can I coat myself in the thinnest layer of dalki - an insecticide mist of order to mediate my response to things i both hate and crave?

remembering egypt

I think i'm starting to forget the Egyptian color palette.
This picture is from a sunday morning that the president came to Alexandria. The police officers placed every 15 or so feet along the road stayed there all day. They stretched in both directions till eternity. Click the picture for a bigger size.


Also, i think Facebook degrades the quality of the photos when you upload them, so this one's a repeat: