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