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.