the narcissism of (sm)all differences

recent additions to the archive... (3D edition)

2009-03-11T08:53:00.008+09:00

Door Bell
metal and rust
6 x 4 inches
$5

Suger bowl
pewter
6 x 7
$5

Cigar box
metal
3 x 5
$20

the longest 5 minute walk...

2009-02-22T06:49:00.006+09:00

Recent additions to the archive...

2009-01-24T19:55:00.005+09:00

marketing a placebo

2009-01-07T02:09:00.003+09:00

Birell, the non- alchoholic egyptian beer, is marketed in the same way that american beers are.

Babe:
Hi Morsey.
Guy:
In my opinion, that girl has a beautiful personality
Announcer:
A girl's personality is the last thing that you notice about her.
Be a man and drink Birell, It's a pure feeling that only a man would feel.

Yes, there slogan is "Be a Man."

Because only real men drink non-alcholic beer so they can pretend to feel a religiously prohibited form of inebriation.

i don't even know what else to say, really.

Pray before you die! (a friendly public service anouncement...)

2008-12-29T22:52:00.004+09:00

or for the less morbidly inclined...

this one is ALWAYS playing on TV, and i actually kind of like it...

enjoy!

2008-12-29T22:39:00.002+09:00

internet-less

2008-12-20T19:48:00.000+09:00

1. Internet access in Egypt (and the rest of the Middle East) has been reduced by 80 percent.
2. An Alexandria schoolteacher is going to trial this week for beating a student to death over missing homework.
3. Riot police dispersed hundreds of protesters in Alexandria this week after a carriage driver lit himself on fire when given a traffic ticket.
I'd post links, but its a miracle i'm able to post at all.

(Abstract expressions of waning hegemony in the passive voice)

2008-12-17T22:40:00.005+09:00

Who throws a shoe?
At whom is a shoe thrown?

Three days later, the shoe-throwing incident is still big news in Egypt.
It seems that American coverage of the event has focused primarily on two aspects.
First, there has been the talk of how Muntader al-Zaidi has become a "folk hero" in the Middle East, inspiring rallies in Iraq, and general admiration from Arabs everywhere.
Second, there is the attempt to impress upon the American public the cultural significance of throwing shoes – how this is more than just Austin Powers slapstick comedy – but a grave insult.

But both of these components, while important, seem to miss the broader significance of the event from a Middle Eastern perspective… namely that it somehow symbolically undermines a perception of American credibility, that it intangibly pierces the 4th wall of American hegemony…

I like to do a grammar exercise with my Advanced English classes where we look at a list of Bushisms and attempt to fix the grammar and usage mistakes. It’s a fun exercise, but the initial reaction from students is inevitably one of disbelief; not only that the American President could have a weaker grasp on the English Language than they do, but also that such a compilation of quotes even exists… that the President of The United States would stray from a carefully orchestrated image enough to say such things, and then that these comments would be publicly viewable – and open to public ridicule.

That kind of thing just doesn’t happen here. This is a country where it’s illegal even to speculate on the legal succession of the 80 year old president. Where the biggest scandal of the year – involving a millionaire murdering a famous singer – is banned from state broadcasting.

It’s not so much that it’s unimaginable that someone would throw a shoe at Mubarak: its unimaginable that Mubarak would have a shoe thrown at him. This is not something that happens to a President. This is not something that happens to people with power.

As much as Egyptians might hate the United States government, there is still a firm appreciation that it is the Government, a separate entity detached from the mistakes and embarrassments that might affect the citizenry. Indeed the general warmth shown to regular Americans here is entirely predicated on the notion that, just as their government is completely separate from what they deem humanly Egyptian, so is ours.

I’m trying to decide how obvious of an observation this is… back home we take for granted that Bush is a Lame Duck, a laughable goofball who's days are numbered. The Middle East, still swarming with US troops, doesn't exactly have the luxury to appreciate this viewpoint.

All this is also directly tied to an alternate understanding of Respect in the Middle East. For better or worse, in America humor is an acceptable - and often effective – way to diffuse potentially embarrassing or disrespectful situations. One’s ability to laugh something off, to show that it has not affected him, is seen as a sign of strength. Indeed, humor seems to be the general response from Americans. Yet as I’ve learned the hard way, this doesn’t really fly in Egypt. I won’t go so far as to say that authority is all that Egyptians understand – an idea that strikes of Barbarism, but I will say that in most cases, a perception of toughness is a prerequisite for respect.

But personally, I’m surprised the coverage hasn’t focused more on the Presidents reflexes... he dodged that shoe fast.

hugging the imaginary Sphinx

2008-12-16T22:37:00.000+09:00

blood on the tracks...

2008-12-10T17:22:00.005+09:00

my shoes got a little bloody...

yeah!!!!!!!!!

... and then there were bones...

christmas trees vs goats (part 1)

2008-12-09T17:48:00.001+09:00

Eid al-Adha was yesterday.

It was hard not to think about New York, and all the christmas trees laid out for the slaughter in the weeks before Christmas. only here, the slaughter is literal.

And now the internet won't let me upload any more pictures, so the streets running red with blood will have to wait another day....

CIB involved in unsafe mating practices.

2008-12-01T18:14:00.007+09:00

Aside from the fact that the slogan "confidence breeds success" seems more appropriate for a stable than a bank, its hard for me to trust in Confidence's animal husbandry skills when the bank's entire computer system has been down for 2 consecutive days.

This would be the point in the post where i link to an article explaining Confidence's apparent inability to coax Success into fruitful copulation, but that would require a newspaper to consider this an important enough setback to write about.

I mean, shouldn't this be a vaguely big deal? Considering that Egypt is an almost exclusively cash economy - with major transactions literally being conducted with paper money - the inability of the largest private sector bank in Egypt to dole out cash ought to be news. What if i was supposed to buy a house today? I'd be fucked, that's what.

Whatever, i guess if your vision is as concise as "To be the best financial institution in the Middle East and Africa by 2020," you needn't worry too much about the small details of actually being able to give people their money.

nomadic misopaidea

2008-12-01T05:53:00.010+09:00

Ugh. I want to write about Egypt, i really do. But there's a problem.

In Korea, i had nothing to lose by fixating on the bizarre and the different. Korea was not my home.

But home intimates normalcy, and if i want to 'live' in Egypt, to actually unpack, (if only for a while) - it means ignoring the differences that before would have intrigued, upset, and infuriated me. i can stay here as an abject foreigner, observant but uncomfortable, or i can try and let a little go, for the sake of actually living somewhere in the present for once.

Basically, its hard for me to justify expressing all the subjectively peculiar things i see without accepting that I'm just a nomadic misopaidean, (a 'hater of cultures', if my Wikipedian Greek serves me correctly) or an accursed nostaphile...

This is, I've realized, why i had such a hard time writing after returning to New York City. It wasn't that i didn't have anything to say, but rather that the admittedly acerbic humors of differentiation began to feel a lot less funny or meaningful as they began to hit closer to 'home.'

Or to put it another way, i began to appreciate the sentiment behind the phrase "don't shit where you sleep."

That being said, i would like to briefly point out that Egyptians seem to sweat a lot...

from their butts.
Maybe everyone does this. Maybe the real story here is that i notice it. Clearly it's irrelevant to anything, and even i can't come up with a good way to make this representative of some broader cultural distinction.

But you know, its been on my mind. And its good to be back.

Alexandria Zoo

2008-11-24T17:34:00.004+09:00

This tiger was not happy... i'm still trying to decide if the handlers were genuinely nervous, or whether this was some sort of elaborate show meant to edge on the tiger for the sake of onlookers. Wouldn't be too surprised either way...

Can someone please tell me why the video quality always sucks once i upload to youtube??? i have more, but i'm too disheartened by the degradation of quality (the degradation of the animals, not so much.)

what $361.50 can get you in Alex...

2008-11-15T19:56:00.003+09:00

not exactly the most profound of returns...

2008-10-26T05:07:00.002+09:00

Egypt hasn't changed. Lee and i went back to my old neighborhood last night. They're building some sort of amphitheater on the grounds of the old ruins next to my house, and my old doorman was nice enough to sneak me in.

more to come...

destroying the Home-myth

2008-05-11T03:54:00.006+09:00

Let us approach travel as dualistic, defining it by what it is not. Travel is, most importantly, not being home. This is to say, travel can be differentiated from Nomadism in that there always exists a 'home' from which one has left, and to which one will presumably return.

(In the modern world, travel is usually Defined by Home; one leaves for a set, usually predetermined, period of time, wherein one is 'traveling,' and then returns.)

It is clear that Travels' significance derives from it's foreignness. One can only recognize foreignness (and therefore travel) by having a frame of reference - here 'Home'- for which to make comparisons. Like movement in general, foreignness is relative; we need the fixed road to determine speed, we need Home to determine Other.

But here we reach a problem, because Home is conceptual, a thing we carry with us in our heads.

Whereas velocity is measured by fixed, physical constants, in travel we are comparing the experienced with the remembered - two unstable and subjective sources of comparison.

A concept of Home is multi-faceted and holistic- it is composed not only of location, but of relationships, smells, events, memories, - in short, a collection of unverifiable 'feelings.'

Travel has always been viewed as an opportunity to evaluate and take stock of these collected Feelings, which together may be said to compose a "Home-myth." Travel, simply by putting distance between oneself and the Home-myth, changes it's dynamic, forges doubt and introspection. Like seeing a map of a familiar place for the first time, The Home-myth from a distance reveals previously unknown problems, values, and truths.

In small doses this distancing is inarguably healthy. While the lucid nature of the Home-myth
makes it fragile, a week or month of traveling is hardly enough time to force a shattering.

But prolonged travel causes something else to happen. First, the concept of Home, like anything held in the head, becomes faded, altered, changed. Second, people back home die, get married, and grow in ways that render the concept flawed, no longer a representation of the still-there, but rather a memory of the left-behind.

Time and distance make the Home-concept cloudy, while change renders it inaccurate.

And here the problems begin.

With the original Home-concept fading, the constantly traveled person struggles to find new frames of reference... new ways to judge the newly foreign he encounters. Suddenly, the references for locating foreign become prior foreigns, and travel takes a step towards Nomadism.

But if travel has the effect of unveiling the Home-myth, then further travel acts to paradoxicaly unveil the Foreign-myth without displacing one from the foreign. The effect is a forced state of detachment. Foreignness gives unfamiliar objects meaning - it defines them as other and lets us relate to them, whether that be in joy or disgust. But unmasked objects just present themselves, like photos without captions. The constant travel cannot judge what he sees, and so travel degrades to mere movement.

This loss of the Home-concept is neither tangible nor abrupt. It is an inevitable, gradual forgetting, a process where the familiarity of the original Home-myth is replaced by a familiarity with the foreign, but without the motivation (or ability) to internalize it, to transform it into un-foreign. TO accept the foreign as normal is to accept a new home.

But travel, as we have already said, always has a return in mind The foreign must remain foreign, internalization prevents return. What could be worse than returning to that faintly flickering memory of Home, only to find that YOU, that YOUR concepts of normal, changed more than hers?

Internalization in movement equals Nomadism, in stagnation it is expatriateism. There is no middle ground.

what have we learned?

2008-04-15T23:54:00.002+09:00

...next question.

end of days...

2008-03-13T18:25:00.011+09:00

tomorrow morning i leave for china, by way of FORTY EIGHT HOUR FERRY!!!!
I'm not sure if i'll be able to blog from China, because supposedly they block everything blog-related. But check back, because i will have lots of time to write in between bouts of seasickness and baccarat, and hopefully i'll find some sort of workaround. (if you can find a workaround for posting -even if its only text - from china, let me know.
oh, and i went to a sumo championship today in osaka.

bye japan...

2008-03-12T16:36:00.001+09:00

nine and a half hours on local trains. (round 2)

2008-03-09T23:52:00.005+09:00

Also, because i don't feel like devoting yet another post to unoriginal pictures i have nothing to say about, this pavilion is made of GOLD!!!!

so thats what Meg Ryan's been up to

2008-03-09T23:46:00.005+09:00

(she's been selling shitty vending machine coffee in Japan.)

update: woah, she's also selling navigation systems.

japanese design and aesthetics blah blah blah

2008-03-09T22:32:00.009+09:00

whatever. Tokyo is making me feel disgustingly inadequate and unoriginal. I went to an after show party for this guy last night, and i felt uncomfortable, self-righteous, and very small. (psychologically speaking - physically i felt enormous, because Japanese people are TINY, and all the foreigners do their best to emulate this via eating disorders.)
But I will say that Japan does have an amazing, hypnotic design sense, almost as if it taps into this primal need for control and order, so that even buying this toy made me feel like maybe my life will be a little bit more in control.

(and yes, it comes with replaceable arms and head, so she can eat ice cream or carry a gun, depending on your mood.)
Where does this attraction to simplistic perfection come from? Is it really primal, or is it a subconscious backlash against modernity? And how come the Japanese are so fucking good at it?
While the aesthetics of food and architecture are amazing, its the toys that i can't get over.... its not just that they're 'cool'... but that they're a form of salvation. Live a life of insecurities and failed expectations, go to work at a job you have no control over - and then come home to tangible, compartmentalized perfection.
What separates toys from food, electronics, or architecture is that from an adult perspective, they are 'function-less.' Or rather, their functionality is limited completely to symbols of order and perfection: you don't play with them, you don't use them in any way at all. They sit their and emit cosmic simplicity, universal order.

i wish i made this video...

2008-03-09T21:06:00.002+09:00

It's almost like it was scripted... everyone is so happy and unique and AHHH, Japan is amazing.

kyoto walk

2008-03-07T18:07:00.007+09:00

i'll post writing soon, really.

How to invade japan

2008-03-06T19:59:00.004+09:00

take local trains.

celebrity sightings

2008-03-06T19:49:00.004+09:00

hiroshima

2008-03-06T19:15:00.008+09:00

bleh. Hiroshima was overwhelming, and i don't know what to say about it.
How do you approach the impossible?

...clock stopped at the moment of impact.

...and this one floored me.

black guy + talking dog = comedy

2008-03-04T22:32:00.003+09:00

they're a big happy family...
who said Japan was xenophobic?

um... cute

2008-03-03T23:50:00.001+09:00

the toilette as philosophical muse (zizek shall go unmentioned)

2008-03-03T16:22:00.006+09:00

Post #1
Its pretty common to see ashtrays in bathroom stalls outside the US, but Korea is the only place i've been with ubiquitous urinal ashtrays. What's more, they often have lighters in them, suggesting a need to light up directly after (before) taking a piss.

Post #2
I'd like to see a cross-cultural study on the average number of post-urinary 'shakes' among adult males. I'd anecdotally peg it at 1-2 for Americans, 6-8 for Koreans.

Post #3
From Japan, this is truly brilliant...

It directs the fresh toilette water through a faucet atop the tank, so when you flush you can use the clean water to wash your hands before it drains into the reserve tank. Saves water and 2 knob turns.

yet another sign of impending danger

2008-03-03T15:59:00.006+09:00

I guess un-calming warning ads aren't an exclusively Korean practice after all...
(tears/flop sweat are apparently mandatory.)

japan day 1

2008-03-02T22:07:00.010+09:00

After all my talk about the failure of Korea's restoration/preservation projects, i've been a bit nervous about Japan... I mean, Japan holds such a large place in our mythification of Asia that I'm not sure if one can truly remove themselves from the experienced knowledge that they're seeing JAPAN. Will i be able to "objectively judge" (i.e. judge from my subjective aesthetic values) what i see? Or will i be so psyched about how cool Japan is that i'll just fawn away, much like a reporter covering the Obama campaign? (i try hard to keep my material fresh and topical, fyi.)

SO, with that out of the way, i will say that Dazaifu certainly felt a lot more authentic than almost anything in Korea.

Maybe it was the plum blossoms? Or is it a stone vs wood thing? Or maybe its just a "this ain't Korea so Hell Yeah" sort of thing.

One clear difference is the quality/style of things you can buy around the shrines. In Korea the stalls around historical sights were limited to street food and children's toys like battle axes and squeaky hammers. Random.
But in Dazaifu there were stores with enormous beautiful 3000 dollar hand carved wooden sculptures. There were hand made tea pots and intricate tiny cloth dioramas depicting traditional Japanese life. And these weren't kitsch or tchotchke or anything... at least i can't imagine a handcrafted doll the size of my thumb, meant for a home shrine and costing 45 dollars, being considered 'kitsch.'
In Korea, I found the lack of anything worth buying with a 'cultural personality' strange, but i didn't really hold it against the place. I'm ready to do that now.

Also, Japan has this:

btw, that giant Luke Skywalker riding the Tauntaun is only $29... ebay anyone?

so long k town

2008-03-01T22:29:00.002+09:00

... and on to japan.
But theres so much i never got around to blogging about! Like the obsession with the word 'story,' or how flashers are called 'burberry men,' or how you can use hongul to make a picture of a man praying or crying. sigh...
At least i got paid and made my ferry.
AND,
look what i found at the ferry terminal, in a vending machine past customs, literally a foot away from the point of no return...

... and you know what? it wasn't even that good.

Jewelry, you're no wondergirls...

2008-02-27T08:27:00.010+09:00

damn.

really though, this song is pretty catchy.

its like if every pop star in America came together in some sort of Asian fetish super group... (Alicia Keys, what?)
which frankly, might not be a bad idea.

But how the hell are you going to knock Wonder Girls out of the top spot unless you have an infectious dance to go with the song? What were they thinking????
(i've become way to involved in this... which is why it's good that i'm leaving in THREE DAYS.)

Also note when "alicia keys" says "together" and drops the "th" sound... so good.

Travel as a study of The Trajectory of Pop Music in a Globalized World

2008-02-24T03:11:00.009+09:00

Once I sat in a Pizza Hut in Nizwa and they were playing White Town's "Never Be Your Woman."
40 years ago Nizwa was a rebel Omani city without paved roads or electricity. Now... White Town (...and pizza.)

Last week i heard Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping" on a public bus into Pusan.

I don't know how many times i had to defend my distaste for Michael Bolton/Phil Collins/George Michael while living in Egypt.

IN OT Meta-blog 7th day [sunday] wtf

2008-02-17T02:47:00.020+09:00

Maybe this is a painfully banal and obvious post topic, but I've been thinking about how the process and value of thinking something is a lot different than saying it out loud. How you can imagine 'conversations' in your head that couldn't possibly pan out in real life, which points to not just a 'disconnect' but more precisely the existence of two distinct separate entities of personality. And if they are maybe 2 separate and distinct entities than maybe its also best for us to name them as such.

labels:
Internal Narrator (IN) and Outgoing Talker (OT).

examples:
1a. The way when you're at home later and replaying a conversation in your head it sometimes sounds horribly stupid.
(IN has different values/ideas from OT)

1b. The way 'conversations in your head' can never be replicated in real life and always sound trite/grandiose/staged when attempted.
(conflict of IN attempting to 'put words into the mouth' of OT.)

2a. The way most communication is focused around one Personality Half sharing the experiences of itself i.e. we talk about conversations we had/things we did (OT on OT) and write about our ideas^[*] (IN on IN) and when we do try to have some sort of cross over and say 'talk about our feelings' (OT on IN) it 'comes out all wrong' or scares someone away or is 'a downer' or 'cliché' or see 1b. (likewise when we try and imagine dialog or write fiction (IN on OT) it similarly sounds trite or contrived because what the hell does the IN know about what the OT would say anyway. see 1b.

3a. The way when you are alone extendedly and interacting rather exclusively with one sided stimuli (like movies/books/music/old diary entries) the character of that stimuli and its effect becomes noticeable to the point where reading can be seen as a dialog-al opportunity for the IN and 'watching' the corresponding opportunity for the OT. So that sometimes when you're alone, reading is counterproductive because it grows the IN making it harder for the OT to function properly if/when it is [will be] used again. So that sometimes watching TV is healthy not because 'it makes you feel less alone' but because it nurtures the OT/shuts up the IN.

3b. The way when you read something profound but also maybe painfully sad/nostalgic it is effecting because the 'reading' has handed it directly to the IN, but if you were actually taking part in same said situation you might write it off as phony or whatever. [This thought experiment might suggest a descriptive labeling of the IN as sappy/emotional with the OT being sociopathic/unreasoned. I dunno.]

4. The way using someone as a 'sounding board' to 'bounce ideas off of' is just a safe way for the IN to communicate or share with the OT.

5. The way you can catch mistakes in writing by reading out loud.
(OT can sometimes serve as copy editor for IN.)

other thoughts:
There has to be communication and balance.
If the IN is given autonomy (either due to circumstance (like living in a country where you can't communicate with almost anyone/ where all background chatter is white noise and therefore completely undistracting) or due to choice (person is a recluse anti-social) ) then the situation snowballs and you can get 'trapped in your head' and then when you do finally get to talk to someone the OT is so starved and pent up that he just spews his [your] fucking guts and won't shut up and talks about himself forever until its boring and you^[†]^[‡] wish you could stop but really have no say anyway.
Or maybe the dominant IN causes the opposite to happen and you start to live in the IN and see the OT as epiphenominal and become so detached from your experiences that you don't even notice that you're distant or needy or anything, in which case the effect becomes indistinguishable from the reverse situation of dominant OT dormant IN,
which is when if for whatever reason the OT is so strong as to eclipse the IN then you become unhinged and unable(unwilling) to moderate yourself as projected through interactions to the point where you are repetitive and shallow stagnant boring but also possibly more entertaining in small doses.

Thats all for today

^[*]Of course some people use their journals only to record conversations/experiences and not to offer commentary in which case the diary is just a police blotter or archive and no real interaction between OT and IN takes place anyway. And does this mean that people who keep these sorts of journals have dominant OT's since even writing which should be the domain of the IN is instead used as an extension of the OT?

^[†]I (as a Person with an imbalanced heightened IN who can't help but think of Myself as The IN, with the OT being a possibly External Interloper/foreign agent/savior) wonder if someone with a reverse imbalanced heightened OT when they do think worries that it is the 'thinking' that is off kilter and feels more comfortable/'Himself' only when talking.

^[‡]Of course this suggests that there is actually a Third Person hiding out back who chooses to dwell in/watch from the vantage point of one particular location/mode of interacting [these being either the OT or IN] at any given time, or that OT and IN are more like tools that this Third Person uses to communicate with either the Self^[§] or the Outside World, in which case it is not so much a conscious 'choice' but rather a natural unconscious usage of the most apt tool, like how you hear with your ears and see with your eyes, in which case this entire entry is pointless and stupid.

^[§]which means the Self itself has to be split off again to become a 4th part that the Third Person is communicating with vis a vis the process/instrument of the IN.

(linguistic) insecurities

2008-02-14T00:25:00.006+09:00

The first time a student in Egypt explained to me that Arabic contained every phonic sound from every language on earth, i was a little taken aback.
After all, Arabic contains no V, P, or CH sound, nor a grouping of 3 or more consecutive consonants (like in spring).
And this is only the English sounds that Arabic lacks.

But in the Middle East, Arabic is more than just a language. It is first a signifier of purity - the Koran was revealed in poetic Arabic, and unlike the Old or New Testament, it cannot be sacredly translated.
It is also a symbol of unity.
Though the Egyptian and Moroccan dialects are as different as Spanish and French, their definitional sameness acts to represent (maintain/produce?) an analogous unity among Arab countries. When you speak the same language, you implicitly share values and responsibility - and as differences in culture, politics, and economy have decimated any notion of pan-Arabism, Language has remained the one true bond. The exclusion of Shi'a Islam in Iran and 'secular' Islam in Turkey from the broader Middle Eastern concern is no coincidence - they speak a different language.

While living in Egypt, I saw this linguistic myth as nothing more than the language component to a host of myths meant to reify Arabic/Islamic superiority through 'empirical' examples.

And then I came to Korea.

And sure enough, identical story. Only here the claim is expanded to include Hangul, the writing system, which can supposedly reproduce any 'foreign' sound.

While no language can make the claim to umbrella all others, at least Arabic was sort of close. I mean, Egyptians are shockingly fast language learners, and they actually don't have strong accents.

But Korea? Aside from lacking phonemically differentiated L/R, B/P or G/K, there is no F, Z, V, or voiced dental fricative TH (as in 'the'), nor many short vowels. Also, any consonant sound must be followed by a vowel, even if it at the end of the word. (thus max becomes maxuh.) Koreans are shockingly bad language reproducers.

But the 'fact' of Korean lingual superiority is so ingrained (mythified) that it goes completely unchallenged. The adult students i have confronted about this obvious untruth have either laughed in realization, or frozen up, like being told God didn't exist.

But their is more to this bizarre convergence of mythified Linguistic Exceptionalism.
The direction towards which this myth is used varies greatly between the two countries. In Egypt the linguistic superiority myth served to unify a diversified Arabic culture and reify Islamic superiority. Although it was to an extent used as an in-group creating example, (demonstrating superiority over the European out-group) this "in-group" included many countries, and in a sense expanded and defined the group beyond an equally plausible "Egyptian exceptionalism."
But in Korea, the Linguistic Superiority Myth serves an almost opposite purpose. Korea doesn't share its language with a broader region, and so the bolstering effect of the myth does not expand the group. Rather it exclusively serves Korean Nationalism, which unapologetically accepts Korea as the Best Country on Earth.

Of course, there are a billion examples of how this myth is hypocritical. Just as Koreans claim their language is superior, they also rely on English catch phrases as an economy of 'cool' more than anywhere else I've ever been. Korean advertisements regularly use nonsensical English phrases to bolster their images.

(the usage of 'story' in store names will be the subject of another post)

Furthermore, a large portion of the Namdaemun disaster coverage here has focused on Foreign coverage of the incident, to the point where it feels like The Korean Media is over-emphasizing foreign concern as a way to demonstrate the true importance of the disaster. Like the news is saying - "If the New York Times and CNN are covering this, than you know it is important."

As always, i'm not sure what the point of these observations are. In English, I feel like we're more proud of the words we absorb than anything else - knowing the definition of schadenfreude, or that the word for 'tariff' is of Arabic origin, is a sign of sophistication, and any notion of linguistic 'purity' only comes up when confronted with the idea of Ebonics as a legitimate linguistic whole.

But if we weren't so confident about our economic/political/moral superiority, would things like linguistic nationalism start becoming more important?

Max-uh

2008-02-13T01:03:00.000+09:00

This commercial speaks for itself i guess.

And this is a popular TV show with a regular panel of foreign women who speak Korean. (notice the same girl from the commercial, here speaking fluent Korean, though in the commercial she says "max" instead of "max-uh")

Post on linguistics on the way...

You've come a long way, baby. (video edition)

2008-02-11T21:30:00.000+09:00

This was my job in Egypt...

And this is my job now...

And i'm the asshole who misses Egypt.

A personal contribution to the "tell me" universe.

2008-02-11T21:24:00.000+09:00

I know it sounds like i'm badgering her, but she sings it constantly...

(Some background info here.)

from my myspace 'homepage'

2008-02-05T20:26:00.000+09:00

Choosing a religion.

Which religion should I choose to believe in?

www.peace-of-mind.net

I'm just going to point out that this sentence is logically impossible, and leave the commentary about how 'shopping for religion' is retarded to someone feeling a bit more motivated.

Putting that aside, the site is kind of amazing.

And wouldn't you know it, but the 'rational,' 'logical,' 'secularly deducible,' choice is Jesus.
You can't argue with science.

our quest is at an end.

2008-02-04T21:33:00.000+09:00

Haeundae beach

2008-02-03T21:52:00.001+09:00

technomythonoia update

2008-02-03T21:47:00.000+09:00

a genuine cause for concern.

(original post here.)

gift sets i have seen.

2008-01-31T21:42:00.000+09:00

With Seollal just around the corner, it seems a good time to comment on Korea's unusual knack for gift sets.

It's funny to me not so much because they're popular here, but because for some reason they're not popular back home. I mean, a well wrapped set of toiletries or coffees is actually a pretty nice gift.

Of course, this being a blog about differences, i'm going to focus on the ones that might not go over so well back home...

A whole case of generic brand Spam!

Nothing says "happy new year" quite like 12 cans of tuna!

Dried sardines are always a safe bet.

meh dong!

2008-01-28T22:09:00.000+09:00

Korea gets 5 points this week because sticking your tongue out is a vocalized onomatopoeia.
And they do it a lot.

enerzen, you harlot.

2008-01-25T02:28:00.000+09:00

I know its out there. I just can't find it. yet.

interneting, computing, and the permanence of memory

2008-01-22T02:53:00.000+09:00

"The dangers of facebook is that it is a natural archivist. Before the internet, i could have been a king for saving every scrap of paper, but now you actually have to go out of your way to delete a message. Forgetting becomes the challenge, remembering the routine."

Digital ephemera is impossible. Every note, every draft, every email and text and message is saved without me knowing it, waiting to be recalled at the darkest hour.

Even itunes records the last time i listened to a song. One year ago today i was listening to (smog). How is it helpful to know this? How can it do anything but root me in a past that should only be meaningful as a prefixed segment of a narrative called MY LIFE NOW?

What will it mean in 25 years when i can still recall, at the slightest touch, every single word of contact i ever made via the internet? And because this is the norm - because it is erasure instead of saving that requires action - what would it say about me if i 'chose' to forget? The internet has in every way flipped the natural meaning and value of saving.
And i am scared.

Near the Oracle of Ammon at Siwa oasis. (because every post deserves a picture.)

A year of meta-living (not really.)

2008-01-19T02:10:00.000+09:00

As long as we're on the subjects of New Years, I should mention that my biggest (and lamest) resolution was to only read books that could be construed as meta-fiction. (non-fiction is exempt, as are short stories. Memoirs are to be decided by committee on a case-by-case basis.)

Although to be fair, my definition of Meta is more aligned with the concept of Matroyoshka doll's than anything else.

And so, without further adieu, i present the worlds first meta-vending machine:

Wait for it...

Hell yes. It's a vending machine that dispenses little toy vending machines. Life is good.

There is a lettuce on the plate.

2008-01-19T01:59:00.000+09:00

It's frustrating to have to teach children incorrect English...

But everyone makes mistakes.

What drives me crazy are things like this...

The yellow star to the above left of "bird" says "Watch Out!" Every vocabulary box has one world singled out as a "watch out" word. But its always a random word, not something difficult or watch-out-worthy.

Also, the Atlantic Ocean apparently does not exist.

a very belated new years post (of sorts)

2008-01-16T23:44:00.000+09:00

On new years i was supposed to join the supposed 600,000 citizens who crowded Haeundae Beach in Pusan to watch the sunrise. But it was freezing, so i stayed in bed. Apparently, i was not alone.
Because this is a Korean tradition, I wasn't surprised that when i asked my kids on Tuesday how many of them had seen the sunrise, most raised their hand. What did surprise me was that most of them had "seen" the sunrise in a rather insincere manner; by watching it on TV or looking at slide shows on their computer.

huh?

There is a language barrier, and so the most pressing question was to decide whether

A) the kids were watching the sunrise later in the day to avoid waking up at 6am.

B) The kids were watching it on TV because they were too cold/lazy to go outside.

(Un)surprisingly, the answer was evenly split.

I understand people watching the Times Square ball dropping live via television. That is a site-specific event. But the sunrise? Furthermore, i can't really image someone watching a taped 'ball-dropping' the next day because they were too tuckered out the night before.

I have a very hopeful image of my children watching the sunrise on their Samsungs while the actual sun rises, um, like directly outside their house. For added irony, one of the children gets up and pulls down the blinds to keep the glare off the TV.

A boy can dream, can't he?

A susan Sontag kind of week (part 1)

2008-01-14T01:33:00.001+09:00

I finished reading "Regarding the Pain of Others" yesterday, and it was gooood. And while i agreed with most of it, something strange happens in the last chapter that made me feel uneasy:

Part 1

Towards the end of the book, Sontag gives the strong admonishment that...

"Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.
No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia." (p 114)

Is this true? Does being an 'adult' imply an obligation to not only accept, but accept with such detachment, the wickedness of humans? Does holding onto a hope that the worst that humankind has shown is an aberration really imply an 'unacceptable' naivety?
It would seem to me that this position creates a number of moral problems. If one is morally required to not only accept, but accept without flinching, the potential for gruesome depravity, then it complicates our expected response to a situation where such violence is even possible. If we cannot be 'illusioned' that anyone would refrain from the worst, how can we justify preparing for anything less? It would seem obvious that any relationship with another human is founded on a tacit agreement that such depraved acts remain 'off the table.' And if these acts are understood as beyond boundaries, then it would also follow that the necessary reaction to witnessing them is precisely that of disbelief; of disillusionment with the contract of human decency.
But this disillusionment cannot be permanent. The renewal of faith required to go on after the invariable aberration from a Contract of Decency - not just as a functioning society, but as a psychologically sane individual - is predicated not on forgiveness of the individual who errs, but on labeling the act itself as Exceptionalist.

Sontag does go on to acknowledge the incongruence between the value of remembering and the importance of forgetting. "Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together... [but] to make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited." (p 115)

And in a general sense, this also presents a catch-22 of sorts. Because while Sontag admits that remembering in particulars can be counterproductive towards the cause of reconciliation, it is also necessary towards any sort of 'meaningful' remembering. If we only know that genocide is possible in the abstract, it becomes intangible, unreal. But if we remember it in the specifics, it not only prevents forgiving, it also becomes an act tied to the memory. Depravity existed here and here - and we can locate and maybe begin to explain it in 'this' historical context. So we are at an impasse.

So yeah. This is - i am well aware - a completely inappropriate comparison in terms of scale and weight, but it is my life this week:
I quit my job here in Korea on Monday. I knew that even though my contract clearly states that i can give 30 days notice at any point without penalties, my boss would probably screw me. At least, i was aware that in the history of people quiting there jobs in Korea, there are very few cases of happy endings, and quite a few cases of disaster. As a result, most people who choose to leave early turn the tables and preemptively screw their bosses by 'pulling a runner' and simply leaving in the middle of the night right after payday.
This is undoubtedly a vicious cycle. The more people 'pull runners,' the more bosses won't trust foreign teachers, and will try and abuse them, which just makes it more likely that someone will run in the first place.
I knew this before Monday, but i still didn't believe it would happen to me. Or rather, I had to be naive enough to see if it would happen to me. I was curious to see if my boss, who i respect as decent and honest, would try and take advantage of me. And of course she has.

Also, Korean kids love peanut butter sandwiches, but the thought of adding jelly makes them cringe. fyi.

A Susan Sontag kind of week (part 2)

2008-01-13T14:32:00.001+09:00

part 2

Sontag talks about viewing suffering in two very different ways;
First - and more importantly - as a way to remember and honor war's dead, to (maybe) avoid future wars, or at least to understand their horrifying implications.

Second as a narcissistic and base desire to witness the morbid.

Since leaving Egypt i have thought a lot about this second part. About our natural 'attraction' to viewing suffering and the grotesque. Sontag locates the first recorded acknowledgment of this attraction in Plato's Republic, where in Book IV Socrates relates a story about Leonitus, son of Aglaion:

On his way up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, he noticed the bodies of some criminals lying on the ground, with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, "There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight."

Last night in a taxi on the way back from Pusan, we saw flashing lights up ahead on the highway. Scott said it was going to be a checkpoint, but i was pretty sure i knew what was coming.
In America we're so fast to hide the bodies. Part of the implicit pact of rubbernecking back home is an all-but-guaranteed PG-13 rating. We crane to look, but we anticipate only the signs and symbols of carnage - shattered glass and crumpled metal. I've noticed that this is rarely the case outside of the West.
Last night no one had bothered to cover up the body. It just lay there, face up, on the side of the road. I saw him first, and pointed out that "that guy's dead," whereas Scott and Cyndi decided that he definitely was not. The cab driver, for his part, said "oh my god" dramatically/breathlessly a few times, clearly for our benefit. ("Oh my god" is a genuine Korean expression, used in all corresponding situations to the English version.)
Afterwards, i couldn't stop thinking about the gulf between our different reactions.
Cyndi asked, "how can you be so cavalier?" But I wonder how i couldn't be.
I saw so many car crashes in Egypt that the cringe-component of the shock faded. All that was left was the visual, and the visual remains fascinating.
Sontag points out that "suffering from natural causes, such as illness or childbirth, is scantily represented in the history of art; that caused by accident, virtually not at all - as if there were no such thing as suffering by inadvertence or misadventure." (p. 40) This is probably because suffering removed from pathos becomes narratively meaningless. (unless of course it serves an anti-narrative of universal pointlessness.) And because most of Sontag's book is devoted precisely to the 'meaning' associated with viewing suffering, she doesn't dwell any further on the accidental misery of others.

But if Sontag is correct in arguing (and i think she is) that viewing the misery inherent in war photography cannot be separated from the narrative of the war in question, then photographs - or first person viewings - of narrative-less accidental death is indeed a very different bag. It is all the depravity with none of the 'benefits.' Except that even here Sontag sees potential for personal growth:

As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible. (p 98)

And if this truly is a goal (i'm skeptical), then I would think that accident photography offers the best way to approach this, free from the distractions of the narratively contextualized. And the lack of any mainstream interest in narrative-less accident-photography (whether documentary or artistic) becomes a strange omission.
Or maybe we really just need this contextualizing as a shield. Both from appearing morbid and grotesque ourselves, and from feeling that the world itself is morbid and grotesque without consequence.

Or maybe i've written a stupidly long post.

2008-01-05T16:39:00.000+09:00

i woke up this morning thinking about this Levi's commercial...

Those must have taken him a very long time to make.

so...
Does reproduction really disqualify meaning?

How important is sacrifice to a gesture like this? How important is authenticity? or Honesty?

And finally, why do i wake up thinking about this stuff anyway?
i think i need a hobby.

2008-01-04T01:52:00.000+09:00

this is unfortunate in so many ways. but its 2 am, so i'll leave it at that.

this has got to stop.

2008-01-03T00:54:00.000+09:00

wondergirl hysteria has reached the point where it has literally eclipsed the existence of anything else. Like the alloted musical space in korean culture has been filled with "tell me," to the exclusion of all other music past or present.

flight attendants...

child exploitation

best of...

and a tutorial for the curious...

on decay

2007-12-29T23:21:00.000+09:00

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

2007-12-29T20:28:00.000+09:00

"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

2007-12-29T17:21:00.000+09:00

um...

2007-12-28T20:01:00.000+09:00

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.

2007-12-26T00:33:00.000+09:00

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!

2007-12-24T21:34:00.000+09:00

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

2007-12-24T01:21:00.000+09:00

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.

2007-12-23T13:53:00.000+09:00

gaming

2007-12-19T13:30:00.000+09:00

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?

2007-12-19T12:54:00.000+09:00

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

2007-11-30T20:47:00.000+09:00

2007-11-30T20:24:00.000+09:00

rock on china...

2007-11-27T02:27:00.001+09:00

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.

2007-11-27T02:16:00.001+09:00

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...

2007-11-22T01:05:00.000+09:00

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.

2007-11-21T02:23:00.000+09:00

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

2007-11-18T23:08:00.000+09:00

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)

2007-11-15T23:56:00.000+09:00

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.

2007-11-13T00:49:00.001+09:00

small differences (korean edition)

2007-11-12T21:18:00.001+09:00

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

2007-11-10T16:02:00.000+09:00

war as comedy

2007-11-07T23:41:00.000+09:00

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.

2007-11-06T01:50:00.000+09:00

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.

2007-11-02T14:31:00.000+09:00

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?

2007-11-02T02:03:00.000+09:00

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

2007-10-30T03:26:00.000+09:00

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?

2007-10-28T23:34:00.000+09:00

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...

2007-10-27T08:23:00.001+09:00

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

2007-10-25T02:22:00.000+09:00

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

2007-10-23T01:42:00.001+09:00

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

2007-10-22T00:23:00.000+09:00

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

2007-10-20T21:53:00.000+09:00

Happy Saturday

dalki=desire

2007-10-20T18:31:00.000+09:00

"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

2007-10-20T16:56:00.001+09:00

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:

what would freud think? (part 1)

2007-10-14T19:51:00.001+09:00

hungover and incompatably brained

2007-10-14T13:16:00.000+09:00

I saw this over at one of my favorite blogs, the washington monthly. At first, i could only get it to go clockwise. For like 5 minutes. Then i changed it to counterclockwise, but i couldn't change it back. Now its back to clockwise. I should probably go get some breakfast. This is more stress than i need on a sunday morning.

kitsch----->irony------> the universality of humor?

2007-10-12T22:31:00.000+09:00

This advertisement from Egyptian tv doesn't really need to be translated. It is exactly what you think it is. The fat guy is a "boredom fighter" for the Egyptian equivalent of MTV called Melody Hits, but he's ready to quit because of the disrespect he gets from professors and parents. The woman is begging him to keep working, "if not for me, than for your son."

Yes, this ad is great. But its infinitely greater for being completely unique within the Egyptian cultural context. Egyptian mainstream humor is usually more like this:

(i saw this movie twice at full volume on the most painful bus trip of my entire life)

I guess, in keeping with my thesis of the Narcissim of Small Differences, i shouldn't be so hard on it. There are plenty of American movies that are just as painful. But it is not an exaggeration to say that i have never seen an Egyptian film where less than 80 percent of the lines were shouted full blast.

So what place does american style humor have in Egyptian society? Melody hits has recently started an ad campaign with videos like this:

First, the mother smacking her son on the back of the neck is classic: the quintessential egyptian attack.

But beyond that, there's a lot at work here: Juxtaposing egyptian traditionalism (fat kids, dirty streets, and traditional clothes are ubiquitous in the ad campaign) with American sex music video's has to be some sort of commentary...

The cynic in me sees these ads as geared towards a strata of society that -from my experience - has a universal desire to leave egypt. In two months of asking twenty-something English students about there dreams, i got 'leave egypt' about 95 percent of the time.

(a rebutal might be 'well duh, that's why they're taking english classes,' but everyone from this income level is taking english classes, so there.)

These ads highlight exactly what westernized egyptians hate about egypt - and then poke fun at them. They entrench egyptian ideas about a split between unattainable 'westernism' and inescapable 'egyptianism.'

Watching this commercial in a koshery joint next to a 10 year old and his veiled mother was awkward, but i can't imagine what either of them must think about it.

Yeah. There's more in my head to be said about this, but
not now i guess.

What's the fun of travel without weird cultural differences?

2007-10-12T02:40:00.000+09:00

I have nothing to say about this, but i think its pretty cool.

In korea I am a year older, because everyone is born 1 year old.* This is, supposedly, because they count the gestational period in the womb as a year. Alone, this is just sort of unusual, BUT...

while they do celebrate their actual birthday's, they don't consider themselves to be a year older on that date. Everyone turns a year older on the same day - the lunar new year. Therefore, conceivably, if you were born the day before the lunar new year, you would be a 2 year old the second day you were alive.

Moira says - and i think this makes a lot of sense - that because Korea is a super Confucian country, and age is so important here, this makes things a lot simpler. If you were older than someone half the year, but the same age the other half, then your cultural relationship to them would be in constant flux. Big brother would become friend, and then go back to being big brother, and thats just confusing.
In this system, your relationships are set.
As usual though, wikipedia does a better job explaining it than i do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning

*It's 3 in the morning, but still, i should know this= Is it "1 year old" or "1 years old"? Dammit.

quotes

2007-10-11T21:47:00.000+09:00

i think i have a fairly good memory for quotes, but it's mixed with a helpless system of filing that leaves a trail of highlighted text and little more.

A (twice) relevant example would be the scene in "Franny and Zooey" where Zooey goes into Buddy and Seymour's old room, and sees the neatly compiled list of quotes that covers the back of the door. The list goes all the way down to the floor, and you could tell that the bottom ones were added while one of the boys lay on his belly. -I always wanted this to be me. - Anyway, I can remember the summery of this quotation; but i have no way to access it in its literary realness.

So i've decided i'm going to start posting quotes here so i won't forget them.
This, by the way, was prompted by the discovery that when i enter a quotation mark into google, my autofinish comes up with this:

"Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present."

A quote that is apparently by Cyril Connolly, and which i have no recollection of reading or subsequently googling. It seems pretty high school yearbook-ish anyway.

So lets start with my perennial favorite, recently recalled:

"Quick as thought he snatched a knife from Hook's belt and was about to drive it home, when he saw that he was higher up the rock that his foe. It would not have been fighting fair. He gave the pirate a hand to help him up.

It was then that Hook bit him.

Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and all the rest."

-j.m. Barrie

kitch/nostalgia

2007-10-07T04:20:00.000+09:00

I'm not a huge fan of American kitsch, but it has an appeal that i think i understand...
it's like the consumer culture equivalent to taking your new girlfriend to the same restaurant that you met your old girlfriend at. It messes with continuity and uniqueness in a way that is somehow simultaneously comforting and perversely thrilling.
It takes generally accepted ideas of 'old fashioned' and by trivializing (and often sexualizing) them it validates the fact that we've changed while also erasing the need to remember/forget that we have. or something.

What i don't understand is when other cultures appropriate American kitsch as a non-referential aesthetic form.
The photo on the right is from a box of corona chocolates i bought in Egypt. While i suppose there's a possibility that they actually have been using the box design since the 50's, (they do still have fido dido on the 7ups) it seems more likely that it's some bizarro world attempt to imitate American kitsch culture. But why?

I dunno... it just strikes me as perverse to sell chocolates using a throwback white american child to a country that has no cultural appreciation of irony, nor (understandably) the information to appreciate this manifestation of it.

It also takes the kitsch selling point ("life was simple in the past, buy this chocolate to recapture the simple pleasures of eating chocolate as kid... oh + Irony") and reduces it to pure imagery (a white kid is eating this chocolate.) And that is kind of fucked up.

So... fast forward a month to Korea, where there is a home decorating store a block from my house exclusively selling 50's style americana embroidered pillows and the like. There's also a 50's era faux car advertisement that says "way my woody!" (referring to the woody wagon) and a rustic crate filled with billy idol vinyls. Huh? What's the appeal? Afterall, no one here knows enough English to understand the literal meaning of the car ad, let alone its double entendre-atic brilliance. And even if someone did understand these things, it would still be nothing more than vulgarly pointless without the cultural cues and references that locate it as kitsch.
Where the hell does this stuff come from?
any ideas?
anyone?

so this is boredom...

2007-10-06T04:40:00.001+09:00

2007-09-29T13:41:00.001+09:00

i went online today to find a word that combines arachnophobia and hypochondriac; ie, the feeling that you are always covered in invisible spiders. It's no secret that i went a little crazy towards the end of my time in egypt, and my number 1 fear was that i would somehow take egypt with me, specifically in the form of bugs.
i came across this blog, and honestly its like the best support group ever. I should make a more interesting point about the correlation between sanitary scientific modernity and the obsessive fear that invisible creatures will haunt you forever - but i'm lazy. i'll just point out that the idea of small invisible creatures living on me is infinitely scarier than either an invisible non sentient virus living inside of me, or a full grown visible animal confrontationaly attacking me.

this quote pretty much sums up my feelings:
"I wake up nervous and afraid each morning for fear that we will continue being infested forever and that the people I care about have caught it too. My bf doesn't ask me over anymore since I told him. Every morning I feel doomed and it's hard to stay positive and hopeful and pretending my life is normal. I've broken down a few times and I know it's a sign of weakness but I feel like it's never going to get better. Í don't see many posts or success stories on the Net when it comes to Bed bugs. "

a dialectic of Other Cultures... or something

2007-09-24T21:38:00.000+09:00

The cultural tension in Egypt has to be taken as a given. When i was first in Egypt 3 years ago, a Syrian born singer named Ruby was causing a stir in the egyptian parliament over this video:

Literally every shop/restaurant/whatever in Egypt has a television tuned to a music station (usually melody hits), and when that song came on, business honestly stopped.
Contemporary videos tended to look something more like this:

Lots of face covering, giggling, and lots of references to 'traditional' Egypt. The fact that the guy never gets her is standard. In fact, it was more common for the video to end with the singer waking up, or fading away, thus negating any immorality by presenting the video as a dream.

So, 3 years later, what do video's in egypt look like?
Well this one's pretty popular:

You really have to watch it long enough for the bed scene to understand how much egyptian cultural acceptance has changed in the last 3 years...
but has it changed?
This is what I'm so goddamn curious about.
It never really occurred to me until i left Egypt how unusual it is that you are literally continuously bombarded by soft core music videos. Even in america the level of saturation isn't this high.
And yet these videos offer absolutely zero reflection of accepted cultural values. Its almost like their purposely flaunting what they claim they don't want. And it has to be described as flaunting - because most of the time the videos are played with the sound turned down while other music is played over it. And this is where egypt entirely loses me.

I guess maybe this is just an example of reverse sexual orientalism:
(from wikipedia)

"...But it was not until the 19th century that "Orientalism" in the arts became an established theme. In these works the myth of the Orient as exotic and decadently corrupt is most fully articulated. Such works typically concentrated on Near-Eastern Islamic cultures. Artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Léon Gérôme and Alexander Roubtzoff painted many depictions of Islamic culture, often including lounging odalisques, and stressing lassitude and visual spectacle. When Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French Académie de peinture painted a highly-colored vision of a turkish bath (illustration, right), he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. If his painting had simply been retitled "In a Paris Brothel," it would have been far less acceptable.^{[citation needed]} Sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient. This orientalizing imagery persisted in art into the early 20th century, as evidenced in Matisse's orientalist nudes. In these works the "Orient" often functions as a mirror to Western culture itself, or as a way of expressing its hidden or illicit aspects."

Actually, that works pretty perfectly. shit.

this was a stupidly long post, so i'll just leave you with these two MUST WATCH VIDEOS!!!!

actually i really want to write a seperate post on those last two videos... but another time i guess.