To Dwell is to Garden
You can see the Seoul Mosque – to which S. and I made a very drunken visit. So much for Moslem sobriety.
Borsche – I think it is called. Delicious despite the strange pink color. No one in the restaurant spoke English – we had to communicate with the Russians via poorly spoken Korean on both our sides. Long live the Korean based Russian mafia…
Aftermath of the bent I-beam raking:
The Unicorns – one of my favorites at present, although their presence on the scene has sadly evaporated. They hail from under the icy suns of Montreal.
The ultra-happy lo-fi sound of this album is a consistent counter-point to the serious intellectual meditation on death and social dissolution that makes up its lyrical content. It’s difficult to grasp which side is the pro/antagonist in the album’s totality. Self-respect should compel you to search out this beautiful one-off masterpiece.
I Don’t Want to Die:
Although the sudden death of this band is tragically ironic given their only album’s philosophical underpinnings, all is not lost! Some still twitching limbs of the Unicorn corpse reassembled into Islands, whom are slightly more polished than their fabled ancestor - but still dead cool.
Living here in the belly of an East Asian Tiger for the past 11 months, I have witnessed (and participated in…) so many happenings that completely lack context in my previous life of university campuses and shady pubs (I don’t mean to imply that I haven’t visited my share of shady pubs here, it’s just that they’re called ‘hofs’). Something that comes to mind as particularly dissimilar to everyday life in Canada is the speed at which new buildings (large and small) and constructed and dismantled and business space occupied and abandoned. Small business turnover in Korea is dizzying – it’s hard to keep your bearings from week to week if you rely on restaurants and confectioners as landmarks. The landscape changes shape well before the the latest new store or apartment building forces a change in focus.
But like I said, it’s not only the speed at which buildings go up that is astounding, but also how fast they come down:
This is a backhoe that has apparently picked up a bent I-beam to rake through the building it is destroying – this was very intense to see so close up; it is happening about 6 feet from the sidewalk. I would have taken more pics, but I was compelled to run for cover. (Safety aside, the dude manning that rig must have been having so much fun!)
Here is one of my all time favorite movie clips, and the philosophical link between the above picture and the clip below was the raison d’être for the wordy title of this post. It is a scene from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. About 5 minutes in you’ll see my alleged ancestor very thoughtfully pick up a bone and enter the hermeneutic circle. Every time I see this sequence I can’t help wondering what (and how) that little monkey was thinking. The music is from the opening of Strauss’ tonal poem Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30, but of course everybody knows that old one. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdoA3AJ6zGE]
Being from Canada, I am no stranger to the psychology of dwelling near a country with extremist leanings and extremist weapons. So much so, in fact, that I feel little terror despite the fact that my new neighbor is Comrade Kim Jong-Il and not the illustrious President of those 50 odd states whose present union appears to be grounded in a fear of the foreign.
I suddenly realize that I cannot pursue the dangerous ground that is thus far this post… My sincerest apologies are in order, but I feel that I would only talk myself into a hole (perhaps a physical one) if I continued on this train wreck of thought– and I do not presently intend to do that!
Anyone with a driver’s license knows that being behind the wheel can at times be a little much on the nerves. But those of you who take for granted those societal conventions known as stop signs, traffic lights, turn signals and general common sense will have at least one thing to be homesick about if you’re tough enough to drive here in Asia.
I live in Korea (in a tiny suburb of Seoul with a population of nearly 4 million), and each morning, half-asleep and still beery-eyed, I take the very real risk of walking out my apartment door and onto the thoroughfare. In the beginning I would tell wide-eyed, exasperated stories to my co-workers about my experiences during the half-mile trek – but in all things, I suppose, one becomes acclimatized to the situations they face daily, and thus nothing short of being actually killed now seems worthy of conversation. The callous disregard for red lights, the sudden and unpredictable u-turns in heavy traffic, the lack of signaling and generally random and spontaneous behavior of many vehicles on the road, etcetera – all of this has become second nature to me. For instance, the impact of having your 65 cent city bus, crowded well over capacity, suddenly veer off the highway and into a gas station, have itself filled with diesel - without being turned off - by a man who does not put out his cigarette (to his credit, the ‘No Smoking’ signs are in English), and then casually remerge with the sea of maniacal drivers begins to lose its frightening novelty after prolonged exposure. I now bike to school in the morning…
People in Shanghai drive fast – that is the only word that seems to fit. Even late at night on small streets with only two lanes you’ll see Chinese people with a caution that borders on paranoia scanning the darkness for a trace of movement or noise. Despite the copious amounts of Tsingtao I was consuming during my trip, the extremity of the roads in Shanghai had an almost instant sobering effect.
In Vietnam I traveled by bus, car, motorcycle-taxi and cyclo. Each one had it’s own specialty fear linked to it. Compared to Seoul and Shanghai, however, the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City was… Well, I can’t do it justice with words:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN_t0Ic-2u4]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BarYqv0yc90]
It looks to me as if both of these vids were shot from a motorcycle-taxi. (My sincere thanks to the courageous YouTube posters of these killer vids. I couldn’t bring myself to unpocket my camera whilst I was on the back of one of those bikes…)
p.s. I’ve never driven a car in my life.
