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Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Happy New Year.




I figured I would do my Happy Holidays here in a New Years post. To start the new year right, I thought I would give some free promotion to a very worth website, dedicated to addressing the problem of hunger. Really, the worthwhile things in life would never come about if we spent all our time worrying about where our next meal was coming from. For all those Da Vinci's, Einsteins, Jordans, Gilroys, Duchamps, Rushdies who will never see the light of day because they struggle to meet the bare necessities of life: food, clothing, and shelter, this post goes out to you.

Please click on this link to make money for the hungry. If you don't know how it works, there's more information on the site. For every click they get, they make an amount of money which goes towards feeding the hungry. If you think this is a scam, feel free to look it up on Snopes.

www.thehungersite.com

Sunday, December 17, 2006






This is my friend Jae-Yung. I went to visit him in Jinju on the weekend, and he took me to see Jinju Castle. Apparently during one of the many Japanese incursions into the Korean Peninsula, a woman martyred herself by dancing for one of the Japanese generals, and then embracing him with interlocking rings on all her fingers. Once she had trapped him, she jumped off the cliff into the Nam river and killed both of them. Jinju castle was a resort for Korean generals and the aristocracy. There they enjoyed feasts and entertainment. The second picture is a picture of Jinju castle after the sun went down. After going to the castle and shopping, he took me out for baked eel, the specialty food in Jinju. I even tried eel bile, mixed with soju, the sweet potato liquor that is so popular here. It's supposed to be very good for your health. The eel was delicious, but I was a little indifferent to the bile.

If you're reading this, Jae-yung: thank you for a wonderful time. You are always welcome at my house.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

The Ran-domicile



Well, this photo is a little off-season. It was taken in September. I decided it would be a good idea to go to the DMZ, the border between North and South Korea on my upcoming vacation. Should be eye-opening like Le Chien Andalou.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

The Kyoto Protocol



I had to walklimb a mountain
to right this poem. here in beautiful
hangook, smog settles in valleys
where the suicidal species congregates
and lives in high-rises and billboards;
so here I am, trying to find some clean
air, a piece of mind
above
the love/hate relationship I harbour
for my own caucasian male ego. The people
here speak to me and I can understand
little of what they say. Their faces
say more -- kind and generous, have what I have.
Busan stretches its limbs below, encircling
its own heights that reach
for the sky
like a woman's breasts when she's on
her back, and there's nothing
sexual about that right now; I'm gay
for chrissake! For Christ's (and other's)
sakes I crossed the burden
of my being in a ferry named atomic.
For strictly exercising her lungs,
a woman cries out and magpies call back,
looking
for leftovers flung over the shoulder
of a kind and generous "have what I have"
face that quenched my thirst
with a persimmon.

What is it about heights that makes
people delight
in shouting, overlooking the harbour
where thousands board high-speed trains
with hand-bills and church congregations
sing suicidal hymns next
door to buddhist monks sneaking
into a tavern to quaff a drink, dripping
with the memory of incense.

Speak to me,
people hear!
of what they say I can understand
little.
And redundant,
recursive
limbs
stretch back behind the sky,
reaching for the atomic ferry.
Tinker bell,
a mountain named desire
maintained as a molehill,

echoing.

Monday, November 27, 2006

News, sewn with barbed wire...

Apparently, that sleep thing that I mentioned a few posts back was related more to a sickness (tonsilitis) than anything else. I had a bad fever, went to the hospital the next day, and my boss called me and urged me to go back to work because there are two illegals at the hagwan, who are missing that week due to the visit of some or other inspector. He told me to come back to work when I had an IV stuck in my arm. Between that and the "Stop playing games" and "make it more fun, the kids are getting bored" I don't know what's what.

I felt like crap again today: nausea all day, although it got better towards the end of the day. Plus the students of one class were lying through their teeth about an assignment that was due today and none of them did it. "Teacher, you didn't tell us it was due today." I told every single one of them at least three times: more likely five. Ok, if you're going to lie, at least make it plausible. Scratch that! At least make it interesting. Then, to try to make me feel like a "filthy foreigner" They touched my hair with a kleenex and spent two minutes making grossed out faces and doing their best not to touch it. Do I ever feel appreciated!

Thank goodness even crappy days come to an end.

Monday, November 20, 2006

WTF?!



I found this sign semiotically confusing, considering potheads have a reputation for poor hygiene and Metrosexuals have hyperactively good hygiene. Also, what does pot have to do with Ireland besides the colour green?

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Hello Whoever-you-are!

God bless your heart! I see you've been following my handiwork very well, and it feels good to know that someone is interested enough in the hard work I put into my blog and my music site (www.zebox.com/treevortex) to log onto both many times and loiter around for so long. I feel appreciated. Feel free to leave a comment, I don't bite! I will even respond in kind. Yes, I'm talking to you, inktomisearch person! You there, in Sunnyvale, California. This blog's for you!

And to my other loyal readers in the Toronto area: don't feel left out! I will dedicate one to you soon...

Here's a poem

The newspapers are all adrip with transparent ink
ghost words, remedy for the bored mind to rail against
bottled up, the pressure of a jobless space in the day planner
looks like a neck when you draw it on paper, cross-hatched
eggs rolling down the nape of breakfast, ruminating,
like a car idling, time waiting in line, what happens when we blink?

Everywhere people say with their eyes watch out or don't blink
you might miss something, a get-rich quick ticket with fresh ink
security guards, on the graveyard shift, in front of screens ruminating
stone still with drooping eyelids, a vagrant outside pitched against
the marbled edifice, steel enveloped glass, people hatched
direct into the hurry, a restless current, the vision of a city planner.

In a park, tuxedoed men rock on heels, relief sighs escape a wedding planner
rings pop out of boxes, held aloft for a crowd to see, minerals blink
and flash in sunlight, hands shake, arms clasp across backs, hatched
from stone-age burials, plant pigments, the smell of octopus ink.
Jet through the streams, downloadable desires set against
burgundy blades, trundled over flesh, eyes in the mirror ruminating.

Instinct still polished and stainless steel smooth, feet ruminating
the get up and go that got up and went, rending the event planner,
tragedies personal but outed, in the end sung, but to swim against
the tide, you need a diet of basso profundo, no ovation, just a blink
stage fright, flights from predators, camouflage covers the ink
on a newspapers' fine print that never made it to print, hatched

like a virus from its entanglement with the strands that hatched
its fight against the life that gave it life, walls are ruminating,
wailing with sewn together lips, criss-crossed with tattoo ink
hands tied with umbilical cords, no one is a birth planner
down to final details, with details so final, no cries are heard, no blink
is seen, face pressed against glass, against the bed, just against.

It all pushes back, doesn't it? If it was as simple as for or against.
An ostrich sticks its neck out, no sand in sight, even though it just hatched.
If I could learn from these words, it might make quiet sense when I blink.
Head perched on an end of the world railing, thoughts themselves ruminating,
my mind has a mind of its own, its ownership is a planner.
Can we make the needed leap, no faith involved, from pixel to ink?

So when you ask what I'm doing next Tuesday, I'll say ruminating.
If payday comes my way, I'll become a vacation planner.
Eyes closed while walking, I forgot to look in your face and blink.
Storm tossed branches, settled
tabletop splintered and angled,
the home seems less a home than an
eviscerated body.

Saturday, November 04, 2006

The Terrorism of Circumstance



My other favourite work at the Busan Bienniale was this weather balloon kept afloat by a fan blowing air upwards. It had a radio signal that broadcast through about twenty speakers arranged in a circle around the room. The radio signal was picked up on an amplifier through some feedback mechanism that varied the sound it made as the balloon moved around in the room and changed its distance from the amplifier. The sounds produced were very trancy: reminiscent of a cross between tibetan chanting and cicada song.

Unfortunately, as I was watching and listening, the balloon and its attached radio collided with the fan cage. The sound became very tinny, high-pitched, and loud, and then faded away totally. One of the bienniale staff soon appeared and looked at me, and I just shrugged my shoulders like I didn't know what caused the mishap (which was true). I guess I was lucky. They could have construed that I somehow screwed with the installation. Whew!

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Busan Bienniale



I finally made it to the Busan Bienniale a couple weekends ago. It leaned fairly heavily towards video and installation art. I have this minor grudge against video art, as so much of it totally disregards the way people receive art in a gallery. Let's face it, even if you're a top-notch artist, it will be difficult to make someone stay in the same place in a gallery for very long. I think video artists should keep this in mind, and compose accordingly so people can get the "gist" of your video from any 2 or so minute fragment. Mind you, this only applies to video art displayed at large exhibitions like bienniales.

Regardless, there was a couple good video installations. This was one of them. On the one side, an outside corner that made the projection surface look like a glowing cube, various deserted architecturally inflected images dissolved in and out. As you walked around the cube, however, the inside corner on the other side revealed that it was not a cube at all, but merely two fairly flat surfaces intersecting on a perpindicular plane.

The inside plane depicted an avalanche in slow motion, engulfing everything in its path, including a road, miniturized by the scale of the mountains and the avalanche, and eventually engulfing the whole screen. The way this piece conveyed the awesome natural power (that can be both beautiful and destructive) as the architecturality of the box was absolutely brilliant. The domestic sublime, you might call it.

My other favourite work was a sound installation which I will explain more in a subsequent blog.

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Things are getting tense here...



Or not... One morning, when I woke up, I heard an air raid siren. Then, as I was walking to school, I heard fighter jets. But the Koreans will blast fireworks and party for the scantest reason, including the current Chrysanthemum Festival. Even though the South has quickly followed the North into 1000 km missile range capability, they still have time to celebrate flowers. Thank goodness for smelling the roses, er, I mean, Chrysanthemums!

Monday, October 23, 2006

Is your Sex Sexy Enough?



If not, maybe you need one of these! I went to this motel in Busan, and there was this thing that looked like an exercise machine, but it turned out to be a Sex Machine. Where's a James Brown CD when you need it?

Thursday, October 19, 2006

ISP tracking RULES...

I found out that someone from Tokyo, who works for Japan's largest internet service provider read my blog for fifteen hours! I guess they read the whole damn thing!

American Spies.




Maybe I've been watching too many Hitchcock movies, but I get the uneasy feeling that there are American Spies aplenty here in South Korea. I think I ran into one of them last weekend. The evil is palpable.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Marnie.

So I watched Marnie last week. It launched into my "best five" ever movies rather quickly, although when I revisit it in my memory it might be hampered by its weak link: Sean Connery's accent slipping in and out of his Scottish brogue. No one can match Hitchcock for the psychological depth of his characters (except for Bergman in his film Persona). He also has the distinction of making a propaganda film that depicts the villain as still human (Lifeboat). Not a common characteristic of propaganda films, it is yet ultimately more convincing to show the humanity of the enemy. It's also preventative medicine against the very worst atrocities, or do our animal instincts drive out the reasoning beast within, regardless?

Monday, October 16, 2006

Mail Art



My sister is an artist, and we are collaborating on a mail art project. Here's a photo of my fragments-in-process. I'm excited.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Surf's Up!



There are surfers in Korea! Here is one of them cutting a nice line at Haeundae Beach in Pusan. Coming from Canada, I'm pleasantly surprised by the warmth here. Back home it is 6 degrees Celsius, but here it is still above 20 degrees Celsius every day.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

North Korea blew up a nuke!




So if bombs are ever dropped, I hope I'm at ground zero and instantly vapourized rather than being caught in a fallout zone. That said, kids rule and above is a concrete example of why they rule.

The Down-low lowdown on Ginseng




I finally decided to do something proactive about my health, so I invested in some Ginseng products. My choice of product perhaps is questionable, but we shall see. I bought some Korean Red Ginseng Wine (pictured above), and I have been indulging every day (not to the point of drunkenness, mind you). Despite the rash of Ginseng products available everywhere these days, overuse of ginseng can be hard on your heart. Medicine can be poison and vice versa like a certain french philosopher and others have noticed. Ginseng is supposed to be a good tonic when you are ill. I think my sinuses warranted a shot, and so far I have noticed a slight improvement. When I bought the wine, they threw a huge bag of ginseng candies my way as well. That happens a lot here: buy something get something free.

Thank goodness for the man-shaped root.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Are there cameras in money?




I get paid in cash! WTF???? This still blows me away. The Koreans love their cash money.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

The Art of Rolling.

People roll many things: pizza dough, joints, meditation balls, dice, California, but I just learned how to roll one of my favourite Korean foods. All hail Kimbop! I am on my way to a volcanic island in the sea of Japan, and on the bus to the city that runs the ferry service which I will use to get to the island, I met this really nice Korean fellow Jae-yung. He put me up for the night and taught me how to make Kimbop!

I'm stoked.

When I first tried to make Kimbop, I tried sealing it with rice syrup, but he told me all you need is water! I guess the K.I.S.S. axiom (keep it simple stupid) was applicable. Of course, I failed miserably with the rice syrup, but now I know!

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Subterranean Homesick Blues




I'm having the first bout of homesickness I've ever had despite all my travels. It seems as soon as I'm feeling physically better, the next day I feel crappy again. I think the pollution here is really bothering me and the air was especially bad (or so it seemed) yesterday and today. I want to feel healthy again.

I didn't even really have a longstanding home in Canada, but I miss my partner a lot. This run-down stuff is making me more irritable too.

I've heard that months 3-6 are the most difficult when teaching abroad. I have been here a little more than 4 months and much of the novelty has worn off I guess.
The picture above encapsulates my heightened awareness of time these days.

Friday, September 22, 2006

Traffic

Traffic here is crazy. I've almost been hit three times, and one time, I was shaken up so bad I had to lean up against a phone booth and catch my breath. No one stays on their side of the streets, almost everyone cuts corners, and traffic lights are not very visible and seem more like a guideline than the law.

As a country that has almost entirely reconstructed itself since the Korean War, Korea is a development success story. It does however have its share of growing pains. One such pain is the traffic! A culture that has only had the car as a commonly accessible commodity for three or four decades sure has been among the things that has taught me the value of human life, and its frailty beside these speeding behemoths.

Saturday, September 16, 2006


My ex-professor and friend (or so I'd like to think lol) Dionne Brand recently won the Toronto Book Award for her novel What We All Long For. I must confess I haven't read it yet; I am more familiar with her poetry. I read her book of poems "Inventory" before I came to Korea and it was incredibly inspiring. It was one of the only pieces of art that motivated me to create myself in recent memory. Congratulations to Dionne and go buy her books! She's really, really good!

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Miscelleria of Modernity (on your knees biotch)




Well, what do you know? After I write a blog about a magazine that doesn't pay me after I published in their rag, I get the freakin cheque and free copy sent within two freakin' days. I'm stunned. Obviously the new staff is PR savvy!

My neighbour keeps bringing me delicious Thai food cooked by his wife. I think he's trying to butter me up for something: a grand plan to blackmail our boss or something like that. I don't want anything to do with it really, but I secretly hope the gods wreak vengeance on behalf of my beleagured coworker (long story that involves some compromising info).

My lover wants to take a Tantric workshop and a dominate/surrender workshop. I think he wants to spice up our sex life or something. It's really a sweet gesture because I think he's thinking of me. I like to dominate people. Don't tell, please.

In case you're wondering, the photo below is of hundreds of baby jellyfish.

Saturday, September 09, 2006




Hanging out at the coy pond, feeling coy.

One of the biggest corporations in South Korea is Dae woo: you've probably heard of them. They've got their thumbs in many pies: cars, stereos, even department stores. I found out recently General Motors owns a stake in the company. It's mind-boggling how a few people basically own the whole world, and let little peons like me make a liveable wage, while many others make a hardly liveable wage and endure incredibly shitty working conditions.

Forget about a big fish in a small pond: I'm a microscopic plankton. Love me.

Friday, September 08, 2006

George Bush IS intelligent.

Look. He's got the whole world talking about him, thinking about him. Maybe most of it is negative, but you know what they say: there's no such thing as bad press. The occasional ridiculous verbalism does not automatically make someone stupid. Think about it. I say stupid shit all the time and I was the most sought after student in my Master's degree cohort. The only difference is that I don't have zillions of cameras on me at all times to catch my "Bush-isms."

No. I simply don't believe it's possible to ascend to the top of the most economically and militarily powerful country on the planet (though I don't think they are any more) without at least having the intelligence to recognize intelligence and surround yourself with it.

That said... intelligence is a neutral quality; it does not automatically translate into moral "rightness." George Bush is a bad, bad man.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

The Mighty Cicada



This is a picture of the loudest insect on earth: the cicada. Cicadas live as larvae under the ground for over a decade, then they come out, they sing their song, lay eggs or fertilize eggs, and then die. I think of them as magic creatures, prehistoric, wise, and powerful. How else can such a small thing make such a big noise but magic. Yes it's physics, but the best magic is always based on the material nature of the world.

I bring cicadas up because one of my students brought in two of the largest cicadas I've ever seen to class today. Everyone except him and me freaked out. The cicadas stayed speechless, stunned by their erstwhile captivity. If aliens tried to contact intelligent life on earth during august, all they would hear was a relentless metallic buzz, drowning out the traffic and the conversations below.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Small Face, Lovely Breast



This ad was one I saw on the Busan subway. It advertizes a small face, but lovely breast. I think it is for plastic surgery, which is fairly popular here. The most popular form of plastic surgery is the replacement of the hymen!!!! (or so I'm told). I wonder what's wrong with big faces? Maybe the Korean sense of beauty strays more towards finer features. I personally like big round faces...

I'm not exactly skinny, but I'm not nearly fat by North American standards, and I had one of the young students write me a letter, asking me why I was so fat. I laughed. Finally, the gender divide seemed erased as far as the expectation of female thinness goes. It made my day! I gave another group of students an assignment to draw and describe their best friend, and one of the girls described her best friend as fat!

This was not her being mean or anything (I don't think so at least). The Koreans just have a different sense of honesty about these things...

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Lost in Translation




For a native English speaker, there are many signs in Korea that cause one to pause and maybe have a private giggle. I took a photo of this sign on the ferry to Ulleung-do, an island in the strait between Korea and Japan. My friends and I thought it was a very funny translation. You often see T-shirts that have laugh-inducing English slogans on them. One memorable one I saw today was "Fuckin Design T-Shirt Store."

Sunday, July 23, 2006


Since I spent too much money in Seoul (it is quite a bit more expensive than Masan, as you would expect) the weekend before, I decided to take it easy last weekend. On Sunday I hiked halfway up Mt. Mahakasan to find the café I discovered the last time I hiked. I intended to get a beer to sip while I finished “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth (excellent book, incidentally). I sat down and started to read, but no one came over to take my order. I noticed that there was people only at the one table, and they were laughing and carrying on. Looked like they were having a good time. After about half an hour of reading and taking photos, the aforementioned people waved me over.

The only woman of the group vacated, and from what I understood, she was the patroness of the café. Next thing I know, I’m being offered moccoli (rice wine), plum wine, and kimchi (pickled cabbage) with tofu. One of the group was due to travel to Canada himself, to Vancouver. He was also a chiropractor. As I had begun seeing a chiropractor in Canada before I left, I tried to let him know that I would be interested in seeing him as a patient.

This was the first time that I got frustrated by the language barrier. No matter how hard each party tried to understand the other, I could not get his business card or phone card. He kept asking for mine, and weird as it might seem, I still don’t know my number because the school takes care of all my bills and subtracts it from my salary. About an hour later, I ambled down the lower portion of the mountain, slightly tipsy.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

World Cup Fever






A few nights ago I went to see the Korea vs. Togo World Cup game; It was being broadcast in most public locations: sports bars, billboard screens, the local stadium, and on a huge screen in a large construction site. My friends Tim and Amy accompanied me, and by this enormous department store downtown we met a few Korean friends. One of them, Yung-tek, is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life. He greeted us with gift bags, having bought us each a red “Fighting Korea” T-shirt. I went to put it on over the T-shirt I was already wearing, but Yung-tek insisted that I take off my current T-shirt to put it on. I obliged, and he and his friends proceeded to laugh at my prodigious chest hair. I blushed!

We bought snacks and beer in the department store, a sprawling multi-floor deal that is like Walmart in its “you can buy anything here” approach to retail. Next, we headed over to the construction site, part of a swath of swarming humans, all decked out in red shirts, armbands, headbands, face paint, and glowing devil’s horns. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They had erected a temporary pavilion complete with spotlights, huge balloons, a stage for entertainers, and television cameras. There was maybe a thousand people there, all cheering, chanting, and waving inflatable rods, that, when struck together, make a shallow snare drum sound. When combined, the resulting percussion is considerable.

In between entertainment acts, I somehow became separated from my friends. I looked for them briefly, and then felt that this was a futile activity, so I sat down to enjoy the proceedings. I watched most of the first half from this location, occasionally looking for my friends. Just before the game started, I heard a string of Korean announcements, and I could have sworn that I heard my name and something about Canada. I did not believe my ears though, and so I missed the obvious: my friends had secured a public announcement to try to reconnect with me. At the break, Togo was up 1-0, and I headed to the rear because many people were making their way out of the construction site. There was a bottleneck, so I thought I would have a good chance of finding them there.

I had forgotten my money on my bed, and I didn‘t know the way home, so I would have had to find a bank before I caught a cab. All of a sudden, through the loudspeaker I can hear my friend Tim’s voice say in English “Trevor, if you can hear me, meet Tim at the camera between the two towers.” I was thrilled; as I was hungry and thirsty and they had all the snacks I could alleviate my bodily discomfort and enjoy the rest of the game with good company. Korea scored two goals in the second half, and every time they scored, they fired off fireworks and people got up out of their seats, hollered, hugged each other, and slapped each other high fives. We went out for drinks after Korea won 2-0 to the jubilation of the people.

Saturday, June 24, 2006


I was thinking the other night, as I was falling asleep, about how living in another country forces you to think about the country you were raised in more carefully. In a way, you learn more about your national identity when you’re abroad than when you’re in your home country. Of course some people in these days of the globalization of culture have grown up without a mother/father country, moving frequently. As an urban Canadian, I have realized here that our multiculturalism is both unique and thorough.

While there are certainly bigots in Canada, the mainstream ethos, especially in cities like Vancouver and Toronto, is that the idea of a “foreigner” is itself foreign. There are very few people of European descent in Korea, especially in Masan where I am living. There is a section of Seoul that is primarily American, a leftover military village from the Korean War, but other than that, it is a little unusual to see a Caucasian. Whenever it happens, and your eyes meet, there is a curious, inquisitive moment where you are both wondering the reason for the other being there. Usually, among people of my generation, it is teaching English that brings them to Korea.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t see the people here as intentionally trying to make me feel like a foreigner or an outsider. But they do treat you different. Overwhelmingly, it is usually different in a positive light. They come up to you and say hello, hoping to practise the little English they know; they put extra stuff in your shopping bag or give you a discount to try to give you a good impression of Korean culture, or perhaps because they try to imagine the difficulties of being a foreigner. Alternatively, they can guess why I am here, and because Korean culture places such a huge emphasis on education (it is not unusual for high school students to be up until midnight studying), I get treated with respect because I am a teacher, a sung-saeng-nimh, a term they also use for elders.

All this pampering has made me reflect on the lack of mutual respect I often felt back home. One effect of Canada’s intense multiculturalism might perhaps be an erosion of hospitality. Not that Canadians are inhospitable, but perhaps because the idea of a foreigner is foreign to many of us, we don’t feel the need to go to such great lengths to assuage the difficulties of being a foreigner. Just a thought to be considered more…

Friday, June 16, 2006

A Seoul-ful Trip (Part II)


The neighbourhood in Seoul that we went clubbing in was raucus. Cars and people packed the streets like sardines in a can. None of us had the can opener either… Jenna, Adrian’s friend, seemed to have a dead-set itinerary in mind; anytime I whimsically suggested something else (I think I only did that once anyway), it was if I hadn’t said anything. I didn’t mind at the time, overwhelmed as I was with the sights, smells, and sounds emanating from the restaurants and bars that lined the streets. I guess this crowd was sick of the place they usually went to and stayed at.

We went to a sheesha bar: a place where you buy a flavoured block of tobacco and smoke it through a hookah or water pipe. The place we went to was full, but the atmosphere I could tell was fantastic. The plan-B spot also had an amazing atmosphere: it had cushions with which you could lounge on the floor; a pond in the middle of the room with a burnished metal-fish scale effect on the bottom, rose petals, and candles floating on the surface of the water, and private booths on different levels separated off from the other rooms with a gauzy curtain.

While most things in Korea are cheaper than in Canada, the prices in this place were on par with a trendy spot in Toronto. I had an $8 margarita that tasted like straight tequila, and they brought us snacks. The aroma of incense was a little sedating, and I soon got restless, eagerly anticipating the bustle and excitement of another place. The next spot was a sports bar type thing where people were watching world cup action. We ordered more drinks and played euchre. I got my butt kicked!

Next we went to a bar called tinpan alley, where the beers were cheap, and the company consisted of more ex-pats than your typical Korean bar. I met Adrian’s boss here, and he shook my hand firmly said “I like you.” He’s probably one of those guys who evaluates other guys on the strength and co-ordination of their handshakes lol. Nevertheless, he was roguishly charming, and he ambled on in what I thought was a Scottish brogue, but he turned out to be Irish. Here, we played a drinking game called “Circle of Death.” It was incredibly fun: if you draw red, you have to take that number of gulps yourself, but if you draw black, you distribute the gulps to others. If you draw a king, you have to make up a category that everyone has to think of things that fit, and the first one who screws up or can’t think of one has to drink. Draw a Jack, and you have to think of something that you’ve never done before, and anyone who has done it has to drink. Our minds were humorously in the gutter for this one, and a couple times ventured into the realms of “too much information.”

We left this bar for a dance club where they were playing popular North American hip hop songs. Although it was very crowded, the dancing was animated, and much fun was had by all. Jenna could have qualified for “Girls gone wild” at some points of the evening. Adrian and I caught a cab home and unwound, rehashing some of the nights already fond memories. The verdict: Seoul is full of Soul.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

A Seoul-ful Trip



I went to Seoul on the weekend, whimsical, sprawling Seoul. The scale of this city is mind-boggling. The only thing that compares to it in my experience is London (mind you, I’ve never been to New York City). The area around the bus terminal is kind of boring, so my first impression was a little dreary. The cloudy weather didn’t help. I arrived in the city at four in the morning, having slept what little I could on the bus from Masan. I romped around a little, taking a few night shots with the trusty digi-camera, then I found a bathhouse to clean up and take a little nap in.

I woke up at seven and proceeded to walk around for hours, as I was due to meet my friend after twelve, when she would finish teaching her students (yes, there’s school on Saturdays here at some schools). I wandered around in a daze, made it to the Han river, which is much wider than I ever expected. Many bridges span it, and in the distance, atop a small mountain was Seoul Tower, a structure roughly similar to Toronto’s own CN Tower, or Seattle’s Space Needle…I made a mental note to visit again in order to see the view from it; I’m sure it would be spectacular being on top of a mountain as it is and all…

Then I wandered back towards the bus depot, where I was meeting my friend Adrian. I passed it, and I found a sports field where people were playing soccer, tennis, basketball, and some weird, wobbly skateboard-type thing. Being a big basketball fan as I am, I sat down and watched the action for a while. When I finally met up with Adrian (I haven’t seen her in 8 months), she asked me whether I wanted to go to one of the magnificent palaces that Seoul houses. I said of course. But soon after we exited the subway (whose system is much more complex than Toronto’s), it started raining raccoons and wolves. We still decided to go through with the hour and a half tour, after which we ended up soaked on one shoulder each, as we were sharing an umbrella. We then went to Adrian’s apartment and relaxed a little before we met up with some of Adrian’s teaching friends for dinner at a Thai restaurant and proceeded to go clubbing. Now, I’m not the sort of person who goes to bars too much anymore, as I usually get bored because I prefer to have conversations where I don’t have to yell, and I appreciate the smoky atmosphere even less than when I was younger. But I figured that because I’m in Korea, now is the time for me to do things I normally wouldn’t, and go out on a limb; I went for the gusto!

But that’s all for now: I will finish the story tomorrow.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Should Palestine get its own state?

The history of Zionism is long and baroquely complex. This Judaic philosophy of nationhood and return to the ancient homeland was made possible partly by the cultural value placed upon celebrating agricultural feasts, calling for rain according to the seasons of ancient Israel even in Russia, and the importation of sacred vegetation from ancient Israel. When muslims took over the area, their tolerant attitudes towards other religions coexisting with them permitted the Jewish community in Palestine to revive. This revival suffered a drastic setback during the Holy Wars of the Crusades around 1000 AD, when all but about 1000 Jewish families survived the slaughter and subsequent exile. After Saladin regained control of the area on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish rulers occasionally invited members of the Jewish diaspora back to Palestine to settle. Because of ghettoization in many European cities, this prospect became very attractive, and once again the Jewish community experienced a time of revival.

These cultural memories, combined with the occasional emergence of would-be messiahs who called for a return to Israel, kept alive the idea of return. Indeed, if we think of a nation of people, as Zionism treats Jews, as a body, then we can think of the original exile as a trauma. As Freud, himself a Jew in the fraught atmosphere of Vienna during the rise of the Nazis, noted, behaviour is often outside of conscious control, shaped in part by the occurrence of trauma and its memory. In remembering trauma, we often become transfigured, made over as we were at the time the trauma happened. The return of Jews to their original homeland became in the popular imaginary of Jewry a kind of therapy: a guided return to the site of trauma in order to resolve the “issue” and heal the wounds of the collective psyche.

There were several precursors to the formal emergence of Zionism as a coherent ideology. In 1808 a group of Lithuanian Jews settled in Palestine and forged an agricultural community there. A rabbi named Zvi Hirsch Kalischer petitioned the wealthy Rothschild family to buy Palestine or at least the Temple of the Mount for the Jews in 1836. Another rabbi named Rabbi Solomon Hai AlkalaI believed and taught around this time that redemption was only possible through a return to the ancient homeland. Then, in 1896, Theodore Herzl formally founded the doctrine of Zionism: the idea that the Jews were a nation, a people, and that to enfranchise themselves politically and economically, they needed a state. The next year, there was a conference at Basle, and the focus of Zionists was to procure a state through diplomacy.

Britain favoured the idea, and negotiated with Herzl to build the Jewish State in various places such as Cyprus, Uganda and Palestine. All this diplomacy never amounted to much, but his practical program of encouraging Jews in the diaspora to immigrate to Palestine, especially in the face of of pogroms and other anti-semitic activities in Russia and Europe succeeded. Soon Zionist leaders, in the colonialist fashion of the period, started to discuss plantation plans that included Arab labour much like the plantation system in Algeria, a French colony. The oppression of Jews deflected onto another group: the Arabs.


It has been fashionable for the left to condemn Zionism because of the trouble in the Middle East, and because of its historical association with colonialism. But this does no justice to the breadth of Zionism as an ideology. Some Zionists, in fact, were socialists who envisioned a Jewish State as the only road to true political enfranchisement, and who also founded the kibbutz movement, heavily informed by utopian and socialist sentiments. On the other hand, there were (and are) Zionists who openly discussed the purposeful displacement of Arabs who had long been settled in the area. As it is, the Arabs still do not have a formal State in an area they have lived in for over a thousand years. This just repeats the historical wrong of the exile of the Jews… and the viscious cycle continues.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

What makes a Genocide a Genocide?

I heard a man from Columbia University questioning the unanimous condemnation of the situation in Darfur as a bonafide genocide by US officials. The African Congress has been hesitant to come to the same conclusion because it recognizes the ideological motivations behind naming some events genocide and not others. Genocide becomes something "over there," perpetrated by "monsters."

He argues, however, that we hesitate to call the colonization of the Western Hemisphere genocide when we teach history, which was exactly what it was. First Nations populations were as high as almost 100 million when settlers first arrived (hardly an uninhabited continent at all), and dropped to as low as 6 million! Sure, many died from smallpox, but many were simply slaughtered. And the middle passage’s name itself is a euphemism.

Many slaves never survived the middle passage; some preferred to throw themselves overboard in the middle of the ocean than live in the filthy conditions imposed upon them. For that reason, they had nets around to ships, because the slave owners did not want their "property" to get damaged. And even some abolitionists were not pro-emancipation. They wanted to abolish the slave trade, but continue to harness the labour power of slaves through the rape of women already in slavery. These were people who founded our countries. It’s one thing to be proud of your heritage; it’s quite another to sweep all the bad things our ancestors did under the rug. That aside, we still need to find forgiveness in our hearts, or else the cycle of vengeance continues.

African-americans and first nations have inherited this legacy of genocide that still weighs on all humanity. In Canada this legacy finds expression in the contamination of water on reservations. Many of them have been on boil water advisories for years. Let's be honest and call it what it was. Although we might not like to admit it, not only are there monsters overseas, there are monsters in our governments, and there are probably monsters in our family trees.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Rumsfeld - Foot in Mouth Again!

Rumsfeld Quotes!

In April 2003, after news images circulated of Iraqis looting Baghdad, Rumsfeld dropped this gem:

"Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here." Then he went on to say that looting was not uncommon (as opposed to common) for countries that experience significant social upheaval. Does Katrina ring a bell? Or Watts?

"Stuff happens." Such a stunning polite turn on a pedestrian obscenity! How very tidy of him!

General Richard Myers towed this binary line: "This is a transition period between war and what we hope will be a much more peaceful time."

On the location of Saddam Hussain on April 12, 2003 (soon after the war began), Rumsfeld said: "I do not personally have ... enough intelligence from reliable sources ... that would enable me to walk up and say that I have conviction that he's dead, I also lack conviction that he's alive." It's a tightrope walk having such power, I suppose. You're constantly negotiating between war and peace, death and life, bad things and wonderful things. Here we are, two and a half years later, and still no "peaceful time." And just what are those "..." hiding?

Sometimes I think this dumb act is exactly that - an act ("I do not personally have ... enough intelligence"). I think that these folks are smart enough to make other smart people laugh at their slip-ups, and yet appeal to your average joe. I was wading through my files as I was moving, and I dug up a CNN article that had these quotes in it.

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Euthanasia

Euthanasia

This blog is a little more personal than most of my previous ones, but I will try to link it to current political issues as well. My partner's cat, Lily, has shared his life for nineteen years, and mine for a year and a half. She is a very sweet tempered tabby, who often seeks to be beside us. She has her own chair, and she often sits with us during dinner. One night, he was at a party and a friend of his brought him the cat as he was leaving and told him that it was being abused. He took her home, and Lily found a loving home.

Yesterday, she had 4 incidences of diarrhea and 3 of vomiting. She is loosing weight and looking increasingly frail and fragile; she gets comfortable with difficulty. We are considering the difficult possibility of euthanasia. I bring this up because I support euthanasia in both pets and humans. Sometimes pain and chronic discomfort is too much of a cross to bear for the afflicted, and it hurts loved ones to watch the steady decline. Life is not a value in itself; it must be accompanied by a modicum of pleasure, happiness, and comfort. The erosion of these things and the ascendancy of agony and trouble leach the dignity from life.

I sympathize with the buddhist's mission to eliminate suffering from life. The interconnectedness of phenomena means that the enlightened person cannot enter Nirvana for the simple reason that it is a selfish act to leave behind the unenlightened in the province of suffering. You cannot become enlightened without shedding your attachment to the self, such that the self-interest necessarily accompanying the act of choosing to enter Nirvana disqualifies you from enlightenment. Therefore, the bodhisattva, or enlightened one, chooses to remain outside of Nirvana to help others achieve enlightenment. In other words, no individual can enter Nirvana in good faith until we all can.

Lily has been an angel in our lives, and I wish her well whatever happens to her after she leaves us.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Geothermal Energy: An Alternative to Oil and Electricity as a Source of Heat?




A building in Kitchener, Ontario has jumped on the vanguard of alternative energy; they heat their business with geothermal energy. They built a series of pipes leading straight down into the ground. The pipes are empty, and because the earth, mostly solid, takes a lot longer than air to cool down, it is quite warm as little as 100 feet into the ground. Because warm air rises, this air travels up the pipes and into the building. Brilliant and simple, isn’t it? Much simpler than transporting oil across the world (even though it might be produced a few hundred miles away) to be sold to a distributing company, which then sells it to other sellers, who then sell it to consumers.

Do you liked smoked salmon, or other types of smoked fish? Apparently, more and more companies, rather than using oil or electricity to create the heat to smoke fish, are starting to use Geothermal energy. George Bush and some of his administration have gone on the record as saying that the environment doesn’t matter because Jesus is going to come any day now. But really, protecting the environment is a win-win situation. If you believe in God, then how can you dare profane the world he created by willingly destroying it? If you believe in the earth as an organism, then you are doing right by it through protecting the source of all life through protecting its various essential organs.

How George Bush can claim that the environment doesn't matter, and his actions speak louder than his words with his refusal to sign the Kyoto Accord. He now wants to develop petroleum resources in a National Wilderness Area in Alaska! His logic baffles my mind...

Sunday, January 22, 2006

A Review of Paris, Texas

I saw a movie the other night that blew me away. I forgot that I had already seen it until about 2/3 of the way through it. Although you might be asking yourself “How can it be that good if you forgot all about it until over half the movie was past?” don’t be fooled. This was a potent film, and apparently it won some prestigious prize at the Cannes film festival. It devastated and crushed me to a pulp with its tragic beauty.

The movie I speak of is Paris, Texas, directed by Wim Wenders, a German filmmaker who I love, but I think I tend to underestimate him sometimes. It starts off with a man walking through the desert around Big Bend National Park in Texas. He finishes the water he carries, and much later we see him stumble into a man’s shack, root around in his icebox, and eat some ice cubes. Then he passes out. When he wakes up, a doctor is tending to him, but cannot get any information whatsoever out of him. Rooting around in the stranger’s clothes, he finds a phone number and calls it. It turns out to be his brother.

The brother travels from Los Angeles to Texas to pick him up, but he has disappeared. We learn that he and his wife have been missing for four years and that his brother and his wife have been raising their son as their own. For nearly the whole trip home, the seemingly amnesiac man, Travis, doesn’t speak, much to his brother’s frustration. I won’t go into much more detail, but at his brother’s Travis finds out where his wife is living and he kidnaps his own son to go find her. Near the end, you finally hear their story as told by Travis, who maintains a stoic silence through much of the movie. Their story is heart-rending… Sad and beautiful at the same time, and full of moral complexity.

I highly recommend this movie to anyone: the cinematography is beautiful, the music is inspired and suits the content brilliantly, and the screenplay was written by the playwright Sam Shepard. It is really a tri-national collaboration between Germany, France, and the United States. I suppose it’s possible that I wasn’t ready for this movie the first time I saw it.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

The Struggle for Water

Passports Required at Canadian Border?

It has been a hot topic of debate whether or not the United States and Canada should require passports at the border between the two countries. Among the arguments against it is that it would be bad for business. Some say that a small percentage of Americans have passports, so this might reduce the flow of tourists north. This would restrict the movement of people across the border. While the European Union as an economic bloc has been moving towards the freer (that word looks funny) movement of people as well as goods across national borders, the NAFTA bloc (drafted by bloc-heads?) has been falling apart. As well, the United States has put in place tariffs on softwood lumber coming from Canada that directly contravene the stipulations of NAFTA, and both the Canadian lumber industry and the American consumer are suffering as prices of this commodity in the US rise.

On the other hand, the normalization of international relations between the United States and Canada is necessary at this juncture if Canada wants to maintain independence in the world economy. We have the second largest oil reserves in the world, according to the somewhat ineffective method of calculating reserves by only regarding the statistics of proven reserves. We also have huge water resources. If the United States continues to levy tariffs on lumber imports, the Canadian government will look to sell its oil to China and India. Furthermore, the current practise of selling the huge majority of petroleum produced in Canada to the United States must stop. If Canada, a net petroleum exporting country, sold its oil within its borders, rather than importing oil from unstable areas, we could lower our own fuel pricesinsert sarcastic dig at Canada's trade policies here. The requirement of passports would constitute one such measure of normalization. Several vigilante patrol groups on the American side have confronted visitors, demanding passports long before this measure has even been introduced. Talk about crazy... They show a total disrespect for international citizenry. Next time they need water, they shouldn't expect to their northern neighbour to help them out in a bind... Shooting yourself in the toe anyone?

The Struggle for Water (next century's oil?)

There has been a dispute over the milk river watershed, which meanders both through American and Canadian soil between Alberta and Montana. The irrigation in Alberta has diverted water from the watershed, leaving water supplies depleted downriver in Montana. This dispute is covered by a treaty over a hundred years old. This is not the only dispute, though. There has been talk of diverting water from the Lake of the Woods into the United States. NAFTA is fuzzy(a lack of clear borders) about water issues. The US cannot legally divert water from water that naturally exists in Canada, but as soon as we start treating it as a commodity, it comes under the jurisdiction of NAFTA, which is far from clear on the subject. Canada should use their water resources as leverage to require that the United States strengthen its sustainable development policies. Air and Water, after all, cannot be confined in borders like humans can. Air pollution from Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Chicago all end up in Canada, which in term affects the integrity of our natural resources.

NAFTA needs renegotiation. While it disgusts me that goods have freer movement than people, I think that in the current political climate the requirement of passports at the border mightn't be the worse thing that happens. What do you think about this issue?
©Trevor Cunnington

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

A Critique of Knowledge: Modern Day Bodysnatching

I know people romanticize and idealize knowledge. I do it myself. But some cases inevitably arise where knowledge is harmful.

In the late eighteenth century, a phenomenon called "bodysnatching" proliferated. People would dig up corpses from graveyards and sell those corpses to Medicine. The demand for corpses was so high that there was a famous murder case where the murderer killed someone for the expressed purpose of selling their body to the medical establishment. The will to knowledge became complicit in the production of immoral behaviour.

In the United States, when a homeless person dies, their body automatically goes to science. In other words, property ownership has become integral to the definition of the human being. A human being should be entitled to human rights, right? Isn't it a fundamental right to decide what happens to your corpse after death? If so, then doesn't this trample all over the humanity of the homeless? Truly, the homeless do not even own their own bodies in the United States.

Monday, January 02, 2006

Guatanamo Bay: The Political black hole

Canadian citizen Omar Khadr has been detained in Guatanamo Bay since 2002, when he was captured in Afghanistan. He has been held incommunicado by officials there under the dictates of the Patriot Act, and he has recently been charged with murder in the death of an American soldier in Afghanistan. In custody, he has endured torture; they have bound his hands and ankles in various painful positions for hours at a time, and at times they have not allowed him bathroom visits, resulting in him urinating all over himself. At one point, they used his torso, with his hands and ankles bound to each other behind his back, as a mop for his own urine.

When he was captured, he was fifteen years old. As such, the United States contravened international law that states that child soldiers captured in war should be held in protective custody and treated as victims of war rather than its criminals. He does not even necessarily know the charges that the United States has brought against him, and he has been denied due process, including access to legal counsel. In Afghanistan, he was fighting on behalf of the Taliban regime, and some accounts have reported that he threw the grenade that resulted in the death of Sergeant Christopher Speer. As awful as that may be, the United States cannot charge him with murder as he was fighting as a soldier, who are exempt from charges of murder in times of war. They are attempting to revoke his soldierly "privilege" of killing.

Although they originally sought the death penalty in the case, the United States wisely heeded the international pressure mounting against such punitive measures. But beyond this, they must allow him to have access to legal counsel so he can mount an appropriate defense if they intend to revoke his soldier status and charge him with murder. Furthermore, they must be held accountable for their breach of international law in the capture of a child soldier and the subsequent illegal forms of torture as pertaining to the Geneva Convention on Universal Human Rights.

Actions such as this certainly give fodder to Islamic Fundamentalists and their anti-Western fire, in addition to such grievous inequities as Iraq's situation of paying reparations for the first gulf war while enduring an occupation by one of the nations to which it pays reparations. The situation in Iraq merits a multicultural UN peacekeeping force, not an occupation by a hostile superpower.