this feeling. it is of passing through, of being forged, shaped. I can feel how this is shaping me, slowly, gradually, eventally. is it towards the better? that is for my own grounding to do. it is possible for this to turn me bitter, angry, suspicious, hard, thin-lipped. it is possible for me to pass through this into a realm of compassion, soft eyed, a kind of deep-sighed, oh, you know, I know, full of hurt-driven understanding. I know, you know? that you were all trying your best. that we were all trying our best to protect ourselves.

yeah.

behind this of course, is a well of sorrow, of deep sorrow. is this how thoughts ought to hold shape? is this what this all is worth? I remember talking to K a few months ago, on the pier. do you not understand? I said, in mock outrage, first shaking in the air, mock outrage but sincere sadness. do you not see these connections? understand how special and precious they all are? the shimmering mass of relationships? they've what we've got, the starstuff, the tender filaments that shape our environments? and is this what it's worth? what years and decades of connections is worth?

some time ago I half-joked that being in love with white people has given me the patience and understanding to think about race in a different light. there is no enemy in a person, no bad person, just people, bearing the history and weight of beliefs and processes, somehow believing that protecting a way of life requires to be on the attack, that protection requires damage. self-defense, hold your ground. and that these things congeal into a self-reinforcing system. the colony, the castle. the psychogeography of fortification come to bear on the self. it's a half-joke. a quarter-joke. an asymptotically-approaching-zero joke.

I can feel this experience shaping my understanding of people. where does belief come from? how do systems knit together? the fear of being left out of the group; how does that operate as an action of shunning? how does harm happen from a place of hurt? how often is harm justified, not as harm, but as a form of self-protection and preservation, retribution from the language of future-self-preservation?

if retribution is supposedly for a future self, against a future scenario, then what is at stake is our imaginaries, our understands of what the future could hold. does it keep on playing out the way it has? are there any possibilities of transformation, or change? I imagine drawing the future trajectories of planes in the sky, pool balls across a table, someone wanting to hold them to their linearity. this will go straight. this will go straight.

--

the questions I have are myriad. they spill over and pile onto the table and I am in the midst of wondering how I should talk about this, openly. should I draw a system diagram? write scattershot? just mull it over, wander amongst it?

or: in the end, are such systems things I cannot and should not understand? people act in the way they do, and I will do so too, and we make whatever system we do? is it part of my own unhealthy pattern that I may seek understanding in order to move in a way that guides us towards a harmonious whole?

or: this notion of the self; where does it come from? whose notion are we using? we love to say 'put on our own oxygen mask', but we wouldn't say that about food, would we? and the fact of the matter feels like, that I want to argue is: most things are like food, than oxygen masks. most places that we inhabit are not burning planes crashing to the grounds, but full of days, days of pain and hurt and joy and satisfaction and love, but days, in which the sun rises, then sets, and rises, and sets. if I live my life like there are oxygen masks I need, then I live my life like a burning plane.

if I live my life like there are days in my life, then there is food, on the table. we serve ourselves, we serve each other. we look each other in the eye, and smile. 'wine comes in at the mouth, love comes in at the eye.' and we start eating, together, and the act of eating together, itself, nourishes us. together.

--

i imagine us as these galaxies, these universes, holding stories. inside of those experiences there are shimming loops, graphs, that twinkle. past experiences hold the trembling energy of emotions, in the body and in the experience. in the present, an encounter puts us in the same body, in a similar experience, and that emotion reverberates out, shaping the present moment's experience. the present day plays out, according to the same way, a kind of sports play shape, football diagram where the dynamic is actually the movements in-between. are we sadly doomed or happily destined to repeat these out, well-worn paths of hurt and joy?

to me the answer always has been yes and no, we see it and we shape it, we move around, we shake our bodies, play a little bit, learn how to dance. find meaning in the movement. sometimes, the answer is a shaking trembling gasp in the body making its way into the world. sometimes, the answer is stillness. sometimes, the answer will be ... well, I don't know.

I guess we'll find out together, self.

some kind of optimism. here we are. do families change? do people change? some sort of change bubbling up since august. to move ahead. what are the words that come out of my fingers?

I am learning. I am growing. in some ways I feel like I am younger. I have become younger. recently I have been ten, fourteen, twenty one, twenty four, twenty eight, thirty two. I oscillate between my ages. I remember all of my selves.

it's like the inner world is so new, so new. there's so much. I know there are things like career, projects, work, things like that. I know that's important. but what seems so much fascinating right now is the world of the self, of the community, of you and me, of history. where we come from. where we move towards. how we replicate patterns. how we live.

in the midst of this where am I? what kind of change do I wish to see? there is policy and urban planning. the desires of my mind and the desires of my heart misalign. this is good. I have two vectors. I have more than two vectors. they pull me in different ways. I don't average between the two, though. somehow I increase in volume. it's like the real and the complex. somehow I move in a complex combination of my heart and my mind. my movement newly circulating. discovering places that, according to the dimension of the mind, seems identical, but might be varied, complex, richly new within the dimension of the heart.

architecture, space, design, career. oh sure.

but also: emotions, family, history, psyche, self, memory, trauma, embodiement, intergenerational communion, communication, misunderstanding, language, distance, exhortation, pain, feelings, fear, consensus, recognition, acknowledgment, cameraderie, companionship, commitment, trust, depth, faith, gratitude, anchorage, adventure, exploration, discovery, unknown, self, loss of self, new selves, finding other selves, being in one's self, changing one's self, shaping one's emotions. isn't this all a big experiment? to which direction do I move? do we move? does it matter that I ask the question? because I ask already I find myself driven by my heart, to wander in the direction of my emotions, to let myself feel, to find and feel...

post-semester pre-2012 snippets, like little truncated section cuts through my thoughts.

all these ideas, all these ideas. if there is like a snapshot of me right now, for the me in 2012, 2013, and 2014 looking back, then it's:

1) negate vs posit, negative vs positive, the critique vs design mindset; at any point there's nothing but either a a) reaction to the present and a modification/change that attempts to arise out of this present, or b) a willing suspension of understanding in favor for a placed statement that wishes to be neither 'new' or 'impartial' but rather simply is stated as being, as there, as what-I-would-like-to-see, and everything else organizes itself and mobilizes itself in order to move towards that future. posit or negate, it's like there's a single continuum, and there's only hope in the former and failures in the latter.

2) it's all people, really, just people, people and their relationships, people and their relations, and people organizing around people. eventually these organizations (between people) become coagulated and calcified into concepts that claim to be free of that initial medium. (for example, the way the word 'ripple' becomes abstracted from the material condition of liquidity, viscosity, fluidity and becomes an isolated way to describe a phenomenon.)

so there's nothing but people all the way down;

3) support each other, otherwise all is for naught.

I am on a train train I am on a train, looking out the window at a dusky sky. There is: bluish infrastructure, stark skeletal trees, puffs of smoke hanging still in the air.

Two things:

One: I am suddenly reminded of: I am in the darkroom in high school, developing, and I hear mr. C and J talking about J's photograph, and J explains the meaning behind the photograph and this emotional connection he has to the photo (of his grandmother). mr. C explains that an outside viewer can't really see or feel this emotion, and I hear (all the while rocking pans of developer and stop back and forth) J then explains that he understands but that he thought it would show anyway. and I remember thinking then that I liked that, the concept of an emotion soaking into the image, oozing out into the photograph, despite all possible odds and the likely disconnect that happens when you show someone a photograph of someone/something that matters to you. but can't you see? Afterwards I leave the darkroom into the light and J's standing there quietly, looking at his photograph, trying to become an other so he can look at this anew.

Two: more and more I feel: everything is in the meat of the thing, like the actual making process, the dirtying of hands in sawdust and powder and stuff; this is where things really happen, where the productive conflict between theory and praxis exists. Either they happen in a concrete cerebral process or they happen in a concrete tangible/physical process. Here is a preemptive new year's resolution: less input and more output, to privilege writing over speech, contemplative action over conception.

things-a-changin.

at some point I looked around and realized it was december 2010, the end of a year, and it's funny because time for me always seems stationary, the way that you grow up with people who are always in your same age, everyone's always on the same age bracket with you more or less, until one day you look back and realize that you're not in seventh grade anymore. like climbing a mountain and all of a sudden looking back at the ground which is oh-so-far away.

sometimes in studio I would catch myself looking around and think -- is this graduate school? is this this? are the tasks, the thought processes, the motions I am undergoing mature, or developed, or advanced enough to be called 'graduate'? or: where are these certain ideas? where are these discussions? (the sound of a hand slapping against a table) I want to talk more about ineffective architecture, dead architecture, unethical architecture, ethical architecture, architecture with a short lifespan, things like that; what is it like to make a building that does not function? does function? architecture for the image? what is it to have an architecture formed from usage? usage that solidifies into structure?

at one point I vocalized to E.: architecture that's impossible (not unfeasable, but impossible) is like an alien anthropology, claude levi-strauss for the martians, or more concretely like ursula k. leguin writing intelligently and carefully about the sex/gender structures of other species on other planets somewhere. which is to say: absolutely fascinating, interesting, and obviously separated from our current existence. and if there's a value to be gained in this alien anthropology, then it's maybe either a) because the pure value of imagining these situations is fun and b) because the analysis of something supposedly (literally) 'alien' to us actually doubles back and touches us again, that in reading historical fiction about some other non-existent society, we gain some other knowledge, or expound upon certain strains of thought. these narratives work as elongated thought-experiments, maybe, and we bring it back into contemporary life, absorbe the logics found in these novels into our own selves.

or maybe it's rather like sci-fi, technological sci-fi, which as a whole generates these strong mental image of 'what-the-future-is-like', and as such operates to modify and form the course of human movement and operation. what, did you dream of a future in which you could talk to someone and see their face when they were thousands of light years away? that you could fly on your magic carpet to see someone else? that hologram rooms would exist and you'd spend your entire life in them? sci-fi, or the image generated from overall sci-fi, is the mirage-like endgoal that technological progress moves towards, maybe, an image in the distant sky that you try to march towards as straight as the bird flies, but in the process you find yourself wandering around terrains, stumbling onto new building blocks, and once you get there we all realize that things are different. the networks that enable the face-to-face communication of video is not as interesting as the other repercussions of online networks: massive modifications on the level of social interactions, crowd-created software, instantaneous online communities, and so on.

and so then, in terms of architecture, what is this? are the monolithic structures of superstudio and the movement of the walking cities of archigram cut-outs that architects paste on their wall as an idealized image? 'somewhere, the architect works in his or her drab gray office, dreaming of a radical future'? is it the endpoint of a vector that points that-a-way, these radical optimistic fictions serving as long-term goals, the unachievable yearning for over-there generating all these other things in effort?

=

post-mortem, really.

My god. Bridges are beautiful. New York is beautiful. Buildings are beautiful.

almost.

--

more bite, less bark. hello.

ruskin:

"Imperfection is in some way sort of essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent…. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty…. To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy."

--

run run run run run

you see these photos and they're black and white with a harsh flash, probably desaturated in photoshop or shot with a yashica t4 or something, and it's a photograph of a girl laughing and some skateboard on the ground and the flash means that the background drops away into black more than quickly, and the punctum (if there is one) for you is probably more than anything the gradient of this dropping-away that happens at the upper edge of the photograph, and also the thin layer of shadow that follows the curves of a pant leg or a hand and makes you think 'space' or 'emptiness' -

and what's this? what's it to know that the circles you are in and the friends you take and the people you interact with are at there sincerest, most sincere, trying for themselves and making things to make things, but that this becomes exported out into this aesthetic found and followed as an imitation of the byproducts of following this interest? maybe you live in a warehouse, or you laugh on top of rooftops, or you bike around in the cold, or your friend's bartending in chinatown. sure. "export" is this funny word, and by funny I mean sinisterly appropriate, because what starts as idea and becomes followed through with effort often turns into product (which isn't bad at all) and becomes fetishized into something else. perhaps the space, step, gap, delay between product and fetish is where everything happens, this is the battleground of us versus us where there are no such things as victories or losses but just distributions, leanings, border patrol guards.

if anything the byproduct of doing a lot of design work is that these things become much more transparent all the time; the immaculate presentation of a product hinges on the subtle alignment of images on a grid, or the forms of a typeface and their thickness, size, geometry. so-called elegance and put-togetherness comes from an indesign page and can sprout from that and only that. there is this remarkable, incredible accessibility to the tools of elegance-creation that is so very one-sided, and this one-sidedness is both what design exists in pursuit of and supports, a one-sided fetish, a pop-up facade that nobody on one side believes to be anything other than a facade and that most everybody on the other side conceives as a relative structure. of course that's how it is.

it is always good to make. making is always always better than talking about making. for many reasons: a, b, c, d, e. one of these (reason d, say) is because talking about making invokes a paralysis, a stoppage. making without talking creates something. and it's always better to create something than to not have something at all.

the freedom of a city without automythologizing impulses.

just go out and do it, you FUCKER.

thingies to see.

Dec 27: EXP Performance?

Dec 27:Crying Nut, Moonshiners, Rux, Copy Machine @ Sangsangmadang, 7pm, 35000 won.

Dec 27:Linus Blanket, Starry Eyed @ Club BBang. 7pm, 15000won.

Linus' Blanket, way too mellow and cutesy at times. Used to be part of my regular soundtrack junior year of high school. Oh man oh man.

Dec 28:Sugar Donut, No Brain @ Sangsangmadang. 7pm, 25000won.

I probably won't go to the last few shows I just listed. But Sugar Donut was another main band I listened to a lot, another staple on my duct-taped rubber-banded CD player. They're a bit powerpoppy, but -- what can I say? They still sound nice.

Dec 27-28: Participating artists' talks/11 artists and their motives. 4pm and 2pm respectively.

Dec 28: Bulgasari performance. "experimental noise"/. Sounds interesting, as publicly underground as possible, maybe. I should go.

Dec 11 ~ Dec 29: aliceon: adieu media 2008

Dec 17 ~ Dec 31: New Generation Art Fair @ Sangsangmadang 상상마당 gallery

Nov 7 ~ Dec 31: TRANSMISSIONS BY AVPD @ ssamziespace

Dec 20 ~ Jan 2: kim yun-tae exhibition?

Dec 5 ~ Feb 1: Label Market @ Sangsangmadang

Go to 퍼플레코드, get cds by 비둘기 우유 and Daydream. Korean shoegaze.

there's such a youngness and a newness here. maybe because part of it is so devoted to staying alive, to having a space, to performing. intent focused not on the process but on the goal of subsistence, activity. everything is always to some extent 'underground'. it's admirable. there's a small community.

again, a basis on exclusivity. it's small because everyone else is big. they're big because this is small. who cares? an argument for arbitrarity only discounts an underlying belief in objective ends, realities, foundational universal teleologies.

who's here? who's here to take part in this haze? if korea and seoul are utopian it's because real-world necessities are utterly absent here, for me, during these breaks. the apartment is utterly still. the refrigerator that is my brother (we share the same birth year) whirrs away.

let's: walk with headphones, wait for buses, go to cheap restaurants, stay late on the subway, go to someone's house party. afterwards walking out the sun starts setting or has already set. it's noisy outside, but in a quietly noisy way. the hubbub is quiet. the noise is quiet. quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet quiet.

this article just tears me up.

all of a sudden: I do know what it's like to pass winter in a old dormitory with one-pane-thick wooden windows overlooking the tennis courts with boston in the distance. It's cold and nobody's around and you wake up on a sunday morning and walk out the front door in your pajamas. that girl you like is in another dorm. there's someone walking outside barely awake to the dining hall with its chimney steaming of smoke. if you go, there will plates of leftover scrambled eggs and a scattering of people talking idly. it's too cold. there's a box of pizza lying empty on the desk, a videogame has been paused on the television overnight, a sweatshirt lying around on the couch over there. most everyone is asleep or absent.

maybe you decide to go into the city. the walk is twenty minutes, the trolley is fifteen minutes, the T is thirty-five minutes into harvard square.

four years you later you keenly and always understand that your recollection is only yours, because for those who stayed in that city the overlay of people and encounters dilutes every human presence on every street corner. the most recent inscriptions of a palimpsest are the most visible.

there were still: the forbidden, the hidden, the mystical, promises of this, this, this. once you found a medium format negative lying in a book, ran to develop a print. some soldier standing. when was this from? who was this? that experience was a convenient metaphor epitomizing this, this; there's more, it'll happen, there's stuff to find. there are few rankings. are you interested? are you fascinated? life becomes permeated with deliberation, careful examination. what is this? what is that?

--

what's more valuable -- heterogeneity that comes from seeking after obscurity for the sake of being different, a reliance upon an external definition of a norm ---- or being comfortable with (or deliberately comfortably oblivious to) the relatively mundane, normal, slightly interesting, believing in the myth of an untouched presence unaffected even by that which one usually wishes to rebel against, and so therefore not rebelling for the sake of rebelling manifests itself as a hope for independence that may or may not align itself (hume's word is "conform", I say co-incide) with a complacent attitude of embracing the norm?

--

cuuuunctation.

I missed my flight.

One thing that strikes me, taking trains out in Queens so far out on the edge of this borough that it borders suburbia, is the amount of space here. Without any buildings to block my perspective from close up I see the horizon with sheer scale. I am struck by how large those manhattan buildings are, the verticality and closeness making the sky into a vertical negative of the skyline, rather than the gently punctuated expanse that i see here now. Negatively defined, the sky gets squeezed in whenever it can in the city, becomes molded, shaped, formed, malleable according to the whims of itself visually wealthy, graphically rich, optically abundant residents. The sky fills the apartment shaft, surrounding the contour outside a capital H. Phenomenological power is lost, given to the creators of buildings, the activators of light-switches.

In the country and the suburbs the sky is wider, flatter, larger, domineering. Scale provides this. The slope of a straight line from a point on the ground to the top of the empire state building drops exponentially as the y-intercept moves away from the origin (Macy's at midnight) towards infinity (jamaica, queens; lax; icn)...

What am I saying? The iphone keyboard is tedious to type with. Bottleneck squeezes things into indigestible chunks. Constipation pontification.

Here is a reiteration of an idea mentioned in an interview between Michael Silverblatt and David Foster Wallace, about Infinite Jest. Here is the book, in two dimensions:

Vertically: the narrative flows into and around the structure of the book, nestling into the lower areas, naturally fragmented due to the laws of gravity, storytelling.

Horizontally: the Koch curve timeline runs jagged, folding upon folding upon itself, with an infinite length, an infinite amount of detail, the molecules of the Incandenza family visible somewhere in the curve, and more.

--
The narrative starts; our characters are introduced.

--

--

--
and the denouement, which rather than being an 'ending', is the fulfillment of the tip of a complete structure (the narrative of events):

The storyline is not integration; it's not the area under the curve, but rather the limitless area above it: literature, starting on a platform of fiction, growing into the aether above.

More on this later.

some thoughts looking out bus windows, walking on different bricks a different shade of red:

--

Encryption based upon publicly-available files: a book cipher, but with software versions. Normal encryption/compression involves: ciphertext ==key==> plaintext. In this idea, the encryption involves: ciphertext ==book==> plaintext. Erg - I guess the book is still the key, but the idea is that the ciphertext is so compressable because the book is a large enough file. Maybe it's a stupid idea.

--

In Doug Aitken's book Sleepwalkers, for his video installation of the same name, there's this great interview with Melissa Plaut, and they talk about the aura of the city, and mystical flows, and segments of time. I can't find it online, but it's great, nothing really special, just filled with small snippets of quiet exuberance. It's less of an interview, more of a coordinated duet, in which they agree with each other, complement each other, weave in and out circling and talking about the same city.

--

After talking with Clara, I reaffirm: Politics is everywhere. This is simultaneously a reason for woe, joy, and also something quite normal and not warranting exclamation.

--

Meta-knowledge versus knowledge; the study of understanding knowledge, as a sort of side effect of understanding.

--

I created this diagram a few weeks ago as part of a computer music project. I kinda like it. It was part of a project based around the idea of subdividing (into segments of time) a room into a series of spaces, and then sonifying those spaces into sounds (that are devoid of time).

"The idea draws from the image of a djinn releasing itself into the air, sublimated as sound. The process of listening involves the process of anti-creation; in listening to the sound, you disturb the forces of creation at work. Every time the space is opened, the recording/generating process stops, and a djinn is released, its inception process is interrupted.

Also: to a solipsistic self, the interior space of the room ceases to exist when I
close the door of a room. From my point of view, my timeline is punctuated at periods by the interior space of the room, and vice versa. Leaving and entering the room is like a thread weaving in and out of a two-sided strip of cloth; on either side of the cloth, there is only a series of disconnected pieces of thread, and empty spaces, in which the thread punctures the cloth and is on the opposite side.

I wanted to explore this idea in terms of a space, in which opening the door releases a sound that is a tangible aggregation of the space/area that was sealed in the room: in other words, the segments of string running on the underside of the strip of cloth. The user’s opening and closing the room divides the room into a series of rooms, like the disconnected pieces of thread. The sound that is released defines the space within that was contained, because the texture and quality of the sound is actually generated by the portion of time that passed -- each sound generated is the aural representation of an entire section of invisible space (with dimensions width x height x depth x time). "

-me, Spaces

last night in new york, 2007. when I come back you'll be in the new year, dear city.

smoky night, with sulfurous smoke really rising from sewers, being wisped away each time a car passes over it. the empire state building towering high, and taxis going especially fast riding waves of green lights down lexington ave. large buildings turned unmonumental by people and humanity, turned again monumental and overarching by fog, clouds, nature.

-

Movie theatres deal in space - pure space, offering size.

-

I finished Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo. Most of the book was on the M16/M34 buses going crosstown; I think this was semi-intentional on my part, since the book chronicles a one-day journey of a stretch limo going crossbound on 47th street, from east to west. Thirteen streets south I mimic a fictional world, following DeLillo's finger-paths on maps, in parallel and not quite touching.

I'm struck how much of Fury (Salman Rushdie) I'm reminded of - powerful men angry, furious, pushing against the city, the sky bearing down, immortality realized. Cities are always rendered with such loving grace, such ethereal presence; they're larger than life and angry and out to get you. In some ways, I feel like this is an attempt of the author at trying to depict a universal city, shared and inhibited simultaneously. In practice, in reality, in experience, cities are more personal, experienced within personal spheres - cities, experienced within a singular unit of taste, feel, sound, vision. My relationship with the city is less about bumping into individuals and more about mixing in a crowd; about closed stores and fire hydrants, walking down avenues, calculating and orienting myself along this grid. This lattice of magnetism runs off-north, off-south, creating its own power structure, its own method of alignment: New York - Skewing Your Internal Compass for Centuries.

The city is a shared language without territory, internalized without ownership. I have this city, and it is not mine.

How many cities do you speak?

-

Quote by Robert Smithson, heard at a talk at Performance Lab Space by Piper Marshall:

"Size determines an object, but scale determines art. A crack in the wall if viewed in terms of scale, not size, could be called the Grand Canyon. A room could be made to take on the immensity of the solar system. Scale depends on one's capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception. When one refuses to release scale from size, one is left with an object or language that appears to be certain. For me, scale operates by uncertainty."

Robert Smithson, The Spiral Jetty, 1972

it's good to be back sometimes, I suppose. I do miss living here, identifying with these places. I came back and bridges got flashier, things with more lights, larger sans-serif fonts with larger designs, the 2-line gets platform barriers, a new building sprouts in 잠실, cars with emergency lights in department store parking lots. I went out today and thought about the size of these subway cars, the stance and method in which people assemble themselves, stand facing outwards, away from the center, the rows and rows of sodium lights, another bus looking out a window reading and listening. oh man man.

I say this all incoherently and haphazardly and stupidly unedited but to have trust in the in-between and to describe this momentary return is like describing faint notes of taste, or a proustian madelineian reminsecence immediate momentary and piercing:

today I was looking out the window when I saw the side of the bus and something that reminded me of something other else, didn't really matter, less subject than presentation. I could feel my spine stiffen and this - oh this these things at the core of things - this initial jerk, slight slip sideways at recognition, a burp in the process of a slight alignment of the past.

gosh, memory is a funny thing, and this oscillation is as well, and to return back here is to 1) attempt to accept this place for where it is, (which really means that I attempt to accept the union set of the inverse sets of me and this place, what-we-both-don't-have-in-common), 2) identify my own lack of identification, ascertain the degree with which I am distanced and external, (and in the constant permeation of a mainly streaming culture to lose all of these wit-ful humor references, whatever),

to 3) return and to attempt to assign great meaning or symbolism to the idea of return itself, memory itself, a sentimental romanticization of the idea of cities and leaving, apparent disconnect, et cetera et cetera.

I'm tired, all I know is this feeling of the under, depth, a grounded sodium orange accented by the sensation of float, of gentle and inculpable disconnect,

I found some ansel adams photos in a bookstore the other day, and realized now -- wow, does he have a crazy sense of composition. his photographs collapsed to the point of blocks-of-color non-imagery would still be astounding, dynamic. no wonder. forget nature, sentences talking about "the grandeur of nature" or what not.

korea. it's cold here. I've eaten: 떡볶이, 붕어빵, 순대, 오뎅, 만두. off the street, mostly. quota fulfilled? I need to eat some potatoes at a highway rest station, chew on dried squid absentmindedly. oh no, against italicization.

(wait, what do italians call italics? surely someone's asked this before. let's google:
"italics in italy": 0 results.

perhaps italics in italy is still italics, some sort of self-referential? hamburgers in hamburg, frankfurters in frankfurt. haha. I am a korean, an italian, a hamburger, ich bin ein Berliner.)

is it funny to be back? things tingle in the end of my toes. i've moved, no longer living in my previous apartment. Hmm, I spent part of my puberty years there (pubertinous years? pubertinilicious? pubeilescent? oh, pubescent!). aw gosh, it's not the same being back, but it's the same ever.

----

so far I've held importance in the in-between, the sliver of importance, the space between turned pages, the thickness of a photographic negative, things like that. the importance of a pause in the spoken word, sunlight on your nape as you turn around...

is seoul larger? seoul seoul seoul seoul seoul. funny place. oh gosh. gosh gosh gosh.

---

"Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen in his Peenemünde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating the Law which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional to temporal bandwidth."

"Temporal bandwidth," is the width of your present, your now. It is the familiar ∆t considered as a dependent variable. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are."

-Gravity's Rainbow