I've been: It occurs:
I've been: walking in Seoul, creating mental maps, organizing spaces. This is probably the first time that I'm appropriating the city as a conscious choice of location, rather than as a default, flitting from subway stop to stop, grounding geographical location on a one-dimentional colored subway line.
3 areas I've been mostly in, in no particular order:
- 삼성Samsung/강남Kangnam/압구정Apgujung (they're all the same, places to eat/drink/watch movies.)
- 인사동Insadong (sometimes-forced Korean-quaint-old-natural, relieved mostly by the fact that it's a space for the appreciation of A Korean Identity, counter to the more prevalent undercurrents of Korean inferiority complexes)
- Gosh that sounded so elitist/judgemental.
- it's just a part of identifying/feeling capable-authorized of such judgement.
- 종로3가Jongro3ga/을지로3가Uljiro3ga/청계천Chonggye-chun. (Those areas, full of liveliness and in my opinion the more fleshy beating heart of Seoul. Cameras, motors, zippers, lace, semiconductors, pvc, watches, lights, bathroom sinks, art supplies, film, fabric, wood, glass, posters, paint, rubber mats, what not. Raw business in its operation, supplies and dealers, advocates of the corporeal, the unprocessed, the smelly busy active and pure core of things. Boxes lashed onto motorcycles twisting between cars losing themselves in a two-stroke haze cloud sliding down side alleys. Someone sits outside smoking, three hours before dusk. I take out five cameras onto a table into a pair of knowledgeable hands and the atmosphere changes, shifts imperceptibly into mutual appreciation, inspection, lexicon flowing under the table : seal, filter, fungus, pc, synchronization.
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It occurs to me that Virginia Woolf and Henri Cartier-Bresson feel old to me, old, less engaging, more, er, boring. I feel as if I've betrayed part of myself that would try to see if the intensity of my pen-underlines (representing the intensity of my delight and excitement) would sublime through the page and leave rip-marks so soaked with dark that they would slowly chromatograph outwards and outwards. Just just, representational, visual, mimetic, 's no longer cutting it. I get angrier at photography, the action of capturing -- irrationally and without reason, worried that a photo was taken because uh that looked nice and I wanted to capture that nice-looking uh that.
I realize that I read Lolita all wrong all wrong, all trustingly and pre-post-modernly, as a straight love story, a real one, with truth and beauty and sincerity and all that. I read Pale Fire recently, and I realize that Nabokov is all about the process of writing, the role of the narrator in disguising, re-inventing and masking, and the role of the reader (in his novels) to penetrate the narrator's mask and arrive at some apparent 'inner reality' that may or may not exist. In short, the reader's action is in parallel with the narrator, appropriating a viewpoint to create another one, and also, the writer and reader is on opposite sides, with each side wanting to interpret and create and justify...
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These ideas, and the effort necessary to realize them. more, more. get on it, taeyoung, self-motivate.
- segmentation of spaces with aural fingerprinting
- portable boundaries
- l+c