Sunny Breaks

It’s getting cold here. This morning when I woke at the god-awful time of 6am, as I have been sentenced to for the remaining three weeks, the apple weather applet told me that it was -8 degs centigrade outside.
The floor heating has beeen difficult to regulate. In the evening as I unwind it is chilly of my feet but by midnight the heat ramps up and I cook where I lie on the thin mattress.
Last night I dreamt of a deluge and the things that sprung therefrom. I was on my little bike that I have here, riding through the muddy water with tires completely submerged but somehow managing to stay upright.
A moment later I was standing on a garden path with a large (knee-high) toad in front of me. It appeared to be smiling in a subtle way. Its skin was covered in lots of rough bumps that glowed like lava and slowly change colours across the spectrum. I turned to see another had hopped up behind me.

Had sat up late each night preparing the coffee for percolation. He’d put several beans at a time between pieces of newspaper and smash them with a hammer. What it produced was still not fine enough so he’d role it with a soup can. Had said it was becoming a chore but could not think of another way around the situation.

I just found this little promo for Transformer at the end of a digital version of it. Neat.

Old People.

Fight.

Cabbages.

I feel like I never quite ‘finished my say’ as they say here with regards to Japan and Tokyo. I liked it – that was my final assessment. I guess am a bit of a cultural elitist and I guess that a lot of the things that were taught to me when I was a stripling have been near-permanently ingrained. I am not as flexible as I thought I was and I accept that this is not such a great thing.

For instance, in China, where it is de rigeur to spit unwanted bits of food out onto the floor, I had trouble accepting this and there was no way I was going to participate. Compare this with the attitude of a colleague of mine, that being more along the lines of ‘cool!’ and got right into it.
For these kind of reasons Japan was more fitting to my way of being. Example: there, the WCs have the same amount of water down the bottom there to bomb into as you would find in a western country. Here in Korea there is often very little there, leaving one’s leavings high and dry—and my nose does not like. It’s just the way things are here. Sit-down toilets are overtaking squat-toilets but the lack of a port to “see one’s friends off at the port” with remains. I have heard that in times previous there was some need to get down in there afterward and examine the droppings to make sure you didn’t have worms but I think this era has passed.
And now I get to the point I am to make.

This is the pullquote. Things often stay the way they are for no other real reason than that’s the way things have been.

If a taxi driver puts his car in neutral and pushes it one spot forward up the rank rather than turning the ignition and touching the accelerator – then this is his habit and it will probably stay unless someone or something very persuasive comes along to change it.

The one last thing about Japan and here that I only really became aware of after getting back here was how how slaved to the car Seoul is.
This is something I find really interesting. According to wikipedia (so make of it what you will) :
1 Tokyo/Yokohama     Japan     31,112,000     7,200
3 Seoul/Incheon    South Korea     22,447,000    2,300 (ref)

I’m not about to get a calculator out but I can see that the density ratio is higher in Seoul. Tokyo takes up more space but they are a long way short of over double the pop. of Seoul.
Then comes the real kicker—with Tokyo being earthquake prone, a lot of the residential buildings are only two or three stories high. There are some high-rises but it didn’t look like the way things are here. They’re everywhere here.

When I first got to this city and had a go of the subway I got to thinking that the public transport here was awesome. Compared to Melbourne, I guess it is. Here, it is fairly adequate but then it needs to be with so many people travelling around to and from work. The wheels of industry would fall off if the subway didn’t run. I would say that the subway/train system is equal to Tokyo’s, but on top of it in Seoul there’s a much more extensive mesh of roads. There’s a lot more buses, taxis, motorbike, little trucks and single people in cars. I remember from the enviro activist days that it’s not just road’s we’re talking about when cars eat a city, it’s also all the parking and all the business serving cars. Long story short: Tokyo – more living space, Seoul – more car space.

There’s a lot more trees in Tokyo. It’s warmer. The old people are meeker, the way they should be.

Winter is coming and he’s not so much looking up at the icy stars as looking up to see if there are any stars up there anymore. It’s hard to tell through the glare.

Santa is coming and we’re expecting two of everything. Everything has to be bigger than last time.

He’s waiting for Santa, looking for that sleigh. Jab him in the arse for leaving a sleigh-long scratch down the side of the Audi last year.

Marking may be a pain, but writing mid-term tests allows me a little creativity.
“Vincent van Gough was known for doing something that was pretty crazy. Circle the crazy thing that he did.”
(a) He bit off Paul Gauguin’s ear.
(b) He lived in Antarctica with the penguins for a year.
(c) He cut off part of his own ear.
(d) He cut off part of his girlfriend’s ear.
(e) He painted pictures of Space Invaders before the game was invented.

You see how I got some delayed rhyme in the (a) n’ (b)? So far, no one has taken choice (e) but I’m less than halfway through.
The thing that I really dig is to see how they illustrate how their minds work. They circle, underline and make all kinds of markings through the question, hinting at what they think is the pivot-word. ‘Crazy’, and ‘crazy thing’ are most common.

One thing I like about getting weeks off like this is, no matter where I get to physically, I get brain space enough to think about writing fir the sunnybreaks more than twice a month.

A couple of weeks ago the geelong cats australian rule football team, the sox family’s chosen team, won the Premiership (last game of the season) after being losers for forty years. Several times during the 90s Geelong got into the Grand Final and we, the family, went to the games only to see them lose—it’s pretty tuff on a kid, letmetellya. It’s worse to come second than third or forth, that’s for sure.

A few times in the last couple of months mum’d told me about how well the team was doing. I listened but thought that they’d choke any week soon. There was probably more than a couple of gatherings of people watching the game in Seoul but I wasn’t really up to being around that kind of crowd. Even when I went to the games I’d often be approaching the whole viewing experience from a different angle than folks around me.

Thanks to a few wealthy people in anonymous places in Australia (I say wealthy because bandwidth pirates, Telstra, keep internet culture in poverty in aust.) I was able to download bit-torrents of the two halves of the game and ended up watching it on sunday night (it was on saturday arvo).

The first half was in Hi-def and looked fantastic. The game was good too. Well, it was a bit of a walkover, but when it’s your team doing the walking you don’t mind.
Sport doesn’t really warm the cockles of my heart, but it made me happy to see Geelong win.

As I was saying, barracking for the team is a family thing and extends through my mum’s side of the family. Here is a picture of one of my cousins who somehow got hold of the cup. They must be letting anyone have a feel of it these days. Probably charging 5 bucks a go.

Having a bunch of fun wandering around here and there in the city. Lots of things to tell but most of it’s fairly mundane.
Someone please break into my house and smash up my guitars. It’s the only way I could justify buying one here—but by golly they’re cheap. Cheap and good. Locally made Fenders, that is. Just look at this Jaguar and Jazzmasters.

The prices translate to roughly $621 USd. I don’t think they can sock a tax on you if you’re just carrying something as hand-luggage. There’s bass guitars too. I think I’ll go back there tomorrow and have a play.

The Japanese really do know how to do cute. This is the logo of a courier company—simple, yet something that pretty much everyone can understand, and cute!

I’m on my way to Japan. I’m surprised they’re letting me back in after the last little fracas.
Nevertheless, I am going back—my sister lives in Tokyo, did I mention that? Or as they say in Korea, I am going to the dokkyor.

Ah, it’s all in the past now. It’s almost funny when I can think back with this much distance between.
I was down in the south part of the main Island—I forget the name of the area now, funny that, but it was winter or nearing it and I was at that place that’s famous for the spa bath monkeys. The ones with red noses.

Man, you know I just wanted to get warmed up a bit – so I went in the water in the main section with the monkeys.
They didn’t take to kind to this, you see.
First it was just dirty looks, then looking away stiffly when I looked at them, as if they were saying, “good day, sir!” in a huffy English way. However, after living in Korea for two and a half years, I used to this kind of thing. I ignored it and enjoyed take-a-bath.
One of them splashed me.
I splashed back.
A larger one waded over slowly and in quite a deliberate kind of way, stood up and slapped me across the face.
A monkey slapped me across the face.
I would have none of this, yet could not lower myself to the truly barbaric notion of fisticuffs with a monkey.
I beat a retreat to the edge of the pool and was making to get out.
A monkey jumped on my back and puled me back down!
I wrestled free, got out quickly with several of the monkeys hot on my heels.
They were surprisingly fast little buggers and I was only just in front of them. I lost my advantage as I bent down to grab my backpack. I felt a push in the back, lost balance and went sprawling. Stuff from my bag went everywhere.
The silver of my pocket-knife, glinting orange in the light of sunset caught a monkey’s eye.
The monkey grabbed it, flipped out the blade and it was on. Two centimetres of raw stainless-steel terror!
Action music started blaring from speakers in tree-branches!
We danced around eachother keeping a low center of gravity, each waiting for a moment of weakness, the time to strike.

Needless to say, things did not turn out all beer n skittles for the monkey, for it is I writing this weblogue memoir and not he.
Caused a big international incident. On the re-entry form it asked ‘had I ever been convicted of a criminal felony in this country?’ I just lied—seemed to work okay.
So I’m here staying with my sister, did I mention that? Her place is tiny.

It’s a canadian movie from 1941.

I actually tried to watch this about a month ago. It was on TVlinks and I got to about halfway through before attempting to pause it to go to the toilet. The divX thing crapped out and I couldn’t get it back to the same spot without watching it it again.

As a side note, the whole communication via the internet and electronic means seems to be falling down when it comes to how to show telly and movies streaming. The whole thing dies on me often. I don’t knoww if it’s divx, or firefox or apple but someone needs to get their act together.

Back to the movie.
There’s submarines in the first five minutes—that’s what kept me watching. A German U-boat gets sunk in Hudson bay and a bunch of the nazis onboard have to make their way down through the countryside to the USA, which is at that stage, neutral. That’s right, in 1941 Uncle Sam didn’t have a problem with the Third Reich, or as thehy pronounce it in the movie, riiiissshhh.

Laurence Olivier is in it and he gets shot. The Nazis come across a community of Hutterites. (Go listen to their music.) This was the first of the funny scenes, where the head-nazi gets to a point where he was confident that the Hutterites would love Hitler too, based on the fact that they were german.
After dinner he gets up and huffs out the whole spiel, he gets to the end and does the salute + “Heil hitler” and so do the other three nazis with him, but all the Hutterites are still sitting there stony silent. The head-nazi sits down. I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, it’s just a funny movie. The main characters are the Nazis – we follow them through the county. It switches between bits where the Germans argue with canadians, and the canadians say how great it is to be free, free to complain, to worship, or to hang out in the forest with the Redfoot Indians while acting like a fop. It switches between that and bits that seem like Canadian tourism promos. that’s hard to do considering it’s in B&W.

I give this movie 3 cement mixers out of five.

When I was a third through the sixth year of my primary education we moved and I went to another school. There was a boy there whose family name was Cretin. He had red hair.

The other stuff I didn’t mention about taking a day out was that I went to a small seaside place called Jeong-dong-jin, which is about 20 minutes on the bus south of Gangneung.
It seems like the most recent edition of Lonely Planet, Korea is out of date enough to be almost useless.
It was a pretty nice little area – the sand looked pretty good for Korea. It was nice to see the eastern horizon. This place actually tries to be touristy – in that they have stuff for the tourist to do. There is a hotel perched on the side of the hill and it’s shaped like a cruise ship.

There’s this one little museum called ‘timestory’ which is all about clocks or cogs inside of clocks, I don’t exactly know because I didn’t go in. There used to be a gramophone museum, boasting that it was the largest in the world, but I guess it just got too big because they moved it to the other side of Gangneung and, as a result I didn’t see it.
A little further up the coast is a place called ‘Unification Park’ – one could ponder on the name for some time because the park is made up of one captured North Korean submarine and one donated yanky WWII cruiser. Check out the totally ace fotos here.
At this point I would like to point out that this is one thing that the LP book got completely wrong—the unification park is North of Jeongdongjin, not south.

I often get the feeling that the reader must think I am shitcanning everything I write about, and maybe sometimes this is true. There is some things I notice and I want to pass it on, usually without animosity intend. I mean, just look at how well I coped with that bus ride.
The yankee boat, I don’t know it’s name, was really quite big inside. The Korean Navy used the opportunity to put a bunch of recruiting propaganda posters and stuff in there, but at some point they ran out, so there’s also ceramics, fake plants and all manner of brick-a-brack.

I am going to write to the Korean Navy and suggest that their new slogan should be, “Korean Navy: It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll”.

The NK sub was really something else. You can imagine how excited I was to actually walk through a submarine that was being used in real, evil actions eleven short years ago.
The only info I have to go on is what the Lonely Planet said, so who knows if it’s true, but they say that when it crapped out on the rocks, there was 12 crew and 15 soldiers on board, which is pretty amazing considering how little space there is in there. I never knew they made subs that weren’t painted black (excepting the little yellow ones that people like Jacque Cuosteau drive).
I can find sweet FA info about this sub incident on the internet—but L.P. says that when it ran aground the captain had the crew short rather than get into the hands of the S.koreans, then he and the soldiers made an attempt to get back north via land. They didn’t make it and they all got shot.

Oh man, I just got back from a bus ride that normally takes two hours forty but today it was six hours forty. I coped with it surprisingly well. It’s situations like that that make me feel like The Jews in Nazi Germany—being herded into a boxcar = ‘perhaps something good will happen!’, being put in a big shower room with no clothes on = ‘I’ve got a feeling things are going to get better real soon’.
Every time the bus sped up I thought – ah that’s the end of it, it was just a car broke down snarling things up and it’ll be plain sailing from now on.

However, when we got to about halfway between yoju and eee-cheon, and it was gridlock from then on, again like the jews, I just resigned myself to the fact that there was nothing I could do about it, so just chilled. It’s a good thing me waters were not moving.
I have to hand it to the driver too. He made a break for it down the emergency lane whenever possible. You know how you can get stuck in a three-lane jam like that. You look out the window and see the same people over and over, eventually becoming like a little rolling community – you know that? Well it wasn’t happening because the driver was picking the quick lane all the time.

In any case I think I’ll write a letter to the law makers and suggest that the next time this national holiday comes up, they should make it that if a car breaks down on the motorway, its fair game for the other cars to shove it off and over the embankment. Or obliterate it with large-calibre machine guns. I can’t decide which.

I’ve always thought it was right for each person to have a theme song; one particular song that encapsulated their personality – maybe partly through lyrics but certainly not necessarily. In fact I had often been drawn to instrumentals.

My first theme song was The Lonely Bull by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana brass. Up until recently it was the version of The Guns of Navarone that The Skatalites, an old ska band, did. I think I’ve just switched again.

That’s right, Hall & Oates, I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do). Rediscovering it again last week—and then looking into the history of the track sealed the deal. Blue-eyed soulsters. A couple of whiteys successfully imitating a black sound, with this track at least. I like that sort of cross-over. Using violins on disco tracks is a similar example, although unrelated to (no can do).

I’d actually like to write a major motion picture detailing the rise (and fall) of the Hall & Oates duo. One pitfall I can immediately see is that it would be difficult to not have a lot of it set in a recording studio, which would be boring. I would have one or two gratuitous scenes to do with John Oates’ moustache. They would not be overly long, but enough to make the critics comment on it.
Another theme would be the teamwork thing, how eventhough Daryl Hall was the frontman and the pretty boy/girl he needed Oates there as some sort of cosmic balancer. I like it how, in the videoclips, Oates essentially does nothing. He holds a guitar, sings the odd backing word and has a moustache.

To the people here, is not the weather fan-fucken-tastic at the moment?—take away the humidity but leave the warmth and the viability to lead a normal life here goes up by magnitudes.
Anyway, so last night as I crawled out of the subway hole as per usual, I decided to walk home rather than catch the battle-bus.
There was some sort of festival event outside a govt. building. A high-school age band played the main riff of Nirvana’s Smell’s Like Teen Spirit, but stopped when it got to the singing bit. They threw their heads around more than was called for, wore girl’s cardigans and had terrible taste in guitars. You’re not supposed to use a slap-bass for a song like that.

Then within minutes the whole stage changed and it became like some kind of quarter-circus. There was a metal cage with a fucking tiger in it! The cage seemed overly small, the tiger didn’t look well treated and I immediately felt sorry for it. These kind of things, outdoor public events in Seoul, you can be assured that there will be no shortage of spot-lights or PA-volume. The speakers are always set to the highest so that the sound is breaking up. They played that 80s pop single, Man Eater (look out boy here she comes she’s a) by Hall & Oates.

Hall & Oates

I was kind of surprised at how they’d picked an appropriate song, but still had doubts that the tiger was a girl. The door lifted on the cage, the the tiger took a step out and pounced on a guy standing not far away. I really don’t know what he was doing standing there in the first place, on the stage like that. And of course the tiger was pissed, what with all the noise, light … plus the small cage.

I happened to be standing at an angle where I could see it all; all being how it swatted at his head to knock him back off balance and then (!) I dead-set saw those huge eye-teeth puncture right through the guy’s torso—stomach, kidneys, liver—who knows.

It reminded me of those teethy things you use to remove staples from bits of paper that’ve been stapled.

I probably never mentioned how I bought a midi-keyboard around my last birthday, nor do I recall mentioning my intentions to become an electronic music recording artist of the internationally renowned nature. It’s taking longer than I thought. It’s like writing; you have to actually put some effort in if you want to get anywhere.
Using a boosted copy of garageband 08, here is my first ditty, working-titled backbeet (1.1mb) and officially titled Throwing a letter off Pohang pier in January.

I think that no matter how much stuff I had there would always be something out there on the horizon of stuff that I had desire for. That’s not a complaint, it’s okay with me. It’s okay because these days I have a bunch of stuff that I wanted, say, 5 years ago. When I really think about it, I had most of the same kind of thing back then too, but perhaps different. Different computer, different guitar, different digital camera.

Here is a picture of my current heart’s desire, the Rickenbacker 4003 bass guitar, known for its ringing sustain, treble punch and solid underlying bass. It plays in stereo which makes it better than all other bass guitars. Lots of cool people have played them through the years and I’ve certainly been aware of it. People such as Kim gordon, mod-rockers, Yes, and Joy Divison.
Reading the wikipedia page about the televison show, Are You Being Served?, and how it mentions that the bassline to the theme song was probably donw with a Rickenbacker tipped the scales. Ref. Are You Being Served?.