Unfinished Business

(Hey, remember that time...)

Things are clueing up here. I'm down to about a dozen days now- my last weeks are filled with what feels like a closing ceremony. Packing and cleaning and booking and planning. Luckily, I'm a flagrant procrastinator, so I've hardly done any of it.

No, I'm far too busy tending to more important matters. Months ago, back in November, I tried to destroy Ben's phone with a bunch of fireworks. Since that didn't work (or rather, since the charred phone still did) I simply had to finish the job before leaving Korea.

Armed with the combined innards of several gutted roman candles, I set the scene and marinated everything copiously with lighter fluid. Ever cautious of safety, I used other fireworks as projectile fuse ignition doodads, to keep a 'safe' distance away.

The whole ordeal was a success. While the destruction was more of an extended fireball than the single, eyebrow-searing boom I feared, it sure burned the fuck out of the phone. I've highlighted the photo of the charred remains to show the screen (left) and the keypad (right).

Of course, I captured the whole thing on video (from multiple angles). Like most of my self-destructive exploits, it's been put to rock music and put online here.

After the phone met its maker (mister LG?) we were thirsty for more booze and potential destruction, so we met Mike and Adrian in Gangnam. That went like other Saturday nights often have here in Korea.

Start with eating charred pig and gulping beer and soju at a Korean restaurant. Then off to wander streets, drinking and probably annoying the shit out of Koreans. Actually, I think this night set itself apart in that we kind of went out of our way to do the latter. The specifics aren't real clear right now, but pictures of Adrian wielding traffic cones and megaphones can't be a good sign.

The cutesy heart pillow is a complete mystery.

Not content to keep our irritation at street level, we pulled ourselves into a Noraebang and screamed into microphones for a bit. I've actually got video from this, but I'd never release it to the Internet public, as doing so might incite riots. Or just make us look really retarded. Probably both.

I think the expressions on everyone's faces should suffice to communicate the sort of singing skills that were brought to the table that night. If that doesn't do the trick, the bottles of cheap booze on the table should augment the picture a bit.

After the Noraebombing, we wandered a bit and cabbed off to Mike's apartment, where we shot the shit (as well as Mike's pellet gun) until blinding sunlight reminded us to catch the train home.

This is the kind of note on which I want to leave. This kind of meandering Korean-ness. With only two weekends left here, I couldn't ask for better than more of the same, really.

I finally got my Holga film developed. Unfortunately, a little loss in translation mean that I got them developed into negatives. I scanned and reversed the negatives, and while the images are messier and blurrier than they'll be when I get them developed, they give me a good idea of the blurry images the infamously, wonderfully flawed camera will give me. They look fucking haunted. I'll look back at this and think I visited Korea sometime in the 1920s.

A lot of the pictures are spoiled (spring-powered film cameras don't have a delete button) but the ones that came out are worth it. I actually really like they way they look on film strips like this, too. Makes the ghostly glow all the more creepy. Makes this cool-digital Korea a little more warm-analog. I swear I can almost hear gears ticking inside my cellphone.

But I'll miss cool, digital Korea. It's given me just what I wanted from it. If I was in the mood to make bold, pretentious, uninteresting statements, I'd say it gave me one of the defining years of my adult life. I think saying that it gave me a hell of a year will suffice, though.

I'll miss a lot of things. I'll miss the food, for example, and everything that surrounds it.

Cooking your own galbi with friends. A collection of sixty-some-odd magnetic take-out ads that have been left on the other side of my door. Mascots who are not only willing, but honoured - excited, even - to have you eat them. A tank overfilled with about a hundred giant scary-ass battle crabs. A country that's so goddamn silly that it thinks potato is a good pizza topping. Not to mention corn and pickles.

Ice cream on salad. Cutting food with scissors. Whatever works, it's an interesting approach to culinary delights.

So many of the things that seem so funny about the food here is the Western food that's been warped by the fun house mirror of Korean culture. But as I mentioned, that's not the only part of Western culture that gets a bit blurry through the Korean lens.

Once again, I'm ignoring the myriad spectrum of thoughts and opinions Koreans actually have about foreigners, and I'm trying to define our image in Korean popular culture. And there are few things more popular in Korean than advertising.



In contrast to the singing, gambling cowboy image of a few weeks ago, some of the only ads in Korea that use white people portray them as creepy, plasticy repressed caricatures straight out of the '50s. There are more ads than these, and they all have even-creepier television versions.

Living in a place where you look so different from everyone is interesting. You're loved, hated, ignored, stared-at, fled from and fled to all at once. I think that's the crux of Korean attitude towards foreigners there. There is no one attitude, surely, other than the definite, universal realization that we "ain't from 'round these parts".

So regardless of whether we're liked or loved, we're inescapably alien.