New Travel Article

Here is a new travel article about Korea which was recently published on The Expeditioner, a travel website based out of Brooklyn.

Mixing It Up In Seoul: 5 Unique Ways To Experience South Korea

Travelers often feel a certain pressure to see everything of historical and cultural significance when they visit a new city or country. They frantically rush from museum, to monument, to palace as if they are writing a guidebook, and before they know it, the trip is over. They return home exhausted, armed with an overabundance of stock postcard pictures hastily snapped in front of [insert appropriate tourist attraction here] to show to their family and friends. Not only does this method of travel limit their understanding of the contemporary culture, but what’s even worse, it doesn’t seem to be much fun.

I spent the last six months living and teaching in Seoul, South Korea. During this time it was not the guided tours or visits to significant sites that ultimately shaped my understanding of the country, but rather the common everyday happenings that were both revelatory and enjoyable. My best moments came when I stopped viewing Korean culture from afar and instead participated in it.

With this in mind I have created a list of things to do in Seoul. While the obvious attractions — Namsung Tower, the DMZ, the palaces, Myeong Dong, Insadong — are all places I recommend you visit if you have time, my list is intended for people in pursuit of a more unique and participatory experience. It includes some things your average Korean might do in a weekend and other things that are a bit more creative. But for me, all of them…

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE.

http://www.theexpeditioner.com/2011/10/17/mixing-it-up-in-seoul-5-unique-ways-to-experience-south-korea/

Paris and Newark: Same Difference

Paris is a lot like Newark, New Jersey. There are buildings and roads and cars and people. The people like to eat, sleep, fuck, have a good time, and earn money. They smoke cigarettes and they drink alcohol and they occasionally look up at the sky and wonder, but mostly they just go about their day. It is really quite the same, in fact. They have windows and door frames, they wear socks and shoes when they leave the house, there are trees with leaves and benches in parks so that people can sit. The people eat with forks and spoons, chopsticks in Asian restaurants, and they laugh the same and kiss the same, and even fart the same. In this sense it is also a lot like Seoul, South Korea and Ko Phangan, Thailand and Edinburgh, Scotland where people also live under roofs and have windows and door frames and eat and sleep and fart more or less in the same manner. There must be some correlation between these places that I’ve been. A common conqueror? A silk road, perhaps?  What a profound disappointment to discover the world is full of farting people that reside under roofs and have eyes and ears and butt cheeks all the same.

So I am from here and you are from there, and I have been here and you have been there, and we can talk about it until one of us falls asleep in our soup (which is also the same)—but aside from a handful of astronauts and a myriad of lunatics no one has ever been anywhere all that different, because, well, it doesn’t exist.

Ode to the Eiffel Tower

I once read that you were nothing more

than a giant dick rising into the soft Parisian sky.

(I didn’t read that, I made it up, but who’s to know or care?)

Although man always can (and always will) build a bigger phallic,

you are the unmatched bachelor in this city of arches.

Fastened by a million bolts? A million links of steel?

What does it matter, anyhow?

If you really care, Google it.

Your glory lies in that like hope or love or god or death

you can be seen from almost anywhere,

but then at times you are forgotten.

And last night I discovered while chewing on a stale baguette,

that when night falls, you are not a penis after all.

Under the mystical guise of darkness

your steel staff transforms magically

into a golden waterfall in a diamond dress

that dances on the hour like moonlight on the sea,

and that no one, not even the dead, can watch with honesty

and not be moved.

two more drawings

Yellow Flowers

doubles

ultimate goal: to get poem onto canvas and canvas onto dilapidated graffiti-stained walls.

the poem: The Flowers

A woman brought me flowers and told me to treat them as if they were her.
Orange-yellow flaming flowers, I parted her lips.
She was not lonely, she said. She had baseball…students…coworkers…
Her legs ran down my bed like green stalks and shivered at my touch.
I am the wind, I whispered in her ear. And she replied curiously,
I will never drink the poison.

This is the result of an exercise my tutor gave me; draw something without looking at your paper. My new favorite thing to do in Parisian cafes.   : )

a few sketches

open mic night in yellow

visions of the eyes of the painter in the louvre

The Mona Lisa and her damn smile

This morning I woke up early to see the Mona Lisa before the hordes of Snappers arrived. Although it was my ninth trip to The Louvre I had been putting off a visit to the main attraction until the right moment. Today, for some reason or other seemed right.

I got to the museum around 8:45 a.m. and the line was surprisingly small. Even the non-ticketed, sorry-looking bunch of unfortunates whom I usually enjoy strolling passed each morning with my yearly Louvre pass in hand thinking things like ‘this is how Justin Bieber must feel everywhere he goes,’ hardly reached beyond the maze of ropes, whereas some days it stretches for three or four city blocks.

I walked directly to the Mona Lisa, only pausing to admire The Winged Victory of Samothrace perched atop a massive staircase. This 2^nd Century marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike portrays an incredible headless winged goddess standing on a massive boat like a sail. I pondered for a moment if one could be headless and still be considered the goddess of victory, but thought in the end, who could really say.

And then I walked in to see the world’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa.

There she was, her plain face, her enigmatic smile, her Mona Lisa folded hands; and aside from the brief excitement of seeing her in person, she was as dull as she was dull in the photo in my guidebook.

And as I tried to convince myself of the sheer phenomenon of this masterpiece, of the thrill of seeing it in person, of how many people I could bore to tears at cocktail parties (if my friends ever start having cocktail parties) about what it’s like to see the Mona Lisa in real life—I decided that if the Mona Lisa wasn’t already so damn famous people wouldn’t notice it much at all. If it was just another important Renaissance work hanging in the gallery between the celestial blue of a Raphael sky and the Venetian cityscapes of Guardi, then most tourists wouldn’t give two shits about Mona’s puzzling smile.

And I may not be entirely wrong. In fact, my art tutor here claims in regards to artistic significance, that the work actually isn’t that important. That it was made famous by its theft in 1909 when a former Louvre employee stole the painting and the poet Apollinaire and Pablo Picasso were called in for questioning as suspects. For almost two years it was thought to be lost until the thief, an Italian patriot who believed the painting belonged in Italy, tried to sell it to the Uffizi gallery in Florence. Oops. Apparently the directors of the gallery weren’t as patriotic as him.

Perhaps even further adding to the notoriety of the work (and if not, still funny) in 1974, a handicapped woman sprayed red paint at the painting and in 2009 a Russian woman shattered a mug against the glass that was purchased from the museum gift shop. Though each perpetrator’s motives were accounted for (the first was protesting the museum’s handicapped policy and the latter was pissed off because she was denied French citizenship), I hypothesize that either A) they were disappointed by the dullness of the work or B) Mona’s enigmatic smile really got under their skin.

Fortunately, however, in each case, the painting was unscathed and the quizzical smile remained.

But for a moment as I stood beside the Snappers and grown men with fanny sacks, I tried to be serious and really contemplate the work. If the Mona Lisa is only remarkable because of her profoundly ambiguous smile, than what is it that attracts people to ambiguity? I certainly don’t think people are attracted to ambiguity in life, but perhaps in art they are. And if so, why? Do we believe that ambiguity is somehow more truthful than certainty? Or does it have more to do with the fact that pure ambiguity gives critics and bored married couples something to squabble over for the rest of time?

Of course, if there is no answer, if the work is truly ambiguous than everyone is entitled to their own opinion, the validity of which will be based on how clearly it is defended, regardless of “truth.” Though ultimately the only real “truth” is that the truth is uncertain, unknown, and our opinions such as—“I think she is smiling at her lover Leo” or “That ugly bitch is mocking me because I was not granted French citizenship!”—do not need to be defended by sophisms but can be, in fact must be, based purely on faith alone.

Perhaps then, that is what we want in art. Something that inspires us to have faith, that inspires us to believe on our own accord.

artwork from the past 5 days

Edward Degas, copy

studying ART week 1

I’ve got my daily pass to the Louvre! For 30 euros I can go every day for a year and avoid the infinite line of suckers with their digital cameras, packed lunches, and khaki shorts. Mind you I’ve got my own digital camera, packed lunch, and khaki shorts but my shorts are cool (they have cargo pockets), my lunch is an orange (all naturale), and my camera can go under water—boooyah!

My schedule for the next month is to go to The Louvre every day that it’s open and to visit different museums (d’Orsay, The Dali Museum etc.) when it’s closed, which is every Tuesday.

I am also starting each day by attempting to copy a painting from one of the art books I have. I will post these merely for your amusement so that you can laugh and smack your knee and say witty things like what the hell’s that kid doing with his life? And I hope he doesn’t quite his day job.

But know, I know I’m not a visual artist, that’s not really the point.  And I already quit my day job. So far it’s been wonderful.

Here’s my colored pencil imitations!  Be nice.

Original Matisse (minus the glare)

colored pencil imitation

L arlesienne Madame Ginoux- Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh, imitation

a meditation on disassociation

I would like to revise this and turn it into a sort of essay on craft, and perhaps submit it to a journal. So I’m very interested to see what artists and non-artists alike have to say about it. Please comment. Help start a dialogue.

It is impossible to disassociate entirely. We look at a plastic bottle of soda with a red label and white strip of text and think, “Coca-Cola.” A rug of green stretched over the land beckons to be called “grass.” Regardless of our language we are aware of the sign, the representative symbol in front of the object. Because we know these things it is unnatural to separate their form from our  label for them.

An artist, a writer, a poet, must learn to disassociate. He must look at the world with fresh eyes, create image and metaphor, investigate the deeper nature of things. He must try to see the image behind the label, the actuality behind the sign post. What is this specific grass like? What is its nature, its qualities, both in its universality and its uniqueness?

In daily life many people use external supplements to disassociate. We drink, we do drugs, to disassociate things from other things, and ourselves from ourselves. Once, many lives ago, I sat high on mushrooms on a balcony bar in Thailand that overlooked an incredible beach. I looked at the white table where my water was sitting, and it was no longer a “table” but a form—a legged creature, a white spider perhaps, with a piece of flat, painted wood laid on top that just so happened to perfectly hold my drink. The spilled neon paint on the table that I had noticed when I walked into the bar sober were now explosions of colors, sky colors, cloud colors, sand and jungle and star colors. At the time I realized that for a moment I had disassociated the table from everything I had ever known about ‘tables’ and from the word itself. But while I had gotten away from the names, the signs, the labels of the colors, while I had looked at the ‘table’ anew in a sense, I was still associating with things I knew—the table with spider, the colors with sky, cloud, sand, jungle.

To disassociate entirely would be like reverting to the day you were born, it would be like falling into an abyss where everything is unknown and new. It would lead to madness.

But we needn’t rely on destructive elixirs or plunge into the depths of insanity to achieve the effects of disassociation. We can easily walk into a supermarket and begin dancing as though we are in a club. We can discover the new and unreal by consciously breaking our habit-actions in order to challenge ourselves, to disorient ourselves, to experience ‘newness’ hidden in what we already know. To do this is to make poetry out of life, to make the surreal a reality. This in many ways has been the job of the artist, in that it is linked with metaphor, and the job of the spiritual teacher, in that it is linked with an intense presence, self-awareness, and a desire to uplift the Now.

Travel is another means to potentially disorient and force ourselves to live with disassociation. In a foreign land we observe a strange fruit we’ve never seen and have no name for. We cannot lazily rely on our symbols. If we are to describe it, even just to process it, we must look at it fresh, we must create metaphor, and by doing so even the most layman among us become poets. In a sense, our ignorance becomes our strength.

One of the reasons poets such as Rimbaud and Kerouac’s work is so passionate, vibrant, alive, and new is not only because they were disorienting themselves through drugs and drink, but because they constantly traveled (in reality and in the imagination) and forced themselves to describe the foreign, the strange, the unknown, and especially in Rimbaud’s case, the unreal.

But most of us have a natural tendency to associate, to orient ourselves wherever we are. Before we travel we scan guidebooks to find the best things to see and do. The more diligent among us study up on a country’s history and its present state, perhaps we even study the local language. When we arrive we open up our maps and make mental notes of landmarks because we are afraid of getting lost. We use our research and our wits and whole lifetime of experience to give things names.

But what few of us consider the beauty and utility of being lost? Of being in a strange place where words are only sounds and objects have no names, at least not known to us. This newness, this strangeness can be invaluable for a writer because each moment tests his abilities of description—how will he convey the place and the feel within the place without relying on the usual signs?

Paradoxically, however, the very act of writing, of explaining, of translating, begins to orient the writer or artist, whereas the non-artist can explore the full possibilities of disassociation without ever coming up for air.  And why is disassociation useful for the non-artist? Because through discomfort it heightens his presence, and through exposure to difficult/uncomfortable situations, he is challenged and often times surprised and rewarded. It also enables this non-artist to transcend the normal, the mundane, the commonplace—something invaluable to many individuals in today’s world.

And, because if the non-artist finds a way to articulate this place he immediately becomes, even without being aware of it, a poet.

impressions. first night in Paris.

The softness of Paris tonight as I walk the crowded streets along the Seine, orange beige of dawn like a fallen cloud illuminated by gentle neon’s and candle-colored cafes— red reflections off the wine glass—so silent for such immensity, still, almost, even as people, Parisians with legs crossed sophisticated and sweaters around their shoulders like Ivy League, and tall Africans, and Asians and Spanish and Americans, and Italians sipping in cafes and watching the street like theatre—and owners outside the restaurant in the busy alley beckoning tourists and me inside—and the great modern barge floating down the dark-teal Seine overflowing with tourists snapping pictures of students and lovers perched on the walkway with wine or sitting on the gray steps that climb to Notre Dame.

I walk watching, absorbing the comfort of this busy silence, to Shakespeare and Company’s bookstore where Hemingway was loaned books on credit and good faith—and the books! the books! so many volumes one would die to try—Rimbaud, Kerouac, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Ginsberg, Joyce—literary magazines and philosophy and art—everything and everyone under the moon and all sorts of hidden volumes poking their heads out from busy shelves—and English readers perusing muttering things like “this is a great bookstore,” and “I think Hemingway came here”—and a room upstairs with a piano and a young Frenchman and his girl, and he begins to play while a pretty brunette opens the dusty-cover of some ancient volume in a corner chair and begins reading, and I want to ask her what she’s reading, or how she manages to read with all this commotion and all these books around! but I don’t.

—I walk down the busy alley, footpath of crepes and neon mist–passed expensive restaurants I can’t afford with tourists and lovers and well-dressed, casual and enjoying——I wander into Taschen Books and flip through photos of Mohammed Ali in a massive book almost a meter long—with colored pictures and black and whites and wonderful quotes and sweat dripping off the chin of some fallen foe so real I taste salt—and Frida and Van Gogh over in the corner for another night— All this at 10 pm. Literature and art alive in the drunken night.

—Paris! One couldn’t tire of falling in love here under the vestige of an orange-beige twilight on a summer night with all the books and wine and art and beautiful lonely eyes peering like moonlight through the back-alley shadows that any fool could ever want.