Thursday, February 26, 2009

Pachyderm

* Why do you even do those things, anyway?

* It’s fun.

* Really?  Looks hella boring.

* No, it’s good.  It relaxes me.  And it’s so satisfying to work them out.  You start with all these mysteries; it looks like they couldn’t possibly have have told you enough to mean anything or get anywhere.  The numbers just swim around like fish, each one in its own little bowl, perfectly disconnected.  But if you approach it methodically, row by row and column by column, the truth begins to emerge.  Maybe you get one number for sure, or can narrow it down to a couple of options.  It’s still wide open and mostly empty but you’ve got that first little toehold toward a solution.  Then you pull back and look at the big picture again - is there someplace you can really be analytical?  You think about how verticals and horizontals impact each other, or specific arrays with low-hanging fruit.  Can you fill in just one more square, and does that give you the leverage to get a few more? Sometimes I can stare at the grid for a couple of days, totally stuck, losing confidence, reworking everything over and over in my mind to make sure that I haven’t made any mistakes, and then like a bolt from the blue a connection will click in my brain and I’ll suddenly see a place where something cannot be, which means it must go somewhere else, which suddenly resolves a whole slew of mysteries.  Then all the cryptic little notes I’d left for myself in the corners of all those boxes start paying off, answers tumbling into place one after another, each new realization resolving another old question somewhere else… it’s logic and vision and deduction all coming together in different ways, intersecting and aligning.  For a long while, the farther I get, the harder it becomes to pick up the remaining pieces.  But my mind gets sharper and I eventually see structure through the chaos - but I have to think my way through to it.  It’s never a matter of what I already knew or being in on a joke - externals don’t come into it.  It’s me and the numbers and the matrix.  And once every row, column and array is neatly and uniquely filled, I wind up holding a piece of the universe in my hands that I’ve fixed, and I can stop and take solace that in this broken twisted world, I’ve done something pure and clean and perfectly ordered.  It’s a good feeling, a deep, gratifying feeling.  That’s why I do these. 

* Yeah?

* Yeah.

* I dunno, man, whatever.  I just don’t get it.  But hey, um, do you know a nine-letter word for “trunk toter?”

Visual entertainment: cellphone shot of the art light installation under the Fremont Street Transbay Terminal overpass.  It’s a miserable gritty stretch of shut-in streetscape, but they’ve installed rainbow lights that change color and shine happily on the underside of the overpass.  If you wish to return today’s blog post, keep the photo as my free gift to you.  All rights reserved; licensing by written agreement only; Rule Against Perpetuities will be enforced to the fullest extent of the law.  Other than that, enjoy.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Wolves and Knives

My recollection is that being six years old was a complicated affair.  I understood some things well enough; some others confused me or seemed inexplicable though so generally accepted as to preclude questioning; and some big stuff apparently evaded my meager notice notice altogether.  Regardless, I demanded, impertinently, my measure and more of participation and respect from society, and blithely blinded myself to the limitations of my immaturity.  I wanted answers to my questions, a say in decisions affecting me and an unearned degree of autonomy.  It took an English table setting to put me in my place. 

Dad’s studies took him to the Bodlean every so often, and 1970 was his sabbatical year so we all went along with him.  For six months we traded homes with an Oxon don who was doing a stint at UCLA, and set up housekeeping in the fair and pleasant England of Blake’s imaginaings.

Of course, he also imagined “dark satanic mills.” Had I known those lyrics at the time, I might have better prepared myself for the experiences that followed.  Then again, maybe I was better off blithe.  The foreknowledge might have crippled me.  As it was, I at least woke up most mornings expecting the best, and that was probably the best I could have done under the circumstances. 

My age placed me approximately in what my Albionic hosts called “first form,” and as I was facing half a year among them I was duly enrolled in a nearby public school.  “Public school” is what they called it, anyway, but that’s something of a misleading term.  It was certainly a private institution; I had to interview to get in and wore a uniform and all that.  Wolvercote, it was called, charmingly enough - a name up to which it seemed eager to live.  Their school year bore no resemblance to the one I knew from back home, and their curriculum was notably more advanced.  Back home in kindygarden I’d been playing with colorforms and copying out letters; now in first form we were doing book reports and subtraction.  I’d also spent six weeks in a full arm cast shortly before making the trip to England, further impairing my already limited physical skills, and I wore ungainly orthopedic shoes, so under the best of circumstances I’d have been at a notable disadvantage.  Add thereto my freakish accent, my heretical Judaism, and a native strain of public school attitude for which no child can truly be prepared, and I never really stood a chance. 

I didn’t have much fun at Wolvercote.  Classes, as I recall, were sufficiently benign, but I spent my daily playground time walking slowly around the perimeter of the field, dragging my hand along the hurricane fencing and trying to avoid being forced to articulate any quaint Americanisms for the entertainment of my peers.  I seem to recall an incident at their swimming pool in which I, a nonswimmmer with tubes in my ears that shouldn’t be submerged, was dragged out of my depth and left to sink, for which I received a sound and ironic ear-boxing by my academic overseers.  However, the incident that caused my parents to remove me from Wolvercote’s clammy grasp was when I came home asking to be taught to use a knife to cut my food.  To that point, I’d been satisfied to have my parents do the mealtime knifework for me, and they were overprotective and anxious enough to keep me well clear of dangerous objects like butterspreaders.  Why the sudden interest?, mom asked, as dad patiently positioned my fingers on the blunt blade.  In response I shared this story:

We had all gathered in a refectory for, I guess, refectation - a meal of some sort, the specifics of which I now disremember.  What I do recall was that something on the plate was made of meat and needed to be cut up, and I was unprepared for that task.  I requested assistance, as a six-year-old boy sometimes does, and the headmaster, if memory serves, came forth in response.  He cut my food, but he wasn’t happy about it.  Any student in his school would have proper table skills, he coldly informed me, the knife ripping through my meat and scraping harshly on my plate.  And until I had developed those skills, he went on, I did not belong at a table with civilized people.  Better, he told me, that I eat outside, where the rats wouldn’t be offended by my ineptitude.  His exact words escape me today, but his sending me out to the company of rats I clearly recall.  I also recall the derisive hoots of my classmates as I carried my tray outside, and sitting down by a cinderblock wall next to a dumpster to eat my meal.  I even remember a measure of relief at dining alone in peace, safe from uncharitable taunts. 

I came home requesting cutlery instruction, was asked why, and told that story.  Shortly thereafter, I left the Wolvercote School for good.  I was done with Wolvercote. But now, having spun this story out nearly four decades downstream, I’m still not sure it’s finished with me. 

Monday, February 16, 2009

Nu, Again?

It has been said that everything old is new again, but never before has it seemed more true than now - and I mean, never in the history of the planet, with which I enjoy an unrivaled personal familiarity.  Lately all kinds of stuff from twenty years ago and more has been coming back to ask me where I’ve been and why haven’t I paid a call.  There’s no excuse, really.  Some of that old stuff is pretty damn good.  Let’s enumerate, inasmuch as this is the whole gist of my post today:

1.  Okay, this isn’t going back 20 years but it’s a good place to start: remember CDs?  They’re still a pretty useful way to cart music around sometimes, especially when your MP3 player is on the fritz, as ours was till the good folk at the Apple store replaced it FOR FREE for us last week.  But even then, sometimes one of us would have the ‘pod and the other would have the car, and the one with the care was stuck with the ignominy of radio because our in-dash CD player has been on the fritz for more than a year.  We’d gotten a great disk (Keller Williams, if you must know) for xmas ‘07 and had popped it in the cd player right away, only to have it jam and stick and stop playing.  “Eject” was ineffectual.  The disk was lodged permanently in the player and we lacked the motivation and resources to repair it.  The case stayed in the car as a constant reminder of our audio failings and just in case the disk spontaneously self-ejected at some point, but after twelve months and more that just didn’t seem too likely.  Kel had even taken to giving Jesse the empty CD case as a fallback kiddy distractor, when pretzels and emergency road flares stopped entertaining him.  At some point, though, she realized that, as he played with the empty CD case, IT WAS NO LONGER EMPTY.  Somehow the disk had gotten back inside of it.  This, she found mysterious, and she asked me about it the next time we were out driving together.  As it turns out, one other old disk was rattling around in the door-side cubby, and I pressed it to the long-latent CD insertion slot to see what would happen.  It should have bumped up against the disk already in the slot, impotent and mocking.  Instead, it slid right in as if it were the most natural and usual thing in the world, and Bud E. Luv’s “Iron Man” chimed out from our speakers.  Somehow, the CD player had repaired itself.  It was like waking up to discover that I’d regained the special senses I have in dreams and lose upon waking.  “Better than ever” now means “just as good as before” - and that’s good enough by far for me. 

2.  Old friends, via Facebook: when I started blogging, it was a means to keep up with new friends, basically none of whom I still see anymore.  However, shortly thereafter I began to make new, on-line friends, and many of these continue to be among my most cherished acquaintances, even those I’ve never met face-to-face, and even those who no longer keep their own blogs nor read mine.  Yes, friends - cyber and real - have come and gone.  My core group of friends from college have remained with me, for whom I am eternally grateful.  However, I have given almost no thought in all the time since leaving them, of my friends from before college - high school, jr high, and for gods sake elementary school and even pre-school.  There were some decent folk in that crowd but I have kept up with almost none of them, and apart from one reunion I have had basically nothing to do with any of them since I ran away from the twerp I’d become by senior year of high school to re-invent my twerpdom anew in college.  The weird thing here is that Facebook, that blog for those who do not blog, has suddenly blown up in my face with dozens of erstwhile friends from my formative years.  It’s truly blowing my mind that I’ve got a date now to have supper with a dozen people with whom I went to pre-secondary school.  Some of them have reminded me why I’d sought their friendship in the first place, and I now regret the many years I’ve let lapse without the pleasure of their company.  It’s a repossession of my own social history, and there are a few chapters I actually look forward to expanding upon in the future.  I know, I’m as surprised as you are. 

3.  DYNABALL!  Back in my scrawny geeky grade school days (as opposed to my current scrawny geeky days, if you’re keeping score) I had a little exercise device that I really enjoyed - as much for its nerdacious scientific angle as for any actual benefit it did me, since I didn’t use it nearly enough to make a difference.  It was a gyroscopic ball in a plastic sphere that was capable of thousands of rotations per minute, generating a powerful isometric force when one rotated it in small circles in the palm of one’s hand.  It served me well, if infrequently, until I dropped it on the pavement of my backyard and it broke.  Easy come, easy go, eh?  Well as it turns out, I wanted another one but it didn’t come nearly as easily as it had gone.  I have actually spent the last several decades looking for a replacement.  And now I’ve found one.  Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to present to you:
Dynaflex!
Apart from the new garish colors, the rubber fist-grip, and the groove for starting it with a little shoelace which is a lot easier than just getting it rolling on a pantleg or by telekinesis, it’s the exact same toy/tool as I recall from my old days as a toy/tool myself.  I’m using it on the bus, waiting in line at the Apple Store, during my pre-dawn workouts, and whenever the spirit moves me.  It still generates a powerful resistance that runs from my fingers up to my shoulderblade, and one of my colleagues has already gotten one of her own to help her golf game.  I can feel the improved strength and vigor of my upper appendages.  It’s a nice feeling, and it’s about freaking time. 

4.  Witch Mountain: All I knew about it at the time ("the time” being around 1978) was that my classmate Ike was in yet another big movie.  Ike was among the busiest “real” actors in my jr high, and he regularly was featured in Disney productions, where his malleable androgynous features had made him quite the child-star.  And more power to him.  I wasn’t auditioning for any of those parts.  If he was getting them, I had nothing to complain about and it was something I could brag about to the kids at camp.  And now I see that a new Witch Mountain movie is coming out.  Ike is not the main attraction in it, nor is Eddie Albert who failed to be returned from the dead to reprise his original role - Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has taken that place.  The commercials make it seem a bit higher tech and cooler than the old one appeared to me to be, back when I wasn’t watching it originally.  I guess it goes to show me that nothing is beyond being remade.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this time it was actually better than the original, but I’d have to check with Ike about the particulars if I wanted to know for sure.  Dwayne probably doesn’t remember it well enough and anyway he never returns my calls anymore since that “smackdown” incident. 

5. The Watchmen: I don’t mean to be a Hollywood harpy or to marginalize myself as a comicbook fanboy, but damn I am excited about the upcoming release of The Watchmen.  Back in 1986 I started reading the books as they were released once per month over the course of a year, and they remain the only comic books I’ve ever gone out and bought for myself.  Not only that, but I read them with scrupulous care, stored them in plastic bags, sealed the bags with velcro and taped them to heavy cardboard, and kept all 12 issues in mint condition in a binder in my closet lo these many years.  This is not something I’d do for a typical comic, but then again Watchmen was the only graphic novel that Time Magazine named as one of the 100 best novels of the past century.  I’m not going to get into the intricacies of the story, but it’s a good one and very powerful - not escapist, but more the opposite, like a story of what happens when you try to escape but can’t.  I’ve been looking forward to a film adaptation since I finished the last book back in ‘87, and the trailer and commercials I’ve seen for the new production suggest to me that my hopes are likely to be fulfilled, at least on a visual level.  The film looks gorgeous and the commercials are like panels from the actual books. 

And just to humiliate myself a little, let me share how deep my interest lies: here‘s an image of the most dangerous being on the Watchmen planet, Dr. Manhattan… and

here’s a photo of my left calf.  I don’t have much ink, but what I’ve got is Watchmen-related.  As I said, I’m looking forward to seeing this movie.  I don’t think I’ll take the kids. 

And now for something a little different: the last post here was about my dolphin shirt.  I was asked to post a photo of it, so Blogopolis could make up its own mind how embarrassed I should be for wearing it in public.  Never one to shirk my obligation to imaginary strangers, I went out last weekend on a good run in my favorite old T so I could take a representative photo of myself in it.  On my way out the door Kel ruminated that she’d probably have to sneak in and burn it for me while I slept.  However, immediately after taking this

photo, I went to pull the shirt off over my head and ripped the back of the collar seam in three places.  I don’t know if I’ll ever ride the dolphin again now.  But at least I know that I sucked every bit of satisfaction I could out of it.  Not everything old is new again.  Some of it is just regular old old.  Speaking of which, I’m getting tired.  I think I’ve mined this vein for long enough.  Have a good one and keep your history polished and handy.  Sometimes it turns out to be more gratifying than you’d anticipated. 

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Riding the Dolphin

I’ve mentioned the Green Dolphin shirt here before, but I’d almost prefer if you didn’t remember it - that would suggest you’re paying too much attention, and I can’t take that kind of pressure.  In any case the GD is one of my key T’s, one so steeped in personal history that I’d keep it in my textile archives even if I could no longer pull it over my swollen pointy head.  I got it at a steep discount 25 years ago or so; it’s got three two (corrected per actual reality) stylized cetaceans swimming nose-to-fluke in a circle on the front, which I enhanced by dabbing a little gold glitter paint on their eyeholes, and some years later I accidentally stained the back with tar at an Ojai creekbed after a Krishnamurti lecture.  Almost since I first got it, I’ve considered it a “power shirt”: though it has faded and shrunk out of shape, I always feel better when I put it on - stronger, fitter, more charismatic.  The Green Dolphin shirt has done right by me.  In appreciation of that record, I’ve kept it in the “current rotation” drawer for a quarter of a century.

However, for most of that time, it has remained deep down within that drawer.  There just haven’t been too many occasions in quite a while for me to wear it.  During those years, inexplicably, the shirt somehow changed shape.  The neck stretched wider and wider, perhaps to accommodate my increasingly herculean shoulders; at the same time, the length of the shirt sort of shortened, until it barely reaches my omphalos.  Now when I put it on, the sleeves terminate at the upper reaches of my biceps, and it fails to cover the entirely of my midsection, terminating at a point slightly north of my waistband.  It’s really only suitable anymore for exercise or raves, and let’s face it, it’s been some time since I raved. 

On an unseasonably warm afternoon not too long ago, I was vouchsafed time enough for a run to and through the park and back.  But I felt a little low on energy, and my failure to launder had left me short of exercise clothes.  Lucky for me, that let the GDT rise back up to the top of the t-shirt drawer.  As soon as I slipped it on, my low energy level started surging.  With minimal warm-up and stretching I was out the door, earbuds blasting and my stretched-out t-shirt switching lightly over my body with every manly pavement-eating strike I took.

Out the door, down the stairs, into the glare of the afternoon and across the street to the greenbelt, then a left toward the park.  The first full block was an uphill rise, not steep but significant, so that by the time I reached Balboa street my metabolism had kicked in to match the attitude engendered by my shirt: powerful, self-assured, maybe not fast but clearly unstoppable.  I was a force of nature in that shirt.  My knees rose high, my quads and calves clenched and relaxed with rhythmic confidence.  I was feeling good - and better by the step.  I was riding the Green Dolphins again and there was no holding us back. 

Halfway up the next block a knot of people had congregated by some parked cars.  They seemed to be in their 20s, about ten or twelve freshfaced, good-looking young men and women gearing up for an outing of some sort.  They were chatting amiably; the guys perfunctorily tossed some footballs and frisbees around.  Coolers rested near them on the curb and there was a general air of festivity.  Good for them, I thought as I hauled ass past them, my lungs working like a bellows and my shoulders bulging fiercely under the paper-thin fabric of the t-shirt.  Fun for all.  It’s all good. 

As these thoughts drifted through my mind between the guitar licks and drumbeats of my running mix, I imagined I saw something but I couldn’t be sure.  Were the pretty young people actually sneaking peeks of me as I ran past them?  Had I broken their focus on their own socializing?  I felt as if the guys scoped me from the corners of their eyes, assessing me - my stride and my strength, my potential threat level.  And at the same time, were the women flicking glances at me too, assessing me in their own way, marveling at my manliness as it blasted out through the dolphins on my skimpy T?  That’s right, ladies.  I’m running in my Green Dolphin shirt.  Maybe I’ll catch you later.  I’ve got places to go right now.

I arrived at the park shortly thereafter and did my backroad run.  On those wooded paths I was alone with my thoughts, my tunes, and my t-shirt, running fast, leaping over logs and ruts, getting stronger the longer I went.  I looped back along the boulevard to where I’d started, then up through the rose garden, out to the street and back towards home again - back, as it turned out, past that same little crowd of pretty people, now seemingly at the final phases of packing their cars, finishing their smokes, picking with whom they’d ride and where they’d sit… and here I came again, now with a mature stride, my arms pumping efficiently, my lungs heaving deep and clear, perspiration pasting my well-worn shirt to my bulging pectorals.  Again, I got the double check-out - the guys wondering if they could take me, and the girls wondering where I might take them.... I blew past them all with a smirk and let them feast their eyes on my muscular rear aspect and the ambiguous tar-stain on my left shoulderblade.  Have fun without me, folks.  I’m having plenty of fun without you.

I owned the street; my every movement declared it.  The Green Dolphin t-shirt had made me powerful - feared by men, desired by women.  It had carried me through the rigors of the trail in record time.  During my cool-down walk up my block and down again, I noted how intimately it conformed to my physiognomy, almost a second skin but more complimentary.  Its gold-flecked dolphin eyes winked at me in the afternoon sunlight.  I winked back.

My breathing normalizing and perspiration streaming from my forehead, I made my way up my stairs to my front door, tingling with dolphin-tinged afterglow.  Just inside the door was Kelly, puttering with some domestic undertaking.  She turned to greet me, paused briefly, and then broke into peals of laughter.  “That?  You went outside - wearing THAT?  She seemed hilariously incapable of further comment, pointing wordlessly through her giggles to my beloved t-shirt. 

“Yeah, I did,” I replied sullenly, heading back for a shower.  One of us had clearly missed the point.  I hoped it was her but I can’t be sure anymore.  Either way, the shirt stays in the drawer till next time. 

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Snapshots Without Cameras - Seoul’s Unphotographable Faces

okay you voracious blogsuckers, you’ve seen all the photos I’m going to post - but I have a few images left to share.  Images to share, you wonder, without photos?  Is he MAD?  Well yes but not in any way relevant to this conversation.  I did keep a notebook with me, and I jotted down my experiences as I experienced them in journal format.  That is not for you, my friends and other internet strangers - but once I’d written all that out, I still had a nice collection of little recollections that hadn’t made it into the main entries.  They’re the written equivalent of the last set of photos I posted - the stuff that made Korea so wonderfully Korean.  I don’t want to forget any of them, and now you won’t either:

* Hundreds - THOUSANDS - of beautiful young women walking around in miniskirts or short-short, wearing black tights on their long legs against the siberian winds
* The dude on Insadong who served Zach ice cream with an awesome slight-of-hand street-theater show
* The way that we had to put the room key-card into a special slot on the wall of the hotel room to make the lights work
* The condom shoppe near the University that proudly advertised (in english) “small pecker condoms”
* The chirping sound on the subways that preceded the announcements of the upcoming stops
* The group of serious old men in red baseball caps who came together to tour the big palace when we were there, and the group of laughing American missionary-types who were there too with nametags in cyrillic lettering
* The little fish-shaped fried cakes being sold on so many streetcorners
* Zach knowing that the subway was called the “M” (for Metro) even when we didn’t
* Beautiful traditional kites on display at the mid-river design center
* The streets going from quiet at dusk to completely filled with people walking around and partying all night
* The computer at the business center in the hotel that suddenly switched to hangeul lettering when I hit the wrong function key by mistake
* The classic christmas music being played everywhere - Ella, Bing, and all those folks
* The Abraham Lincoln-stencil graffiti that read “Lincoln Failed 11 Times”
* Lots of waffle places but none of them open for breakfast
* The Lotte-Ria hamburger place where they gave us free ice cream with my Paprika Burger, and where the ceiling was covered with bars that lit up in different changing colors
* The amazing profusion of potato-based snax
* The “Hybrid Fashion Style Outlet” Mall
* Bars named “Little Porky Beer,” “Bikini Virgin Bar,” “Ho Bar Deluxe,” “Les Bos,” “Kinky Robot,” and “Cafe Brown Sound” - among many others
* The “Street of Try to Walk” which would have been a nightmare to drive
* The best thing on TV on the airplane being the GPS flight-tracking screen
* The recycling stations at most every fast food place that broke everything down into about seven or eight different receptacles
* A city so complicated that business cards have maps on them, and delivery scooters with big map books between the handlebars
* Tile sidewalks that are more easily removed and replaced for electrical or plumbing work
* The exercise paths climbing the big mountain in the center of town, with pavilions near the top with weightlifting, chin-up bars, and little twisty-platforms for rotational workouts
* “Jack Daniels” flavored Sun Chips
* The restaurant with the “Smart Lady Combo” lunch - probably because the “dumb bitch” lunch didn’t sell so well

So that was Seoul; I’m all Seouled out.  Up next: more traditional Chucklehut nonsense.  I know you missed it, and I’ve got a whole chuckle-load stored up for you to enjoy, or, you know, whatever.  Kamsei Hamnida!

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Wrapping the Dumpling: A Final Serving of Seoul

We’ve had a good time, have we not, laving our eyeballs in the beauty and curiosity of a city big enough to eat my own home town and still be hungry enough to enjoy a good brunch afterwards.  Seoul: seat of mystery, lanes of lore, and tower of power.  There is so much to remember I don’t even entirely know what to start missing.  However, I do have a few visual tidbits left over to share with you, and - like the dessert in a Korean meal - they’re light and amusing and not designed to sit around being savored.  Rather, these LAST photos are the ones that I took for pure amusement and nostalgia for walking those crazy diverticulated streets.  Let’s enjoy.  That is not a suggestion, it is an order.  (and as always, feel free to click-and-embiggen.)

Let’s begin with Hong-Ik University, as seen from our 7th floor hotel room at dawn.  This place is completely hopping from 8 pm till 2 am, so this is a particularly serene time of day and a nice way to start things off:

Here’s the alley behind our hotel.  The big street in front was way too wide and crowded with cars to be fun for strolling, but the rest of the ‘hood was more like this - fascinating little lanes chock-full of delicious smells, fashionable clothing, and tiny shops shoehorned into rambling, ramshackle buildings:

And while we’re on the subject of our hotel, let me share one thing about it: it had the most complicated “facilities” I’ve ever encountered.  I was afeared of it at first, what with all the warnings:

Don’t smoke on it with your legs spread apart!  Don’t squat directly on it!  Don’t, um, procreate with it!  Don’t bottle it!  Don’t, er, child it! 

But when the matter was no longer of my own choosing, I squelched my fears and embraced the technology:

“Keep my grace” is right!  It’s got special buttons for “W fountain,” “ladybell fountain,” and - my own favorite for sheer impertinence - one I call “the puffer.” Once I’d gotten used to eastern sanitation, I never wanted to come back home!

Moving (as it were) on: our first full day in Korea, the foster family took us with Jesse to a very cool park on an island in the middle of the Han River, which bisects Seoul pretty much straight across the middle.  The park was beautifully designed, and in fact featured an actual design center and museum along with a cool post-industrial playground, lattice plaza, and other provocative landscaping like this:

But let me not leave you with the impression that this town lacked the human touch.  Any regular reader here (hi, sis!  hi, mom!) knows of my fascination with vernacular art forms - the ones put in place by regular folk just making their mark on society with whatever is handy.  Here’s a taste of what I found painted on walls around my hotel, and at the funky mid-river art-park:

On the other hand, some of the “establishment” art left me confused, or amused.  Here’s a few examples:

This poster was up in the lobby of the enormous tower with awesome city-wide views.  It’s for the Korean version of Fiddler on the Roof.  For a country that seems to be the polar opposite of “kosher” (I was served a whole baby octopus with my breakfast stirfry), it was an incongruous choice - but the poster makes it look like they make it work.  I would go back just to see that show.  If I was a rich man, I mean.  Di-de-bum-de-bum-de-diedle-diedle-bum.  (which in fact requires no translation.)

Moving from the sublime to - elsewhere: on the way to the airport in Incheon (a very beautiful, modern, and well-equipped facility if I do say so myself), we saw this piece of public art (photographed from inside a van moving at 60 mph or so, so please forgive the angle and clarity).  I think it’s supposed to remind me of an airplane taking off.  In fact, that is not what it reminds me of.  Comments are open if you want to offer your own interpretation. 

Commercial establishments also were stamped with eastern uniqueness.  I lost a lot of the best photos of these, but some good ones survived anyway.  For example:

The morning after the camera malfunctioned I took a one-block walk to a digital imaging studio to get a new SD card.  The woman helping me spoke no English (and god knows I speak no Korean) but she treated me right and got me what I needed quickly and at a good price.  To memorialize her graciousness, I wanted to take her photo.  She wasn’t crazy about that plan and ducked out of the way at the key moment - leaving me to see what it’s like to have a camera stuck in my own face:

There were a lot - a LOT - of places in Seoul named “Bobo.” I’m not sure why but most of my photos of them got eated by the camera.  This one survived, and I’m particularly glad because it is a defining moment in my own Bobohood and that of my elderson:

And finally, Mr. Wow.  It appears he’s left the building.  If you go to Seoul, look him up, won’t you?  There is a lot of wow in Seoul, and anyone who personifies it probably is worth a bit of your time.

That’s it for the photos.  Stay tuned for a word scrapbook - the tiny details that I couldn’t or didn’t photograph, but that gave the city such sublime texture.  For now, though, I am feeling like I’m pretty much back at home.  Speaking of which, Jesse had his third first birthday party a couple of weekends ago.  He enjoyed his cake, and now you can enjoy him doing so.  I think this image leaves nothing left to say, so now I will shut up.