We’re Moving in Two Days…
… but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the utter lack of packing going on in our place. It’s not a big move. We’re just switching neighborhoods and going into a bigger place, but I’m getting surprisingly sentimental about this one.
One of the most amazing restaurants I’ve ever eaten in is right around the corner from our current apartment. I get all misty-eyed now whenever I walk by the place. Of course our new place is only a half an hour walk away, so it’s not like we’re moving to the moon or anything – but still, it was right around the corner.
The semester ends this week. I’m pretty happy about that.
Lastly let’s hear it for boiling soups you crack raw eggs into.
Various Redacted Tweets and Updates From Last Week
– Time to let all the blarg dribble out.
– I don’t begrudge anyone their desire to earn a dollar even when it is my dollar (and not called a dollar) — I just don’t like it when they become so aggressive about their desire that they resemble parasites on the expat community.
– We’re not disagreeing so much as exploring the contours of our agreement.
– Hey Annoying 4th Grade Girl, you are soooooooo annoying, but have embraced being that kid no one likes with such defiance that I have to salute you. Everyone in life will hate you and try to grind you down. Don’t change. Stay annoying. (Just maybe, you know, do your homework sometimes…)
– Isn’t he one of those guys who goes to Steampunk conventions wearing a girdle on top of his JC Penny suit?
– When people favorite my tweets I assume they’ll use them later to blackmail me.
A Domestic Interlude
Husband: “I’m going to make pesto and apple crumble this weekend.”
Wife: “Are you okay?”
Husband: “What? Why?
Wife: “Just asking.”
Husband: “… If I decide to sweep the floor are you going to call an ambulance?”
Wife: “Maybe.”
From Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
“Afterward I remembered these things very clearly, with that longing we feel sometimes to recover a state of life that we have lost for ever, though perhaps that we have lost it is all its value.”
For the Record
I still make an ass-kicking omelet.
Also…
Sesame leaves.
You can never go wrong with sesame leaves.
That is all.
Warchild by Rick Bowes
All right, this book is one of those I wish I had read as a fifteen year old. At fifteen I would have gobbled this up as I did Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. A Mohawk-sporting, telepathic juvenile delinquent hops through time and dimensions to raise an army to do battle with mind parasites?
Yes. Sign me up.
Now sometimes this is a mixed bag. Often encountering something that speaks to our teen-self only increases our awareness of time’s passing, and you either succumb to wistful nostalgia or get grumpy because you got older. Other times by some quirk in the work or possibly within ourselves, the magic’s still there waiting for us to open the pages and discover it. Warchild was one of those other times.
If you have SFnal fifteen year olds in your life, find them a copy of this book and give it to them.
Happy New Year
Have a happy New Year everyone.
My resolution for 2012 is to sweep the floor more often.
(And, yes, I’m not much of a Tom Waits fan. I pretty much like three of his songs and this one is two of them.)
Oh, Look. Pretty.
Hand-colored Lumiere Brothers film from 1896 of Loie Fuller dancing with (modern) music by Raph Regan.
The Eye’s a Filter For You to See
Jin and I went to the beach to eat at one of our favorite restaurants. I’ll probably write about the place one day, but if you’re ever in Pohang it’s behind Tilt, the foreigner bar, maybe about a block or so in.
Afterwards we wandered around a nearby neighborhood where I snapped the above picture. Posting it here has started me thinking how the city must look to people only reading about it on this blog. There’s certainly a trend in my pictures that runs counter to the actual. For one thing the city has people in it, and most of it doesn’t look like the weird, dirty, and empty parts I post pictures of.
This coming week I’ll post more mundane pictures. Maybe the quotidian will be as strange.
And Another Reason
And here’s another reason to keep a blog: I get to make a little archive of neat stuff found or read online. Case in point, today’s post over at Things Magazine:
“What emerges from all this is more evidence of the steep valley that lies between history and nostalgia, wherein a penchant for the latter tends to shape one’s attitude and interpretation of the former.
The Internet exacerbates this condition, building up our perception of the past through the endless reproduction and celebration of past ephemera. The past is filtered through a lens of celebration, a perpetually art directed world, be it the gritty black and white world of life sold from a suitcase in these images of Brick Lane in the 80s, or Soviet ruins, or abandoned lunatic asylums, rusting machinery, filleted libraries, caches of Eastern European match box covers, esoteric ephemera from long-forgotten Olympic games, boring postcards, found photographs, passive aggressive notes left on refrigerator doors, weird LP records, shopping lists, ticket stubs, or even our own almost entirely context free Pelican Project.
Collectively, we’ve managed to make a fetish of the failed, forgotten and the marginal, mashing them together with the Utopian and the celebrated until the edges are blurred. Whether its the decline of manufacturing and urban centres (Chicago Urban Exploration) or nuclear catastrophe (Approaching Chernobyl) or the collapse of the housing market (Scenes from Surrendered Homes) is all rendered flat and equal by the vivid resonance of the image. This is where the overwhelming emotional content of a carefully filtered past meets our nostalgia for now (‘… a mourning for the transience of a moment when you are still in that moment‘), and the result is a state of being that appears to seek out the romantic past in every captured moment.”
Fetish of the failed? Nostalgia for now? Alliterative indigestion aside, I’m going to be chewing on these paragraphs for months.
Yesterweird 