Monthly Archives: April 2006
Logjammin
| April 7, 2006 | Filled under Blog |
Speaking of trophy wives and nihilists, I’ve spent the past two days in Oslo shopping like it’s the end of the world. Today alone I went to three different H&Ms, that bastion of Scandinavian clothing design. Three stores in one day might sound like a lot of walking but let me assure you it was not that far. If Urban Outfitters and Starbucks mated and gave birth to a Swedish baby, it would be H&M — they have cheap and awesome modern retro 80s-style clothes, and there’s literally one on every corner.
Ladies, just for you, here’s the spring fashion report from Norway — nautical, nautical, nautical. I’ve been saying for the past three years that thanks to the war we’d start seeing a surge in military-inspired clothing — things like jackets with epaulets, uniform-style dresses in drab green and khaki and a return of camo-print everything, and I guess I was pretty close because every single store here is selling sailor-inspired clothing.
Yesterday after CLH got back to the hotel I dragged him to the National Gallery to gawk at art. The gallery was hosting an exhibition by artist Tacita Dean that featured films of found objects, such as a decaying yacht hull and this infamous Bubble House. Dean has taken found art to the next level — one display that totally blew my mind was her interpretation of the story of the Girl Stowaway, in which Dean combined found photos of the girl, the ship she stowed away on in stages of later disrepair, film planning scenes, a David Bowie record and even an old and a recent newspaper article about the girl and the exhibit. Fascinating stuff.
I saw some pretty great art at the National Gallery, even stuff I typically don’t get into, like a painting titled “Communion is Prison” or something else I don’t remember. Nonetheless, it was so incredibly realistic that I got up close, putting my face within two or three inches of the canvas and marveling aloud for five minutes to CLH about the realism of the prisoner’s fingernails and the shadows on his shoes. It was so realistic it looked like a photograph and I couldn’t wrap my tiny little brain around that caliber of artistic talent.
I saw several heart-crushing works by the most famous Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch. There is nothing quite the same as seeing a famous painting in real life. So much is communicated to you when you stand there in front of it and see the vitality of the colors and the size, big or small, which adds much to my personal interpretation of a piece of art. Take, for example, “Puberty”, which in real life made me feel extremely uncomfortable. At first it looks like the dark shadow on the wall belongs to the girl, but the more I stood there and looked at it, the more I felt a sense of foreboding, just like the girl, and I began to realize that the shadow is something less innocent, something to be afraid of, and it just really freakin’ creeped me out.
And then there was “The Scream,” the reason for our trip to the National Gallery in the first place. Seeing the whole image, with the blood-red background and the two nondescript figures on the bridge — this painting scares the holy hell out of me, mostly because it hits so close to home. This Wikipedia article on “The Scream” has all the information you’d ever want to know about what is now my second-favorite painting (second only to Magritte’s “The Empire of Light” which you can see in real life at the Menil Museum in Houston), including the fact that the red sky the painting depicts is actually the explosion of Krakatoa. There’s also a photo of one of the versions of the painting being stolen.
I have had some pretty major struggles with anxiety in my life, and although I’m doing pretty well now I am at a point where I really miss my family, but it’s not that easy to call them up and tell them that. I haven’t spoken to my Mom since November, and while most of the time I feel like I’m doing the right thing — creating space in our relationship to help her mend and to mend myself — occasionally I’ll have these dreams where something really horrible happens to her and I never get to see her again and then I wake up and spend the rest of the day in a dark cloud of depression and worry and sadness. I often wonder if I’m a horrible person because I can’t just get over the mistakes she’s made and move on for the sake of my family and my sick grandparents. While on this trip I finished reading “The Red Tent” which is all about motherhood and the life-sustaining relationships women have with one another and it’s made me unusually sad because I have never had that sort of relationship with any woman, much less my own mother.
All these thoughts have been building up inside me on this trip for what seems like no reason really and so yesterday as I was standing in front of “The Scream” and thinking about how the painting represents the buildup and final explosive release of mountainous anxiety, I just stood there and thought to myself, Tell me about it, dude. I know.
Not a girl, not yet a woman
| April 24, 2006 | Filled under Blog |
You know how sometimes things in your life seem to happen in bunches. I think this is often referred to as serendipity, although that’s not the correct definition. Like, for example, when you learn a new word and then suddenly you see and hear it used everywhere.
Well, lately my life has been all about she-males. See, it all started last week when we got the movie “Saint Jack” in the mail from Netflix. This film is based on a Paul Theroux book of the same name, and even though Theroux is typically considered a writer who appeals to men (a la Hemingway or Bukowski) this book of his is one of my all-time favorites. Even before watching the movie I was torn about it because I cannot friggin’ stand Peter Bogdanovich but I love, love love Roger Corman, who produced the movie, and of course I love the book.
The story is about a laid-back American who lives in Singapore and runs a whorehouse. Now, there is not a whole lot of talk about lady-boys in the book, but that is one of the things Singapore is famous for. So, in the movie, which had a pretty small budget, almost all of the peripheral characters are real people playing, essentially, themselves. This is one of Corman’s trademarks.
Anyway, this means that a lot of the prostitutes in the movie are not women at all, but trannies. This is pretty interesting because neither Christopher nor I had any idea until we were watching the commentary special feature.
Worst drinking game ever: Watch the director’s commentary of “Saint Jack” and take a shot every time Peter Bogdanovich uses the phrase, “This was real”, “These people were real,” “This was a real building,” or “He/she was a real …”
Even better drinking game: The first person who notices an actress with both breasts and a penis (and you can most definitely see this, if you look closely) gets to drown their subsequent misery in an entire bottle of the booze of their choice.
So just a few days after we watched this movie, Christopher and I were out for a jog when we came across a sign for a new bar opening up here, called — wait for it — TANK TRANSGENDER BAR.
This is quite curious, I thought to myself. I mean, we live in a very small town, essentially in the country, for one thing. Secondly, Korea is a verrrry male-dominated, masculine society. Unlike in Thailand or Malaysia, most of the time you can’t even get a Korean to admit that there is such a thing as homosexuality, so the idea that something like a transgendered community could exist in our tiny little town just sort of blew my mind. You know, Koreans use a lot of English in their advertising, and most of the time it’s pretty bad English — misspelled, or misunderstood or just plain misused, like the fact that the building we live in is called Beverly Hills 2. So I thought maybe it wasn’t really a transgender bar — maybe they’ve used the wrong word here or something.
It is definitely a transgender bar. And they have a floor show, which my friend Jaynie described as “educational.”
I haven’t been yet, but you can read someone else’s experience of the place here. And there are pictures.
Then, panic set in
| April 27, 2006 | Filled under Internerd |
Even though the archives of this site only go back to January 2005, I have actually been blogging since July 2004. My first blog was started much like this one — under the guise that I would use it to hone my writing skills — but it ended up being filled mostly with photos of vacations I’d taken with Christopher and little else. My life got pretty busy and I abandoned the blog for a while and then I felt like I needed a fresh start so I decided to delete everything, because the internet is forever, right? Best to get rid of all the evidence.
In the time since then I’ve often regretted deleting that site. I still have all the pictures I posted there and I didn’t really lose any significant writing, so I think the real reason I wish I still had those archives is because I read things like the interviews on LeahPeah and all those bloggers have been writing online for half a decade. There’s some sort of imagined authenticity in my head about that — like, they were there first, before it was a fad, before Technorati started reporting that 75,000 new blogs are created each day.
In 1997, I was an analog blogger. I made paper zines, staying late at night at my Dad’s office to use his photocopier covertly and then passing them out at punk rock shows. I kept notebooks full of writing that are still stashed in a hatbox in the closet of my old bedroom at my Mom’s house. I wanted, for a long time, to go online, but I knew nothing about html or how easy it could be. In fact, the first time I remember even hearing the word “blog” it was being made fun of in a 2003 article in The Onion, and it didn’t sound like the type of website I was thinking of starting.
Sometimes this wistfulness passes over me and I wish I still had that old site, just for posterity’s sake, and when this feeling hit me last night I got it into my head that I could recreate the old site with the help of Blogger, a Google cache and the Wayback Machine. No such luck. There is no proof anywhere that my site ever existed in the first place.
I guess maybe the Internet isn’t forever.
