Well, the time has come to cease talking of many things, to stop going to PC Bangs, to pack up my bags and head for different places, to leave behind many happy and strange memories of my time here. It is hard to believe that four months ago I arrived in Seoul in the middle of summer, and that now this city is goign through its coldest December in a century. How much has changed, both for me personally and in the world in general during that time. How people have grown older, or younger. People I will never see again. Parts of me I will never know again. Stop me before I get too sentimental. But let me just say, one thing I will really miss is my Korean phone with its ringtone, these lines from "The Girl From Ipanema":

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes, each one she passes goes - ah ...

I still have some poems to finish (especially my planned epic ode to Starcraft) but I think I will post them on my home page instead. For first time visitors, this blog was written between the months of September and December 2005, while undertaking a residency at Sogang University in Seoul. This residency was made possible by the generous support of the Australia-Korea Foundation and the Australia Council for the Arts. My thanks to Nikki Anderson and the staff at the Asialink Centre at the University of Melbourne, Moon Sun Choi at the Australian Embassy in Seoul and Brother Anthony (An Sonjae) at Sogang University for their assistance, encouragement and support during this time.

My initial aim in coming to Seoul was to research PC Bang (internet gaming room) culture in Seoul from a sociological or ICT perspective. I've always been interested in public use of internet technologies, but in the past this was purely from a research perspective, as opposed to a creative perspective. So initially, before I arrived here, I was determined to document PC Bangs as a sociological phenomenon but I began to lose interest in this once I arrived here. For one, I began to feel that the issue of PC Bangs has been over-hyped or fetishised in the West, to the point where it has become a stereotype. I wanted to get beyond this stereotype and actually exist and create work in these places, rather than simply be an observer looking at the Koreans as an anthropologist might. Secondly, and this might seem contradictory, these spaces are so interesting and so varied, I began to realise that if I was really looking for a space in which the Korean "dymanism" is flourishing, I needed to go where the Korean people go, whether it be a businessman on a lunchbreak, a school student after classes or a university student late at night, or even someone who's had a big night and is using the PC bang as a place to sleep. For me, it was also important to get beyond the "Oh, PC Bangs are bad, did you know someone died in one recently?" kind of reaction, to gain a better appreciation of why people go there. I could only do this by going there myself, and trying to do what I wanted to do. In the end, I succeeded, but in an altogether unexpected way.

As documented in an article on my project in the Korea Times, in coming up with the PC bangs project, I was influenced by Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities, in which Marco Polo described a series of fictional cities (all of which were really Venice) to the Emperor Kublai Khan. For me this book, with its meeting of east and west, says a lot about the western imagination and how it projects its own view of the world upon "the other", whether this be Asia or any other alien place. So, instead of writing about invisible cities, I decided to write about imaginary cities. I drew up a list of words in English ending with "city" (for example "tenacity", "audacity", "ferocity") and removed the letters "city" from each word, thus creating new cities - hence, "tena", "auda", "fero". In this way, the idea of the city would be present but both imaginary and invisible. Over the course of two months I visited a different PC Bang in Seoul every day and wrote about an "imaginary city" in each one. Of course, like Marco Polo, each of the cities I was writing about turned out to be the same place - in my case, Seoul.

One unexpected image or theme that continually came up in the poems/ pieces was the situation of everyday Koreans affected by rapid changes in both the Korean economy and internet technologies. While I was inside the PC Bangs, ostensibly connected to the world via broadband technology, I was acutely aware that outside (for example around the Jongno area), there were people living on the streets, sleeping in ATM booths, or in the park. This stark contrast could not help but show up in the pieces, most of which are full of old men, ajummas, cooks, drunks and everyday people whom i saw on the streets, in restaurants, or stumbling home late at night. So, in a way, to compare my cities to Calvino's would be a mistake - they are all really Seoul, and they are all actually about the people living here, of course viewed by me as an outsider, but nevertheless I hope I have been sympathetic to the street culture here, and to the spirit of the Korean people in general, which is so palpable, even to an outsider like me.

There are so many people whose friendship, kindness and humour have helped me through this period away from home. Most of them are mentioned in one of my final imaginary cities, Viva. In particular, however, I would like to thank Larissa Hjorth, a fellow Asialink resident, whose friendship, drinking and debriefing abilities saved me from certain insanity. Everyone else - well, you know who you are.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this blog and its contents to the people of Seoul and of the Republic of Korea as a whole. I hope that peace will prevail on the Korean peninsula and that the fabled Korean dymanism will not be lost in the sweeping tide of change now gripping the globe. I also hope one day to return to this most beautiful, contradictory and fascinating city but for now so long and thanks for all the soju ...

#   0 comments

---

#   0 comments

---

#   2 comments

---

#   0 comments

---

#   0 comments

---

#   0 comments

---

#   0 comments

---

<------ A city of terminals. << This city with no streets but networks of amputated limbs. << City of burnt grass and black limousines. << Go back to Basi. << Lost city of the broken draft, Cadu is a pile of turnips rotting in the moonlight, begging for a trundle. << Autumn in the city of snow-stolen leaves. << Downtown in the city of greige skylines: muskrats grope for cinnamon oranges in the shadows of a giant air-conditioning outlet. << City of sleepy subways and swift downstrokes. << City of miniature cities, laid out on lawns like picnic lunches, skyscrapers made from sweetstuffs, syringes for telecommunications towers, lights blinking away the loneliness of miniature people gazing up at the stars. << City of warm breaths and gentle men. << Sister city of the radiant golden hair. << City of incompatible systems, apocalyptic notations and superannuated evangelists. << City of riotous dance halls and movies that never end. << City of hunger and dirty palms. << Turning upon the incendiary maple, coming down on an avenue of triumph. << City of dictator beige and magic honey. << City of sandy streets in a lonely tear gas nation. << City of emphasis mines and gravity bombs, assassination attempts and mourning news. << City of vapour trails and suns that set like eggs in a sky of brandy. << City of radiation and pliers. << City of garrets and all-night nature rants. << A film-strength city situated, obviously, deep in the marshes. << City too big to be called a city. << City of the big one, the whopper and the raised eyebrow. << City of dread, of shanties and loam. << The city is tiny but it takes up so much space. << City that encloses many other cities, like a lunch pail filled with multiple containers, each of which holds a prescribed number of foodstuffs - nuts, sultanas, rice, meatstuffs, tapioca, croutons, larvae. << Once upon a time there was a piece of paper through which the words printed on the other side could not be seen, a piece of paper so thick it might have been made of wood. << Stripes of dry land trapped beneath a pale halogen daymurk. << It's just been built but already you can see the tyre-marks on the roundabouts, the skidding tales of midnight smashes and the crumbs of shattered glass. << Alligators crawl through the slippered streets, punctuating the monks' marches for alms. << That vision of you standing in the snow was my secret talisman, a lucky charm to ward off bad weather, frosted lips and crunch hips. << There was a trumpet somewhere but it was tarnished and could only play the theme from F-Troop. << The ajumma comes to the end of her story - the slicing of a giant onion into irregular chunks - and looks up at me as if I am about to leave. << City of sadness engines and wet kindling. << City as weary as a tree that cries leaves. << City of organisms. << The velvet night trips me, I can't see jack via fistlight. << If Velo wears a cardboard crown then surely Vera appears draped in green. << Viva! Page not found. <<------ from: imaginary cities -- vorti -- cities imaginary: from ------>> Page not found. Viva! >> Vera blissful and breathless in daylight's profusion, singing through grass streets stretching seawards to the pipelines, shoves the matter deep in her coat pocket and marches, unfollowed, along cool bitumen avenues, her feet seeking skin prints in the improbably husked net. >> Brims of water and the morning, sirens from the soft ward of someone's conscience, eradicated. >> Human city of bacterial plants, filled with ripe organisms, dead organs and the ghost of a tissue, like a frozen sheet of snow, in the smudged sky, the toxic sky, called home. >> Clothe me in the colour of my departure, then sew up my eyes with city needles, urban thread. >> Dusted with a subway smear. >> We will make stories from the pork and vinegar, roll these in the plotlines of sesame and salt, dip once into the ever-changing vinegar bowl, now greasy with pork fat, picking up where we first left off, being sure also to grab in our shining silver chopsticks without story or meaning a small sliver of white onion, and then taste the whole mysterious historical combination on the ever-unfolding storyboards of our pink wet tongues. >> But in the city of Rau all of these instruments have been silent and sad for a very long time now. >> This is your guarantee. >> Zookeepers have forgiven animals for lesser escape attempts; now comes the time for you to size up the wend of the wires. >> Alone, in the chamber reserved for you in this newest of love-hotel streets, you switch off the flourescent bulb instead, before cracking the set-list in your imaginary, trembling hand. >> Driveways old and empty, bollards wrapped in multi-coloured wire. >> Twenty eight times upon a time there was a dead city called Opa, and this is how many stories you will have to endure before anyone is willing to tell you behind which screen or on which page it even exists. >> A multicity referring and cataloguing itself again and again, until even the patterns of its forced assimilations begin to resemble constellations, beehives, shrouds, lives. >> Odes and elegies, sung in minor keys. >> For once I hear nothing. >> Typical. >> Strawberry soju forever. >> The burning resin between us, behind us, in our heads. >> Lonesome peaks, jagged. >> They can be compared with the other cities, existing (as we do) on warped and tortured scales. >> These are the times when you would like to run. >> When will you cross that line thatched with straw, mountainous with geese? >> Caught in the updrafts of belching subways, a new mythology to replace the reverse dream. >> I've turned my safety off, having no further use for disguises, stealth or radioactive hair. >> The city is full of us - fistfights galore. >> Money strafes us all. >> You. >> Something tells me no one would try to stop me. >> Splashing, exhausted, into a pool of algae and carp, because no one was there to catch me when I fell. >> A city no one living in my home town has ever heard of, nor ever will. >> Await the final outcome. >> This little piggy stays home. >> You're not the only one praying for dawn. >> Couples stroll under the avenues of greening trees, whispering lines of poetry, like thieves unhurried in the dark. >> Blast. >> But their dreams - ah! If only you could see them, feel a sleeping heart's beat! When morning comes, be sure to keep a map beside you, if only to reassure your nocturnal half that Basi is real, just like the obscure system of pressure points that is said to lead to another most ordinary city, that of the smile. >> Behind us, mountains; ahead, cartwheels of conversation, opening. >> Shoulder arms. >> Night comes, and the neon day begins. ------>

#   1 comments

---

#   0 comments

---