Imaginary Cities | PC Bangs

The city is tiny but it takes up so much space. In the tunnels, on the wagons and under the stars. One more push and then the darkness will cloak us, or crack. Dreams of a black crow with a blade of grass in its beak. City of wondrous walls and far-up windows, through which candle light bleeds. Oh yes, it's historical. It's bathed in the blue skies of a post-plague morning. It's covered in mist. It's prandial. Esoteric balladeers pepper their sets with sidelong glances at hourglasses and mead. Fake beards ... okay. Someone pours tea from a giant steel kettle and we settle into our familiar jousting positions. City of interminable consultations with oracles. City of bad news recirculated through flues. City of underfloor heat and head-high smouldering looks. City of jawbones and dialectics. Shutters whirr, somewhere. Outside a stillness prevails, lording it over the jackdaws and scarecrows out on loan. City inside a glass globe. The patter of lower court officials. Thatc

City of dread, of shanties and loam. In a police state jacked on lonely clubs and bullet time, some streetwalkers trip the line, busting the bleeding hearts and painting skyscrapers red. The tenements by the disused stream are no longer reliably dangerous. Shadows swoop on crumbs of maize and shoot arrows into corporate plans but it's all dead-beat, thrashed. Like the screech of Babylon in tremble bars, or the criss-cross of pseudo-mazes infesting the low town. Clamps on all my wheels, buttons on my bread. Time for more sugar. Anytime I might. Seeds and straw, beige monotones and super action. Walking the world into the ground. Plastic bags over plastic plates, on which plastic food is served using plastic implements. A small bowl of soup and three white plastic cakes in a sea of blood-red sauce from a plastic container. Plastic shoes of all stripes, boxes of plastic biscuits. Smashing into plastic signs, drunk as midnight on Jongno-gil. The barbituate of loneliness. Self-doubting

City of the big one, the whopper and the raised eyebrow. City of tales so tall they call them riddlescrapers. City of a thousand hits and one junkie's promise to tell all. City without a story arc. Follish little boys trundling barrels down to the px for spare candy. Two old men fighting in the street with a crowbar next to a construction pit while everyone else just looks on. City of two finger type pads and mouse recalls. Third floor activity hubs. Second floor restaurants catering to the mafia. First floor florists. Streets filled with newspapers telling of the latest academic to be hauled before the prosecution for supporting the non-existent enemy state. City of excruciating silences and barely audible whines. Factory timetables. Hawker routs. City of the tin whistle, the banana peel and the open mouth. Gags that flow like rivers through the food halls. City of girls who hold their hand over their mouth while speaking on mobiles, laughing or both. City of girls in short skirts

City too big to be called a city. City too large to fit on any map. City too huge to have a name. In the city of Mega, it never rains. The colossal pap of remediation hits me. Hey, maybe you only live three times. Sidewinding down to the intermission between tracks one and two. Burning tool hunters. Opera evasions on the side, glassed out emergency macs all over. City of chrome bars and enamel furniture. Primary colours, fruit fusions and blue buttons. Spouts of water dressed as funerals. Arriving at a conclusion that was someone else's initial departure point. Playing tag with the beacons of drizzle. All of a sudden, the atmosphere becomes turpid. Like sunglasses freeze-fitted to the face. The winking lights of the riverside expressway warm my heart. Applying lip gloss in the dark. Waiting for the subway train that will spirit me to Jeju-do, and the lava tubes. Singing a sad folk song upon your departure. Finding out its name years later. Spin-dried woollen pants. Silkworm rot. Ba

A film-strength city situated, obviously, deep in the marshes. Canals full of treacle and drains that drip. Body-parts moving infinitely towards their obsolescence, pulsing nevertheless with the isotope of hopeless life. Hopeless life, staggering towards reproductive symmetry. Symmetry, between our bodies and the city's design. Blank signs, stretched across a broken boulevarde. Dream spurts, like a monsoon of desire. Speaking of Lubri, a mechanic drew for me his own version of the plastic passions. It looked a little like a bowl of noodles. I danced around a pole, subverting the warrant for my repression. Something sidled up to me and thrilled me in the dark. My hand lay clenched by the remocon, unable to let go of its caffeine fixation. Somehow, we slept. The days could fill a plastic spoon. An endless city of reboots and configurations drawn in red. Beyond the heat-haze, on the river coated with lurid green fronds, we sat and watched as the ferries punted to and fro. The beer bot

City of garrets and all-night nature rants. City of the invisible line between smoking and non-smoking areas, waves of smoke billowing freely across this demilitarized zone while observers from both sides wo-man their monitors. City of freak scenes and bad acne, too much foundation and red blood dripping from the lip. City of faux-soundtracks to eighties jazz bio-pics shot in sepia-green. City of corn investigations, acid-rash and delta dreams. Waking up non-plussed by the miaowing of a miniature fridge, set to icicle. City of blather. Move along, please. Haunted by the disco-pup cruising at three o'clock, dumplings like miniature brains at an autopsy. Cleaning up after the big tsunami. Coin-drop can dispensers, grape soda rushes. Waiting to hit number one, for the counter to trip zero. Surprise me, phantom pants. Wriggle out of a stone. Borrowing a line from an anonymous abstract, bleatings from the online cyclo-pediatrics. Your cyworld homepage gives me the impression that you ha

City of radiation and pliers. To find meaning in the ad breaks between sutras. City of radio free emoticons. Television is a sheet of glass between eternity and magnetism. Decomposition comes naturally. We are of the worm. This electronic charge re-situates my poles. I crave great density. Listen to the crystals dictating terms for an armistice that will never come, discovering some correlation between diplomatic functions and these bare-faced streets of Ioni. Packed with pseudopotential, the trains revolve on time. Chaos - or is it entropy? - is achieved in such a way that no one ever notices the difference. At the community police station, some charge is bound to be read out, slowly. I document the eruption of a different species. It is no longer appropriate to quote scientific abstracts in the fce of minor court officials. Beneath the piping of sub-latrines, a new manure-nation can unambiguously be defiled. By means of decomposition, the general and his band of assassins attempt mic

City of vapour trails and suns that set like eggs in a sky of brandy. City of drivers on auto-pilot and air pregnant with the rumour of the first snow. Snow so fine it falls in shards and can only be seen in the light of the eerie streetlamps. Wan glow so eerie it makes you feel like snow. Tomorrow morning you will walk out your door, see the damp bitumen and think: last night it snowed. Only here and now, in the alleyways of Inter, snow is just a jotting on a "to-do" list, like missing your appointment with thanksgiving and going out drinking instead. Compiling a list of body-parts you would like to photograph. Check the hourly news bulletin for a ping from some long-lost friend or your new-found love. Burying your new-found lust under a tree, then walking three circles around it. Crying at the sight of children holding onto handrails and not looking down as they inch towards the tempting sweet. Air so cold it makes your eyes wet, coming out of the subway with no gloves and

City of emphasis mines and gravity bombs, assassination attempts and mourning news. City of lightning and turtle boat people. City of city slickers in emergency ponchos goose-stepping through puddles of rainbow-infected grease. Monumental city, shouldered with statues of great and far-flung revolutionary bandits. City of the comet Kohoutek and the Sun King. Wave your pink fronds in equal time, denizens. Men in short-sleeved shirts and ties as if this is Dallas in the 1960s; women in traditional dress and immaculate make-up and perfume. City of bombs reversing into the cargo bays of silver aeroplanes. City of cricket operas and cicada sonatas. Drizzle falls along the motorways, while distant guardhouses flicker in the dim fog. The self-important jeeps honk and rattle, slowing only for hairpin bends, or mountain curses. The pyramid, fashioned from the jetsam of a streamlined war, remains unoccupied. Even great leaders, it seems, must wait for sanctity to be betsowed upon them by temporal

One of the highlights of being here in Korea has been meeting some strange people. And when it comes to strange, you can't do any better than Canadian-turned Yankee Kevin Puloski , who I met while staying at the Seoul Backpackers (Deluxe). Through Kevin I met a lovely Korean girl called Young Eun , with whom we spent one delightful drunken evening in ... erm ... October? Cripes, the old memory's on the fritz. Anyway, here's some snaps that Young Eun took that night. She also made some movies of us singing at a norebang (Korean karaoke), including one spectacular clip of Kevin and I performing "Paperback Writer" but Blogger seems to be having a coronary when I try to upload it, so you'll just have to imagine ... I really like this one, taken down at the Chonggyechon stream project. Arty. This one could almost be a band shot. Taken out the front of a Sweet Buns franchise. My favourite place to be! Me and Kevin clowning around. Heck, someone's got to do it.

City of sandy streets in a lonely tear gas nation. City of secret cities and minimal identification requirements. City of corkscrews. Dawn breaks across the children's playground, the eerie neon of the all-night soju bar casting a sick light over the kerb's exchanges. As I work my way through this alien's alphabet, I take solace in the cheerful smiles of advertising posters. Inside the club, the space is dense with the sweat of foreign girls and couples lining up for the coatcheck. I order whiskey and coke for myself, then try to dance. Some people - mostly girls - can do it easily. I stumble through the first of many traditional techno-climaxes. Dancers mince and groan on the stage, grinning at non-existent admirers, or perhaps their own unchronicled secret one-liners. City of thrash and guitar experiments. City of miniature pizzas served in paper cups, full moons folded in half. City of night explosions and odyssey marches. A city that cries like single men coming home fr