March 2012
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AggroCulture
The Rat (Aloha Super Brand- Corporate Camo#1) “The Rat and the Octopus” is a triptych of photographs featuring two allegorical characters, the land speculator and the construction worker, and their magic economic ritual that turns land into a commodity. In the left panel, the phone-toting speculator wears a lime-green suit printed with a repeating pattern of handshakes and blooming...
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“Economics has a lot of trouble reconciling its solutions with ‘the way of...”
– Dave Swenson, Leopold Center. (From American Wasteland, Jonathan Bloom)
February 2012
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H-3
We were driving to Sunset Beach from Kailua and inadvertently ended up at the Marine base. I forgot freeways have their own logical outcomes, especially if you aren’t paying attention. (My family was talented at ending up in the wrong state.) H-3 gets to be an interstate because it’s a defense highway, built to facilitate military movement.
Of all aspects of the built environment, I...
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Disappearance of Continuous Place
(This was posted in 2010 on a short-lived group blog, thinking about Seoul street signage reminded me to dust it off and put it back up on the internet)
AECOM design for Seoul Grand Park
What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there. (1937, Gertrude Stein in her...
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Park Life (no relation to San Francisco's Park...
Got a call for submissions for Parkinprogress, a “nomadic mobility programme supported by the European Commission.” I’m not sure what nomadic mobility is supposed to invoke, but the 2011 incarnation is described here and here. I’d be more excited about the project if it was more political in its approach to public space, even in the hippie Stonehenge Festival way described...
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A Litmus of Local Knowledge
Level 2 or Level 3 of the Seoul National University Korean language textbook includes a chapter on asking for directions. In class, we mocked the example dialogue as thoroughly unrepresentative of how Korean people actually give directions. “주우우우우우욱 가면 나와요” “Just keep going.”
I’ve heard that since my departure, Seoul city has made another stab at...
WatchCaught a glimpse of this film that spans China, Ghana & Mexico by Vincent Goudreau and Javier Martinez at the Hawai’i Art Now show at the Honolulu Museum (it will take a while to adjust to the new name, and I’ve only got 2 years of habit to correct. You can tell who indoctrinated me in local geographies because sometimes I want to say Liberty House.)
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Formative Fictional Neighborhoods (Part 1)
I literally grew up in John Hughes territory in suburban Chicagoland. When I was 2, my parents moved to the best school district they could find, a North Shore suburb sandwiched between the towns featured in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Home Alone. But I also grew up in and through the John Hughes territory of film, a landscape of absent parents and class-conscious mayhem that bore little...
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Dancing in Public
Came across PINA - Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost via Polis and thought it a nice follow-up to the Bill Shannon video at the end of yesterday’s post. Despite my terror of contemporary dance as interpreted by college students and the contestants on So You Think You Can Dance, I secretly adore almost all forms of dancing.* **
And most of all, I love dancing in public spaces. I wrote...
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Skaters and skyscrapers
I’m still on my research binge re: public space and found an urban planning dissertation on public space and skateboarding. Skateboarders have been consistently excluded from public spaces and city sidewalks as menaces to the proper pedestrian.* Francisco Gallart argues in his dissertation that skateboarding has been and is still a “critical spatial practice”, even in an era with...
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“If corporations are people, and life begins at conception, does that make anyone...”
– Matthew M. 15.02.12. (via citymaus)
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“I believe that a great part of the [Vietnam] memorial’s symbolic power is...”
– James C. Scott in Seeing Like A State on the Vietnam Memorial. I love that last bit “…virtually requires participation in order to complete its meaning.”
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WatchThis short film on a Hong Kong-born Vancouver chef reminded me of one of my favorite documentaries, Dream Cuisine (Aji). If I tell you it’s about growing old, childhood dreams, a rising China, and cultural identity, that makes it sound so stodgy but it’s really a film about how love is in the details and global consumerism. Gah, that sounds even worse. OK how about someone else’s...
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War of the Roses (Ethiopia Edition)
The thing that’s shitty about globalization as embodied in my daily life (yes, I’ve been reading a lot of David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope for my theory classes) is that it makes you complicit in so much crap. Like, turning on the lights in Korea connects you to the military junta in Myanmar and tar sands extractions in Canada. I unplugged everything in our Seoul apartment after I...
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Hawaii's Food Situation
From the August 10, 1942 issue of the Far Eastern Survey:
For example, in the period 1935-39 the Territory imported nearly three-fourths of its food calories. Practically all cereals, cooking fats, butter and evaporated milk were imported, and from one-half to two-thirds of the fruits and nuts, fish, meat and cheese, and eggs. Local production of vegetables about equalled imports. Local output...
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“Issues of surveillance, and the blurred line between private and public space...”
– Mitch Epstein, who popped up in the New York Times recently for his photos of urban trees.
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Seeing Trees
Image taken from Seeing Trees
My mom changed the way I look at landscapes about 10 years ago when she off-handedly mentioned that she loves old trees because there are so few in Korea. What trees escaped Korean War bombardments would be cut down for firewood or shelter by refugees. So the trees of Seoul are almost all younger than my parents, and even the mountains and country hills were largely...
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“The construction of a city must, indeed, be designed to facilitate the...”
– The Beautifying of Honolulu (1906), by pioneering American urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson.
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On non-climate controlled lives
Barbara Flanagan in I.D. Magazine in 2004:
What happens when humans treat themselves like dairy products chilled behind glass? Civilization declines.
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When citizens can no longer withstand the unconditioned air between buildings, urbanity ceases.
Our first morning visiting Vientiane, I wondered why the city rose so early. (The Vientiane morning market used to run from 2am to 11am...
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Bigger better more, on bicycle
From the artist’s site:
Alain Delorme seems to create a parallel between these manufactured totems and the buildings in the background, which have become themselves contemporary sculptures. The urban space is permanently under construction, developing relentlessly. The skyscrapers invade the city and rise always higher, such as new totems, always more remarkable, always more impressing....
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On the proper use of sidewalks & Occupy Honolulu
I floated past the Occupy Honolulu encampment at Thomas Square earlier this evening, curious after reading the Civil Beat article on their December meeting with Mayor Carlisle following the new city ordinance prohibiting the storage of personal property on public sidewalks. Asking for an exception to Bill 54, the stored property ordinance, seemed like a failed opportunity on the part of Occupy...
November 2011
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August 2011
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August 15th 2011/1945
10,000 Korean won that the kids are yelling “Mansei!”
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Being a Korean girl (you're doing it wrong)
Walking downstairs in heels is easier if you have a boyfriend for balance
As a rule, Korean American women of my acquaintance have shorter stints in Korea than Korean American men. Not only are we bad at being Korean in Korea, we’re also bad at being women in Korea. Every day is a series of reminders that you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you speak Korean like a gangster or a grandma...
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How the mode of transportation determines the...
Lagos, Nigeria
Talk radio is for nations with crappy traffic.* This is the only way I can explain Rush Limbaugh in America — people must be longing for a scapegoat for their road rage. But a happier convergence of gridlock and radio is Wazobia FM. The people of Lagos, Nigeria (population ~8 million) have embraced their local pidgin English radio stations with a vengeance. I wonder if...
June 2011
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May 2011
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Palaka and Pidgin
A few weeks back, the new permanent exhibit “Pidgin: How was.. how stay” opened at Plantation Village Museum in Waipahu. I confirmed that a home-study course consisting of several hours of Rap Reiplinger (despite the organizers’ acknowledgment that local humorists had helped spread respect for Pidgin) did not make me even a beginning-level speaker. One look at the “Pidgin...
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cockroaches of the sea
I hate shrimp. I hate their beady little eyes. I hate their mongrove destroying ways. I hate their hot crustacean band and most of all I hate how much they resemble my insect tormentors.
We once figured out that my 1984-style Room 101 of terror would consist of a dodgeball game in which I was subjected to a barrage of shrimp and crayfish.
* Top image via Weird Sea Monsters.
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my father's maps
[Via Slate, a map drawn by artist Alexander Calder]
My father writes the most meticulous directions. He uses street names, number of stoplights, and landmarks. I always took it to be a symptom of his engineer training and a need to build-in redundancy. After living in Seoul for five years and struggling with the general non-usage of street names (we navigate by subway stop exits and landmarks,...
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Ghetto Superstar
A Youtube flurry led to the discussion that hip-hop videos are all about place. Biggie Smalls, Nas, ok pretty much any New York rapper has shot a music video of a saunter through the neighborhoods of his youth.
Go West Coast, and although Tupac hops into the convertible by the third frame, the camera is still moving along iconic vistas of Los Angeles institutions, strip-malls, and palm trees.
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