Photographic Recursivity?

Looking at Jonathan Morse's cool photography site (which you should all visit forthwith, and if you do I'll save you some groaner of a joke about "thirdwith", or worse, "sandwhich") I saw a picture of some poor cowering punk being photographed by press photographers (with those truly intimidating big-flash units that they used in the day) that made me wonder.

Who has taken the most recursive photograph?

I include here three different "single-recursions" that I liked.

The first one on the left is the classic photo of the photographer at work. And it has to be work just to carry around the kit that dude has.

Really, check out the lens on that camera on his back! He's either a professional or he really has something he's compensating for.

The second is the equally classic reflection photo (which unfortunately just reminded me of the dude who used to put pictures on ebay in which his nude reflection was on the item for sale).That one is from NASA, and they were kind enough to take the time to enhance the reflection in the visor. What can't you do on a Hollywood soundstage?



The third is the party-favorite, taking a picture of the person taking a picture of you.



But it is not enough! All these photos (below) make me want to do is go to a car-show in Seoul and snap a picture of the guy who is always snapping a picture of the 50 guys who are snapping pictures of the car models (In fact, at these car shows, the cars go pretty much un-attended in favor of the models. Sensible, really).

Or, get even more meta (somehow) - line 10 people up and have the first two take pictures of each other, 3 takes pictures of the first two, 4 of those three, etc...

Why?

Because someone has to do the really dumb shit!

Guiness World Record folks, where are you?

The Verb, to Bee!

Why have I been such a bad blogger? Because I’ve been on Staycation here in Seoul. Been sleeping in late, studying Korean, and wandering about the City, with a strong emphasis on Namsan.

Sleeping in is, of course, an unalloyed good, which requires no explanation. It is odd, therefore, that I have the punched-looking eye-sockets of a boxer and a permananent case of the old pee-gon hayo.

Studying Korean, on the other hand, is supposed to keep my mind young, or flexible, or creative, or something, but its main take-home lesson so far has been that I am either too old, rigid, entrenched, or too stupid to learn a new language.

Wandering about has been more successful and, as I sit here waiting for some big-ass editing job to come over the mojo-wire, I am sorting some pictures from Mt. Namsan. I’ve been up it three times this week.

Yesterday I walked from my Korean lessons in Gwangwhamun, over the top, and then down into Itaewon-dong. On the way up I snapped a quick picture of a tour company that might want to change their name? I stopped at the top for a delicious bowl of bibimbap, which gave me the strength to continue.

On the way down I snapped the picture of what I know believe to be an actual cicada (or certainly some other kind of insect). If it’s eyes look weird, that is because it has obviously been the victim of some kind of hideous vampire-bugs who ate its brain out.

Yep, you’re looking through the empty eyeholes to the foliage beyond. Cool or gross, I can’t decide?

Monsoon season is allegedly winding down, but as it continues to rain, it continues to be green and insect-y. Today I spent some time snapping pics of honey-bees. These bees are working the Mugungwha blossoms that have just begun to appear and man do they go at it. The bees get completely coated in pollen, then head off.

After a couple snaps of that, I concentrated on getting, with mixed results, some snaps of bees landing.

That Hot Chick from Bulgogi Blog Found These Pics of Daejeon

Wow


Yvonne, the rare blogger at bulgogi (and, of course, my fiancee) found a slide-show of pictures of Daejeon in 1951, after the Civil War had left town. They are farking amazing pictures if you have ever been to modern Daejeon.



Boggling..



I'm not sure war left Dresden this flat?

Snaps from the new lens..

So my old kit lens would take a shot like this (when fully backed out)


My new lens does this:



when fully backed out.. but that still doesn't quite show the difference, since the photos are the same size. So in Photoshop I did this...


The black representing what the old lens caught.

OTOH shooting vertically..

This




turns to this


With photoshop revealing:


Totally worth the money at under $250.00.

Now I need a macro and a nice 70-200mm piece and my lens collection will be solid

The Second Wave

Namsan is changing, as it does.

The bright blossom colors from this day have gone away.

Still, the greenosity is epic.

this




compares to this (click ya genius!) in that apples and oranges way.

And the once gnarled Rose of Sharon (click here, ok?) now looks like this:



meaning the field of ochre that was this link.. is now this field of green

And the blossoms be coming baby, the blossoms be coming!




One more pretty time before the heat killlessez...

The End of Hi-Seoul

Being pretty busy, I contrived to miss most of Hi-Seoul, the annual festival of culture, but last weekend ADAM and I did take a spin around town to catch what events we could. I had Friday off, and he left Daejeon in the morning, so we headed towards Cheonggyecheon to see what we could see. It was "street performance day" at the stream, and so we were treated to a pretty amusing clown doing the kinds of things amusing clowns do.

As a teacher of English in Korea, I identified!

As an added bonus, ADAM is Mr. Photography and he knew of the fabled Canon dealership in Seoul. For a measly 10K chun they took the camera apart and cleaned both the sensor and the see-through apparatus. I had known the sensor was smudged - in close up pictures you could actually see the smudges on the digital output, but I had no idea how bad the eye-piece had become.

It was like looking through an entirely different camera, and a better one at that!

As you can see however, it did not succeed in making my photographs any better. ;-)

As we wandered down from Cheonggye and I took some snapshots of about the 100th "Changing of the Guard" ceremonies that I have snapped in my life, we also went by this kind of cool installation art in the sky. Later that night Adam looked it up on the wikipedia and it was revealed that the fabric was supposed to represent rivers.

We were just impressed by how it looked, and even more impressed at seeing such a grand expanse of green grass anywhere in Korea. Most fields are of spit-permeated dust, or covered in concrete or stone. What little grass is around, is usually pretty beaten and abused, but this was in good enough shape to lie directly on (after conciously excluding the whole "coated with spit" thought from your mind!).

Then it was home for dinner, Yvonne joining us, and some time spent over in Itaewon. Never my favorite place to go, but it was pretty fun.

The next day was back to Seoul and some cultural performances. I was still carrying the effed up card from Tokyo, so I really only had 256 safe MB to work with and was thus quite parsimonious about my snapping. Still, this pictured little girl was both intense and cute, and the medley of Beatles songs(!) played on traditional Korean stringed instruments (help me here BKF?) was soothing and kind of ridiculous sounding.

Finally, as we backed out of the shrine/temple park, we were amused to see the following piece of (I think) conceptual artwork. Someone has erected a scaffold around a brick building and is enclosing it in a facade of doors. Surprisingly, to me at least, it looked attractive and thoughtful.

Unecessarily Graphic?

It isn't Just Fan Death that can kill you around these parts, mister!

I have to hat-tip the BKF for giving me a clue of this. We were walking to dinner during his visit (a time I already refer to, with just a hint of woe on my otherwise noble countenance, as "the good old days") and he started laughing. I asked why and he gestured back over his shoulder, "There's a sign back there that threatens to kill litterers."

In the interim I have learned the word for garbage, and so today as I walked past the store I could read some of that white sign scratched in the concrete. It says, "If you litter around here, I'll kill you!" (that is kind of translated from the literal)

New Words are -
걸리면 = When caught
버리다 = throw away
죽는다 = dies

and I think(?) that the verbs are all in the root form to make it simple for foreigners to understand? The BKF can clue me in on that, I'm sure.

UPDATE - The only other thing I can easily read there is the advert for cigarettes, not only because it is ubiquitous here, but always looks the same - white circle, red letters, blue background. Now THAT is marketing!

The Hills Are Alive....

Walking up the hill behind BPU2 to get to Namsan Park I first come across this little shrine, tucked between two horizontal trails across the hill. Around it you can see the kind of springing that is going on.


Those once ochre and dull-green hills have asploded with color - in fact much of the cherry-blossom color has already fallen off of the trees. As you walk through, the wind brings down gusts of blossoms, like velvet flakes of snow.



Finally, a close-up of the 무궁화 bushes reveals that they are finally starting to come back from their savage pruning. Good, since I think it will mean a second efflorescence on the hill.

I'm all for it.

The Path Taken More Times Than Jenna Jameson

ME AND IMMIGRATION

Today is my weekly day off and it started well, lolling about in bed and IMing The Reprobate, the OAF, and MAF at the same time. I felt such a 21st century boy! If only some of you other "friends" and "family" were more certain IMsters. After all, I now have a personal best to beat.

Then it was off to get the last bit of my difficulties with immigration ironed out. Simple things are often good things (explaining why I dated Kim Vickery) and I had a breakfast of Kimbap and Coffee which is both simple and good.

As a bonus, I got to Immigration, got my ticket out of the machine and was called within three minutes. So now, at the cost of 700 dollars, I'm clean with Korea. Looking at the passport I'm not sure that I have the paperwork I need for multiple entry (which reminds me of an experience I once had in a men's room at the bus station in New York, but perhaps that is for another post?) status, but when BKF lands I'll have him look at it.

This has been, as my first lovely picture of Namsan over there indicates, an uphill struggle.

Still, I'm quite happy it is over and despite initially getting on the subway in the direction of outer nowhere (Somewhere between Alameda, California and anywhere in the semi-autonomous English posession of Scotland) I was home by 1:30 or so.


UP THE HILL BACKWARDS (IT'LL BE ALRIGHT)

Since I had purchased some new headphones last week on my trip to Yansang, and wanted to use the mighty Ipod, I thought a trip up towards Seoul Tower would be a darned good thing. I grabbed the camera and headed up.

Spring is very slowly beginning to sprung. I could see some color - those yellow bushes along the road have bloomed in the last week, and when I looked closely at the bushes and trees I could see buds everywhere. The buds were pretty obvious on some of the flowers - the only exception were the Mugungwha (Rose of Sharon) which have been so tightly pruned that they seem to be in a state of shock. That might not be all bad, since although some plants have been fooled by last week's Spring-like weather, it went back to about freezing the last few days and last night, as I went to dinner at a Nepali restaurant, it snowed a bit.

But spring is coming, as even the trees are starting to bud. Most of the hill is still pretty ochre, but some spots have dashes of color and, after Spring last year in Daejeon, I'm looking forward to see what's going to happen on the mountain.

I didn't include pictures here of the lilly pond on the Itaewon side of the mountain, but by change of the season, or by the hands of man, it is starting to get substantially less cloudly and it also looks ready to start blooming into something cool.


BE VEWWY VEWWY QWIET... I'M HUNTING AJUMMA!

The hiking behavior of older Koreans is unlike anything I ran into in The Empire, so I also took a few emblematic snaps of them. The first thing I noticed in Korea (on the trails that is) is that older Koreans have a very characteristic walking style. They either carry a walking stick, in which case their hands are free, or they clasp their hands behind their backs and walk slightly leaned forward. Spookily, this walking style is exactly that of the OAF (this might explain her love for kimchee - shared genetics) and it has always reminded me of old WWII pictures I saw of Hitler reviewing the troops. At any rate, it is very typical.

The second thing, that I think I've mentioned before, is that for people going out "into nature" Koreans do everything they can to cover themselves from it, and many Ajumma look only a plane ticket to Nepal and three Sherpa short of an attempt on Everest.

It was a bit chilly today.. 45 degrees in that savage measurement system that many of you use back in The Empire ... but not that chilly, and this style of dress is as strictly adhered to when it is 90 degrees and 90 percent relative humidity as it is when ice-storms are blowing through. Anyway, I include a snap of each style. That picture of the couple, particularly spooks me out, because .... because... THEY HAVE NO FACES!!!

Ahem, I'm better now.


USE YOUR. TALENT TO DIG ME UNDER

Last week I also went on search of pots for plants, potting soil, and fertilizer. Only one of these things exist in Seoul (pots - a culture so good with ceramics is likely to have a lot of pots about). Some quick confabs with my lovely students returned a uniform response, "you have to go outside Seoul." But all the classes were also uniform in suspecting I was some kind of dangerous retard for wanting to pay for dirt.

I took great pains to explain that while I was some kind of dangerous retard, it was for not this reason. Also, after my explanation of what I needed, a student in each class finally said some version of, "Professor, why pay for dirt? Our school is next to a mountain."

And so it was that today, on my trip to Namsan Mountain, I took a little tupperware container and stole some dirt from beneath a newly planted tree.

This went against everything the Sierra Club ever taught me, but when in Rome, I suppose, I must do as the Romans propose.

Then, maybe 100 meters past the site of my dirt theft, The Universe either taunted me, offered me an answer, or is trying to get me arrested. Maybe all three.

As a dangerous retard I have no way of judging.

But there, to the left of the trail, was a tarped stack of of 20 kilo bags of dirt that the park gardeners apparently use for planting things.

I'm not sure what to do about this, but If I call any of you for bail money, I damned well expect you cough up. Got it?

Ah.. a good day in the land of always tomorrow...

This weekend may be MT, which should be a raft, if not an actual cruise-ship (since who knows where we are going), of entertaining stories.

For now, it may be time to toddle down to the regular and have a delicious Gin and Tonic.

After all, days off only come around three times a week.

My Walk To Work: Being the First Part.

So.. as I walked home over Namsan yesterday I noticed that small, almost infinitesimal bits of rambunctious Spring were starting to break out.

Last week, as I walked home from BPU2, I took the photos embedded here. At that time little on Namsan was green except the tops of the evergreens. That little green patch on the ground is on account of some kind of granite culvert, but elsewhere even the small buds on the ends of branches and shoots were a scruffy brown.

With the smog and yellow dust, it was a semi-apocalyptic sepia-toned world. Except for the ajumma and ajeoshi hiking everywhere. Who, when you think about it, are relatively sepia-toned themselves. Not that you can tell, because when older Koreans hike, they nearly cover themselves from head to toe in layers of clothing, masks, gloves, and some things I'm not sure I could ever really identify.

Still, on that day, there was a rather muted palette of colors, and the first signs of the watercolor explosions to come are just now creeping out.

Some Kind of purple flower has burst out on the East side of the hill, and you can see slight green-buds everywhere (Well, you'll be able to see them when I photograph them tomorrow).

The last picture at the bottom looks rather crap right now, but I bet it becomes pretty impressive when the three-week long Spring really hits. It is a patch of Mugungwha bushes, and I plan to stop by every so often and take a picture as the look changes.

Then, the pollution, dust and sand will come, and photography will become impossible.

It will be impossible, I say!

Fame but no fortune..

A letter from semi-prestigious magazine:

Dear Charles,

Congratulations on your new position. Even though I work on Japan, I have a special interest in Korea and am happy that you are in Seoul. I am also attracted to your idea of a photo spread for the fall 2010 Asian Religions special section. The deadline for that issue is May 10, 2010. Please plan on a photo essay of about the same length as your first one.

I am also keenly interested in you doing a second photo essay that, if accepted, will be published in the spring 2010 issue with a deadline of December 10, 2009.

....A bunch of detail excised....

Charles, thank you so much for your interest in working with us again. I look forward to hearing from you about both of these potential topics.

Cordially,
name redacted

sweet! Of course planning so far ahead means that I will be hit by a bus or catch the cancer. ;-)

The Wisdom of the Apes...

AS NOTED AT SOUTH-CENTRAL "ZOOLAND"
























By the Tragic Monkey...

Updates (and pulled plug)

Amazing how much you can get done when your internet is pulled. One of the "bad" things about moving apts is that I got reamed for 100 bucks of penalties on intarwebs because the new building won't accept Inet service from my old provider...

So they came today to take my porno away! This meant no random searching around for internet meaning.

But, it did mean that I got my list of things to do.. well.. done...

I have a good "moving towards final" draft of my paper, I fixed up my CV.. and here is Seoul, brother...

Heck, tonight I might even read something!

First, two quick pictures from the night before. Here is the OAF posing by the river. And, as we walked along the river we saw, under each bridge, some kind of entertainment and crowds of Korean couples and families. I think I’ve mentioned it before, but one of the truly grand things about Korea is the amazing amount of public entertainment and the Korean pleasure in going out and doing social things in public. Even in the shittiest weather you can find Koreans under bridges, playing cards, drinking, sleeping, fishing, whatever. That was certainly true this Saturday night. Under one bridge there was some flute music, and under the bridge in the picture, someone was showing cartoons on the opposite wall.

Sunday was a quick trip to the Starbucks and then up to Insadong. The OAF had been to Insadong twice before, but on a previous trip she wasn’t really happy with. This time, with sun beating down, she happily bounced up and down the cobblestones saying, “I’ve never been here before,” and “They didn’t have all these cool things before.” I didn’t point out to her that if she had never been here before she could scarcely remember whatever cool things might or might not have been around. After a couple hours wandering about, we had tea in the same tea shop, several years ago, that Ed first introduced me to Mrs. 신 – who promises to be most helpful in my efforts to get that next job.

On our way out the night before we had noticed that the “Restaurant That Serves The Ickiest Soup Ever” was now swaddled in the framing and cloth that Koreans put up prior to demolition. The Maitre’ D however, was sitting outside the cloth sheath and when he saw my look of befuddlement he quickly walked us through an alley and to the new version of the old restaurant (which, mysteriously, was mentioned in the translation that BKF and I just worked on). So, if you want some delicious hemmorhage soup you’re gonna have to come to me for directions. ;-)

Then it was a walk back to Cheonggye Plaza and the food festival. This was a major disappointment. There were only about 20 booths and they were all standard festival faire, by which I mean non-food festival fair. The OAF had some corn that was so soggy we tossed it out. When the New York Hot Dog is the tastiest food at the Korean Food Festival? Something went a bit wrong. I hung around for a bit and watched people get a shot at the ttok-dough (entirely different from Dokdo!). You had to really pound the crap out of it in order for the smallest bit of dough to fly, and it was interesting to watch people try. Then it was off to the Texas bar for a beer and to Seoul Station to get the OAF back to South Central in time for her work the next day. I also bought my ticket for the next day – but this time I got a 새말 ticket, which is much cheaper and the trip, as it turns out, more scenic if a slight bit longer. I went back to the Hotel and was so tired that I didn’t go back out again. So when I lay my head down at about 10:30 it came as a considerable shock that I couldn’t go to sleep. Just could not.

Finally dozed off sometime near 1, woke up at 3:30, and then woke up again for ‘good’ at 6:30 the next morning. I spent the whole day in a semi-coma. The day was highlighted by a sweaty trip to KLTI to drop off the BKF’s translation and then a trip back to Seoul Station to discover that I had purchased a ticked from Daejeon to Seoul and not one for the direction I wanted. The nice ticket lady exchanged these tickets with minimum fuss although I did have to wait an extra 40 minutes to catch my train. The ride down was nice, except for about 20 minutes of atrocious behavior by a child sitting behind me. Then it was home, off to the CafÈ Idee for two glasses of wine (French! And for only 5 bucks a pop) and back home for some sleep which came quite easily.

I woke up the next morning to discover I had lost my electronic dictionary, which was a bit of a bummer, but I was soon to get over it.