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I had a rather cultural weekend, which is good because I've been getting a little tired of hanging out with little kids by day and getting smashed at night. I mean, I still like those things but sometimes a boy wants more, y'know?

Saturday I tooled down to the Suwon Fortress with Belinda and Sam in Dook's rumble-van. Our interaction with the fortress itself was minimal, limited to driving around the outer walls and saying things like "Where the hell is this place?" We were on a very special mission, you see, a mission to find the Ultimate Eatery. And so we did, passing by a giant bronze emperor sitting serenely on the cusp of Suwon, benevolently watching over his hotbed town of neon and industry. He had the fortress locked down: we had more immediate goals in mind.

The eatery itself, as it turned out, was a ragtag half-basement operated by an immensely fat man in combat fatigue pants. A tiny, masterfully hidden, screen door granted us entry and we crouched through to find an abode housing three small tables. And it was awesome! The walls were decorated with guns and parasols and used grenades and masks and American Confederate propaganda and a giant wooden penis. The screen door featured a story about how it had been constructed by seven men, at 100 000 won apiece, with extra charges for soju snacks and fish along the way. Thusly, the door declared, the grand total cost for damaging it would be about 750 dollars. So we didn't smash the door.

Our big-bellied host fried us up some delicious kimchi pancakes and we drank milk-white liquor, called mak-o-lay, out of prison-style metal bowls. Mak-o-lay, as I have crudely phoneticized, is a rice-booze similar to bekseju but had the curious property of making its imbiber feel more stoned than drunk. This makes it vastly superior to bekseju in my eyes, especially because bekseju is gross and sucks the bag. There we were: me, Belinda, Sam and Dook, giggling to ourselves like schoolgirls, liqui-fried out of our skulls. It was surreal to the max.

Then the Fat Man's posse dropped by, all smashed on soju, and we proceeded to have a good 'ol time with liberal interpretation services from Dook. All of them were former yangachi, or gangsters: aging men with fading jailhouse-style tattoos on their forearms and diamond rings on their fingers. They were bang-up guys, too, and two of them kept insisting on cramming pieces of raw fish into my mouth. Because I was pseudo-stoned, I could say mashi-issyo (it's delicious!) and honestly mean it. The posse ribbed the Fat Man endlessly ("Hey fat pig, do you have any fish today?"), which he took with stoic good grace, and whenever he went back to the kitchen to perform food services the most spry of the yangachi would leap to his feet and slyly refill our mak-o-lay bowls. "Sur-viss-uh" he would say, with a wink.

"Service" in Korea basically means "give me some free shit" and, as a general rule, you should say "service" whenever conducting even the most menial transaction in hopes of landing some extra prize. Well, we landed plenty of free mak-o-lay and while we drank, a few down-and-out adashi came down into the eatery and the Fat Man hooked them up with some free soju and a handful of weirdo seaweed grub and a few ribald insults about penis size. We finally left our laughing, wasted ex-gangster friends behind and took a brief look at the fortress walls before heading home, fully intending to return for mak-o-lay redonkulousness at a later date.

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On Sunday I was planning to sit around and shake off a hangover garnered from several Korean army fellows who crashed our poker game and forced me to shoot soju with them the night before, but Chad and Jen thankfully offered a more culturally stimulating pathway: the National Museum of Contemporary Art. We subbed it over to Seoul Grand Park and made our way past Seoul Land, which looked like a pretty crappy excuse for an amusement park. It was like Santa's Village, maybe, or what would happen if you took all the rollercoasters and fun rides out of Canada's Wonderland and then beat every arriving guest with a bamboo switch. So we judged and strolled and judged and before we knew it, the museum rose before us majestically and a giant fucking robot was guarding the entranceway.

This robot statue was especially freaky because its huge mechanical jaw would creak open at intervals and the thing would start singing, some kind of queer siren song which, if one listened long enough, would surely convince you to assassinate the president or maybe buy seventeen souvenir shirts at the museum shop. So we rushed by warily and, after briefly stopping to help some statuesque Koreans push at a big mirror ball, entered the accultured halls of the National Museum of Contemporary Art.

Contemporary, for the most part, means a hodgepodge of retarded modernism drivel and postmodern WHY DID WE DO THAT?? The first sight we beheld was a massive circular bank of television screens, spiraling up and up and up forever. Each display featured a psychedelic seizure of global images and flashes of colour. The overall effect was quite impressive, and I wondered whether I could perhaps tune this armageddon of television to something useful like, say, the Leafs game. Sadly, art is never useful and we wandered onwards.

There were some interesting one-colour reliefs depicting Korean military nationalism and many traditional scroll-scapes of sages on mountaintops, contemplating some shit. Every time I tried to take a picture, a well-dressed museuwoman would rush over and say something in Korean, most likely asking for a spoonful of porridge or demanding my opinion on interstellar warfare. It got annoying, so I eventually ceased and desisted my futile efforts to photograph the galleries.

It was probably just as well, anyway. Most of the art was pretty kife nonsense: a clutter of tangled chicken-wire entitled "TIME", for example, or a big posterboard of black squares entitled "TIME". Apparently time is a popular subject for meaningless abstract representation, along with "THE ORIGINS OF EVERYTHING". I am thinking of creating a postmodern "TIME" of my very own by throwing several rolls of Bounty toilet paper down a staircase into a sizeable pile of broken glass, filming it, and displaying my masterwork backwards on an old Colecovision monitor that's been smeared in maple syrup and smashed up with an authentic paganist ankh. HOLY SHIT THAT'S ART!

There were some fairly thought-provoking pieces, however. One of my favourites was a hi-definition vertical screen alone in a black room, playing a silent slow-motion loop of a crowd of people jostling for position in the camera spotlight. The darkness of the room and the quality of the display demanded attention, and I found it fascinating to watch the interactions and body language of each person in the 'film': making up backstories for their apparent joy or sadness or indifference, watching the way they brushed past each other and held hands and looked back at the camera as if to ask who we were. It was a surprisingly engaging piece, for a technologically-driven exhibit.

Lots of Korean contemporary art seemingly revolves around the (mis)appropriation of technology. One bizarre display featured a split log with several rocks bouying up a small television set, upon which flickered a static image of a rock. Seated on the ground in front of the television, seemingly watching the motionless display was - you guessed it - a rock. A rock watching a TV show about a rock on a TV that was held up by rocks. The show looked pretty boring to me, but I guess if you were a rock then it would probably be like MTV, right?

One of my favourite non-tech exhibits was this business-pig and his fishy wife. Of course, the pig has a fountain pen in his breast pocket and one can't help but think of Orwell's Animal Farm and its accompanying anti-capitalist ideology, but yo, what's with the trout woman? Is this some kind of reverse mermaid dealie, a sly commentary on the true scent of a woman? If it is, at least one Korean artist is a dirty, hilarious bastard. Also notice that the pig is imperiously turning its head away, out of reach of the kissy affections of his aquatic lover. Perhaps this is a critique of the Korean work ethic and the subsequent damper it inflicts on intimate relationships? Man, who knows, it's an alabaster semi-fish kissing an alabaster pig in a suit. This thing is so fucked it could really go anywhere.

We only got about a third of the way through the galleries before we were kindly and firmly booted from the premises by Closing Time and a maddening tune played over the museum loudspeakers. The welcome robot was silent during our exit, his subliminality sung out. I wasn't concerned. What we had seen was definitely enough sustinence to last a while - further culturing should be quite unnecessary for the next few weeks. Eritis sicut dii. Philistine I am.

Posted by Chris at 10:23 AM >> Commentations (1)