This is too much.

Here's a silly video that circulated all around the internet a few years ago -- about in 2004 or 2005. It makes me laugh.


numa numa song


On a COMPLETELEY unconnected note, here's a cute popsong that I heard constantly (when there's a hit song in Korea, it's TOTALLY ubiquitous -- it's almost dizzying how much you hear a song when it's number one in Korea, walking past storefronts, etc.) in 2006. Even my little seven year old students would sing along to it. The artist's name is Hyun Yeong. Yes, she is at least somewhat serious.


nuna wei ggum - the sister's dream



Here's another pair of videos that caught my attention for TOTALLY UNCONNECTED reasons. Especially the Choruses. If you wish, you can ignore the imagery and just listen to the music, or you can watch the videos and muse on the objectification of women and the vileness of beauty culture, both in the West AND in the East.

I know what you're thinking with all these videos by now: CEASE AND DESIST ALREADY, ROB!


"Do Something" by Britney Spears




(yes, I just put Britney Spears on my blog. But I'm making a point here, OK?

Now, "Gonna Getcha" by Korea's own number one Pop Tart, Lee Hyori. In this one especially, pay attention to the loving fixation on stuff, especially in the transitions between dance sequences -- car, phone, clothes, those amazing boots -- so many materials to obsess over, it's almost like stuff pornography.




Not to be nothing but disparaging (how do you like THAT triple negative!), here's my favourite Korean songwriter/singer. His name's Kim Kwang Seok, and like Jeff Buckley, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and almost every other artist I love except Tom Waits and Radiohead and Prince (and a few others), he died young. He committed suicide (purportedly) because he was depressed from hiding his closeted homosexuality in Korea's very conservative society. Before his tragic death, this guy was about as beloved as a pop star can be in a country--every Korean my age and up can tell you their favourite Kim Kwang Seok song, and how they felt when they heard the news that he died.

This dude has a gift for melody, an incredibly expressive voice, and a real grace that I love. It's a shame he died and let the plagiarists take over.


This one's called "Letter of a Private" it was made for the soundtrack of the movie "JSA" which is remembered as a high watermark in Korean filmmaking; it's a story about low level soldiers on either side of the demilitarized zone (the Joint Security Area, or JSA is where North and South stand closest to each other), who become unlikely friends. If you ask nicely, I'll do a post about my favourite Korean movies, and one I loathe.




I really like the next one's melody -- my man Kim is a real wizard with a melodic line. I think it and his expressiveness are his best strengths. The song's title translates as "Please Wait"




This is my favourite Kim Kwang Seok song, the one that I think shows everything I love about him. It's also the only Korean song I can even come close to singing in the noraebang (karaoke room). The title is something like "I used to love you". If you're only going to listen to one of these, choose this one.





He even warrants a tribute: here's a tribute to him, recorded by some other big Korean stars. It's another of his best songs, rendered. . . adequately and lovingly, by some other people.



And one more upbeat one.

Let me tell you about my wonderful friend.

Here's Mel and me and her husband (fiancee at the time) Brent, all at my university graduation.

I made a joke on my blog comments page that wasn't nice to Mel, so with apologies to Tamie's penance post, here's my own penance post.

Mel, also known (to me) as Mellifluous, and Melly-Cat (Melly-cat, oh Melly-cat, what are they feeding you?) is my best friend in Canada. All my students in Korea hear about her so often that "My best friend in Canada Mel" has (along with "My best friend in Korea Matt") become my own personal sigh-inducing equivalent to American Pie's "This one time, at band camp. . . " line.

Mel is great! You can go to her interesting, thoughtful, more-frequently-updated-than-mine blog (link at the side of the page), and learn more about her if you like. Our friendship goes back to a Milton class where we seem to basically have sniffed each other out as fellow artists. (Mel corrected me when she read this, informing me that she sniffed me out as an artist; I just wanted attention. I'll pass that on to you, and let you judge for yourselves whether, from what you know of me, that might be true.) Since then, we've have some of the most amazing talks I've had in my life, some of the most ridiculous laughs, and borne with each other through various "I thought I'd hit bottom, but THAT'S when everything REALLY hit the fan" kinds of crises.

She's one of the best conversationalists I know, very articulate, even for a brunette, and in the top ten list of "nicest/coolest/kindest/most reassuring things anybody's ever said to me," she owns at least a third of the spots. For example. . .

(just kidding. Those are between me and her. I'm such a tease.)

She has a wonderful husband and two great kids I got to hang out with this July when I was back in Canada, and she's an awesome life-saving siren-wailing first-class cool-under-fire paramedic.

Plus, she's kickin' smart, but even though she's kickin' smart, she hates intellectual arrogance (thus keeping me in check).

She's also the one who teased me out of talking about music incessantly (you may all want to immediately hop over to her site to thank her personally).

My friend Mel. She's top-shelf.

love
Rob

Bubbles.

So this place next door to my school has a bubble machine they run from the balcony all day long.

It's fun to watch people walking by, suddenly startled by bubbles drifting into their paths, and then avoiding, or chasing, or popping, or swatting at them. (See the bubbles?)


When they touch the pavement, the bubbles usually pop, of course, as bubbles do.

But when it rains, and the pavement is wet, the bubbles stick in half-spheres, like bits of glow growing out of the pavement, on one of the busiest streets in Korea, and people walk by without even noticing them, and it makes me happy that such fascinating little things are all around me.



Most people don't even notice them, and, perversely, that makes me happy too, because if most people don't notice them, but they give me so much great joy when I spot them, it makes me think. How much of the wonderfullness (wonderfulousity?) in the world goes unnoticed -- is the difference between hating and enjoying, and immensely loving your life, just a matter of paying more attention to little wonders, and noting the little wonders for what they are? And if 99.9 % of the people don't notice these little bubble-globes, how many brilliant little scintillae am I also missing, because I haven't learned yet how to pay enough attention to them?

To paying more attention!
Have a vivid day.
Rob

Tamie wants me to post more often.

So this is for her.

Check out this excellent, thoughtful post I just read in one of my friends' blogs.

Among other things I did while sorting through all my stuff. . .

I also sifted through scads of old photo negatives, and got London Drugs to scan the best ones, the keepers, onto CD, so that I could preserve them in digital form.

Here are some of the best ones.

Matt's new haircut in Japan


Me with my favourite class ever -- from my first year in Korea.


Me in a field of dandelions.


Me in a tree in Stanley park.


I hid a camera in my sleeve, and took a picture with my university's president as I walked across the stage to receive my diploma, at my university graduation.


Kids playing at a palace on Korean Thanksgiving Day.


Dancing with an old lady. Full story here.


One silly Christmas: finishing a roll of film with mom, Deb and Dan.


At an airport in Ontario.


My second favourite picture of my mom and my nephew. (The favourite one wasn't in my pile of negatives. Dad has it somewhere.) I think this one really shows the special relationship my nephew and my mom had.


Hope those pictures made you happy!

love:
Rob

Look what I found!

Highway 22 in Alberta is also known, appropriately, as the Cowboy Trail.


Here are some pictures from google images. (See? Who needs a camera, really?)

Curses!

I have mentioned before in this space how I have no luck with cameras.

I always either lose them, forget them at home, or forget that I have them, and so fail to take any pictures. Any way you slice it, the end result is that I finish my trips with few or no pictures. It always seems to go the same way. The pictures in the posts below were all taken with my cellphone camera, which I had to turn on and wait forty-seconds before I could use it, so many of the prettiest views I had in the road never got photographed, because they were gone before I could take a picture.

Here are the pictures I wish I could show you.

___ the mountain ranges that kept seeming to turn up exactly at the spots in the rockies where there was a passing lane, so that I was always so concerned with passing or being passed, and navigating corners safely, that I never got around to taking pictures of any of the snow-capped mountains footed by mirror-still lakes.

___ Highway 22 Northbound from CrowsNest Pass, Southern Alberta. If you ever get a chance to drive around in Alberta, you need to just get on Highway 22 and drive as much of it as you can. It runs parallel to Highway 2 (or Queen Elizabeth Way 2), the main corridor from Lethbridge to Calgary, Red Deer, and Edmonton; however, instead of having towns and gas stations all along its roadsides, it has huge foothills covered with yellow grass and cattle ranches, fences enclosing giant acreages, and the occasional deeply rutted river valley, steep-banked, and widened by floods.

___ The shores of Long Beach, Vancouver Island. The vegetation here slopes up like the front of a race car, razed down to that shape by terrifying winds and storm weather that washes entire trees ashore during the winter. Climbing on those logs was like being a little kid again, and watching the giant waves crash in (best surfing in Canada on Long Beach), then seeing what those waves did during the winter (huge piles of tree-trunk-sized driftwood right up next to the forest) was humbling and elevating at the same time.

___ The picture I'm glad I CAN'T show you: Banff downtown (previously one of the prettiest, cutest main strips in any town), all under construction as they expand it to fit Banff's growing tourist industry (sigh. so sad)

Imagine taking a highway exit expecting, looking forward to this:


And instead getting this.


Quite a let-down, unless you happen to have a fetish for heavy machinery. (Which I, categorically, do NOT).

___ I wish I could show you pictures of my friends. Especially Mel and her two wonderful little boys (you can click on the link to her blog on the side of this page and see that), and pictures of Tamie and me in Lynn Canyon, and me and Anila and Antaya watching TV together, as cozy as kittens.

Here's a picture that almost perfectly recreates my first experience in Agassiz since October 2005.





Along with my camera curse, I have a sunglasses curse.

Every time I travel, I lose a pair of sunglasses. The trip where I danced with some crazy old ladies was the first trip that started this trend (I'd finally shelled out for a pair of shades I quite liked, and they broke. Shouldn't have sat on them, I guess), then I bought another pair in Japan, only to lose them in Malaysia. I bought another pair (with playboy bunnies on them) in Malaysia (you can see them here) but one of the tiny little nuts holding the glasses part onto the frame came off, so you know it's only a matter of time for them. Well, at a random gas station with my kid sister Antaya, I saw a pair that I quite liked, bought them, and used them all through the sixty-plus hours of driving I did in July, but then, on my last day of driving, I think I took them off to use an ATM machine, or to put Irish Cream syrup in the gas station coffee (didn't help the coffee, either) and forgot to pick them back up again (the same way I lost the camera I got with my university graduation present money, except that time I was climbing a mountain, and changing out of sweat-soaked clothes). So I'm back to my usual cursed, sunglasses-free self, thinking about just wearing a hat all August, rather than getting heat exhaustion from the criminally hot sun all month long, and needing nine hours of sleep a night.

My usual policy with things I keep losing, breaking, or otherwise seeming to have bad luck with, is just to give up. I will no longer buy expensive cameras or sunglasses, because I'm just throwing my money away. Of course, there are some of those kinds of battles I WILL continue to fight -- for example, I will continue zipping up any slippery flies on any cursed pairs of pants I may one day own, but I certainly won't get myself frustrated buying cameras and sunglasses, when they just get lost, and I prefer journals and hats anyway.

sw

More about Canada.

Driving to Creston was really pretty.


But Vancouver Island, where I saw Matt's older brother Joel get married, really took the cake. We travelled all over that island, and every corner held another gorgeous view. Really, I just can't get over how pretty Vancouver Island was: I might just have to spend six years there at some point in my life. :)




In Creston, I gave Becca's kids a clown nose to play with. They really enjoyed playing with it. Carrie-Ann smiled and laughed when she saw it on her brother Matthias. . .




Bethany had a habit of taking it out of Carrie Ann's hand so she could play with it.


But once she finally got her hands on it, she knew what to do.

This is one of my favourite songs right now. More about my trip to Canada soon.

Warning: it's noisy.


That's "I'll Believe in Anything" by Wolf Parade, the song that's been cropping up on every mix CD I make these days.

This is another one of my favourite bands these days. The White Stripes rock. They have a new CD out.

This is noisy too.

Rag and Bone



This isn't noisy. I like it too.

Scythian Empire


Even Mel, who hates when I talk about music, liked this guy when I played him for her in 2005.

His name's Andrew Bird.

Back in Korea Safely!

This was funny.



This one has a bad word in it, but when I sent it to my brother, he said "Yeah, I laughed because it was exactly your sense of humour." It's true. It's basically the video I'd make if I had the know-how and needed to make an ad for a fictional product.

Power Thirst


The cicadas are buzzing outside. That's right: I'm back in Korea. I borrowed my brother's car and buzzed all over the Pacific Northwest -- it was sick how much driving I did, from Red Deer Alberta, to Agassiz, to Portland, Oregon, back to Langley, up to Comox (Vancouver Island) ALL over Vancouver Island, to see Matt's older brother Joel's wedding:

this is where Joel had his wedding. Around the corner and down a trail is a heart-stoppingly beautiful waterfall, beside which he and his wife Emily exchanged vows. The country in Vancouver Island is just so beautiful, I don't even know what to say, except that I sure loved driving around it for three days.

And the Finlaysons are a wonderful family, and I know I'll always have a home there in Comox if I need it.




After that I drove back up to Abbotsford, then to Comox to see my sister Rebecca, and finally back to Red Deer. Altogether, I logged more than 65 hours driving around the Pacific Northwest. Sick. I think it put off my owning a car for another two years. Not until I own a cabin by a mountain lake.