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Diario de Ciudad de México VIII

Friday, November 11, 2011

As luck would have it, the camote man turned up on my birthday. We’d put away beer after beer and pizza after pizza, I had a birthday brownie (fully equipped with ice cream) comin’ my way, and there came a whistle so plaintive it could have only one source. While indeed plaintive, the whistle also has the quality of “extreme volume,” so a friend easily tracked the man down and had him wheel over to our table. One of the Japanese people I’d only just met bought me a camote with condensed milk. Some brave entrepreneur needs to import this ancient tradition into Los Angeles.

(The ancient tradition of Japanese people buying me sweet potatoes.)

My experience of D.F. eating culture mostly comes down to comida corrida, or street food. In line with the general phenomenon of every patch of open space becoming a store, many of those stores sell tacos, quesadillas, sincronizadas, tortas, huaraches, flautas, sopes, gorditas, empanadas, pan dulce, fruit with chili and lime, prepared tamarind… the list goes on. You find good things to eat on almost every city block. (You also find less appealing stands that sell what I call “sun-dried sushi.”) We’ve eaten full meals, and eaten well, for around five U.S. bucks. Not to say that you can’t go all-out; when friends took us to Roma’s famous Contramar, we ate a meal we’ll never forget — and it still cost about two-thirds of what an equivalent L.A. restaurant would have. If an equivalent exists.

One possible structuring principle for a future Japan trip: go from jazz club to jazz club to jazz club. Given Japan’s large, enthusiastic jazz culture, this would ensure a rich experience. The same goes for Mexico City coffee culture; on some days, the drive to find the next coffee shop seemed to hold everything together. I need give you no more detailed a starting point than the café de olla found at Coyoacán’s Café El Jarocho.

This reminds me to reflect upon how much sweeter a café de olla tastes than anything I get into the habit of drinking — or eating, for that matter — in L.A. Vast swaths of Mexico City’s culinary scene could take their slogan straight from those Juicy Fruit commercials of the late nineties: “Gotta Have Sweet ®”. I reached the apex of this at Churrería El Moro, an all-night churro joint in el Centro that offers four different kinds of hot chocolate, each sweeter than the last, for the express purpose of churro-dipping. (One even has what looks like a warning on its menu line: “MUY DULCE”.) I took two of these churros home with me but left them on the floor of a cab, which is the greatest loss anyone can experience.

A less appetizing element of that night in el Centro: digging to build a new Metrobús station, a crew seemed to have hit a sewer line, smelling up the whole block and beyond with human poop. This rarely happens in the States, but then again, you don’t get a bus service as good as the Metrobús in the States. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

If you go to Coyoacán for a café de olla, do pay visits to Frida Kahlo’s house and, a few blocks away, Leon Trotsky’s house, both of which stand as museums about their former residents. I don’t have to tell you to go to those, actually; almost every foreigner seems to. While I have no particular love of -isms, I gather that Leon Trotsky’s fans consider him the one communist you can like without getting too much historical blood on your hands. How they feel about the Negritos machine installed in his backyard I cannot discern.

Speaking Spanish and Japanese, languages I don’t even understand well enough to call “second,” brings to mind a piece of research I once read about. I can’t find the original now, but, in gist form, it found that autistic men marry foreign wives much more often than non-autistic men do. (Here’s an Asperger’s-type forum thread discussing it.) We’ve all met the caricature couples of socially maladroit men with wives from halfway across the world (usually Asia, in my experience), and it’s easily observed that ladies who come from other cultures don’t care about or, often, even notice the quirks that put off their men’s own countrywomen. But I bet the obvious and thus acknowledged communication barrier between partners from different cultures also wards off the kind of misunderstandings that come from the assumption that two people, by virtue of being born in the same country and natively speaking the same language, can and should communicate with perfect clarity, as if by telepathy.

One of our Japanese friends doesn’t live in Mexico City; she quit her job in Tokyo and came to visit her sister here for a few months. Discussing this in Spanish, I’ve heard the verb “renunciar” come up. It means “to quit” or “to resign,” but I like the sound of it: “She renounced work.” After two and a half months of my current, very unsustainable lifestyle, I’ve begun to feel like I, myself, have renounced work.

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Diario de Ciudad de México VII

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Mexico City has three major department stores, each of which began as an importer from a different region: Liverpool, Sanborns, and El Palacio de Hierro. Some of the latter two feel truly-old school, like how I imagine the American department stores circa 1960. They’ve got doormen, they’ve got fine chocolate sections, they’ve got restaurants, and they’ve got bars separate from the restaurants. (El Palacio de Hierro also provides me with the only way I can consistently make locals laugh: “Soy Totalmente Palacio” jokes. Interestingly, all those brash ads belie the store’s deep frumpiness.) For my purposes, they’ve got bathrooms. Reliable public facilities being hard to find in el D.F., I see those red Sanborns owls or that huge cursive “PH” and feel sweet relief a-comin’. Though I’d assumed that the nickname “Sanbaños” would have entered common usage decades ago, I find I may actually have coined it. (On the internet, anyway.)

Speaking of, most of the upscale-ish bathrooms here employ an odd faucet design: you push a stick that pokes out of the spout in any direction, and only when you hold it down does water come out. I’ve asked if this has to do with water conservation or something, but most people just act surprised that these faucets don’t exist in the States.

While making the long, winding, often M.C. Escher-ish walk between two connections in a subway station, we found ourselves at the head of a parade. Encircled  by a squad of federal police, a section of UNAM’s marching band celebrated some sort of victory by making serious noise in the cement corridors. (For the recording enthusiasts out there, late-sixties subway stations offer a very “live” sonic environment indeed.) This immediately and simultaneously struck me as “something you wouldn’t see outside Mexico City,” “something that makes me want to live in Mexico City,” and “something that would get irritating if I did live in Mexico City, but not if I could keep a fresh perspective on it.”

The streets of el D.F. provide unusual, fascinating, or just surreal things on the street each and every day. Alas, according to the unflinching principle of yin and yang, it also serves up a number of horrific sights. Madelaine expressed a kind of disturbed awe (or awed disturbance) at the sight and sound of a battered-looking and drugged-acting woman warbling karaoke on the subway for money, portable amplifier and dazed young son in tow. “Don’t look at her,” she insisted to me. Later that night, we also had to pass through some sort of glue-sniffer alley to get out of the Insurgentes station (also known as the site of Total Recall‘s JohnnyCab chase). If it’s any consolation, glue-sniffers aren’t dangerous; they just sort of slump there and stare at you.

Farther down Insurgentes — and, need I add, in broad daylight — I paid a visit to the previously mentioned Condominio Insurgentes, a grandiose condominium tower dating from a previous era of Mexico City prosperity now reduced to a squat by damage from 1985 earthquake and various ensuing fires. It looks exactly like the pictures, and the dead husk of living spaces really does sprout from a reasonable healthy ground floor (“planta baja” en español) of all kinds of shops, including a sushi bar. Madelaine didn’t seem to want to go upstairs, but from what I saw of the inside, holes pepper the entire building. I guess it’s too extensively damaged to repair and too big to remodel at a reasonable cost. See also my Marketplace of Ideas interview with Daniel Hernandez where, at the very end, he describes attending a rave on the top floor.

Not to get too grand about this, but I would submit that Mexico City offers not beauty, and not ugliness, but a kind of flamboyant a-aesthetics that goes beyond beauty and ugliness. Mexico City either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what’s aesthetically appealing and what isn’t, and I find that refreshing.

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Diario de Ciudad de México VI

Monday, November 7, 2011

I’ve talked to Peruvians, Germans, Frenchmen, Australians, and Japanese on this trip, and they’ve all told me that the unwarranted fear of Mexico City in their home country matches or exceeds the level I saw and heard in the United States. Turns out that most of el D.F. actually feels safer than major metropolitan areas in the United States. ¨You come from Los Angeles,¨ said a concerned Mexican taxi driver. ¨Isn’t there a lot of violence there?¨

If you’re going to die prematurely in Mexico City, I wager you’ll do it crossing the street. Most intersections don’t have any lights for pedestrians, and when they do, the lights often show confusing combinations like a walking green man below a standing silver man or a green man and a red one simultaneously. Even then, drivers don’t really stop for you; most just kind of swerve around. I’ve developed two reliable methods to get across Mexico City streets: (1) wait until cars stack up at a stoplight, then walk safely through the middle, or (2) only cross when Mexicans cross. Somehow, they just know.

When last I saw Los Angeles, it had begun yielding to a siege of ads for Jack and Jill, Adam Sandler’s new drag comedy. The same thing’s happening in Mexico City, except the posters and billboars prominently feature some guy named Eugenio Derbez. Sometimes they only feature Eugenio Derbez. Turns out he’s a famous comedian here, born and raised in el D.F. He, too, has a drag role in the film, playing both ¨Felipe¨ and ¨Felipe’s Grandmother.¨

 

A few more facts for Asperger’s-ravaged rapid transit enthusiasts like myself: Mexico City metro trains run on rubber wheels, which go easier on the unstable soil beneath. They also have the only openable windows I’ve ever seen on a subway, which do let in a much-needed breeze. In a nod to illiterate riders, each station has its own icon representing the locality’s history, culture, or landmarks. A gringo actually created them: Lance Wyman, the graphic designer behind Washington D.C.’s metro map. I desire only one souvenir of el D.F.: a poster with all 150-odd metro icons. But no luck finding one yet.

I haven’t ridden many buses here, although in the Pasadena-like area of Coyoacán I tried out a pasero, a sort of puttering green van that stops whenever and wherever any rider or anyone on the street says to. (I think Philippine jeepneys operate on a similar principe, but I won’t find out for sure until April.) I also rode to UNAM’s campus on a system called the Metrobús, a network of large buses, wider even than subway trains, that go back and forth in their own dedicated lanes. Though usually against buses in all their forms, I kind of like the Metrobús for its speed, comfort, and general non-shoddiness. It brings to mind what I think L.A.’s rapid bus lines are trying to do, but without their own lanes — so, uh, not. Get that purple line drilled west, L.A.!

Public transit aside, every single vehicle I’ve ridden in has had a 5-speed transmission. Not an automatic in sight. Do I chalk this up, I wonder, do economic concerns, to quirks of manufacturing history, to Mexican driving culture, or what? I just feel relieved that nobody has called on to drive a car in Mexico City, since I haven’t put my hand on a gearshift in a decade. I’d look like an old driver’s-ed student. (And then there’s the traffic.)

I bitch and moan about how L.A. subway riders don’t understand the concept of standing on one side of the escalator and walking on the other, but I’ve found that chilangos never even try to walk up the escalator. What, no places to go, no people to see?

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Diario de Ciudad de México V

Monday, November 7, 2011

became aware of myself pretending i had been asked to choose two countries to remain in existence and me choosing ‘mexico and japan’

– Tao Lin

 

Much of the Mexico City exploration we’ve done in the past week, we’ve done in the company of three Japanese ladies: two D.F. residents, one visitor. Our group has these linguistic ranges:

  • Native Japanese, good Spanish, pretty good English
  • Native Japanese, good Spanish
  • Native Japanese, difficult-to-discern understanding (but not speaking) of English
  • Native English, pretty good Japanese, some Spanish
  • Native English, reasonable Spanish, parched bare bones of Japanese

My English, needless to say, hasn’t seen a lot of action lately. I actually feel a certain friction writing these posts in English, although I’m sure that’ll dissipate as soon as I ritualistically kiss the Los Angeles ground. But hey, what they say about even a short time in another country vastly improving your ability to speak its language(s)? Truth. My Spanish, which now sucks, used to blow chunks. And my Japanese now blows chunks!

A line from my eventual biography: ¨He turned 27 precisely as God intended him to: in the heart of Mexico, surrounded by Japanese people.¨ I find that one Japanese person tends to know another, and it’s true in el D.F.: I ate my birthday dinner at a table with at least eight of them, only one of whom knew any English. (But if you have the means, I do recommend the choice cultural experience of speaking Spanish to Japanese people.) Several are artists who find Mexico City a much more suitable working environment than their homeland. I asked one of them what he likes about this city. Ï love pollution,¨ he replied, either in Spanish or Japanese, I forget. I asked another if the food’s any good at the Japanese restaurant that provides her day gig; her opinion remains unclear.

We went to a temazcal, a pre-Hispanic sauna that involves singing, drum-beating, self-flagellation with aromatic branches, and total, utter, darkness. Never have I so enjoyed profuse sweating. A local joined us in the dome partway through, and I discussed with him about the stark contrast between Mexico City’s reputation of violence and its actual level of violence. (He claimed that it’s actually the safest big city in Mexico. I’ll look into it.) ¨Un temezcal con dos gringos y tres japonesas,¨ I said to him. ¨¿Qué sorpresa, no?¨

Taxi driver to main Japanese friend: ¨¿Usted es la china?¨ ¨No soy china,¨ she replied, for probably not even the hundredth time.

For Dia de los Muertos — an important holiday down here, I can assure you — we visited the campus of UNAM, the largest university in Latin America. They do it up every year with dozens upon dozens of themed altars. For this year’s theme, not only did they select Jorge Luis Borges — whose writing gave me a damned good reason to get interested in the Spanish-speaking world in the first place — they specifically selected his story ¨The Aleph¨, which, back in the States, we’ve been (slowly) shooting a short film inspired by. Amidst all the revelry, trying to explain this to las Japonesas felt like perhaps the most Colin-like thing I’ve ever done. At least before the inevitable blackout.

For Noche de Brujas — a less important holiday down here, which falls on the day of U.S. Halloween — kids trick-or-treat. I got a lot of plastic buckets held up in my face, and my lack of candy forced me to feign a total lack of understanding of the Spanish language. Later, one of las Japonesas informed me that the kids don’t want sweets; they want money. No wonder that little clown squirted me with his flower.

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Diario de Ciudad de México IV

Saturday, November 5, 2011

If I had to describe the difference between Mexico City and other cities as succinctly as possible, I would say this: when a space in Mexico City can become a store, it does become a store. This goes for parks, sidewalks, rickety bridges, and subway stations alike. (We´ve also exited several stations directly into sprawling complexes of tent markets. One of those complexes deposited us into an amusement park.) In subway trains, you see (and hear) not just a louder variety of the candy sellers on the L.A. metro, but  also blind people wearing backbacks with boom box components grafted into them. They blast clips of as many songs as possible between stops in order to hawk CDs of the greatest hits of las setenta, las ochenta, y las noventa, la musica mas bonita del mundo. Or so I’m told.

Cargo pants never went out of style in el D.F. They just became… more cargo-panty. Many Mexican men dress very well indeed — this could turn into the men’s style city to beat in a few years, once the suits lose their synthetic shine — but others wear a style of pant I’ve never seen anywhere else: cargo jeans that appear asymmetrically sewn together out of dozens of jagged panels. Yesterday I spotted a pair of these pants with cargo pockets on their cargo pockets, which felt like insanity.

In El Monstruo, which I brought to read in the D.F. even as I experience it, the late John Ross writes about the used book stores of Donceles Street. When David Lida mentioned them as well, I knew I had to get out there. Businesses cluster geographically in Mexico City in a way I haven´t seen them do elsewhere, and damn, does Donceles have a lot of used book stores. Some of them seem to have endured floods, resulting in stock that’s perhaps less pristine than I´d like, but I´ve nevertheless managed to pick up a few Carlos Fuentes books in cool old paperback editions.

Mexico City’s reading culture interests me. Books cost slightly less here than they do in the States, but as a percentage of the average wage, they might qualify as mild luxury items. When defeños read, they seem to do it with good taste: bookstores often dedicate sections to curation-inclined publishers with a solid aesthetic sense (Sexto Piso comes to mind), and I’ve seen 1Q84 in even the shiniest, mainstreamiest department-store book shelves — though right alongside Nicholas Sparks in translation.

A couple blocks from where we´re staying stands parked a gleaming fleet of eighteen motorcycles tricked out with pizza-warming boxes. They deliver for the local Domino’s, which suprised me by being not a take-your-shit-and-get-out type of establishment but, as we say in the States, a genuine ¨sit-down restaurant.¨ No word if actual Domino’s pizza tastes better in el D.F., and I´m not about to investigate.

Some food carts here sell cigarettes indvidually. If you want to buy a pack instead, be apprised that, by some sort of fiat, they all come emblazoned with stickers of various troubling images. It seems like manufacturers can choose between ¨gross teeth,¨¨gray fetus,¨and ¨girl weeping over open coffin.¨ Madelaine offered to buy me a birthday cigar at a pretty swank store, but all this visual drama distracted me. Which I guess is the point. But still.

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Diario de Ciudad de México III

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

In terms of scope, diversity, and improvisatory growth, you could almost consider Mexico City the Los Angeles of the south. The analogy works as far down to (and probably best at) the level of neighborhoods. La Condesa, where we’re staying, is Hollywood; both afford their residents ample opportunities for outdoor dining and ample quantities of dog-walking couples of all sexes. The older, more tightly-packed El Centro, where we roamed around today looking for used books (Carlos Fuentes, Mario Bellatin, Haruki Murakami en español), is downtown. My own neighborhood in L.A., Koreatown, would be the Zona Rosa — or at least the edges of it, where you find all the Koreans and street food. Las Lomas would be Beverly Hills, because I’ve seen it compared to Beverly Hills in articles.

If YHWH commanded me to live in any city I’ve been to except Los Angeles, even just my brief experience so far has convinced me that I would live in Mexico City. I feel confident in this claim, since I’ve already experienced a couple of the place’s major downsides. Despite assurances from locals that the water problems inherent in a city this huge and dry don’t often get in the way, we’ve had two water outages in three days. The second time, I quickly grew terrified that I wouldn’t get a morning shower, which is the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone. A mezcal tonic helped resolve this situation.

You feel the other obvious mark in the negative column — and this one everyone who writes about Mexico City, even its defenders, bemoans — when the subway gets crowded. I actually like riding the metro here, mostly due to the frequency of the trains and the whole system’s slightly faded sixties-Utopian aesthetic. (If I trace my interest in Mexico City back to the very beginning, I land on Total Recall, much of which Paul Verhoeven shot in a couple metro stations around here. I couldn’t get over how those backgrounds looked so futuristic, yet so old.) The crunch of humanity as rush hour nears seems tolerable — human adaptability is a wonderful thing — but ask me again the next time it rains too much, all the trains grind to a halt, and all the tunnels drop into darkness for fifteen or twenty minutes.

I told someone here that I like living in Los Angeles because of the whole world-in-microcosm thing, how you can go from country to country without ever leaving city limits. She nodded and replied, ¨Sí, como EPCOT!¨

Through rigorous testing, we have developed and refined this traveling method:

  1. Eat breakfast
  2. Walk around the city all morning
  3. Eat street food
  4. Walk around the city all afternoon
  5. Sleep, maybe
  6. Drink coffee all evening (and walk around the city)

Feel free to apply this method in the rest of the world’s great metropolises.

Each and every night, I keep my ears open for the forlorn whistle of the camote man. No dice yet. I don’t think he gets around to Condesa much.

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Diario de Ciudad de México II

Sunday, October 30, 2011

On the ride in from the airport, I immediately saw my first Mexican thing: a hunched fellow pedaling a bicycle loaded down with a five-foot-wide pallet of cookies and pork skins. On the freeway. Inches from traffic. We entered a tunnel, and I saw my second Mexican thing: a line of pedestrians shambling toward the Basílica, also inches from traffic. When we emerged from the tunnel, I saw my third Mexican thing: an enormous movie theater complex giving top marquee space to Johnny English.

Outside the Museo Nacional de Antropología, a thirteen-year-old girl with her dad and brother in tow stopped us and asked if we had time to give an interview. She had to interview people in English for school, and what better place to do that than on the steps of the most foreigner-attracting instutition in the city? She asked all the standard questions about where we live, if we’ve visited Mexico before, our favorite thing about Mexico (the food), and if we believe all the media heat about Mexico’s violence (nah). But then she asked the most inadvertently incisive question of all: ¨Did you come to relax, or to know Mexico?¨

I hadn’t seen many Asian people around until arriving at  the museum. We pulled over one group of girls, asked them if they were Japanese, and explained that, no, we weren’t Mexican. Madelaine asked them how they liked Mexico, which drew a collective shrug. The one from Osaka got a little more excited (but only a little) upon hearing that we’re going to Osaka next year.

(Still haven’t spotted any black people, though.)

This evening, I recorded a Marketplace of Ideas interview with David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World, one of the main books I read to prepare myself for Mexico City. The others included Daniel Hernandez’s Down and Delirious in Mexico City (I interviewed him about his book earlier) and John Ross’ El Monstruo, which I’m finishing here. We had a post-interview drink of mezcal, which Madelaine very accurately described as a ¨liquid cigar.¨ For whatever reason, I desire few things in life more than a drink that tastes like a smoke.

Waiting to fly out of LAX, I saw a banner emblazoned with the face of Mayor Villaraigosa and the words, ¨Welcome to Los Angeles: the City That’s a World in Itself¨ (or something like that). This sounds on one level like garden-variety meaningless civic boosterism, but on another level, it’s the entire reason I moved there! Mexico City has an impressive internationalism — I plan to visit its equivalent of my L.A. neighborhood, Koreatown, soon — but even here, you don’t get the experience of traveling from country to country every few blocks.

One mid-twentysomething Mexican to another mid-twentysomething Mexican walking alongside him: ¨¿Eres feliz, bro?¨

 

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Diario de Ciudad de México I

Saturday, October 29, 2011

I´d write at greater length, but this Mexican keyboard slows me down. This strikes me as a challenge basically identical to the guy in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly who has to write by repeatedly telling a nurse when to stop cycling through the alphabet. I´m a regular Jean-Do in Mexico.

(Except Jean-Do didn’t have to endure Windows mistakenly underlining his every word as misspelled.)

Note to those considering Aeroméxico for their civil aviation needs: they don’t have self-check-in machines for you, nor do they have a shorter line if you aren’t checking luggage. And believe you me, Aeroméxico passengers check themselves a lot of luggage.

Met a late-middle-aged couple on the flight. They live in Newport Beach most of the year, but come down to the house they own in Acapulco to ride Harleys the rest of the year. ¨We ask and ask our friends to join us,¨ the wife lamented, ¨but they’re too afraid of getting their heads cut off. I say, if you’re going to think that way, why bother living at all?¨ Tell it, sister.

(¨Heads cut off¨?)

We’re staying right across the street from the Centro Cultural Bella Época, a combination of cafe, theater, and the largest book store in Latin America — in other words, the ideal place for me to stay across the street from. Half of its shelves offer Haruki Murakami novels or books related to Haruki Murakami in some way. 1Q84 recently came out here, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I’ve long felt a resonance with the Spanish-language literary world in Murakami that I can’t properly describe. (Not with this Mexi-keyboard, anyway.) Sam Anderson’s New York Times Magazine profile of Murakami reinforces a notion I’ve harbored: I so often return to Murakami not for his Japaneseness, but for his internationalist Japaneseness. (Recall his trip to Stockholm to dig crates for classic American jazz records, watching Godard DVDs along the way.) This may well hold for every Japanese thing I follow, except maybe Ozu.

Every Mexico City business I’ve thus far patronized has about thrice as many employees as its U.S. equivalent would. It sounds irritating to have a lot of extras hanging around, but I enjoy the attentive service experience. (I do wish waiters wouldn’t stand there staring at me while I count out my cash, but hey.) Highly beneficial side effect: this is one of the cleanest cities I’ve ever visited, except Vancouver. (No city’s as clean as Vancouver.)

In line with the waiters and street-sweepers, there are cops and security guards everywhere. That bookstore I mentioned has the same level of security as a small-town prison — wait, a medium-town prison.

I see more dogs  and a greater variety of them in Condesa, the neighborhood I’m staying in, than anywhere else I’ve recently visited. These people love their pups, however oddly shaped or scabby. The dogs stay clean, though, through creative business ideas like ¨Condesa’s Fluffy Shower¨, a truck containing a shower for dogs. I saw a line of panting clients chained to various trees next to the Fluffy Shower’s parking space.

Much of my Spanish listening practice over the last few months has come from Cinemanet, a podcast seemingly associated with Mexico City’s Cineteca Nacional. What’s screening at the Cineteca while I’m in town? Oh nothing, JUST A BELA TARR RETROSPECTIVE. (And a Naomi Kawase series, speaking of los Japoneses.) It really is my birthday. In like a week, anyway.

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The Korean Hal Hartley: “Whatever can be defined, it is bullshit.”

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Upon moving to Los Angeles, I made it a priority to visit the Korean Cultural Center, a combined museum, screening room, language school, and library of Korea-related materials. I’ll start taking classes there next year, but I didn’t want to wait to get a library card. I first checked out Huh Moonyung’s Hong Sangsoo, the entry in Seoul Selection’s “Korean Film Directors” series on my favorite Korean filmmaker of them all.

To people who haven’t heard of him — and in the States, many of remain, even among cinephiles — I describe Hong as “the Korean Hal Hartley.” Often, this doesn’t clarify much, but despite struggling to share my enthusiasm, I find myself drawn more and more frequently to his worldview and the way he structures and aestheticizes it through cinema. I’ve picked quotes from the interview with Hong that makes up the book’s middle that best give you an idea of how he thinks and creates (bolding mine):

  • “During the process of meeting actors, they remind me of the people that I have known in the past and the fragments of events I have experienced with them. Everything that I encounter during filming can stimulate me. For example, I could remember a past event while listening to a conversation of crew members the night before, or the weather at the location that day could stimulate me somehow. Everything that surrounds me could potentially stimulate me as the starting point for the details of what I need to film that day. That is the reason why I [write the script] the morning of the shoot.”
  • “I believe that my films are not made to express a story, but to feature some fragments. I don’t think I have any other option. I take those so-called fragments and, with them, derive a whole structure centered on everyday situations. And within that structure, I select appropriate rhetoric. And when I go into the shoot, a new process of discovery begins.”
  • “My drawing teacher in college wrote in my recommendation letter I had a strange sense of humor. That was the first time I heard of it. I find it fortunate that my wife laughs at my jokes from time to time. If one looks at each slice of life without being so self-centered, so impulsive, so purpose-driven, then the arrangement of those familiar slices will escape from being clichés and even become the basis of strange humor.”
  • “I want fragments first to be picked up and then for them to form a movie. I want to make one body that can hold all pieces even though they seem contradictory or unrelated to each other. For me, making a movie is about what I choose and how I arrange them.”
  • “I went through puberty clinging onto ideals such as absolute truth, perfect world, absolute purity, etc. Everything I had encountered in life was automatically compared against an ideal value. I failed to comprehend things in life that couldn’t be incorporated into that ideal system. So, my life became fraught with schizophrenia asking why reality cannot easily converge with these beautiful ideals. Only when I reached my 20s did I fortunately begin to see the falsehood behind those ideals and began to better appreciate life, that is, as it is. Characters in my movies reflect such experiences. Specific characters chase after clichéd ideals, or even get chased by them, but I want my gaze on these characters to be composed from visions that are free from these clichés. To those characters, the conflict between ideals and life that veer away from these ideals is very painful. I want to say that all these pains are actually unnecessary. It’s the ideals that are the essence of the problem, not life itself.”
  • “I welcome strange coincidences and think that they are like a wedge driven into the frame of a banal and conventional mind.”
  • “I don’t feel disappointed [with poor reception] as long as there is a dialogue between the audience and me.”
  • “I had thought providing a simplified monotonous background [in Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors] would make it easier for the audience to visualize the contrasting contents better. But I think it may have been just a theoretical calculation. What’s more important is that I wanted to feature wintertime Seoul in black and white.”
  • “I think I was lazy my whole life. I would procrastinate as much as I can. At the last moment, when I can no longer procrastinate, some spontaneous thing happens in my actions. I always liked that.”
  • “I am cautious about the strong image that I have decided in my head in advance. They are mostly the result of a desire to reconstruct an image that I have seen from watching other people’s works.”
  • “There are men who feel that only with women can they feel an absolute sense of connection. I think it’s a good experience to go through that absolute kind of connectivity, be it one hour or a year. However, that very subjective experience may not be enough considering that our lifespan is longer than one hour or a year. The rest of time is too long. And so they fall in front of women continuously. But men haven’t defined what life is. Maybe it’s because whatever can be defined, it is bullshit. That’s why there can’t be a contract or a rule needed for minimal decency promised to women. That’s why it is difficult for women to begin a relationship with men with whom she can place a minimal amount of trust. A woman knows that she is getting tired, but she holds onto a relationship until she can trust. Men embrace women thinking that she is the only savior, but are nervous because they can already visualize the end even with their eyes closed.”
  • “I don’t have hobbies, but I do drink some.”

At the moment, I find Turning Gate, Night and Day, and Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (about which I wrote a Humanists column) Hong’s funniest and richest pictures. But if you’re in the Anglosphere, you’ll have an easier time finding Woman is the Future of Man, The Power of Kangwon Provice, and Woman on the Beach.

Trailers usually make me less interested in films, not more, but this one promoting Hong’s latest, The Day He Arrives, strongly suggests that someone at TrailerCo’s doing their job at last:

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To go with my new writing space, my new career

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

From Donald Richie’s Japan Journals:

Called a flâneur in print. Looked it up. “Witty, insouciant, man of the world.” Like that very much. Also, “not serious.” Like that even better. It is like being a dandy without having to pay tailoring bills. An element of pose and nothing, such as earnestness, to mar the effect. Also, though this the dictionary does not say, someone who sees through appearances and who refuses to abide by the dull rules.

From the New Yorker’s profile of L.A. food critic Jonathan Gold:

For years, Gold’s itinerant eating seemed purposeless; then, suddenly, as with the hungry caterpillar in the Eric Carle book, there was a glorious, fully realized point to it. John Powers, a film critic who met Gold at the Weekly in the mid-eighties, when Gold was a proofreader there, says, “He has the flâneur instinct. In all those years, when his peers were very busy professionally writing, Jonathan was professionally wandering around not writing. By background, inclination, and practice, he has always been the one who knows the most stuff close to the ground.”

“Flâneur, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia“:

While Baudelaire characterized the flâneur as a “gentleman stroller of city streets”, he saw the flâneur as having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. A flâneur thus played a double role in city life and in theory, that is, while remaining a detached observer. This stance, simultaneously part of and apart from, combines sociological, anthropological, literary and historical notions of the relationship between the individual and the greater populace. After the 1848 Revolution in France, after which the empire was reestablished with clearly bourgeois pretensions of “order” and “morals”, Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire’s phrase, “a botanist of the sidewalk”.

Clearly, I must append the list of jobs to which I’m best suited:

  1. Raconteur
  2. Provocateur
  3. Boulevardier
  4. Enfant terrible
  5. Flâneur
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