NEW BLOG: Les Madeleines du Memoir

Hiya everybody.

I am posting to inform you all that i have a new blogger blog called Les Madeleines du Memoir. It's a food writing and recipe blog. Anyone who knows me well knows that i pride myself on being an excellent, and experimental cook...now I have an outlet for my recipes and food reviews, a good practise place for journalistic writing, and something to divert me between job applications. I hope you will all visit, comment and maybe try some of the recipes!

love,

SR

evening occult

THis is what i did this evening


it's gonna be part of the installation at the art party on the 24th


see

Boston Art Party

for details.

Nomad

Last night I had the strangest dream,
Maybe it’s always been this way with
New buds to push out the old, clothes
Rolled in piles in the white morning
Of someone’s apartment on the 3rd floor.

Last night I had the strangest dream
That the coffee I drank and songs I knew
When I was younger were flowing out
A hungry inch from pinched brush to
Pinched paint brush and pen. Only then

When I slept with him, curled up against
His flat back, smoothing down his shoulder
Did I fall into sleep and dream that
As I get older the dreams keep coming
True. Only not maybe like you expect them to.

Last night, the dream I had was strange.

It filled me up, a cool rush that replayed
In snatched stepping to a pace, as I strode
Down the street I felt it making all time a
Nothing. It’s rhythms compressed light.
The sun of summer beat on my hairline

The snow I knew in piles at night.

In the dream I had I could touch the
Spring he brought with him, so soft,
The swinging of a tree, I could touch
My Christmas party in a room cramped
From living. Beijing factories. Witches breathing.


The thousand times I waited for a moment
With someone
alone.

Last night, when my arms wound round his waist
Covered in a sheet and the smell of paint I dreamt
That I
Was home.

poem for Sabrina 11/20: I wanted to bring you Neruda

I wanted to bring you Neruda

Something warm, yielding: page by page of vanilla paper a
Soft Something nourishing to your bed
Side. I considered John Donne and dismissed him
Out of turn, too wordy I thought, too pained.

Plath was out of the question.

I wanted to bring you Neruda.
Pages of light and lushness, plants to grow around tickling your toes
In the hospital bed. A forest of loving flowers lifting their faces to
Yours. I pushed aside Lacan and Freud for him…pulled
Volumes from the sunlit shelves bringing up wisps of dust.

He wasn’t by the bed side either
Where I had thought he might sit forlorn with the petals of a rose between
Ivory teeth of pages.

A volume of French Renaissance poets seemed dismayed.

I wanted to bring you Neruda.
But I couldn’t find him in the towers of paper lined up like messy soldiers by
The unkempt sofa.

I brought instead the words of a friend between green stiff covers
Because only a few can speak like Neruda of loves and of lovers
Of friends and leaves and light. I would have brought you Whitman
Had I come at night, but since a cold wind blew down the doors
Numbered in gold on Auburn streets, since the high blue sky of early winter
In purpose had no peer

I brought you Shakespeare.

life, love and morning

so once upon a time i started something about what had happened in the past year...making the snowflakes fall or something like that. Last night I was sitting in my office, revising for my Urdu test on monday when I decided to re do the calender on the chalkboard since it was fast reaching the very end...we put it up in September with 2 and a bit months of information on there, and now it's November so. So i started wiping away the weeks of exhibition openings, the chocolate tastings, the little marker for my birthday, drew little cartoons on thanksgiving and christmas and began to feel quite odd. Christmas is coming soon! WTF???

Last Christmas i was embittered and tired, still with Will, by a thread. I remember sending a package on New Year's Eve of cds and hotchocolate and other paraphenalia. This was a package that he never received...all the cd cases lovingly sketchd with psychadelic patterns and a card with many kisses. It arrived back to me about half its original size from being around the world and wrapped with rubber bands and tape in June, i think, or august. It was a strange little visitor from the past. And now i wonder what would have happened if he had received it. would it have bought us a few weeks more?

What have I done this year. So many things. When I put the calender up i suddenly felt as if i had done nothing and was met by this gaping vaccum. but actually it's not true. So much has happened. It has to be said that this has not been a year of stellar academic acheivment but it has been a trip, to be sure. Poetry readings and activism, falling into depression, fancying people, falling in love, painting, fucking, writing.

and a partridge in a pear tree.

anyway. Now is the time to work on the CV and life and essays and hope to god it all comes together...but first....i think i will take a little nap.

Exhibition Case/Shop Window/Television Screen: CHina on Display week3: World's Fairs

Exhibition Case/Shop Window/Television Screen

About two years ago now I was laying in bed watching a late night documentary in a last ditch effort to try to sleep after a night up working, insomniac fashion. The program was called “Travels with a Gringo” if I remember correctly, and was on this occasion concerning our young and very socially conscious host’s trip to a silver mine in South America where a crew of miners daily crawled through tiny darkened tunnels and breathed in toxic fumes that were killing them not so slowly, crumbling away their lungs to nothing, in order to obtain silver for trade. The host and the camera crew duly followed the team into the pits of mountains where they would have to pause to try and breathe and discuss what was going to happen when they couldn’t get into the deposit line anymore. The tale was engrossing, sad, painful, but that wasn’t the part I remember. At one point the mining party and the camera crew that followed were sat in semi darkness in a tunnel deep in the mountain, bathed in sweat and gasping for air, chewing coca leaves while waiting for rocks to be moved so that the passage could be cleared. Our socially aware “gringo” turned to the miners and began telling them in Spanish that this film was going to be shown in Britain, in Europe, perhaps all over the world. The implication, I believe, was that people would see the program and care about their plight…that perhaps the lives of the miner could be bettered. One of the miners looked the camera dead on and said, “Do people like watching this sort of thing over there?”

What are we seeking to gain anyway? Is it a view of lives unraveling that makes us feel magnanimous if we offer a few dollars of aid? What the miner meant, I think, was partially about what the intent was of watching him and his friends struggle and die to eke out a living, what kind of vicarious thrill or sense of Schadenfreude was being enacted, or at least, these are the question that I thought of when I thought about what he had said, but also, why would people want to watch something that is just life? Just real life. Tragic, happy, drunken, confused, dangerous, dirty, dramatic, mundane. This is what made me think of this instance two years ago when considering this week’s readings.

In The World as Exhibition, Mitchell argues that Europeans and Americans sought endlessly to create a replica of reality, a picture that would encompass all in one imperious and imperial vision. This might also be thought of as a constellation of that “Universe of Symbols” discussed in the introduction to the discussion of the Louisiana Purchase Fair. It also makes me think of how the television functions in today’s society as both of these things, as a sort of constant world’s fair at one remove…pictures encompassing and representing with a conceit of reality by virtue of accuracy, trueness to life, and all this to such a degree that television and cinema like all truly circulating and potent cultural phenomena influences lifes expectations and the way we live, just as Mitchell argues the World’s Fairs altered the epistemological frames, symbologies and view point of Fair goers.

In thinking about our South American miner, as he looks through the TV and into the living rooms, that is, past the digital velvet rope that cordons “us” from “them” something else occurred to me in connection with exhibition and the World’s Fairs. Something about how the “natives” experience the fair, what looks were directed at the specimens of Europeans or Americans, perhaps just “the White Men” in their Native Costumes as they filed past conveniently for view. If the World’s Fair, as the grandest type of exhibition, the crucible of a universe of symbols that allows the existence of a certain sort of cultural order, has a narrative, can that narrative be read against the grain and if so how?

Mitchell’s article about the Egyptian view of the Europeans begins to consider this question, but I would like to know more about how those gazes functioned and how that dynamic worked…what of those Filipino guardsmen who strolled about with St. Louis schoolteachers? What did they think of the fair? What did they think of St. Louis? Or what indeed became of Columbus Chicago? This is one further aspect of the literature produced on the world’s fair as describe in Hinsley’s piece on the Colombian exposition…the extraordinary discrepancy between the scene portrayed and the interpretation given in the literature below in for example the “portrait” of the “turk” and his family. The caption is extraordinarily racist and strange, but even more it just seems so bizarre in reference to the picture. The man in the picture, although he looks posed, looks determined, half looks at the camera with a confronting gaze. The caption seems to be the American photographer reassuring himself from behind the lens as to the jocular, not quite real, not quite serious status of the “primitive” “brown man”…that is…unable to quite make the scene fit a picture by photographing it, he has to tidy up the edges with literature, place the image firmly into a “symbolic universe” so as to render it comprehensible.

All the talk of the camera and cameraman being the ultimate unseen, voyeuristically partaking in pleasures of the screen does raise one important additional point in this connection, however, before we throw up our hands and throw the camera out the window. All too often the anonymous male gaze of the camera is understood to be an imposing and dominating factor, a machine that changes behavior, changes images, renders them up to a (Western) god of photography/pictures for exhibition of a real that undermines the subjectivity of the people portrayed. I want to argue that while it is true that the cameraman often aims to go unseen in a fashion, to be unpresent, and to record people going about their business authentically there is indeed agency in the sideward glance, in the look away from the camera, and inn the getting on with your life that the “subjects” of the photograph rarely get credit for. A look directly into the face of the camera is powerful indeed, but are we so egotistical as to assume that this is the only way in which subjects can b rendered real?

Thus too an approach which does not conform to the requirements of the world’s fair can still be seen as an approach with its own agency and consciousness of power. The Chinese displays are endlessly contrasted with those of the Japanese contingent at the various Fairs of the Fair Fever at the turn of the 20th century, and the strategy employed by the Japanese curators is analysed and understood to be a political one. While it is true that the approach of creating a space incomprehensible to the symbolic order of the exposition did not necessarily serve US?chinese political relations well, the way in which those displays were mounted does warrant attention, in that they represent a different epistemological space, and perhaps can give ideas about alternate modes of exhibition and the understanding of same with regard to Chinese art. It is interesting too to compare the US political stance vis a vis China to former discourse about Japan. Endless articles appear today asking if “cChina is the New Japan?” (what an odd question) and by virtue of the question itself the conclusion is made to some degree, as before, we identify something of the “Yankee” spirit in the entrepreneurial dealing of the mysterious east…”with luck and pluck they may go into business for themselves”

That the “East” and particularly the ultimate other that is still so often constituted by the aesthetics and cultural values of China is still engendered as a market place in European and American pictures of “real” life should come as no surprise in the era of late capitalism, when the “imperial” gaze of the camera has become as ubiquitous for Indian and Chinese tourists as for travelers from the US. Paris, that endless labyrinth of mirrors, and maze of simulacra was host in 1997, I believe to an exhibition of Chinese goods at one of it’s major palais to commerce, Printemps, for example, and such eposition have it would seem, moved from the educational to the truly commercial sphere, or else frayed and bled into the kaleidoscopic pictures of television news. But if we acknowledge that the symbolic universe, and indeed the World’s Fair is, to some degree, alive and well at the dawn of the 21st century in the form of brothel holidays to Thailand, Fox News and the Department Store, what of the exhibition space, the museum. In the series of essays Cosmopolitanisms by Homi Bhabha et al. a convincing argument was made for rethinking the city, walking against paths, zig zagging across squares, walking on the grass in theoretical as well as physical terms. The same principles must be applied to exhibition.

Last week discussion of the trend for nostalgic curatorship was discussed in some of our readings…curatorship that would seek to create an exhibition as it really happened if such a thing can even be entertained. While there must be room for this kind of psychological play too, such a nostalgia would doubtless find it’s dead end in the curatorship of most Chinese art from before the late 20th century, besides creating of the past a picture, a cinematic other to be studied, and of the people who lived it objects to be viewed at a safe distance and with air conditioning. Taste makers, experts have always been at the forefront of defining the category of Chinese Art, or Japanese Art, and this is likely to remain a continuing trend, but to form a sort of heteroglossia of back steps, misreadings, rereadings, and gaps in this visual universe for the viewer to inhabit, and to acknowledge that the viewer makes the exhibtion as much as the exhibition influences the viewer, in a sense to put the viewer on display is perhaps the only way to circumvent the totality of hegemony in favor of personal agency. The viewer become the exhibition as they internalize it and it’s values long after the installation comes down and it’s pieces broken up, long after the Filipinos develop small pox and the “turks” (interesting to note modern usage of that word) are sent home because, after all, “some memories don’t fade”.

There are a great man questions that remain, as I have outlined above, but one that is particularly “beautiful and piquant” is this:

What would an anthropological exposition of Americans in their natural habitat look like?

PAN 9

last night i had the strangest dream...

New Poem: V for Vaudeville (draft 1)

The cinema died in celluloid swells that sparked my skirt,
Dyed in dyes that flaked off between my fingers where it made soft roses (hidden)
in the white of my hands. That dye like a butterfly.

From sepia canyons the light wove in throes and fits to hit hard the soft surface of a dirty mountain stream.
Not clean
Like some book or show but filled with mud, silt, sand,
leaves
feces.

I pulled my skirt up and ran the way that dogs do:

To Fro To Fro

Pell mell they say.
Oh hell.
Oh leather.

On the other side I saw the dark coming on like Dor-
othy, the Emerald city.

THERE IS: NO PLACE

Noplacelikethoserubylips noplacelikethoserubyslips
But as the clouds gathered green, I watched the sunset
Of the screen in waves of
Blink ing
light.

The cinema died that night with a one-two punch, a whispered kiss.
Pomp, Romp & Ceremony as I made it down the quiet hall alone, a weary traveller in some solemn steamy dream with no C for Cinema only V for...

The credits rolled a final time in step as, beautifully,
Tragically, with a car chase, a final sigh, a fandango, a top hat scream, dropofblood like a black pearl

(Perfect, never drying)
Cinema lay dying.

A silence. A cut.

It died then, in the moment I found you ,
down the town below
in those theatricals, hands singing like tough birds
Belly like fish, and the eyes of a shorn whore
Vellum Vaudeville reborn in fetish garb:
Oh hell.
Oh leather.

(Mary, Joe and Sade. A rebirth of entertainments gored, gone and dog-eared).

You whiteness, fleshed, no longer flat and light as light as light on screen had been.

You, the new god in stereo with a seraglio of cigarettes, rubbers and loves.

When push comes to shove you will make it XY XY XY: high, dry
the unlikely hero of flesh and blood.

No poison will harm you,
And your fingers burst through the gloves of some high fiction, as they reach through me.

This is not film
This is just Noir
This is not cinema
This is just verite

There may be dancing in the final scene but
That tango will be for you and me alone
For no eyes in space will keep time
When your eye look into mine.

And you light a cigarette in your own style
Forever undirected.

dream brother study 1

this is what i did today.

Interlude

making the flakes snow: looking at a year part 1

there's a suitcase on my bed again.
I am making preparations to leave singapore, and go back to home, another home, again. i ws saying the other night that i feel like if i live somewhere...doesn't have to be a long time, just a few months, but if I LIVE there, i always miss it. that's my failing as a nomad. instead of having the home be inside me so that i never move, the ideal of the floating nomad life, i find that the world is my home...and there is always somewhere that i miss.

A year ago, august was all heirloom tomatoes and purple twilight. i was listening to vinyl with the windows open and a candle. Now i wonder...where did all the fireflies go?

Full of nervous energy
sleeping in the fold out bed, no furniture, new apartment, waiting for shipment, glossy wood floors and a pilow in front of the tv to watch Law and Order while eating roasted veggies in a wrap and a glass of white wine and later, to be sitting smoking on the porch in my towel...i love the feeling of drying off from a shower in the open air...hair up in a towel knot.

somehow the cigarette smoke was bigger before the furniture, the books...i wanted to let it out the back door.

I spent the days wandering around, and sitting by the pit, reading Bai Xianyong, i think...musicians, stilt walkers, madmen, drunks...i found home on the benches, in a movie of ease and elliott smith, the odd hard drunk. THe days were hot, and everybody said hi, you know, everybody said hi. i had to slow down just to go...take your time, miss. take your time.

When things started, when classes started i was walking through Harvard yard listening to tears for fears with the sun coming light, and a mug of joe from home, the co-op carry cup that i had picked up when i joined one august day after going off to watertown with a jar of homemade muesli for Fish and the Fam. I was listening to Depeche Mode that day..my jeans were rubbing out the tune to Personal Jesus from between my thighs. But, anyway, back to Harvard yard. I stepped through this shoal of people, it was the 80s all of a sudden...clean, bright, slightly vicious.

I was filled with love.and still being filled with love for my ex. I never thought i would speak of him as my ex. i was looking to the cleanliness of the wrought iron chairs, their happy picturesque position. and the T that sounds like elliott smith, the Decemberists, the pogues, the hidden cameras. always.

my grandmother died just as the air was getting colder.

and the speech between me and WIll was getting thinner and thinner, but what there was was boiling like tea on a mountain top. I remember he called me one time when fish was over and i had this sinking feeling as i sat in the red phone chair. my feet beat out a tune on the fridge..the words of the fridge poetry between my toes. "winter". "woman".

i took the plane home for the funeral after a week of being dazed. my grandmother had died in the time it took me to make and eat a bowl of oatmeal. I sat on the park bench in the island at the entrance to my development listening to Morrissey's "Our Frank" knowing that something big was ending. and it was even more than my grandmother's life. it scared me to kiss the smell of rot and shit in the crematorium, to cry so hard when i saw my own empty room where i had made love to will the last time. on the cream carpet floor in the summer lamplight. (you see, i remember. I remember the first time too)

in black i drank a black beer in the pub that was grey and low, surrounded by thick fingers in gold rings and hoarse voices and ploughman's sanwiches, everybody thinking of her great knees up, her G&T and her sense of style. her fuss, her jokes, Her sense of duty that was sharp as her photogenic nose.

I came home to cambridge and morrissey afraid that my last 18 years were being pulled out from underneath me.

------------------

I See Color Bars When I Come

the red sugar crystals on the cake sparkled in the candlelight. I was naked. It was my birthday after all and i was going to eat cake and run around and do my ironing at 3am like the sawn off bitch that i am. But, mate, with a heart of gold.

Halloween i set the fire alarm off and became an unpopular resident. But i went to Rocky Horror anyway in a gothy get up that (reminded me of the good parts of venice, before i woke up smelling like rotting on the inside from the most painful..no i never felt that way again...i washed so hard so long.) and Blue with a gold earring and an old slouch hat walked me home like a gentleman jim.

Sawhain round the table with new friends, a strange mix..a big sweet fairy running around granting chocolate to me and a little girl with dark hair. and my how we drank.

NOSFERATUNOSFERATU NOSFERATU.

i was painting. reading. so excited. so stressed. the snow began. the markets shut..but not without a few trips to buy groceries on fridays in freezing rain...thanksgiving was a haunting of a childhood hotel and thinking that Business Chinese was a drag. it was.

--------------------------

here is my heart:, as best as i can explain it.

for all of you...

An Homage to National Day

O it is coming.

After hearing fighter jets nearly every day and crazy big groups of soldiers marching and entire highways blocked by files of pristine (as never used) tanks and artillery, Tuesday is finally...Singaporean National Day. yes. I know. You're THRILLED.

So Singapore is celebrating the big Four-Oh and this seems to be an enormous deal (and not without reason, i might add, BUT) it's like kids and Christmas where they start getting excited about the big day right after Haloween...is it almost here??? Is it??? Is it??? the military bouncing up and down tgging the sleeve of the whole island. this is like the big show to prove to all the wives and mothers that when you send your sons off for National Service they do actually learn how to DO something.

marching.


they're REALLy good at it.

thing is, there is a good side: No work. plus...and this has been the sweet part of the gearing up escapades....FIREWORKS. Now as a consequence of the hyperactive and yet overly cautious (read: must practise every weekend so as to make sure the show is RIGHT) pyrotechnics being's habits i have been party to some pretty nice fireworks shows on saturday nights this month...and the capper is...i can see them from my window. howzat???!!!

Pay $70 singapore dollars to squeeze inbetween a bunch of people painted red and white my ARSE. No. I am going to maybe take a stroll, see what kind of crazy thing people are getting up to afterwards, but as for the fireworks and that itself...I will be doing it in true Singapore style...with no WALKING whatsoever...sitting by the window of my apartment. i will salute this crazy place in the most fitting way i can think of...with cholesterol:

Singapore, i raise my Kaya toast to you!



(for those of you not familiar...kaya is a yummy yummy hainanese coconut spread with egg yolks in it that will kill you. really. But it's WORTH it.)

night vision

so i am drinking my jasmine tea concoction, listening to Arab Strap and trying to work out what digital camera to buy because i am going to india next week. Lots of saffron coloured smog i expect. i hope to be able to upload lots of stuff for you all to see...DIMACo should have pictures from Xinjiang soon too, i reckon.


I was going home in a cab today (left my metrocard at home...high heels...long story) and i realised how little i have explored in Singapore. What with all the web stuff for Dudley and the writing and what not i haven't gotten to nearly as many places as i would like. So this weekend is going to be hectic. I just saw all these interesting places fly by and just wished i didn't have to bring my mac into work everyday (the IBM has issues, and besides, i hate pcs) so that i could be more footloose and fancy free. the food i eat at lunch just about makes up for it...i travel a thousand miles through my tongue.

all kinds of projects happening now...new feminist journal could be starting, a real project...will write about that when i have more time, and i am trying to put an online exhibition together. If only i could design webpages properly!!

I will write more later, but i kind of needed to put somethng in as a marker between the present and the horrible bombings. Thankyou to all of you who signed my e-letter of solidarity. I plan to post it here and send it to SOAS and the BBC on the month anniversary of the bombing.

love you all and can't wait to come home to see at least some of you...some of you i will have to wait longer to love at close quarters...

SR65X

london

what is happening? What IS happening? Bombs went off in London today, again i am out of the country when something happens in a place i love, and i have to thank god, but also to feel profoundly frightened. I was in Beijing when 9-11 happened, and now i am in Singapore. One of the bombs went off in Kings Cross where i lived between 2000 and 2001 and which i lived nearby between 2002 and 2004. another bomb went off at Russell Sq. the tube station where my alma mater is. My friends and teachers work and live in the area where this happened. i....

i don't know what to say at all.

TO all my friends in the UK. STAY SAFE. I miss you all and love you. Thank you to those of you who replied to my desperate email finding out if you were ok. It's good to know that you are all intact...makes me feel like i might have a chance at sleeping. sending all my love.

like mate to check

Ok so here's another new poem...not finished, but...for your perusal.

------------------------------------------------------------------


In bed I fight with muscles move, against the mattress like mate to check
Make gestures, inspect the springs for signs of you
But your motions are printed into sheets split by time and time zones
Where your body lays and sways to whistling breezes in yours, the
State
Of Sleep/

I battle tangled sheets, the sails of dream-ships flying out to you,
Pull down the rigging, chart maps, your borders fine patrolled
Find the blind spots, soft points unwatched and slip in easy
Mounting my invasion by the light of the North Star.

Your arms embrace me like the harbor bar

Your lips salty with the light of morning

I never was a stranger
No alien here
As I step up time’s gangplank
Toes curled on ridges of days
Living the love to know your body’s home.

This is a morning

Where I approached you where you lay

So sweet so soft and drowsy
Put down my thoughts and sighed

This is a moment

Before you know I’m there.

In bed I fight with muscles move, against the mattress like mate to check
Whispering yet trade routes into the pillow’s ear, knowing that
The lights outside still blink e-ven e-ven be-fore the dawn

Turns

On

And I find myself spread in bed alone

moveon pac petition...please sign!

Subject: O'Connor is retiring. Take action to protect our rights.

Hi,

As you probably heard, Sandra Day O'Connor just resigned from the Supreme Court. This is an extremely important time for our senators to hear from us. They need to know that we are counting on them to stand up to President Bush and protect our rights -- because with a moderate like O'Connor stepping down and a far-right like Bush making the nomination, well, the stakes couldn't be higher. The Terri Schiavo tragedy showed us all just how far these people are willing to go.

MoveOn PAC has already started an emergency petition, and we're looking to get 250,000 signatures and comments to the Senate before Tuesday -- which is when rumor has it Bush will announce his nomination.

I hope you can take a minute to join me in signing this petition, so our senators know that, in what might be the fight of our lives, we need them to do what it takes to protect our rights.

http://www.moveonpac.org/protectourrights

Thanks!

Go Ja Go Karta

Well, i am writing because tomorrow i am going to Jakarta Indonesia on my own on behalf of DBS, the company I am interning for out here in Singapore. My boss will follow on thursday, but i wanted to let you all know where i was becasue, well, i dunno...

THis week has been CRAzy so far. New friends on motorcycles, boss takes me out for thai food, marketing people actually really really nice and should open own design firm and stop being paid less than they are worth.

more later, promise...right now i have to go make sure i have everything and go to sleep crack of dawn flight tomorow. Up at 5am. ugh.

take care, all of you,

much love,

SR65

XXX

in love with a view

my penultimate full day in korea. THis has been for me one of the ultimate holidays, in a way: I get to listen to really great lectures for free and commune with feminists and see really great art (more on that later) and then go and have amazing food and shop. i had planned to do a bit more museum going...there is so much to see here...but by today after three days of 8 hours of lecture sessions (more or less) i just felt like wanderng and shopping today, my day off.

Unfortunately i have an outrageous headache right now...probably from being out wandering in the sun.

I had the ultimate korean experience yesterday and today:

Yesterday I went to the conference as usual...there has been a lot of stuff there about the plight of the korean women taken as "comfort women" i.e. sexual slaves/forced prostitution/rape victims by the japanese army durng the second world war. I am sure that some of you are aware of the level of brutality that these women, now mostly in their 70's and 80's were forced to endure. on monday there was a meeting between Koizumi and the Korean leader (whose name escapes me, ugh) here inSeoul (and actally, i think at my hotel, at least in part...there were tonnes of riot police and what not here on monday...it was scary) and Koizumi categorically refused to acknowledge that these atrocities had occured and refused to rectify new textbooks that glossed over this and other war atrocities (the textbook has China's back up too...incidentally). So there ws a protest, actually the 67th (i think) on this matter yesterday, and i and many participants from the conference were pleased to take part and lend our suport to these brave women.

afterwards i went to some more lectures about gender in china and whatnot, and then to a rountable on women's new media art...i am thinking about putting an online exhibition together for Dudley!! I have another plot/plan which i will write about shortly and which i am really excited about...a feminista-journal-scrapbook-translation project (more on that later)

So i met some wonderful curators and artists and went out to dinner on my own, came back an looked at the films that were being shown through their work, and the work of EMAP (Ewha Media Arts Project). glorious evening...been walking aroun Seoul with my massive Bose headphones on listening to Van Morrison and Fairuz(the ones my parents gave me as hand me downs) looking very old skool. Funny thing...huge headphones attached to an iPod!

Today I started my day with a green tea an Sweet potato Latte at O'Shelloc ( swanky japanese influenced green tea boutique cafe) in Myeongdong (nearby fashionista lively shopping area) and walked to namdaemun Market which is HUGE and piled high with dried fish, fruit and veg, and fake gucci...as well as sundry household items, art supplies (?), costume jewellery wholesalers and dry goods as well as clothes in great heaps for no money (but not anything you would want, for the most part). Had lunch at a market stall in the midst of all of this, a quiet corner in the chaos (there was a demonstration going on on one of the streets at the edge of the market as well...no idea what for...signs all in korean) where i saw somebody eating something that looked tasty and i pointed an said "i'll have what he's having". Ended up with a huge bowl of vermicelli type noodles in an iced soup with kimchi in. it was absolutely delicious. I drank a bottle of iced green tea an ate what i could reading "The Opoponax" and the ladies working the stall were somewhat amused.

went on the Dongdaemun, another market in the shadow of one of the former city gates, except this is a whole series of huge fashion malls something like Xidan in Beijing, plus a big clothing warehouse market...more like Wujin Xing with hats and scarves and stuff. I bought some great stuff...and went off to look for some culture. BEcause even though i didn't feel like musuem hopping all day, i couldn't shop all day either.

wandered around the lovely buildings of the "traditional korean village" at Cheongmuro. big groups of chinese an japanese tourists. after getting dusty looking into the comfy looking wooden floored homes stocked with furniture and bolsters, i had a cup of citron tea (AmaZING.. a sweet marmalade like paste you mix with water to make a kind of tea) in the restaurant that is inside one of the traditional style buildings (xirca 19th C), just as the sun was begining to be a little gentler and a breeze was stirring up

Spent a couple of hours wandering aroun the Lotte Dept. store, one of the sawnkiest i have ever been in...really...rivals japan. sampled all different snacks, and bought some...seaweeds and crackers and encrused tea leaves (i think..it's tasty, so whatever) to bring home..and some of that citron tea.

now, probably due to being out in the sun, i have a raging headache...but it was worth it...i have one more day of conference tomorrow,,,an ihave to pack...get ready to go back to singapore...which is how i got the title of this entry. Because as good a time as i have had here, and as much as i like it...i actually miss singapore. I miss my apartment..i miss the sense of space and the cleanliness of the air in my room, the incense burning, the indian markets and the exciting prospects....most of all, i miss my view.

SR65X

the feminist and "the visit"

Ok...so it is in fact 11.30pm here in Seoul, yes..I am in Seoul, Korea for the International Interdisciplinary conference on women. And it figures that having stressed all night and then gone to be very late, getting up late too and scrambling into a cream coloured pants suit so that i can look all professional-like (he) when giving my prsentation i got to the opening ceremony late...not that it mattered. the kicker was that as I was standing out in the scorching sun after having been given a huge quantity of reading material and other ephemera in my very own "Women's Worlds" complimentary conference pack, i felt cramps starting and suddenly realised i was getting my period. Right now. I had anticipated this would happen. I am not one of those women who knows the ins and outs of her cycle intimately, and times her life around it. No. Mine is generally something that happens, i vaguely know when it is going to kick in. I missed last month...go figure, and i thought somewhere in the back of my mind...it is bound to come during the conference, it is bound to come during the conference. Because it shows up at the most innoportune times always. When I am moving. When I have exams. whenever there is a high stress situation it just has to come in and be the icing of annoyance on the proverbial cake o' stress. Anyway, i thought it was a rather interesting excercise to try an explain that i needed a tampon or other sanitary item to a helper at a korean women's university during the first 2 hours of a women's conference. Hilarious actually.

My presentation went ok, incidentally. One of the panelists didn't show up, and everybody was still just getting oriented on campus, so we only ha about 6 people, or 7. my paper was too long, but the Q & A session was great fun.


But what the hell. It's over. I did it. It goes on the CV and i have a week of cool lectures to go to, and i had Donkatsu for dinner (very bad for me, i know) while reading Wittig's "THe Oppoponax". And then a pair of drunken Koran guys eating ice cream asked me for cigarettes on my way home to the hotel and the one who had the less minimal grasp of english vocabulary kept asking for my phone number and putting his arm around me. I couldn't take him seriously enough to be worried, he was so silly, with an ice cream cone and a cheezy drunken grin.

I have spent most of my money and have nothing to show for it really, except for a catalogue of good meals. I am going to do more wandering and stuff starting wednesday. TOmorrow...more conferencing and my mom's friend is meeting me for dinner i think.

One more piece of news though. I signed up to read some poetry at the closing ceremony. what am i getting myself into?? I think i might red my new poem though...it is suitably feminist.

let me know what you all think,

missing everybody!!

love,

SR65X