Davey Dreamnation

Ian McEwan, Atonement
Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty Seventh City
Todd Swift, Monsieur Pigeon’s Best Machine
Ku Sang, Eternity Today
Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives
Simon Armitage, Kid
Clive Hamilton & Richard Denniss, Affluenza
Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place In the Sun: A Modern History
Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have
     considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf
Ha Jin, War Trash
Paul Auster, The New York [...]

you never did cross it but still it remains
a pair of spectacles submerged in the river
on one side lies the pleasure district:
neon and ribbons, arc-welded limbs
the scintillation distractors
on the other: some home
or one light that was gutted then torn down
extinguished by passionate hopes
between them, one heartless bridge
a fiction beneath expatriate memories
the mind`s dim canals …
of [...]

cold sweats in an immigration queue
i`ve everything & nothing to declare
hand trembles as it pushes a passport
over the ledge into the hand of fate
a process designed to inspire nervous
twitches/ recognisable warning signs
asked for evidence of forward journey
(as if mere mortality were not enough
then subjected to a crotch pat-down
luggage rearrangements & repackings
an apology & our tidy [...]

ian fleming eat your heart out
a beetle hits the lane running
then bursts into the blue road
all its legs up atomic powered
sound a whee! about to explode
three hours flat busan fukuoka
along this navigator`s spine -
past those sea anemone islands
ploughing up the roadstead like
nobody`s dymanic business multi-
currency bi-lingual & all edges
not a plume in sight (even the
sun [...]

Well, the time has come to cease talking of many things, to stop going to PC Bangs, to pack up my bags and head for different places, to leave behind many happy and strange memories of my time here. It is hard to believe that four months ago I arrived in Seoul in the middle [...]

> Page not found. Viva! >> Vera blissful and breathless in daylight’s profusion, singing through grass streets stretching seawards to the pipelines, shoves the matter deep in her coat pocket and marches, unfollowed, along cool bitumen avenues, her feet seeking skin prints in the improbably husked net. >> Brims of water and the morning, sirens [...]

Viva! Page not found. Viva! City of marshall arts. Viva! Grape soda. Viva! Song lyrics spread from mouth to mouth. Viva! Your mouth, my lips. Viva! Trouble girl. Viva! City of endless planes. Viva! The angel of hips. Viva! Snowy boots. Viva! Timpani. Viva! Pansori. Viva! Ko Un. Viva! Hiddink. Viva! Holland. Viva! Pa ra [...]

City of organisms. City of organs. City of tissue. Organisms that change shape depending on the flow of traffic. Organs that thump and glow, in time with the jingling of beggars in the aisles. Tissue that blows in the wind and is mistaken for snow, finally alighting upon a loudspeaker. City of poisoned organisms pelting [...]

City as weary as a tree that cries leaves. City on the edge of hopelessness, on the duckboard of despair. The pathos of a rushed existence, coupled with an addiction to shuffling. Manacled to the winter sun-dial, I tripped upon a field of transparent snow. Windows were curtained, dogs barked all night at the makkolli [...]

Okay, so I’ve already posted this on the PC Bangs blog but once is never enough. I’m very excited to say that there’s an article in today’s issue of English language newspaper The Korea Times that profiles my PC Bangs project here in Seoul. You can read the article online here.
Big thanks to journalist (and [...]

Melbourne-based new media artist, lecturer and all round soju-panda Larissa Hjorth, who is also undertaking an Asialink residency in Seoul at the Sszamjie Space, held an open studio the other night, to celebrate the completion of her “Snapshots of Almost Contact” project. Please, consider …

Soju-Panda Eyes herself: actually, this shot was taken last month at [...]

One of the highlights of my Australian Culture classes was the series of student presentations which took place at the end of the semester. In one of the final presentations, on the topic of Australian poetry (a topic that no one was really that keen to tackle), the students (including the cute koala pictured below) [...]