Auda, city of burnt grass and black limousines. City of nudes and spider lilies. How the grass stands up even though it is on fire, whistling a harvest tune. By the railway lines, entropy rules: jagged weeds and mystery melons scramble for space, riddling the rails, disguising the sleepers with their fantastic tendrils. Like a smoker’s signal, brave and futile. Trains slice these ribbons into tendons, timetabling history, scattering seeds, accelerating some abstract chaos. Trampled soccer balls like snakeskins or leather on the shining road. As inspectors, we climb the stainless steel stairs, pass the plastic clinic and the coffee mall, then enter the machine room. Here the rumble of traffic is merely a shiver in your bowels, increasing anxiety but barely shaking the keys. Predicting story arcs is what it’s all about. Prisoners, good deeds and friendships betrayed. The studios will be eating out of our hands. Privately, we model alternate scenarios: the prisoner escapes; the can of boiled beef falls from the adjutant’s hand; a friendship is consummated in a bloody latrine scene. Here, the streets are viewed as if through the screenshots of an amateur photographer: the perspectives slightly skewed, casting one’s eye off balance. Jets scramble overhead, but no one notices. The flags of a thousand federations burst into the blue sky, unfurling like false spring. The sound of trickling water consumes bus drivers and cart pullers alike. Insanity is the key, although mistakes are sometimes made. Usually, these thoughts disappear. Slowly, a city comes to know itself by the bend of a river, the argument of a steel canal. Behind us, mountains; ahead, cartwheels of conversation, opening.
Tag: PC Bangs (page 11 of 12)
This city with no streets but networks of amputated limbs. This officious city of criminal investigations and inquests whose soul is a square of cheap, grey carpet and a water dispenser. The tinkle of pachinko, the sudden sirens of attack. Those women with the hand bills, so stubborn and intent upon their mission, invading the bodyspace of the factory workers like influenza. Sheets of steel carried by a dozen men at a time towards the railhead. Rain, in bursts of noise upon their heads. Somewhere here there is a map of the city’s improvements but no one I speak with has seen it. Wheelchair-bound ladies protest at the new constructions rising up around them in terrifying spirals. No-one is allowed to see them. Behind their riot shields, the police men are only boys. Some of them wear white sneakers, as if they have been called in from basketball practice. Sleeping street people curled up like scraps of paper on the subway stairs, trusting that the spirits of Atro will protect their small change, their street salaries. Mandarin peels in the gutters. Sewer smells that hit the face like a nervous pigeon, with the frightful proximity to disease that experience entails. A hollow city, stained with sad skirmishes and pickled fistfights. Gouged-out eyes that speak. Tables hoarded under orange shelters. Old men dancing in parks for citizens, while citizens peer out at the sky like lost kittens in bamboo. Squeals. Drums. Discarded cloths, blood-stained. News of another seperatist attack filters through stale cups of coffee, cigarette butts neatly stacked like garbage bullets. A simulated odyssey through virtual historical battles gains popularity in the parlours. No one speaks of it; these things require no advertisements. Beware the reconstituted cutlets of crumbed meat. That way annihilation lies. Pull back the tarpaulin to reveal today’s wares – a rack of twisted and burnt squid, dried suckers and flattened jerky. Remove hospital identification barcode. Shoulder arms.
A city of terminals. Crashing cymbals greet the slapping match contestants. Skies rain down grey, metallic drops of thunder. Manners are loose. At the station, hawkers sell second-hand saucepans and yesterday’s newspapers. Here the time is digital but everything else succumbs to the analogue of winter. Only one species of tree has been planted here. Nevertheless, each tree sheds its skin at a different rate, the pixellated leaves shimmering in the haze of pre-nitrogen fuel emissions. There is a river here, known as “the snake” in the strange, unpunctuated language of its people. They crowd the banks, shaded by the giant overpasses and rusted cantilever bridges. Once there was a port here but the river has silted over the years and is now so shallow children can walk across it, unimpeded. Shopping bags inhabit the water as the jellyfish once did. Smoke from plastic fires stings the eye. Banners have been hung between the tallest trees, demanding celebrations. Wearied, the streetwalkers refrain. Here and there in the quiet spaces, women with small babies shelter from the sunlight. Old men read unbound books without covers, passing the leaves from hand to hand. Pages from the lunar calendar litter the pavements. Awash with alien capital, anti — makes the most of the boom, erecting mirrors on street corners to satisfy the woman’s vacuousness, the man’s thirst for the perfect haircut. Nobody speaks, least of all to strangers. When you leave, someone will sweep your footprints into the gutter and they will remain there, homeless, until the time of the next pavement cleaning. Teenage boys make their fortunes this way, eradicating foreigners from the bitumen shores. Night comes, and the neon day begins.
A PC is obviously a personal computer but “bang” is the Korean word for “room”, so a PC Bang is a computer room, slightly akin to what we would call an internet cafe in Australia and elsewhere.
The big difference, however, is that while in a typical internet cafe one will find only travellers checking their email, in a Korean PC bang one will find Koreans of all ages playing games like Kart Rider, Starcraft and Lineage, old men playing online gambling games and businessmen smoking thousands of cigarettes, at all hours of the day and night.
Some people say that with the growing level of home internet usage in Korea (especially broadband), the PC Bang will soon become a thing of the past. Honestly, I don’t think so. It’s a unique space where people can get away from the everyday humdrum of their lives and shoot some aliens. Sounds good, huh?
During my time in Seoul (September–December 2005) I’ll be frequenting these often smoky, noisy and chaotic places, ostensibly to write poems but actually just to exist for a time in that virtual headspace we know as cyberland.
Hello, welcome to PC Bangs and my apologies for the delay in getting things started. I have now been in Seoul for what seems like an eternity but which has actually only been two weeks. Over time, I hope to describe some of the aspects of Korea’s unique ‘PC Bang’ culture. Here, ‘bang’ is a word that means something like ‘room’ so ‘PC Bang’ translates roughly as ‘computer room’ or, more helpfully, ‘internet cafe’. Over the course of the next four months I’ll be visiting various examples of the PC Bang phenomenon and hopefully taking some pictures of the really cool signwork they have here (you can see an example on the top right of this page).
First things first, though. I arrived at Incheon International on Saturday 27 August on a hot and muggy day. The only thing that I can really remember about the airport is seeing a sign reading “Gateway To Asia” and thinking – hang on, isn’t that Darwin’s claim to fame too? Doubtless, there are many “gateways” to, from and in Asia but I would hazard a guess that Seoul is perhaps more entitled to that description than Australia’s northern capital. Nevertheless, when I got out of the airport and headed for the bus, I was hit by a blast of hot air that I actually recognised from my time in Darwin in 1994 as a public servant. All of which is to say that at long last I felt I had arrived home. Only I was in Korea.
I’m currently staying at a hostel in Insadong, the arts and crafts ‘precinct’ of Seoul crammed with sweet shops, art galleries and classy home style Korean restaurants, not to mention one basball hitting range, a million street stalls selling the usual fare (notebooks, pencils, figurines) and about seven million people too. Despite the crowdedness of the main street, once you get off it and into the alleyways (where the hostel is located) it’s actually very quiet and about the most exciting thing that’s going to happen to you is getting run over by an over-zealous motorcycle courier. This is not Hanoi, however, and the number of motorbikes (or even pushbikes) is very small. This is partly due to the massive subway system, on the subject of which I could write a novel. Or two.
After settling myself in at the hostel it was time to front the university where I’m teaching this semester. Sogang University has a reputation as being one of the best in Seoul. I’m currently teaching two courses: one in creative writing and the other in Australian Culture. For a while I told everyone who was willing to listen that the Australian Culture course would be a short one. I made a lot of mileage out of that joke but now I’m here it just doesn’t quite seem so funny. That’s not to say I don’t pull it out every now and then but like the Western predilection for puns on the word ‘Seoul’ (‘seoul brother’, ‘seoul survivor’, ‘seoul searching’ or even ‘o seoul mio’) it wears a little thin after a while. That being said (and I’m not really sure why I even mentioned that), it should be a fun semester.
I have already given my students fair warning of what to expect from my classes by launching into a rendition of “Advance Australia Fair” at short notice. Knowing that I will be responsible for their grades at the end of the year, they wisely chose to roundly applaud my singing talents. So then I hit them with my a capella version of “Waltzing Matilda”. All I can say is that they had their chance. With forty five students in the class it’s the biggest group I’ve ever taught. My creative writing class on the other hand consists of only eight students, which is ideal, giving me enough time to focus on their work individually. So, yeah, it’s going okay at the moment. I have been given an office with a computer and an internet connection, which is great. The staff here are also very friendly so all in all, it’s not that different from teaching creative writing at Melbourne University.
That is, of course, until one leaves the university campus and hits the streets of Sinchon. The region around Sinchon is packed with universities (about five, I think), meaning that the whole area is full of students, student bars and a million shops trying to tempt these young consumers into parting with their cash in exchange for mobile phones, gizmos and gadgets, beer, pizza, noodles, music, t-shirts, coffee and so on. There’s a real buzz to the streets and the neon has to be seen to be believed. I haven’t ventured into the bars around here as of yet but hope to do so at the end of this month when Club Night rolls around again (15000 won gets you free entry to fifteen clubs in all). So far, I’ve really only experienced the nightlife around Jongno, just south of Insadong. But that’ll do me for starters. There’s more neon there even than in Tokyo, or at least it feels like it. There’s lots of clubs with various themes, lots of beer drinking and sometimes the odd ingenious device, such as the five litre jug of beer complete with dry ice machine to keep the contents cold.
Food-wise, I’ve been eating a lot of barbecue pork but also noodles, rice dishes and (okay I’ll admit it) the odd serving of junk food. I have also developed a taste for the chocolate biscuits, bean curd sweets and sponge cakes that you can find in almost any convenience store. Cold coffee in a can has also sustained me quite well, while the ion replacement drink Pocari Sweat is a pleasant though acquired taste (ie, it actually tastes a little like sweat). The same can be said for the local spirit, soju which, when mixed into a two litre jug of lemon cordial tastes like nothing at all but may leave you blind if you drink too many shots. The beer is quite nice though not so strong. Then, of course, there’s kim chi. I know that many westerners can’t stand it but I have to say I really like it, and I haven’t had any yet that’s really blown my head off. In fact, it’s quite mild and goes well with beer. Heck, almost anything spicy goes well with beer.
So far I haven’t done a lot of sightseeing but I have been to one massive palace, the enormous war memorial next to the Yongsan US military base, several markets of the flea, junk and craptastica varieties, as well as just poking around the streets of Insadong looking for unusual signs. Of which, more later, that is, as soon as I get a digital camera. I’m also about to get a phone which will make it easier to stay in touch but I’m shying away from purchasing any more electronic gadgets at this stage. In fact, I have discovered a shop that sells cassette tapes and so I’ve rigged up my Walkman in my hostel room together with a couple of speakers in a nifty little lo-fi kind of set-up. Add a couple of James Bond movies on cable television and I’m in heaven. Well, actually, I’m in Seoul but more on that (and everything else) later, dude.