Author: Josh Philip Ross

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The Lure of Asia

The American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Asian Peoples, inaugurated in 1980, opens with a diorama of a Samarkand market stall, undated, over which is the tag line “The Lure of Asia.” One couldn’t ask for a more perfect example of the kind of Orientalism Edward Said took to task four years earlier. There’s the othering — Asia is only a lure to non-Asians; for actual Asians, it’s just home — and the presentation of authentic Asianness as an undated premodernity. You see the same thing over and over throughout the exhibition, like the bier that’s presented as part of a Chinese marriage, with no notion that Chinese marriages in 1980 might be any different from whatever they were in the static eternal traditional past.

For all its flaws, though, the Hall of Asian Peoples was at least an attempt to make Asian culture, traditions, and artifacts legible to an audience unfamiliar with them. It belongs to a different era of ethnography — one corner describes “man’s rise to civilization,” as if it were unidirectional and didn’t involve women — but it’s not irresponsible. The collection is presented carefully, thoughtfully, with great attention to detail and a genuine attempt to respect the cultures presented.

The same, alas, can’t be said for China: Through the Looking Glass, the Costume Institute show at the Metropolitan Museum. The exhibition begins with a wall text that name-checks Edward Said in order to cast aside any serious reckoning with Orientalism as a field of power relations, choosing instead to see Asia as a source of inspiration and creativity for Western artists through the ages. All well and good, except that the show then colonizes the entirety of the Met’s Chinese art galleries, literally casting them in its own light, and making the objects and history of the actual China almost impossible to see. If it’s a show about Orientalism in action, it delivers.

At the Met, the Chinese galleries begin with the monumental, breathtaking 14th-century Buddha of Medicine Bhaishajyaguru, which, at 25 feet by 50 feet, gives a sense of the grandeur of Chinese tradition. Except that now you can’t see it, because of forest of glass bamboo poles is in the way, a work meant to reflect, I suppose, the repeating film clip we see of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The takeover continues, as the long hallway of early Chinese art is dimmed, lit in weird colors, and overtaken by an unnecessary wash of vaguely Asianish synth washes for no discernible reason. The Astor Court, normally an elegant refuge, is turned into a sordid nightclub, the rear wall lit red, the floor covered in black plastic meant to look like lacquer, the usual hush overtaken by kung fu movie sounds. The weird, bad lighting throughout — meant, I imagine, to preserve the clothing — destroys any opportunity to engage with the Met’s substantial Chinese art collection on its own terms. The exhibition even wanders down into the Egyptian wing, as if to say a little hello to Edward Said’s corner of the world. And you can’t escape the noise of this behemoth, even when you sneak off into the Chinese decorative arts, or the Korean collection, or the Gandharan Buddhist sculptures. Like any colonizing force, it’s insidious.

The exhibition tries to be clever, juxtaposing dresses and historical pieces. Sometimes it works, and other times it’s just facile. It might have been kind of hip if it had been put in the Costume Institute, or in its own special exhibition area. Instead, it’s just unnerving and weird: you look for your favorite pieces, like the Han Dynasty dancer, and they’re gone, only then you find them in some dim Plexiglas vitrine next to a dress with a dreadful Asiatic kitsch hat thrown on top for no good reason.

It is, I think, the first show I’ve ever seen at the Metropolitan Museum that actually pissed me off. I wanted to go look at the Chinese art, and it was buried. Fashion has a nasty habit of borrowing and burying, and also a nasty habit of turning Asia into raw material, whether it’s silk, ideas, or labor. That the Met gave it free rein to do so in its Chinese galleries is a disappointment.

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Yes, you can celebrate marriage equality even if you’re a radical progressive

I’m starting to see the backlash rolling in on Facebook — not from the right, but from the left. There are voices within the queer community and among its allies who have found reasons to be sad about the Supreme Court decision that has made gender a non-issue in marriage law.

Choosing your battles

The first critique, and the easier one to dismiss, is that this was the wrong battle. Why are we fighting for marriage equality, and celebrating its spread, when we still lack anti-discrimination laws and other basic protections?

The answer is simple: marriage equality has been an astonishingly effective platform for changing attitudes about being gay. Just as the civil rights movement of the 1950s chose issues that had broad appeal — letting young black men eat lunch at Woolworth’s, or letting an old black woman sit down at the front of a bus — the gay rights movement took on an issue that would humanize gay people to the broader public. Were lunching and bus-sitting rights the biggest problems facing black people in the age of lynchings? Not hardly. But they were effective in making it clear that black people deserved dignity and rights, and that those rights needed the protection of the law.

Did you see that rainbow White House? Did you notice the Supreme Court talking about the dignity of gay couples? If you somehow think that will have no impact on the ongoing struggle for anti-discrimination protections and the like, you’re nuts. The marriage equality movement has brought about a sea change in attitudes about homosexuality in America, to the extent that 27 percent of evangelical Christians now believe in same-sex marriage. And when you believe in the rights of two people to marry, you start to follow that logic a little bit and see that it’s probably not OK that they can then be fired for having gotten married.

So yeah, you can celebrate this victory without thinking it’s the last civil rights issue that will ever need work.

Wholesome versus Folsom

The second critique, and the more trenchant one, is that marriage itself perpetuates a whole bunch of heteronormative, oppressive thinking about how society is structured, how relationships ought to be, what’s acceptable and what’s not. This is what I call the “wholesome versus Folsom” debate, between those who want to assimilate and those who want to radicalize.

Marriage equality is a victory for the assimilationists, that’s for sure. And I’m kind of not one. I would like to see a discussion of sexuality and relationships that doesn’t imagine binary life-pairings as the one true goal. And that’s why I originally favored a shift to civil unions for all, taking the government out of the marriage business completely.

But I came around when I realized a couple of important things.

First, there was no way that American governments were going to stop sanctioning marriage licenses and switch to civil unions — no way that states would begin informing their citizens that their longstanding marriages are null and void, or even just recast as something else. Marriage as a legal institution is not going away. You might want it to, but that’s a very long fight for another day, and not one I would want to pin to the gay rights movement. And as long as governments are in the business of ratifying marriages, they ought to be ratifying same-sex marriages.

Second — and this is the really important one — gay rights can’t wait for a radically progressive America.

If it feels like the gay rights movement has been getting less and less radical over the years, that might be because people further and further in from the radical fringe are willing to come out as queer and to be part of a political movement for rights. Pride parades that used to be radical displays of countercultural expression are now bland strings of corporate floats pumping out mainstream pop.

That means we’re winning.

When you become a big-tent movement, it means that the radical voices tend to get drowned out by the mainstream voices. It can mean that the people who always get marginalized — the poor, people of color, women — end up getting marginalized again, within a movement that’s supposed to be helping them. The people with money and power tend to take over. And that sucks.

But there’s also something else that happens, and it’s more legitimate, which is that the movement becomes more democratic, more representative of the spectrum of views in the society within which it’s working. Where before the movement for gay rights attracted a radical few who were willing to rally to the cause, now it attracts people who aren’t especially political, who might just care about this issue for limited selfish reasons, who don’t care to see America remade as less capitalist or less focused on the nuclear family.

Marriage equality is a huge victory for LBGTQ people, but it is not a victory for radicalism. It’s a mainstream, middle-of-the-road sort of victory, in which queer folk become boringly more like everyone else who isn’t a radical.

Which let’s think about that for a minute. Gay people. Mainstream. Middle of the road. How could that even be a thing?

Oh, right. The marriage equality movement.

And that’s why I’m celebrating, and you can too, the way black people (and everyone else) can celebrate Juneteenth without betraying the ongoing struggle for liberty and rights.

Posted on

Yes, you can celebrate marriage equality even if you’re a radical progressive

I’m starting to see the backlash rolling in on Facebook — not from the right, but from the left. There are voices within the queer community and among its allies who have found reasons to be sad about the Supreme Court decision that has made gender a non-issue in marriage law.

Choosing your battles

The first critique, and the easier one to dismiss, is that this was the wrong battle. Why are we fighting for marriage equality, and celebrating its spread, when we still lack anti-discrimination laws and other basic protections?

The answer is simple: marriage equality has been an astonishingly effective platform for changing attitudes about being gay. Just as the civil rights movement of the 1950s chose issues that had broad appeal — letting young black men eat lunch at Woolworth’s, or letting an old black woman sit down at the front of a bus — the gay rights movement took on an issue that would humanize gay people to the broader public. Were lunching and bus-sitting rights the biggest problems facing black people in the age of lynchings? Not hardly. But they were effective in making it clear that black people deserved dignity and rights, and that those rights needed the protection of the law.

Did you see that rainbow White House? Did you notice the Supreme Court talking about the dignity of gay couples? If you somehow think that will have no impact on the ongoing struggle for anti-discrimination protections and the like, you’re nuts. The marriage equality movement has brought about a sea change in attitudes about homosexuality in America, to the extent that 27 percent of evangelical Christians now believe in same-sex marriage. And when you believe in the rights of two people to marry, you start to follow that logic a little bit and see that it’s probably not OK that they can then be fired for having gotten married.

So yeah, you can celebrate this victory without thinking it’s the last civil rights issue that will ever need work.

Wholesome versus Folsom

The second critique, and the more trenchant one, is that marriage itself perpetuates a whole bunch of heteronormative, oppressive thinking about how society is structured, how relationships ought to be, what’s acceptable and what’s not. This is what I call the “wholesome versus Folsom” debate, between those who want to assimilate and those who want to radicalize.

Marriage equality is a victory for the assimilationists, that’s for sure. And I’m kind of not one. I would like to see a discussion of sexuality and relationships that doesn’t imagine binary life-pairings as the one true goal. And that’s why I originally favored a shift to civil unions for all, taking the government out of the marriage business completely.

But I came around when I realized a couple of important things.

First, there was no way that American governments were going to stop sanctioning marriage licenses and switch to civil unions — no way that states would begin informing their citizens that their longstanding marriages are null and void, or even just recast as something else. Marriage as a legal institution is not going away. You might want it to, but that’s a very long fight for another day, and not one I would want to pin to the gay rights movement. And as long as governments are in the business of ratifying marriages, they ought to be ratifying same-sex marriages.

Second — and this is the really important one — gay rights can’t wait for a radically progressive America.

If it feels like the gay rights movement has been getting less and less radical over the years, that might be because people further and further in from the radical fringe are willing to come out as queer and to be part of a political movement for rights. Pride parades that used to be radical displays of countercultural expression are now bland strings of corporate floats pumping out mainstream pop.

That means we’re winning.

When you become a big-tent movement, it means that the radical voices tend to get drowned out by the mainstream voices. It can mean that the people who always get marginalized — the poor, people of color, women — end up getting marginalized again, within a movement that’s supposed to be helping them. The people with money and power tend to take over. And that sucks.

But there’s also something else that happens, and it’s more legitimate, which is that the movement becomes more democratic, more representative of the spectrum of views in the society within which it’s working. Where before the movement for gay rights attracted a radical few who were willing to rally to the cause, now it attracts people who aren’t especially political, who might just care about this issue for limited selfish reasons, who don’t care to see America remade as less capitalist or less focused on the nuclear family.

Marriage equality is a huge victory for LBGTQ people, but it is not a victory for radicalism. It’s a mainstream, middle-of-the-road sort of victory, in which queer folk become boringly more like everyone else who isn’t a radical.

Which let’s think about that for a minute. Gay people. Mainstream. Middle of the road. How could that even be a thing?

Oh, right. The marriage equality movement.

And that’s why I’m celebrating, and you can too, the way black people (and everyone else) can celebrate Juneteenth without betraying the ongoing struggle for liberty and rights.

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Electronics for the road

As I’ve planned for travel, I’ve thought a lot about what electronics I’ll bring with me — finding balance between keeping the weight down, keeping the cost reasonable, making sure the electronics are durable, and making sure I can do all the things I want to.

Here’s what I’ve decided to take with me:

In addition, to keep everything charged and connected:

In choosing items, I had a few principles in mind:

  1. Keep it light. I will inevitably end up hauling around too much stuff. I can at least start by paring down the weight of my technology.
  2. Keep it cheap. Who wants to spend a ton of money on something that may well end up at the bottom of a river in Laos?
  3. Keep it USB-chargeable. When you see laptop weights, they never include the weight of the charger. And what do you do if you lose or break your specialized charger when you’re halfway across Java? Micro-USB chargers will probably always be around to buy or borrow. And anything that’s USB-chargeable can be charged on the go with a backup battery.

Laptop

HP Chromebook 11-1101

Some of the loneliest moments in my life have been in hotel rooms, when I felt too tired or sick or overwhelmed to go out but totally isolated inside. Back then, your only option for connectivity was an Internet cafe.

But Wi-Fi is replacing Internet cafes, and it’s a great comfort to be able to hide out in your hotel room and get on Facebook or Skype, or just watch episodes of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. (There are other things on the Internet that it’s also probably better to look at in the privacy of your own hotel room.)

I considered a tablet-plus-keyboard setup, but laptops are just more comfortable to type on — especially if you happen to like typing in bed — and I type a lot (cf. the thing you’re reading now). That meant picking between a MacBook and a Chromebook. (I haven’t used any Microsoft software in years, and this didn’t feel like the moment to go back.)

A MacBook, either Air or the new gold thingie, is more graceful and powerful than any Chromebook. But the chromebook I chose — the HP Chromebook 11-1101:– has a number of advantages:

  • Price. Listed at $239.99, I got mine for about $25 plus some points that had mysteriously accrued in my bank account. Even a used MacBook Air is more than that.
  • Weight. The MacBook Air plus the charger weighs 3.16 pounds, while the HP Chromebook 11-1101 weighs just 2.38 pounds. (The new MacBook is lighter, at 2.02 pounds, but a lot more expensive, plus it requires its own power adapter.)
  • USB chargeability. No risk of wandering around Cambodia in search of a MagSafe 2 charger or a USB-C power adapter.

I’ve had the Chromebook for a while now, and it feels good to use, plus it has good looks for a cheap device. And if you’re going to look at something every day, it might as well be decent.

Camera

Sony DSC-RX100M III Cyber-shot Digital Still CameraI have a camera. Several, actually. Plus also a phone. So why get a new camera?

A while back, the artist and photographer Gina DeNaia let me in on a dangerous secret. She taught me about sensor size. It turns out that the size of the sensor in a digital camera makes a huge difference to the quality of the photos, especially in low light. I got myself a Fujifilm XF1, which has a 2/3″ sensor — much bigger than a typical point-and-shoot, much less a phone — and I like it. Sort of. But it has the annoying quirk that the way you turn it on is by twisting the lens barrel, which means you can’t shoot one-handed.

In the meantime, there are now point-and-shoots with 1″ sensors. The competition came down to the Sony DSC-RX100M III Cyber-shot and the Canon PowerShot G1X Mark II. They’re both impressive cameras that can fit in your pocket, but ultimately the Sony won out. I got mine used for $689.

  • Big sensor. OK, they both have big 1″ sensors, so that’s a wash.
  • Viewfinder. Yep, that thing’s cool. I’ve used it a bit, and it’s fun to try holding a camera up to my face again like I did with my old film camera.
  • USB chargeability. There it is again. No risk of leaving behind my charger and battery in a hotel room somewhere. If the battery dies in the middle of the day, I can toss the camera in my backpack with the backup battery charger and power up again.

Was it really worth it? The camera will be the most expensive thing I carry, though it’s pretty cheap compared to a typical DSLR rig. But I’m going on the trip of a lifetime. I want to record it well enough that I could print the images later for professional use. Compromising to save a few hundred bucks probably wouldn’t seem so clever in the end.

Phone

A smartphone is a necessity for world travel these days. With a local sim card, you can get maps and figure out where you are. You can send messages to locals and other travelers. You can function like a normal person.

Right now I’m likely to take my Nexus 5 with me. I already own it, and it’s a perfectly capable phone. And why spend a bunch of money now, when there will inevitably be newer and cooler phones by the time I get to Korea in 2016?

The only thing that tempts me about pricier phones is the memory capacity for downloaded music — nice if you’re going to be away from Wi-Fi for a while and want music for the road — but that’s probably not enough to get me to spend $800 right now. And I can always change my mind and get a phone later on, whenever Google rolls out its next Nexus or whatever.

E-reader

Not exactly a necessity, but nice to have. Reading on a phone is a drag and a battery killer. And since I already have it and it’s tiny and light and cheap, I’m taking my Kindle Paperwhite with me.

And guess how it charges? Right.

Other stuff

I decided to get myself a backup battery to charge on the go. Plus I got a card reader so I can upload photos to the web via my Chromebook without having to go through a Wi-Fi or USB link.

Addendum: I’ve added a JBL Clip portable bluetooth speaker. at 5.6 ounces, it doesn’t add much weight, but it means I can add reasonably good-sounding background music to any room I’m in, or watch TV on my laptop without headphones, or throw a little party somewhere. We’ll see if it turns out to be worth it.

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One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

– Andre Gide (found written in a personal notebook from 2002, when I was in Nepal)

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Rathole

NYC
It may be a rathole,
But it’s the biggest rathole
It’s the best rathole
And damn if that ain’t something!

Something I wrote probably in 1993 or so, found written in the margins of a photocopy of a page of How Does a Poem Mean?

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Joining the match in progress

In the kitchen closest to my desk at Google, there’s an ongoing chess match. Anyone can walk by and make a move, and a game accumulates.

Yesterday I was contemplating a move when someone else stopped by. “Sometimes I show up and there’s, like, and exposed queen or something,” he said, “and I feel bad taking it. Like, I didn’t earn that.”

What my companion had stumbled on — along with a poorly played chess move — was a good metaphor for the experience of privilege: we drop into a game that’s already being played, and some of us discover that there are pieces just waiting for us to take them, while others find that we’re already down a couple pawns and in a terrible mess.

To put it another way: some of us are born forked, and some of us are born forking others.

We should be cautious about taking too much credit for finding ourselves in a good position, or casting too much blame on others for being in a bad one. Some humility is called for, and some compassion.

Life, however, is not a game of chess — the metaphor only goes so far. We can do our part to improve the board for everyone, and we should do what we can, even if we make just a few moves in a much larger game whose beginning is lost in time and whose end we will never see.

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Travel and frozen time

I know what India’s like. I know because I’ve been there.

That’s how I tend to think, anyway. But do I really have any idea what India is like now? I first went there in 1997, spending four months backpacking alone around the Subcontinent. I returned for another six months in 2002, and then I made a brief, two-week visit for business in 2009.

I still describe experiences and memories from that first trip as if that’s just how things are done in India. Yet that trip was 18 years ago. Back then, cassette shops sold music, Internet cafes connected through dialup twice a day to send and receive emails at their own POP addresses, and typists plied their trade (they’re still around, but a dying breed). No one talked about an IT revolution in India — the dot-com boom hadn’t even hit America yet. Business, it seemed, ran on hand-written ledger books. This was the very end of the Congress Party’s long era of dominance: the BJP was running hard, and they won enough seats to form a government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee just a month after I left the country, and the country tested its nuclear weapons a few months later.

Change, in other words, was coming, if you could see the signs. I gathered some sense of the political shift during my travels, but I had no idea about the economic and technological revolution that would transform the country. When I came back in 2002, Internet cafes were everywhere, with uninterrupted power supplies and Internet Explorer 5. CDs had replaced cassettes. Indian Railways was so effectively computerized that a clerk gave me my change when I switched my ticket time and the new one turned out to be cheaper.

I saw further changes when I went back to India in 2009: shopping malls, an emerging security state in the wake of the Bombay attacks, greater ambient wealth. India still felt very much like India, but it wasn’t quite the place I experienced back in 1997.

My frozen home

This frozen-in-time quality is typical of travel accounts — I grew up on my parents’ tales of what Europe was like, as their late-sixties experiences receded ever further back in time — and maybe even more typical of how expats and exiles think of their former homes. It’s funny to me the extent to which parts of Flushing feel more like the Korea of 2001, or even earlier, than like the Korea of today. Restaurants like Kum Gang San cater to Koreans of a certain age, and of a certain Korean era. My parents’ New York City, which they left in the 1970s, is not the New York City I live in.

And very soon, I’ll be talking about a New York City that will be frozen in time.

I’ve been here since 1993, which is quite a while. I’ve seen in change. I’ve called in a dead body in Hell’s Kitchen, and done it on a payphone. I used to go to the 2nd Ave Deli on Second Avenue, and I used to ride the Redbirds out to Jackson Heights for Indian food and not Tibetan food. I remember Pearl Paint and the Twin Towers and the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Ave and the old, hideous Columbus Circle and tokens. A lot has changed.

And it will keep changing without me, after I leave. In a few years, I will be telling someone about New York, and all the hipsters in Bushwick or how Citibike works or how much fun it is to get some ice cream from Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and go to Columbus Park to watch the old men gamble and the old ladies sing, and some actual New Yorker will interject that actually it’s not like that anymore, that they cleaned up the park, changed the bike laws, and moved all the hipsters to Brownsville.

The passage of time

I suppose this is also just a function of getting older. When I was a kid in the eighties, I imagined that the styles then in fashion, music, film, whatever, were just the defaults. I’ve now been around long enough to see things I remembered from the first time come back into style and then go out again. I am aware of the passage of time in a way I couldn’t have been when I was younger.

But then there’s New York. I’ve been here long enough that it’s my home and nowhere else is, but I’m leaving. And New York isn’t a place you can hold onto. It moves on without you. It does not, frankly, give a shit about you, especially if you’ve gone off to live somewhere else. You keep up with New York, not the other way around. Quicker than most places, New York erases and replaces the things you knew.

Well, quicker than most places in America, anyway. Eventually I’ll be settling in Seoul, a city that changes even faster than New York — where you can leave for three years and not be able to find your old neighborhood because the whole thing has been bulldozed and replaced.

And in the meantime? I’ll be traveling, gaining new slices of experience, and trying to remember later when I talk about them to say, “This is how it was then,” instead of “This is how it is.”

Posted on

Travel and frozen time

I know what India’s like. I know because I’ve been there.

That’s how I tend to think, anyway. But do I really have any idea what India is like now? I first went there in 1997, spending four months backpacking alone around the Subcontinent. I returned for another six months in 2002, and then I made a brief, two-week visit for business in 2009.

I still describe experiences and memories from that first trip as if that’s just how things are done in India. Yet that trip was 18 years ago. Back then, cassette shops sold music, Internet cafes connected through dialup twice a day to send and receive emails at their own POP addresses, and typists plied their trade (they’re still around, but a dying breed). No one talked about an IT revolution in India — the dot-com boom hadn’t even hit America yet. Business, it seemed, ran on hand-written ledger books. This was the very end of the Congress Party’s long era of dominance: the BJP was running hard, and they won enough seats to form a government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee just a month after I left the country, and the country tested its nuclear weapons a few months later.

Change, in other words, was coming, if you could see the signs. I gathered some sense of the political shift during my travels, but I had no idea about the economic and technological revolution that would transform the country. When I came back in 2002, Internet cafes were everywhere, with uninterrupted power supplies and Internet Explorer 5. CDs had replaced cassettes. Indian Railways was so effectively computerized that a clerk gave me my change when I switched my ticket time and the new one turned out to be cheaper.

I saw further changes when I went back to India in 2009: shopping malls, an emerging security state in the wake of the Bombay attacks, greater ambient wealth. India still felt very much like India, but it wasn’t quite the place I experienced back in 1997.

My frozen home

This frozen-in-time quality is typical of travel accounts — I grew up on my parents’ tales of what Europe was like, as their late-sixties experiences receded ever further back in time — and maybe even more typical of how expats and exiles think of their former homes. It’s funny to me the extent to which parts of Flushing feel more like the Korea of 2001, or even earlier, than like the Korea of today. Restaurants like Kum Gang San cater to Koreans of a certain age, and of a certain Korean era. My parents’ New York City, which they left in the 1970s, is not the New York City I live in.

And very soon, I’ll be talking about a New York City that will be frozen in time.

I’ve been here since 1993, which is quite a while. I’ve seen in change. I’ve called in a dead body in Hell’s Kitchen, and done it on a payphone. I used to go to the 2nd Ave Deli on Second Avenue, and I used to ride the Redbirds out to Jackson Heights for Indian food and not Tibetan food. I remember Pearl Paint and the Twin Towers and the Barnes & Noble on Sixth Ave and the old, hideous Columbus Circle and tokens. A lot has changed.

And it will keep changing without me, after I leave. In a few years, I will be telling someone about New York, and all the hipsters in Bushwick or how Citibike works or how much fun it is to get some ice cream from Chinatown Ice Cream Factory and go to Columbus Park to watch the old men gamble and the old ladies sing, and some actual New Yorker will interject that actually it’s not like that anymore, that they cleaned up the park, changed the bike laws, and moved all the hipsters to Brownsville.

The passage of time

I suppose this is also just a function of getting older. When I was a kid in the eighties, I imagined that the styles then in fashion, music, film, whatever, were just the defaults. I’ve now been around long enough to see things I remembered from the first time come back into style and then go out again. I am aware of the passage of time in a way I couldn’t have been when I was younger.

But then there’s New York. I’ve been here long enough that it’s my home and nowhere else is, but I’m leaving. And New York isn’t a place you can hold onto. It moves on without you. It does not, frankly, give a shit about you, especially if you’ve gone off to live somewhere else. You keep up with New York, not the other way around. Quicker than most places, New York erases and replaces the things you knew.

Well, quicker than most places in America, anyway. Eventually I’ll be settling in Seoul, a city that changes even faster than New York — where you can leave for three years and not be able to find your old neighborhood because the whole thing has been bulldozed and replaced.

And in the meantime? I’ll be traveling, gaining new slices of experience, and trying to remember later when I talk about them to say, “This is how it was then,” instead of “This is how it is.”

Posted on

New and old

Design Korea has posted some pictures of a Korean house with a cutaway roof, designed by the Korean architecture firm IROJE KHM.

The house looks exquisite, if perhaps a bit awkward to furnish. But what I find fascinating about it, beyond the intrinsic cleverness and whimsy, is how well it manages to be at once contemporary and rooted in local tradition — in this case, that of the Korean hanok,

I find this fascinating not just for its intrinsic cleverness, but because it is a very rare example of an architecture that feels at once contemporary and rooted in a local tradition — in this case, the Korean hanok, with its dark-gray sloped roof and its interior courtyard.

It’s a synthesis that’s hard to pull off. Too often, especially in Asia, the attempt to integrate local traditions into modern architecture results in modernism with retro decorative flourishes. But it’s not surprising to me that Korean architects would be feeling their way toward a deeper fusion. Korea has made a concerted effort over the past decade to find ways to bring its traditional culture into its modern culture.

Korea has an interesting history when it comes to working with its own traditions. China went through the Cultural Revolution, during which traditional culture was vilified and destroyed in an orgy of violence. Japan, on the other hand, after the rapid modernization of the Meiji Restoration, suffered the defeat of its modern nation while retaining its emperor, leading to a reactionary cultural conservatism that’s much less prominent in Korea. Korea (and here I mean South Korea) has used its traditional culture for various purposes in the modern era, first as a rallying point for national autonomy against Japanese colonialism, and later both to legitimate the conservative military government and to rebel against it. The result is perhaps more flexibility than one finds in either China or Japan when it comes to working with traditional culture in a modern context.

When I first came to Korea, in 2001, traditional culture was still somewhat fenced off, seen as maybe a bit of an embarrassment by a country keen on taking its place among the developed nations. But as Korea has grown more confident, there has been more willingness not just to preserve traditions, but to extend them, to grow them, to let them live and breathe. This unusual house is just one example of many, and a rare architectural example. I hope to see more such architectural innovation coming out of Korea.