When we were in Cambodia Mary decided to get her diving certificate. I held off as none of the dive shops in Sihanoukville had particularly great reputations, nor were the views reputed to be that great. But if all you needed to do was pass the test then what was on offer seemed fine. We booked the test a few days ahead of time and were told that a Tuk-Tuk would pick us up in the AM, drop us off at a dock and that we’d take a 90 minute ride to an island off the coast. Sounds fine.

The day rolls around, we crawl out of bed and sure enough, there’s the Tuk-Tuk. No problems. We get to the dock and they load us into what’s basically a glorified canoe. We’re offered a short and sweet explanation: The other, larger boat is being repaired and so our little boat should be fine. And for the first blissful 15 minutes, it was. The water was calm, instant coffee was summoned from a red and white thermos and some lousy pastry was passed around. Somewhere in the middle of this the first large wave struck the side of the boat.

Now, I’ve read plenty of books about THE FURY OF THE SEA and my gut level reaction has always been, “It’s the ocean, dude, get over it”. No more. Here we are in the middle of the fucking ocean, in a tiny boat, the plaything of waves 10 or more feet high. It was pure, awful terror. You’d see these enormous waves come from a distance and the 2 troubled, serious looking Cambodia dudes manning the tiny boat would cut the engine and steer into it to keep the boat from being overturned. So you’ve got this lateral, side-to-side rocking, but also a roller coaster style up and down, stomach-in-your-throat up and down rocking. We’d enter these valleys of water where the ocean literally looked it was being ripped apart as two 10 foot waves gathered on both side of the boat. At one point we were on our side, taking on water, people literally hanging from the handrails of the opposite side.

This went on for 3 hours.

When we finally arrived at the island, the wind was so bad it was blowing the boat away from the dock. We eventually got to dry land and a totally lovely island that I never even got the name of.

I had written an exhaustive amount about our vacation, while on our vacation. Then the netbook suffered a grueling, mechanical death and took my little travelogue with it. Whoops. I figured the next best thing would be to post some photos and tell a little story about them. So:

We decided to go from Vietnam into Cambodia via the Mekong Delta. Our adventures at the land crossing last year were, by now, the stuff of awful legend. We spent some three hours in the bitter sun at the Thai/Cambodian border filling out forms, shuffling slowly forward, bribing border guards and eventually stumbling into a bit of good luck when a young Canadian kid named Max turned out to be going to the same place we were. The way back was worse- Mary was sick with something we never go to the bottom of and the agonizing border crawl was pockmarked with fever and pain.

So it made sense to cross via the river border. We booked a 3-day tour up the Mekong and it was pleasant enough, but also kind of pointless. We spent more time on buses than boats. Anyway, these photos come from the 2nd day. We got up way too early and boarded a boat that took us around the floating market. We’d repeat the experience the next day in smaller boats, at a smaller market, but this was, I would guess, a kind of tourist market.

To be honest, I’m not sure how much the floating market is still a part of rural life. Most of these boats were loaded with fruit or snacks or clothes, but the only people who were buying anything were tourists. And even then it tended to be a single can of beer or soda. I think it may have been a bit of a show, but these people do indeed live on their boats and conduct business from them.

If there was a single astonishing thing about it, it was their great ease on the water. Where the rest of us seemed to be in permanent danger of falling overboard, the Vietnamese who made their lives on the Mekong seemed to not even feel the roll of the river, the tilt of their boats. They made daring leaps from deck to deck without issue. I guess if you do anything long enough it becomes natural, but there was a real grace here that only comes from sort of being a part of something.

I’m spending most of Saturday waist-deep in some programming nonsense so that I can launch this project I’ve been babysitting for months and the SECRET to productive GENIUS is to drink a bunch of coffee and listen to jamz like this all day:

I have a weirdly huge number of things to post, a whole mountain of text that I’ve just been sitting on for whatever reason. It includes an unwieldy recounting of our latest vacation, which includes being on a boat that nearly sunk, maybe, and other death-defying feats. But I’ve also been trying to write about video games a lot in an effort to compile something that looks like a portfolio. SO you’ll see that coming along, too.

But I saw this this morning:

And it felt like a bummer not to share it. The game itself looks like a stock and standard zombie slasher and I have no idea how it’s going to be any different than Dead Rising, but the trailer is beautiful. Game trailers tend to be filled with big explosions and exciting gameplay, but cramming the worst moment of a family’s collective life into 3 minutes is aggressive and beautiful and risky. Playing on the weepy, sad side of a zombie has never been an idea that seems suited to DUDES WHO LIKE ZOMBIES, but it’s really powerful here.Uh, beware: Contains zombies and everything that comes along with that

So Saturday I busted my ankle. I took 2 days off work to heal up. I really shouldn’t be walking yet, but if I take 3 days off I have to get a note from the Hospital. Koreans LOVE TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL. If you have a sniffle they’ll be like: “Did you go to the hospital?” and I’m like “No” and they’re like “GO TO THE HOSPITAL”.

So I hobble to work this morning looking like a crazy man (My shoe wouldn’t fit my swollen foot, so I wore one shoe and one slipper) and make a joke out of it. I drew a bite mark on my arm and told all my kids I was a zombie and chased them around for awhile. So it eventually transpires that I have no class today or the rest of the week. Wow, good thing I showed up, right? So I decide to just sit at my desk and screw around for the rest of the day.

I do this for about 40 minutes when they come to my desk and tell me “We must go stamping. Many stamps, okay?” and I’m like “But my foot is fuuuu” and they’re like “Principal make request lets go” and because I’m a pussy I was like “FINE WHATEVER”. So we go upstairs into this SWELTERING OFFICE and there is a comically huge stack of paper. It’s the largest stack of paper I’ve ever seen outside of a movie about HOW TERRIBLE OFFICE WORK IS. It’s probably close to a thousand sheets of paper. It’s huge. And they sit me down at a table and they’re like “Here’s a rubber stamp, stamp every page”. I figure I’ll just put my back into it and bust it out and so I start stamping these pages.

I get like maybe 200 pages done and my, uh, handler, who is standing over my shoulder tut-tutting me everytime a stamp is mis-aligned, is like “Ohhhh red ink no good. blue! blue ink” and hands me a blue stamp pad. We eventually work it out that I will not be the one to restamp the previous 200 or so pages. I power through the rest (The Koreans keep holding a pow wow about whether or not a stamp is good enough, aligned enough or whatever. There’s a whole invisible field of criteria I’m not privvy to). It takes like an hour but I bust through the whole stack and then there’s this gem:

“Starting with tomorrow, is Spring Vacation. How many vacation days do you want?”
“Uh. All of them?”
“Well, you dont have many vacation days left”
“Right, but it’s Spring Vacation”
“No,no. Take take vacation, you must use vacation days. Otherwise you will come in”
“Who else will be here?”
“No other peoples. This is school keeper’s phone number. When you come in morning, call him and he will come and unlock school for you to sit”

6 months.

I’m off to Hanoi tomorrow, but Mary left last week, which is a twist in the plot. Usually she takes care of things like passports, travel arrangements, check in, etc. I’m just the sidekick consigned to drag around the bags like a handsome Roman slave. But without her here I’ve been left to my own devices, re: become organized and do not fuck up. It turns out that I am not entirely hopeless, which is good.

Those of you in long-term, live-in relationships know that it’s a weird thing when the person you spend nearly all of your free time suddenly steps out of the picture. At first it’s completely awesome: You can sit around in PJs, eat fast food and play video games until your eyeballs bleed and no one says a word. Then there’s a pretty steep decline until you’re a completely sad version of yourself, playing video games until your eyeballs bleed because no one is around to tell you not to. Given the option of maximum freedom, most of us crumple into a ball and wait for it to be over because in our heart of hearts most of us thrive on rules. We like rules. For as much the American meta-narrative boasts about freedom and liberty, the truth is that we like, to a degree, being told what to do and what to expect.

Anyway, it’ll be nice to be together again and on an adventure, even though I know some stretch of it will be stressful and awful and the only relief will be the knowledge that it’ll make a great story.

The song above is ‘We Will Vacation, You Can Be My Parasol’ by Be Your Own Pet. They were like 16 or 17 when this record dropped and they just obliterated everything else that came out that year. There was nothing this raw, nothing with this total lack of self-consciousness. Anyway, there’s a lyric:

Vacation says, vacation says
We have to be good to each other
We have to be so good to each other
We have to lend our support

And I think it’s at least partially sarcastic, but it’s good to keep in mind.

Snowed quite a bit tonight, I popped out and got some video:

Snowy Seoul from Scott Stephan on Vimeo.

I got bored, when out and shot a bunch of video. My battery died about halfway through but luck of luck, what I had came out to just about the right length.

There’s almost no editing, I walked outside, shot it, strung it together and uploaded it in about 55 minutes. Apologies to those of you who put thought and effort into your videos.

On an old blog I used to have a category called ‘Niche Spectacular’, devoted to things that only I could love, stuff that happened to occur at an intersection between two of my obscure interests. If I had kept that category, this video would be it’s masthead: 8-bit rock dudes Anamnaguchi covering monolithic, critically adored pioneers of a genre that never had a single hit record.

My Bloody Valentine famously spent two entire years and half a million bucks making ‘Loveless’, a record that even today has no equal. It’s most renowned as the dense, loud archetype of shoe-gaze, but inside of it’s surface-level ferocity is a hell of a lot of pop. Given Kevin Shield’s reputation as a studio perfectionist and nob twiddler it’s no surprise that even trying to cover My Bloody Valentine is something of a lost cause- Much of the band’s catalog finds it’s magic in the interplay between the guitars that sound like bits of broken glass, reverb that sounds a 1000 feet deep and light as a cloud melodic elements.

Trying to recreate that is like trying to cook your Mother’s recipes- It’s so tied up in something utterly outside of itself that even making the effort is a weird kind of pointless. There’s something about being pathetic- trying to recreate a past that exists only in memory- and something kind of blasphemous- you run the risk of disturbing memory. But the Anamanaguchi dudes put up a nice effort. They substitute Shields’ jagged guitars with bits of pitchy Nintendo noise and the well-deep bass gets a reasonably crunchy electric, instead. In place of the airy melodics we get two dudes singing in a warbly falsetto.

In some ways this is kind of an ideal cover, it reverse engineers the good stuff and plays to it’s own strengths, but it’s also another in a long list of MBV covers that just don’t work. And that’s okay, it’s kind of the Kobayashi Maru of covers. No one ever wins, but everyone gets to try.

And I know why, but I can’t fix it until I get home. Bear with me.

One of the strange side effects of living abroad is that advertising no longer works on you. This is espexially peculialr because modern people have become so completely inured to the strange alchemy of ads- A union of text and imagery that appear to be a seamless whole. And as much as we po-mo urbanites love to pretend that we’re culture warriors who are utterly indifferent to the slogans sorrounding us, the flat truth of the thing is that they work.

I think what we don’t realize is that far from being a kind of concrete science, ads tend to be a magic trick. That is, they present a cohesive front, but really rely on a lot of effort and dexterity. Which is why going abroad renders them naked and useless- You’ll get the image and not the message which even in the best of cases turns a dashing magician into a balding, 40-something in a thrift store tuxedo. In the worst of cases, it tends to turn the magician into a party clown (Sorry Dad).

I saw this in the subway the other day. It’s Pavarotti in a shopping cart. I have absolutely no idea what it’s trying to suggest. We get the image, but without its hard sell, without the clever aside, it becomes a non-sequitor. Asia is packed with these- American movie stars glowering from 80 foot banners, children peeing into the spout of a whale, a baby eating beauty cream. When we first got here there was a large ad campaign featuring a 20-something woman with a black eye smiling. The best we could come up with was that it was a PSA about domestic abuse. A Korean friend finally translated the text as “Sales worth fighting for”. Ooops. There is, of course, a kind of cultural white noise involved here. Injured women haven’t been worth a public chuckle since Ralph Cramden threaten to send his wife into orbit. And while domestic abuse is a serious issue in Korea, it’s not PSA-serious and it’s not widely acknowledged in the culture. For Koreans, the beautiful girl with the black eye was not a call to cringe, but to laugh, especially when coupled with the text.

But back to Pavarotti- Here we’re left with nothing but a goofy image. Fat man. Shopping cart. Smiling lady. He’s got a good deal in mind (People in ads always do, don’t they?), but on what I can’t say. .015% seems like. Well. Nothing. So if it’s savings, I can’t imagine this being an enticement, unless it’s something like “Uranium per ounce”.

But the whole ad is just. Dysfunctional for us. It says nothing at all and that lends a strange peace to a lot of our day. We don’t have a TV in the apartment, but when we see an ad at the movies or at someone else’s house, they look like technicolor fever dreams. I always feel a little bit like an ugly American sitting in the theater doubled over with laughter during a bank ad, but they’re just so strange. And with nothing to contextualize the information they just look like elaborate practical jokes, a late-night comedy show’s idea of Asia (This one is, I think, for a bank):

Or they’re unthinkably racist in only the way a country just meeting the rest of the world can be:

As a bonus, here’s another ad for. Well. I’m guessing it’s for a business in the building, but I could be totally wrong. Often these kinds of things will have us nosing around looking for whatever could inspire such a strange banner, but on this occassion I found nothing but offices and a bathroom. Maybe it’s better not to know.