A real-estate agent’s map of Seoul. Jongno, January 2010.
The last seven weeks have seen us taking our fledging operation on the road. Between our last report to you on the 22nd December and mid-January, we found ourselves in Palm Beach, New York, London, Seoul and Tokyo: the price of having a far-flung family.
As you’d imagine, we spent a lot of that period in a jetlagged (but well-fed) daze, and as you also might expect, it’s been a little difficult to reintegrate fully into Helsinki life. We’ve been helped immeasurably in this effort by our dear friends Sasha and Petri — and suspect we would be by Bryan as well, if he were ever in town.
The pace of Tokyo Blues orders has slowed after its initial spike, but we’re actually happy in that this has allowed us to handle fulfillment from the road. We took a stack of books with us wherever we went and shipped them from wherever we happened to be as orders came in, which is a luxury/burden I can’t imagine too many other publishers experiencing. We don’t believe this led to any problems with delivery, but please let us know if for whatever reason your order hasn’t arrived.
Our trip to Tokyo was brief but instructive: the city’s homeless, having already been chased out of the subway tunnels at the end of the 1990s, are now being exiled from the public parks they colonized in the early part of last decade. One unexpected, minor, but very interesting consequence of this is that Tokyo Blues has acquired new value as historical documentation, as the conditions it depicts are no longer extant — at least not in the parts of Shinjuku and Shibuya we were able to reach.
The city’s parks, playgrounds and interstitial spaces have been swept clear of any sign of their former use, to the extent that I have a hard time imagining how anyone encountering them for the first time now will understand just how richly and cleverly they were inhabited. What we thought of as a more-or-less permanent feature of the cityscape turned out to be just the way things were done during a very particular interval in time. I feel very lucky to have something we can point to and say, this is the way it was.
Another nice piece of luck: after many years of poking around Seoul, obviously in the wrong places, we’ve finally touched base with something that feels to us like vibrant alternative culture. Nurri had read about a bookstore/imprint out of Itaewon called Post Poetics, and we dropped in to have a look. It turned out to be this amazing oasis of lowercase cultural production — somehow simultaneously spare/minimal but ad-hoc and funky — run by a lovely guy named Jowan; he, in turn, let us know about a sound-art opening at the brand new Space Hamilton around the corner, and that was also pretty great.
It was all a little uncanny for me personally, since this little nexus of activity lies just up the street from the place where a pleasure district (”Hooker Hill”) once huddled up against the gates of Yongsan, formerly the main US Army base on the peninsula. I spent a decent amount of time up in these alleys in the late ’90s, watching twenty-year-old Rangers kill their neurons by the millionfold with soju kettle (a concoction of 86-proof rice whiskey and Kool-Aid, served in two-liter soda bottles with the tops hacked off) before setting off to making fools of themselves by trying to bargain with the working girls.
After the turn of the century, and especially since the return of Yongsan to Korean control, the neighborhood’s lost most of this character, becoming heavily Bangla and Pakistani (and gaining some incredible hole-in-the-wall places to eat in the bargain), but my own memories of Itaewon tend to feature landmarks like Polly’s Kettle House and the supercheesy Reggae Pub. Post Poetics isn’t entirely detached from this legacy — it is, reassuringly, one floor up from a tacky little sex shop — but I have to tell you that walking into a space hereabouts and seeing shelves lined with Apartamento and Kasino A4 and Butt still strikes me as nothing short of surreal. Here again, a study in changing urban dynamics. (Congratulations to Jowan on bringing something lovely into being, and our thanks for having pointed us at some other great stuff.)
The last thing we have to report to you for now is something that makes us really happy: Nurri’s won a 2010 Finnish Arts Council grant for work on an upcoming project, of which we’ll tell you more in days to come. For now, stay warm, keep in touch, and keep sending us those pictures of you with your books.
