Mountain climbing

 

Winter and climate change

 

Climate Change in Korea

 

Climate Change

 

Jaywalking

https://youtube.com/shorts/U2XyGKyFekI?si=GisO58t56NFnyGp6

Jaywalking in Seoul: Why Not Often Seen? #pedestriansafety https://youtube.com/shorts/U2XyGKyFekI?si=GisO58t56NFnyGp6 via @YouTube

Visitors to Seoul sometimes comment on how law abiding the pedestrians are. There are structural reasons for that.

About Kyonggi do

 

Yongin

 

PicGall 20

Clip from PicGall 20

Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/20mxqKN_j7Y?si=1HJPF9ozYVKcNqDq 

#streetphotography #zve10 #photography #photooftheday #seoul #urbanliving

From a series of minute-galleries of recent photos taken in Seoul and Yongin, Kyonggi do. 

On Literature and Cinema 1

 ON CINEMA AND LITERATURE 

Cinema and literature are art forms that are proudly distinct from each other, yet — at least from point of view of moviemaking — inextricably linked; movies, after all, need scripts.

But on an important level, literature needs cinema as well. For ‪one thing, literary writing is becoming simpler; “script-like”. For another, arguably, the sensibility of writers is becoming more and more focused on scene creation … on depicting setpiece situations in which we observe the surface of characters’ actions, this accompanied (sometimes) by the monologue of one character’s interior monologue.

It’s a perfectly fine narrative strategy. But it raises a question: why not acknowledge the obvious? Why not make literary works into “movies”? 

Ex 1: https://youtu.be/GV2sxT5t8yg?si=CKmHhWAoEFA_-TbV

2: https://youtu.be/MPivPuRAyYA?si=7zOeCIzu-4P661T1

/end

Why?

 Clip from Why Are Some People So Nice?

Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/1-5L60wK5zc?si=GO5Ns7vQzgAIdROh

#poetry 

In Yongin

 

Canlit and the Hyper Modern 2

 CanLit and the Hyper-Modern 2

*

Canadian letters has always been good at highlighting environmental issues; it’s not a controversial issue, and artists, by their nature, tend to be sensitive to ecological concerns. 

However, concern is often contradicted by behaviour, especially when one’s career is at stake. 

The reality is that conventional book production has a significant carbon footprint, and so does book promotion. 

Yet authors need to make a living. How to square this circle?

CanLit and the Hyper Modern 1

 CanLit and the Hyper-Modern 1

*

AI is in the process of being replaced by artificial general intelligence — known by the acronym AGI.

Many novelists have dealt with this potentiality — most famously, perhaps, Arthur C. Clark in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Stanley Kubrick adaptation of that novel was so groundbreaking as a work of cinema that it’s eclipsed the novel’s place in the cultural firmament. But it was a novel that inspired the movie.

In Cdn letters, there have been speculative fiction examples. But not nearly with the same cultural impact. Why?

PicGall 17

 

Who? What?

Happy that/ heureux que my brief VideoPoemSong entitled Who? What? To be screened at Minute Madness in Toronto.

COVID-19 is going to have an impact on all our lives, either directly through long term illness or indirectly through massive social cost. Yet we still understand very little about the origins of the disease and are not currently trying very hard. It may be that those origins are too obscure to ever be known. At the sane time, we pay very little attention to improved mitigation measures, and how we can prevent epidemic disease spread. That IS an area where we have some control. Yet we choose not to exercise this control.

If curious , YouTube link: https://youtu.be/wyEXTUYpwuE?si=U0si82Z2NcCe3mT9

The Human Volcano

What burns hottest?

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/G-gX1kUr-Xo?si=bvH8teMO-2A2nkDx

Yongin at night/ 밤에 용인

 

Greening Korea: Boiling Oceans

Clip from Greening: Boiling Oceans.

Full video at YouTube: Greening Korea: Boiling Oceans

https://youtu.be/YgBivdKSzXo

*

It’s unusually warm in Korea this autumn. Ocean surface temperatures have a lot to do with that.

#climatechange #carbonemissions #oceantemperature

Yesterday’s walk

 

Dinocaurs…

 

Kyonggi do

 

Yongin

 

BTS? ㅋㅋㅋ

 

Yongin

 

Still from the project Darkness Lighting Darkness

 

The Policy and the Pendulum

Who manages 

your little life?

Clip from « The Policy and the Pendulum », an authorial moviepoem about diplomacy and grand strategy.

Full video at YouTube: The Policy and the Pendulum - final swing

https://youtu.be/cf_LmVUHjjM

#war #geopolitics #poetry

The Wargasm

#peace #antiwar #moviepoem #poetryfilm #israelhamasconflict #ukrainewar #gaza 

Where is all this conflict leading the planet?

*

Clip from « World War 3 seems to be coming along nicely: The Wargasm » 

Text:

Why do we 

*desire* war?

Sung:

Don’t resist,

don’t contain,

don’t hold back,

don’t think hard…

Text: 

The steel casings fall,

and leaders declare

one or another firm resolution.

None of that is key;

what really matters

is the explosive emotion —

the craving for release…

the machinery 

of modern pleasure.

Spoken:

Bombing by night 

doth leaders excite.

But bombing by day

is still A-OK.

(October 8/23 version)

*

Where is all this conflict leading the planet?

Full video at YouTube: youtu.be/8IRq7KcE5v8

Poster

 

The Business Army

 THE BUSINESS ARMY 

Gerald MacGuire, the apparent driving force behind the business plot — an attempt to destroy democracy in the United States  — was simply a lowly bond salesman . He was used to doing others’ bidding.

He, in turn, was employed by seasoned capitalist Grayson M. P. Murphy. Murphy in turn was heavily involved with the American Legion — a veterans’ group involved in right wing activities. (It’s important to note here that veterans groups in Germany and Italy were pivotal in the rise of reaction and fascism.)

Grayson met with Murphy. For Murphy had a plan. But he needed to be sure that his agent was controllable and ruthless.

Your World

 Still from a project recently chosen by the Gao International Film Festival.

Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/kaI1ZtdRVPA?si=r0sX60o8fbEQPfyd

In Yongin

 

In Hadong

 

Trudeau the Dictator?

 #trudeau #glenngreenwald #podcasts 

Glenn Greenwald is asserting that Canada has « one of the works most repressive online censorship schemes ». A lot of people, especially on the right, agree with him. Is the assertion true?

More at YouTube: 

https://youtu.be/9lne1dDfMps

Hadong

 

THE BUSINESS ARMY

 THE BUSINESS ARMY 

As the Roosevelt administration planned to move off the gold standard, some industrialists became hysterical…

Climate change in South Korea

 

On adapting short stories: the example of Young Goodman Brown

 A lot of canonical short fiction is either not adapted to film, or turned into audio books (novels are preferred for film adaptations).

However, there are exceptions. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown was adapted as a movie. The trailer here: https://youtu.be/VuY0qRI-7mM?si=hnc_ZHl0g3vLmbsj

(There’s apparently another professional film version of it, too.) 

I can’t judge the entire film but it’s obvious even from the trailer that the both dialogue and tone of the story are changed.

This young filmmaker version of the story *does* make an attempt to stay true to the short story’s tone but abbreviates it radically and has uneven dialogue that’s sometimes true to the text and sometimes has an updated, goofily contemporary, quality that’s impossible to take seriously: https://youtu.be/N3vQu25X2RI?si=yuFW8E5upO1pK0pZ

So film adaptations are hard to pull off without losing much of the original beauty of the story, which lies in its language.

Yet the audio books lack the visual interestingness that a short story like this would inspire a lot of filmmakers. 

And so we come full circle: how can one adapt a short story to film and new media, while still retaining the beauty of the original?

https://youtu.be/Nq6AY2AaEe4?si=wFqLGdjEdh5xhKsW

Your World

Very happy that my hybrid documentary/ moviepoem about market culture vs urban commercialism, entitled “Your World”, was just selected by Goa Short Film Festival via FilmFreeway.com. 

If curious, YouTube link: youtu.be/kaI1ZtdRVPA?si… 

#Korea #marketplace #rural

Greening Korea: When Festivals Lose Their Focus

Contemporary South Korean culture is great at organizing festivals. But sometimes the essential point of the festival is forgotten.

Brave Broken New World

 

End of summer

 

Workplace drawings

From a series of drawings of workplaces in 1980s Toronto. I’d carry my sketchbook with me and do these from life without photo references. This one from a small machinery shop called GM Machinery on Richmond. Now defunct. It’s little known that medium scale machinery and garment production existed throughout downtown Toronto until the early 90s.

D’un series des dessins des locales de travail à Toronto dans les années 80s. J’ai porté mon cahier de sketch et fait ses dessins sans références photographiques.

The Canadian novel and its discontents

 

Am cleaning out my mom’s bookshelves. The original plan was utilitarian; get rid of all except a handful of special volumes. But finding that hard. It’s a good library, with, unsurprisingly, a strong contingent of Cdn books. 

Reading these, though, is a mixed bag. Am currently reading a novel by a prize winning author described as “beloved” on the dust jacket. He died a few yrs ago and was instantly forgotten. Why, exactly? Who knows. However, no great injustice that the novel I’m reading is not still talked abt; it’s abt first love during the 1940s, and while it has its moments, it’s generally a static read. Scenes rarely come alive. 

My mom and brother often used to discuss why CanLit struggled being as vital as Am or Brit lit. Reading this novel, two explanations come to mind: one (a point my mom liked to make): Canadian novelists (and their publishers) often fixated with being “worthy”; the novels function as moral lessons, not a mix of entertainment and art. Another is the anemic state of criticism in Canada now. @stevenwbeattie has remarked that a literature can only be as good as its criticism. The novel I’m reading now received high praise in a major news outlet and Q&Q. The two criteria intertwine; an urge toward moralizing and emotionally fake criticism lead to a static literature in which better work struggles to break through. 

What then is to be done? Cdn movies have some of the same shortcomings but not quite as noticeably. Part of the solution is to write fictional narratives for print that more closely resemble movie scripts. This would at least force Cdn writers to avoid the stylistically pedestrian introspection that sucks the life out of so many of their scenes (the point here being that timid criticism allows Cdn writers to keep doing this). At least with the format of a script, a writer is forced to bring the reader into current action. Narratives using this strategy can still be “quiet”. But they need not so often remove the reader — and the narrative — from the present. In other words, they need not privilege moralistic reflection over action. Examples of how this might work to follow. 

Loveography: A Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative

 

EXT. A SMALL KOREAN VILLAGE. AN EARLY SUMMER EVENING, MID-WEEK.

A WESTERN MAN is walking down the city's main street. To his left is Haemi Fortress, a medieval Korean fort. Its wall is built of unevenly-matched stones, each lightened by age to a gentle ochre, as if the stone itself has softened.

The MAN walking beside this wall has a peaceful expression on his face. But from his body language we can tell he's lonely.

VO: Those were the days before I met you.

SFX: A light breeze.



EXT. THE INNER COURTYARD OF THE FORTRESS. MOMENTS LATER.

The Western man sees a group of CHILDREN. They are giggling and playing with each other. Then one of them spots the man.



CHILD: 의국인! [Foreigner]

SECOND CHILD: [sing-songy] Hello!

MAN: [smiling] Hello.

ALL CHILDREN: [gleefully] Hello! Hello!

MAN: [speaking slowly] Can you speak English?

The CHILDREN suddenly start to giggle uproariously. But their amusement is more a symptom of shyness than a desire to carry the game any further. They run away, still laughing.

The MAN continues walking. He makes his way through small, sad, empty streets.




V.O.: Chris Marker once asked how we can remember thirst. What I want to know is, how can we remember loneliness? It penetrates not just oneself but the world. Reality itself appears changed. The side-streets suck themselves empty, their noise vacuumed behind shuttered store-fronts. The sky pulls itself as taut as a blue drum. The clouds starve themselves and harm themselves, like self-loathing anorexics.

And as the world seems to change, so does the self: feel lonely enough, and that juncture of soul and body that comprises what you think of as you becomes as parched as cracked soil. The lonely individual is ancient, he is dirt.


INT. AN EVANGELICAL CHURCH. TEN MINUTES LATER.



The MAN enters. He is somewhat surprised to see a CROWD OF WORSHIPPERS. They are very involved in their prayers.

The MAN walks cautiously forward.

A MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN spots him.

CUT TO: CLOSE UP of MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN.

MIDDLE-AGED KOREAN MAN: 하느님! 하느님이 자를 사랑하습니다! [God! God loves you!]

The MAN pulls back, alarmed.


EXT. A STREET. MOMENTS LATER.

The MAN is walking by himself again. He looks even sadder than before. A DIFFERENT CHILD spots him.

DIFFERENT CHILD: [especially enthusiastically] Hello!

V.O.: I don't know what it is was about that kid's voice. It went to my heart -- pierced it, like an exquisitely fine spear, the sharp end of sweetness. And it was this strange combination of sensations -- the needle's prick and the blood's sunny melt -- that suddenly transported me (there's no other word) to a different time. It was a time in the more recent past, when I still felt the residual parch of loneliness. But it was a time when I started to feel.

I mean, it was a time when I started to feel again.

A rainy day in Seoul

 

Jangma and precipitation patterns

 

More from Yes, Plant, We’re Warming

 

Yes, Planet…

 

The Novel and the Movie — part one

 In a recent review of Patrick DeWitt's novel The Librarianist, Steven Beattie gives what seems at first read a positive assessment of the DeWitt work. The novel is filled with self-consciously flamboyant characters -- apparently an artistic strategy to throw into stark relief the considerable blandness of the novel's protagonist: the lonely, aging librarian Bob Crane.

Beattie: There are earlier indications of deWitt’s “stealth absurdism” in the character of Miss Ogilvie, Bob’s first boss at the library. A vicious harridan who prizes nothing so much as silence, Miss Ogilvie is a comic delight, a character on the margins of the story who fully inhabits every scene she appears in. Despite her powerful presence, however, neither she nor Connie’s father — nor, for that matter, the bombastic Ethan — fully detract from the focus on Bob and his bookish interiority, which carries “The Librarianist” forward in a spirit of what might be called insouciant melancholy.

 

However, there are problems with literary flamboyance, and one of them is it makes a narrative hard to believe. And, near the end of the review, Beattie seems to acknowledge this -- albeit with the criticism slipped quietly, librarian-like, into a drawer: "Of course, the section at the Hotel Elba goes to show the extent to which an ordinary life can be deceptive, though this comes at a cost on the level of emotional resonance. The aching heart of “The Librarianist” is a piercing seriocomic character study of isolation and abandonment. Would that deWitt had left his more flamboyant tendencies in the drawer for this one."

 

Whether The Librarianist is truly successful as a work of vital art, it is certain to sell well: almost all of DeWitt's novels have become best sellers, and many of them adapted to movies, which  only augments DeWitt's celebrity as a writer. The movie-making process is quite different from the novel-writing one, and DeWitt emphasizes this in a September 26/18 interview he did with Library Hub. In the interview, DeWitt emphasizes the considerable difference between bringing a novel manuscript and a film to completion: "I didn’t really understand how difficult it is to get a movie made. It took eight years, and so many people worked so hard over the course of those years to get the film made. It makes me thankful for the relative simplicity of life as a fiction writer where you sit down and do it."

 However, by the time the movie of the The Sisters Brothers was complete, DeWitt was already experienced in the film industry; in 2011, he wrote the screenplay for a movie entitled Terri. He was conversant with both mediums. He was also aware of the dangers of movie adaptation. In a September 21/18 article in Publishing Perspectives, DeWitt apparently had misgivings about the possibility of his story being distorted unrecognizably. John C. Reilly, one of the starts of the movie version, had to reassure DeWitt that DeWitt's original narrative vision would be respected: "In a recent news conference at the Toronto International Film Festival, Reilly was quoted by Jessica Wong of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, saying, “We know what can happen in this process of books becoming movies. Often, they get twisted into an unrecognizable shape … We said, ‘Pat, we’ll try our very hardest to make a great film out of this. We’ll find the very best people we can. Please trust us,'”"

 

Jangma and River Systems

 

Regenerating ecosystems 1

#ecosystem #NaturalRejuvination #globalwarming 

Clip…. 

Sometimes human behaviour can help repair ecosystems — from damage done by previous human behaviour. 

Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/hryEkdBmt5E

Climate change in South Korea

#globalwarming #climatechange 

Clip — full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/w8e9G4TUcIk . 

Climate change is real and it’s been affecting the weather patterns in South Korea for many years.

What changes do you notice in your region? 

The War on Smog 1

THE WAR ON SMOG [Text]

The bombs are smart

Even against camouflage,

And they drop their loads

With a righteous

Boom.

We are saved frequently

By these awesome systems.

They save us

From emergencies

And all the,

All the bad guys.

— Finn Harvor

*

From my collection of authorial movies. These poems are primarily from a massive project entitled Plastic Millennium. It subdivides into a series of modules and thematic concerns. What is here are a few pieces from a series of nature works entitled the "Baram" series ("baram" is the transliteration from the Korean word for wind). Also are a few interlinked pieces about war and what I term “The Constant Roar of the State”. I'm drawing a linkage between these and the nature poems insofar as industrialism now – as in, really now – is impinging on what we define as the natural; in other words, we are warring on nature itself. The metaphors have disappeared. We're in the midst of something that is moving with glacial speed, but is like a bomb going off.

The Baram Series contains a substantial amount of nature scenery (a passion of mine). But it is not meant to valourize or sentimentalize the reality of 21st Century nature, which, after all, is increasingly boxed in by 21st Century development. One can see that in Canada, where I grew up; one sees it especially vividly in Asia, where I now live. The project started almost by accident: I had a piece entitled “Baram Writer” accepted by an online lit magazine (now defunct). The title was a play on words: a few years before, I'd seen a movie in Korea entitled “Baram Fighter” – that is, the transliteration of Hangeul to the Roman alphabet sounded just the same. I liked the play on words, and kept the “baram” as a sort of talisman for what followed.

These pieces exist as poems and videos, with each element of the project linked but also discrete. I have been working on the project for many years, and am not trying to be trendy or “newsy”, but instead capture something of the larger age we live in. War and the environment are now connected: by the very act of “fighting an enemy”, we – via the exhaustive machinery of war – create another, more amorphous, but also threatening enemy.

In these poems, "baram" -- or other elementary aspects of nature ("geu-neul" [shadow] and "hai" [sun]) -- do not function so much as symbols of nature, but direct "branches" of it. In other words, nature touches us directly, and gives us tangible experience. Yet at the same time this is happening, nature also can bring us closer to other forms of more emotional experience that are linked to our connections with the others who are meaningful in our lives. Yet articulating this rather simple connection is hard, and that is because being conscious of the experience is hard. Therefore, these poems will, I hope, be read on several levels: as appreciations of the natural, as experiential-philosophical meditations, and as love poems.

These poems are in turn are from a much larger project that in its totality comprises over 800,000 words, 1,500 drawings, 1,000 plus original photos, 100 original songs, and 1400 authorial movies (movies based on a belletristic text in which every element is made – authored – by one artistic sensibility). It is a first. (There are longer textual works out there, obviously, but none as long and also with as much variety of artistic forms.) As I remarked above, I've been working on this material for many years now, and it has a broad thematic range. 

About myself: I'm an artist, writer, filmmaker, and occasional musician, and live with my wife in South Korea. I've published art and writing in The Partisan [upcoming], Pacifism21, Former People, The Puritan, Eclectica, Canadian Notes and Queries, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail, The Korea Times, Dogmatika, Dark Sky, the Quarterly Conversation, rabble, the HUFS International Journal of Foreign Studies, The Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Now Weekly, The Canadian Forum, This Magazine and several other publications. I've had group and solo shows of of my artwork, have written and staged two fringe plays, and invented a new genre of experimental movie (the “authorial movie”, in which the basis of the narrative is a belletristic text, such as a poem, short story or movie, and one person – one author – produces all elements of the video, such as text, art and music (for more examples of these, see the links below)).  I have had group and solo shows of my  visual art.My videopoetry has been screened in the US, UK, Greece, Ireland, Hong Kong, South Korea, Kazakhstan, and India. Finally, I blog at Conversations in the Book Trade, where I have conducted interviews with people including Adam Bellow, Ian Brown, Philip Marchand, Bev Daurio, Brian Palmu, derek beaulieu, Ed Champion, and Richard Nash. Link: http://conversationsinthebooktrade.blogspot.com/

https://youtu.be/ZmCk1a6uDyk

ChatGPT and creative writing

#canlit #ChatGPT #chatgpt4 . ChatGPT is causing consternation among writers. What kind of effects strategies can we develop to prevent literary culture from being “disrupted”? The answer lies partly in better criticism. 

Clip above.

Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/UZuW9xPAgV4

Weird Weather, Wonky Weather

#climatechange #moviepoem #globalwarming #weatherpattern

If curious, full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/UPrH6pu2bsI

Sudden changes in temperature are nothing new during transitional seasons like the spring and fall. But in recent years, these changes in South Korea have become more abrupt and extreme, leading to noticeable changes in the breeding of frogs and blooming of spring flowers. What is happening in your part of the world?

*

#changementclimatique #moviepoem #réchauffementglobal #weatherpattern

 Les changements soudains de température ne sont pas nouveaux pendant les saisons de transition comme le printemps et l’automne.  Mais ces dernières années, ces changements en Corée du Sud sont devenus plus brusques et extrêmes, entraînant des changements notables dans l’élevage des grenouilles et la floraison des fleurs printanières.  Que se passe-t-il dans votre partie du monde ?

Boy Meets Girl After Battle 1

 

Toronto smoke

 

Sori Oasis

New poster for my mini doc Sori Oasis (“Sori” means sound in Korean). Was shot in and around the Soraepeul hiking trail in central Gangnam, Seoul. Cities need “quietness zones.” 

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/X8Ybg1LkaHQ #SoundPollution #Seoul #urbanbiodiversity 

Boy meets girl after battle

 

Your World

 

 Happy that/ heureux que my quasi experimental documentary/ moviepoem Your World took a prize at the Athvikvaruni IFF and is a selection at the Sittannavasal IFF, both in India. Perhaps because of the project’s subject matter, this movie seems to be resonating with juries in India.

If curious, YouTube link: https://youtu.be/kaI1ZtdRVPA

Three Tragedies, Four Seasons

#poetryfilm #videopoetry #videoart #moviepoem

This is an early cut of one of the first feature length moviepoems I made. 

Synopsis: Three Tragedies, Four Seasons is the result of three projects that came together and merged. One was from a series called World Bardo, which were short ambient pieces or videopoems, and some were about the death of my mother-in-law in the summer of 2018.

She passed away in July. It’s a sultry time of year in South Korea, and the sound of insects, the heat, and the humidity suffused everything. 

The second death was that of my brother — in January, 2013. The weather then was the opposite: frigid and spartan. My brother was fascinated by both summer and winter, especially the bleak, spectral beauty of winter. The final story is a work of fiction — also set in winter. Throughout all these pieces, wanted to capture a feeling of seasonality, and also the sense of the nature/life/death cycles that exist in the world. It’s easy to talk about cycles in an abstract way; after the death of someone you care deeply about, these sensations becomes very profound. The world, the environment, feels like it’s entering you. Intense sadness dissolves us.

Awards

Krimson Horyzon International Film Festival

Nov 15, 2021

 

Gangtok International Film Festival

Nov 5, 2021

 

Chaplin International Film Festival

Nov 12, 2021

 

Gully International Film Festival

Oct 31, 2021

 

Tagore International Film Festival

Mar 17, 2021

 

Virgin Spring Cinefest

Jan 7, 2021

 

Selections 

FILMYSEA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Mar 18, 2022

 

Chennai Indie Film Festival

Dec 26, 2021

*

From my collection of ambient and authorial movies. My focus is on videopoetry; however, I work in other genres and art forms as well.

Facebook: 

https://www.facebook.com/finn.harvor

VideoStorage:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/250816849097045/

Happy New Doom!