Saturday, December 30, 2023

Climbing Hyoungjae Bong part one


Clip from Climbing Hyoungjae Bong/ 형재봉 등산 이야기 #mountainhiking #지리산 #등산 #hikinginkorea 


Full video via YouTube link: https://youtube.com/shorts/J01imHKLFw4?si=Repo9jWKUnARzx1Y

Climate scientists and messaging


 Climate scientists do important work. But could their messaging do with a rethink? #climatecrisis


Full video at YouTube shorts: Climate scientists do important work. But could their messaging do with a rethink? #climatecrisis

https://youtube.com/shorts/Vhldr34O8yY?feature=share


Friday, December 29, 2023

Hyoungjae Bong


 형재봉높에서


At the peak of Hyoungjae Bong.


Full video at YouTube: Hiking the Jirisan Mountains./ 형재봉 그름다리의 풍경 #hikinginkorea #mountainhiking

https://youtube.com/shorts/8NIbygid5AU?feature=share



Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Jaywalking in Seoul


 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.



Thursday, December 21, 2023

Borges and the lit biz

  Borges once remarked that normal people want to be praised for what they’ve accomplished; writers want to be praised for what they will accomplish. Touché. 

And yet … what is deemed « accomplished » in 21st literary production tends to measured by skewed metrics. I have several mss I keep dutifully shopping ard; gatekeeping has bec dysfunctional — the influential agents and acq editors know it, and obv writers do too.

Gatekeeping — what I term Selector Class Systems (and extend to prestigious MFA programs, prize jury selection, etc) — needs public critique. Yet this rarely happens; it’s a career risk after all. In the meantime, speaking personally, the work I do have out there (including an online chapbook of poems/authorial moviepoems (something that hasn’t been done before: formerpeople.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/baram-… ) and a historical novel abt an attempted fascist coup in the US: eclectica.org/v23n2/harvor.h…— receive no critical attention. The excuse given is they lack an ISBN.

The presupposition is that online work is somehow less worthy; somehow akin to self published work. But both these works are curated, and what’s especially galling is work that IS self published but can camouflage itself as not receives reviews and shortlisting for prizes. The issue here isn’t one of the occasionally delusional self regard of writers or the rocky process of contemporary canon formation. Instead, it’s an issue of fundamental fairness. If work is out there, shouldn’t it be judged by objective standards?

Friday, December 8, 2023

Alibag Film Festival


Happy that/ heureux que a few more pieces selected by the Alibag IFF. The first, an experimental documentary, the second a smartphone doc (I posted about the latter a couple of days ago at a different festival). Both of these about the region where Suki grew up.


If curious:


Your World: https://youtu.be/kaI1ZtdRVPA?si=l0AJvzDrwTK3MmFN


Speaking with Mountains: https://youtu.be/vYrauBynRVc?si=03VMu3ndFQMOtod8

Thursday, December 7, 2023

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. 

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

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

Monday, December 4, 2023

Why?

 Clip from Why Are Some People So Nice?


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


#poetry 


Sunday, November 26, 2023

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

Sunday, November 12, 2023

Greening Korea: After Heavy Rain


Part four 


More about unusual rainfall patterns in Kyonggi do, South Korea.


#ClimateAction 


More on climate change in Asia at YouTube: Yes, Planet, We’re Warming

youtu.be/8EiEyA7bF14

Thursday, November 9, 2023

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

Saturday, November 4, 2023

City and Temple


 World Bardo


Temple and City


YouTube link: Ambient: Temple and City (World Bardo 98 - new cut)

https://youtu.be/7qpR0IcL3G8


Screenings and awards:


Winner, best cinematography, Global India IFF, March 20, 2019


Festival selections:


Indo Global International Film Festival

Dec 25, 2020

 

Goa Short Film Festival

Nov 2, 2019

 

Chhatrapati Shivaji International Film Festival

Dec 26, 2019

 

MoziMotion

Sep 20, 2019

*


An authorial videopoem. The footage was shot over several months in/ near Seoul.


Thursday, November 2, 2023

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


Sunday, October 29, 2023

Car More? 1


#ClimateAction 


The mean surface temperatures of much of the world’s oceans has reached historically unprecedented levels. This in turn is increasingly atmospheric temperatures — something we’re noticing right here in Korea. One would think there would be collective action to slow down these trends. And to some extent we do. But not as much as we flatter ourselves.


We’re greener than ever. We think.


The pandemic temporarily reduced levels of industrial pollution, but it also elevated car usage (as people avoided mass transit). Industry is back. Yet car usage remains high. 


Full video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/yBJaF2Wo3fk?si=zITYCJzGTNdEJxuD

Saturday, October 21, 2023

BTS? ㅋㅋㅋ


 We came across this concert in Gwanghwamun. Thought they were pretty good.

Saturday, October 7, 2023

We need peace

 YouTube link: Ambient: We Need Peace, Not Pieces... (World Bardo 103)

https://youtu.be/0C_VoHYVwW4




Friday, October 6, 2023

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

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

THE BUSINESS ARMY

 THE BUSINESS ARMY 


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




Thursday, September 21, 2023

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




Friday, September 15, 2023

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

The Business Army: Roosevelt’s Inauguration 1

  THE BUSINESS ARMY 


Roosevelt’s first inauguration 1


Herbert Hoover had taken a lassez faire approach to overcoming the stock market crash of 1929; the approach failed miserably. Roosevelt was elected on a platform of revitalization and increased government spending— a New Deal that seemed revolutionary at the time.




Saturday, September 9, 2023

Darkness Lighting Darkness


What colour, the void?


*


Clip from the authorial moviepoem Darkness Lighting Darkness, to be screened soon at IFF Akrobat in St Petersburg.


*


Also from this series: 


Wind Circles, part one

https://youtu.be/WK13A9N8qiA

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

The Business Army, pt. 1

 


 Occasionally I post a link to a historical novel I had published at Eclectica Magazine: https://www.eclectica.org/v23n2/harvor.html


It’s entitled The Business Army, and it’s about a historically documented attempt to organize a coup d’état in the United States during the early months of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.


The novel exists in two forms: as a conventional manuscript and as a form of graphic novel I call the Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative (a mouthful, I know; I might rework the term).


I’ve decided to post a lot of the latter form of the novel. Graphic novels tend to be expanded comic books (I wrote/drew one many years ago, and know the degree of labour involved). Conventional novels, on the other hand, tend to be devoid of art, and also tend to hew to a rather  traditional concept of how narrative should be produced. Yet at the same time, our mass culture has become acutely influenced by the feature film as a vehicle of narrative. We — including literary writers — now think in a filmic manner; this is self evident. 


The Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative is an attempt to bring novel-making in line with the new cultural reality we find ourselves in.


O Planet IV: Stop


 

Friday, August 11, 2023

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. 

Thursday, July 27, 2023

The War on Smog


From the War on Smog series: youtu.be/MPs59Eat-MA


In effect, the primary threats to humanity have changed. And no amount of weapons systems can insulate us from those dangers.


#ClimateBreakdown #ClimateActionNow

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

The Suicide of Earth, one

#moviepoem #videoart #poetryfilm #climatechange #videopoetry 


You — we — need to change.


Clip below.

 

Full video at YouTube: The Suicide of Earth (One — July 26/23)

youtu.be/NdYfJXgyoDM

Saturday, July 22, 2023

Yes, Planet, We’re Warming


#홍수 #큰비 #ClimateChange #korea #globalwarming


Screenings:


iSmartFilms Festival

Dec 5, 2020

 

Dublin Smartphone Film festival

Jan 4, 2021

 

LIFFT INDIA FILMOTSAV - World Cine Fest

Nov 15, 2020

 

Chhatrapati Shivaji International Film Festival

May 23, 2021

 

*


This is a smartphone documentary project that took several years to complete. It began after the unprecedented heavy rains in 2011, which caused lethal mudslides right in the center of the Gangnam district of Seoul. After that, the government took action to build flood channels and improve storm sewers in the metropolitan area. 


But for rural Korea, flooding remains a threat. Moreover, because global warming seems to be changing the seasonal calendar, the rainy season rhythms that Korean agriculture adapted to millennia ago are also shifting, having a negative effect on agricultural productivity. And there is the sheer extent of the volumes of water, which still catch local governments by surprise, and sometimes cause untrammeled flooding in any event — which is what is happening in 2020. 


Finally, the unseasonably heavy rains that have lasting well over a week ago in Korea and which have caused dangerous flooding aren’t just a local problem; they auger the future of the planet.

Friday, July 21, 2023

War Markets - moviepoem


 

War Markets

  

War Markets
by Finn Harvor

Where were you born?
In what city
was the future written
on the hard,
cakey walls
of destiny’s
blind alleys?

Well, don’t worry —
International markets,
dizzylingly high
on their abstract
mountains
of profit
and gas —
have been teetering lately;
their great volumes —
stacked high as peaks —
are due for a crash.

Experts
all bitcoined (till last spring)
take to media,
and reassure, reassure —
while stocking secret fridges
in faraway
cottage-bunkers
with veggies, dried meat
and fruit ...
food, in the near future,
will be the new loot.

And as the
concussion bursts echo
from one oblast
to the next,
and cheap,
green kamikaze drones
fill the autumn sky,
policy experts discuss
what will happen next:
will the war go nuclear,
will Vlad lob a bomb?
Will we have to respond to
a tactical burst,
without uncontrolled
exchanges
and strategic mega
doom?

Then the experts draw
deep breaths,
and tell us not to fret,
for even in the almost-next-worse-case
scenarios,
the worst that can happen
will just be a Crash;
all those savings in bank accounts —
tinkling ...
piggy banks smashed.
And the resulting Depression ...
trillion-strengthened
by a billion plastic debts
will temporarily-
permanently
last.

And on this patchwork
planet —
battered, tattered globe —
from faraway battlefields,
their earth newly soaked,
to the stock markets
and bourses,
where the day traders
toke,
the future’s just a mirage,
and we, common people,
its fodder,
its joke.

Originally published in Mudlark 

Thursday, July 20, 2023

The World Bardo




 The World Bardo 


S. and I went to a temple today. It’s the fifth anniversary of her mother Shil An’s death. Suki remembers the exact moment it happened.


Her eldest brother Su man has been gone four years, and my brother Richard ten.


Since S’s family is Buddhist, Buddhist imagery, ritual and cosmology tends to imbue any anniversary that occurs. My brother wasn’t Buddhist, or any religion at all — if anything, he was nihilistically atheist. Yet in the writings he left behind there is a very pronounced emphasis on “eternal return” and the elementary nature of universal cycles. S. and I often talk of how much he would have enjoyed temples if he’d made it to Asia.


In the meantime, my father (just as atheist as my brother) lies in a hospital in Toronto. The medical team reassures me he’s stable. But he himself is obviously nervous when we talk every day on the phone. S. and I have plane tickets and we’ll be able to see him in a week.


Cycles continue. And are unpredictable.


Friday, July 14, 2023

High School 5

 THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE 


*


HIGH SCHOOL 5


Int. A basement in a low rent row house. Evening.


Tom is watching TV — the news.


Broadcaster: Our top story tonight — Mao Ze Dong, the revolutionary who became China’s paramount leader and both ruled and transformed that great nation for several decades, is dead. The entire nation is in mourning. From Beijing, our reporter Brian Henderson….


Cut to:


Int. The basement. Thirty minutes later.


Tom, tired, his expression impassive, fatigued, rises from his impromptu sofa, the weirdly coloured styrofoam slabs, and turns the TV off.


Cut to:


Tom, in his bedroom, five minutes later.


It’s dark out, and dark inside, too.


He does not turn off the light in his room to change into pajamas. He just stares hypnotically out the window.


SFX: … The wet buzzy drone of the rain….




Wednesday, July 12, 2023

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 seemingly 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 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,'”"

  

Tuesday, July 11, 2023

Greening Korea: Precipitation Patterns


Yes, it matters when it rains.


#moviepoem #climatechange #climatecrisis #globalwarming


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

High School 4

 THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE 


*


HIGH SCHOOL 4


Int. Tom’s home. The home is a row house. Basement. Evening.


His brother and mother upstairs, Tom sits on a tatty styrofoam pillow the colour of yellow yolk that’s been left to age.


SFX: The drone of the TV


A motorcycle cop: Don’t you realize that California law stipulates you should check your muffler every six months?


Tom, his face impassive, gets to his feet and turns the channel dial. It clicks loudly with every new channel.


New voice (on a talk show): Today on Front Page Challenge, we have a guest who was the first Canadian to star in an American western.


SFX: Applause.



Monday, July 10, 2023

High School 3

 THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE 


*


HIGH SCHOOL 3


Int. A city bus. Evening.


Tom is riding home. The steady motion of the bus. The rain outside.


Sunday, July 9, 2023

High School 2b

 


 THE HIGHLY ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY NARRATIVE 


*


HIGH SCHOOL 2b


Int. A high school classroom in 1976. English class. Day.


It’s raining outside. The students seem numbed out by the topic at hand: the blood motif in Macbeth. One student, TOM, seems particularly uninterested. Yet at the same time, he listens carefully to Mr. Barrett’s words, searching, it would appear, for vital meaning.


Wednesday, July 5, 2023

The situation at Zaporizhzhia

 


 


There has been danger of a nuclear catastrophe at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant throughout the duration of the war in Ukraine. Recently, however, the Ukrainians have been warning that Russia has mined the plant for potential sabotage.


The danger of a catastrophe is not as high as it was in the video above. This is because the plant , at the behest of IAEA inspectors from the United Nations has been placed in cool shutdown.


From CNN (July 6/22): “What Grossi is doing is completely unprecedented in the history of the IAEA,” Alberque told CNN. “The whole thing was saying: Russia’s basically going to have to kill me, in order for me not to make this nuclear power plant more safe. It was astonishing.”

The IAEA staff’s mission, Alberque said, was to “establish a precedent here, that we’re willing to get involved and to try to take this chess piece off the board.”

Russian occupiers, however, continued to prevent Ukrainian operators from putting each of the reactors into a safer “cold shutdown” status. This means when the reactor’s temperature is below boiling point but electrical pumps moving water through the core must still keep working to cool the fuel and avoid meltdown – which requires an external power supply.

The safety of the plant was threatened further by the breach of the Nova Kakhovka dam on June 6, which lowered water levels used for cooling the plant precipitously. Ukraine accused Russia of deliberately destroying the dam – a claim that Moscow has denied. Shortly after this, the final reactor unit at ZNPP was put into cold shutdown status on June 8.



Nevertheless, there is a general threat that the Putin government — which has engaged in nuclear saber rattling throughout the entire war — will deliberately set in motion some form of nuclear incident.

Part of what makes the situation unstable and worrisome is the psychology of Putin himself.









High School — original authorial moviestory


 

Tuesday, July 4, 2023

High School 1


The Highly Illustrated Screenplay Narrative 


HIGH SCHOOL 1


Exterior. A city street. Early evening.


The sky — bright fifteen minutes ago — is now heavy with thick grey.


Pedestrians make their way along the sidewalk with the expressions of those just released from labour: office workers, students…