picture 1

so eager.

a short babble on ‘the digital’

The iPad’s out. (Ugly name, right?) Sure, it looks cool, except that I can’t seem to escape the less attractive idea that it’s just a bloated iPhone.

The promo video is the first one in which it feels like it’s contriving. A lot of what iPad can do than what it is. The latest addition to the sleekness that is apple can’t seem to speak for itself. What does it matter to me, though, considering that the only Apple gadget at my disposal is a 2nd generation iPod that refuses to work. Even the gesture of trying to comment seems ludicrous. The only motivation that can possibly justify—not that I really need a justification—this new post is that i felt a messy ambivalence when watching the iPad promo. I can blame it on the John Zorn I was listening to beforehand, but that’s a sweep.

Apple really does make me wonder about the whole idea of tangibility. As attractive and desirable their products are, there seems to be a weird trade-off between what is felt with your hands and the digital semblance of that experience. I’m probably not saying Apple takes away a sense of materiality. If anything, apple products are more appealing precisely because it aims to hit the senses. (Isn’t that what good design always aims to do anyway?). What’s disturbing is precisely that; it does it so well without actually doing it. It makes everything as intuitive as possible that what is behind the screen disappears completely. The ‘great thing’ about the iPad seems to be that its proximity to the user. I mean, we all do think, at least in theory, that digital readers won’t possibly replace books because there’s that coffee-scented, coffee-stained rustle that cannot be recreated in any digital form. But Apple seems to say that it offers something ‘better’: all of the content that you need, but neatly and sleekly contained in a pad, all in your hands. The compensatory act seems.. uneven?

A purist is one thing that I’m not. If someone were to hand me an iPad right now, I’d be glad to use it.
But I can’t help but think that the trade-off may not be a satisfactory one. There is pleasure in getting paint all over your clothes and  traveling across the canvas, in getting your hands dirty in the darkroom. Photoshop can’t replicate that. (I wonder if our food culture will ever be digitized. I guess vitamin pills, although not digital, work like digital semblances, at least in concept.)

This post is as ambivalent as what I’m feeling.

turn of phrase

My dad’s usually not the one to crack jokes, make puns, or even attempt to pose the cool when the previous two don’t work. Stereotypically speaking, he’s the one whose many attempts at pulling out a chuckle result in a sad, delayed reaction that is composed of a different kind of laugh (you know, the kind people belch out in order to diffuse the awkward unfunniness of the situation).

But what makes all of that worth the pain is that once in a while, once in a very great while, he would surprise us all as well as himself (because he never plans it. he can’t). The thrill is that when he scores, he really scores. The accuracy in timing and expression is transcendental in the sense that it surpasses the average funny person’s funniest moments. It’s like, “Did you really say that? You?” For a split second he opens up for us a window into a new world in which you find unfamiliar combination of words but still feel an ineffable kinship to the expression. (Of course, he never manages to sustain the energy, somehow having acquired that rare skill of inadvertently extinguishing the fire he ignited. But that’s for another day).

Today, I called my dad, who was in Seoul for the day, asking him to bring me back a pair of my shoes from the studio. I described to him the shoes that looked something like this:

Yes I wear ugly shoes but that’s beside the point. So my dad was grazing through the shoe shelf while on the phone with me. He said that he couldn’t find what I was describing. I said it was tan-brown. He said everything on the shelf was tan-brown. I told him that it’s the one that looks really comfortable (yay for descriptiveness), and that they have shoelaces. Flat, suede, did you find them?

Then came the felicitous turn: “Oh. Noah.”

Uhhm. Huh?

“The ones that look like Noah, right?”

Noah.

This was a whole new level for me. I was struck not because of the seemingly ridiculousness of his comment but the fact that I found myself instantly agreeing with the fact that the shoes were precisely Noahs. And the agreement was immediately followed by a tinge of pleasure towards things coming into unlikely congruence. Strangely, I didn’t even have to ask him what he even MEANT by just saying ‘Noah.’ It just made sense. It was what Richard Rorty would call a metaphor, a new association of words, or between words and things, that pierces a hole in the established system of language and expression. An unfamiliar utterance but that which immediately adheres to the mind with such ease. Yeah. (I’m perfectly aware of how ludicrous I sound at this point, but I proceed).

After I hung up, I couldn’t stop laughing about the fact that he described those moccasin-like whatevers as Noah, and the repeated realization of how right the association was kept me chuckling for another 15 minutes. Kudos.

My dad’s no poet, but really. Noah.

hello beijing

so early, so industrious.