It was then and there I spoke at length about Korea with an ex-english teacher who spent the brunt of two years as a white man absorbing his experience in what my more racist friends would describe as the heart of ‘yellow fever.’ Mind you at this stage of my life I have a very different take on Korea and Hangul. I could care less about exploring the earth or escaping the realms of western civilization or even sowing my royal oats in some western fantasy attributed to such words as oriental, occidental, or ching or chang or chong.

You couldn’t count on a million clenched fists how many times someone has asked if the reason I’ve tried to learn an Asian language was to have sex with Asian girls. Its on par with how many times I’ve heard the sagely wisdom about getting over an ex-girlfiend by hate fucking an unsuspecting member of the opposite sex. Easy mode. Assisted Ultras. Miss Cleo. One Nine Hundred LL Cool J. There is an afterlife. Can you win the Lotto? What is matrix? Soylent Green is people.

But this is the proverbial world I live in nowadays. Its unsafe and caustic. Full of weak thoughts and weaker pickup lines. And dare I say its harder to navigate than a phonetically based font set hellbent on societal literacy.

I find peace in Hangul. There is a weird zen to the repetition. There are no grey areas. Sentence structures are rooted and pronunciations are sterile. That is to say beyond the swallowed consonants and the accents, of which ring in my ears in a sing song fashion from day to day in packed elevators. The first very memory of the initiative to learning Korean had little or nothing to do with girls, douche baggery or wanderlust. It had to do with sanity.

I can’t count how many times I woke up in the morning mumbling to myself. I’d sit in the shower hungover and rattle off random english phrases like uzi’s. Chalk it up to being a freestyle emcee. Mark it down on the calendar like a zombie outbreak. Its like I’m eating my own brains; slowly going mad in the fields of atrophy. Fuck me. What am I doing with my life? Ou est la plage? It became necessary to speak the same thing in a different tongue. A bit like working out. Masochistic yet progressive. An exercise in the futility of communication. Do you copy?

Delta-Fox-X-Ray. English motherfucker. Do you speak it?

Its always easy to segment yourself and marginalize. To be racist. To be classist. To pigeonhole yourself in your peer group and throw stones willingly. Its the surest way to assert your lack of comfort in chaos. Center yourself in the grid of the sprawl. Worship the cul-de-sac you come from. Where you played makeshift kickball in the summer sun for a month or two. The next six months where you sat holed up in your parents basement playing dungeons and dragons and checking for traps amongst trolls and gelatinous cubes.

Things miles away in the imperial standard are alien. Its as if the moon in the afternoon sky is akin the the paintings on the ceiling wall of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at either coast of the Americas. I remember one fateful afternoon that I got stuck there in that boat with the yo ho yo ho theme on constant loop. I stared up at the ceiling at the grates that led to the maintenance shaft. All the while I thought that I could crawl up there and right the wrongs. Maybe I could hack the fucking planet. After all that’s my generation’s mantra. Fuck this world up until it becomes my proverbial bitch (if there was a holy book that had a worthy proverb regarding said bitch.) Its like the moon in the sky blue in mid afternoon; impossible yet crucial; an affirmation and not a mirage or tease.

And so sitting in the center of the universe watching the radioactive decay in slow motion, I sigh. I tap away on the keyboard and rattle away random phrases into the void. I roll the old bones out every night or so in hopes to cross paths with heathens. To hear stories of tattooed miscreants talking with straight laced white men in Seoul bathhouses to be excused in the parlance of our times like “it ain’t no thang.”

And this is what I hear echoed in my fear of facing the reality of my own artistically manifested epidermic psychosis. I hear the stories of men in these very same bathhouses speaking in hushed but greeting tones of their livelihood. Of how they break faces, sell sex, horde drugs, and propogate crime. Of how they drink soju and sing karaoke. Of how they live life outside of the rules and how romantic that is in the face of the echoes of communism and confucianism.

And its there where I find myself on an average day sick of the average ways of western life staring at a black and white picture of a Korean born yet assimilated japanese gangster. He is sipping on a tumbler of presumably some asian analog of the finer spirits with crooked teeth and bald head. I read that from Japan he plays an active role in the kidnapping of the leader of Democratic Unification Party, who almost dies a Chicago style death of bricks to the feet and a couple or so leagues to the sea. Hours that seem only like moments earlier, I watch the films of Nagisa Oshima in a twilight zone fashion that daub the Yakuza in a surrealist fashion. I find myself delving deeper into his filmography to reveal the racism and politics inherent in japanese culture regarding the death penalty and the korean minority and it all subsequently blows my lily white devil mind into chunks.

The voice from the east has spoken. Korean yakuza godfather Hisayuki Machii born Chong Gwon Yong has entered and left the building. Those same personable motherfuckers infesting the bath houses filled with eager american speakers.

Its those very same nights I find myself at home with being an outsider on either side of the map. I feel like E.T. in the forest waiting for some fucked up ufo or rocket ship. After all, as the decades go by these methods of transit get more sleek and more architecturally sound and aware of gravity. You still have the cave people on the side groaning their esoteric grunts of disapproval.

But in the end, its all comes down to the voice whether from the east or the west. It all comes down to grunts, to phrases, to power over word. Language spoken automatically versus deliberate verbal command.

Anyone can ask for a sandwich. Anyone can ask for a cheeseburger. Anyone can button mash their way to a solid KO and walk away gloating. But not many can say they are gangster enough to manipulate whole governments with a bald head, makeshift teeth, korean born genetics in the face of discrimination, and a smile full of crooked teeth with a shot glass of poison.

I can’t say I or the rest of society could agree with you or your method and dare I say it would be the same vice versa. But we’re all here breathing the same air and spinning in the same yin and yang. And for that, I’m sure we’re both thankful to be alive countering each others frailties.

East meeting west.

acid eagle – untitled
serena-maneesh – honey jinx
boy voyage – high in the trees
broken water – say whats on your mind
eternal summers – secret language
berlin blondes – secret days
lush – untogether
birds are singing but my lover won’t return -Cambodian Cassette Archives: Khmer Folk And Pop Music Vol. 1
entro mc feat. the dawn – lure of the gypsy (cookie mountain)
bronze horse – number four
the goslings – overnight
broadcast – come on lets go
ariel pink’s haunted graffiti – suicide notice
phew – dreams
scott walker – archangel
entro mc – gold dawn
the farther away I am – Daryl Hall and Robert Fripp
eddy current suppression ring – i admit my faults

http://www.entroemcee.com/grifty003-brasstackz-podcast.mp3

Click on the links, pour out some drinks.

GRIFTY PODCAST 002 – BUMMERZUM EDITION

featuring many a fucking downer jam:

Entro MC – Sometimes it snows in April (in dub) – excerpt
Psychedelic Horseshit – Unseen Voids
7A3 – Mad Mad World
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Round and Round
Ozzy Osbourne – Goodbye to Romance
Dirty Beaches – White Sand
William Basinski – Fringe Area
Broken Water – Want it
Entro MC – Harshedmellows
Puffy Areolas – Lutzko Lives
Bird Names – New Life
Roche Moche – Sea of Filth
Ears to the Grass – Who knows… here goes
Jacuzzi Boys – Planet of the Dreamers
Billy Squier – In the Dark

Entro MC – Live at NEXT/Art Chicago

And here’s me totally ruining someone’s day with a live set at NEXT in chicago on 5.02.10

Entro MC – Weird With You (Instrumental)
Clipse – Grinding
The Cool Kids – 88
Dirty Beaches – Low Rider
A Tribe Called Quest – The Pressure
Washed Out – Feel it all around – (Entro MC’s please listen to my demo edit)
Entro MC – Summer of Sketch (Instrumental)
Telepathe – Breath of Life – (Entro MC’s shook gums edit)
Ride – Dreams Burn Down

So this change of locale brought me to a particularly odd nodal point in one Thomas Hoving. Thomas Hoving was the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art affectionately known as the Met by more cultured personages than myself. Hoving isn’t someone I’d particularly search out as a fascinating topic of discussion. Hoving isn’t a dragon or a fucking unicorn. Hoving didn’t openly use psychedelic drugs. Hoving doesn’t wax poetic about whiskey or craft beer. Hoving doesn’t make loud, abrasive music. Hoving certainly doesn’t hold a spray can effectively, at least not within my current level of familiarity with the man and his legacy.

But Thomas Hoving apparently did a whole slew of things within his lifetime that the arts community respected enough to write a particularly engaging article in Art Forum. And seeing as how I was a captive audience nursing two types of head wounds (a punch to the jaw from an errant mosher and a blow to the liver) I was all eyes. And so I cupped my head in my hands and began reading the story of Hoving, who at exactly my age of thirty six had become the director of the Met bringing a sense of showmanship that would be both ridiculed and respected by New York and beyond.

I imagine Hoving as being some sort of Indiana Jones of the art world though thats probably the most gutteral way to refer to him. The man was obsessed with finding art attested by his mantra “When I see something I want, I do everything I can to get it.” Clearly, this is a man that does not fuck around; the gears grinding behind the sinuses operating with otaku-like fervor. Its that instinct that you come to respect over the course of the ten or so odd minutes it takes for me to ingest and reflect. Here is a guy that sees an object come into being and immediately recognizes its autonomy and metaphysical sentience, right?

Which leads Hoving to the rather dicey matter of the Bury Saint Edmund’s Cross also knows as the Cloisters Cross. In Hoving’s 1981 tell all some twenty years after being aquired with Hoving’s aid for the Met he describes it as follows:

“The inscriptions on it are so hate filled and yet its such a masterwork. Its as if Hitler and Michaelangelo collaborated to make a masterpiece.”

Its about here where either the caffeine is starting to settle in or Art Forum just turned into the printed media I should have stolen from my ex before vacating our mutual agreement of cohabitation. Because clearly, this Hoving character is someone that should’ve been physically on my radar. Its not that I idolize the above statement. I’m clearly the most apologetic white male I know. But it blows the mind that this man facilitated the purchase of an object based on artisan merit alone. And then hid the rather sickening nature of its true meaning lost upon those not hip to the lingo of the 12th century monastics, which have the museum and art community backpedalling to this day.

In true Guattarian form, the object and the artist were at a standoff between master and servant. Here was a piece of craft that was given the chance to be respected on its own autonomy, free of the ideology and hate inscribed by the creator and their Creator who art in Heaven. Hallowed be thine name. Therein lies the maverick nature of Hoving which admittedly could have been construed as a tad bit reckless and nieve. An article of transgression far more radioactive than Serrano’s Piss Christ, the Cloisters Cross goes beyond questioning the desperate idiocy of religion. And the curator makes this statement by standing behind it and selecting it and willing into being the funds and stage to make it possible.

Its there where you wonder why the fuck it took you this long to come across this guy who began to subvert and revolutionize an institution at an age where you piss away your PBR night by night in dirty loft bathrooms. Why hasn’t this guy popped up on the facebook feed of your four hundred and forty three friend collection (surely four hundred and fifty by now?) Why wasn’t a scandal of this magnitude lodged deep in your consciousness as much as Serrano’s aforementioned work that motivated Jesse Helms and crew? Could it be a testament to the genius of Hoving, the once proclaimed PT Barnum of New York Art? That Hoving knew what real art was and did his best to represent it in its true light.

Those musings are left to more informed journalists of highly lauded arts magazines and not to street level hip hop emcees who find it painfully hipsterish to be reading a token copy of said magazine in public. If there is any message within the story of Bury Saint Edmunds for myself, its not for me to ramble on about any more than I have already. I am already at risk for sounded far too smart and informed for my own good on the internet. I’m sure the next time I’m sitting at the bar this meditation will come in handy wafting off the whiskey vampires and waves of herpes perched on my peripherary.

And to think, I’m only on page forty six.

Thomas Hoving’s book “King of the Confessors” is available on Amazon.

You can subscribe to art forum at a special discounted rate of 46$ for a year subscription online here.