Miru Kim's Haunting New York Underground: Naked City Spleen

Talk about KO of the day. I'll admit I'm late to the party on this one, but I've just discovered the absolutely amazing work of NY photographer Miru Kim. I was searching the Web for information about Freedom Tunnel, an old Amtrak tunnel beneath Riverside Park housing murals to commemorate the hundreds of homeless people who lived in shantytowns there and were relocated in 1991. Then I happened on this:



Croton aqueduct, the Bronx

OK, OK, you had me at Hello, I'm a beautiful naked woman traipsing around the bowels of New York...

So, who is this artist and what is her mission? Miru Kim shoots nude self-portraits in crumbling urban tunnels, morgues, catacombs, abandoned buildings, and basically anyplace there are likely giant rodents, fetid water, malodorous mold colonies, and even piles of bones (see Catacombs, below). Why, you ask, would anyone want to disrobe in such decasia? Especially someone who comes across as demure, soft-spoken, shy.

The 30-year-old Korean-American photographer explains: "I was interested in animals that dwell in these derelict places in the city. The fictional character I wanted to create had to be universal, and clothes make the living being too culturally specific and time-specific. I started modeling myself because I couldn't convince anyone to get naked in all these locations, and getting an animal to do it was even harder. Then the performance aspect of it became very appealing to me, because I started noticing how these spaces transform as soon as I take off my clothes and walk around. They become much more familiar and peaceful."

Her project name, Naked City Spleen, pays homage to Weegee's Naked City and Baudelaire's Paris spleen poetry.

Bennett School, Millbrook

I'm particularly partial to this one: Petit Ceinture, Paris

Again in Paris, here she shot the Catacombs using the warm light of carbide lamps that miners employed in their less-creative outings during the 19th century.Not only beautifully lit but incredibly brave, cuddling up to all those bones. Yes, bones. Dating back to 60 B.C., the Catacombs hold the remains of more than 6 million people. This particular shot was taken beneath Montparnasse Cemetery.

I am at this very moment trying to ignore the fact that I hear some little animal under the floorboards of my living room asserting its presence. Giving me...angst...the kind I feel sure that Miru Kim would grok. In fact she does claim considerable anxiety in entering these locations.

She notes, "I often felt . . . a kind of alienation and anxiety in urban environments, and one of the ways I could escape the negative side of that was to visit forgotten, abandoned places in the city. The feelings of isolation and loneliness I've had may be related to having moved alone to the U.S. at age 13 without knowing the language. But I think most urban-dwellers understand these feelings regardless of culture."


Revere Sugar factory, Brooklyn (currently a strip mall--pun might be intended)

“The island of Manhattan alone has such a dense, mysterious network of man-made structures soaring 1,500 feet above ground and digging 800 feet below. The 5 boroughs of NY are connected by more than 35 bridges and tunnels that make the city a miraculous feat of engineering, architecture and design, incomparable to any other. The anatomy of the city is complex, like that of a human being, both physically and psychologically,” Kim says.

Immersing herself in this vast id, Miru Kim sometimes receives unexpected visitors. In a tunnel beneath Hell's Kitchen (see 2nd photo, above), after she had just disrobed, a homeless man appeared, walking toward his campsite. After she explained that she was doing an art project, he left her to continue to shoot herself running naked through the tunnel. When she was done, he offered her his shirt to wipe the mud from her feet. “In my mind, he is a dweller in one of the darkest rooms in the collective unconsciousness of all the inhabitants of New York and possibly of all modern cities,” she posted on her website.

Showing in galleries throughout the world, Miru Kim has confirmed that this collective unconscious is a subterrain into which many are compelled to stare. Of these once magnificent, now crumbling structures, she reflects, "I am reminded of how fragile our sense of security is and how vulnerable people truly are."

"Our computers will now determine your liveness quotient. Please hold..."

If you’ve ever suspected that the line between screens and reality has increasingly been blurred, check out the following blog entry, which ran on Huffington Post on 2/4. Written by a Yale graduate student, this piece was posted not as satire but as an earnest guide to differentiating “real life” from virtual contacts with others. I confess that while surfing half-asleep at midnight last night, this completely stopped me in my tracks, as I hadn’t realized that we’d progressed to the point at which college students needed assistance in determining what was “real” and what wasn’t.

The post is also an interesting foray into helping young people assess which sort of virtual contact it is “polite” to acknowledge first, giving it an oddly retro, Emily Post twist. In my late 40s, I am part of the generation that straddles the analog and digital worlds. My generation didn’t begin to interact with computers (or even VCRs) until after college, so have lived approximately half our lives not having to do the apparently arduous work of distinguishing “real” from “virtual.” While some of our peers were clearly more interesting or articulate or better looking, the assessment of “liveness” never entered the picture. Except after, maybe, 17 drinks. We would not, for example, need a Yale grad student to tell us, “The more ‘live’ a person is in relation to you, the more attention they deserve, and the more promptly you should reply to their message.” As Gordon puts it, “Liveness was just life.” It makes me laugh that this truth is apparently no longer self-evident. Laugh, and maybe shudder a bit—or a lot. What tutorials will Yale students be posting 20 years from now?

Gordon proceeds to pitch the virtues of traditional conversation. Because young people tend to communicate via text at this point, perhaps this is a necessary reminder that vocal chords can and do work and utterances issuing forth from them can actually create interesting sounds and verbiage. As Thomas Dolby observed back in the 1980s, "The moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it."

I don’t know. I find this whole thing capital-S Scary. See what you think.

A Conversation with Your Cellphone

By Claire Gordon

My digital media use can sometimes graze the edge of social acceptability. I might reply to a text during dinner or download music while a friend monologues. Yet there are some transgressions that make my insides seethe -- a friend interrupting our conversation to tweet that hilarious thing she just said, or sitting silently with someone involved in an endless, banal BBM chat, when they could be sending endless, banal messages to my in-flesh face.

Some of these things are obviously rude. If you're irritating the person you're with, you have probably tripped up in the Kabuki of modern etiquette. But as digital and analogue life become evermore integrated, the protocols get blurry.

Why is not replying to a text less rude than taking a moment out of a conversation? Why is leaving someone lingering on Skype more or less rude than answering a phone call?

A simple answer is that one interaction is more "real" than the other, and the breathing organism should always take precedence over the bits and bytes. But the "real" and "virtual" divide is tricky. Firstly, we may all live in the Matrix, and everything both real and virtual is just the doodling of a malevolent cyber-intelligence. Secondly, the "virtual," in these cases, are also real people in real places with real thoughts and feelings. In some instances, like with Skype and the phone call, our competing interactions are both "virtual" in the sense of no one being physically present.

"Liveness" is perhaps a better barometer. The more "live" a person is in relation to you, the more attention they deserve, and the more promptly you should reply to their message.

If the message is an e-mail, give yourself a day. If the message is "what's up?" and he or she is sitting in front of you, give yourself two seconds.

But "liveness" is also a slippery creature. As a concept, it only sprang into existence with the birth of mediating technologies. Before that, "liveness" was just life. It wasn't even the invention of sound recording that spurred the human mind to construct the categories of "live" and "mediated." The difference was obvious: one was life, and one was a 78 rpm shellac disc revolving on your gramophone.

It was the birth of broadcasting that fundamentally jumbled the distinction, with no way to know whether those EM waves radiating from your receiver originated at a plucked string, or a plucked string in a recording studio that was now a disc spinning on the station's turntable. It was in the desperation to make sense of this difference that "liveness" was finally born.

Coined by the BBC in 1934, "liveness" became a nifty discursive distinction when an ontological one didn't really exist. As Von Phillip Auslander writes in "Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture," "liveness" never really referred to co-presence in space and time. The word instead evolved with emerging technologies, so that today phrases like "live broadcast" and "recording live" are meaningful and not paradoxical jibberish.

"Liveness" is experienced more as a feeling or an affect than an objective reality. But with such a flimsy definition, who's to say Gchat is more or less "live" than the guy sitting next to me on the subway?

Skype, for example, is very "live" for my mother. Too "live," in fact. But Facebook? She could go for weeks without checking. This is not a "live" experience for her; it's about occasionally dropping by, getting overwhelmed, signing off, and sending me an e-mail a few days later criticizing one of my photos.

"Liveness" is a very subjective thing.

Mushon Zer-Aviv, the designer and media activist, has invented a far more concrete framework by which to judge our social existence: content vs. conversation.

To define content, he uses metrics devised by Danah Boyd: persistence, replicability, searchability and invisible audiences.

When you tweet something, that tweet lasts forever (persistence); it can be easily retweeted, tweaked and retweeted, or slapped on a t-shirt (replicability); it can be found with some speedy Googling, and if deleted, scooped up from the darkweb (searchability); and no matter who you think your followers are, that tweet may eventually end up on the interface of an employer, creepy dude, or your born/unborn children (invisible audiences). If your communication fulfills some of these criteria, it's probably content.

Conversation, on the other hand, is ephemeral, unreplicable, unsearchable, and your audience is known, often right in your field of vision.

Why is conversation better than content? There's a lot of schmaltz I could spread for an answer -- that conversation is more authentic and less performed, more intimate and less displayed, magical in its fleetingness, and more existentially affirming in the ability, on occasion, to actually make eye contact.

It is in the world of conversation that ideas are really exchanged, opinions shaped, and laughing out loud makes a sound. These kinds of conversations may take place in chat rooms or on comment threads, but if nothing else, the existence of a Caps Lock key will forever doom many exchanges to CONTENT!!!!!

As Zer-Aviv rightly points out that in this framework Chatroulette qualifies as conversation and a parade of genitalia probably shouldn't qualify as anything. But there is something in the essence of Chatroulette -- two strangers serendipitously matched for a small spell of time -- that has the glimmery feel of conversation, even if one of those strangers takes off his pants.

Facebook and Foursquare, like video games, may be more instantly gratifying in the way that they dole out hits of rewards. Content can also be creative and socially valuable. But conversation, "real" or "virtual," "live" or "mediated," may be able to offer something even better than the Mayorship of your local discount liquor store.

Ghosts in Their Element – Torin Stephens

I’m all over this…A very different approach to street art, courtesy of Portland photographer and painter Torin Stephens. 1) Find a photo of a recently departed Oregonian on Facebook or a Web news source. 2) Project their image onto a place that meant something to them: a favorite spot...or their final spot.



3) Photograph the image projection and repost on the Web.

"These images were a copy of a copy, but by reintegrating them into the physical world and treating them as spiritual fragments, I hope to instill them with new life,” Stephens says. As those who grieve, I think we tend to imagine people’s physical bodies still moving around the same environs they did when they are alive. Especially when they die young and tragically, as all of these individuals did. This is one thing that is so striking about Stephens’ work. As humans, this is how our mind sees them: embodied.


While he claims no relationship with his subjects, I’m sure an ethereal bond arises after working with their images in this intimate a manner. He notes,“Western culture, unlike many other cultures, resists the idea of ghostly presence. The work suggests that if we cannot as a culture see these symbols, perhaps we must create them in order to tap into their emotive power.”

Intentionally created ghostly visages via light and lens. Wow.


Stephens’ own presence on the Internet is a bit spectral, with little information to be found, except his own Facebook page and a piece on the Wooster Collective, but I hope we see more from him.



























Subjects' names:
1/Kipp Crawford
2/David Minor
3/Keaton Otis
4/Seamus DuBarry
5/Grace Throckmorton

A Prescient Quote from "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace"

David Foster Wallace, discussing his book Infinite Jest and the addictive qualities of TV and the Internet:

"The technology's gonna get better and better at doing what it does, which is seduce us into being incredibly dependent on it, so that advertisers can be more confident that we will watch their advertisements. And as a technology system, it's amoral.

It doesn't...have a responsibility to care about us one whit more than it does: It's got a job to do. The moral job is ours. You know, Why am I watching five hours a day of this? I mean, why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean, that's something that a little tiny child would do, and that would be all right. But we're postpubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we're supposed to have grown up...

I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It's a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn't require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can't see me. And they're there for me, and I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive.


The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know, I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up.

...as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up...at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable to be alone with images on a screeen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're gonna die."


It's difficult not to agree with DFW. While distraction in measured doses can be a beautiful thing, the cumulative presence of TV, Internet, gaming, cell phones, texting, IMing, smart phones, social media, and sundry other technologies has undeniably altered the ways in which we relate to other humans. I have lately acutely observed the flattened, sometimes surreal quality of relating online versus the depth of experience one feels in 3-D (aka “real” life).

Online communication adds a layer of abstraction that seems to confound my brain. There is the person to whom one is speaking, then there becomes this avatar, the recipient of the email, who, while resembling this person, is solely a cognitive/verbal entity. The physical field is completely wiped out, and the emotional field clouded. Online relating brings with it much space for interpretation, in a way that face-to-face encounters often do not. In person, we read people’s energy more quickly than we do their words, and in fact process what they say via how they look and how they say it. Actual verbal content has been proven to be just a small component in the communication process. How things are said—vocal intonation, gesture, pitch, volume, phrasing—holds much more sway. All of this is absent in virtual communication.

Email and the Internet have also impacted the length of our relationships to others. Virtual communication makes it very easy to jump ship—to move on to the next person, the next topic, to blow people off, to not spend a lot of time working through issues. There are simply too many other options, and we lose patience quickly. Like a baby averts its eyes from anything that disturbs it, we can easily perform a few mouse clicks and the offensive entity has been excised. And if I can’t see you, see the upset you may feel when I dismiss you, then it doesn’t exist, right?

So if we in our world allow ourselves to be passively entertained, and accept a dehumanizing medium as our predominant form of communication, over time, what is the end result? While Foster Wallace’s conclusion feels somewhat extreme at this moment in time, it's certainly not inconceivable.

“ …each generation has different things that force the generation to grow up. Maybe for our grandparents it was World War Two. For us, it’s gonna be that at…a certain point…we’re either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn’t all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being? And if we don’t do that then (a) as individuals, we’re gonna die, and (b) the culture’s gonna grind to a halt. Because we’re gonna get so interested in entertainment that we’re not gonna want to do the work that generates the income that buys the products that pays for the advertising that disseminates the entertainment. It just seems to be like it’s gonna be this very cool thing. Where the country could very well shut down and die, and it won’t be anybody else doin’ it to us, we will have done it to ourselves.”
























I highly recommend all of David Lipsky's fascinating book, which documents a 5-day road trip taken by the Rolling Stone correspondent and David Foster Wallace in 1996. It's both a compelling conversation and a glimpse into the writer's thought processes, interspersed with plenty of humor, humanity and bits of profundity. We're fortunate to have this transcript as a glimpse into Wallace's amazing mind.

I Am a Buddhist Geek - Published Today

An excerpt from my article, which has been published by the wonderful podcast/magazine BuddhistGeeks.com today:

I have taken many lessons from Bernie Glassman’s extensive work with the homeless. Glassman’s street retreats, in which people live outside, beg for money, eat in soup kitchens, and sleep out or in shelter beds, have helped thousands of participants generate wisdom and compassion, the kind that only direct experience can spark. The first precept of Glassman’s Zen Peacemakers Order is “not-knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe.” Working as a socially engaged Buddhist has made me rethink many of the notions I once held, nested within my desire to help “others.” As I was busily considering them as “others,” I was looking down from a mountain of separation. Certainly I have always felt compassion for the homeless, but that issued forth from a secure position of being housed and “feeling sorry” for their “lesser fortunes.”

But as I practiced the Zen Peacemakers’ tenet, the notion of merely doing service work transformed into recognizing a truth of Buddhism: nondualism. I began to realize that, despite the illusion of separation, the boundary between “subject” and “object” is unreal. Like the Jungian use of figurines in sandplay therapy, perhaps our minds have dualistically projected the separateness of others as a way to explore concepts we could not have experienced within the closed loop of a mind.

Glassman states that not-knowing should be “a state of open presence without separation.” Yet if one has never experienced homelessness and is frightened by both the beggar’s mask and the fear of possibly being in his shoes, it is an act of courage to merge with the person on the street. It takes guts to truly own the times when we have felt homeless, not had a safe place to occupy, felt discomfort in our own skin, and dissolve into pure awareness that in essence we are all there, all the time. Whatever props we use to build security around ourselves, homelessness is our natural state. And the often intimidating manifestations of fear and other emotions that we witness in the homeless are states we have all experienced. Cold, hunger, rejection, being turned out—we’ve all known those conditions, too. And at the end of the day, we all have kindred goals: to be safe, to be loved, to be sheltered, to be fed, to be understood.

To read the entire piece, please see:
http://www.buddhistgeeks.com/2011/01/of-nondualism-and-cooking-for-the-homeless/

Buddhist Street Art - Part 2

1/Spaulding at Melrose, LA. Photo: George Szakall.
2/Cabbagetown, Toronto. Photo: J. Diggity.
3/Leiden, Netherlands. Photo: Maurits Burgers.
4/Brazil. Photo: Tvindy, Flickr
5/"Basic Buddhism 2" by artist Jason Etienne. London Buddhist Centre.
6/San Francisco. Photo: Liz Hager.
7/Art by Karve. Photo: Mike Cargill.
8 /"Praying Monk" by artist Gaia. Seoul, South Korea
9/London. Art by Banksy.
10/Art by Shepard Fairey. Bowery, NYC. Photo: Brecht Bug, Flickr.

Happy Martin Luther King Day

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness;
only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....
The chain reaction of evil --
hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars --
must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”



Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Strength To Love, 1963