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Like A Tongue To The Throat

from May You Know And Do Better Than We Did by Murakami Girls

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lyrics

It is cold, as these false spring days are wont. The sky attempts a middling clarity, and though the sun fights, its powers which so cleanly sear the mist of later-season mornings from drifting over the ground are less effective on the veil of pollution, whose earthen-steel pallor hangs like filthy gauze limply strung as though from invisible hooks among the buildings, and the mountains we are out today to admire.

We course through the city, lurching along on a bus, our guide a lifelong resident of this place which I’ve come to know only as The Factory, given its resemblance to repetitious layers of indistinct, assembly-line mechania you can see from the incoming approaches that the airlines always take into Incheon. Incheon may have no such kitschy rhymes to serve it as well as the now faux-capital (having been officially relocated to Sejong City, a non-central burp of an urban project city convenient to no one and yet soon to be a required commute for anyone who is someone enough to be required in physical presence at their job, which simultaneously assures us that such a requirement will befall no one of genuine consequence in this city). In any case, the soulless apartment towers, flaking concrete facades, warped vinyl signs, and cracked LED screens which dominate what might be called the character of the city all serve to obscure the images we try to recall, though their origin is not in our own minds, but through the stories of our guide who speaks to us constantly. Here, this was my middle school, he says. There, nestled among the would-be skyscrapers, a pocket of red brick from the 70s. Low lying homes now mostly decrepit and unrepaired, lest any of their residents be given hope of remaining instead of one day moving themselves further towards the sky and its metaphorical promises, and as such more distant from the tireless earth that foots the bill no matter who places the order.

We look for the mountains he names, and for the royal tombs we lurch by, our hands grasping vinyl loops bolted to rails running the length of the bus, only to find nearly all of the landmarks mentioned obscured by batch after batch of apartment towers. GPS is perhaps the only thing that prevents residents here from a case of perpetual deja vu, so alike is one block to the next, like am American suburb expanded into three fuller dimensions. We roll over asphalt. There’s a river below us, our guide says, recalling swimming in it as a child. Did you know? We shake our heads, no, we didn’t. Amazing, he says, gesturing to the hidden water. The bus merges onto another covered tributary of the river Han, whose qi softens the hardness of the essential influence of Gwanaksan, a key component of Seoul’s original placement when it was called Hanyang: Protected by a dragon to the west in Yongsan, a tiger to the north in Bukhansan, and a peacock to the south in Naksan, a cradle of animals and their totem spirits ground the capital spiritually into the very granite that the city’s wealthy would, hundreds of years later, eviscerate and flatten to ensconce their own private estates, their minor attempts at playing royalty, though none would ever be a palace no matter how high the walls.

He takes out a photo, or rather displays a picture on his tablet, much larger than mine, which he takes from a green nylon pouch belted to his waist. An idyllic scene. A fountain, a spacious plaza planted with grass and trees, a streetcar, and Belle Epoch architecture befitting of the finer boulevards of Paris and the avenues of New York City. Do you know where this is, he asks us, and I shake my head, as does my companion. Seoul, he says, and I frown in disbelief. 1920s, he says, no one remembers this. Everyone looks at pictures from the 50s, the 60s, all war era and reconstruction. Of all the poverty. He looks at the screen, and shakes his head. People once said, England has London, and Korea has Seoul. No one says this anymore. He holds up the tablet and gestures to buildings that we pass. That’s the building here in the picture, and this fountain, it’s the same one as the picture, he says. It’s all gone. It’s all ugly. The best was 1935, Seoul’s golden age. Everyone forgets.

(via NouveauTrad.com)

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from May You Know And Do Better Than We Did, released March 21, 2015

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Murakami Girls California

Fuzz and fluff in commensurate, sun soaked volumes. Music for the road, music for the head, music for fleet feet dancing on the bed.

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