It still feels like yesterday I was behind the steering wheel screaming because my learners permit had no way of stopping the oncoming traffic from likely killing me. Its almost been two years this august that a bureaucratic mistake gave me a driver’s license, and while I still have the haphazard driving skills of the average seventeen year old I still lack the romance of driving. I pickup remains a pickup no matter how pretty paint job and a BWM is too near a Porsche for me to tell the difference. When I heard the news then that we were going to the Hyundai plant followed by the beach and a ceramics shop, you can imagine the sparklers that didn’t go off in my eyes.
Fortunately we were treated like third graders, which surprisingly made things okay. Hyundai gave us each a toy car—the kind you pull backwards across the floor and it zips forward. Much like a real Hyundai I have no idea what to do if the oil light goes or a tire flattens, but I can get it to scoot awkwardly forward.
I also haven’t played with ceramics since I was a high school student looking for an easy A in my schedule, so I forgot how unskilled I am with clay. “If you are a good potter, then you are a good masseuse,” my teacher said, referencing the even and even pressure through the fingers and hand. By my bent bowls and lopsided vases demonstrate dates gone horribly wrong. Seeing Shilla Kiln’s master ceramicist Yu Hyo Ung work with clay, on the other hand, is like watching a magic trick—the fast, relaxed way someone might pull a coin from behind your ear. There was a lot of “just do it like this” while in a single gesture he makes a tea pot already full of Oregan Chai. An enormous amount of things in Korea seem to operate on the principal of magic, kind of like the way my tourmates keep manifesting cell phones and Farrah Fawcett haircuts. Sadly, without a crossroads to sell my soul at, I crafted an ashtray the size of a bisected bowling ball. I have the feeling this might be a metaphor for my efforts in local cultural endeavors: lumpy and heavy handed.
No comments:
Post a Comment