Living in a home in the heart of the (Korean) country

Foto.Feola.Friday for March 1, 2024

Looking for a home in the heart of the country
Heart of the country
Where the holy people grow
Heart of the country
Smell the grass in the meadow
Woah, woah, woah
Want a horse, I want a sheep
I wanna get me a good night's sleep
Living in a home in the heart of the country
I'm gon' move, I'm gon' go
I'm gon' tell everyone I know
Living in a home in the heart of the country

Foto.Feola.Friday

Someone asked me if it was hard to get this shot, which ran as a full front page of Pacific Stars & Stripes:

(Sorry about the quality; that’s a print copy. Haven’t found the negative yet.) “Not really,” I told them, “As long as you don’t mind crawling around through the freezing mud of Korean winter for hours while you try to line up the shot in time.”

Came across a different roll of Tri-X from that shoot; thought it would be interesting to look at a few. Here’s a reject; the Blackhawks are still lining up for their run.

I was lucky that they kept coming my way, but I was also in the right position because I’d been crawling there all day as Blackhawks came and went. I am stubborn and persistent, if nothing else.

These war games took place in the little village of Chi Pyong; I hope I’m spelling that correctly. Hard enough to read my handwriting, without it being something I wrote with grease pencil 50 years ago. Here’s a shot of the villagers watching us. The Korean War never actually ended; it’s been suspended by a truce for seven decades. So the war games go on and on. It’s not exactly bucolic.

All photos taken on Tri-X with a Pentax LX and the SMC Pentax 200mm F4.

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Sunday March 3rd — Tick-Tock on the clock. Bet the mortgage on this one: The Game of Thrones books will never be finished in George R.R. Martin’s lifetime. There’s a new Marvel Universe entry every week; if you miss one, none of the rest make sense. The Wheel of Time guy died before finishing all 14 books of his trilogy. There are apparently no book editors left anywhere; every successful novelist fluffs 300-page novels out past 1,000 pages. It’s no wonder TikTok is so popular when long-form entertainment simply isn’t worth the time.