Green, White and Yellow on Yellow

We went to Itaewon for a Mark Rothko exhibit on the day a new Bright Eyes album dropped.

SEOUL — There’s something nice about writing from a city that doesn’t take a country signifier in the dateline. There’s also something good about datelining a piece from a city you truly love.

I’ve driven plenty around the country by now, but this was my first time taking the Mohave deep into the belly of the metropolis. The Pace Museum in Hannam-dong is running an “in-conversation” exhibit that if you’ve been following my writing from the early days you expect I would brave the Seoul traffic to see.

I don’t work Fridays because I’m on the Sunday shift, so Nammin and I try to use the day to enjoy our free daycare and go on a date. This past Friday was one of those days.

Last week was Chuseok, when Korea celebrates the mid-autumn harvest over three days. We had several big meals with Nammin’s family. Plates of japchae, L.A. galbi, and bossam — a lot of food. I worked through the holiday to bank the vacation days for a trip home over Christmas, and it was good to be in the air-conditioning during the hottest Chuseok on record. 

It was also a week of potential assassination attempts and exploding pagers in Lebanon; rooftop drinks with new friends and Jia surprising us with something new every day.

I was processing all of that as we drove the expressway along the Han River that plunged us into the center of the city. We turned off at the Yongsan Station exit for Itaewon, the international district that meant a lot to both of us at one time. This is where we met, and where we both spent plenty of weekend nights in the bars, restaurants, and clubs before we got married, moved to the U.S., and became parents. We truly were different people then.

We were different and this place was different. That was many years before the Halloween crowd crush that killed 159 people in the alley next to the Hamilton Hotel. When I met Nammin, Itaewon was shedding its reputation as a place where soldiers and other foreigners came to frequent streets they gave names like Hooker Hill and Homo Hill.

At the time, some of that still went on, but mostly it was fashionable Koreans out for nights at great clubs that played the perfect soundtracks for late, late nights. The food and bar scene was getting better all the time. We’d loved it enough that I rented a two-bedroom above a brewery and next to a well-known bakery. We could walk to everything we wanted to do.

Nostalgia is often unreliable, but I still believe that was a special time in a special place.

Neither of us had ever been down the main drag — Itaewon-ro — in a car that wasn’t driven by a taxi driver. I tried to watch the traffic with one eye and look for what had changed with the other. Places like Seoul Pub and Gold Bar were long gone, but Vatos Tacos and the Big Size shoe stores were still there.

We didn’t have time to walk the back alleys to check on all the places we liked to visit. I’m sure we’ll be back there again some time.

The art exhibit at the Pace was on the other side of the main strip, in the fancy part of Hannam with the branded retail stores — places like Commes des Garcons and Diesel and Supra. A white Ferrari sat parked in front of a Gucci store where an attendant in a suit stood guard.

The exhibit was six Mark Rothko paintings, all of them the floating blocks of color that made his legacy. The canvases are large and seem to move off the wall as you look at them.

I was stuck to the floor by a painting that I had seen before and had inspired a device in my apprentice novel The Green and the Gold. “Untitled (Green, White and Yellow on Yellow)” is a block of green on a yellow background, and it has always looked like Nebraska to me — a spring wheatfield growing next to the gold of cut-down corn stalks. The color scheme of John Deere tractors.

I had to talk myself out of taking a picture of the painting, despite the “no photography” sign.

If you buy a smartphone in Korea the camera settings are fixed by law to make a clicking sound when you take a picture. Too much perverted picture-taking on public transportation. My U.S.-issued camera doesn’t have that feature, so stealth photo-taking could have happened. But why? To prove to you that I actually saw it? Who would it be for? Sneaking a picture would have taken me out of the moment, and looking at it on my phone would have only cheapened the memory.

No, I stood there and I thought about Nebraska. I thought about who I was when I was obsessed with Rothko and trying to force my way into becoming a novelist. When I was too young to have anything to say. I thought about aging, as I often do these days, and how reconnecting with the things that mattered to you when you were younger has good and bad outcomes. The good: You remember that you were young once. The bad: You’re a long way from that age now. 

I thought about Rothko’s singular vision for his art. The confidence it must take to create something simple, yet identifiable and powerful. How style is just that — finding the one small thing you do well, mastering it, and doing it over and over. 

Pace’s website allows you to “inquire” about a painting if you’re interested in buying one. I looked up how much Rothko’s paintings sell for and one recently sold at Christie’s for more than $86 million. 

The correspondence part of the exhibit was in another room with a handful of Lee Ufan’s paintings that are more vertical and splotchy and have their own movement. I did not find them as powerful, but I have never found another artist’s work more affecting than Rothko’s, so the comparison is unfair.

We went up the hill to have lunch, and as we were eating the new Bright Eyes record downloaded on my phone. I put it on during the drive back to Ilsan, and again I was confronting the work of an artist who spoke to me when I was young and trying to understand what kind of art I wanted to make — when I was trying to figure out how to talk about Nebraska and what it meant to be from there.

I’ve loved Conor Oberst’s music for so long that I’m always nervous to spin a fresh record. I’m worried that a new album will be a disappointment and taint my impression of what I used to love. I’m also afraid that I’ve changed and won’t be able to connect to the music in a way that I should because I’ve gotten older and don’t have the heart for new music that I once did.

This new album’s about a lot of that, too. Oberst talks about the time he has left, how he’ll be turning 45 soon, and in a way it’s comforting to hear that even someone as successful as he is can’t escape the angst of mid-life.

The other recurring theme I picked up in this album is that the body keeps the score. He mentions it at least twice. And that goes back to another idea, that, to use his words, “it all catches up to you once you get just a little too old.”

At this age, I’m starting to see this a lot, the way life sneaks up on you. Self-help gurus call these lagging indicators. The success you have might be because of some choice you made 10 years ago. The opposite is also true. You often hear the same wisdom from people in their later years — that getting old isn’t for the weak. I’m not there yet, but I can see it coming. It’s not dark yet but it’s getting there. The body’s keeping score, yes, and so is the mind, and all the choices you’ve made, whether you know it at the time, add up to putting you exactly in the place where you are now.