The 1,000 year old Lotus Lantern Festival celebrates the birth of the Buddha and thousands of Koreans – plus guests from around the world – come together with the sole purpose of wishing each other happiness and well-being.
Lanterns of every imagine sort, size, and design feature prominently in the festival, and they decorate every corner of Seoul. They also light up the processions and rallies which fill the city’s streets each evening, casting their warm glow on dancers and musicians, rope walkers and Buddhist monks.
One of the highlights is the Lantern Parade. It begins at 7p.m., leaving the Dongdaemun neighborhood and passing along Jongno downtown street, all the way to Jogyesa Temple. During the parade, more than 100,000 parade lanterns and floating lanterns will move through the crowd.
Seoul Lantern Festival 2018
Seoul Lantern Festival – Wikipedia
Lanterns
Reports
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p.s. Hey. Today a kind and generous reader of the blog has gifted us with this magical guest-post concerning the long standing but previously unknown to me Korean Lantern Festival. It’s a pretty thing, and I hope you’ll enjoy it and will spread any pleasure, gratitude, or whatever else you feel today in your comments to Periwinkle, who will no doubt be watching and hoping you’re pleased. Thank you, and many, many thanks, Periwinkle. ** Dominik, Hey, hey, D! Oh, your poor dog, but I’m really glad you and Anita saw the year out appropriately. The new film script is very, very close to being finished, or at least the version we’ll use to fundraise. I’m sure it will change a lot over time just like ‘PGL’s’ did. Anyway, Zac has some last changes he wants to make before we have it translated into French, so that’s the immediate goal. Interesting about the Manson book. Yeah, he seems very cagey to me. I guess I don’t fully buy his thing. I guess it’s probably good that I didn’t write that article. Yes, I wondered if you knew Monika Treut’s films. Um, I think maybe start with ‘Gendernauts’ if you can find it? This week: Work on the film script, see some art … Zac and I are hoping to go to London just for an afternoon so we can see the show at Cabinet Gallery that has my GIF novels in it before the show closes on the 12th, so maybe we’ll do that one day. Stuff like that. You’re back at work? For the income or … ? 4 hours a day isn’t bad in any case. You have an amazing day too! ** Davdi Ehrenstein, Hi. Agree about Treut. Ah, you know her, cool. I should have guessed. HNY! ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Thank you a lot for talking so richly about your novel in progress. Very interesting. Very interested to see how you do the inevitable ending. I think it could be said that ‘PGL’ has one of those. I hope your job restarts okay. Wow, yeah, I hadn’t thought about how the shutdown would mean basic services like heat are cut. That seems pretty sadistic. I hope it ends soon for your sake, but I sure don’t have any idea how it will. ** Sypha, Hi. Oh, I was just aiming for levity too, so our wires did not cross. I refuse to join Pinterest, I don’t know why. Joining it would make blog post assembling a whole lot easier, but I don’t know. There’s something about Pinterest that gets my guard up. I greatly look forward to the Harlem Smoke post! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Good, good, about your dad’s slow but steady progress. I sometimes order the kosher option on plane flights for the same reason. Horror theme is always good. I mean, it’s hard to imagine that theme not paying off. Well, yeah, if you’re going to use that title, you probably should at least skim the book or read the Cliff Notes ‘cos people will note the name share. ** Bill, Slaves make good occasion markers. If I could, I would assemble a bunch of them to be waiting for you at the SFO arrival gate holding up signs with your name written on them in their own body fluids. I hope the de-stressing is for real. How was the noise gig? ** KIIIdidas, Wow, I barely recognised you. I don’t sleep so much. I just go to bed early and wake up early. It’s weird. I always have, even when I was a young wild druggie maniac. Acing camera angles is interesting. It’s interesting to me that it takes, like, an hour to set up the camera to do a shot and then another hour to break that down and move the camera and set up an other shot, but on film it’s all so smooth and quick and ‘real time’. I suppose that magic trick will get old eventually. Don’t get the cough. The blog is partying like it’s 9102. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. There must be a trickier reason than that, no? I’ll try googling an answer. I just use social media to look for interesting things and people and occurrences and so on and not to say anything to anyone apart from some ‘likes’ and ‘loves’, and it’s ultimately a valuable resource to me, so there’s that angle? ** JM, Hi. I’m one of those people who can’t get into King’s prose, and I can’t read prose when I’m not into it itself, so I always wait for the movie versions of his stuff because I do like his ideas and cleverness. All’s well here. And with you and yours, I trust? ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. I have no idea what zombo.com is. But I shall find out imminently. Thank you. Happy Wednesday! ** Right. Let Periwinkle’s lovely show wash over you today, and say stuff to them please, and thank you, and see you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
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These Koran Lanterns are Spectacularly Gorgeous!
It’s Todd Haynes’ Birthday!
Todd’s working on a documentary about The Velvet Underground.
Polanski’s “J’Accuse” starts production in Paris shortly. it would be great if you could get cast as an extra in the trial scenes. Maybe you could play Proust! (He went to all the trials and wrote about them in “A la recherché”)
Thanks for sharing this Periwinkle, some of these designs are fantastic: I especially like the women with the ant heads and some of the tigers. Great stuff…
I actually took a sick day from work today, Dennis, which I hate doing so early in the year… but I literally didn’t even get an hour’s sleep last night and just feel like shit. Well, I only took 3 sick days in all of 2018 (which is pretty impressive given my usual sickly state), so I don’t feel TOO guilty about it! Pinterest I’m not serious about but it can be a timewaster… sometimes I drop in there just to see what they’re recommending for me today and you click on one picture which brings up a whole bunch of other pictures and so on and so forth.
@ Periwinkle, this Lantern Festival is a thing of great beauty and I’m grateful for your showcasing it. Like Sypha I find the ant headed women to be a definite highlight.
Since Sony Pictures Classics bought the North American rights to Polanski’s last film in the spring of 2017 and then decided not to release it when the metoo movement took off, I wonder if J’ACCUSE will be releasable in the US right now. It’s already been attacked because the premise has been seen as a self-serving allegory about Polanski’s legal woes. It’d be safer to keep doing cameos in Christophe Honore films, although I like the idea of you playing Proust!
Have you heard guitarist Wendy Eisenberg? She released an album called THE ,MACHINIC UNCONSCIOUS on Tzadik last fall and another album in 2018 that I haven’t heard. At least on THE MACHINIC UNCONSCIOUS, she’s working in a vein that mixes jazz, math-rock and metal – I thought of Massacre, Keiji Haino, This Heat and even King Crimson and Mahavishnu Orchestra if they were willing to get much noisier.
Speaking of This Heat, I was excited to learn that This Is Not This Heat just scheduled a show in New York at Le Poisson Rouge in the middle of March.
I wrote to the Guardian’s music editor today about doing reviews for that section. I sent 3 pitches for albums coming out this month or February, one being the new Flesheaters. I love the 4 albums released by their original incarnation and I’m excited that Chris D. got back together with Dave Alvin and John Doe, although their new version of “My Life To Live” left me thinking “This is a perfectly good re-recording of a great song. Why?” I’m not optimistic about freelancing these days, but maybe I’ll luck out and he’ll get back to me with something positive.
haha, if i might pry just a bit, what do you do while lying in bed? do you create? do you search for ideas? just curious. i dont sleep well, i have a lot of nightmares. haha it took me forever to understand how they came up with the word maniac. i guess ones normal is anothers different. your latest movie makes me think its all very difficult. watched the first F13th last night. haha some of the shots are really good. i feel like film is so granted that cut-scenes and such have become mental reality. the post today is inspiring. i must go to asia someday. my you bushido is still pretty deadly. 9102, you mean the escort/slave posts right? hehe much love
Good Morning,
Happy New Year. what might be a good time for a skype conversation this or next weekend. Let me know trying to corral us.
xo
Periwinkle, Great stuff here. It’s beautiful. And interesting. Me likey.
Dennis, Thanks.
Yeah, it is sadistic. People are freezing their asses off. It’s like we’re being punished for the shutdown, as if we had anything to do with it. Even the conservative people where I work think it’s all a bunch of bullshit. Oh, well. And you might be right, it might last a very long time. Ugh.
Hmm, yeah, I think the arc of PGL kind of demands that ending, no?
so pretty… thank you for the post, Periwinkle.
Re my forthcoming horror zine, I had the idea to give it the happily tautological, Lovecraftian name The Call.