Fufurasu : OBEY

Saturday 28^th of February 2004, 1:17

OBEY

[OBEY]

Brussels, where I took this photo of the obey giant posters, can best be described as not-quite-Paris. The aim of the trip was to visit the concertgebouw in Flemish Bruges. For a few hours last Friday I felt the insecurity of not speaking the language of the place. Dutch is bad enough, but Flemish (like Afrikaans) is off-Dutch, id est worse.

[Toilet sign. 2002. Paint on concrete.]

Anyway, the building was great. As is the case with large buildings, the most memorable aspects of the concert hall were clever little details, like the signs, hand painted on concrete, using a bold, italicised, Frutiger-like font (Adobe Myriad?). And in the main hall, there was a story written in Flemish across the backs of the seats, starting on the leftmost seat of the first row, and ending on the rightmost seat on the second balcony.

I came back to find that my Chinese name had been truncated from 胡奥仁 (Hú Aò Rên) to 胡奥 (Hú Aò). Apparently, the early version has some undesirable connotations in Taiwanese slang.

Comments

eLfie Saturday 28^th of February 2004, 12:06

..so now i’m supposed to call u.. 阿澳.. hmm.. doesnt really work.. oh well, if the taiwanese said so then she said so! :P hehe..

JenJen Monday 1^st of March 2004, 12:34

But what was the undesirable connotation? *is nosy*

Really like the nitty-grittiness of the second photo. Reminds me of this photobook called “Ghetto” I saw in London, think you’ll like it!

Afrikaans sounds nice, how dare you! >:O

^_^

Jane Wednesday 3^rd of March 2004, 17:05

奧仁 when pronounced in Taiwanese, means something like a bad person…the sort of person that tends to owe you money and never pay you back…sort of person that never does what he/she’s meant to do…the sort of person that always likes to 耍賴 (struggling to find such a word in English). Plus, two character names are cool…..like 王菲…like mine! :)

eLfie Thursday 4^th of March 2004, 20:12

oh? well mine’s 3 characters! :P and i’m cool!! *makes-a-face-at-jane*

Jane Friday 5^th of March 2004, 10:52

well….two characters is just cooler than cool!…freezing in fact,(yes, its a poo joke)…*smiles and dangles a pot of B&J in front of eLfies face*..I can see you smiling!! :)

big monk Wednesday 17^th of March 2004, 9:18

you should see me smiling! and i don’t even know what a pot of b and j is.