Want to learn photography? How about podcasting? Want to learn how to properly produce a podcast in the first place? Or bring your blogging to the next level?
Announcing mid-term and NEW signups for the Multimedia Production classes! The course is 8 weeks, divided between photography in the first half and multimedia in the second. The classes are 3-hour seminars, once per week, mostly conducted in my studio but with a couple spent out in the field.
My studio has an 80-inch projection screen fed by a superfast Mac, as well as a secure wireless Internet connection, and 5.1 Dolby Digital/DTS surround sound in order to make group work truly professonal.
Interested? Send me an email from the link at the top of this menu.
Buy Prints!!!
Support Street Photography!
Want to keep the "real" Korea experience with you always? Prints of any documentary/art photo I have taken on this site are 175,000 KRW ($175 USD), signed, numbered, and framed. For the print only, you need only pay 125,000 KRW ($125 USD) for the same without the frame. Please contact me directly via email for orders.
I can't stand when so-called "conservatives" try to get all historical, yet know less history than the average grade schooler. Especially when it's the crux of one's point. Look it up on Wikipedia at least, fer chrissakes., before going on national television and making an idiot of oneself. Or, alternatively, shut the f**k up.
This tool got owned on national television. I'm sure he'll go back to his radio show and whine about how he got railroaded or something -- but in the end, he's just stoopid dumm.
The "five mistakes" are kind of telling, in that these are not the kind of mistakes that I would have wanted a potential president to make. And when I say "deserve," I mean it -- look at the frickin' delegate count lead Obama has, which has remained constant for far longer than Hillary should have been in the race. Time Magazine's list:
Obama's come a long way, too, and more than earned the right to shake of the "all talk" jabs by holding his own against anything that Clinton threw at him, by taking the high ground, by actually not engaging in the dirty pool that he claims to not want to play. His money came from average people and not old money, he planned ahead, he had a pulse on the sentiments of the people.
How is he not completely and obviously better qualified than Hillary to be nominated? What remaining reservations are there? Ah, he's not a realist, we need a connected political animal to get things done? She has "more experience?" Pshaw. Is that all that's left?
In a way, it doesn't matter. Obama's done the do-diligence. He's run the political gauntlet, even as people (including myself) were half covering their faces and hoping that he wouldn't fall flat on his face, and as he not only didn't, but continued to display his appropriateness for the job, and many on the side of the fence who might actually vote for him have continued to be emboldened enough to be more vocal about their support for him.
Many African-Americans were initially quite skeptical about his prospects at the beginning -- and did not offer the kind of blind support that many seem to assume was given only because he was black (umm, Jesse Jackson was also black, but let's not nitpick...) Now, Obama's completed the tough task of convincing these final cynics -- us.
What people fail to realize in this myopic, horse-race way of dealing with political races in the US, is that Obama has already changed a lot of the rules of the game, has raised the level of political discourse, has already raised the bar again for what can be hoped for in politics. Is the job done? No.
But the man ain't even President yet. And prognosticating naysaying aside (since he's made it through a whole heaping helping of that and come out rosy), what if...just what if...his candidacy actually reflects what he does as president?
Imagine that!
My vote's right where it's been since December, 2007.
This is not hyperbole. It is simply fact. Not in cases, but the precedent has been set. So what happens when the scope of the present state of the law is inevitably expanded?
Probable cause? Warrant issued by a judge? Bill of Rights? Come on! So you know now that the Feds (customs agents) now have the right to search any electronic item you own and its contents on its own whims, now, right? Once, for the government to put its hand in your pockets and start fishing around, it either needed a warrant or probable cause to do so. Now, it doesn't even need that. And in the digital age, our electronics are where all our most valuable and intimate possessions are.
Probable cause or a warrant is the only thing that separates me, a citizen, from the arbitrary whim of the state. Where the Sam Hell have American values gone? How can even the broadest interpretation of the meaning of the 4th Amendment mean this? The main purpose of that part of the Bill of Rights even EXISTING was to force the state to show a SPECIFIC REASON to conduct a search. The burden of proof, very importantly, is on the STATE. Once that element is gone, it is left up to arbitrary whim. And that power, in the hands of the state, will be abused. Period.
So, you look at the customs official the wrong way? Seize and search your computer. The guy thinks all brown people "look suspicious?" Seize and search. Or someone just gets up on the wrong side of the bed? Seize and search. Whatever -- you make the scenario. The point is, anything's possible now. And that's for customs. For now. But since the precedent's been set, what about the next overzealous police action that gets defended on the basis of this principle? Then becomes the law of the land. For the police to force you to yield your cellphone for pictures/phone numbers? Or someone's PDA? Or -- and is far more likely -- a photographer's camera at a protest rally?
Before, you needed a subpoena to get a photog's pics, say, if the police wanted to use them after a protest rally to round up participants. And now, in the digital age, and with the ease of erasing pics and cards, the urge to perhaps immediately demand such items is going to be greater. This all adds up to freedom of the press being restricted, since if any photog is basically (albeit involuntarily) a snitch, either protesters are going to be (rightfully) wary of photographers, or responsible photographers will be selective in the pictures they take.
Either way, it adds up to less truth getting out there, and additional danger in trying to gather it.
Although people think the word "police state" is harsh, history has always shown that 1) this is the most common thought before the actual implementation of one, and 2) the thought that "it can never happen here" is actually what allows it to happen in the first place.
Our Constitution -- both in spirit and to the letter -- is being perfunctorily shat upon. Seriously. Where is the country called America, where I once used to staunchly defend to non-Americans as a place where "certain things don't happen." Once, that thing was torture used by the state. It also used to be a fairly active freedom from the press from state interference -- until the Pentagon started forcing news agencies to EMPLOY its agents to push news stories (seriously, people -- did you miss that one?).
Now, the state can freely, in theory, search your electronic items. For now, in customs. In a year, perhaps directly taken from your person?
My next question, to those who would call me "paranoid" or a "conspiracy theorist", neither of which are even applicable to these perfectly rational concerns: at what point would you consider erosion of the Constitution to be problematic? Specifically, I mean. Seriously -- why are the American people and those who call themselves "patriots" and dare wave around the American flag, especially, sitting still for this?
This is the last time I will post here. My time as the "Metropolitician" is up.
I've realized a lot of things over the last week or so, since falling for a certain young lady of a more conservative persuasion, who has quite literally rocked my world. I realize that a lot of the liberal ideas I had formerly and formally adhered to were largely misconstrued notions I had held, distortions of ideological ramifications that simply had no precedence in either established fact, dilapidated fiction, or even (and not either) the demonstrated dialectics of most people's dystopic desires.
In short, a new kind of love has made me into a harder, more turgid man.
No longer will I carry the torch for a a deluded liberalism, nor be the voice for lefty illiberality. What I truly hanker for is a haughty helping of a hunk of cheese that isn't defined in terms of a mere neo-Freudian kitsch, but the kind of cheese one can count on, like money in the bank; indeed, one needs sustenance so solid and reliable one can literally stick it in a pipe and smoke it.
So I can no longer continue to write here, after having fallen for someone like the one who has learned to call me "oppa." Such is an experience I never thought I could have had, either as a black man, or a Star Trek fan, and her highly-developed sense of what I have previously called here mere "fetishized femininity" has caused in me an emotional rise that is quite epic in its tense and torpedo-like tautology. Indeed, they didn't call Moby a "Dick" for nothing, as they say. Unlike the proverbial Ahab, my little lady has actually caught her whale.
When wondering why I have decided to forgo any further forays into formalism and endorse not Barack "Aladdin" Obama, but rather John McCain, the answer becomes perfectly obvious, does it not?
When you ask yourselves these questions, as you struggle for the answers, yet still can't bring yourself to face the truth, realize that Tom Cruise once said, quite poignantly, that the "truth could not be handled" and that in a similar situation, Al Pacino pointed a finger and said that the entire Supreme Court was indeed, very much "out of order."
In the same way, I was once out of love, and was so lost without her, but believe you me -- I now realize that it's hip to be square. Or did not Huey Lewis not give you that news?
So, it is with heavy hands that I make my last entry here, since the Metropolitician that was me has completely and totally ceased to be he.
For Pak Geun-hye's youngest daughter knows how to hit me where it counts, and to not just do that to me once, but likes to hit me, baby one more time, all the time, if you catch my meaning, number one Negaroni! See, I don't shrink away from saying, loudly and proudly, what needs to be said. And if you didn't get it from the passage above, you need a double dose of dis doubletalk. April mothafuckin' fool's, bitches!
Did I just see a black candidate for President of the United State just make clear, in perfect rhetorical form, what many Americans can barely even bring themselves to talk about, what few of us Americans feel comfortable discussing in mixed company?
Did I just see a political speech actually lay down historical anchors, with mention of the slave trade protection clause in the Constitution, deft presentation of sociologists Massey and Denton's analysis of how wealth production in the black community was prevented by discriminatory Federal Housing Adminisation, GI Bill, and exclusionary real estate practices? Then move right into the silent anger of the black community, followed by mention of how the black community has often been complicit in its own misery?
Did I also just see a black candidate for President of the United State channel sources of white frustration, talk about why many whites reject the criticism of "white privilege", and the understandable fears and prejudices that makes whites guilty of being nothing more than human, as opposed to "racist?"
Whoa. This is the most powerful and historically lucid speech I have seen in all my short 36 years of time spent on earth. This is a man who is not only a uniter, but eminently "presidential" and who truly transcends the petty politics of reductionist identity. It is worth watching in its entirety.
Firstly, it was a risk. He let people off the hook, put himself potentially on it -- he didn't make political potshots, and kept it classy.
It's honest and I respect Obama for not simply dumping a friend because it's politically convenient, especially when it would have been actually understandable -- nay, even expected -- that he do so.
He manages to rise above the mud-slinging fray and actually let Ferraro off the hook by equating her with Wright, and for suggesting that not only are her feeling expected, but even understandable.
He, for the first time since I have been politically self-aware as a political being, articulated the problems endemic to American society -- health care, housing, and education -- in terms of the need to rise up beyond the "not my problem" way of thinking when watching the "kids on the other side of the fence" go to failing schools, live in dilapidated and dangerous surroundings, or go without health care. Ever since Jonathan Kozol's book Savage Inequalities both angered me and cause me to well up with tears, I have never heard a politician make the central point that it's a crime for Americans to watch other Americans live like this, regardless of them being "other people's children."
And this speech puts to bed that ridiculous but persistent notion that Obama is "all talk." After going toe-to-toe in several debates with the sharpest political animal imaginable, after showing that he is perfectly capable and deft when getting nitty-gritty on the "issues" but obviously has chosen to speak-to-inspire when on the campaign trail -- now, he has displayed a "third mode" for me.
The man knows how to integrate powerful political rhetoric with the hard facts of history, with an emotional suasion and clarity that speaks directly to the hearts of Americans of all backgrounds, who sit in their corners, too afraid to talk with one another, too timid to exchange anything other than polite pleasantries across the racial/ethnic divide, while the big, fat elephant continues to sit in the room, preventing us from solving any of the corollary issues that continues to keep our nation less than it should and could be.
This is a man who has just demonstrated that he is truly a class act, a level above anything Clinton or anyone like her could muster up, even on their best day.
This man is a true LEADER, and the most deserving of being elected President of the United States that I've seen in my lifetime. He's not the "not-Bush" John Kerry, or "Slick Willie" or even any of the men I've read about in history book for whom I might have voted (and hindsight helps): Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, FDR.
Is Obama as great as any of them? Quite possibly, but he ain't been president yet. But he's on the short list already, and I damn well wanna find out.
I'm voting for Obama WHEN he's chosen as the democratic nominee. I haven't this excited about politics in my life.
And back on earth, in the realm of petty politicking, I'm sure Hillary is hating that speech, because it was just so damn good, and she wishes she had made it. Well, if that were even possible.
Damn, Obama's good.
And that's the thing. He's not even trying to be. "Good," that is. He is just who he is.
And anyone watching that speech knows he just hit a fucking home run outta the park. Gone. Over the bleachers. Hit a skylight, too.
Man - somebody needed to be given a smart slap about a decade prior.
I only say that because if I had said, "My mom is a f**king b***h" and "I hate her" or the same with my dad, ya'll would have never even heard of me. Wouldn't even be here, my peoples!
One story I can relate from my childhood is me, in front of all my cousins and relatives, complaining about some present I didn't get, grumbling and being pissy. For about a minute.
I was told, in a stentorian, Darth Vader tone, to go wait downstairs and await my whooping. I begged, I pleaded, but I had to go.
The great guru of the 1990's -- Steven Seagal -- once said through film that "Anticipation of death is worse than death itself." I am absolutely sure that my dad sat around the kitchen table with the other older aunt, uncle, and granny, smoking a cigarette and chuckling about how my butt needed to be "lit up." I must have waited 10 minutes for that whooping, and that is THE WORST. I doubt my dad had seen Above the Law or Hard to Kill or whichever movie that line had been used in, but he knew that fact implicitly. I think he must have learned it through direct experience.
So when I hear the footsteps, I am bouncing off the walls, trying to negotiate, to stop what cannot be stopped. Parents, I hear, often say things like "This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you," but my parents never wasted time with such obvious and utter bullshit. On the handful of times in my life when I was bare-butt spanked and for a good long time, it hurt like a mofo and remained in my memory forever.
Yes, I had learned the error of my ways as soon as the command to go downstairs was received, and that feeling doubled as my dad's footsteps creaked down the stairs. But they say the best learning happens in an emotional context, and I think fear works just as well as any emotion.
Not only did I truly, madly, and deeply come to understand the "sound of one hand slapping," the command to "Now, go back upstairs!" was even worse. That humiliating walk back up the creaky stairs and the deafening silence that roared from the lips of all my cousins and relatives watching -- wow.
You know that twitch you get after crying really hard? That weird artifact of hyperventilation that developed as part of mammalian evolution on land? Where your whole side spasm rhythmically about once every 4 seconds? Man, that shit is loud when you're sitting around all your folks, who are kinda thinking, "Man, that was a pretty stupid thing to pull on Christmas Day. Now, lookatchoo." Hehe.
That straightened my shit RIGHT out.
And surely, any of the younger cousins were thinking, "There, but for the grace of God-given common sense and the desire for boodie self-preservation, go I." My spanking had surely served the additional purpose of being that first hostage in the bank that you make an example of just to make sure everyone knows you're "serious." I think my forced return was a message to the other kids, just as much of a message to me. Dang those sneaky adults!
And I don't even remember being spanked more than once by my father, although tales of other spankings existed, but I don't seem to remember them, as in when I had a fascination with electrical outslets or something.
I also remember my mom spanking me after I spent an hour at a movie theater gleefully hiding and crawling under the seats (they seemed so big then!) and the game seeming to get even more fun even as it became more real, as several ushers had been dispatched to find me. I knew my goose (and my ass!) was going to be cooked once my mom caught me. Man -- even *I* was mad at me for getting into this situation. I remember that one well, grasshopper. I never knew my mom had ninja skills, but she flipped OUT when I got home.
Moms be fast, 'cause she caught me as I was running around the dining room table. They say that one of the first steps of response to an inevitable doom or terminal illness is "negotiation;" I think it's true. I quickly learned to just accept the inevitable. What -- am I going to dodge my mom forever? I learned to just get it over with. But even when you do, you kinda regret it if the spanking really hurts.
Anyway, I am just very, very glad my father wasn't like, "Oh, I'll buy you another little red fire engine, then, Mikey!" and wasn't to offer some other indulging placation of brattiness. I am glad that I had parents who drew the line and stuck to it, because looking at this video, this looks like a girl with a long history of getting what she wants and walking all over her elders.
As I get older and think about having kids, I think I will end up keeping my family's way of allowing a lot of leeway and room to explore between set boundaries, but once a boundary has been violated, the retribution is veritably nuclear. Once you learn that being a punk means reaping the whirlwind, and you know WHY being a punk is not to be tolerated as you learn the sound of one hand slapping, I think that does a lot.
And it seems to be ingrained in me. The sight of random kids running around the restaurant while their mothers chit-chat, or spoiled little boys throw a tantrum over not getting ice cream first or whatever while their well-trained young mom goes, "알았어, 알았어. 아이스크림 줄께!" and then rushed over to get them some -- oooooooooh. I can't even concentrate.
Strangely enough, I find myself possessed of a powerful urge to go over there and teach that kid "the sound of one hand slapping."
Well, now that the caucuses are factored in, looks like Obama actually won Texas. Nice one. Check here and here – time for the mainstream media to correct some erroneous information. And Hillary needs to respect it, too. She's all about the "process," right? Just like she argues with the superdelegates?
Before you say this site is "anti-Korean" or bashing Korea – read this: "Why Be Critical?" Chances are, if you're simply angry because I am a social critic in Korea but not actually Korean, see if your argument isn't just a kneejerk response that follows these patterns.
As for my photo book (now in limbo due to editorial differences with the publisher), you can see the representative chapters from the "Seoul Essays" posts below. Note that Chapter 3 remains undone and in limbo on my computer:
Recent Comments