Scribblings of the Metropolitician

Seoul's 1st Pod Party!

"Awwww – Geek out! (So chic; a geek)."

Announcing the 2nd event planned for friends of this blog and podcast – this time celebrated as a Pod Party! Last time was cool, but the big table in the restaurant was kinda awkward, no? So we're gonna mix it up while also doing some cool stuff!

THE PLACE
What does a pod party entail, you ask? Here's the plan. You come to the Lotte World and come alllll the way down into the deep, dark depths where the ice skating rink is. There you will find a Sizzler, where there is an "outdoor" terrace area perfect all reserved for us. You can see people whizzing around the skating rink, the sound of glee and cotton candy is in the air, and by the time our pod party is over, you'll be able to see their little fireworks/laser show. But what will we be doing there?

THE SCENE
Buffet. Diet Coke. People whizzing around in circles. Like-minded people. Such an environment encourages socializing and gettin' creative. What happens, I wonder, if we add a mike to the mix?

YOUR MISSION

There are several little tables spread around the terrace area, where you'll be eating, yapping, and meeting new peoples. Sometime in the 3 hours we'll be there, you'll be encouraged to come to the microphone area and put up to 5 minutes of anything you want in there, to go in the next podcast. A poem? Your rant about life here? A promo for your blog and why people need to go there? A song you recorded and you brought on your laptop? How about just you audioblogging a message to your friends? Got a list of top ten somethings about Korea? Maybe you want to grill me for 5 minutes of your agenda. Anything's possible. Just keep it to 5 minutes or less so we can link them all together into an interesting pastiche podcast composed of the content you make.

RENDEZVOUS POINT
St. Patty's Day – Friday, the 17th, in the Sizzler right next to the Lotte World skating rink. Just go to Lotte World in Chamsil and keep going down the escalators. We're reserved from 7-10 PM, when the Sizzler closes and we absolutely have to leave. For those of you planning St. Patty's parties, we'll be ending early enough for you to make it anywhere cool.

EQUIPMENT
Geek out! Bring your laptop, your digital camera, your iPod, and any other equipment that might make you more creative, that might go with the audio snippet you record. There will be power strips there and Nespot wireless internet is also in major effect. If you want to sign up beforehand, but still haven't, click here to read more as to how to do so. Like they said in that cheerleader movie, "Bring it!"

RSVP
Like last time, please RSVP if you're gonna come. The terrace has room for about 30 folks, technically, and I'd just like to know if well either be coming up short, or will need a few more chairs.

SUGGESTIONS?
Drop a line to the comments section if you have other suggestions about this event-in-motion. So let's party, pig, and podcast together!

WHY ATTEND?
Fellow pod partiers – if you attend this wildly cool and probably first-ever event, you will rise in levels of coolness that are simply indescribable. The only thing I can offer is an example, in the form of before and after shots. Here is a man before attending a similar "geeky" party I once held in Oakland, who benefitted immensely from the experience.

BEFORE PARTY

AFTER

ANY QUESTIONS!?

America the Indestructible!

In my youth, I was a huge comic book fan. Well, that is to say, I loved almost all the titles in the DC Comics line and was intensely allergic to Marvel. What's the difference, say you, the comic book layperson? In a nutshell, DC characters tended to be idealistic, perfect, and clad in costumes that generally stuck to primary colors.

They had ridiculous superpowers and secret origins that seemed a bit less beholden to the dictates of plausibility than their Marvel counterparts. Examples are Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and Justice League of America. Marvel, on the other hand, seemed a tad more serious, the characters reflective (sometimes to the point of being self obssessed), and often more thoughtful about real social issues. Examples are Spiderman, The Fantastic Four or The Uncanny X-Men. Again, I'm not a Marvel man.

In terms of movies and presence in the American consciousness outside of the geeky comic realm, the ones that are the longest-lived and have had the most impact on the popular culture are clearly Superman and Batman. Wonder Woman has also made her impact felt. More recently, as cinema has gotten darker and the American moviegoing palate a bit more sophisticated, the relatively darker fare has come to the fore and the older, blander, and simpler stuff of the 1950's left to collect dust; over the last decade alone, we've seen really decent treatments of Spiderman and The X-Men that a global market has really responded to.

The even darker (and I do mean this in the pigmentive sense as well) productions of Dark Horse Comics and other underground companies have also been recently translating over to film quite well, namely in Spawn, Blade, Hellboy, and Alien v. Predator. The latter entry was a true disappointment, but don't confuse that artistic and commercial Hollywood blunder with the concept itself being flawed; the pairing of the Alien and Predator characters has been going on with great creativity and coolness since the late 1980's.

Also, one might note that the only black superheroes who haven't been some white dude or group's sidekick were "spawned" by non-mainstream lines. It's only been recently that mainstream America has been ready for a black man who didn't die in the first action sequence and whose blackness itself didn't need to be referenced in his moniker.

DC's Black Lightning, of course, springs to mind when thinking about such examples. Of course, as a black character at that time, he was expected to be doing "black stuff," but at least he was out there. Note that the coolest action heroes and comic characters don't need to reference the fact that they're black. It might come up, but Blade isn't stuck wrestling with vampire drug lords in the inner city, nor is Storm fixing environmental catastrophes in African countries. The scale of what they are doing is now equally as grand and sweeping as it is for white characters.

Thankfully, there aren't many leftovers of this racialized pattern of thinking that for the general audience to identify with a character, they have to look like what comic companies saw as the majority of their audience, which made all movie "heroes" white, something that is now changing with the recent examples mentioned above, along with that of Halle Berry's Storm character in the X-Men – and it is again, no surprise that hers was not based on a DC character. Even more interestingly, her character is drawn somewhat racially ambiguously, although she is still African-American. The white hair is pretty cool, and having Halle Berry play her was an appropriate choice.

So, if you wanna get old school and trace back some patterns of thinking from the previous century and earlier, it is Superman – and his bigger-than-believable DC compatriots – who is the clearest marker of the American consciousness. If you want to see what America was thinking as well as how it regarded itself, check out what Superman was capable of, what feats he actually performed, and how he was drawn.

For example, in his original iteration, Superman had merely "superhuman" strength, but he wasn't possessed of a God-like immortality and invincibility. He was strong, could stop bullets, and could leap over tall buildings – but he was still just an extremely strong dude.

By the 1950's and the Cold War, I remember (from the books I collected) him coming back from "interplanetary patrol" and noticing that Pluto was a micro-fraction of a degree out of orbit, so he gave it a little nudge; in another issue, he was helping the US Army test out hydrogen bombs by standing in the middle of them to note their effects, and even until I remember in the 1980's, he regularly flew through the sun (!) because it was the only thing that could clean his super-threads (which were untangled and rewoven by Ma Kent into his costume, by the way; they could never be cut). This brought up small problems, such as, "How does Superman shave, if nothing on Earth can cut his super-parts?" which were, for the most part, solved by him using parts of his own powers, or objects/shards from his original planet, Krypton, which brings us to the subject of Kryptonite.

One problem with the 1950's Superman is that he's boring. You start with foiling bank robberies and deflecting bullets, but that gets old; you move to mad scientists and their diabolical devices, but he bests even Lex Luthor at his own game; if you're a smart writer, you might even come up with ways to "threaten" the Man of Steel where he is weakest – the human heart – so you set up the danger of his secret identity getting revealed and either Jimmy Olsen or Supe's Double-L Harem of Lovely Ladies™ (Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lori Lemaris) being offed in horrible-yet-creative ways. But even that gets old.

(ASIDE: In researching this blog post on the Internet, it came to my attention that a couple collections of Superman comics were compiled together for your retro pleasure. Check out Superman in the Fifties yourself on Amazon if you'd like to buy it. And before I get another complaint about any commercial interests here, no, I am not getting a kickback. It's the least I can do for using images from this guy's book in this post.)

With all his powers, Superman was in desperate need of a weakness. The height of the kryptonite kraze was in the 1950's and 1960's, which made sense for a character (and country) that seemed nearly invincible. This was after WWII and before Vietnam, when America had been undergoing its biggest social, economic, and military growth in its history. The Cold War was on, yet American was confident. Yet the threat of international Communism was a threat that we couldn't escape, we had to deal with. Would I go so far as to say that Communism was America's kryptonite? Naw – that level of specific reading and interpretation I'll leave for the individual; but I will say that a look at some comic covers definitely reveal major patterns in American thought about what is right, what is socially acceptable, and what is common practice.

It's no surprise that in the 1980's, when reality and fantasy seemed too divergent even for comic books, that DC Comics decided to have a huge cleanup of all its ridiculous characters and parallel universes in a so-called Crisis on Infinite Earths, which was a meta-catastrophe that basically hit "reset" on the entire DC line.

It was also the time to kill off Superman and bring him back as a more vulnerable, human character – erm, kind of like what many Marvel characters already were.

When I was younger, I didn't want to hear about Spiderman's alcoholism and depression; but as an adult, I thought it could make the character interesting. As a nation, perhaps America had also grown up and wasn't a nation that matched an indestructible übermensch dressed in psychedelic tights and a cape. But in the end, the Man of Steel was many things to the American people, even if the culture had grown more cynical, jaded, and dragged out of the inward navel-gazing of American exceptionalism into thinking about ourselves in a more global context after 9/11, even if we did so kicking and screaming. For that and many other reasons, perhaps that can explain why it was such a shock to be reminded that the Man of Steel was indeed still a man of flesh-and-blood after Christopher Reeve's horrible accident; but even more than that, when the "real" Man of Steel died last year, I think it was a deflating reminder of how much America had changed since seeing our icon most believably portrayed in his 1977 movie debut, and just how "real" the world had come to seem for Americans when he died last year.

But for those of you who maybe aren't too familiar with the Man of Steel and how "innocent" America was, while at the same time "guilty" of many things we find unacceptable now, here's a reminder, a la the primary source-filled primary document-fests that were my Bubble Sisters and "Why Korean Folks Don't Like Black People" pieces. Behold:

Supes sure seems to be OK with violating his code of not taking human life. But beyond that, certain things are just now considered matters of poor taste, or just aren't in the spirit of Superman.

Whew. But Superman's new love of guns was relatively tame. Take a look at this:

What happened to Batman's solemn vow to never even pick up a gun? Umm, as in the defining moment in young Bruce Wayne's life, when he saw his parents gunned down in cold blood before his eyes? In many Batman stories, eschewing a readily available gun is a key plot element, not to mention the anchorpoint for his identity as a crafty crimefighter. And what's more, I'm sure that mowing people down with a gatling gun while Robin works the ammo belt would qualify as a major violation of the spirit of the agreement. Yet, we get this again:

I know there's a war on, but Batman pimping guns in the jungle? And surely the Dark Knight himself, master of stealth and silent stalking, might have thought that bright, colorful costumes don't make for good camouflage? But check out this even more blatant and frankly illogical display. Here are the main DC main men, all together. I don't think we need Freud here to talk about phallic symbols, do we?

But let's take off the kid gloves, shall we? Here are a few more interesting ones:

"Yesiree, C'pn Marvel, suh! You keeps-a holding 'em, and I'll keeps a-hitting!" Now, what do black people get out of this, again? "We're fighting for freedom from a racist, Aryan supremacist system that would have enslaved us." Hey, waitaminnit – who we talking about again?

Dude – Dr. Seuss? Dr. Seuss?! Yeah. This is how pervasive anti-Japanese sentiment was at the time. Hey – America put its own citizens, who happened to be of Japanese descent, in concentration camps. Are you really so surprised Dr. Seuss got in on the "Jap" action?

Here's another favorite, made for the boys overseas:

In comparison, this comic seems tame to what people with superpowers were doing to "Japs":

Hey! Hands off the white lady! And arms off, too! Ooooh – that's gonna leave a mark.

Stop – I mean start – the presses! It's time to slap a Jap!

I hope he has a parachute, because Supes doesn't look like he's keeping his oath to not kill people.

Here's the ultimate irony – this seems like America now. This cover is especially prophetic. If Superman is America, and America is the president, then we get – Super-Bush! I guess his kryptonite is the combined force of truth, restraint, and rationality?

Special thanks be to Superdickery.com, whose raison d'être is to show that "Superman is a dick." I came across this site while Google image searching for covers I remember collecting, and this site had all the good ones already collected and scanned. Sweet. And before you get your red tights all in a bunch because someone dared called Superman a "dick," take a look at the covers. The site's not an ideological or political one, but rather one that rose after the underground phenomenon that happened when people began looking through old comic covers that became available on a really cool website dedicated to archiving these comics as history, and a few fans with senses of humor began noticing the extremely weird stuff that came up when looked at through modern, cynical eyes. I suggest, however that you don't visit the site, since you will be sucked in and hours of your life will disappear in an instant, never to be regained. But if you do go, I guarantee that you will laugh your ass off. Here's a famous example:

If you don't get it, you might wonder why, when informed that the person each character has "touched" is doomed, each character thinks of the name of their female main squeeze, while Batman's mind instantly turns to Robin. Hmmmmmmmm. One wonders if the writers were running inside jokes with unbelievably obvious innuendos just by accident. I know people used the term "gay" more in its original sense, but still:

You gotta wonder, dude. And for all my insane and expensive comic collecting from my youth (I have 3000+ books in my house to this very day, yes, I do), I never knew this about Jimmy Olsen, who apparently crossdressed like a lot. Here's the funniest example that I found in my searching, from the TGFA Archive, a place that seems to be dedicated to locating old comics just like these that had storylines about gender-bending:

I mean, you really, really gotta wonder just how little these guys knew about alternative lifestyles. Well, people back then were so dense and in denial that anyone lived outside of the realm of "normal" could be as gay as a jaybird, but nobody would go so far as to actually think it could be you. Umm, does this sound familiar (Korea?)

Ah, this digging up of American ideology and rooting around in the 50's has inspired me to finish working on a post I abandoned a long time ago, talking about why, with its still-extant fear of Commies, strict gender roles, and variety show TV, Korea is just so retro...so... so...fifties! I mean we've got cross-dressing, makeup-wearing men who play a king's concubine in an insanely popular movie, who walks, talks, and squawks like a girl – but he's not gay – because there are no gay people in Korea! My question is – what do you have to do for people in Korea to suspect you to be without actually admitting in a nationwide media venue, a la Hong Seok Cheon? Well, Jimmy Olsen went strutting in heels, skirt, and makeup for kicks, and no one thought anything was up. Gosh, that's just so...fifties.

But I guess people were dense. Even straight people apparently didn't object to this little panel, which caused me to giggle insanely. I was thinking, "Are you kidding?!"

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!

Man, I love comics.

Podcast #21 Is Ready! Comments for the Next One?

The fabled and much anticipated 21st podcast is ready to listen in the left menu, or a click away from the white iPod icon, also in the left menu bar.

This week, the show starts off with a bangup old school song that's strangely apropos for the subject of media, misrepresentation of the truth, and the consequences of being naughty and getting caught in the public eye. First, though, we get a few listener letters and then try to fly through a few "What the Hell?" stories, including the non-issue of fan death and other urban myths. While editing, I realized that I could have dealt with the questions better, and thought of a few better answers after the fact, but realized that what with the difficulties of producing this episode, if I went to re-record, this podcast would never get done.

So I'll talk here a bit more about a couple things I thought of after I had already laid down my answers on the digital "tape." First of all, there is the issue of "air conditioner disease," which seems to be only a disease in Korea. I know many other places that are hotter, run air conditioners longer and hotter – but have never heard of this dread disease. I am convinced that it is simply part of many austerity, conservation, and public awareness programs typical of the more propaganda-filled pre-2000 Korea I remember. Back then, there was always an obligatory brainwashing piece public service announcement before every movie in the theater, focusing on subject such as not inadvertently starting forest fires with your family, the dangers of not conserving water, the need to continue keeping an eye out for spies, and detailed descriptions of "air conditioner disease." In that one, I distinctly remember describing how all kinds of evil bacteria live in the filter (which sounds like it might be plausible) but the real culprit lies in overuse of the air conditioner in the first place. Basically, the line was that overusing the "aircon" was not only a waste of resources, but it was also detrimental to your health. So STOP – turn that aircon down, get off your ass and get a handfan or two, and smile with the knowledge that you're helping make Korea a better, safer, and more energy-efficient city.

That's when I knew, deep in my heart, that I was a big, fat, ugly American – my reaction was, "Screw that. I'm keeping my aircon on at 11 on the dial and not stopping until my fingers turn blue and my Diet Coke starts developing ice crystals in the bottle. And pass my Big Mac, punk."

OK – so maybe I got a bias against believing such campaigns, and maybe I just assume everything I've learned on logical, scientific America is inherently true until proven otherwise. But I still think "air conditioner disease" is a crock. If it were so dangerous, then wouldn't frail, little old people in Miami be keeling over all the time? I mean, we're talking about sticking kimchee in air conditioners to prevent bird flu. Whaaaat?!

Anyway, the main feature is an interview with journalist Sei Chong, former editor of a major newspaper here in Seoul, who will give us the inside scoop on journalism and the Korean media. She's frank and likes to tell things straight – so if you've ever wondered what some of the issues are with journalism in Korea, standards of ethics, and how all that mixes together with various interests here – you gotta take a listen. The show runs a bit long, but that's the beauty of time-shifted media, ain't it? You can always save some for later!

Running Time: 1:25:29
File Size: 29.4 MB
File Info: 48 kbps (technically 96 kpbs stereo) at 22.050 kHz, MPEG-2, layer 3 (MP3)

Show Links:
Roland R-1 Digital Audio Recorder
The recorder I use – it's served me well. No real complaints here and more rugged than the cheap plastic body would have you think.

M-Audio's MicroTrack 24/96 Portable Digital Recorder
A highly-recommended recorder for prosumer enthusiasts.