Scribblings of the Metropolitician

The NYT Does Korea Again!

The New York Times is at it again, with their Korean culture stories. Korean chicken. Vietnamese brides. Korean marriage customs. Good stuff.

It is curious that the NYT has a continuous interest on Korea, and I wonder where that comes from – whether Korea has become of great enough interest in the general public (like Japan in the 80's) or perhaps there is a particular interest there amongst the editors there. Either way, they're producing some thought-provoking stuff.

A side-effect of all this is that Korea keeps getting this international spotlight about a variety of subjects that have nothing ostensibly to do with economic development, the World Cup or other major sporting events, nor anything that people in Korea generally expect to receive attention over.

And I like that.

No matter how much some Koreans may fret about perceived "negative" news – as defined by being something a government planner wouldn't put in a tourist brochure – the more exposure of this type there is, the better it will be for Korea's real image in the world, as opposed to the self-produced fantasy one that government planners continue to think anyone cares about.

From "Hub of Asia" to "HiSeoul" and "The Soul of Asia." I have to admit, "Dynamic Korea" wasn't bad, but let's not kid ourselves – Korean publicists' narrow view of what they think foreigners should and actually want to see in Korea has been selling the real charm of this place short for a long time.

Pieces like the ones produced by the NYT makes Korean culture interesting, it makes Koreans human beings, it makes people want to perhaps find out more about the culture. That's not something people do when you're just reduced to an "economic miracle" or tourist destination. And as much as the Ministry of Culture and Tourism tries, Korea isn't the first place on many people's lists of possible places to visit in the world in terms of flashy tourist destinations and world-famous landmarks.

In the international marketplace of flashy tourist campaigns marked by people in colorful ethnic dress, doing exotic dances, or smiling invitingly for tourist dollars, Korea ain't so especially special.

The New York Times has probably done more lately to raise real interest in Korean culture amongst the general American public than any tourist campaigns the MoCaT ever thought up.

My advice to planners to "improve Korea's image internationally," which is a question I've been asked a lot lately – make a frank and funny look at all types of quirky aspects of Korean culture hosted by some cool English-speaking hosts and put it on YouTube.

That's free, just like my advice.

Korean drinking customs. A comparison of Korea's spiciest foods. Where Korean couples go on dates. Renovating a palace. Throw a social problem in there and do some obligatory hand-wringing over it. Go to a gaming PC Bang. Interview the world champions in Starcraft (who just happen to be Korean). Go visit a foreigner who lives with the Buddhist monks in the mountains. Show Korean nightlife. Talk about the custom of "booking" (a pet subject for news radio in the late 1990's).

If there were a cool and fresh series like that on Youtube and promoted in other outlets, it would be a far, far better thing than the Arirang method, which is condescending, utter bullshit. To paraphrase Denzel Washington in Training Day, it's sometimes useful bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless.

The NYT is probably doing more to open minds to Korea than both the "Dynamic Korea" and "Hub of Asia" campaigns put together.

And don't fret, Naver News and other outlets. The best publicity in the world is free.

This Sounds Eerily Familiar

Ouch. Scathing little piece on the British expatriate scene written by none other than a British expatriate. Well, it would have to be. But still, I do hope that A.A. Gill doesn't find himself a marked man by irked Brits in Manhattan.

It also brings to the fore the ancient memory of why Sting's "Englishman in New York" song always irritated me. So he's "an alien. An illegal alien...an Englishman in New York." And? That sounds pretty hard.

I always thought that Shinehead's dance hall reggae version to be much better than Sting's. He just substituted "Jamaican" for "Englishman" and added some soulful angst; suddenly, it felt like a real song: "I'm an alien / an illegal alien / I'm a Jamaican in New Yoooork." That worked for me. And it was reggae – come on.

Oh, how parallel are the barbs and jabs in this article about Brits in Manhattan to western expats living in Korea. If you want to see Americans being more a living stereotype, Canucks plastering the maple leaf over every part of their body, or Aussies acting extra Outback, one would not have to look far.

I guess the job of finding normal people in one's crowd of expats is a difficult thing to do, no matter where you are. The circumstances are obviously different, but the overall pattern is the same:

Go up to the bar on any Thursday night and see the serried, slouched, braying, bitten-nailed ranks of them, all in need of a toothbrush, a cotton bud, and a dermatologist. Nursing beers and a well-thumbed ragged project. They're all here not making a film, not writing a book, not selling a sitcom. Don't tell me about your latest script. You're not a film writer. You're a handyman. You've never made so much as a wedding video. You do a bit of decorating, some plumbing, and you house-sit plants. There's no shame in it. It's what immigrants do.

Oooh. Come on – don't pull punches! Tell us what you really think!

I notice a man in a kilt. For Chrissake, who moves to America and brings a kilt? Did his mother say, "Farewell, son. Make something of yourself in the New World. Have you packed your native costume, just in case?" Just in case of what? Just in case we decide to re-invade Canada? Just in case he finds a girl with a thing for men in frocks with no knickers? Just in case there's an England-versus-Scotland match on the satellite television in some fake pub? Other countries keep their quaint ethnic customs, their special days. But somehow Diwali, Panamanian Martyrs' Day, or Jewish Family Friday Dinner seem quaint and diverse, while a drunk Scots banker in a skirt in the early morning is actually pathetically annoying.

This was a funny piece for expats living the life anywhere and who have a thick skin and a healthy sense of humor.

"Looker"

Get ready for the summer, boys (and interested girls)!

I dug this out of the archives from last summer, and had totally forgotten this shot, which I actually hadn't remembered to check whether I'd actually gotten or not.

Old girl in the front was totally in full display mode, while dude with the cigarette makes no bones about appreciating her – fully.

And if what I hear is right, this summer's fashion is gonna make Ms. Hot Pants look, well, normal.

And in terms of the photo critic side of things, I don't know of a better instant of "male gaze" being frozen for the eye to see. What I like even more in the picture is the way she is totally putting herself on display, so there's much more of a feel of give and take in the way I've been thinking about how femininity is constructed in Korea, on the street.

It stands out much better than in a similar picture in which I captured a man catching a glimpse of a woman (it's far more obvious when printed larger than the 500 pixels here), but she is totally oblivious.

I like the fact that in the newer picture, there is a clear sense of both a gazer and gazed in a discursive relationship, which frames the obvious fetish value of her high heels, which dominate the foreground of the picture. Visually, they form a nice triangle – a perfect one, in fact – so that makes me happy.

In a nutshell, I got damn lucky with that picture. It also happens to accidentally crop her face but leaves enough (via her mouth) to be able to discern an impression – in an ideal world, I might obviously prefer the face to be there, but as it relates to Korean law and the fact that this picture's a little hotter, topic-wise, than the average street shot, so much the better. No one's recognizable enough, thanks to slow shutter speed and blur do to camera shake, to really be recognizable. So – no legal issues here, either.

What do ya'll think?

10 Ten Reasons You Gotta Love Korea

I got it in my head to do another one while taking a shower today, which is when the best moments of inspiration come in any culture. Yet, I was doubly inspired because I thought of just how right Korean bathrooms are for me.

I've loved them ever since getting used to them in 1994 for the first time, when I was temporarily confused as to what to do in there – umm, where's the shower curtain? Sliding glass door? What's this scuba gear doing in here (my host father's)? Help! Help!

After I got over that, I accepted.

I thought this list was a bit harder to come up with – care to make any additions?

10. Korean bathrooms, in which the whole thing is made to get wet, no separate wet and dry spots – just a drain in the middle of the floor. Clean the walls, clean yourself, clean the toilet. Just spray, spray, SPRAY!

9. You hardly ever have to pay for software – especially Microsoft software.

8. Internet – everywhere – fast. Even grandmas have faster connections than most small businesses in the States.

7. In Korea, nothing is lukewarm. It's either gonna boil your tonsils or sear your taste buds off.

6. Quikservice. Guys on motorbikes who risk their necks (and the lives of others) to deliver you whatever you need for less than it would cost to take a taxi to pick it up yourself. Fucking cool.

5. The ajussi who can fix or make anything, and all for cheap. Almost every custom wire I paid out the nose for in the States (minijack to female XLR microphone adaptor, for example?) was made on the spot for me. That was $5.

4. Samgyupsal. The bacon part of the pig sliced raw into thin strips and eaten with garlic, leaves, and soju. It doesn't get any more pure instinct-in-the-cave than that. "Strength and honor!"

3. Korean banking. A checkbook that's always balanced and instantaneous wire transfers, to boot.

2. In Korea, it's always miniskirt weather. Even in winter. Even in church.

1. Corn dogs – everywhere.

Strange Bedfellows

I think I understand what a woman of chastity might feel not on her wedding night, but on the morning after.

It was a long time in coming. I had tried once before, but it didn't take, and I felt uncomfortable about trying again, lest I commit a great mistake in a moment of intemperance, a moment of weakness and not in full control of my passions. It was an interesting first experience, but one fraught with enough nervousness about doing something I might later regret that I decided it better to not try again. That was nearly six months ago.

Today, after much trepidation, I am happy to declare that I have finally installed Windoze XP on my Apple Macintosh. It was really touch-and-go at first, but after the fear went away, it was over and I was busy watching bad "UCC" on Pandora TV with Active X dingles and dongles installed; it dawned on me that the Great Mystery had finally been breached – I was now operating Windoze on my home computer, of my own free will.

*SHIVER*

I still get goosebumps, though. It's not like it's been a long time since my Mac chastity belt has been broken, so don't expect me to act like one of the ranks of the jaded, experienced Microsoft masses. I'm just getting the hang of this, you know.

But I did pretty well for a newbie. With the help of Parallels for the Mac, the insertion was smooth and sweet. Parallels took away all the potential pain of a raw Windoze install, since once the program is running, it just asks you for a Windoze install disc – any one you want, Service Pack 2 or not! – for you to just stick in the drive and and do... the driving.

I guess one can't say one could actually "enjoy the ride" of installing Windoze, but at least I was able to go take a shower and get some lunch while it went at it. I simply had to select an option once; otherwise, I just looked at the ceiling and thought of...well, I guess not Mother England, since I'm not British nor do I live in Victorian times – well, actually, I just surfed the Internet in another window.

You see, the install is totally safe. Before, I had attempted a real install of Windoze using a wrong – and ahem, bootleg – version, and for that, you have to have a separate partition on your hard drive. That's kinda scary, since during the install, if you push the wrong button in Korean, you can reformat your main hard disk – and you DON'T WANT TO DO THAT. Seriously – one wrong button click (in Korean, no less) and your main system disk goes away. Permanently.

But all that worry and trepidation are over; today is a new day. I awoke this morning and watched a little MBC news, opened my Nate On chat window, and double-checked a couple sites' appearance in Explorer (eww!). I might venture and do some Internet banking next.

But it's all within the safety of my Windoze window. If there's a virus, it can only do havoc from within the lockdown of the virtual machine environment, and if I ever have to reinstall it, no problem, no stress.

Next time, I'll just ease back and enjoy the ride. There's nothing better than Windoze – in a Mac.

Who knows? Maybe I'll be ready to get kinky and install Ubuntu just for kicks? Naughty!

P.S. For those of you who do this, note that the English/Hangul button is also mapped on the Mac keyboard – it's the right OPTION button, just about where the matching button is on Korean keyboards.

For Koreans who think Macs aren't for them, trust me – this is the sweetest Windoze experience I've ever had, and you get the security of a Mac protecting your Windoze environment! I'd say it's the best of both worlds.

Remember Johnny Carson?

For those of you who remember going to sleep in front of a TV with Johnny Carson on it – before there were any other late night hosts I could remember – here's a story and a video that not only talks about him via his wife's retrospective (he passed away two years ago), but has excerpts from the tapes that haven't been seen since they were aired on TV decades ago, and were picked by Johnny himself as the ones he wanted to be remembered by. It's pretty touching stuff, and the clips they show are hilarious.

On the page, find the small link to a 15-minute-long interview his former wife did with Larry King – that's the one.

And for those of you who don't remember Johnny directly, now's your chance.

More about 300 and Apocalypto...

Hmm.

This was gonna be a comment, but TypePad won't let me post a comment on my own site – the system thinks it's comment spam! I guess there are too many links and instances of HTML formatting in there; maybe it's the machine's way of telling me that this should be a post and not a comment. The Matrix has me, indeed.

So I've been looking around the 'net and comparing my reasons for heavily disliking what I had heard about Apocalypto and why I found the political readings of 300 somewhat uncompelling, at least in my gut. This is in relation to the post – "Fascism Isn't a Mere Aesthetic" – which generated a really interesting conversation thread. Thanks all, to those who joined.

I guess I've been putting the problematic aspects of the film (300) into the stylistic/Orientalist category that isn't too surprising to me, as opposed to the category of the more political reading that might be applied to the everyday. As I look around and read more and read up on the debates, I have to concede some more ground with what I see in my head; still, for some reason, my alarm bells don't ring nearly as much in my gut with this film. Perhaps because the message is so pat and simple that it's easily dealt with and done away with, at least in my head?

For me, I find the much more subtle cultural arguments that I hear are being put forth in Apopcalyto more problematic, because it's so much harder to pick out what the problems are, unless one is a real expert in the field, or at least has a bit of exposure to more enlightened learning about Native cultures. The egghead opposition to this film is heavy (read here and here and here and here), along with the people who simply feel directly slighted. This is not to say that people feeling directly slighted is any less important - I just think the arguments being leveled here are much more subtle, pervasive, and hence, dangerous.

I think of it sort of like the awkward political message put forward in another fantastic universe, through Anakin's character in Revenge of the Sith, when he turns evil and faces off against his own master to defend his "new Empire." He paraphrases Bush in saying, "You're either with me or my enemy" and gets ready to thrown down with the saber, looking drunk on power and positively Bushwhacked. But it's so obvious and ham-handed that it's better left ignored.

I guess maybe why I'm not feeling this could be because I saw the Persians in the film as so far removed from any reality in Iran/Iraq or Leonidas as Bush (at least the character of Leonidas is a man of honor and character, to a fault, something that the American president presently lacks) that it just doesn't register as anything that I could take seriously. I'd heard about these interpretations before seeing the film – I just can't see them as very compelling in the long run. It's sort of like the enemy you see coming – it's not sneaking up on you; you can easily know how to counter it.

Which is the problem with Apocalypto, if its critics are to be believed, and they sound pretty credible and make some compelling arguments. At least the general facts of the Battle of Thermopylae are in order in 300; in Apocalytpo, it seems as though the historical reality of the Mayans and their culture are almost completely out of step with what you see on screen; it's sort of like the Disney film Pocahontas: in general, some of the things in that film could have happened, probably did; but it strays so far from historical fact that it would have just been better to not call it "Pocahontas" and just tell a good yarn that coulda happened, maybe. As it was, Pocahontas just pissed people off.

But reading the Slate review, then an Iranian reviewer's digestion of that review, then hearing about Frank Miller's new take on patriotism on NPR, and his more recent interview on that network, and further reading around guided by the comments in this thread, I see the point that perhaps there was more intention than I had made room for. Still, I have to be honest when I say that this film will do less to vilify Iranians (I still think that the link between Persia and Iran is not a so in the gut as something a lot of moviegoers are hearing about as a debate and going "Oh, I see" over) than any film that has your standard crew of radical Islamic terrorists yelling "Jihad!" and "For Allah!" and blowing up the plane.

Just a few more thoughts on the matter, as I continue to mull over it. Thanks all, for a good conversation.

And now, on to more thinking about my "ethnicity" reading of Lord of the Rings...

Top Ten Signs You've "Koreanized"

Lately, there's been this pattern of taxi drivers and other service people with whom I come in contact saying some variation of "Wow – you're totally a Korean now!" in a half-joking way, but yet given as a compliment when I do something unexpected for a foreigner to do.

What's more, I've come to agree with them, although I still believe I am as American as they come, especially since living the expat life as one; surely, in some ways, I've become much more American, to the extent that I've been Koreanized at all. Life is full of contradictions.

The things on this list are all true for me, and I've been noticing them lately, when American friends come visit me. For me, it's not so much what I do, but what I don't anymore, that sometimes surprises me.

What makes this exercise fun is that they are all true, and all mark big changes in thinking and/or habits since I was a "pure" American.

10. You now see toilet paper as a long napkin.

9. You have an urge to take pictures of your food.

8. You crave squid.

7. You find next-day service for repairs unacceptable. "Why can't you do it today?!"

6. You feel bad about eating while walking.

5. You leave valuable objects such as laptops or cameras on tables and go to the bathroom, assuming no one will take them.

4. You can fall asleep within 30 seconds of entering any moving vehicle.

3. You change/remove all of your clothes as soon as you come home.

2. Going to the Long John Silver's at home and instead eating the crab legs, you suck the meat out of the still-attached side of the crab, to everyone's utter horror. (Michigan, 2001)

1. You find a bug in your pizza, but just remove the offending piece and finish eating the pizza. (Pusan, 1994.)

You guys got any? Just have them be personal and real, and they'll be all the funnier.

Stuff in a Box

To those of you who were not living under a rock or completely disconnected from the United States last holiday season, here's the video that became an instant classic – the infamous "Dick in a Box" skit that's probably one of the best songs Justin Timberlake has done in years.

Of course, "imitation is the highest form of flattery," and that is supa true on YouTube. A more kosher version of the piece:

And then we have – puppets?! Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The last is perhaps the weakest entry of the set, but funny nonetheless, and they get points for trying. I am also partial to Macs. But those East Coast ladies on top have got much more soul than the Silicon Valley types. But "Mac in My Top?" Nice.

And all of these videos will probably stay up, because they're either approved by NBC (in the first case) or are actual examples of what Korean marketers call "UCC" (User Created Content), a model that is failing to generate any real content worth talking about (as I said it would) because it is so over-commercialized by the won-hungry portal companies that it is turning off users and stifling any of the innocent creativity that gets videos like these produced.

YouTube's problem is the opposite – they have the creativity and user participation in spades, but haven't figured out a way to make money off of it. But it's day will come, I think, although the monopoly they had on the idea of embedding code to make videos easily transferable is over. But they do have such a large user base...

Anyway, enough talk! Enjoy the videos!

Pretty Much My Sentiments In a Nutshell

To save myself carpal tunnel syndrome, I'd like to respond to some of the recent threads I've had about the war in Iraq, its results, criticism of the president and his policies, civil liberties and the supposed bias of the "liberal media" (which lay down in front of Bush for a year-and-a-half after 9/11 and irresponsibly gave him carte blanche because of fear of the accusation of being "un-American") using the poetry of another:

And all these debates needed a bit of humor anyway. I feel myself getting so deadly heavy and serious on the site these days, as my previous piece on that really bad review of 300 should make clear, or the several before that.

Still, I gotta try to flex the academic muscles a bit, lest they get rusty, which I think they have already become. But it took me around 3 hours to write that post, and it was good review and good exercising of the gray matter. I know it must have been a bitch to read, but if any of you are on the same program as me (trying to do something with the brain), then you might be of the mind to slog through it.

And if anyone's wondering – no, I am not so sanctimonious and snarky in person – I just like to be on the blog, in written form, where I think everyone has a higher responsibility to be careful with words and back what you say, because you have more time to think. And I frankly don't think there are enough sanctimonious and snarky people writing and blogging away on this side of the fence, so I kind of feel like someone should.

And if I can keep my higher English skills in practice while doing it (the raison d'être of this blog), so much the better.