Scribblings of the Metropolitician

Holy Ketchup, Batman!

Rotten Tomatoes – a weirdly reliable source on how good a movie will be, and one I've been using since forever – rated The Host at a whopping 95%. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring got 93%.

Dang. That's no joke, dude.

The Host With the Most

I love the fact that The New York Times is loving The Host. I'm still wigging out that my favorite director from back in the day is now the hottest thing since sliced tooboo around the world.

By turns a carnival of horrors and a family melodrama (variations on the same theme), “The Host” is also a rethink of those 1950s cine-quickies in which mondo ants, locusts, wasps, crabs and snails and one seriously ticked off amphibious reptile go on the rampage, visiting punishment on a hapless, guilty humanity. Like Godzilla (Gojira in the original Japanese), some of these mutants were born under a mushroom cloud; others were hatched in the B-movie hothouse of box-office opportunism.

I'm sure Bae Du-na is wigging off of being in The New York Times over any of the other actors, outside of the traditional publicity shots. Perhaps she's so good at looking apprehensive? Confused? But she was definitely cool with the bow and arrow. Remember, she's the only one who faces off, warrior-style, against the monster. 3 times. Badass.

It's also interesting to see The Host being so heavily compared to Little Miss Sunshine (both in the NYT and Salon), in terms of a quirky family that transverses and transgresses American society. One of the strengths of The Host, when I first saw it alone, without finished sound effects, in my home theater in the middle of the night as prep for meeting the director the next day, was its universal appeal, but chock full of local flavor.

To me, this was the answer of how to balance the universal appeal required to appeal to just about anyone – especially international audiences – while preserving the grit, flavor, and funk of the local culture that makes foreign films, well, foreign.

“The Host” may be born out of sociopolitical tensions, scares about SARS and the avian flu, or Mr. Bong’s imagination, but it’s also a snapshot of a modern South Korea bordering on social anarchy, one in which a fatalistically obedient old-timer and his three preternaturally immature adult children face down a rampaging beast along with clueless doctors, Keystone Kops, faithless friends and even hordes of paparazzi.

This is what the rush to capitalize on the "Korean Wave" is missing, as directors like Kang Je-gyu (Shiri, Taegugki) try to make Korean films universal by making them in the Hollywood style and forgetting Korean flavor in the process.

I see it this way: if you want to market Korean food, you prepare authentic Korean food made with the best Korean ingredients possible. You don't take American ingredients and try to fake the funk. Kimchichigae is good because it's kimchichigae; you might reduce the spice a bit, or add some more meat for a different palate, but the basic ingredients are the same. But you don't replace kimchi with boiled cabbage and throw in some red pepper powder to cover it. That's what Shiri felt like to me.

To me, the future of any "Korean Wave" that will succeed lies in the Bong Joon Ho recipe, who is that antithesis of the Kang Je-Gyu, which is to milk and bilk the Korean audience and the fad of the "Wave" for as much as he can get away with. It may seem harsh to say, but such films as the ones he makes are an insult to the true power of Korean cinema.

And with films like The Host lie the future, in terms of good cultural content, not a self-congratulatory, self-conscious, and smug sense of being an unstoppable "wave."

Salon's Take On The Host

I'd been looking forward to The Host for years. Well, that's an exaggeration, but yet kind of true – I've been a Bong Joon Ho fan since I first laid eyes on Barking Dogs Never Bite for a Korean cinema class at Berkeley in early 2002. You can read all about it in my post "The Monster Cometh," from June last year.

I'd always shown Bong's first film to friends who'd asked to see a "representative" Korean film, and they'd always been very satisfied – much more so than Korean audiences, who "ho-hummed" and shrugged their shoulders at it when it came out. At the time, Koreans were generally still wigging out that there were Korean films with big budgets that looked like Hollywood films – Shiri, oh masterful piece of derivative crap that it was, being the first of them.

I still say that if I want to watch The Rock, I'll watch The Rock, not a movie named after a fish. If I want to watch Saving Private Ryan again, I'll watch that, and not Taegugki. To me, the success of Korean films was actually sabotaging their creativity; now used to chasing after the big bucks against Hollywood movies, it seemed like they were trying to out-Hollywood Hollywood itself. Suddenly, Korean film fan that I had been, I was no longer interested. Again, if I want to see Hollywood films, I'll see the originals, not Korean versions of them. Ho-hum.

But The Host brought me back, and I was happy to hear from Darcy Paquet (of KoreanFilm.org fame) about it, which he talked about (in episode #19, available to the left) way back in one of my early podcasts, but had to remain pretty tight-lipped about. But I was happy to hear that my favorite director was making a monster movie about some slimy thing that came up out of the Han River and acted as the foil against which to look at a slice of Korean society.

I was also even happier to get the chance to meet the director in person, as I helped do the subtitling for the translation job that Darcy had done. That was eminently cool. Too cool. I was too sheepish to ask for a picture, even though I could have easily done so after one of our sessions. Doh!

Now that the film has come out in the States, I must say I'm pretty happy at what sounds like a good first reception, and a good review – that "gets" the film – from Salon, no less. And they "get" the fact that film is far, far bigger than the label "anti-American" (which I addressed in a previous blog post as well), since its agenda had a few more fish to fry – well, broil a bit.

Yes, the fishy, flippery, 60-foot-long thingummy who emerges from the polluted waters of the Han River in central Seoul to terrorize the populace in "The Host" is the result of poison from an American military facility. Well, what the hell else would cause such a horrible mutation? The fertilizer off Uncle Hang-soo's farm? I don't think so.

There it is.

There's no question that Bong Joon-ho's film, which is the most satisfying monster movie in many years, takes some easy shots at the American military-technological colossus, and at the Korean government's sheepdog-like subservience to it. I'm inclined to interpret pretty much any junky old movie as a dialectical critique of whateverness, but in this case both the sanctimonious leftists and the contrarian critics are reading way too much into this simultaneously big-hearted and farcical adventure...The Americans are diabolical Strangeloves and the Koreans are two-faced sycophants. His hero, on the other hand, is Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), a middle-aged loser with a bad blond 'do who slumbers away the days at his dad's riverside squid shack. (That isn't any kind of a joke: Koreans really, really like squid.)

Hey. I like squid. You know you've been in Korea too long when you go to the Aquarium in Monterey and salivate when you look at the blue squid tanks. Or you see a picture of the first-ever picture of the giant squid they caught and you fantasize about how well it would go with beer. Beeeeeeer.

In the end, I'm just happy my name is in the film, in the end. Yep – that's right, uh-huh, uh-huh, my name's in a fiiiiiilm. Go crazy! It's ya birthday! Go crazy, it's –

But they spelled my name wrong. Michael H-U-N-T. Doh! Such is my life – get your name in the biggest film in Korean cinematic history, and...

DOH!

Go see it, ma. At least I know you know my name. And for those of you really interested in going hardcore, listen to the audio commentary that Darcy, a couple friends, and I made.

Sync up them iPods and go see the movie twice. And look for my name!

The Inverse Power of "The Inverse Power of Praise"

Maybe the title of this post should be "How To Present Foreign Knowledge Out of Cultural Context."

The February 19 issue of New York Magazine reported on some new findings from a Columbia University study that showed it just might be beneficial to not praise your kid too much for being "smart" but better to emphasize the "hard work" done. What's important in this is the fact that if performance flags, you can't say "you're not smart" although you can say "you didn't try hard."

The most important thing is that since there's an image of the kid "being smart," if there is failure, the kid feels bad. And when there are new things to try, new skills to falter at, the kid is often scared to try, for fear of not living up to that expectation. Of course, there would be none of that if the kid is expected to "try hard." The money quote in the article:

"I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts."

OK – all good, all good. I don't have a kid yet and it all sounds fine to me. I'm not writing here to debate the fine points of child-rearing; I am, however, writing to talk about cultural contexts and how amazingly little this is conveyed in the information that Korea gets from the West.

So when this report first came out in New York Magazine and started getting reported in American media, of course the Korean media picked up on it a few days later. It appeared, as far as I can tell, here first, then on television, then quoted widely in places such as cafes and blogs, and most likely on the morning radio news before being passed around the virtual water cooler.

What's the problem, then?

Well, the whole thing is taken out of cultural context. When it comes to education and child-rearing in the States, the cultural backdrop against which this article appears is one of excessive praise and a feel-good emphasis on "self-esteem," one that is starting to create a lot of irritation amongst academics and the intelligentsia, which, like most knowledge, will be followed up soon in the popular culture.

Even as some are starting to not only reject the Oprah Winfrey/Dr. Phil/"I am somebody" model of psychological "well-being" (here's another loan word fad I don't need to start getting on about), and some are starting to do so with extreme prejudice, there is still the fact that the "culture of praise" in America and Korea are almost polar opposites.

Look at the how this is illustrated in the photo illustration that accompanied the original article.

It's obviously referencing, as per the article, the fact that kids' sense of self, especially as it has to do with being "smart," are pumped up to outrageous proportions.

So what effect does this have in Korea, then?

This is an education culture that does not generally offer praise, in which a 95 on a test elicits the typical Korean mother question of "Where are the other 5 points?" The education culture in America tends to be, to a fault, "Good job! You're so smart!"

Of course, everybody doesn't fall into two categories, but the tendencies, for anyone who has been deeply immersed in both education cultures, is undeniable. I constantly was telling my high achievers in the foreign language high schools that I would have died for a (then) nearly perfect 1560 on the SAT. Or when I got a 94 on a given test in a difficult subject in high school, I was quite satisfied, since I knew how much work it took to get that grade.

I instinctively learned the way of the "law of diminishing returns," but didn't learn the law explicitly until college; Korean kids, on the other hand, have all learned of the academic existence of the law, but find it impossible to apply to their actual lives.

So I am not going to spend double the effort it took me to get a 94 on a geometry exam in the first place just to get a 98, because those precious hours could be spent doing something else. 3 hours of studying to get a 94 versus 6 hours to get a 98 doesn't make sense to me. I just slowly came to realize that I wasn't that good at math, I'd have to try harder to get a decent score than others, and that it would be silly to hold myself up to a standard of perfection in that area.

Everyone has strong and weak points.

But the Korean style of academic achievement doesn't recognize this. Parents don't recognize this, so kids can't. And until recently, the entire structure of the Korean education system didn't recognize this. What do I mean?

Everyone in Korea wants their kid to go to Seoul National University. Not really, but kind of. So the process of discovering that this might not be possible for the kid, or that the kid has decided not to pursue the life of self-torture and self-flagellation required to clear the hoops to get there, or that they want to have a career in modern dance, or go to Chungang University to be a photographer, is often a painful one.

This painful process is usually a struggle of watching the kid not match expectations of perfection, or at least the parents' lofty dreams. It is maintained by a cutthroat entrance examination culture, in which a 94 on a test does mean you're not in the top. It's tough for all around, and it results in kids getting pushed to extremes.

And even if kids are self-motivated, they're brutal in their self-flagellation. I had one student at my previous institution want to drop out because she was getting averages in the low 90's. She was actually considering dropping out, madly attending hagwons to catch up, then reentering the same school at the same grade level to compete. I called her plan sheer and utter madness – although all nice and counselor-like – and she later calmed down and used her obvious ambition to do well in the place she was at.

But this was just one of many scary Korean student stories I could tell you after a stiff drink. Well, you wouldn't need a stiff drink to get me started, but I do like stiff drinks.

Point is that, after this story gets oversimplified through the filter of careless reporters writing them up without even a note to the vastly different cultural contexts from which they appear in the West, people are talking on the street how "you're not supposed to tell kids they're smart."

Whaaaaaat? In an education culture that seriously needs to tell kids that they're good at anything, that test scores are not the reification of your worth as a human being, such that kids don't go taking flying leaps off of their apartment buildings every November?

You have to emphasize that crucial point, or it's being irresponsible. What, the photo illustrations that accompanied the original New York Magazine story, with the "I'm awesome" trophy or the little girl sitting atop a stack of them, wasn't a tipoff?

This is irresponsible and sheerly stupid reporting in an education culture that has elementary school children killing themselves because of academic pressure.

Let me repeat that for those who didn't get it. ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN kill themselves because of academic pressure in this country.

And the Korean media is implying that kids need to be complimented less? See, that works in an education culture that might compliment kids too much, or too much in the wrong way; but I'm what I'm saying is that Korean kids are not, for all intents and purposes, complimented at all.

That's almost as dumb as saying that "A recent study shows that excessive kimchi consumption leads to stomach cancer" and then The New York Times food section writing up that "klmchi leads to cancer."

Helllllooooooo?

If I have to draw out the fact that in one country, people eat kimchi EVERY DAY and in the other, most people don't, then this entire point is lost on them.

Well, it seems lost on most members of the Korean media, which is basically reporting the "praise causes cancer" in respect to its "inverse power."

Which leads me to inaugurate a new category here, which I'll call "Korean Media Follies."

I'm going to praise myself for how smart I am now.

Smart Jokes and the Comedy of the Stupid

Sometimes, I forget why I am proud to be from a culture in which freedom of expression is valued by some to the point that even my boundaries are pushed. Even though I'm way late to the party, this excerpt from the first episode of the "Real Time" show with Bill Maher on HBO has some of the most lively tongues I'd seen in a long time, and such frank speech, from such figures as the genius-boy academic Mike Dyson, ever-moronic Ann Coulter, fast-talking Bill Maher, a guest rant from Chris Rock himself, topped off with Sara Silverman's brave, unique, and socially transgressive comedy – the Holocaust, jabs at black oversensitivity about race, and even poking fun at ignorance by role-playing the racist – wow.

I'd heard that Sara Silverman's standup routines were truly off-the-hook and one-of-a-kind, and I'm glad I'd finally got to see one myself. I was also happy to see Mike Dyson again, who was briefly at Brown while I was a freshman, but got stolen away from us. Boo hoo.

This is the kind of show I like, where stupid people can just be called fucking stupid, but smart commentary can still happen. Ann Coulter is fucking stupid, as I don't need to remind anyone with half a cerebral cortex, a basic education through high school, and who's been keeping up with the news these days, or has ever seen her speak.

How did she get on TV again, besides the fact that she's got slim and blonde and probably got her knees dirty for it? Because it certainly isn't her intellect, not is it her skills at journalism. Yeah, you can ask the question of whether I would be so mean if she were a man, and the answer is – "yeah." Fuck Ann Coulter. Watch the slur.

Hey – she has the right to say what she wants, but she'll pay for her sheer stupidity soon. Really. Where did she come from? I've never seen someone so stupid be on TV so much, especially as a political "pundit."

Pro-choice people "celebrate" the death of babies? 9/11 widows were "reveling" in and "enjoying their husbands' deaths?" Wow. And as for simple questions about politics, she keeps saying "I don't know" and can't even answer simple questions! She sounds like she doesn't even watch the news. She sounds like she didn't even read her own book! The "liberal doctrine of infallibility?" Wow.

Ann, answer the question!

Canada sent troops to Vietnam? News to me.

This is my ode to you, Ann, conveyed through another person's poetry. Hat tip to Where the Hell Am I? for steering me to this video.

Ah, America.

Stuff like this really makes me homesick. But on a personal note, Ann Coulter just makes me sick.

Smoking the English Crackpipe

BONUS POINTS: If you get to the end of this essay, you get to hear me attempt my first academic lecture in Korean. For those of you who can understand it, it should prove to be a worthy little piece of amusement.

Let me start this little essay by saying outright that Korean society is so deeply mired in a mixture of intense development-era competitiveness, runaway "education fever," and deeply-entrenched sadaejuui (사대주의) – that is, a nearly slavish mode of deference to a perceived superior culture – that it is getting to the point where it barely knows up from down, shit from shinola.

The new drives to have all university courses in Korea taught in English is about the dumbest fucking idea since Pookie starting sucking the "glass dick" in New Jack City.

Korea, oh beloved "Land of the Morning Calm" – please put down the English crack pipe and go get help.

As a non-native speaker of Korean and native speaker of English who has lectured and taught in Korea's top universities, and in a subject that was in English but was not English – history, social science, and translation – I will say that what the Korean academy needs is not another swift kick in the nuts and something else to make it harder for native Koreans to be effective academics in their own language in their own country while privileging the privileged who are able to live and study overseas.

Korean society and Korean people in general spend soooooooo much money and social energy in a self-created web of English-related inefficient education and artificial worry that it is nearly crippling. People spend good chunks of their salaries toiling away in a hagwon system with no standardization or universal levels of achievement or promotion in order to take tests for jobs that mostly don't require much knowledge of English, that being the TOEIC.

Let me reiterate here what everyone already knows – your TOEIC score is usually required as a standard of promotion for jobs that have require no real English skills. I have a revolutionary proposal? What about a test related to duties performed on the job?

The reality is that English language ability has been conflated with intelligence, or at least academic ability, both problematic standards for jobs that generally require answering phones, shuffling papers, and other duties that are generally easily learned on the job. Yes, there are jobs that require communicating with foreign clients, or working with documents in English, but the vast majority don't.

This is but one example of the huge engine that drives the English industry in this country.

But WHY? This is the question that development and progress-frenzied Korea rarely asks. But I'm not even going to go much further in that direction. I'm just going to talk practically, not theoretically today.

Instead of driving another nail into the coffin – or to use another colorful metaphor – instead of adding more ballast to the sinking ship that is the Korean eduction system, the pressure point being pushed in society should not be the average Korean professor, but several other places:

• Don't push English-only at the universities, across subjects that shouldn't be taught in English (no one likes hearing this, but the academic level of Korean universities overall is already low enough, without being forced to adhere to the lowest-common-denominator of non-English professors' English skills) – push English-only for English teachers in English classrooms in middle and secondary schools. Yeah, I know it's already a rule, but it's a joke and never enforced.
• Wake up from the English "haze" and start making positions for non-Korean native speakers of English who are not English teachers but can teach other subjects. There are always some of us here, but we always end up leaving Korea because there's nothing else to teach but English. Sounds crazy, right? Well, guess what – the majority of people in "외국" aren't English teachers! And the few of us who might like to – and are qualified to – teach courses in Sociology, History, or Anthropology actually have few places for us in Korea. Then you'd have qualified foreign teachers and professors teaching subjects in English that will take off pressure to do so from Korean professors.
• Regulate and make universal standards in the hagwons! So much energy is wasted on the revolving door of Korean citizen taking a grammar class here, speaking class there, then dropping out because it's ineffective, rolling back in ability, then repeating the cycle all over again. If you can't create curriculums, at least you could make universal standards for gradated certification tests, to which many of the hagwons would start teaching. Then maybe some of the pressure could be taken off of the single-sitting TOEIC and spread throughout more regular and nuanced level tests whose main function is to simply promote to certain levels. Then, instead of hagwons making up their own level tests and evaluations, people could just be placed according to their non-binding level certifications. Use standardized testing – by creating and standardizing them – to society's advantage for once!

The whole point here is that Korean society is going so English-crazy that it is starting to hurt and embarrass itself, even as its citizens are bending over backwards, spending inordinate amounts of time and money chasing a pipe dream. The result? In a country that is already pretty English-friendly and filled with decent English speakers:

• Why is the standard for self-evaluation of one's English is that of a native speaker of the language? I speak almost exxlusively in Korean with Koreans, and it's interesting to note that when they sometimes hear me speak English with other American friends or when I pick up the phone, they often say that they envy that I "speak English so well." Umm, I'm a native speaker. I don't speak it "well." Then some people want to know "how to speak like a native speaker." I say, "You can't. Ever. Until the day you die. And I'll never speak Korean like a native speaker." The point is – why is a native speaker's level of fluency the standard, instead of the level of English appropriate to how it is used in one's life or career? And this is mostly from Korean speakers of English who are already quite good. It seems that the more English one speaks, the less satisfied one is with the level of speech.
• Why is the expectation always that Koreans in Korea should speak English in non-English education-related environments, instead of foreigners living in Korea to speak Korean? I'm not saying to pass laws "Korean-only" laws or such nonsense, but it smacks of toadyism when people cower in the sight of foreigners, stumbling over English learned in schoolbooks, then apologize for "not speaking well." Why are Koreans apologizing to foreigners for not being "good" English speakers in their own country? Shouldn't there be some expectation that foreigners speak Korean, instead of treating every white man who utters "annyeonghaseyo" like an alabaster god descended from the heavens?
• Why does the government believe that by not fixing its broken system of English-language education, while simply putting new pressures on the production end of that system, is going to do anything by expose more of its cracks, accentuate existing inequalities, and generally make life more miserable than it already is in this "education fever" afflicted nation?

It really is like smoking crack. It's a short-term fix that's going to be long-term harmful. And it may even feel or look good for a short time, but it's gonna hurt for much longer.

The Korean government has already done quite a bit to fuck up theoretically good ideas with short-sighted, bballi bballi, ill-thought practice. See my previous rants on the matters of how not to integrate foreign teachers into Korean public schools, or how to best work to cripple the few elite schools in this country in the name of jealousy and if-my-kid-can't-no-one-else-should, "배 아퍼" thinking:

EPIK as Case Study: Why Korean-Style Management Sucks

The Phantom Menace

Attack of the Clones

If this new initiative goes through, it'll add more energy to the existing contradictions in this society, especially in terms of added pressure to attend foriegn language high schools, increase the pressure for private tutoring even more, and most important of all:

The value of a Korean Ph.D., which is already such that such will guarantee you never being able to teach in a top-tier Korean university as a Korean, will truly be shit. Effectively, in order to meet these unrealistic requirements, foreign Ph.D.'s will become next-to-required, and will of course increase the pressure on prospective graduate students to study in foreign graduate schools, since one is probably going to be better off with a lower-tier graduate degree from the US than a Ph.D. in Economics from Seoul National.

That process is already well underway; this new policy will be the final nail in the coffin.

And look at the quality of international graduate programs, which already conduct all their courses in English. Only 2% of them actually have entered international organizations.

I see the entire project of English education as a giant treadmill with no real destination. Yeah, the overall level of English in Korean society will marginally increase, mostly as a result of the huge rise of English "education fever" temperatures with only marginal effect.

But this education fever being raged inside the body of the Korean republic is slowly killing the patient, and the only real effects I see in the near future of ingesting this "remedy" is that of completely gutting the organ of Korean higher education, even as it drags the others to eventual overload and failure.

The question is: Where does this crazed race on the treadmill really get Korea, even as anti-foreign sentiment drives out foreign companies and investors? Lately, the obsession with English and the errors of kneejerk nationalism are really acting to hurt the nation, much more than help it.

But I guess the problem will only really be apparent after a clear divide has developed between Koreans with preferred foreign and denigrated domestic college degrees, former Korean hagwon teachers, with more word-of-mouth power than any Ministry of Culture and Tourism, return to their home countries to spread news of how xenophobic Korea is but is yet a good place to make a buck, or as more foreign companies find China a less hostile investor environment than Korea – and cheaper, to boot.

But I'm just a foreign blogger talking "negative" about Korea, right? I'll continue to sound the alarm bell, but no one's really listening, I think. Yet, I write in the hope that someone will, while keeping my higher English skills in good enough shape to get a professorship in a university back home after I get my doctorate.

BONUS:

I end this essay with the promise of self-flagellating abuse – I recorded a lecture I recently delivered to a group of undergraduate American Studies majors who had invited me to a recent conference they had put on, in which I talked about the future of African-American representation in the US. Since they were mostly from universities outside of Seoul proper, their English language ability would have been a pretty significant barrier to my delivering the lecture, so I thought this would be the perfect time to try and deliver most of the lecture in Korean.

I flub and repeat myself in the heat of this ongoing moment, and even have my brain cloud over long enough to forget which country Barack Obama's dad was from while using him as an example, but I also tackled the problem of protected speech under the First Amendment, affirmative action, and other grave-sounding topics.

Since I record all my lectures now as a way of keeping myself honest and in as good lecturing form as circumstance allow – self-recording all academic presentations is a new rule of mine – I thought I'd share with you all my little triumph while using it to make a point:

Even qualified academics who can give lectures in Korean have no real place in Korean academia, no matter how specialized the practitioner. I'd be better off using my skills on Korean TV, which has been an option I've turned down several times and will continue to turn down.

I was recently offered a spot on an Arirang TV talk show (never!), even as the Hanguk University of Foreign Studies didn't reoffer me (nor even inform me of the fact, even after several phone calls) my position as a lecturer in Introduction to American Culture (a class I really loved teaching, even at 32,000 won per hour, 2 hours a week, so no – not much reason to teach outside of pure love), even though I was one of the highest-rated classes in the school, as students would constantly tell me. But since I had taken a break for a semester – they had asked me to teach "Introduction to English Culture" and I had respectfully declined, since I knew as much about England as your average Austin Powers fan – I think the next person who took over the desk in the department literally forgot I existed, or there must have been some other embarrassing reason for not rehiring me and then not telling me I wasn't rehired.

The English department never returned my phone calls. I found out I wouldn't be teaching the next semester from students emailing me as to why someone else's name was listed under the course listing.

Nice and professional, Waedae.

I think I'll be eventually taking my skills and credentials back to where they'll benefit me and be appreciated. I'm not lamenting this, though, to complain about my situation – I'm more than fine and I'm doing a lot of projects that are keeping me here and happy for the time being. But in the end, I think it's pretty sad that the best options for some of the most academically qualified foreigners in Korea are still teaching English to little kids who live in expensive Kangnam apartments.

'Cause I certainly wasn't teaching my little class in Waedae for the money.

Ah, well – I guess I'll just chalk it up to being reminded the hard way that even academic and professional recognition is something I won't find in Korea, where a black Ph.D. candidate with an Ivy League degree and is conversationally fluent in Korean can barely get a job in a hagwon. Well, maybe if I knew somebody, I'd get an interview, right? Hehe.

And a hagwon will be the only place that, if the Korean government gets its way, a Korean Ph.D. holder will be able to find gainful employment.

The Politics of What One Wants to See

Below is the World Press Photo 2006 Photo of the Year, which has caused some controversy and raises interesting issues as to who is responsible for what, who makes captions, and how much you think you know about what is apparently reality.

Read NPR's blurb on the issue, but more interestingly, listen to the short interview with the photographer on that page (it's Javascripted, making it hard to link directly). I went through the trouble of linking to the story at Der Speigel, which has an English-language version of the story available. NPR – links, please!

It's one of those cautionary tales about how you represent what you see in captions and to the rest of the world that wasn't there. The funny thing is that there is quite a bit of just the kind of contrasts that were apparently captured in this picture. But, as Der Speigel story pointed out, these people weren't the people in question.

And this was a good reminder to photographers such as myself, who are informed outsiders bringing in pictures that require a good working knowledge of the culture and society in order to even photograph – if that were me in that neighborhood, knowing nothing about Lebanon nor its class politics, I might not have been found anything unusual about this shot.

The photographer, Spencer Platt, had obviously known about the contrast, which is what caused him to make the split-second decision to shoot the car he said he saw coming out of the corner of his eye. Knowledge of the tensions in society and having seen this kind of scene many times before probably made him do a mental touchdown dance and mouth the word "nice!"

I can relate. When I was sitting at a table in a cramped grilled pork restaurant in Mapo, both my tablemates and myself had been listening to the powerful voice and caught glimpses of the animated gesticulations of a man who seemed the archetypical "sajangnim" or older man who is president of his own small business or company, likes to give sage advice about all sorts of life's trials over soju and meat, and wears a suit to everywhere but the shower.

Yet, I don't know this guy, and can only venture a guess as to who he is. There's a young girl sitting next to him who doesn't seem like his relative and could perhaps be a junior member of his organization, younger men who seem to know the man well, and older ladies in the foreground who don't seem to indicate that this is a company meeting, nor anything that would include women in the 40's and 50's.

In fact, it would be impossible to tell what's going on here just by looking – but the curious mix of people tells me that it's probably not a company meeting, and they don't look like relatives who know each other well. In the end, I don't know for sure, but it struck me as unusual and interesting enough – made so by the dynamic speaker who commanded everyone's attention – to snap a picture.

But say this picture suddenly became important. Maybe it wins a prize for some reason I can't foresee. People would be surprised to know that I took the picture as I was standing up and was so close that I didn't look through the viewfinder, but just aimed and shot. All the information I just processed for you above wasn't clear in the split second I took to choose to take the shot and the 2 or 3 seconds I let the shutter run.

As in many shots, it was motivated by instinct, a feeling that "Hmm. Something's interesting here." So you press the shutter button and work it out later. And in the editing, you sometimes find new things that you either didn't notice before, or hadn't consciously thought about, but were obviously motivations in taking the shot.

When I edited this, I realized why the man at the next table had struck me, as the image in my mind of "storytelling" had been the chord struck in my head. When I went home and looked through my photo books, I couldn't place the name, but found it in a collection of Life Magazine pictures. I had thought that this was part of the "Family of Man" series, but I had been wrong.

It was Nat Farbman's picture "Bushmen Children." He had been one of the first photographers to document the life of the nomadic tribes in southern Africa (something I had to look up), but the picture had always stuck in my head. That's why photographers should always be buying photo books.

One could bring up questions about the "anthropological gaze" and whatnot in these pictures, and in the connections that I made in my head, but I felt the key concept was "storytelling" when I snapped the shot. It made me think of that scene in Return of the Jedi when C3PO was retelling the story of the (then) previous two movies to the Ewoks, albeit as a near-deity and robotronic sound effects.

Since visual artists and storytellers such as Lucas are people who are good at their jobs and do their homework, I wouldn't be surprised if that scene in a Star Wars picture had been motivated by Farbman's very real picture taken from the human condition.

Yes, all that stuff can be bound up in an instant for a photographer, since photographers work in and deal in images, instants, and instinct.

The Anti-War Movement and Questionable Sources?

We've disagreed before on issues related to the portrayal of the anti-war movement, and have some pretty different political stances, but I do watch GI Korea's blog for a great perspective on what knowledge is being produced in the military itself, especially since blogging has allowed for a direct kind of reporting and voicing of soldiers' concerns in way that goes around the filters of the traditional media as well as the even more controlled military press.

Although the title's a bit inflammatory and I think hinting at the opposite of what GI Korea is trying to prove as not really existing, his post "Exposing the GI Fifth Column" is a must-read – very interesting stuff.

And I don't mean that previous sentence to sound like a back-handed compliment; I'm just thinking that a title indicating that GI Korea thinks a lot of the "internal" protest within the ranks of the military is planted, as opposed to organically grown, would fit better.

Take a read, because there's an interesting point of view that I'm glad I'm getting to see here.

One question I have – how strict is the US military with soldier-blogger-journalists? Are there regulations governing the freedom to blog? Is there any censorship or consequences for being critical of the military, or even just through good blogging, being "too political?"

Great work, GI Korea.

Teacher To Rot In Prison For Being a Noob?

Maybe I'm late to the game, but you have to read this.

I fucking hate Windoze. So I am not an expert in it, I've never had to install and re-install it, nor have I had to deal with spyware, malware, or even viruses. Hey – I have a Mac.

Anyway, without getting on a Macevangelist streak, enter a middle-aged substitute teacher in Connecticut who is using the computer in class when it starts going into a pop-loop showing people humping, pumping, and squirting all over the place.

On the morning of Oct. 19, 2004, Julie Amero's life changed forever when pornographic ads flooded her web browser during a class. According to the prosecuting attorney, David Smith, Amero's computer began displaying images of naked men and women, couples performing sexual acts, and "bodily fluids."

Now she's in the danger of going to the clink for 40 years on charges having to do with the mucking up of the morals of children (10 years for each of 4 counts), all for being an computer noob.

The prosecution's witness is a cop who's got 2 weeks of training and certification in using some weak-ass commercial computer security program – named, appropriately enough, "ComputerCOP Pro" – which simply tracks which sites were logged into at what time, and can't distinguish between human and malware-produced clicks.

Compared to Horner, the prosecution's expert witness has little formal IT training. Detective Lounsbury has completed two two-week FBI training seminars on computer security and other continuing education programs. He is also a certified user of the computer monitoring software ComputerCOP Pro.

Allison Whitney, ComputerCOP's director of communications, explained how her company certifies police officers to use the software:

"They get a full hour of training, and then they're tested," Whitney said. "A lot of these people don't have any kind of training. Their [superior] officers may give them some kind of low-level training. Most of the time we do the training over the phone."

Niiiiice. On top of that, the computer, according to experts in the IT field, was probably pre-loaded with malware – in fact, their analysis positively showed it to be – likely primed and ticking from before she even went into the room. And let's remember – she's a substitute teacher, so it's not even her computer, nor was the computer secured before she started class – umm, hello, dorky boys surfing the Internet for porn before class?!

"She was set up days or weeks before she ever sat down," Horner said.

Here are just a few of the red flags Horner discovered in course of his laborious forensic reconstruction: Anti-virus software triggered security alerts as soon as he started copying the hard disk for testing. The computer's Norton activity log showed that by the time Amero came to Kelly, her computer was already infected with spyware from notorious websites including marketscore.com and new.net.

One piece of spyware had been already been tracking the computer for about a month.

Horner also discovered that someone, presumably the computer's regular user, had been accessing eHarmony.com before Amero's visit. As he noted, dating sites are notorious for spreading porn-related adware.

Another program called Pasco showed that malware had automatically redirected Amero's browser. Horner stressed that this particular form of hijacking is invisible to ComputerCOP Pro.

On Oct. 19, someone did an online job search shortly after 8:00 a.m., activating several different malware apps. At approximately 8:15 a.m., someone accessed www.hair-styles.org, Horner suspects student involvement, in part because the next visit was to Crayola's homepage. Over the next several minutes, still more malware came alive, most likely triggered by the hair site.

The user kept surfing, and by this point, "crap was pouring into the computer at the speed of electricity," Horner said. The real point of no return was when the computer received a huge porn-filled Java file. From that point on, the machine was locked in an endless porn loop.

Note that Amero's class started around 9 a.m. Neither the prosecutor nor detective Lounsbury was able to tell AlterNet whether the room had been locked before class, or exactly what time Amero sat down at her desk.

Damn. As a teacher who's been forced to many an unknown computer in classrooms and lecture halls, most of them unsecured and surrounded by pubescent kids, I sure am glad I'm living in tech-savvy Korea, where IT at least has a clue as to how to lock down a system, or at least secure a computer for users.

As a Mac user, I would feel as helpless as this noob teacher if some crap like that happened to me, and I'm not a nice, 40-year-old white lady substitute teaching in Connecticut. If it were a dude at the computer, who would even extend him this much credit?

Which goes to show you – that's another good reason to bring my Mac laptop, work from the video out and audio outs, bringing the appropriate cables with you. And even if malware took over my computer – or the popup ads started flying – I could at least pull the plug.

Moral of the story – use your Mac with a User ID made for classroom presentations, separating your class materials from your personal stuff, while using Firefox, Camino, or Opera with popup suppression.

Geez – poor lady.

But as always, there's another side to the story...

But The Register contextualizes things even a bit more:

The substitute teacher said she immediately stepped in and shielded the children from the images, pushing them away or physically blocking them from seeing the images. As she tried to close the pop-ups down, new ones would pop-up. She walked down the hall to get the assistance of another faculty member, who advised her that there was nothing that could be done. Meanwhile, of course, the hard-core porn was popping up on the computer for all the seventh graders to see. The substitute asked one of the teachers to call for the school principal to help, but no help was forthcoming. At the end of the day, Amero reported the problem to the assistant principal, who told her "not to worry". Apparently, the incident was not seen as all that significant, and the log data indicates that Amero had continued to use the computer for the rest of the day – browsing lots of other sites, unrelated to porn. Oh yeah, and unrelated to her work as a substitute teacher. In fact, it appears that Julie continued to browse the web all day – even after the pop-up incident.

When the students told their parents what had happened, they told the administration, who vowed that Julie would never work in the classroom again. But they went further. The 40-year-old substitute teacher was arrested, indicted, tried – and here is the kicker – on January 5, 2007, she was convicted of four counts of risk of injury to a minor, or impairing the morals of a child (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 53-21).

Sounds like the sort of thing that could have been shoved under the rug, especially since:

Julie faces 40 years in the slammer for exposing the kids to porn. This despite the fact that a recent study by the University of New Hampshire, published in the journal Pediatrics, which indicates that 42 per cent of children ages 10 to 17 have been exposed to pornography on the internet in the last year, with two-thirds of them saying this exposure was inadvertent – due to pop-ups, bad URLs, or bad search results.

That's why, when I do certain search results during history class, I get a little careful and unplug my Mac when I sometimes have to do a spontaneous search during class. Imagine getting to WWII in a Korean class, the issue of the "comfort women" coming up, and deciding to search in Google for that one site I heard about that had the thing with the guy who said whatever; the search term: "korean women sexual slavery."

Playing with fire, even in Google "safe search" mode. And it's not just sexual content, but content that might better be described than seen, such as the picture of a Chinese woman in a chair contraption with some objects inserted into her vagina.

Point is, things like this can happen when dealing with multimedia, equipment that most of the operators aren't equipped to fully handle, or just in the course of teaching, when things slip up.

I wanted to show parts of the film The Name of the Rose, which I thought was an interesting film to see after the kiddies had finished A History of Knowledge and had learned about the loss of great Greek texts, the tensions about "the two truths" of the spiritual and material, and how many texts were rediscovered hidden away and forgotten in monasteries across Europe. Sounds boring, but after reading the book, the kids found it fascinating, yet weird that someone had actually made a movie about this stuff.

Except that there's a scene in the movie where the younger monk (a young Christian Slater, a fact not lost on pubescent young high school girls) shags the stuffing out of a peasant girl in a shed. I mean they get aniMAL up in there.

Even if they had a "SKIP A SPECIFIC CHAPTER" feature on DVD players, I wouldn't leave them alone with it and go have a smoke, trusting a piece of confusing consumer firmware to not show a roomful of high school kids just how well a monk can get it on doggie style with a peasant girl on a 100-inch screen.

Not. Good.

So I am always waiting for chapter 11 ("Interlude With the Girl") to show up, my hand on the button, baby. I would also never trust some smiling student to skip chapter 11 while I go chat on MSN, because there's a conflict of interest there. They're gonna watch that shit in slow MOTION. You know they are.

So you're stuck with using the material – it's a good murder mystery, and properly primed and prepped, even middle school students could find it interesting – and being pretty careful.

In the Korean case, it does help that the film ratings on home material gets real conservative when it comes to sexy stuff, although you can have a vampire speared in the heart and diced in a giant blender and still get a 15+ rating.

Or in actuality, you can get the important film Amistad – which is very useful for demonstrating the conditions of "the Middle Passage" (although the events in the movie occurred well after its legal heyday) and the interesting legal, moral, and political battles that were starting to warm up in the 1830's and 40's that would eventually explode into Civil War...

But the movie starts with a slave revolt, necks being slit open, and the captain having his sword slowly and painfully driven through his chest, all the way through to the floorboard of the ship. That's even before the scene where they drop dozens of chained African prisoners off the side of the ship, laden down with rocks to make sure they sleep in Davy Jone's locker.

That's tough to watch, and I weigh the fact that many sheltered Korean kids – especially the girls – have never seen any stuff on this level in their lives. Even I find it the "human freight" unloading scene hard to watch. It's something these kids will remember for the rest of their lives, just as watching and excerpt from the original 1933 black-and-white King Kong was a revelation to many of my kids, who found it pretty surprised that, on the big screen, the movie is still pretty damn good, even as we picked scenes apart for clues as to the racial, gender, and class codes that were signs of the times, as we looked at the film as a primary document.

In any case, is purposely exposing kids – and yes, with good educational purpose – to images that can and will fright and thrill really less scarring or jarring than a substitute teacher who got barraged with porno popups during her class? It's not like half of these kids – or more – aren't already surfing to these sites like made when they get home.

Point is, here's another case of American polyanna, Puritanical propriety meeting legal ignorance of computers and reality.

Although perhaps on a lesser scale, shouldn't Grandpa go to jail for leaving his box of Playboys in the garage for us to find? What if he knew the kids had breached the box, but he really didn't care, since "it was time those kids learned to be men, anyway?" Shouldn't he go to jail, too?

Dudes. Some porn got ahold of the system that a sleep-at-her desk sub was using, and she wasn't swift enough to get on top of it, it wasn't a big deal, the administration said that it wasn't a big deal, until somebody started talking lawsuits, jobs, and "heads rolling." Probably after a couple kids told their parents, while having dinner, about what their stupid sub did that day in class.

Gawd. Some kids saw some naughty popups in class. That's gonna happen somewhere, right, what with Windoze 98, all kinds of malicious software, and a fuddling substitute teacher trying to use the Internet to keep her kids busy while she checked her email.

She deserves 40 years for this?

Geez.

An Interesting Point About Engagement

As much as I oppose the war in Iraq, I am also one of the many who realize that since we're there, we have to think about ways to wage it effectively.

Newsweek magazine recently quoted Marine Capt. Rob Secher, who complained that "anytime an American fires a weapon there has to be an investigation into why there was an escalation of force."

Two related things I am concerned about are the lives of Iraqi civilians and reducing such casualties, as well as allowing the troops to do the job they were sent to do, which will hopefully bring more of them home, faster. It will also hasten the theoretical day that Iraqi will be left fully in the hands of the Iraqis, however they are defined.

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting op-ed piece on the matter, one worth reading. I'm not one for the "shock and awe" attitude towards engagement, but I also don't that inquiries and finger-pointing every time a weapon is fired in war is the solution either.

The lessons of Vietnam ring truer than ever here; for as much as the US has gotten itself into the proverbial "quagmire", it is also defaulting to the same bureaucratic and political solutions that are just an ineffective in solving the bigger issue as they are guaranteed to get more soldiers killed.

I'll end this post with the ending to the article from which I am quoting:

Americans are supposedly united in "supporting the troops." But how can a country support their troops with restrictions that hamper their ability to fight? The surge is already under way. What's needed is a surge of common sense to persuade the Pentagon to restore traditional rules of engagement. Doing so will give our soldiers the dignity they deserve, the legal right to defend themselves – and the freedom to fight this war to win.