Caveat: Män som hatar kvinnor

I watched a movie I’d read about, finally, yesterday. The name it was released under in English is “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” but the movie is Swedish, and the Swedish title is “Män som hatar kvinnor” which translates as “Men who hate women.” This latter is a much more appropriate title – the fact is, it’s a very dark, brutal film, on themes like rape and misogyny, and therefore I should picturemake clear at the outset, I don’t recommend this as a “lite” cinema experience: not a family a film.

But the acting and cinematography were pretty good, and the good guys (and girls) win, in the end, so it’s not that depressing.

My main thought as I was watching the movie, though, was actually linguistic. I’ve never studied Swedish. I did, in fact, study Danish for a short period back when I was “surfing languages” at the University of Minnesota in 87~89 (I had a tendency to attend a few weeks or months of various beginning language classes without even actually enrolling – or enrolling and then dropping before the full refund deadline – as a kind of linguistic sampler, and during that two year period I hit perhaps half a dozen languages that way). Swedish and Danish are closely related. And they’re both close relatives of English.

The consequence of this relatedness (combined with the general insights offered by my having studied linguistics, and those weeks of beginning Danish) is that I found myself depressedly realizing I could understand about the same proportion of the Swedish dialogue as I am able to understand of Korean dialogue in a Korean movie – after having been trying to learn Korean for several years! Not all foreign languages are created equal, in terms of foreignness, I suppose. But it was kind of a strange and frustrating realization.

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Caveat: Dropping ants from toy helicopters to see if they can survive

I saw a Korean popular science game show type progrom where they were dropping ants from toy helicopters and then looking for the ants to see if they survived the fall.  The ants survived, of course.  I think ants are of such low mass relative to surface area that falling through air is like falling through water for something larger… the air resistance means their terminal velocity is quite low or something like that.  They ride the air down like a feather, floating and wafting about.

Today I had a lunch of delicious kong-guk-su (handmade noodles in an iced soy soup, with cucumber) – I went out with Cheor-ho.  

I thought my first grade class went well today -  I'm not sure why I think that, since the kids were running around like crazy monkeys.  Maybe I just felt more peaceful about that fact?  For a while I had them sitting in a circle on the floor with me, while we read a story.  I would stop and ask them simple questions, based on the model of the story:  "Do you want some milk?"  "Yes."  Miming, going around in the circle.  Before that, the kids had gotten hyper throwing paper airplanes we made, too.

I'm trying to get my sixth graders to start buying and selling land from each other in the town we've built.  But they're too respectful of each other's prerogatives… or too shy to aggressively buy and sell, even though they have no problem hurling insults at one another.  It's interesting observing these cultural differences, and to reflect on what implications they may have (if any) for how Korean capitalism actually works.

Caveat: 좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈

picture“좋은 놈, 나쁜 놈, 이상한 놈” is the title of a Korean western. Yes, western, as in western genre movie. It takes place in 1930’s Manchuria, which was a bit of a wild land at the time, with the Japanese trying to exert imperial control, while the Chinese, British, Germans and Russians tried to regain spheres of influence, and with disgruntled and outlaw-ish Korean freedom fighters and Mongolian tribesmen thrown into the mix.

The title is an homage to Eastwood’s classic American western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” – it translates as “the Good, the Bad and the Weird.” The title itself tells you there will be some interesting post-modern things going on. It’s over-the-top in terms of violence, but worth seeing.

I love how it includes all these seemingly out-of-sync cultural objects and references – 1920’s big-band dance music, Japanese soldiers, Korean merchants or black-marketeers, Mongolian tribesmen sitting on horses on hilltops looking like Native Americans…  but I would imagine it might not be that far off vis-a-vis what Manchuria must have been like in that era. Of course, everything is exaggerated and re-imagined, just in the way American westerns re-imagine North American history, too.

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Caveat: The faith-based economy

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I don’t normally like South Park that much. But sometimes I watch it, because the social and cultural commentary can be so amazingly intelligent and deep-cutting. One such episode I caught recently was the one entitled “Margaritaville” about the way that what we believe really drives the economy. Kyle becomes a Jesus figure, and saves the economy by taking on everyone’s debt (the way that Jesus takes on everyone’s sins) and thus allowing everyone’s lives to return to normal. It’s pretty funny, but scarily accurate in the way that it explains how the government bailouts are supposed to work.

And another episode where Mickey Mouse beats the crap out of the Jonas Brothers is funny, too, although much nastier and cruder, more in alignment with the South Park norm.

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[UPDATE 2024-04-18: Originally there was a link to the episodes discussed, but that link rotted and I have no replacement link. Thank you, internet!]

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Caveat: Le Corbusier’s Fantasy, Manifest

Walking along the Juyeop Park Esplanade yesterday in Ilsan in the humid, still evening, I watched the children playing among modernist statuary, parents playing ball with their kids, kids walking to or from hagwon as if they were college students, grandparents strolling, an old woman selling onions and garlic.  All around, a rectilinear park-like environment, punctuated by a seemingly endless array of identical high-rise apartment towers of dubious individual architectural merit.  This is Ilsan, a city of half a million that didn't exist the first time I came here, in 1991.

Yet unlike so many Modernist planned cities, Ilsan seems to work, at a very fundamental level.  Imagine something with all the charm of Cabrini Green (Chicago's infamous 1960's era Modernist housing projects), but inhabited by a mostly Lake Forest demographic.  The children play happily amid the soulless buildings, the parents are a bit overwrought, but deeply bourgeois.  This is not typical Korea, either, but it feels very much like the future.  The future that visionaries such as Le Corbusier and other Modernist "new city" proponents supposedly got so wrong. 

Ilsan represents to me the proof of the fact that although most contemporary urbanist thinking seems to focus a great deal on the way that we can influence lifestyles through how we plan our urban spaces, when you get right down to it, there are very few elements of the physical urban space that are guaranteed to make a difference, positive or negative.  Density is significant, but Ilsan is probably as automobile-reliant as any American city, if only because of the upper-middle-class status of most of its inhabitants – they need their cars, as aspirational objects, above all else.  Perhaps it makes me a bit of a cultural determinist (read:  marxist), but what makes urban spaces work has more to do with the socioeconomic position of the inhabitants than with how they are put together.

Caveat: The Princess Mafia

Back in 2008 I had a middle-school class called TP1. By sheer distributional accident, it was all girls. And they were not the “good student” type of girls – they were all rebellious, obnoxious, and often lazy as all hell. I tried some various gimmicks to try to keep them engaged, but ultimately the only thing that ever worked was to go “off script” and just talk about stuff. This suits me fine, actually – I think that’s the absolute BEST way to learn a language, talking about things that are interesting to one. But it raised a lot of ire with my bosses because I wasn’t making progress in the text.

pictureAnyway, way back then, I was also reading a lot of manga (Japanese serial comic book novels), and was toying with trying to write my own. The most progress I made was with a sort of concept of essentially recreating this experience of this clueless, fuddy-duddy, middle-aged, American guy trying to teach English to a bunch of trendy but disinterested Korean middle-schoolers, much more fascinated by the cute guy in the next class and their cell phones and their own reflections in the windows than in learning how to take the TOEFL.

I had named the class the “Princess Mafia,” which the girls alleged was offensive to them, but which they nevertheless seemed to adopt as a sort of badge of honor, and would bandy it about. And that became the working title of my little manga.

I did some plotting and framing on it, but my artistic skills are unpracticed. And then it sort of faded from my mind, as a project. Recently, however, I ran across some pages of character studies I’d made. I wonder… it still seems to have some potential. At right:  Hannah.

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Caveat: What you shall do

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." — Walt Whitman

Caveat: This Is Happening

Yes.

I recently downloaded the latest album by dance-punk outfit LCD Soundsystem. It’s really good. I’ve collected a few of their tracks prior to this, and thought they were snappy and clever, but not like “great art” in the field of contemporary pop music.

pictureBut this album crosses over to that status, for me.  There are snippets and tastes of some of my favorite groups’ styles: Modest Mouse, Radiohead, Talking Heads, Magnetic Fields, even weird old progressive rock stuff like King Crimson. Not just one or two good tracks – I think I could move 5 or 6 of them over to my “top rated” list for heavy rotation on the mp3 gadgets.

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Caveat: Iranians speaking Korean

I'm fascinated by the weird connections, cultural and economic, that seem to exist between Korea and Central Asia.  These are largely Stalin's legacy:  in the 1930's, millions of ethnic Koreans were relocated from the area around Primorsky in the Russian Far East (and neighboring the Korean Peninsula) into Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Russia.  Even today, Koreans are one of the larger ethnic minorities in Uzbekistan, and South Korea has cleverly leveraged these ethnic connections into economic ones, in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Back in Soviet times, however, many Korean-Central Asians had fled the region, and, in the years when Iran was reliably in the Western camp (i.e. before 1979), some Koreans had settled in Iran.  The consequence of this is that there were Koreans in Iran, too. 

I was reminded of this because I was watching a documentary on Korean television this evening, about the strong economic ties that currently exist between Iran and South Korea (which of course underscores the fact that Korea, for one, has no interest in sanctions and blockades).  But what really struck was that the documentary film crew were strolling around Tehran, and randomly ran into a group of Iranians who spoke excellent Korean.  These were ethnic Iranians – not Korean-Iranians.  But they explained to the film crew that they'd lived and worked in Korea for a number of years, which of course jives with my observations regarding the way certain parts of the Itaewon area, in Seoul, seem to resemble a "little Middle-East," these days.

Anyway, I don't really have a major point, here, except that it was very cool to see a group of Iranians talking to Korean reporters using the Korean language, in Tehran, with bustling crowds of women with head-coverings and big signs in Farsi in the background.

Caveat: Foodie?

Here is a little-known secret fact about me.

There are not that many websites for which I am a "regular." Most you could probably deduce, simply by "reading between the lines" on my blog a little bit: huffingtonpost, theregister.co.uk, wikipedia, theatlantic.com. But there was one that surprised even myself, when I caught myself typing this address into my browser this morning: latimes.com/features/food/.

Hmm… jeez, am I a "foodie"?

Maybe. I sometimes fantasize about my "next career" being that of chef. Not that it will come true. Why, specifically, LA Times? Because it's a pretty good food section – there are so many interesting restaurants and food trends happening in LA. Also, at least so far, the LA Times is one of the few major US newspapers that hasn't taken to experimenting with throwing up "pay barriers" for their online content. Not to mention the fact that I lived in LA for almost 10 years, and that was one of the paper-pulp version's sections that I browsed pretty loyally – sitting in the Burbank Starbucks on Saturday mornings, and all that.

Caveat: President X

I have seen so little discussion of Obama's character that I find genuinely plausible, at a core level.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, blogging for The Atlantic, recently, finally managed to strike a chord for me. He writes:

"My sense, in reading about Obama before he was a national politician or even a politician at all, is that this kind of cultural conservatism is genuine and not a ploy. There's a section in The Bridge where, having graduated from Columbia, Obama becomes a kind of ascetic and basically tries to remove himself from all the worldly things that tend to tempt men. It reminded very much of the kind of thing you see black men go through in prison, the most obvious being Malcolm X. Indeed, I've always thought there was something of Malcolm in Obama–the mix of humor and sternness, the notion of re-invention, the cultural conservatism."

The implication is that far from being the kind of left-wing liberal that the Right caricatures him to be, Obama is a kind of "radical centrist," which, in the long run, they should be much more worried about – because he's the embodiment of what happens when "by any means necessary" meets head-to-head, and then merges, with pragmatism, ambition and perhaps, even, compassion. Indeed, maybe Obama's a sort of "compassionate conservative."

Caveat: The Latest Drama

Many people know that I have developed a bit of a habit for watching cheesy Korean dramas – specifically the semi-comedic, semi-romantic contemporary genre. My excuse is that they help me learning Korean, and I think that’s true. But I find them just plain entertaining, as well.

pictureI finished watching “별을 따다 줘” a few weeks back (I think when I was tromping around Fukuoka), and have begun watching one called “오 마이 레이디” (Oh My Lady). I don’t like the Konglish title – I think it’s dumb – but the show itself is pretty good. I watched 2 episodes last night.

And then I watched an episode of a sciencefictiony US TV show called “River World” that I’d never heard of before. I found it hard to understand – despite the fact that it was in English. But it nevertheless managed to keep my attention.  I’m still getting used to the idea that I have 50 channels of TV to watch. I only got about 5 broadcast channels on my TV in my apartment in Ilsan – and that was only up until my TV died sometime in 2008. I didn’t really miss having a TV – I’m too easily drawn in to watching absolute nothingness.

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Caveat: 50 first dates… with a Vulcan

I used to love Star Trek.  I thought the best of the many spinoffs was The Next Generation – far better than the original, both in terms of acting and production values, as well as in writing.  And after TNG it went downhill, too.  Needless to say, when the series Enterprise came out, a few years ago, I was unimpressed, and I never watched more than a few episodes.

But it turns out, among the many unexpected things I found stashed on my hard drive recently, I found all of seasons 2 and 3 of Enterprise.  In a fit of escapist boredom, last night, I watched a few.  Compared to the first season, which is what I had seen before, the writing was improved.  And the main actors had developed some rapport and cohesion, too, so that the whole seemed less of a violation of the canon. 

I saw one episode in particular, last night, that I rather liked.  It was entitled "Twilight," and, like most episodes of Star Trek that I like best, it involved themes of weird time travel conundrums, alternate histories, and memory.  In fact, the plot was basically a rip-off of the movie 50 First Dates, which starred Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore.  It`s one of my favorite cheesy romantic comedies, because the themes, involving the nature of memory and the narratives that make up our lives, along with the ending,  are pretty deep, in my opinion.   Anyway, take that same plot, and put the captain the Barrymore character`s role, and put T`pol (the Vulcan first officer) in the Sandler role, and you get the plot of the episode.  It was … philosophically hilarious.  So I liked it.  It will rank up there with some of my favorite Star Trek episodes. 

OK.  Back to reality.  It`s raining.  I think I`ve decided to return to Fukuoka, today.  I`ll resume my WAITING, there.

Caveat: 금도끼와 은도끼

금도끼와 은도끼

옛날 어느 마을에 가난한 나무꾼이 살고 있었습니다.  그는 어머니를 모시고 살았는데, 부지런해서 늘 아침 일찍 산으로 가서 나무를 했습니다.
어느 날 산 속에서 연못 옆에 있는 큰 나무를 발견하고 도끼로 세게 찍기 시작했습니다.  그런데 손에 힘이 없어져서 도끼를 연못에 빠뜨렸습니다.  하나밖에 없는 도끼를 빠뜨린 나무꾼은 연못을 보면서 한숨을 쉬었습니다.  그 때 갑자기 연못의 물이 움직이면서 하얀 연기와 함께 산신령님이 나타나셨습니다.  산신령님은 금으로 만든 도끼를 내밀면서 말했습니다.
“이 금도끼가 당신이 빠뜨린 것입니까?”
“아닙니다.”
“그럼 이 은도끼가 당신의 도끼입니까?”
“그것도 제 것이 아닙니다.”
“그럼 이것입니까?”라고 하면서 그가 빠뜨린 쇠도끼를 내밀었습니다.
“네, 바로 그것이 제 도끼입니다.”
산신령님은 “당신은 정직하기 때문에 이 도끼들을 모두 당신에게 줄 테니까 가져가십시오.”라고 말하고 도끼 세 개를 준 후에 다시 연못 속으로 사라졌습니다.
그래서 그 나무꾼은 부자가 되었고 그 후에 결혼을 해서 행복하게 살았습니다.
No… I didn’t write this story.  It’s an old Korean fairy tale.  I like the story.
The version here is copied from my Korean Language textbook, at the end of the book.  It’s provided as a kind of culmination of all the material covered.  Note especially all the various constructions using the many possible meanings of “~(으)로.”
But the translation of the story, provided in the appendix, is truly terrible – it manages to be bad English, while at the same time failing to be a close, phrase-for-phrase translation of the Korean, which is what would be useful in a language textbook.  So you can’t really use the translation to figure out confusing grammar points, on the one hand, but it’s not a very clear version of the story, on the other.
So, being the strange person that I am, I decided to attempt my own translation, which follows.  I’m trying to stay very close to the Korean, trying to ensure that each Korean phrase and grammatical element has a match to its closest English equivalent, that I can figure out – but at the same time I’m trying to make sure it’s at least passable English, meaning no glaring grammatical or idiomatic errors.
If there are mistakes in the Korean above, blame my poor Korean typing skills, not my Korean textbook – it’s probably just a typo, since I copied the text of the story from my textbook manually.

The gold axe and the silver axe

In olden days a poor woodcutter was living in some village.  That man lived with his mother, and since he was industrious, every morning he went to the mountain and cut wood.
One day, being at the mountain near a pond, he found a big tree and be began to cut it with his axe.  But then his hand became weak and he dropped the axe in the pond.  The woodcutter, having but the one axe, looked in the pond and sighed.  At that moment suddenly the pond’s waters stirred and, along with some white smoke, a mountain spirit appeared.  The mountain spirit held out a gold axe, and spoke.
“Did you drop this gold axe?”
“No, sir.”
“Then is this silver axe your axe?”
“That isn’t mine either.”
“Then is this yours?” he said, and held out the dropped iron axe.
“Yes, that’s definitely my axe.”
The mountain spirit said, “Because you are honest I will give you all these axes, so take them,” and with that he gave the three axes and disappeared again into the pond.
And so the woodcutter became rich, and after that he got married and lived happily.
 

Caveat: 빈집

pictureI saw the most remarkable movie last night.  It is a Korean movie from 2004, entitled 빈집 (bin-jip = empty house).  The “official” English title is 3-Iron (a golf reference) which is both unimaginative, and utterly fails to capture the primary symbolism embedded in the Korean Language title vis-a-vis the movie itself.
I found it on my hard drive last night.  I must have downloaded it at some point, and totally forgotten about it.  I`m glad to have found it again.
I think it will be my new favorite Korean movie, although the fact that it`s Korean is not really relevant to the plot, which is more universal, and the almost utter absence of dialog (and the relative irrelevance of what little dialog there is ) means that even if you don`t have subtitles, you will understand and enjoy this movie.  It`s pure moving image, with nevertheless deep and interesting characters and a complex plot.  It`s what movies can and should be.
Anyway, I`ll let others summarize the plot and provide a formal review.  But this was a great movie.

Caveat: Projects

“There are projects for the dead and there are projects for the living. Though I confess sometimes I get confused by that distinction.” – Jim White, lyrics from his song “Still Waters.”

I’m pretty confused. Need to focus on my projects, regardless.

What I’m listening to right now.

[Youtube embed added 2011-08-02 as part of my background noise project]

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Caveat: Weird, weird music

So, my chinese-tea-making acquaintance in Suwon has 2 children. The older child, Bong-jun, is 13 years old. There was a picture of the two siblings, along with two history-re-enactors (who are not acquaintances) and me, in one of my blog posts from about 2 weeks ago.

Anyway, Bong-jun has a blog. And he’s got a very weird video on it [UPDATE 2022-10-04: sadly the link rotted away long ago, there’s no video there], which I can’t figure out how to embed directly, here, but I suggest you go have a look. I’m not sure the video will work for you, if you’re looking outside of Korea, since it’s hosted on a Korean website, but it’s pretty interesting. The video shows some computer-generated / computer-played music, which is strangely fascinating to me – because it’s so evidently something that would never have been composed, I suppose, without computers.

If I can figure out how to embed it, later on, I’ll drop a copy of it here.
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Caveat: 고스톱

pictureI’ve been trying to learn how to play a game called 고스톱 (go-seu-top = “go-stop”), which is played with a deck of cards called 화투 (hwa-tu = “flower cards”) – see picture. It’s a very complicated “go fish” type of game that holds a status similar to poker in South Korea, often connected to themes of family togetherness or gambling-among-friends.

There’re several places online to find the rules in English, which is good because just watching the game, and even having it explained by someone as they play in moderately good English, is pretty incomprehensible. The best thorough description of the rules that I’ve found is at galbijim, a website devoted to explaining Korea to “expats.”

I don’t go there often, as I generally avoid the “expat” community, especially the online expat community. Collectively, they seem too negative about so much of Korea. I’m perfectly capable of feeling negative on my own (see previous several posts!). So… I hardly need the encouragement and influence of thousands of disgruntled foreigners. But anyway, galbijim’s explication of the game is pretty thorough.

If anyone’s interested, I’m sure it’s probably possible to buy hwa-tu cards in any Korean-owned grocery or convenience store on the planet. The Japanese use a version of the cards called hanafuda (which represents the same Chinese characters – 花鬪, in Japanese, as hwa-tu does in Korean) to play a game called Koi-koi.
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Caveat: Becoming a better teacher

I read a long book review of a book by Doug Lemov entitled Teach Like a Champion, in the New York Times.   While the apparent reported premise of the book – that good teachers can be "made" as opposed to it being something that is innate – resonated with me deeply, I came away from the review feeling a bit annoyed with the both the reviewer and the book's author.

That's because instead of coming out and explaining the details of Lemov's thinking about how one becomes a better teacher, or how one can be taught to be a better teacher, the review only serves to "tease" the content of the book.  The reviewer is obviously a Lemov "fan," and she's just cheerleading without really contributing to an intelligent discourse about teacher education.  Basically, the message of the review is:  buy this book, and you'll get the secret to becoming a better teacher.  

Knowledge like that shouldn't be proprietary.  But setting aside philosophical/ethical quibbles, I also suspect that knowledge of that sort can't be proprietary – by which I mean that it's not going to help improve education as long as it remains proprietary, when looked at from a cultural practices / knowledge systems angle.  Where good educators come from and how they're made, if they can be made, is not the sort of information you can or should hide behind a "for only $16.77!" barrier (current price on Amazon).  Lemov (and possibly the reviewer) may wish to revolutionize education in America, but I doubt they'll make much progress until they lose the mercenary attitude.  Is that too idealistic of me?

I have had consistently bad experiences with knowledge that hides behind "buy this book" barriers – I'm thinking mostly of the infinite number of self-help manuals that circulate in the world, but my experience with Rosetta Stone language-learning software is also a recent, and expensive, example.  I have begun to develop the belief that "good" knowledge (by which I mean truly revolutionary and/or useful knowledge) must, by definition, be "open source" in some sense of the term.  

So getting back to the idea that good teachers can be made, instead of found, I guess my thinking is that I agree, and I think the idea could be revolutionary for teacher training, but for now I'll continue looking at my own insights, and keep searching blogs and other online content, and keep reading less promotion-reliant tomes.

Caveat: Zina’s Musical

Last year around this time, I went to see my student Zina in a musical production. I blogged about it. This year, I had the opportunity to go again, even though she’s not now my student anymore.

pictureThis time, I had my video camera with me. Here are some clips from the musical. I’m still working on figuring out the plot (I bought the CD and the words are in the extended program, so I can spend as much time as I want deciphering it), but the basic idea is that some kids who live in a futuristic “ecologically sustainable” village get bored and decide to go to visit the big, dirty, polluted, future-city, and have some interesting and scary experiences. It was pretty cute, although I liked the plot of last year’s production better (nothing is better than the idea of mosquitoes bringing lawsuits!).

Note that although the kids are lip-syncing during the performance, I’m pretty certain it’s their own voices, that were pre-recorded so as to raise the production value a little bit – Zina’s voice defintely sounds like Zina’s voice to me.






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Caveat: Eerie Synchronicities

[this is a "back-post" written 2010-03-01]

I was riding the subway on my way up to Ilsan, this afternoon.  There was a giant earthquake near Concepción, Chile.  And at almost exactly the time that the earthquake was occuring, I was reading Pinochet's chapter in his autobiography about his own experience in the January 24, 1939, earthquake in near Concepción.  Of course, I didn't realize the synchronicity until hours later, when I heard about the Chilean quake.  But it struck me profoundly.  Obviously, pure coincidence.  But still kind of eerie. 

Caveat: The Literate Dictator (Dreams of His Father[land])

One of my many eccentricities is my strange fascination for the now deceased former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet.  I've been carrying around and re-reading the first volume of his autobiography, "Camino Recorrido:  memorias de un soldado." 

I'm hardly an apologist.  He was a brutal dictator, and his actions on September 11, 1973, and subsequent misrule and corruption are indefensible.  But several things stand out about this man, that make him different from most historical personages of the "evil dictator" stripe. 

First, of course, is the very existence of a fairly well-written, reflective autobiography.  And although some will disagree, I'm almost certain it was not ghost-written.  Firstly, there's the fact that he was a published author (mostly in the area of social sciences and military history) prior to becoming dictator of Chile.  Not very many evil dictators moved into that latter career from academia, but arguably, Gen. Pinochet did.   Secondly, the book is too stylistically immature to be ghost-written.   What I mean, is that its tone veers from petty-defensive to philosophical to nostalgic to sociological, without much logic or consistency, yet, for all that, it's got some very well-written passages.

Secondly, there is the fact that, unlike most evil dictators, Pinochet accepted the results of a plebescite and stood down, after 15 years in power, and willingly allowed the dismantling of the undemocratic 1980 constitution that he himself had created.   Again, his late-career actions hardly excuse his behavior at the height of his rule, but… well, not all evil dictators are equally evil, perhaps.

Lastly, I for one am inclined to believe the speculation that he was not an entirely willing participant in the initial coup, despite his own efforts to rewrite history after the fact to make his role more prominent.  In essence, I believe that he attached himself "at the last minute" to the CIA's plot, because he saw the writing on the wall, and that, as bad as things were, there were few leaders in the Chilean military who would've been "better," and many, many, who would have been much worse, and much scarier.  In essence, I would argue that his role was, paradoxically, a moderating one vis-a-vis the ultraconservative establishment in Chile.

Again, it's not my intention to defend him – but having access to his autobiography, and to sit on the bus this morning reading his nostalgic prose about his high-school years in Valparaiso and his time as a cadet at the military school in Santiago in the 1930's… well, even evil dictators can be humanized.  I've always thought that there were eerie and unintended similarites between his autobiography and, for example, Garcia Marquez's El otoño del patriarca.

And, how can I deny that I relish the sheer eccentricity of being an American on a commuter bus in Seoul reading Pinochet's autobiography – it's one of those moments when you get to think:  "Wow, I bet no one has ever done this, before.  Ever."

Caveat: 난 드라마를 보면서 한국말을 배울 수있습니다.

I’m getting back into the habit I had last year of watching Korean “dramas” on my computer. I prefer to download and watch them on my computer, rather than on broadcast television, because that way it’s possible to find subtitles for the shows (there exists a vast “fansubbing” community whose members freely create and post English subtitles for Korean shows, online).

pictureThe drawback is that I mostly end up watching “what I can find,” and I don’t get to watch the series in real time, because there’s the delay waiting for a subtitled version to show up. But with the subtitles, I can actually learn a great deal of Korean sometimes by watching the shows. And, the fact is, these shows can kind of grow on you.

Lately, I’ve been watching episodes of a series called “별을 따다 줘” (officially translated as “Wish upon a star” but maybe more accurately “choose a star”). Like most Korean dramedies that I’ve seen, it’s a weird combination of drama and comedy that’s hard to find in American television, and it’s not a series or soap opera in the western sense – more like a mini-series in that Korean dramas generally have a planned, fixed time frame from their outset, and aren’t meant to be episodic in nature but rather tell a plot (sometimes is a drawn out, complicated plot, but it’s still just a single “story”).

The fact is, I’m a pushover for these types of shows. They’re sappy and romantic and they are full of little moral parables and endless repetitions of unlikely coincidences and ridiculous plot complications. Yet they present the most compelling and also the most annoying aspects of Korean society and culture side-by-side, somewhat glamorized and somewhat exaggerated, but hardly simplified, at least in my opinion. This particular show I’ve been watching has me hooked.  I’m waiting impatiently for the next subtitled episode to appear.
picture

Caveat: Flaming Decrepitude

I watch Jon Stewart's Daily Show online sometimes.  A dose of American current events seen through a very sarcastic lens.  

There was a bit he did with John Oliver, where they were mocking the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, making parallels between old age (senators) and possible gayness in soldiers.  John Oliver used the line, [approximately]  "I choose to ignore your flaming decrepitude."  It was a very funny line.

Caveat: all the buddhas died

I was reading the Economist, yesterday.  Apparently, Tsutomu Yamaguchi died.  He was one of the very few "double survivors" of the US's atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 — meaning, he survived Hiroshima, and then, 4 days later, survived Nagasaki.  What I was struck by were some bits of his poetry, quoted in the magazine:

Carbonised bodies face-down in the nuclear wasteland

all the Buddhas died,

and never heard what killed them.


Caveat: Bye, Stuff

I said goodbye to my stuff at my storage unit, today.  I’m returning to Korea in a few days, after staging for a last few days through L.A.

I put the last of my things that I needed to store in the unit, locked it up, and drove away into a swollen orange full moon rising over Eagan.  The temperature was 0 degrees F.  I heard a song by Metric, on the radio, called “Help, I’m Alive.”

What I’m listening to right now.

[Youtube embed added later, part of the Background Noise project.]

Caveat: 돈키호테. 진짜?! 왜요?

I keep telling myself that if my Korean is going to improve, I need to try harder to read things.   I frequently puzzle my way through parts of newspaper headlines or articles, and I’ve learned a lot reading advertisements, but such forms of “found Korean” won’t be available to me when I return to the US.  So I’ve been telling myself I should buy some actual books in Korean to try reading.  It is perhaps too ambitious, given the pathetic level of my vocabulary — but I’m pretty good at working out the grammar as long as I have a dictionary in hand.
In one final visit to the bookstore today, I bought what looks to be a late-elementary or middle-school level text of Korean history, that I might try.  I also found an abridged translation of Don Quijote (돈키호테 = don-ki-ho-te).  I remember when I was first trying to learn Spanish, I would sit down and try to read, in Spanish, books I had read before in English.  So what better first text to sit down with in Korean than a translation of something I know very well in Spanish?

Caveat: DRM and antifandom

So, I made a video and tried to post it, with a song that I really like.  I didn't really think about copyright issues… I've seen so many homemade videos to preexisting songs on places like youtube, that I really thought the issue was resolved as a sort of "fair use."  Obviously not.  Youtube disabled the video I uploaded because it detected "copyrighted material" – ie the soundtrack to the video I made. 

My reaction:  1)  I have to find a different song.  2) I'll have to rethink adding songs to my videos, in general – but, my life has always had a soundtrack, and I was thinking how totally cool it was to be able to "share" that life-soundtrack with others, and now I can't always do that, which leads to 3) some weird, residual anger at the artist in question – why can't I use her song to show the feeling or mood I have associated with my homemade video?  Do I have to go through the rigmarole of getting permission?  It's not even a matter of money – I'm sure the money is insubstantial.  It's the inconvenience.  Do I want to remain a fan of an artist that makes my life annoying and inconvenient?  Maybe not.  Now, when I hear that song, instead of thinking the reflective, deep, philosophical thoughts I previously associated with it, I'll be getting grumpy thinking about DRM and why she wouldn't let me use her song on my amateur video, in what I thought was a thoughtful, respectful way, including crediting the song at the end (as I've been doing).  So I doubt that song will remain on my mp3, either.   Maybe that artist just lost a fan.   Is that what DRM (in all its manifestations) is supposed to do?

Youtube offered me the option of replacing my audio track.  But the whole point of the exercise was that I thought I'd come up with a video that matched the song in question in mood and atmosphere.  What are the chances I'd find such a song in their weird random library of "licensed" tracks?  Further, as youtube notes, "Note that advertisements may be displayed on videos that contain soundtracks from the AudioSwap library."  Oh, goody.  Not that I have anything against advertising… it's what makes most of the internet free, after all.  But, I just don't feel like attaching random advertising to this video.

Outcome:  the video won't be posted.  Sorry.

Caveat: Tagging on the 10

See video embedded below:  take some geeks, a lot of hardware and software and do some crazy coding.  Mix that together with some quadriplegics who got attitude.  And go out "tagging" on the 10 freeway.  As I understand it, it's a sort of "virtual tagging" that doesn't involve real paint, but I'm unclear as to whether the images are projected onto the real objects in real time (i.e. using something like an lcd projector of the sort ubiquitous now in business meetings for showing powerpoint presentations), or whether it's a matter of manipulating the video signal of the scene/surface in question after the fact.  Either way, it's a strange, unique, entertaining way to spend a lot of money and time.   The video is on a site called vimeo.com.  I like the content on the site, but the streaming rate, at least from where I sit currently in South Korea, is horrendously terrible.  

SE2 EP4 – Eyewriter Tempt LA from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Caveat: “i must of wrote that shit with blood”

Atmosphere is a Hip Hop / Rap artist from Minneapolis that I like.  Here are the lyrics to a track called "write now" that popped up on my mp3 shuffle today.  It struck me as interesting vis-a-vis my recent struggles with writer's block.

excuse me my friend, but is that your pen?
is it cool if i use it to duel with my skeleton?
is it proper for me to use it to persecute these people?
is it wrong for me to caress it against my ego?
can i use a ball point just to make my small points?
are these mechanical joints anything like hollow points?
old fashion #2 when i need that shit quick and steady
but that's assuming i ain't chewed off the eraser tip already
if i touch a felt tip believe i'm bout to make hell flip
computer friendly, only cuz that deadly bitch helps me spell shit
scribble for the you, the me and the politicians
aerosol to the wall, write it tall, for all to vision
he wrote it in jail, she wrote it in Braille
i wrote that shit named it, recorded it, i got one for sale!
if i truly feel i got something to show ya
i'd pull out a blank sheet of loose-leaf and draw it out in crayola
i've grown to keep an extra utensil in my sock
and i've been known to market on the sidewalk with chalk
most times, i write with a pen, sometimes i write with a buzz
and if i ever go gold, i must of wrote that shit with blood
and if i ever go gold, i must of wrote that shit with blood
and if i ever go gold, i must of wrote that shit with blood
and if i ever go gold, i must of wrote that shit with blood
multiples level 4, courtesy of the Slug
it's all about the penmanship baby,
it's all about the penmanship baby,
ayo it's all about the penmanship baby,
ayo it's all about the penmanship baby

Here's the video.

[Youtube embed added as part of background noise project.]

Caveat: If you try sometimes

House: As the philosopher Jagger once said, "You can't always get what you want."

(. . . later . . . )


Cuddy:
Oh, yeah, I looked up your philosopher, Jagger; you're right, you don't always get what you want, but I found that, if you try sometimes, you get what you need.

Caveat: Saliendo del túnel por fin

Acabo de terminar la novela El Túnel de Ernesto Sabato.  Me costó mucho tiempo terminarlo, porque me dediqué a leerla únicamente en el metro.  Incluso, sólo la leía durante los períodos cuando el tren se metía debajo la tierra… en el túnel, por supuesto.  Era mi 'subway project.'  No tengo la menor idea porque se me ocurrió leerla de tal manera, aunque al fin y al cabo, fue una forma de leerla muy fiel a sus monomanías novelescas.  

No sé decir si me gustó o no.  Lo cierto es que nunca me aburrió, y a pesar de mi decisión de leerla sólo en el subte, a veces me fijaba bastante para que siguiera leyendo algunos momentos en alguana estación, después de bajar y antes de buscar mi destino.  La terminé sentado en un Starbucks, esta tarde, bebiendo un cafe helado y mirando afuera el tormento a truenos, con fuertes lluvias y viento, que se sintonizaba con la tormenta al final de la novela.

No estoy seguro de que fuera una novela posmoderna, como la califica algunos.  Tiene su cara kafkiana.  La primera mitad me acordó bastante a Gombrowicz, por ejemplo.  Pero al final, es tal vez más que otra cosa un sencillo estudio sicológico, con parecer a una novela decimonónica — como algo de Galdós (Niebla) o de Henry James (Turn of the Screw). 

Hace mucho tiempo que me dedico a un analisis literaria.  Es la primera vez hace casi cinco años que leyo uno de los libros de la maldita lista de los 300 que eran los libros requeridos por mi programa de doctorado en la U de Pennsylvania, de la cual sólo logré leer menos que 50 antes del examen de maestría en 96.  Aquel fue el peor verano de mi vida.  Salí del programa, en parte, porque no quería llegar a odiar la literatura hispana.  Me alegro haber terminado y gozado de este libro, si sólo porque sirva de prueba de que he logrado no odiarlo por pertenecer a la literatura hispana.

Ahora vuelto a casa, he cenado muy sencillamente de arroz con un gimchi de pepino (오이김치) muy sabroso que compré en un mercado el otro día.  Estoy escuchando algunos nuevos tracks en mi computadora y estoy organizando mis notas y pensamientos.

Lista de música recientemente disfrutada…

  • Metric – Gimme Sympathy
  • Empire of the Sun – Walking on a Dream
  • The Herbaliser – Same as it Never Was
  • Hyperbubble – Better Set Your Phasers to Stun
  • Marina & The Diamonds – I am not a Robot
  • Moby – Pale Horses
  • Yelle – Qui Est Cette Fille
  • Röyksopp – This Must Be It
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