The Beiderbecke Affair

'Reverend Richard loves Kimchi'

Maria the Korean Bride is still marrying folks from all over. This summer she toured the Midwest.

My wedding officiant was also a Yellow Shirt. Reverend Richard loves Kimchi, the Korean signature dish. I knew then I loved him even more!

After the wedding, Dave helped me KISS THE RED BRICK ROAD! I felt like
a true race car driver afterward.

I haven’t forgotten my groom, Michael. He was indeed too cute for this project. How can any woman resist? So I married him in that moment. I think our wedding lasted about five minutes.

Read more and watch video at the lovely online journal nanomajority.

PREVIOUSLY: Maria marries “Diana Ross” in Elvis’s White Wedding Chapel.

IMAGE: “Waiting at Shack Up Inn” (Maria the Korean Bride in Clarksdale, MS) © 2007 Maria Yoon

On the Korean Gaze (It's Really Fucking Foreign)

Philippe Chancel’s photographs of North Korea promise “a place not frozen in time, but outside of time, a place, litteraly, like no other on earth” [sic]. A woman in traditional hanbok (or, in North Korea, choson-ot) is faceless, except for her Kim Il Sung pin. His is the only face that matters. Reminds me of the graphic novel Pyongyang by the animator Guy Delisle, which I reviewed a year or two ago.

Delisle peppers the narrative with enough history and politics to orient the non-expert reader. He doesn’t claim to be an expert himself, and he’s best when noticing what only an animator would: for instance, that the omnipresent framed photos of Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, are slightly wider at the top than at the bottom. This, he tells us, is to prevent glare, but it “also intensifies the gaze in this face-to-face encounter.”

That’s what makes this other photograph so powerful: the man’s face, the aversion of his gaze. It provokes something the hanbok can’t: empathy. From another review I published several years ago:

Meanwhile, our ignorance of Koreans—both north and south of the DMZ—rivals only our ignorance of Afghans and Iraqis. In his grouchy but outstanding1997 history, Korea’s Place in the Sun, Cumings argues that in order to understand Koreans, an act of empathy is required. And in order to achieve that, “we should try—temporarily—to disabuse ourselves of American assumptions that get in the way of knowing, of seeing, a truly different society.”

This, of course, is easier said than done. After a year’s experience there, I can testify that Koreans are, to quote P. J. O'Rourke, “really fucking foreign,” and they see us in the same way.

IN ADDITION: “No Motherland without You” [Mp3]

FAQ NO. 582: Brendan, as we gaze at the North Koreans not gazing back at us, what are the Lacanian implications of said gaze, especially where it is, you know, at its most fucking foreign?

A: Good question. As someone else helpfully wrote, “at the heart of desire is a misrecognition of fullness where there is really nothing but a screen for our own narcissistic projection. It is that lack at the heart of desire that ensures we continue to desire.”

On Nationalism, Communism, and Japanese Porn

The South Korean government announced recently that it will seize land from the families of Japanese collaborators. Which is potentially a lot of people since Japan ruled Korea for forty years, ending in 1945. This is not the sort of thing democratic governments normally do, and Michael Breen, for one, objects. Breen is a British journalist and the author of a book rather presumptuously titled The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies. In the Korea Times he accuses government ministers of being morally smug, calling them “vicars in the high church of nationalism.”

This sets off a lively debate in the comments section at The Marmot’s Hole:

HAVIK: One of my acquintants in Seoul who has been importing Japanese porn comics, which by the way turned out to be a real goldmine in Korea, is having the time of his life as his communist grandfather was a member of the anti-Japanese force.

He proudly told me that his grandpa got executed by the Japanese after he had killed a collaborator, raped his wife and daughters before battering them to death, and buried his infant grandson alive.

Great to be part of such an elite culture.

[. . .]

SOMEGUYINKOREA: Nationalism is abused in every country around the world, we just notice it a bit more here because we are outside observers with inside knowledge (plus it’s hard to turn us on to Korean nationalism when we are reminded everyday of our foreignness).

HAVIK: Believe me, there is no such thing as a Korean nationalism, it is a total contradiction! How do you explain nationalism in a country with people dreaming of driving German cars, drinking French wine, copying Japanese and (black) American culture, spending their holidays in Europe, sending their children to American universities, deporting their orphans to Scandinavia, and praying to some foreign god from the deserts of the Middle East?

If you think that unification with NK is nationalism, you’re wrong. There is a huge difference between nationalism and self-castigation.

[. . .]

DOKDOFOREVER: Well, I’d say the colonial and authoritarian legacies have a lot to do with the poor way Koreans treat each other in public, even today. Socialized under a system for 80 years where you couldn’t trust other people, where selling out your country brings big rewards, and most people at the higher ranks of society are traitors. That’s why it’s important to set the record straight on what happened—it’s one step towards building public trust, teaching people to respect community, and show that crime (even when no one is watching) is morally wrong—a lesson the Hanwha gangster Kim Seung-youn needs to learn.

[. . .]

BRENDON CARR: The thesis that all of Korea’s social maladies linger due to the Japanese colonial period—which lasted between 35 and 48 years—is complete nonsense. That such a brief interlude could completely change the culture is hard to fathom. It discounts the 5000 Years of Korean History™ that we hear about so often. How did the Japanese entice, or force, Koreans to junk the paradise of the Chosun era? After Liberation, why wouldn’t the suppressed Korean character return? Is Uncle Sucker to blame? Or is this so-called “Japanized culture” so much more powerful and compelling? Fifty years of Japan can overwhelm 5000 years of Korea, that’s what you’re saying.

I don’t think so. The fact is, Koreans are the way they are because this is the way they are.

[. . .]

DOGBERTT: Maybe this is just something Korea needs to do. If it proves to have been a mistake, then there will be ramifications of some sort. But it is Korea’s decision to make.

[. . .]

HOJU_SARAM: Put it another way, if people in a democracy should be legally vulnerable to losing their assets because of historical wrongdoings—which appears to be what you and the “vicars” in questions seem to be condoning—how many people’s relatives would stand up to the scrutiny, not just in Korea but anywhere in the world?

PREVIOUSLY: Is there a Korean word for ex-pat chutzpah? There should be.

IMAGE: A Seoul street scene from anxiousdog.blogs.com

Whatever You Can Do I Can Do Better

In the wake of the Virginia Tech murders, South Korea is doing some soul-searching. Here is The Hankyoreh newspaper on how Korea and America are alike in the way they treat immigrants:

Kim Yun-jae, a lawyer who emigrated to the U.S., said, “Most Koreans see the [Virginia Tech] tragedy as a cause for shame and guilt, instead of considering it an incident caused by structural problems in American society. In light of this attitude, most Koreans are likely to treat immigrants and naturalized Koreans in the same way [they treated the Cho incident],” he added.

To wit:

A 30-year-old foreign woman, who gained South Korean nationality last year after leaving her home in a central Asian country to marry a Korean, wept on April 20 as she talked to a Hankyoreh reporter. Her bloodshot eyes were mixed with anger and chagrin. Her anger centers on how her 10-year-old son is treated in school, where he is a third-grade elementary student. “Fourth and fifth grade students beat my son because he is different in appearance. Despite my appeals to the school, the matter hasn’t been resolved.” Because of the matter, she transferred her son to another school, but the situation did not change. “My son is scared of going to school,” she sighed.

MEANWHILE: The Koreans have expressed shame and apologized for the Cho Seung-hui’s actions, causing more than a few Americans to wonder, WTF? Language Log explores the “interaction ritual” of saying you’re sorry.

The Audience Can’t Be Cynical Anymore

Terry Teachout quotes himself on violence in films; to wit, he suggests that violence in film these days is violence without consequences, that it exists only for the sake of itself:

. . . violence is an unreal presence and acts of butchery are no more consequential than Wile E. Coyote’s eternal pursuit of the Road-Runner. Automatic weapons are emptied blithely, BMWs driven off cliffs, handsomely coiffed heads blown to pieces—but there are no funerals, no weeping widows, no innocent bystanders imprisoned forever in wheelchairs because they happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The context of his posting, of course, is Cho Seung-hui, who was supposedly inspired by the 2003 Korean revenge film Oldboy. The Washington Post, among others, has noticed similarities between Cho’s self-portraits and images from the film (the former can be seen below and the latter above).

The Post finds even more to say about the relationship between Cho and the films of John Woo.

These similarities between fact and fiction, of course, raise striking issues that all creative artists—but especially those who deal in stories that offer visceral violence as part of their pleasure principle—must deal with. Woo built engines of excitement and stimulation that pleased millions and made him a wealthy, internationally known man. Yet now, all these years later, a young man might have used them as the vessel of his rage and alienation, taken the icon of the movie gun and moved from the intimacy of the DVD player and the arena of his imagination to the public arena, and there reenacted the ritual. This time the carnage is for real.

A little too easy to be smug on this point, I think. Here’s Oldboy director Park Chan-wook on the subject (from a New York Times Magazine profile by Ian Buruma a year ago):

Sitting in his office not long ago, we talked about violence, or more specifically about Park’s terror of violence. “In my films, I focus on pain and fear,” he said. “The fear just before an act of violence and the pain after. This applies to the perpetrators as well as the victims.” To illustrate his point, Park described a scene from his last film, Lady Vengeance, in which the father of a kidnapped and murdered child finally has the kidnapper at his mercy, tied to a chair in an abandoned schoolhouse. The father is there with his family and relatives of the child murderer’s other young victims. They all patiently wait their turns to wreak a terrible revenge on the defenseless killer.

“The father,” Park continued, “has picked up his ax. His daughter tries to restrain him. The audience expects her to say something like, ‘No, don’t do it!’ Instead, she asks him to leave the victim alive, so the rest of the family can also have a go at him. The audience laughs. The next shot shows the father with his ax dripping blood, terrified of what he has just done. The audience can’t be cynical anymore and regrets having laughed at the preparation for such a brutal act.”

Park didn’t smile while he told me this. Violence, for him, is a serious business. He may have a disturbing way of manipulating the viewers’ emotions, but as he explained to me, the focus of his work is not “the beauty or humor of violence.”

PREVIOUSLY: Déjà vu; Oldboy is “a grand, gritty, indelible experience, the sort of picture that mimics great literature in the way it envelops you in a well-told story while also evoking subtle but strong gradations of emotion.”

UPDATE: Slate weighs in:

The “Vengeance Trilogy” is difficult, painful to watch, and obsessed with depicting revenge as the ultimate act of narcissism—a way to wallow in your problems and proclaim “Oh, poor me” with a hammer. But it’s easy to get lost in the surfaces of a movie as technically thrilling as Oldboy and ignore that it urges the audience to question the thrills it offers. Park Chan-Wook sends up genre conventions to point out that we intrinsically like violence—how it looks, the risk it carries, the satisfaction of seeing a dispute resolved by a swift poke in the nose—but that the consequences make us uncomfortable. Still, it’s probably the film’s endlessly consumable mix of technical pizzazz and heavy-duty violence that have made it an instant cult classic; many critics and viewers love Oldboy for the rush of images rather than the ideas hiding in the shadows.

 

Making the World a Better Place (Friday Notebook)

• Moistworks considers Jerry Lee Lewis’s turn in the role of Othello. His fellow actors, writes  Nick Tosches in Hellfire, “were surprised to discover that Jerry Lee was the only actor who knew all his lines at the first rehearsal. ‘I never though there was so many words,’ Jerry Lee later told a Los Angeles Times reporter. ‘This Shakespeare was really somethin’. I wonder what he woulda thought of my records.’”

• Amidst controversy over an English-teacher blacklist in Korea comes speculation that the confessed “killer” of JonBenet Ramsey taught in Korea, too. Just remember: If you teach English in Korea, you must be a loser.

• German painter Manfred Hönig has painted this picture (which, if you look really, really close, includes Bix Beiderbecke) live on the Internet.

• Damn! It feels good to be a poet!

• Gregory Sullivan gets nostalgic at Sippican Cottage: “I like things, often, that are anachronisms. Traditions are interesting, serve useful purposes, and have a tendency to breed such anachronisms. You can never improve on a wooden baseball bat. It’s not possible, because to tinker with it is to destroy it. The clink an aluminum bat makes when you hit the ball has no oompah. It’s got no anima. It’s got no whatsis. The meaning in the thing is lost. Why not use a mortar or a bazooka and be done with it? To suggest that children should eschew aluminum bats for the traditional wood meets with blank stares or acrimony now. ‘Do you know what a wooden bat costs, and how many we’d break?’ is flung at you by persons who think such handwaving arithmetic is dispositive to those of us that can’t help but notice their children are wearing $200.00 sneakers.”

• In that spirit, we are going to give a poor dog a bone, find somewhere to lay my head, sing a Vietnamese folk song, paint the town, find a kind hearted woman and a cruel mother, pay until I find the Lord and then get back in the saddle again.

IMAGE: “Science helps build a new India,” an ad by—you guessed it—Union Carbide, whose pre-Bhopal motto was “A Hand in Things to Come.”

A Little Wide in the Face

Byen Ungpil’s work is appearing now at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul as part of the exhibition Trend-Spotting 2006. By way of introduction, the gallery’s English translators tell us that “Creaming off the most gifted young artists and attaching meaning to them is not an easy task which requires a sense of responsibility.”

So true.

IMAGES: Self-portrait as a man-Long 8 (2005) and Self-portrait as a man-Long 4 (2004) by Byen Ungpil

By the Numbers

Kim Chi call themselves a “multimedia phenomenon.” Really they’re just some college kids from Missouri who, despite not being Korean, sing in Korean. They sample Korean language-learning tapes above their synthesizers and, at least in the case of “Numbers,” generally mispronounce the Korean they sing themselves.

It’s fun.

Meanwhile, “Numbers” [Mp3] reminded me of some other numbers songs.

There’s “Numbers Game” [Mp3] from Radio Pyongyang, which includes a sampling of Korean numbers read over shortwave radio. Whether it’s some kind of communication device for DPRK spies is open to debate. That it’s really creepy is not.

“You Can Count on Me” [Mp3] is a trilingual track from a children’s CD by Saint Etienne. The kids in their audience must have a remarkably sophisticated pop palette.

And finally, let’s pun in French with “Un de toi” [Mp3] by the Indonesian singer Anggun, a track that, if it isn’t aimed at kids, at least begins with kids. This would also work well if you’re looking for the prettiest song ever.

Come Here Often?

Maria is a first-generation Korean-American woman living in New York. Maria faces intense social pressure because she is not married. Maria has answered her critics by climbing Mount Washington and hooking up with a couple of bikers.

I love Maria.

Maria the Korean Bride is a multi-media performance that “contains images and performances of myself dressed in a traditional Korean bride marrying men of all ages, ethnic, religious, and financial backgrounds to whom I have proposed randomly and spontaneously as I traveled cross-country. Ironically these strangers considered eligible bachelors by American standards because they are culturally diverse, educated and ‘nice’ but are unsuitable because they are not from successful higher class Christian Koreans.”

So screw you, Korean men. If you want Maria, you’ll have to settle for the playing cards.

WHEN WILL MARIA BE COMING TO MY STATE? Soon.

HAS MARIA MARRIED ANY CROSS-DRESSERS? In fact, she has. She married “Diana Ross” in Elvis’s White Wedding Chapel in June 2002.

Shooting Metaphors Dead and Other Things to Be Somewhat Militant About

In a review of Far from the Madding Gerund, a new book by the big brains behind Language Log, Robert Lane Greene predictably name checks David Foster Wallace. “These books tend to be written by prescriptivists—people who would dictate how language should be used,” Greene writes. “Descriptivists—those who would describe how language is actually used—have rarely had such eloquent (or prolific) spokesmen. As a result, they’re often ridiculed. Wallace, who himself is a somewhat militant grammarian, has argued that descriptivism is hopeless as a scientific endeavor:* Using what people actually say and write to determine appropriate English usage is, he says, like writing an ethics textbook based on what people actually do.”

I won’t presume to weigh in on this debate (except to say that prescriptivist rules are fine with me so long as I’m free to ignore them), but let me ask this: How does one go about being “somewhat militant”? I mean, if you’re going to be combative, which is to say, if you’re going to engage in violence (even metaphorically), you might as well go all the way.

This formulation is what Donald Hall would call a “dead metaphor,” a phrase that “implies that the metaphor was once a living organism, like a human being, but died and became a corpse. When we use such words in our poems, we populate DM our poems with zombies.”

Anyway, I’m somewhat militant about such lazy applications of language.

HERE’S WHAT I LOVE: Outrageous generalizations about language, in the service of . . . what? I don’t care. But you can find them here, under the heading “Essentialist Explanations.” Since Korean was on the agenda yesterday, here are some observations about that language:

Korean is essentially bad Japanese, also as spoken by Mongols. (Daniel von Brighoff)

Conversely, Japanese is essentially Korean in the mouths of little children. (Daniel von Brighoff)

Chinese, as spoken by hip 20-somethings, is essentially really bad English.
(Jonathan Walton)

Japanese is essentially Tagalog spoken by Koreans trying to do an impression of Americans from the point of view of Chinese people. (Andrew Johnson)

Korean is essentially being caught in a syllable-diagramming exercise gone horribly, horribly wrong. (David Boshko)

Korean is essentially Mongolian with a Chinese vocabulary.(Danny Wier)

Korean is essentially angry Japanese with a speech impediment. (Aeron Lempert)

I disagree with Mr. Weir, however, when he says that “Japanese is essentially the linguistic equivalent of kicking someone’s butt.” I would argue that this is a more apt description of Korean as I heard it used by kindergarten teachers and drunk middle-aged males alike. In fact, when I am barking DM at my cat, I tend to use Korean. It just sounds more cross than English.

* Alas, Languagehat used to have a link to its wonderful refutation of this Wallace essay, but no longer . . .

UPDATE: Languagehat (see comments) has provided a link to “David Foster Wallace Demolished.” Thanks!