The Beiderbecke Affair

Dear Leader Gives Good Poster (And Bad Grammar)

The North Koreans do great propaganda posters: totally bomb-tastic and shameless.* It’s true that their style owes everything to Stalin & Hitler, but that only provides for a delicious irony when you consider that self-reliance, or Juche, is the Hermit Kingdom’s ruling ideology. (You can tell Dear Leader he’s in the Axis of Evil, but whatever you do, don’t go calling him derivative.) “Let’s develop our national form, with Socialist content,” pudgy Kim Il-Sung declared at some exhibit opening in 1966. “Now go eat cheese & crackers.”

In the 40 years since, Form has gloriously met Content in order to lay waste to the United States Capitol [jpg] and to kick some Aryan GI ass [jpg].** Now the wonder twins are back, this time to celebrate an aggressively red*** & phallic missile blasting off into the great Juche sky on some exalted Juche mission . . .

And yet, something is awry.

Notice the Hangul, or Korean writing, at the bottom. One syllable doesn’t seem to be put together correctly. Written Korean consists of individual letters arranged into syllable boxes according to a set of rules. Some letters join together, some don’t. These letters

don’t. An equivalent mistake in English might involve putting a q and an r next to each other. This particular poster appeared on The New York Times website July 9, attached to a Week in Review story about the North’s recent missile test. So what gives?

I hardly pretend to be an expert in the language, and my Korean tutor just moved to Memphis (safe travels, Ji-seon), so if you know better than I, please comment below. [Or not. See update below. – Ed.]

In the meantime, please enjoy “Fucking USA” [Mp3], in which Form (what sounds suspiciously like bad American rock) embraces Content (the title is fairly self-explanatory) “to promote patriotism, heighten the national pride and confidence of the public in living in a Socialist country.” Or something.

* As they say in North Korea, “A boneless human tongue breaks bones.” Although look at that missile. It’s way more boner than boneless.

** Images are courtesy of blogger Oranckay.

*** As they say in North Korea, “Try to be a tomato rather than an apple.” In other words, be red (or Red, if you prefer) inside & out.

PREVIOUSLY:  Speaking of propaganda posters, a Chinese artist uses some good old Heroic Realism to ironically critique Andy Warhol’s ironic critique of Chairman Mao’s narcissistic propaganda.

UPDATE: Christ. Okay, now I get it. It’s just a weird font. The first two letters are, in fact, one letter, which is called pieup. (Its sound is like an aspirated p.)

This is what happens when you read a language at the kindergarten level . . . Fucking DPRK.

Win or Lose, the Pants Are Coming Off

That seems to be the situation in Korea, anyway. When the national team (whose name is so howlingly un-PC that Mickey Rooney might as well be the mascot) defeated Togo in early World Cup action, the celebration got kinky. Or at least in Seoul’s Apgujeong neighborhood it did. The inevitable pictures (go here for the most revealing of the lot) prompted gasps of shame and charges that one half of this particular scoring tandem may have been . . . wait for it . . . WHITE!

Say it ain’t so, Roh! Must the price of victory be Korea’s womanhood soiled?

Not that the price of defeat is much better. After Switzerland rang up a two-nil win last weekend, one citizen (pictured), angered by a controversial call, could think of no more profound a protest than dropping trow.

For a more complete explanation, see soju.

The Sign Says It All

A few months ago, I reprinted in these pages my thoughts on living & eating in Korea. The essay included this passage:

Luckily, in our small but crowded corner of Daejeon, two out of three storefronts are places to eat. New restaurants appear almost daily, their grand openings announced by young women in skimpy blue cheerleader uniforms dancing out front to thumping techno music. They do this even in the snow. (Where do these women come from? Why do they all look exactly the same?) Meanwhile, large, colorful signs show cartoon characters of pigs or octopus or ducks, whatever be the cook’s specialty, in poses suggesting an enthusiastic invitation for you to come eat them. One place around the corner from our apartment depicts a surprised looking cow dancing on a hot grill.

Kate & I no longer have the photos she took of our neighborhood's restaurant signs, so I searched forever & in vain to find similar images online; now Robert @ Marmot’s Hole has done it for me. I love it.

And while you’re pondering the possibilities of porcine pornography (and yes, there is a pigporn.com, not to mention The Horny Pig.com, neither of which I’ll link to this time), check out the outstanding blog Korean Cooking.

UPDATE: Here’s something I can link to (OK, it’s only mostly work safe): “A mural of pink pigs painted on the side of a barbecue restaurant is regarded as too spicy by officials in Snohomish (Wash.). The painting, which had to be veiled behind a white tarp, features five unclothed pigs on a white wall. Co-owner of the restaurant Janelle Carpenter said the city’s Design Review Board, which makes recommendations about exterior changes to buildings, objected to the painting because it doesn’t fit the district’s landscape and because naked pigs might lead to paintings of naked people.”

Black Is the New Face

Here, more than anywhere else that I know or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly—the unending procession of . . .  miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries and extravagances—is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school Superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows.

Mencken was right, of course. I encountered those words last night while reading a chapter called “Ragging and Slanging” in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s wherein author Ann Douglas describes the context of the first blackface shows as a culture that was obsessed with parody: Blacks were parodying high white culture; whites were parodying low black culture, or, in some cases, parodying blacks parodying whites. Pretty soon, everybody got confused. When Paul Whiteman’s popular white orchestra burlesqued the early jazz tune “Livery Stable Blues”—packing it “full of comic instrumental effects in order to illustrate the superiority of Whiteman’s usual smoother sound”—the audience loved it. Sincerely. A serious popular culture is born.

Anyway, I was interested in blackface because this week I came upon this:

Yep. An all-girl Korean pop group that performs in blackface. Wow. Koreans are sometimes a little tone deaf about the meaning & effect of certain appropriations. In Daejeon, where Kate & I lived, there was a Hitler Bar. (Here’s a similar version in Seoul.) When the Sisters (who are not actually sisters let alone sisters) debuted in 2003, they were greeted with comments on their website of which this one is typical: “The Bubble Sisters are ignorant, racist bitches, hands down.” Nanda, Bluesy, Spicy, and Sleepy, meanwhile, apparently didn’t mean to stir anything up. According to the Korea Herald, “Lead singer Nanda says all the extra attention was an unintentional by-product of the ‘blackface’ gimmick.” Like I said, tone deaf. Still . . . “‘We really love black music,’ she explained, drawing a distinction between who the band is parodying and who it respects. ‘We want to undermine the typical Korean band, who are pretty but don’t have any talent, and open the doors to musically talented people who, if they don’t fit into this compartment, are usually forced underground.’”

For what it’s worth, an admirable goal.

That was then, though. The Bubble Sisters disappeared for a while, but now they seem to be back. Sans makeup. Who will they parody now? Or have they become what they once made fun of? How confusing.

In the meantime, via About Last Night, I came across this Warner Brothers cartoon, one of the “Censored 11,” that is another confusing mixture of brilliant art, wicked parody, and racist stereotypes. It’s called “Coal Black” and parodies “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (by the way, don’t Nanda, Bluesy, Spicy, and Sleepy sound like they could be the Four Dwarfs?). Writes the proprietor of Something Old, Something New:

The important thing about “Coal Black” is that it’s one of the best and most imaginative cartoons ever made, with a crazy gimmick or wild experiment in almost every shot, and all kinds of visual ideas that no one had ever tried before (though Clampett’s trick of changing the colour of the background to signal a change in mood was probably inspired by Chuck Jones’s “The Case of the Missing Hare” from the previous year). Ideas like the words “Blackout So White!” appearing in print above the Queen as she speaks those words (and then bites off the phone she’s speaking into); keeping the dwarfs offscreen in one shot and animating their shadows instead; starting a dance sequence with Disney-style rotoscoping and suddenly shifting to a cartoonily-animated jazz dance; having the dwarfs pop up one by one to the rhythm of “Blues in the Night”: there’s something spectacular or hilarious every second. And Rod Scribner’s animation of Prince Chawmin’ unsuccessfully trying to revive So White may be the best piece of animation Scribner—or maybe anyone—ever did.

And finally, The New Republic today pans (mostly) the silhouette art (pictured above) of Kara Walker, which takes on these sorts of black stereotypes (sort of):

Although Walker may want us to believe that she’s telling it like it is, the exhibition is easy on the eyes and easy on the mind. Is there anybody visiting the Metropolitan who doesn’t regard the government’s response to Katrina as a catastrophic failure? And aren’t most people who visit the show going to agree with Kara Walker that poor, African American residents of New Orleans bore an inordinately large share of the tragedy? The images that Walker has selected do form a kind of backdrop for these perfectly sensible thoughts. Homer’s Gulf Stream, with a black man alone on a tiny boat, has always been a powerful painting and is no less so in this context. The show has its interesting moments, no question about it. But this isn’t the same thing as advancing an argument, which is what Walker claims to be doing in a statement that she’s prepared. “In this show’s analogy,” she explains, “murky, toxic waters become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth, flushing out of a coherent and stubborn body long-held fears and suspicions.” In a weird way, this is a feel-good show. Walker is offering museumgoers an opportunity to massage their emotions—and give some relatively simple emotions a highfalutin package. Kara Walker may believe that a stroll through “After the Deluge” will make the world a better place, but what she’s probably really feeling is that she’s become a better known artist. That makes the world a better place for her, which is another thing entirely.

Ouch.

IMAGE: Untitled, 1994/1995 by Kara Walker (Collection Deutsche Bank)

The Truth About Canadians Is Finally Revealed

“The thing is, CANADIANS ARE SCUM! They are self-loving, welfare supporting, over taxing, work ethic hating scum!!! They are not welcome in our group.”

Or so says a Canadian, it turns out.

It's Rude to Point (Monday Morning Notebook)

• Scott Esposito reviews Duchess of Nothing by Heather McGowan for the San Francisco Chronicle.

In its unadorned reality filtered through an unstable mind, "Duchess of Nothing" brings to mind classics such as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. As in those books, the narrator may be dishonest with herself, but she is far from stupid, and much of what she says is beautifully expressed and evocative of thoughts and ideas that far surpass the prosaic reality she is trying to understand.

• Michael Standaert’s Skipping Towards Armageddon is scheduled for release today by Soft Skull Press.

The most effective message yet found by the hijackers of mainstream religion is Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of apocalyptic Christian novels. This wide-ranging study examines the books and the empire behind them. Author Michael Standaert contextualizes the Left Behind phenomenon by probing millennial thinking across cultures, from pre-Christian times to the present, and tracing the evolution of militant evangelism in the U.S., uncovering the links between fundamentalist religious figures and mainstream right-wing politicians through organizations like the Moral Majority. Skipping Towards Armageddon rips the lid off the Left Behind books’ ideological underpinnings, showing how LaHaye uses them to advance the foreign and domestic policy goals Religious Right, from fomenting Middle East violence to promoting homophobia and xenophobia. The book is a timely cautionary tale, revealing that these best-selling books are not simply harmless thrillers written from an evangelical Christian perspective but a tool in a fanatical group’s agenda.

Also check out Standaert’s excellent  blog of the same name.

• Leon Wieseltier cops to being useless when it comes to the war:

The best that can be said of George W. Bush is that he is a small man doing a big thing. And of the war, that good may still come of it. I told you, I have nothing useful to say.

• I’m late to this party, but through a little friendly encouragement, I finally found my way to Mark Greif’s piece in n+1 “Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop.”

The answers are difficult not because thinking is hard on the subject of pop, but because of an acute sense of embarrassment. Popular music is the most living art form today. Condemned to a desert island, contemporary people would grab their records first; we have the concept of desert island discs because we could do without most other art forms before we would give up songs. Songs are what we consume in greatest quantity; they’re what we store most of in our heads. But even as we can insist on the seriousness of value of pop music, we don’t believe enough in its seriousness of meaning outside the realm of music, or most of us don’t, or we can’t talk about it, or sound idiotic when we do.

• B. R. Myers on the notorious Korean temperament (courtesy The Marmot’s Hole):

If I remember rightly, the last World Cup’s “upgrade” of Korea’s image was followed by the downsizing or closing of Korean Studies departments across Europe. And since then, I have met foreigners who instinctively assume that the Japanese claim to Dokdo Island is the more valid one, because the Japanese seem more rational about it.

I hope to see a Confucian sense of moderation during this World Cup. But when you’re Korean it’s much easier to be a nationalist than a patriot, easier to feel a constant xenophobic aggrievement than to cultivate an informed love of an ancient tradition.

The more Korea neglects its language and culture, which are worth a million World Cups, the more it will behave like one giant favela, feeling a thrill of pride only when foreign teams “submit,” as the tabloids say, to its own. I don’t think the real Taekukki warriors died for this.

PS—The article comes outfitted with a photograph of the witty & jaded Myers. Admit it, you were curious.

• Ian Buruma on Park Chan-wook, director of Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and J.S.A.

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.”

• Fred Ramey, publisher of Unbridled Books, on reading a best-seller (courtesy the newly redesigned Reading Experience) . . .

Recently, while trying to read a novel that had graced the independent best-seller lists for several weeks, I came to the realization that a great many readers (enough to cause that book to hit those lists) are apparently perfectly willing to muscle their way through a kind of narrative clumsiness, through some simple repetitiveness and quiet familiarity, and really through an inattention to language and to the emotions that are tied to language.

[. . .]

Maybe every popular novel is only skimmed.

Suddenly, that seems feasible.

For what it’s worth, I bought The Da Vinci Code in the airport this past week and I’m about halfway through it. I’m enjoying it thoroughly and haven’t skimmed a bit.

IMAGE: Crucufixión (1515) by Grünewald (from the cool Spanish blog that I can’t read but can only look at: El puente azul)

How Badly Do Koreans Want to Learn English?

Speaking English with a native accent has become such a status symbol that some parents reportedly put their children through the clinically questionable surgery of snipping the thin tissue under the tongue to make it longer and supposedly nimbler, helping the children to pronounce the R sound better.

That’s from the International Herald Tribune. According to Oranckay, the article also mentioned “an Internet and video program that teaches pregnant women to speak to their unborn babies in rudimentary English.” No such line appears in the piece I clicked to, but it wasn’t really necessary. I mean, you get the point.

Theory a Few Words, Grandfather

When Kate & I lived in Korea, our home was a shiny new neighborhood called Gwanjeo-dong (pictured), our favorite hangout an all-night convenience store called Anyway Mart. Below is an aborted attempt at capturing the craziness of that time & place, the way everything we encountered served to dislocate us a little bit more. Even the bootleg DVDs left behind in our apartment by the previous teachers were as strange as anything we’d seen. In this case, a French flick had subtitles in gibberish . . .

SO ANYWAY

Mart—brightly lit, caffeinated, riding the thump-thump of an all-night no-ray bong, its windows reflecting the multi-colored, neon wash of Gwanjeo-dong, with all of its Internet game rooms and hair salons and hogwans and red-crossed church steeples and stationery stores where we buy monster stickers for our students and Happy Virus notebooks for ourselves and kimbap stands and Western bars with names like Jack and TNT Boom and taekwondo and kumdo academies and seafood restaurants with giant blue tanks of fish out front, flat, slow-moving fish who stare malevolently at kids staring gleefully at them, pissed-off fish whose dank smell reminds me of Young’s Lobster Pound in Belfast, Maine, sitting with you one evening on a worn-out picnic table overlooking the shallow Passagassawakeag, greasy fingers, bottles of Blueberry Ale, the lights of the harbor blinking like stars in the winter, a self-conscious postcard of two lovers still gleefully riding the surface of each other, the thump-thump of reality kept safely in the distance—this, you’ve told me time and again, is your favorite kind of place to be, where empty green soju bottles litter the tops of white plastic tables set up outside and where a twentysomething clerk with blond streaks in his hair grins mischievously and says “Long time no see” every time we push open the glass doors. So can I help it if sometimes I feel like the fish? A man is weaving his motor scooter in and out of Paris traffic, at times braking so suddenly that the back of his scooter rears up, jostling the package that reads “Pizza Joe” and then screeching off again, skidding finally into a throng of cheering well-wishers. “I am the record!” he proclaims, clicking his stopwatch, and the crowd lifts him up and delivers a shout in the direction of the delivery driver’s boss: “Theory a few words, grandfather.” And grandfather, a round-, wrinkly-faced Frenchman in a faded shirt, lifts his arms to calm his employees, pauses, and with a satisfied smile instructs them to “See off the electricity bicycle of red Buddhist nun to stroll about greatly.” A few minutes later, after a high-decibel parade of motor scooters passes before our hero and his girl, two cops ominously roll up. “Holds sending, is it right?” the cop accuses, but the girl looks puzzled. “Are they thin pancake men?” she wonders aloud. “Thin pancake differs from man,” her boyfriend replies impudently, and the cop is quick to take offense: “We do not have the thin pancake, and want to see your license plate.” “The license plate is inside the house,” answers the boyfriend, who this time sounds a bit nervous, “and I go to hold.” “The bright hand point,” comes back the cop, and now the boyfriend seems flustered. “Send immediately,” he says, grabbing his girl’s arm and whisking her away, the both of them disappearing before my mind has had a fair chance to struggle through the wildly distorted, underwater English that serves as subtitles to this movie—a bootleg DVD we inherited six months ago with the apartment and the yellow leather couch and the cookware inscribed with ungrammatical epigrams of flowers and pain. It’s so sometimes I swear I can’t even breathe. This, you’ve told me time and again, is your favorite kind of place to be. So here I am at the Anyway Mart, Gwanjeo-dong, on a Saturday night, writing this postcard to you: Dear Kate. It’s so sometimes I swear I can’t even breathe.

Thinking of Teaching English in Korea? You’re a Loser.

That’s the sentiment of one Brendon Carr, an attorney who works in the ROK. In response to an op-ed by an American teacher, an op-ed that complained about the all-too-frequent scenario wherein said teacher gets screwed by boss, Carr writes:

The masturbating Koreans I can forgive, since they’re obviously clueless. But good God am I sick of the English teachers. There is so much information freely available on the Internet about how Korea is a disaster for so many teachers (my personal all-time favorite is “Prisoner of Wonderland”) that one must willfully disregard every warning, including the warnings of one’s own Embassy (in diplomatese, the U.S. government is screaming “Don’t do it! You’ll get cheated!” but few listen) in order to come here and teach English.

Carr’s comments are followed by a lively discussion that involves rapping, name-calling, holier-than-thou grandstanding, and several well-reasoned points. The gist is that Korea is a prison, and fresh-off-the-boat teachers are new meat. More or less.

Canadians Are Scum (You Heard It Here First)

A story in the Korea Herald announces the formation of an organization meant to foster cultural understanding. The problem is, in a newspaper ad the group made a point to say that Canadians aren’t welcome. The Herald is on the case:

When contacted by a Korea Herald reporter by e-mail, the organizer of the group, Bernard Carleton, elaborated further, “The thing is, CANADIANS ARE SCUM! They are self-loving, welfare supporting, over taxing, work ethic hating scum!!! They are not welcome in our group.”

Anyone who would like to join the meetings with Carleton in order to break down prejudices, dissolve stereotypes and have an enhanced understanding of people from other countries can contact him at cbicsmd@yahoo.com.

(h/t)