.

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We were on a high promontory, an overlook called Mangkkeut that gave us a view over the water, pretty close to the same time as of day we had arrived 24 hours before, and we could see what was very likely the same ferry boat arriving on its regular schedule and pulling in to the pier at Hwangdungpo, the single community on the island, which we could see from this vantage was only two streets with another small one connecting them.   

The ferry we had come in on had carried three cement mixing trucks, a family SUV and two small fish transport trucks of the kind I’ve seen make deliveries to seafood restaurants in Seoul, and other boats and small ships carrying only freight could be seen over the large expanses of water all around. Despite the quiet and the seeming lack of movement in every direction as far as the eye could see, there was really quite a lot of activity going on, quite a lot of business and commerce.

From up here, you notice how the fishing-net pontoons array themselves not only in neat rows but also in rectangular segments, very similar to gardening plots. Most of the fishing – shellfish, primarily, but also various species of finned creatures – is done by the use of small traps and pulling nets up from the water into small engineless craft that appear big enough to hold no more than four people. Marker buoys and ropes embedded with floats designate separate plots assigned to different families, who draw lots each year so that the most productive ones get spread around. Much of the sea in these parts is relatively shallow, which explains the rather small size of the ferries (six vehicles is about the limit, I would think) and the high-voltage power lines marching off both to and away from the mainland told me this place was not unique, and there would be other places to explore if we ever decided to. Aside from the electricity, everything that could not be grown or caught from the water had to come in my these boats, which have to travel a specified route each time.

A while later I was looking to buy cigarettes and tried the door of a pharmacy, and found it locked up and deserted. An old halmoni cruising by with a basket of shellfish on her head told us the proprietors spend their days fishing this time of year, so we ought not expect them back until very late. We saw a couple of goats on tethers near the road, and it occurred to me that amongst the rocky terrain there did also exist places where food could be grown, yet looked as if it never had been tried – apparently people make so much money from the ocean that they don’t need to get their hands dirty by digging in the ground.

That afternoon on Bogildo, the sky was an unbroken expanse of azure, and in the evening, another dazzling sunset. The moon in half-phase came out from behind a bank of cumulo-stratus that had positioned themselves like shelves over a nearby mountain, and for at least ten minutes I watched a slow strobe-effect, bright to dark to bright again, as the descending sun popped in and out, the clouds becoming lacy and brightly-etched, like pieces of a puzzle visible only briefly before disappearing and bringing another into view.

I used to live in San Francisco, just four blocks from Ocean Beach, and when conditions seemed promising I’d walk those blocks in the early evening and let the salt wind into my hair, feel the fine bits of sand enter my clothes and the presence of the water in front of me, the enormity of it. The water below and the sky above had an effect on me that was both calming and enervating and at the same time incredibly stimulating, creating an intense awareness of the body and its connection to the outside world.

We spend the bulk of our lives, most of us, with our surroundings in the middle distance, often in rooms, most of everything around us tending to be less than a dozen meters away, and mentally we always place ourselves in the center of whatever is around us. But standing on soil or rock or gravel with water in front and blue or cloud-dappled heavens above puts us in our place, so to speak, and gives at least an inkling of how we stand in relation to a larger picture of the world – and this is a good thing, of course, to truly feel the reality of how insignificant most of the things that give us stress, the goals we are sure are so very vital and important.

And since I’ve come to Seoul there have been only rare instances when I’ve been able to enjoy a firmament unblocked by tall, and often very ugly, buildings. True, I live a short walk from the Han River, but it’s an option I seldom take an advantage of, with so many other distractions and obligations. My apartment includes a roof, but again, I seldom make use of it except for parties, and when I do, I am aware of other buildings under construction within my sight, a little higher each day, and each day subtracting another tiny percentage of the horizon from my view.

I enjoy living in urban environments immensely, and for a variety of reasons, but access to the sky is one of the first things we city dwellers sacrifice.

More than a half-dozen years have gone by since we made the trip I’ve been describing, and I’ve seldom thought of it in the intervening time, and have done so recently mainly from having come across a notebook I’d done some scribbling in over those afternoons. I haven’t been back, though I’ve been thinking about it lately.

Fact is, I don’t really like to travel – sounds odd from someone living so far from the country of his birth, I know – but I do enjoy being in a different locale, and being able to look at things I’ve never seen before.

And this city is such a noisy place.

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We were staying in a small family-owned inn on one of the hundreds of islands scattered along the southern coast. The staff had left the premises after dinner had been served and the dishes collected and cleaned, and we were alone in the building. It was not yet late, though very dark. We’d found the small pension by random means, sans reservations or prior publicity. It was off-season, just after the summer tourist crowds and just before the autumn holiday of Chuseok where everyone travels to visit family. 

The room had a patio attached where we watched a gaudy sunset as we finished up a seafood stew brought and prepared by the lady who owned the house. The sky showed us more colors splashed about than we ever get to see in the city. The air was brisk, the breeze gentle enough to stimulate the mind and keep insects at bay.

The island, called Bogil-do, is remote but well-inhabited considering that it’s far enough from the mainland that a ninety-minute ferry ride is required, yet nevertheless able to support a small city with a old-style outdoor market, clothing shops (one of which inhabited a city bus converted to the purpose) a school, and even a couple of PC rooms. Another island appeared close enough that you imagined you could throw a stone to it, but in fact you would need to hire a water taxi or take another ferry that only ran intermittently. A bridge was under construction to connect the two for auto traffic. Our cell phones carried a signal but a span of about an hour had elapsed during the ride over when this was not so.

We were close enough to the water to be able to observe the shoreline for several kilometers in each direction, and at night after the sun had gone down completely, barely-perceptible flashes of lights bounced off of the broad, wrinkled surface of the water, the passage surrounded by scattered buildings that attempted to overpower the darkness with electricity and utterly failed to do so, vanishing either way into blackness studded by receding lights that lined the single two-lane asphalt that circled the island. From our room, a few dozen meters above the water, the silence was near-total except for the movement of leaves from a gentle breeze and the white-noise background lublub of water gently tapping the shoreline. The two-lane was a short walk from us but for the entire evening no engines drove on it, as there was simply no place to go. It was an island, and the residents spent their days during that season harvesting goods from the ocean that could be converted into money.

We read books, treating the TV as if it had been absent or malfunctioning, a wordless agreement between us that switching the thing on would reanimate all the furniture of the city that we were attempting to banish.  My traveling companion (and future spouse) nodded off on the futon and I kept reading while sipping some beer, and writing a bit in a little notebook. We had brought our phones, but we left them switched off most of the time.

Sometime after 10 that evening, I thought I heard something in the dimness outside, far off, then gone. Then I thought I heard it again, but it was faint enough that it could easily have been imagination at work. I slipped a sweater on without a shirt, and stepped into sandals to go out on the patio. The lights that lit the narrow path leading from the main road were on a timer that would keep them working until midnight and the yellow-orange glow illuminating the trees and bushes had no effect at all on the smashing brilliance of the stars overhead, so bright and full of dazzle as to almost seem to include a threat in some inexplicable way.

The sound was still there, becoming definite, a buzz, but slightly higher pitched than a car or a diesel, and getting louder. After a minute I could see a light up the hill coming closer.A few minutes later, a motorcycle turned in a wide arc through the small parking lot, the sound jarring and uncomfortable after so much quiet, and a brisk wind, fresh with ocean salt and scrub pine, cut through the gaps in my clothes and tugged at the loose parts of the fabric.

The rider took off his helmet and waved at me, so I waved back. He got off his bike and stood about a hundred meters away, so conversation was unlikely. I had no inclination to walk down to meet him, and after a short time he got back on his machine and rode off.

When the silence returned, it was more pronounced than it had been before, and it’s a mark of what city life does to a person that I did not feel peaceful and serene in my mind because of it, but rather alone and isolated. When I came back in the room, the door closed with a soft thud behind me and the silence was complete. The building was a relatively new one and even the floor was noiseless beneath my feet.

In the morning we negotiated an hourly rate with a bored taxi driver and toured the nearby area.

We found a monument and a park with gardens devoted to the memory of a poet, Yun son-do, who had made his residence here in the 17th century, where he wrote some longish verses about the nobility of fishermen which Korean schoolchildren are still required to learn. There is a forest of evergreens, old-growth and unimpeded by history, a thing rare to see in Korea. We saw a sign for a beach, and went there and walked on it, round golf-ball sized stones. It’s the only one on the island, the rest of the shoreline consisting of steep slopes and rocky cliffs.

Despite the impression one gets of wilderness and rocks and ceaselessly dashing waves, this island had been settled for hundreds of years before the arrival of the poet, and enjoying an academic tradition from China going back a thousand years or more at a time when Americans were fretting about where to put the commas in the Mayflower Compact.

Every day, or so it seems.

As always when I talk about other photographers, I need to make it clear that the pictures on this page are mine, and she deserves no blame for them. Click on the links I’ve provided to see Keely Kernan’s work.

She’s a freelance photographer currently residing in Busan. I came across her work by way of a photo essay published in Busan Haps. 

She seems to have spent some significant time in Costa Rica before coming here, and if you visit her website you’ll see gritty, starkly black-and-white images of young men from Somalia interned outside of San Jose, and Nicaraguan refugees in a village named La Carpio. It is journalism, and of the very best kind, the kind that doesn’t seek and emotional or intellectual response, or to persuade its audience toward some action or change of government policy, but rather simply states, “These people are here.”

She traveled to Port Au Prince and brought back images of the aftermath of the earthquake that took place there in 2010. What will strike you most is not the scale of the physical destruction but rather the faces of the people, at times inexplicably quiet and calm, sometimes brooding with anger just barely contained beneath the skin, and others vaguely haunting, as with a young boy who looks no more than 5 or 6 years of age, holding what might be a broken toy, and looking directly at the camera with an expression that describes deep intelligence and the possibility of an interior life of an adult’s knowledge of loss and pain, and endurance. She’s not shy about including children in her images, but she never succumbs to exploiting the cuteness factor – quite the contrary.

Many of her photos of Korea are not dissimilar to the kind I like to take – market places, and the people on the street – and when I view them I get the feeling she has the same kind of love and respect for the place that I do.  I want to point to her blog, though she has so far only updated once for each of the past four years. Her most recent entry is about Chilburam Hermitage, and I’ll recommend it in spite of the fact that temple stories are usually not my thing.

It was still dark when mediation ended but the sky was beginning to lighten in tone.  I noticed there was a man praying in front of the Buddha statues who didn’t stay the night.  I later found out he started hiking up the mountain at 2 am to pray with the Buddha as the sun rose.  Aaron and I carefully walked around Chilburam trying not to disturb the people chanting in front of the Buddha.  We followed the path back to the top of the mountain to watch the sunrise. The mountains were covered with mist that flowed through the valley.  We sat and watched the sun gradually rise and the fog circle around the mountain’s peaks, disappearing as it flowed down the valley.  The movement reminded me of meditation practice, how you can’t hold on to anything.   Just watch as things rise and fall and learn to let go.

It’s a subject I keep coming back to, possibly because it’s a somewhat popular pastime over here …

My opinions regarding suicide probably don’t correspond with those of a lot of people. However, there is a lot of disagreement from many quarters on the subject. Here are some loosely connected thoughts, just some things that have gone through my mind from time to time.

ㅁ Depending on circumstances, suicide CAN be a rational choice. Note that I said “a” rational choice, because other choices might also be rational in the same circumstances.

ㅁ We make a lot of choices that are irrational, and some turn out to be good ones, or at least suitable. By this I mean that we do things knowing full well that logic does not support the action, nor often any discernible benefit. Modern advertising and political discourse are both very well-informed about this. Artists and poets frequently know something about it, also. (Suicide, or attempted suicide, has a higher prevalence among people with a creative bent.)

ㅁ By calling something irrational, we usually mean that it’s wrong, incorrect in some way, or just a bad choice. The word tends to equate the concept under discussion to the realm of madness, therefore not worthy of further consideration. Even when insanity is part of the process, there are still things that can be understood: motivations, causes, family stressors, chemical imbalances and cultural attitudes that serve as contributing factors. (When people watch Shakespeare and argue whether Hamlet was really mad or not, they are missing the point.)

ㅁ Many will talk about of a right to life, or a right to choose when the topic is creation of a new life. Almost no one will posit the right to choose one’s own death. Those who do, are placed outside the pale, so that discussion never occurs. (E.g., Dr Kevorkian, The Hemlock Society.)

ㅁ Even leaving aside cases where people are facing a painful incurable disease – what about the case of someone who has decided they want to die, the way someone else might want a sports car or a trip to Rio? Both of those last things might be impractical and irresponsible to the point of irrationality, depending on their particular situation in life, and yet they are considered valid choices that people have the freedom to make for themselves.

ㅁ I had a friend who tried to commit suicide and was unsuccessful, so I had to help take care of things. It was here in Korea, and I was closest to the hospital among her acquaintances . I’m convinced that she really wanted to die, but her body was not in agreement with that, and she just had to go along with that and keep living. (She’s doing fine now, thanks for asking.) In my own case, I have never attempted suicide, but there was a time in my late 20s-early 30s when it was on my mind a lot. In the end, I realized that I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t really want to live, either. I got counseling, examined the contradictions in that, discovered there were unresolved grief issues, and then did some things that eventually worked. I’m just sharing these things so you might guess it’s a topic that has involved me in some thinking at various times.

ㅁ When a society, such as the case with Korea, has suicide numbers that stick out so prominently, it’s not unreasonable to think there might similar factors affecting large numbers of people in similar ways – clearly, something is out of whack when it’s the leading cause of death in certain age groups.

ㅁ It’s more than a cliché to say that this is a shame-based culture, and similar statistics are found in other countries in the region. Many suicides occur here because shame produces such pain that death is seen as a reasonable option. Many are those who believe President Roh had no personal involvement in the scandals surrounding his family members, but he nevertheless saw himself as responsible, and that his family and his country would be better off without him. (Ironically, it turned out to be true, because the investigations halted amid the national grief and mourning that followed.)

ㅁ I agree that suicide is the ultimate form of selfishness. We don’t have to argue about that. We do have to explain why so many other forms of selfishness are not only seen as permissible but also many times actively encouraged.

ㅁ I’ve recently learned what might be the simplest, and certainly the cheapest, method of self-ending, though I don’t know how quick or painless it is. Open a pack of cigarettes and drop the fags into a pot of boiling water. Let it steep just as you would for a pot of tea, then drink it down all at once. Turns out there is enough nicotine in a pack to be fatally toxic if ingested orally all at once. (If someone tries it after reading this, don’t blame me for putting information out there. What people do with knowledge like this is a choice they alone are responsible for.)

In which the blogger expands and asserts an addendum to comments provided in the previous post.

ㅁ If you haven’t posted on your blog for a while, don’t apologize about it. It’s boring for one thing, and if the regrets are intended for family members, probably an email or a note on FB would more useful. I have a theory that one of the most commonly typed sentences in the blog world starts off, “Sorry I haven’t posted for a while …” It’s especially sad to see this at the top of a blog and notice that the date on it is 6 months in the past.

ㅁ Blogging is public speaking, just (perhaps) quieter. It’s a bad idea to stand up in front of a crowd of people, have your say, and then think you can remain anonymous. It might happen, but don’t be surprised when it doesn’t.

ㅁ A blog often displays creative work of some kind – but it also in itself an artifact of creation. The blogger will choose how the thing looks, whether to include images or only text, whether to have a unique visual style to the appearance of the page or to simply use a template of a variety already in use by hundreds of other people. All of these things are choices. Choice is at the center of every creative activity.

ㅁ Use of certain forms of vocabulary will attract some readers and disturb others enough to pass you by and never come back. This might actually be what you want. You decide. The result of that choice will do a lot to determine who your eventual audience might be, assuming you want an audience at all. (I’m speaking of swear words, of course, but also overly-intellectual jargon-ish terms and sentence patterns.)

ㅁ As a blogger do I need to care very much about making other people happy? Personally, I think not. It’s a tough job, anyway, and chancy at best, to try to please other people – in fact, one point of view is that other people’s happiness is a pretty impossible thing to achieve. As with most things in life, the best shot I’ve got is just trying to make myself happy –a lot of time and energy can be spent and others will be pleased or not according to whatever is going on with them. Doesn’t mean pissing people off randomly is the thing to do – choose the time and place for it.

ㅁ Excuse me. I feel something of a rant coming on.

Speaking for myself – and speaking to other bloggers in the Koran expatriate community – I’d appreciate it if you don’t set yourself up as some kind of spokesman or representative of whatever group or subculture you might yourself be part of, or whatever topic you might have some interest in.  If you have opinions about Korean food, or Korean cuisine as it relates to world culinary culture, fine. If you have opinions about international relations and how South Korea should be behaving toward the North, that’s fine also. If you have opinions about the way women are treated in Korea and elsewhere in the world, perhaps you have eminent credentials to talk about that, sufficient that you could reasonably be thought of as an expert on whatever topic it is. Perhaps.

All of these sorts of things are interesting to read.

Again, perhaps, depending.

However.

If you’ve lived here for a long time as an expatriate, you might – you just might – find yourself thinking that your take on things is sufficiently similar to that of other expats (or superior, if you think living here longer than others qualifies you for that kind of hubris) and that therefore you can speak authoritatively, as if your words reflect the thoughts of others besides yourself.

Please avoid this. I ask it respectfully. Especially if Korean or international media should happen to approach you for quotes, do your best to couch everything you say in forms similar to “This is what I think about that. And I’m just one person.”

The internet acronym for this is well known: IMHO. In My Humble Opinion. Please, again respectfully, try to make sure everything you say is surrounded by the attitude contained in these words.

If you try to speak for me, I will be annoyed. I know for a fact that other expats will be also. Even when I agree with what’s being said, it annoys me.

Bloggers are not politicians.

Anyway, I didn’t vote for you.

Rant over.

Everyone who does this has their own reasons, some that are shared with other people doing the same thing and some reasons that are just their own. Here’s a list of reasons I’ve come up with, and there could be more that I’m forgetting.

ㅁ It’s a way of communicating with specific people. Family for instance. I’d say about half of what I do here attempts to show the folks back home. through words and pictures, what my daily life is like. In the process of describing and explaining (and walking around with my camera) I probably notice things a bit more, and think about them, at least a little. More about that, in a minute.

ㅁ It’s a way of communicating with rather more specific people. That is, creating a larger circle of friends than what is right in front of you. A lot of this means other bloggers, but not entirely and exclusively that. I once joked that about the only people who read blogs are people who themselves write them, which makes the whole about as relevant as poetry. (Because, you see, very few people pay attention to poetry aside from other poets.) It’s hyperbole, of course, and there are some people who search out and follow certain blogs for amusement and information.

ㅁ It’s a way of communicating with the world. It IS a Worldwide Web, after all. Who knows who might pop in here? Blogs are a small corner of a quickly-expanding planetary culture that is being formed – that we are creating – and however grandiose that sounds, the fact remains that a conversation is taking place by which people express their emotions, create and maintain social bonds, describe and confirm their own personal versions of reality and even engage in debate to try to persuade others to change their perspectives and join one faction or another. (I have no illusions about my own ability to influence such a large project – but I do find that I want to be part of the conversation, at least to some extent.)

ㅁ It’s a way of communicating with one’s self. That’s the primary goal of writing a diary: map out the internal landscape from this spot on the forking path, then take a look later on to suss out what has changed, and why. Throughout history, it’s been a private thing, at least until the author dies and someone discovers it lying around and decides to publish it.

ㅁIt’s a way of finding a community, or building one, and drawing people around – sharing for its own sake or for the sake of self-education and to assert the validity of a particular perspective. In this new century, it appears that some people see the act of keeping a diary as a public and collaborative process where people talk about what they feel is true and others comment, either in the section at the bottom or in the pages of their own blog. It’s a remarkable thing, especially when people discuss very private matters online, and I’m not going to say that it’s wrong, or weird. It might work, to do it that way.

ㅁ For some, it’s a route to fame and  glory, perhaps even a career niche. There are bloggers who seek to become public figures, and there are some who actually succeed.  Some people acquire fame from some other means and use a blog to keep interest going, or to “keep a finger on the pulse,” so to speak. There have been a few cases of book deals that have been awarded on the strength of work shown online.

ㅁ Finally, for some of us it’s just a hobby, a way to pass the time. Like many such, it has elements of creativity that are attractive, challenges and interesting problems to solve, and provides something of a warm feeling after the fact. If other people like it, that’s gravy, because payment was already received by means of the satisfaction that was felt when the thing was done.

My favorite blogs, the ones I like to read, tend to be word-heavy and contain reflection as well as description, and perhaps an effort on the part of the author to impose a narrative on their corner of existence (i.e., tell a story). I like to read things that are written well rather than dashed out in a hurry – that’s what Twitter and Facebook are for, fine for them as likes that kind of thing – and I think there is a place for wish to try to write well merely for the sake of it.

And I don’t know if I succeed in such an effort myself, but I’m willing to give it a shot. Although, yeah, every once in a while I’ll just show some pictures or throw out some links to interesting places on the web …

It’s the street. The street exists also outside the frame of the shot and existed before the shutter was pushed and will continue afterwards and even now, at this moment. You’re never going to be able to see everything that’s going on there, so don’t try. Yeah I know it’s all very transcendental and stuff. Don’t let it mess your head around too much, though. . .

[As always, click the image to get a somewhat larger view.]

I’m a big believer that sometimes the best photos are of people just going about their lives in their natural environment. For me, a lot of it is about being open to something I might not expect, and just like a collaboration between people, there are sometimes happy accidents and things you never could have planned for, though you can be ready. When its working, its not just about people or about a location, but also about how people belong in that particular place. Or sometimes how they don’t. Maybe also about how the place would be different if those people weren’t in it.

For instance, is the shot above about the motor scooters or it about the guy standing, having a cigarette and watching me take the picture? Or is it possibly even about the woman’s hand bag that is just about to leave the frame on the left side of the shot, the fact that a city is full of people moving about while others pause for a bit and look around?

After I took the shot above, thinking the scooters looked sort of cool, I noticed the guy. I walked over and asked him to pose, said he had an interesting look. He was fine with it, and I told him don’t worry, its just a hobby, no danger of fame or anything. Something about is face not classically beautiful – I think he’d agree – but it is unique and it is entirely his. I wonder if other people with cameras have come up to him like that before.

Again, some would say it’s no longer street photography once he knows the camera is here – he’s changing his face and posture because the picture is happening so its not real anymore. And maybe that is true, I’m no longer recording what is there but becoming a part of it . . . but then again, I AM on the street also and so is my camera.  That is also reality. The reality that includes the street also includes the photographer taking a picture of the street.

Ideally,  street photography should mean never having to apologize for taking a picture, and I rarely do. Okay, you’re in the picture but the picture is not about you, at least not entirely. It’s not the same as portraiture because here the person is an element in a larger composition. Yes, usually the most interesting element, sure, but it’s not at all the main thing or the only thing.

I know people who are purists about street photography – to me, it makes about as much sense as being a purist about jazz, but there are those people, too – and they will say things like that it must be in black and white, always black and white, and always with film never digital and always with a rangefinder camera and only with this or that particular kind of lens and none other. And keep that effing Photoshop away from here. If that’s how Henri Cartier Bresson did it, that’s how its done, dammlt .

Well,  I’m just glad there’s not a whole lot of people like that around. I like black and white, but I also like color, and I’m just showing black and white right now because that’s what I feel like today.

Clue: It’s about the picture, not how you got it. The street has its own aesthetic. Find it. By whatever means necessary.

Generally my MO is just like what I described here. I take a picture first then ask permission later, if necessary. If I have to, I’ll happily offer an insincere apology after the fact for violating someone’s nonexistent and purely imaginary idea of privacy – privacy, you say, in a public place? with half a dozen or more cctv cams scattered about that don’t even care whether you look good or not? with everyone on the street equipped with cameras on the phones in their pockets?

Far better to smile good-naturedly, and maybe even delete a shot if someone gets irate than have to deal with the regret of having missed that golden little moment that probably  no one but you knew was about to happen, and no one likely would ever have gotten a chance to see it, except that you were ready and you took the shot.

My first rule is to be unobtrusive but not surreptitious. I never hide the fact that I’m taking a picture, at least I don’t think so – a lot of street photographers will give tips on how to do that, like “shooting from the hip,” or walking around with just the lens sticking out of your jacket. Which seems rather juvenile to me, like a kid pretending to be a Secret Agent.

Well, I’m not a spy and I’m not doing anything wrong. I know what my intentions are and nothing harmful lurks among them.  I usually consider that if I find I am feeling guilty when I’m lining up a shot, if I think I might possibly be intruding, then I probably am. I don’t take a picture intending to make a person look bad, or to ridicule, or make people feel ashamed or uncomfortable.

My number two rule is easy to remember: Don’t be a dick. And I’m not. If people notice my camera and clearly don’t like it, I stop.

(Usually. There was that one time. That woman deserved it, though.)

I know some people have strong opinions about taking pictures of people when they are not aware that a camera is pointed at them. Can’t get around the fact, though: some of the best pictures are the ones that would never happen if you stopped to ask permission first. I forget who said it but sometimes the kindest thing you can do is to get the best picture you can as quickly as possible so people can get on with what they are doing without interruption or distraction.

The woman here didn’t know I was taking her picture. If she had known, it wouldn’t have worked, or not nearly as well. If she happens to see this, I hope she likes it. If she doesn’t, and if she asks, I’ll take it down. I do think it’s good picture, though – not perfect, no, but good – and I’d take a try at explaining why I think so, if we talked about it.

It boils down to: When I’m pushing the shutter release, is there something like love going on in my head, or something I like something else?  That’s the third rule, and I don’t think I need any others – if I have the right answer to it, all the other questions are answered also.

(If you clicked the link I included above, you might have noticed that I wrote a whole lot of the same things two and a half years ago. Clearly, my opinions haven’t changed very much in that time, though I hope the photos have gotten better … and I still have yet to have had a single unpleasant experience from taking pictures in public.)

Waiter, another order of randomness, if you please?

ㅁ My adult student works for McDonald’s. He doesn’t make the burgers, he works in the head office down in Jongro. He was in accounting when we first met, but now he’s in resource management. I asked him how many Mickey D locations there are in Seoul. He said he didn’t know.

“Don’t you think you should?” I asked. “How can you manage resources unless you know how many restaurants you have.”

“I’ll find out. I’m still new at this job.”

He consulted a file during the break. “Seventy-eight,” he said.

Now we know. And now you know, too.

ㅁ This is in the category of come-on-tell-us-what-you-really-think. Sometimes reading a negative review of a book is fun, even if you never had any intention of picking up a copy. It’s a review of Irvine Welsh’s novel, Filth, written by Gary Marshall and published in Spike Magazine, back in March 1999.

 There’s a tradition in reviewing where you make sure you don’t give away the ending of a novel for fear it will prevent people from reading it. Hopefully, then, the news that Robertson committed the brutal murder he’s supposed to be investigating throughout the book and then kills himself at the end should prevent people from wasting their hard-earned cash on this pathetic attempt at a thriller. Maybe then Welsh will stop recycling past novels and will attempt to write something that’s actually worth reading. To describe Welsh as the greatest writer in Scotland is a huge insult to talented writers such as Jeff Torrington, William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Iain Banks and Janice Galloway who produce novels which combine well-drawn characters with empathy and social conscience.

Although the title works on several levels – Filth as slang for policemen, or as a description of the world in which Bruce Robertson lives – the publisher was too restrained. A more fitting title for this shambolic, scatalogical mess of a book would have been Shite.

 Spike is a U.K.-based lit and pop culture review publication, and you can read the anthology they put together from their first 15 years. You don’t have to pay anything for it, either, and you don’t have to steal it. They are giving it away to download and pass around. Look here.

ㅁ I did download a book the other day, and I’m not going to say if it was legal or not. It was the recent bio of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson, which you can probably get on iTunes but I found it someplace else. I remarked to an acquaintance via email that I plan to put it on my Galaxy Tab and read it a bit over the weekend.

I honestly didn’t think of the wheels-within-wheels of tumbling that is involved with this. (Apple’s lawsuit with Samsung over the Galaxy, reading Steve’s bio on it, ignoring iTunes to cop it for free – I confess, none of this ironicality occurred to me until quite a while later.)

ㅁ By way of a friend at FB, here’s a bit from the Wall Street Journal’s pages focusing on Korea. Seems there’s a middle-aged woman who goes around whacking politicians upside the head, only the ones on the left, it seems. Everybody’s being real tolerant about her – imagine if some loon tried it on an American pol – and the article says it might be because politicians knock each other around a lot here, also. You should see some of the brawling that takes place in the National Assembly …

On Tuesday, she walked into an event in a subway station where Seoul’s new mayor, Park Won-soon, was speaking, got right up behind him, then hit him on the head and called him a “communist.”

“Step down,” she yelled before being dragged away by some other city workers. He ducked and continued with his presentation.

I was thinking the left here needs their own politician smacker, but instead of hitting ‘em, give ‘em a great big kiss. “I love you, 2mb!!” But, like, you know, really ironical, see? Sarcastic smooching … and why not? I don’t think it could be classified as assault, though what this Ms Park is up to certainly does amount to that.

As an aside, I’ve tried this as classroom disciple tool over here and it seems to work, especially with elementary and middle-school kids. I just let them know that if they don’t start doing their homework I’m going to keep on saying ‘I love you’ right out loud in front of everyone.

“Jimmy, if you don’t stop kicking little Billy – I’m going to KISS you.”

Works like a charm, and they straighten right up. Fortunately, I’ve never had to actually do it …

People like to have a good laugh. When the laughter targets people in positions of social and political prominence, we experience a delicious thrill, like school kids giggling when the class clown makes rude gestures behind the teacher’s back.

We usually call it satire. Juvenile? Sure. Often necessary, though.

Consider. Part of the needs of democracy entail the requirement that every so often the prevailing crop of bastards need to get tossed on their asses so a brand new bunch of assholes can get a shot at effing things up for a while. At any given moment in a healthy democracy, at least half of society needs to have absolutely no respect for whoever is currently running things, and hence there is a constant conflict between need for social order and the unity of purpose that’s required in order to make things happen – and the corresponding need to hold the powerful to their responsibilities and shine a light on hypocrisy.

The use of comedy in the political arena most often happens when the left attacks the right, though sometimes it’s the left attacking the left, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a political allegory disguised as a fable with talking animals, portraying Lenin and Trotsky as a couple of intelligent swine. (Orwell was a socialist criticizing other revolutionary communists for hypocritically betraying the ideals of social justice by succumbing to the temptations of totalitarianism. The observation still applies, even in this case, because the leaders of the Marxist rebellion constituted a power elite and as such were a suitable target.)

The key here is that satire is always a weapon aimed at the powerful and this represents the main reason it is most often a tool of the left against the right – and the number of political satirists representing a conservative bent are so few as to be remarkable when observed. (Okay, I’ll give you P.J. O’Rourke, but that’s all. Name another one. Chris Buckley? Okay, one more then.)

It isn’t that conservatives just don’t get the joke, though maybe some of that is going on, an over-literalness among a certain set of mind that cannot get around the contradictions contained in the ironical stance. The most frequent reaction I perceive is fear, probably due to the fact that conservatives by their nature seek to uphold the existing power structures, not knock them down. As illustration, here’s a debate page from a wiki devoted to right-wing views, on the topic of “How can we protect Conservapedia by distinguishing real conservative articles from satires written liberals?” When the gap in worldviews becomes great enough, liberals often feel that exaggerating the other side is less and less necessary. The BBC notes their bio page for one of the foremost American statesmen of the last century:

When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the distinguished musical satirist Tom Lehrer decided that he could no longer perform. “It was at that moment that satire died,” says Lehrer, “There was nothing more to say after that.”

Even when the overall tone of a satirical piece presents an image of gentility, rationality and reasonableness (e.g., Swift’s “Modest Proposal”), when it succeeds it’s like a knife in the gut to its target, a vicious kick to the face that attempts murder not only to the established powers structure but also the elimination of any credibility among those who choose to give support.

It’s rough, sometimes ugly. It has to be. As Len Freeman, an academic studying political satire asserts (in verse):

Political satire to be most effective
Is caustic, unfair, and never objective.
With this in mind, you may ask why I’m for it.
The answer is simple: tyrants abhor it.

Generally speaking, those from the liberal-left side will be more likely to use satire against ideological foes because the conservative goal is to preserve the status quo, and means showing respect for those of positions of leadership, usually without a critical eye. It was conservatives who sported bumper stickers during the height of the Vietnam War with slogans like “America: Love it or Leave It” and “My Country Right or Wrong.” For conservatives, love for one’s country necessarily entails respect (and often adulation) for its Commander-In-Chief, and unsurprisingly, the most frequent attack on liberals tends to be that they don’t love their country enough, that they are “soft on” whatever enemy has been most recently declared, and that their loyalty as citizens is suspect.

No surprise, much the same is true over here in South Korea. And in a country still at war with its neighbor, accusations of disloyalty have potentially greater repercussions. The National Security Law here prohibits contact with North Koreans via cyberspace, and just last Friday a former army officer was arrested for operating a website “and disseminating about 13,000 propaganda postings obtained from overseas North Korean websites.” Also, last week, a young woman was sentenced to 2 years for storing 14 MP3 music files with titles praising North Korea on a USB storage device. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees website, “Interacting with North Korea’s new Twitter account can lead to up to three years in jail.” Satire is not a protected form of speech in this country, and as we saw in the altercation between Samsung and Michael Breen last year, it’s not a bad idea to label what you are doing as humor, and even then it might not help much

Last year in May, The Daily Show did a very quick joke about the sinking of the Cheonan, a maritime incident that has caused enormous repercussions in the local political landscape over here, though it seemed to get relatively little coverage in the American media. The joke earned Mr Stewart some criticism, albeit small (“… the blackness of this joke didn’t seem to serve any larger satirical purpose. It’s just offensive.”) but I don’t think anybody even noticed it over here, and speaking personally, it’s just funny enough – the hyperbole in the comparison of North-South relations to a popular board game, Battleship – to justify itself on that level of humor.

Although South Korean cable provides several channels devoted to Hollywood movies and American television shows, but the Daily Show is not among them. (It’s easy to find in the internet, though, from Comedy Central’s website.) If the segment above had been shown here – it would most likely have been snipped from the episode, and unremarked – I have a feeling that Koreans would object to it, not on the grounds of disrespect to the Lee Myung-bak regime, but rather to what they’d see as a trivialization of a very serious (and tragic) event.

Political satire is rare enough over here as to be largely nonexistent. I’ve heard it said that cultural and historical factors make it a hard thing for people to get their heads around, as well as being risky from a legal standpoint. This might be largely true, but it tends toward being a facile and largely useless description unless we can discuss the nature of those cultural and historical factors.

I’ll take a shot at doing that in the next week or so – and, by the way, there are indications that this famine of satire in S Korea might be about to change. I’ve recently learned from some of my students about a podcast recently showing some popularity, Naneun Ggomsuda, available for free on iTunes from a source called Ddanji Radio.

So, hold on, we ‘ll be …

 Got a minute? For a change, this blog won’t ask much more of your time.

ㅁ The BBCis talking about suicide in S Korea. It’s a topic I keep coming back to here, though I haven’t recently. It seems that in 2009, 40 people killed themselves every day in this country – every day. That statistic starts of this article, “Tackling South Korea’s high suicide rates,” and talks about some things the government here is doing to tackle it.

My own position on it is one many might see as contradictory. I think it’s a choice anyone ought to be able to claim as human right to decide when they make their exit, even if for reasons that might seem to the rest of us to be not at all good enough. At the same time, when large numbers of people are seeking out ways to make that choice, something is out of whack.

ㅁ I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and I never thought I’d ever say I’m enjoying it, but I am. It’s a fat one, but I’ve got it as an eBook, so it’s no harder to carry around than my Galaxy Tab. I’m a third of the way into it, and by page count I could have finished two other novels instead. There are pages that are tiresome and seem unnecessarily repetitious, but one of the blessings of a long work is that idiosyncratic use of language a structure that might have seemed annoying at first later start to seem less so.

He killed himself, by the way. One of the fun things about reading a living author is that you can look forward to his next one. Well, there won’t be any more.

ㅁ Three Wise Monkeys has another article by Peter Ward about electoral politics here in the ROK, this time about Ahn Chul-soo, a somewhat charismatic figure who will play a role, and possibly be a candidate in the presidential election next year. I didn’t agree with everything Mr. Ward said in his previous article about the mayoral  election, but I’m glad to see someone writing in English on the topic.

ㅁ Today was the day for the nationwide standardized tests that play such a role in the university entrance process. I have a nephew who had to go through this today, and while I hate the test culture of this country (which, by the way contributes every year to the suicide rate among young people), I do want to mention that I have a nephew involved in it this year. I want to wish him well.

ㅁ I promised Part 2 of the thing I started Monday about satire and politics. I’m breaking that promise. I’d rather do it better, rather than just toss it up half-done to meet a personal deadline.

Hey, I guess a lot of people do. He’s pretty popular.

Esquire published a lengthy profile of the man in its October issue. It is good writing, so it doesn’t matter if I agree with it, and I’ll recommend it on that basis alone. Fans might think it’s a hatchet job from the opening pages, but it’s a rather long piece, so don’t rush to judgment about it until you’ve given the thing a chance.

As the author, Tom Jurnod notes, we like him because he speaks truth to power but I’ve always felt that it’s also because he makes us laugh by telling us things we already knew were true but which most others are not saying – except that now that he’s been saying them, other people are now allowed to. There’s a lot of this emperor-has-no-clothes kind of thing going on, a time-honored trope of the satirist’s arsenal.

The piece is called “Jon Stewart and the Burden of History.” Sounds rather portentous, doesn’t it? My only criticism of this article is that, considering it is about a comedian, there is a very little humor to be found on the page. Though there is a bit.

A lot of the prose will walk a line so thin that some might not realize it’s just barely over the top enough to be very clearly sarcasm. At other times, the snide little lift at the corner of the mouth is more obvious than it needs to be.

He is only one man, after all. It may even be said — if we may say so — that he is just a man. May we? We may, because that’s how Stewart likes it. But we all know that some men become more than men by how they respond to their times. Such a man is Jon Stewart. He has stepped up. He might have started out as a great comedian, but when he saw that the times were no laughing matter, he became also a great man. He transformed himself, and so was himself transformed. Even as the media and politicians he mocked so relentlessly lost their moral compass, he found his. He saw wrong and tried to right it; saw suffering and tried to heal it; saw war and tried to stop it; saw his old friend Anthony Weiner’s penis and tried to make jokes about it…

Sorry. It’s just that when you’re talking about Jon Stewart, you’re never just talking about Jon Stewart. You’re invoking the Jon Stewart narrative — the collective fantasy about Jon Stewart — and it leads to all sorts of inappropriate historical comparisons. You can even play the Jon Stewart Game, in which you start telling his story and see how long it takes you to compare him to someone he should feel really uncomfortable being compared to. See, he really is just a man,and a man from New Jersey at that. The township he’s from, Lawrence, is right between Princeton and Trenton — right at the intersection of smart and tough. He’s always been a ballsy little guy, with a feeling for the little guy. Before he started doing stand-up, he used to tend bar at a joint with a steel door and no windows, in the back of a liquor store on the Trenton side; you see that place, you know that here’s a guy used to living by his wits. So he moved to New York — where else is a guy like that gonna go? Now he’s a real New Yorker, which means he doesn’t take any bullshit and at the same time bullshit doesn’t bother him, depending on the circumstance. But when Congress started jacking those 9/11 first responders around, stalling on the bill that promised them benefits: That bothered him. So he found his opportunity and took his shot, started telling preposterous old biddies like Mitch McConnell to just pass the fucking thing.

And they passed it, last December. And you know what he got in return, from all the grateful firemen in New York? A birthday party for one of his kids in the firehouse in his neighborhood in New York, with a birthday cake in the shape of a fire truck. And you know what else he got? A story in The New York Times that compared him to Edward R. Murrow…

See? It never takes long, when you play the Jon Stewart Game. But hey, it’s not his fault. He saw the Edward R. Murrow thing in the Times, was smart enough to say “What the…?” He made sure to remind us that he’s a comedian, for crying out loud. He makes funny faces and fart jokes. But here’s the thing: When he protests that he’s a comedian, he’s not escaping from the collective fantasy. He’s feeding it. The collective fantasy, you see, is not just about Jon Stewart, it’s about America, especially liberal America, and its need for redeemers to rise out of its ranks. Jon Stewart’s just a comedian the way gunslingers in old westerns are really peaceable sodbusters who hate all that bloodshed and all that killin’ but finally have to strap on them six-guns and march on into town. Heck, he’d go back to telling jokes if he could, but he can’t, not with hired guns like Tucker Carlson and Jim Cramer around…

As the excerpt indicates, despite Mr Stewart’s protestations, he has done more for the world than fart jokes and funny faces – he can now be said to have influenced public policy. The mocking flavor of the passage above could just as easily be turned back upon the author, I suppose. Where were you, Mr Jurnow, and what did you have to say when Congress was still procrastinating on helping the first-responders to the WTC attacks cope with the health problems that have plagued them since that day?

The question might arise whether it is possible for Mr Stewart to claim that balance and fairness is not necessary in his case, since he’s said many times that he is just an entertainer, and if the real journalists were doing their jobs he wouldn’t have to do what he does – still, hasn’t he gone so far in one direction as to become a public figure, if not, as the NYT says in the link Jurnow indicates, an “advocacy journalist?”

I guess I would suggest that he has always been that way. In fact many comedians have a point of view to express, perhaps most. In response to criticism of this nature from pundits at Fox, his longtime nemesis, he replies,

 […] to say that comedians have to decide whether they are comedians or social commentators…uh, comedians do social commentary through comedy. That’s how its worked for thousands of years. I have not moved out of the comedian’s box into the news box. The news box is moving towards me.”

The Daily Show website calls his program the “most trusted name in fake news.” True to form, it sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. At one time polls suggested that the show was the primary source of information about events of the day for young people in their twenties – this poll from Time Magazine after the death of Walter Cronkite shows him at 44% over 3 other more mainstream newscasters –  and I recall thinking that such a factoid likely reflected the grimness of the times, that people should want to sweeten their currents events diet with a giggle or two in order to swallow it – but, far more than that it was delivering a very loud and very clear “Up yours!” to the mainstream media and political leaders of all stripes. It is the jester in his motley garb who can speak truth, not the wizened visages pronouncing behind podiums, this says, and we will choose to believe the fool before accepting the words of the sages and the stooges of the wealthy and the rulers of empires.

I have more to say about this, and more about the topic in the context of Korea. I’ll shoot for getting that to you around Thursday.

Edit –  It actually went up a few days later. You can read Part Two “Comedy and reality” by clicking here.

I’m a big fan of candid shots, and street photography as a genre, but all the pictures here today are posed shots.

This gentleman was part of the set I took at Namdaemun, but when I saw the shot of his market stall, I realized the lines on his face and the expression he was giving were far more interesting than what he was selling. Click below the fold to see the full shot. 

The woman below has to put on these clothes and that hat every day to sell little balls of chicken pan fried with a weird sweet sauce. I tried it once and didn’t like it, but I pass her nearly every day on the way to the market near our apartment.

 She seems to fit into her uniform so aptly that I know for a fact I would almost surely not recognize her in street clothes in some other place.

She works as a hostess / server at a barbecue place just upstairs from Gongdeok Stn, a place that deserves its own write-up one of these days when I get around to it. It was a quick snap as we were paying the bill and heading for the door – I pointed to her, held up the camera, she smiled and I hit the shutter once, that’s all, and we left the building. No muss, no fuss. The lighting is not perfect, but I don’t think I could have gotten a better image if I’d messed about with strobes, done a dozen alternate takes and spent 20 minutes getting the camera ready and getting her hair to fall just right.

He’s playing guitar outside of a little café down the street, part of an acoustic ensemble promoting an event to help people in Nepal, I think. Musicians make good subjects because they are completely focused on doing something they are good at and which they enjoy.

This is in the central park arcade in Hongdae. His friend had a Mohawk that stood out almost half a meter above his head, but he was shy, and demurred when I asked him if I could get a shot. I don’t understand why someone would go to the work to acquire a hairstyle that can only be called remarkable – and then not want it photographed? Amazing. This guy not only smiled for me but did the thing with the cigarette that makes it a bit closer to perfect.

I call her The Tomato Lady. She’s in the open-air market at Mangwon near where I live and she’s always got tomatoes, and good ones, even at times of year you just can’t find the suckers anywhere else …

When I first picked up the camera back in ’07, I was far too shy to take pictures of people. I got over that. Turns out, a lot of people like having their picture taken. All you gotta do is ask.

Michael Paterniti wrote in GQ last month about the Japanese tsunami, focusing on the story of one single individual. It starts like this:

Later, lost far at sea, when you’re trying to forget all you’ve left behind, the memory will bubble up unbidden: a village that once lay by the ocean.

Pretty quickly he tells you what your name is. It’s Hiromitsu Shinkawa, and you have a farm.

You had a farm. Then, one day, in March on the 11^th day, at a bit after 2 in the afternoon the ground started to shake and the waters came.

This force is greater than the force of memory, or regret, or fear. It’s the force of an impersonal death, delivered by thousands of pounds of freezing water that slam you into a dark underworld, the one in which you now find yourself hooded, beaten, pinned deeper. The sensation is one of having been lowered into a spinning, womblike grave. If you could see anything in the grip of this monster, fifteen feet down, you’d see your neighbors tumbling by, as if part of the same circus. You’d see huge pieces of house—chimneys and doors, stairs and walls—crashing into each other, fusing, becoming part of one solid, deadly wave. You’d see shards of glass and splintered swords of wood. Or a car moving like a submarine. You’d see your thirty pigeons revolving in their cage. Or your wife within an arm’s reach, then vacuumed away like a small fish. You frantically flail. Is this up or down? Something is burning inside now, not desperation but blood depleted of oxygen. What you illogically desire more than anything is to open your mouth wide and gulp. You scissor your legs. In some eternity, the water turns from black to gray, and gray to dirty green, as you reach up over your head one last time and whip your arms down, shooting for the light.

What you see when you explode into the air is a world swarming with burbling black water where one hundred homes once stood, pushing you inland on an oily swell. The mountains keep racing nearer. You’re submerged up to your neck and carried with the current, flying by treetops. It takes a moment to locate yourself here, to confirm that for the moment you’re still living in this thin line between water and sky. In the frigid flow is half a roof, which just so happens to be yours. Frogging forward, you close the gap, try to lift yourself aboard, but your heavy clothes drag you down. You try a second time. And a third, arms wobbling until you fall back, exhausted. On the fourth attempt, you propel enough of your body out of the water to beach on the roof, then wriggle the rest of yourself to momentary safety. This is when you’re overcome by two feelings: relief (I’m alive!) and disbelief (Where has the whole world gone?). The wave now surfs you deeper inland, over the homes of Mr. Yoshimura and Mr. Takahashi, Mr. Banba and Mr. Yamamoto (though the water is impenetrably black, you know this village by heart), and just when your forward progress slows (over the roof of the old-age home and the place where the hospital once stood) and is about to reverse direction, you think to jump, understanding that this may be your best opportunity to survive before the wave rushes back or another one speeds forward. The arm of a crane lies just ahead, at the water’s edge, and yet you hesitate a second too long. The reversal of water begins as a sucking sound that gains intensity, amplifying, and then you’re flying, faster and faster, backward over the village on a carpet of black water, to a line of froth where land and ocean formerly met, the mountains receding in a shot, and with them, everything you once thought immovable and holy. Where are you being taken? And what awaits you there?

Paterniti uses the second-person “you’ throughout the narrative, and normally I’d consider it gimmicky, literary-pretentious. It does its job in this case, though. The intent is to place the reader directly within the events unfolding here, and for a while the un-natural effect of the choice of grammatical case serves to instead distance the reader, due to being constantly reminded that it is such an uncommon way to tell a story. It’s a lengthy piece, however – you’ll want a cup of coffee, or perhaps green tea, and perhaps as much as a half an hour to read it all at once. After a few minutes of reading, whatever dissonance you felt at first due to the form of the narrative, quickly comes to seem not quite so odd. By the end, it seemed the only logical way to tell it.

A lot of us watched the video footage of tsunami that hit Japan last spring, some of us perhaps a few too many times. One of the criticisms of photography as a mode of expression lies in the nature of it only being able to show us the outsides of things, just bare exteriors of events, and seldom finds itself able to scratch the surfaces and convey true human experience. I know during all the reading of various accounts of the tragedy in the months that followed, it was a lack I had been looking to fill. In fact, we know that it is not possible to experience what someone else has.

Paterniti makes a good go of the attempt, though. It’s literature in the guise of journalism, or maybe the other way around. I was moved, and affected by what I read in ways that no other accounts or images of the disaster had been able to do.

Click through and read “The Man Who Sailed His House.”

.

Clearing out some stuff on my desk ….

ㅁ There’s a whole lot of water all over Bangkok, and most of it is in all the wrong places. It’s been going on for a month or so, at least. Another thing that was in the wrong place is this crocodile.  There are a hundred or more of ‘em swimming all over the flooded streets.

And I think I got problems? Well, I don’t, not like this.

ㅁ Matt Taibbi is the best thing going on at Rolling Stone Magazine, and he has been for a while. He’s all over and on top of the Occupy Wall Street stuff.

Where was all that class hatred in the Reagan years, when openly dumping on the poor became fashionable? Where was it in the last two decades, when unions disappeared and CEO pay relative to median incomes started to triple and quadruple?

The answer is, it was never there. If anything, just the opposite has been true. Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we’ve obsessed over the wealth dream.

Read his Taibblog. Learn. (Hat tip to Wet Casements blog.)

ㅁ Housecleaning, housecleaning, housecleaning … oh yeah. I’m in the process of whittling down my far-too-extravagant sidebar. The original idea was to use this space as sort of a replacement for bookmarks – just keep all the sites I usually go to all in one place – and while I still don’t think that’s a bad idea, it really has gotten out of hand. Some of the links go to blogs that haven’t published in two years or more, and who needs that? Also gonna revise and update the “About” pages at the top. Probably. No telling when. I’ll let you know.

ㅁ Roboseyo thinks I’m falling down on the job. Says I need to post more often. Meh, it’s all relative, innit? Maybe, my good man, just perhaps it is YOU who are posting too often. Ever stop to think about that?

Naw, seriously, he gave me a charming compliment, and I need to thank him for it. Thank you. And I’ll try to work harder. Sir.

Oh, and check out the comments section of that post for an interesting discussion about why not so many women choose to blog.

ㅁ I don’t know what the story is with that ad there on the left. I snapped it while riding the subway last February, and it seems to have something to do with a credit card from Lotte. I’m quite sure that  a free save has got to be better than the kind you have to pay for. The woman holding up the card looks as if she might have taken some prescription medication before the photo shoot, and I’m a little worried she might even fall over. On the other hand, there are people displaying affection in public there in the background, and the world can always use a bit more of that. That’s what I think.

ㅁ Also along the lines of a charming compliment, at least two pieces from this blog have been selected for an upcoming book. It’s to be called Beyond Bulgogi (I think) and you can read selected chapters online. Better than that, they are still calling for submissions – so, hey, send them something, alright? The worst they could do is get your name wrong or change the title of your masterpiece to something you don’t like so well … That link also goes to the table of contents. My pieces are called “Summer Rain” (originally titled, “After a heavy rain, and just before another one”) and “It’s My Neighborhood.”

You may have read them here already, but you won’t have read the others, most likely. Not everyone included there has a blog, I think.

ㅁ The election for a new mayor of Seoul took place last Wednesday, and it looks like the good guys won this time . . . ”Good guys” as defined by the people who live in our house, that is.

Park Won-soon is a liberal independent, unafiliated with any party, and he beat Na kyung-won by a margin of close to 10%. She represented the ruling party, led by current president Lee Myung-bak (who also served a term as mayor before heading for the Blue House), and was only able to carry the very wealthiest parts of the city – on the map, it looks like Gangnam versus the rest of us, and our side prevailed.

It was a special election, and not a day off from work as general elections are. Despite this, nearly half of eligible voters participated, which is quite impressive considering that many were working class folk who lined up early in the morning or after work in the evening.

The results and the high turnout are being interpreted as indicative of widespread voter disaffection with politics as currently practiced, and will likely portend a greater role for coalition groups and civic organizations – and will almost certainly have repercussions in presidential and legislative polls next year.

Park’s victory is expected to fuel speculation that Ahn Cheol-soo, a software mogul who supported Park during the campaign, will run in the next presidential election. Ahn has said his goal is to end the GNP’s rule, but he hasn’t declared a presidential bid. In polls, Ahn’s meteoric rise was evident as he was ranked as the frontrunner in the presidential race. Until recently, Park Geun-hye of the GNP was seen as unbeatable.

Usually there’s a transition period when someone takes on a job like this, but not this time. Thursday morning, Mr Park walked in to the mayor’s office, sat the desk and put his name on some papers, stamp, stamp. Free school lunches for everyone. Hah!

I wrote about the reasons for this general election several weeks ago. Check that one for more of the backstory. And, oh dear, it looks like I dropped a few paragraphs in the comment section over at Three Wise Monkeys.

Gosh and golly.

 There’s a cluster of camera shops around one corner of Namdaemun Market, and right about 5 weeks ago, that’s where I bought my Olympus Pen. It was about a week later that I decided the machine deserved its own dedicated bag, so I went back. Also, I wanted to take some pictures.

This woman fed me something else, and I found her appearance so striking I couldn’t resist asking for her picture. Generally, I prefer unposed shots of people in their natural environment, so that the picture is more about the place than it is about the person in it, such as the one at the top of this page. However, I’ve been getting less shy lately about asking people and what I’ve found is that most don’t mind at all, and a lot of people enjoy having their picture taken. And sometimes those pictures turn out okay, too.

It’s a loud place, crowded and full of constant activity. It’s an old place, and you can guess that most of it looks pretty much the same as it might have even a century ago.

The name of the place means “South Gate,” which means this was part the perimeter of the walled city during medieval times. The actual gate itself was destroyed three and a half years ago in a weird case of arson. Photos of the landmark still exist in many places, of course, but I realized after hearing the news that I had never taken a picture of it myself, though I’d scampered past it on many occasions while getting to places I needed to go …

I took more photos of the market that day, but here’s a picture I took a few days after the fire, February 2008. As I wrote on my photo sharing site, “People felt as if a member of the family had died unexpectedly. The background image is a photo of the gate, how it looked before the fire, and it’s attached to a restraining wall behind which workmen are taking what’s left apart.” The man’s face looks to me equal parts anger and grief.

The foundation of the monument is stone, but the wood that was consumed was the original lumber from 4 or 5 centuries ago,  back in the Chosun Dynasty. It’s being rebuilt at this moment and will likely be finished by Christmas of next year.

Sometimes I think the very best response to the terror attacks a decade ago would have been similar to how we respond to a natural calamity like an earthquake or a tidal wave: help the survivors, rebuild, and take precautions and remain prepared for future disasters.

Actually, this is usually what I think.

Others have made the point before me that the way that America did respond has done nothing to seek out and solve the underlying factors that led to the attacks and have even made further violence from such extremists even more likely to occur in the future.

Back when the Freedom Towers were first being discussed and plans drawn up guild on what is now referred to as Ground Zero, I recall my own thoughts. “Naw, that’s not it. We should rebuild the WTC just as it was, restore the skyline of NYC to its previous shape, exactly as before. If it becomes a target again, so be it. If it gets knocked down again, build it back. Again. And again, if necessary. The fanatics had a message they wanted to send, and to me the correct response is that we don’t care. We are bigger than one building or even two. We are stronger than a handful of small men with large hate and larger fear. And then we go on. We go on as before, not as if nothing had happened, but rather because we don’t allow ourselves to be changed by this kind of atrocity.”

But it’s not what happened, and in fact America did change – and I would argue that the worst parts of the national character became accentuated, more pervasive and more dominant than before.

Which brings me to this.

A coloring book seems a rather trivial sort of cultural artifact, but it is at least interesting to observe when one is being used to promote a political agenda. Deep in the heartland, some people with ties to the so-called Tea Party have produced one depicting the terror attacks and the aftermath. The article discussing this says that it “angers” US Muslims, but in fact it doesn’t seem that they are much more than annoyed. The article In the Guardian describes it like this:

Showing scenes from 9/11 for children to colour in and telling the story of the attacks and the subsequent hunt for Osama bin Laden, “the book was created with honesty, integrity, reverence, respect and does not shy away from the truth”, according to its publisher, which says that it has sold out of its first print run of 10,000 copies.

One page of the $6.99 book, which has been given a PG rating, shows Bin Laden hiding behind a hijab-wearing woman as he is shot by a Navy SEAL. “Being the elusive character that he was, and after hiding out with his terrorist buddies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, American soldiers finally locate the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden,” runs the text accompanying the picture. “Children, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.”

Despite the gauche cluelessness of the choice of topic for children (who generally prefer fantasy characters with supernatural powers) and the teacher-like tone of the text, what strikes me is the title the publishers have chosen: We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom.

I wonder if it occurs to anyone that the terrorists and the fanatics that persist likely feel very good to know that their goal was accomplished – is there is no doubt that every one of them, bin Laden and the men who got on the planes that day, spoke inwardly to themselves and aloud to each other, “America will never forget what we do today.”

I’m not worried about the fragile minds of kids with crayons in their hands getting swayed over to a xenophobic conservative agenda. It strikes me as something parents will buy if they already hold such views – and kids will ignore as they get back to the much more interesting saga of Optimus Prime vs the Desceptikons.

Here is something the publishers ought to worry about, because they probably didn’t think of it. A lot of kids might look at that picture (check theklink) and o tmight occur to them, “Okay, he’s evil, but he looks old and weak and he’s hiding behind a woman … so why didn’t the Navy SEALs just arrest him and put him in jail?”

The news is a week and a half old by now, but anyway …

Had some people over weekend before last to celebrate another year of myself spinning around on the planet, and I think I can say without fear of being corrected that for most of that Sunday afternoon and early evening, Bobsters House was the scene of a seriously good time.

There were about a dozen and a half of my closest, some I don’t know real well but hope to, and most had significant others they brought along.  About half dozen kids were in the crowd as well – they didn’t get bored and they seemed to have a good time, despite their ages varying wildly from each other.

It seems to be the norm that most social events for expatriates around here tend to involve large amounts of alcohol and blowing off steam in bars until the wee hours. I like to do that too, sometimes, but it occurred to me that there could be something useful in people spending a mellow afternoon cooking meat on the roof with their families along. It seems to work alright.

I think the crowd was split right down the middle between Westerners and Koreans, which is the way I like things to happen here. A big chunk were people from a message board I sometimes frequent for people who are long-term residents in Korea – the site is called AFEK, mostly created by my good friend Mike from Liverpool with a lot of help from a fellow Yank who goes by TJ. Others in attendance consisted of friends that just go way, way back, and a couple more were current private students who were brave enough to hang out in a room with so many foreigners. I think only 3 or 4 people came solo, or had to leave their families elsewhere. One guy brought his wife who is large with child and set to deliver in January. They came the farthest distance from out of town and I’m so glad they made the effort and took the trouble cuz I haven’t seen them both together since my last birthday, I think. It was great to see you Wayne. Another was a fellow blogger, I think the first among such peers I’ve made real-life acquaintance with, whose wife was way too far along in her pregnancy to be leaving the house much. (Conrats, Rob, on the expanded household.)

Yeah, The Bobster has him some friends, and he’s proud to let you know: they do rock. If the occasion requires it, they may even roll, a bit. I will probably keep their pictures to myself because they do deserve their privacy. (I put up a private album of those photos in Google+, so if you were at the party and you are signed up there contact me by the usual means and I’ll add you that circle.)

It was a roof party, with the bbq upstairs, the meat both plentiful and delicious. I think I can risk showing a picture of that. I delegated the grilling chores to a trio of dudes who know their way around a Weber better than I, which meant I was able to socialize a bit. A splendid gent from Ireland by way of England baked a 2 layer chocolate cake and it was great, just as the one he brought me last year was – thanks, Eamonn, it’s the only time of year I get to eat cake that didn’t come from a store. Everybody sang “saengil chukahamnida” (Happy Birthday) and somebody’s little girl kept blowing out the candles before I had a chance – kids think every birthday cake is just for them, I guess.

I wore a t-shirt that I won from the ZenKimchi website for a photo I entered in their contest earlier this year, a bit of food porn shot at a ddalk galbi restaurant around the corner- and it was the first time I ever entered such an event, I’ll have you know. That’s my private student, Mr Kang, and he’s telling you that the shirt says to “Please give me a beer” in Korean.  Me, I think the sentiment is not ambitious enough, and I’d like the change the word in the middle from hana (one) to mani (a lot of).

(As an aside, it’s very uncommon to find t-shirts in this country with words in the native language, and they tend to be made by and worn by foreigners like me – most t-shirts here are in English, and one often suspects the wearers don’t really know what the words mean.)

As for gifts, I don’t want to embarrass people by enumerating them all, but my pal Jason gave me a bit of dutch process siphon-coffee which I just got around to sipping a bit of recently – unique flavor, and quite interesting, and now I’m gonna have to go out and find where to get more if it – as well as some fascinating prints of computer-art drawn from his own hand, or cursor, if you will. Jason, I’ll gift you in return by showing you this site, which I think you’ll agree is hilarious.

Others brought wine and whiskey and damn, I just noticed a pineapple in the fridge, of all things. Who brought that? I think it was Joe. He even brought gourmet food in cans for my cat – Princess Kwenchana, by the way, spent the whole party under the bed. This is preferable to scratching the eyes of small children, I suppose, which is something my friend Keith’s cat might do – and maybe she had heard of some ancient history one of the guests possesses that involves sticks and poking things. I swear, I didn’t tell her.

The weather has been crappy all summer, either humid and way too hot or storming rain, but now its a brisk autumn, with just the slightest chill in the air in the late afternoons. We got lucky this time and we even had a halfway decent sunset – last year when we did this we got intermittent showers.

We seem to be blessed with an apartment somewhat larger than a lot of the people we know have, and then there’s the roof – in that regard we sometimes feel we really ought to do this more often, sort of as a public service. Every time we throw one of these things I keep thinking we should do it more often, like maybe every month, but it generally works out to be seasonal, every three or four months.

Hey, I oughta go full-on pagan with it and do them around the solstices and equinoxes. Ah, then some wiseacre would prolly show up with a goat and try to sacrifice it to the light of the full moon … actually, that might work, if we could toss the thing on the barbie afterwards. Yum.