Sick Babyseyo

Warning: the final picture in this post contains chest hair.

Babyseyo and Roboseyo.

You may notice the newest addition to my family: Spectcloseyo.
Yes. I have joined the ranks of the bespectacled, glasses-wearing four-eyes. And to all of my friends on whose glasses I at some point put a fingerprint as a prank: I'm sorry. I'm a jerk.

So Babyseyo got a cough last week. On Wednesday, we brought him to the pediatric clinic near our home; they gave him a two-days' worth prescription, and said, "If this doesn't set him right, bring him to a real hospital."

On Friday, he was worse than Wednesday, if anything, his crying had acquired a ragged buzz-saw edge to it that he didn't usually have, and he wasn't smiling: just looking around with big, "You can help me with this, right?" eyes.

So... here's peaceful babyseyo (he folds his arms like a buddha when he's really at peace)

OK ok. Or a mad villain concocting evil schemes (if the light is right)

They looked at him and said "We'd like to check him in, please." And he looked like this.


Bronchopneumonia.

Call Rudolph: the baby hospital's horning in on his turf. The gadget that measures his blood oxygen saturation and pulse has made his toe glow. Wifeoseyo did not find my shiny toe jokes funny... and I'm pretty shiny toes don't run in her side of the family, so I'll have to ask my dad about my side.


But readers...
I don't know how to describe what it is to see your own baby like that. It'd be like describing sex to a virgin, or red to a blind person - meaningless platitudes, or words that seem to fall far below the act... but every parent will nod their head and know. It's the final step in bonding with your kid, I think: seeing your little one sick takes all the deep roots of love that have been building, and suddenly reveals them to you, like a flash of lightning outlining the tree in your yard, all at once, in an instant, in every staggering detail.

He's been in the hospital since Friday, as my twitter and facebook people will know. He's better: eating more and smiling again, but it was only today that the doctors finally told us just how bad he was doing on Friday, because they didn't want to upset us then. Not that you had to tell us he was in a bad way.

We're getting good care at the hospital, but anyway... that's baby's first sick. So if you've been waiting for me to answer an e-mail or comment at Roboseyo, please bear with me. And if you're the praying type, say a short one for Babyseyo.

'cause I love this kid.

Shakespeare vs. Sir Francis Bacon, and why @Holterbarbour is a Twitter Genius

@HolterBarbour and I have been trading barbs, wisecracks and puns for a while now on twitter: he's one of my favorite twitterheads/tweeps/whatever they're called these days.

Recently, he's been asking some of his twitter pals for topics, and writing limericks about them. And they're hilarious. I asked him for a topic, and gave him "having snow fights with dirty snow in the city."

He wrote this:
Before you start tossing 'round snow,
The levels of that which you throw
should at least be commensurate
to the layer of expectorate
horked up by old men on the go


And gave me a hella hard topic (especially for an old humanities major): "The relationship between capacitance and capacitive resistance as represented in a sine curve"

I sent him this:
In capacitors of parallel plates

as we search for resistance in rates, 

capacitive reactance
goes up with more distance 

while capacitance drops with more space



And figured I'd earned the right to toss him a tough topic, too. He got this: "Prove that Sir Francis Bacon was not the author of Shakespeare's oeuvre in a limerick". Here's what he sent me:

Hyuna the Stripper and Ajosshi Fans

Eat Your Kimchi ripped Hyuna's video, Troublemaker Troublemaker, to pieces, for Hyuna's one-dimensional sexiness.


Tumblrite Briana, at Noonaneomuhomo, took issue with Simon and Martina's review.
Simon and Martina responded with an explanation of what they were trying to say about Hyuna.

I'm No Picasso added a response to it, with an interesting post about the way women in Kpop videos these days are taking on the Male Gaze directly - with Hyuna as a prime example of that - rather than pretending it isn't there.

It's been an interesting conversation, but I'd like to tie it in with one other thing:

James on The Grand Narrative has been writing about "Ajosshi Fandom" or "Uncle Fans." Read up here.

Basically, here's the rundown:
K-pop girl bands started targeting males in their 30s and 40s. All well and good... those guys have money to burn! The problem is, especially when the performers in these girl groups are underage, it gets kind of uncomfortable for older men to be leering at videos of underage girls in short skirts shaking their asses, now, doesn't it?

To get around this, the discourse of the "ajosshi fan" was invented. Ajosshi fans, or uncle fans, claim their feeling toward the girls' is like a friendly uncle’s feelings toward his niece - a little paternal, a little protective, but most of all, innocent and de-sexualized. This is a convenient justification, because by claiming to be an “uncle fan” a guy can pretend he hasn’t noticed that these band members are chosen and the videos are designed for sex appeal. By throwing up his hands and shouting "Uncle" he gets to ogle underage girls, but the "Uncle fan" explanation lets him off the hook without feeling like a creep. Kind of like the creepy uncle who tries to look down his niece's shirt while going on about how she's growing up. I'm sure my female readers could comment on how NOT benign such affection is... even though sometimes it probably is meant in all innocence.

To be fair: not every “uncle fan” is a creep, but if we acknowledge that sexual interest IS part of the K-pop girl group package, we can start discussing things like guidelines for the appropriate use of underage girls in k-pop groups. And we can recognize that the "uncle fan" explanation may be true for some men who claim to have "paternal feelings"... but the number of men who truly have only "uncle-ish" feelings is probably fewer than the number of men who claim that's why they're avid followers of K-pop girl groups.

And let's just call bullshit on that anyway... because if I saw any of my nieces dressed in the kinds of uniforms k-pop girls wear, dancing that way, and saw thousands of men my age staring at the videos, I wouldn't be proud and paternal. I wouldn't want to give her a squeeze around the shoulders, a chuck on the chin, and say "nice job, niece." I'd be shocked and upset and want to stand in front of the TV to block it, not to watch it again, if it were my niece. If we could ask every "Uncle fan" who watches these videos, "How'd you feel if it was your daughter up there, dressed like that," I think we'd find the "Uncle fan" fiction doesn't hold water. (Hell, I bet we could just ask them how many of the words to the songs they know to find out which ones don't give a damn about the girls, and just like looking.)

If we aren’t honest enough to admit that K-pop is selling sex, then I think it’s dishonest to act like there’s nothing sexual about dressing a young girl up in the uniforms they wear in K-pop videos.

Skirts that show panties - this costume led to... either the costume or the song, or the video being banned. Can't be bothered to check. Girls' day: "Twinkle Twinkle" and buddy, if you're watching this video for the music... you're lying. (discussed here and here)


But whether Hyuna is successful at projecting the kind of sexuality she wants to project or not (which is the point of Eat Your Kimchi's beef), here's what videos like hers do:

When the girls are, as INP says, looking directly at the camera, acting like adults instead of little girls, they're confronting the male gaze that ogles them in their videos. If the girls are using aegyo, I'm an uncle watching a video that's telling a cute story about girls acting like children and being cute... that happens to be sexy (oh, but that's not why I'm watching it: I'm watching it because I like those cute childish faces and that funny fairy tale storyline that involves licking oversized prop lollipops bwahaha).

Videos like this give me that "out"


But with Hyuna, I'm watching a sexy video that's a sexy video because it's a sexy video that happens to be a sexy video, and there's no pretending about it. I'm not attracted to the childish costumes, and I can't pretend that's why I watch, because there AREN'T childish costumes and baby-faces. They pull the rug on the "Uncle fans" and say, "You're going to watch the video because it's sexy, and we're not giving you any short-cut or justification. Because we're f$&#ing sexy, and that's that."

Brown Eyed Girls is making videos like this. (mentioned by Eat Your Kimchi in their Troublemaker review)

You can't pretend that's anything other than a sexy video.

So now, let's actually talk about sexiness in Kpop videos, instead of inventing fictions, justifications, and fishy discourses that excuse ourselves from having to admit what the video, and these kpop bands' sculpted images, are really about.

Talking about it is good.

2011 Look Back: Music and Favorites

Two more things I like to talk about at year-ends: Music and Blawrgs.

I haven't seen enough movies in the cinema to really talk about 2011's films, and I don't pay enough attention to the movies playing when they're on my computer, to really talk about them.

But the best thing I watched this year was "Avatar: The Last Airbender," the Nickelodeon TV series. Don't even mention the movie, which compares to the TV series kind of like if you were expecting a Nintendo Wii for Christmas, and instead got a box of turkey poo: Aang is, far and away the most likeable protagonist I've seen in an animated series: he's human, he's funny, he's a hero, he learns, but he's also totally a kid - fun-loving and mischievous, even when he has to save the world. His journey is authentic and the choices he faces are smart, challenging, and, when you see what he chooses, satisfying. So go watch it.

I briefly mentioned what I love about December -- year-end lists -- so I thought I'd throw down a few of my favorite bands and albums from the year, and ended off with the blogs that have newly come onto my radar this year.

My favorite music - not all of it's from 2011, but I found it in 2011.


Fleet Foxes: Helplessness Blues - everybody loves these guys.

Vampire Weekend - Contra - if Phoenix listened to more of Paul Simon's "Graceland" they'd make this album.


Aphex Twin: Hangable Light Bulb - Electronica helped me study for grad school, and this was the most interesting of what I found this spring.

Tom Waits: Bad as Me - any time Tom Waits has a new album, I'm in. This is a solid album, though like Beck's recent album, "Modern Guilt" which, for the first (or at worst second) was a Beck album that sounded like a beck album (that is, which revisited places Beck had been before rather than looking somewhere new), this is a Tom Waits album that sounds like a Tom Waits album, rather than an album of Tom Waits going somewhere new. That said, this is a lean, taut Tom Waits album that demonstrates the kind of curt brevity required by the MP3 downloading "skip" generation.


Bon Iver: Bon Iver - I liked "Skinny love" on his last album. I like this one from top to bottom.

EMA: Past Life Martyred Saints - this would have been my favorite album ever for a while if I'd discovered it when I was 24. As it is, it's very nice, and EMA manages to move across a surprising range of sounds, all holding onto her center.

The Field: Looping State of Mind - surprisingly stirring for electronic music.

The Flaming Lips: At War with the Mystics - an older one, but I finally started to "get" older Flaming Lips this year. And the first two tracks are something else.

Fucked Up: David Comes to Life - a very rude, random e-mail informed me that Hardcore is totally different than death metal, last time I wrote about Fucked Up. And if all fans of hardcore and/or death metal are as rude as dear Stan (appropriate choice of name) I'm glad I have no plans to get into the genre as a genre. Then again... I know that I'd certainly write an e-mail deriding a stranger, if a blogger I read ever confused instrumental minimalist post-rock twee-folk with freestyle acoustic shoegaze tone-poetry. But who ever gets instrumental minimalist post-rock twee-folk confused with freestyle acoustic shoegaze tone-poetry? Good thing they don't!  However, whatever "David Comes To Life" is, it's awesome. 20 minutes too long, though. I prefer things in a tight package, over things that sprawl.

Leonard Cohen: Live in London - give it some time. It'll grow on you. Leonard Cohen's about 130 years old by now, and still delivers a concert that is graceful, lovely, and touched with moments of real feeling, both in the songs, and between him and his audience.

Suckers: Wild Smile - if Sunset Rubdown listened to more David Bowie, this is what would happen.

The Tallest Man on Earth - Sometimes The Blues is Just a Passing Bird - the guy's voice is annoying and nasal... but the songs just work.

TuneYards - Whokill - so out of the blue. So, so, so good, I have no idea what to do with it, because I can't play any other music before or after I play this.

The Weeknd - Echoes of Silence - New singer, new addition to the list, I'm still breaking in this one, but I like how The Weeknd delivers his music so far. A LOT.

Micah P Hinson - ...And the Pioneer Saboteurs - more mediative and atmospheric than his earlier stuff (I adore his first album) - but it suits his voice and his feel.

Hope you like some of that. If you don't... I never promised you would.


NEXT: BLOGS!

Here are the blogs that caught my attention this year:
Burndog is fun.
Korean Kontext is a podcast that's scored some great guests, but not much buzz
The Dokdo Times picks up the torch as Dokdo Is Ours hangs up its pen.
Stupid Ugly Foreigner is, in my opinion, neither stupid nor ugly.
Ajumma's Journal - well-sourced, at its best when talking about how to enjoy nature in Korea
The Diplomat - it covers all of asia, but it's a fantastic source.
Alien's Day Out - bloggy, but wins points for discussing being a vegetarian in Seoul
If I Had A Minute To Spare, who hates top 10 lists.

2011: Another Year of Blogoseyo

Happy New Year, folks. It's time to look back a little at 2011, for the year it was.

But first: North Korea wishes you a Happy New Year: (seriously: video uploaded January 1) From twitter account @PourMeCoffee

Anybody willing to post the lyrics in the comments?
Do you know any other countries that still use images of factories to project the image of a powerful, wealthy nation?

Back to the retrospective:

(aliens day out also has a 2011 best-of post)

It was an awesome year personally -

Highlights included a trip to the south sea, around Yeosu, with my wife and parents in-law in the spring, a one-year anniversary party in Niagara Falls, to celebrate our wedding with my Korean and Canadian families together, and, you know, baby. Who's laughing now. If you make motorboat sounds.

Among other things going on, in November I started going on air at TBS radio in the morning, and on Friday I did a year-end look back at 2011 in blogs. It's only from where I stand, but here are the blog topics and trends that caught my attention:

Cribbed from my notes for the TBS Radio segment (which can be found here - the 11/12/30 episode), though live radio never goes exactly according to script then, and thanks to the facebook ant twitter friends who reminded me of some of these stories:

Biggest Blog Stories in 2011

Not necessarily the biggest news stories, because I'm sure news websites are covering that... here are the blog stories that have caught my attention, and the attention of the other bloggers I've been reading:

Kim Jong Il's Death

The no-brainer. Of course, how this plays out will continue to be discussed over the course of 2012.

Itaewon FreedomThis video, featuring JYP, the creative force behind The Wondergirls and Rain, probably made the biggest K-blog splash of any musical video since "Kickin' It In GeumCheon"

(runner-up Korea-themed Youtube song: P00lman's "The Subway Song"

darn impressive for a one-person show.

Blackout Korea

The discovery of the "Blackout Korea" blog by Korean Netizens, followed by the opening of a "anti-Blackout" blog and enough angry comments at Blackout Korea to prompt the writer to take it offline, led to some interesting discussions. Interestingly: Blackout Korea is back online. With some rules for how things'll be run 'round here.

I wrote about Blackout Korea here, here. On Bloggers getting bullied into silence:

A post I liked about the issue of anonymity and blogs catching static, was written by The Bobster, about "Jake" the writer of Expat Hell. A blog that's had its own trouble with defensive nationalists (who don't actually live in Korea)

Kpop invades the “other” blogs.
For a long time, Kpop blogs have been their own ecosystem that don't cross over into the "other" k-blogs much. This year, with shows liek "Superstar K" and "I am a Singer" I've been following, and interested, in Kpop more than ever before, and some very cool blogs I like have been responding to what they're reading on the K-pop blogs, with some neat discussions. Do these count as Kpop? Maybe not... but the expat bloggers I follow have been taking more interest in Korean music (other than to scoff at plagiarism scandals) this year.

“See these rocks”
You know what I'm talking about. This was also my most commented blog post of the year. That post has links to most of the other blogs who wrote about the topic.

Tee hee.


SMOE cutting budget
-Because a lot of bloggers are English teachers, English teaching topics always attract a lot of talk.


Newcomers

It's hard to tag "newcomers" in a blog discussion, because the year a blog gains attention is usually not the same year it started posting, so I'm using "newcomers" in a very loose fashion, as you'll see. The three new(er) sites that have probably added most to the discussions I follow are The Three Wise Monkeys, who have run pieces by the former British Ambassador to Korea, Martin Uden (who has a blog himself), top North Korea expert Andrei Lankov, and ran an expose of a crooked travel agent that led to an arrest. I also featured them as Korea Blog of the Month at 10 Magazine this month (January 2010). 

[A small parenthetical: Why Roboseyo Probably Shouldn't Write Angry:Many of my readers will remember that in the spring, I lashed out pretty angrily at 3WM over the series they wrote about ATEK (culminating in this one). I'll be honest: after that series, I was well prepared to thoroughly hate 3WM and everything they did. Hell, I wanted to... but what they did was turn out interesting and generally well-written pieces from a variety of voices that often don't get play in the English media about Korea, and I'd be foolish to deny that. I'm still not wild about the ATEK piece, especially since ATEK has been pretty much silent since then, and I haven't seen anything rise to prominence that (attempts to) perform similar services for English teachers. However, since that series, 3WM has done good work - its best work we've seen so far, in my opinion, so, good job on them.
And if adding a new, interesting voice to the English expat Korea media happened every time I ate my words, I'd do it more often... but this time, I was incorrect in my dismissal of that site, and I'm happy to say so.
(a previous instance when I wrote while angrily also led to an apology post this year.)]

CNNGo has been running travel-tip and hot-spot-type pieces that have sometimes led to good info, and have at other times caused frustrated backlashes from bloggers who thought their advice was off the mark. 

My other favorite newish blog is “I’m No Picasso,” who’s not completely new, but who continues to write interesting things as a public school teacher with a really thoughtful and wise approach to life in Korea, and cultural issues. 

2011 Blog Trends

Multimedia
2011 was, I think, marked by the rise of Korea multimedia. Youtube channels like Eat Your Kimchi, who blazed the trail... but also Steve the Qi ranger, Poolman, also known as Michael (whose subway video linked above went modestly viral in the Korean language internet), and a bunch of photography blogs, my favorite being DayvMattt [spelling corrected] and Hermit Hideaways, and the photo blog run by RJ Koehler - webmaster of The Marmot’s Hole, have come onto the radar this year.

I feel like I'm missing at least four or six important or awesome photography blogs about Korea, so if you know one, please please link it in the comments.

The SeoulPodcast was somewhat active, 10 Magazine started a podcast, and Korean Kontext - keia.podbean.com - has scored some really great guests, though it hasn't gotten much attention yet.

Rise of the tumblr blogs 

The number and variety of Tumblr blogs has really exploded in 2011 - Tumblr’s a kind of different format, that makes it really conversation-intensive but a little harder to follow if you’re not used to it, but there are tons of discussions there that are really interesting, along with pictures of Kpop stars.

Diversification
It’s harder these days to point to a handful of blogs and say they’ve the “major” ones who totally dominate the discussions - which was possible in 2006 and probably in 2009. These days, not so much.

We’ve seen a diversification in the people blogging - it used to be mostly english teachers or people working in the English language media here - newspapers and magazines - and the types of blogs are becoming more varied. Newer blogs are giving me views into Korean corporate culture and other areas.  I hope to hear more from them.

2012 Forecast

I foresee more multimedia - there’s a gap in podcasts, with only a handful making much noise. I predict more will come along.

Even more diversity Domination of blogs by (male, Seoul-based) English teachers will come to an end. This year, I hope to see student, office worker, and other blogs catch more attention. My dream? Some interesting blogs from Korea residents who originate in non-first-world countries writing interesting blogs in English - I’d love to see blogs from people living here from India, the Philippines or Malaysia, for example.

This restrospective is by no means definitive... but here are some ways to look back at the year of Blogoseyo:


Roboseyo's most visited (new) blog posts of 2011 (this will of course favor early posts which have had longer to accumulate pageviews). My "Best of Blogoseyo" one got the most non-home-page hits. Individual posts:
1. Nice Galaxy Tab Ad
2. Slutwalk
3. How to Avoid Getting Forced to Drink in Korea
4. Hyun Bin Psy, and why you can't skip your military service.
5. The "Ni-ga/See These Rocks" post.
6. I am A Singer
7. 12 Actually Useful Tips for Live in Korea
8. Nobody Owns Arirang (related: Who owns a culture)
9. On Netizens Finding Blackout Korea
10. Ten Things about The Last Godfather

All of my top five most commented pieces are also on the top ten most viewed list, except this one: (sexism in the K-blogosphere) so I'm not going to bother with a separate list.

Most interesting observation: none of my writings about English education and English teachers made the list, and almost all of them were analytical pieces on current news stories, or living in Korea tips. So... more of them, I suppose.

Other notable non-2011 posts getting a lot of views
Corporal punishment in Korea's schools
My review of "My Sassy Girl" (hated it)
and most of the pieces linked on the "best of blogoseyo" page. Which I'll need to update with pieces from 2011.


So... what top stories, awesome new photography blogs, podcasts, or general blogs, did I miss, readers?