Ten Magazine is Good People

Ten Magazine is running a huge giveaway where readers can vote on who gets the prizes: 30 million won in publicity and prizes are up for grabs in the big contest, and readers can go here to vote on who they think is most worthy.

Personally, I'm with One Free Korea: I think you should vote for "Justice for North Korea" (facebook page here).

You can also become a fan of 10 Magazine on facebook, here.

Braces!

So I'm a metal-mouth for a few months.  Got my implements installed last month, and will have these for three or four months, depending on how long that stubborn left incisor takes to drop, and for that cranky bottom row to line up like soldiers.  I had those invisible plasticky ones for a while, and they worked for the bigger stuff, but for the final detail work, I'm going to need wire braces for the last few months to get the details worked out. 

As you can see, other than the, you know, wires, things are looking a lot more even than they used to be:  Right Side:

 Left Side:

I've made a lot of progress already...

On the other hand... eating with braces is a pain in the butt.  I'm sure lots of my readers have experienced this for themselves, but I'm going through it now.

Foods that work with braces:

jajangmyeon
seolleongtang
muffins
kalguksu
dumplings
meat... in small bites
spinach
dubu (tofu)-based foods
eggs
kimbap (eaten slowly)
noodle dishes in general
shrimp

Edible, but needs cleaning afterwards:
anything with rice.
that is, most Korean food.

Foods that don't work with braces:
any ddeok and variations thereof
fish with bones
crunchy vegetable matter (kimchi, gakdukki)
nuts
artisan breads with tough crusts
fried stuff (especially deep-friend stuff)

On the bright side, I'm losing weight, because instead of eating until I'm full, I've been eating until I'm tired of trying to eat around my braces.

So that's what's up in Roboseyo-ville.

I've got some things I need to take care of, and I got a really kind e-mail from a loyal reader who's been concerned about the drop-off in posting lately (thanks! sincerely, thanks), and I promise, this is not the end of the Roboseyo we know, and once I've taken care of things, I'll be back in full swing.

But in the meantime... got in my application to the Korean Studies program I want to go to, and did a bunch of other stuff that'll come out once I start catching up on my back-blog.

See you again soon, Readers.  Thanks for your loyalty.

All the best:

Roboseyo

Event: Rubber Soul 2010

Rubber Soul (facebook event page here)

December 4 is World AIDS Day.  Starting at 9PM, in Hongdae, at Ting Tings, Club TA, Club FF and DGBD, you can attend parties at all four spots for a 15000 won cover.  All the cover fees go to Hillcrest AIDS center in South Africa.

You can learn more at the Facebook event page linked above, or at the Rubber Soul Blog, here: http://rubbersoulevents.com.


You should go!


The bands lined up?

Congrats a Bazillion to Zenkimchi Joe!

So Captain Kimchi himself, my buddy Joe, had a baby... well, his wife had a baby, not long ago.

I wanted to send out a huge congratulations to him: I'm sure he's busy as all-get-out right now, but he's been posting pictures of the new baby girl, Ji-an, on Facebook and his website.

He also has an interesting post about Korean post-partum traditions: a pair of old coworkers of mine had a baby while in Korea, and they reported that the pregnancy and childbirth advice they got from their Korean friends was almost exactly the opposite of the advice they got from their phone calls back home.  Their conclusion was that you should do whatever the heck your body tells you to do, as long as you frequently check in with a doctor you trust.

Anyway, if you've had a baby in Korea, head on over to zenkimchi and add a comment to the post where he lists the western and Korean post-natal traditions.

And congratulations again, Joe.

Watch SBS Running Man Tonight!

I can't say TOO much about it until the show airs... but a few mondays ago I stayed up really late, to film an episode of "SBS Running Man" run by Yoo Jae-seok, Korea's top TV show host.

So at 5:20 today, if you're in Korea, turn on the TV, and watch SBS's "Running man" to see what I'm on about.


I met Nikhun... nice, very very nice, very likeable guy.  Even though the gesture he's making to the camera is the british equivalent to the middle finger, I'm sure it's unintentional...


Some of the other stars...




And the man himself, Korea's top TV host, Yu Jaeseok.


And also K-blog celebrities Simon and Martina.  I kept photo-bombing them when they tried to take video.  Can't wait to see the results.


See you (or at least you'll see me) at 5:20.  Or thereabouts.

OK. Lee Hyori gets it this time. 이효리

This is a little after the fact, but something had to be said.

Oh come on Hyori. I like Lee Hyori (이효리). What's not to like? She's cute, she's a super-de-duperstar in Korea, she's really fun in her TV appearances.  She's great, right?  Plus, my "fetish bingo" post about her is one of my most popular posts ever (and the one where I most often have to clean up trolls' comments)

She makes awesome videos and super-fun songs like U-Go-Girl, which is one of my favorite K-pop videos, mostly because Hyori actually seems like she's having fun when she dances, while a lot of the popstars out there seem like they're just playing a role, or going through the paces their trainers taught them (especially live: they're just not having fun.  The farther down the alphabet scale (b-list stars, c-list stars) the worse it is).



She's great, right?  Absolutely... except...

she was on CNN.go on November 11.


and here's what she says, according to the subtitles, starting at: 0.25 or so.

Seoul is a city with a long history.  There are two sides.  Many traces of traditional things on one hand...but it is a well-planned city where you can also see many modern designs.  Koreans are racially homogeneous. It's always been about one culture and one ethnicity.  So we have a strong solidarity above anything else.  And there is the emotional attachment that Koreans call "jeong" which relates to the brotherhood of the race.  This "jeong" is what bonds us tightly and makes us think of one another as a single family.

So... she gets a chance to introduce Korea to the world.

And she chooses to introduce the one-blood myth as the thing that will make people decide Korea's awesome?  I mean, really?  "The best thing about us is that YOU can NEVER be a part of our club!  It's nothing you did; you were just born wrong.  Isn't that great!  Come visit Korea tomorrow!"

As a non-ethnic Korean who plans to live the better part of my working life in Korea, I'm really annoyed by this one-blood stuff.  Really annoyed.  Because while there are many ways to define what Korean society is and isn't, it's one of the few that draws a circle in which I will always be an outsider, no matter how well I speak the language, no matter how dutifully I perform the jesa and the other rites, no matter how many little Koreans (correction: half-Koreans) I bring into the world.    It was a useful myth to generate identity during the Japanese occupation, as well as to help Koreans sign onto Park Chung-hee's development plans... but now that non-Koreans living in Korea have topped the one million mark, and in light of the fact there's NO WAY Korea could have been invaded two thousand times (as it's told) without a little bit of invader DNA mixing into the pure Korean gene pool (p.s.: why is it called the "mongol spot" if Korean DNA is pure?  Shouldn't it be called the Korean spot?)...can we please retire the one-blood myth?

(more on the one-blood Minjok Myth from the Metropolitician, who points out that the one-blood method of encouraging national identity was led by Koreans who had been studying European fascism.  And more again about race-based nationalism.)

"We have a strong solidarity above anything else" -- really?  Because if the one blood thing is true, then North Korea's gotta be included in that solidarity, but most accounts of North Korean refugees don't seem to support that ideal solidarity.  And ask ten South Koreans if they would wish for North and South Korea to be reunified tomorrow, and watch all the backpedaling and equivocations you start to hear.  "It'll be expensive.  It was really hard for Germany.  I don't think our cultures are the same anymore.  Maybe if other countries provided a LOT of aid...  Well, on second thought let's not go to Camelot: it is a silly place."

I'm sorry, but I call bullshit on any one-blood solidarity talk as long as 400 000 South Koreans will come out for a U.S. Beef protest, without seeing at least double that coming out for every protest demanding accountability for North Korea, and the fact they are still operating concentration camps to suppress their own people...(or, in Hyori's one-blood view, "our brothers and sisters").  Didn't hear a lot of "let's reach out to our brothers and sisters" rhetoric anywhere after North Korea shelled that island last week. (More of my posts about North Korea)

And then, just in case we hadn't already gotten the message that Koreans are way more specialer than others, so we should visit Korea and hope to become cooler by association (but really, that won't work, because we have the wrong blood, so we can't be part of the club... but I guess we should still visit Korea to gaze longingly at the cool insiders)... she trots out jung.

Has she updated her views on Korea since 1983?  And is this really what she thinks will win the esteem of CNN.GO viewers for Korea?

Now Jung is an interesting idea - my favorite piece on Jung is from The Joshing Gnome, who wrote "What is Jung and how can we kill it" (part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5) in 2008: one of my favorite pieces of K-blogging, and so good I hope he tells me before he ever takes his website offline, so I can copy his series and host it on my page, wherever that is.

Basically, Jung is a feeling of warmth, affection and intimacy between two people.  It can come out of a lot of things -- it's been used as the reason split-up couples get back together (they're just used to being around each other), it can be used to describe the feeling of kinship that rivals eventually develop, and it can also be used to describe that feeling when you feel like you've been old friends with someone, even though you've only just met them, or the affection by which two old friends can pick up exactly where they left off, even though they haven't seen each other in twelve years.  It's the applicable word for the way you can take one group of five people, put them in a room together for an hour, and they're still strangers, and you can take another group of five people, put them in the same room, under the same conditions, and they'll come out friends for life (cf: The Breakfast Club).  Group B has jung.  The Breakfast Club had jung (and not a Korean in the lot of them, was there?)  Group A doesn't.

Now, because there isn't a word that carries exactly all those nuances in English (or in most languages,) I've been told by Koreans that jung is a uniquely Korean feeling.

I disagree: Jung is simply a uniquely Korean word... but here's another word that doesn't exist in English: "schadenfreude" (feeling happy when something bad happens to someone you hate - for example, the way I felt when I saw this video of Brett Favre)



Now, the fact schadenfreude is a German word doesn't mean that only Germans can feel schadenfreude.  Germans aren't the only ones to go "Yeah!  Brett Favre is really annoying!  That clip was awesome!  Maybe this time he'll stay retired!"  In fact, when I first learned the word schadenfreude, the feeling I had wasn't one of confusion and lack of understanding; the feeling I had was recognition: "So there IS a word for that!"

And it was the same with "jeong" - I was glad to learn the word, because it's a great, useful word that describes an aspect of human interactions in a clean, simple way.  It hits the nail on the head better than any English word I know.

I'm sorry, Hyori, but jeong doesn't relate to the brotherhood of the race, or you have to explain why most of my South Korean friends, as well as South Korean media, are trying to distance themselves from North Korea.  It isn't race-based at all, and making it sound like it's tied to Korean blood is ignorant, and wrong.  I KNOW jeong isn't race-based, because I've had classes of Korean students who just didn't get along, who filled hours of my life with awkward pauses and silences (and it wasn't because of their English ability: they were all intermediate) they just didn't have jeong.  They didn't talk together in Korean either, the night we went out for some beers, in a desperate hope that maybe that would get them talking to each other.  If jeong came from being Korean, they should have had it... but they didn't.

(And if Jeong comes from korean blood, will my kids have half-jeong?  Does the country we live in while they grow up influence that?  What about full-blood Korean international adoptees who can't speak Korean? What about ethnic Koreans in China? Do they have jeong? what about kyopos who can or can't speak the language?  What about a missionary kid who grew up in a Korean school and speaks fluently, but has blue eyes?  And when does jeong get passed from the (Korean) parents to the (Korean) kids, and can that only happen while physically in Korea, or while using the Korean language?  Could a non-Korean kid raised in Korea in a Korean family have jeong?)

And this kind of a description of Korean culture -- laced with undertones of racism and exceptionalism -- is badly miscalculated, if this is how you think viewers of CNN.GO will be convinced to like and admire Korean culture.

I like you a lot, Hyori, but you stepped wrong this time.  And I'm calling you out (fourteen days late).  And maybe the Hyori fan club is going to fill my comment board up with hate... but I'll just have to deal with that, because Hyori's view of Korean culture is outdated, and just ignorant, and as one of the people who is marginalized by the myths promoted in it, I WILL stand up and object to it.

I like you a lot, Hyori, and any time you want a private English tutor, just call me: we're the same age, you know.  But I hate what you said, and the way you think about Korean culture (if this is actually how YOU feel about Korean culture) because you're making me an outsider.

And I'm not.

Give Me Something To Read

givemesomethingtoread.com (easy to remember), is a great little website: the text version of "TED Talks" - another website everyone who wants the Internet to actually make them smarter, should have on their feed, or as their default page.  The topics are varied, chosen from reader submissions, some of the articles are longer - more than a blog post - remember back when we read magazines, and had attention spans?  And it's always worth reading - either thought provoking, or compelling, or sometimes even just charming.

Anyway, they have a "Best of 2010" special up, and if you're looking for some great articles, give it a try.

The articles I'm planning to read this week?

"What Makes a Great Teacher?"
"Can You Disappear in Surveillance Britain?" (relevant to Korea, too, where CCTVs have been put up over nearly every intersection over the last half-year)
"What Happened When I Went Undercover at a Christian Gay-to-Straight Conversion Camp"
"Secret of AA: We Don't Know How It Works"
"The Brain that Changed Everything" - how memory works

I'm Smart, Really!

Hi, Readers.

I'm submitting applications to grad schools right now: I want to get into a Korean Studies graduate program, and some of the admissions people might be visiting this blog to see if the blog really is what I say it is...

So from time to time, you'll see this very post on the front page of this blog, in order that any inquisitive readers from the schools where I'm applying can look at some of my more analytical writings.

And if you want to leave a comment under this, and tell them how smrt smart I am, that would be nice, too.

If you are an admissions official from a school where I'm applying, you may look at this "Best of Roboseyo" page to see some of my better, or more interesting posts.  There are links to some of my favorite posts on the right sidebar.

Also, here are a few of the more extended pieces I've written.  While the writing style is not academic, please consider the content.


Social Commentary
Why do Expats in Korea Complain so Much?
Why do Koreans Get so Defensive?
Links to the full Complaining Expats/Defensive Koreans Series with Ask A Korean!
On Ugly English Teachers and Racist Korean Journalists
Freedom of Speech in Korea
On the (Ridiculous) Portrayal of Foreigners in Korean media
Weddings, K-Pop, Korean Food and Purity: Who Owns a Culture?
Seoul City Should Not Be So Sensitive about Lonely Planet's Criticisms
Student Suicide and the College Entrance Exam
Netizen Bullies Intimidating Foreign Bloggers into Closing their Blogs
North Korea

More of my favorite posts:
Should I come to Korea?
Get your K-blog noticed
Discussing things on the Internet sucks sometimes
Buddha's Birthday Festival is Awesome
The Jesa (제사) for my mother
Korea Needs Kim Yuna
How to Love the Heck out of Korea 

I Loves Me Some Anti-Heroes

Saw a top ten list of "the greatest antiheroes" while rabbit-trailing on the internet today.  And I'll let you in on something:

I love anti-heroes.  Love love love'em.  As you know, an anti-hero is a person who does bad things, but for whatever reason, still has the reader/viewer's sympathy.  Think of my current TV obssession: Dexter
(url: http://www.wallpaperez.net/wallpaper/movie/Dexter-Morgan-1574.jpg)

Yeah, he kills people, but he's such an interesting guy!

Now, these days, there are almost TOO many antiheroes - has Vin Diesel ever played anything but anti-heroes?  However, I love a likeable bad guy in a film.  They're just so interesting to watch.  And way more fun than watching perfect, golden boys and girls marching through plots like little, maddening paragons.

Because they always have to make the right choice, they never make any interesting choices.

I don't know exactly where the idea of the Anti-Hero started-- was Odysseus an anti-hero?  What about Titus Andronicus?  MacBeth definitely was, and his wife even more so.  Was it the devil in Paradise Lost?  Lord Byron's Childe Harolde?  Who knows.

Anyway, this top-ten list of "greatest anti-heroes" was fun to me... it includes Tyler Durden, Cool Hand Luke, Tony Soprano, Han Solo, Malcolm Reynolds from "Firefly" and "The Dude" from The Big Lebowski, and a few from TV shows I never watched.

I'm not sure if Malcolm Reynolds is really an anti-hero, though: my favorite line from the whole Firefly series (yeah, I'm a nerd: but I only watched it once through, OK?) was when he said,
"You don't know me, son, so let me explain this to you once:  If I ever kill you, you'll be awake. You'll be facing me, and you'll be armed." I think that puts him on hero turf, not anti-hero.  But that's just me.

I was a bit surprised at a few omissions on their list as well.  Maybe comic book readers didn't catch wind of this list, because Wolverine was nowhere to be seen.

My own favorite anti-heroes?  in no particular order:

Tyler Durden (fight club)
Batman (Frank Miller/Dark Knight version, not 1960s version: re-watch that show.  He's so durn preachy!  Here's a website that's collected all the times Batman lectures Robin in the old TV series)
Alex DeLarge (clockwork orange) - at the same time, one of the most evil, but also one of the most charming and attractive villans out there.  That Kubrick makes us root for him is enough to establish him as one of the greatest film directors out there.  That when Alex delivers the final line of the movie, we go "YES!  Wait!  NO!  Wait... huh?" makes Alex a permanent top-fiver on my antihero list.  I can't believe there are anti-hero lists that don't include him: my only explanation is that the person who wrote the list hasn't seen A Clockwork Orange.
Dexter Morgan (the TV show Dexter.  Season four is my favorite so far.)
Pick a Clint Eastwood Character - other than Million Dollar Baby and Bridges of Madison County, has Clint Eastwood played anything but antiheroes?  My personal favorite Eastwood Anti-hero is Bill Munny, in Unforgiven. (his best line: see 2:00 of this clip)



Anyway, show me a great anti-hero, and I'll hear you out.  Anti-heroes are great.

Tie it into Korea?  How's this: One of Korea's best movies ever, Oldboy, features one of the greatest anti-heroes out there, along with a badass yogi, one of the most greek-tragedy-ish, devastating endings, and one of the most novel ideas for torture, I've ever seen.

Plus, the hallway fight scene, which regularly gets listed on "manliest fight scenes ever" and is sometimes the only non-hollywood, or non-English film on the list, because it's just so dang epic.

skip to about a minute into this clip: it's all done in one take, and in case you doubted that our man Oh Dae-su was the baddest of badasses, yes, he fights the second half of the henchmen with a knife sticking out of his back.


Other Korean movies with pretty sweet anti-heroes?  Pretty much everything else by Park Chan-wook, along with Oldboy - "Sympathy for Lady Vengance" and "Thirst" come to mind.  I'm pretty sure "The Good, The Bad and the Weird" has a good one.  No doubt the "gangster" genre is full of them, but I don't know that genre of Korean film very well.


And in case you disagree with me that anti-heroes are more fun than heroes...

Which of these two songs is more fun?

"Hero" by Enrique Tightpantsonmyass


or "Bitch" by Meredith Brooks?

My Man Ban Ki-Moon, He Got My Back.

Ban Ki-Moon has gone on record saying that Korea should scrap the mandatory HIV test for E-2 Visa English Teachers.

Yeah.