In Studying the '88 Olympics

a few things I've learned that might not make it into the papers, but were interesting to learn nonetheless.

from "The Games Within The Games" by Vincent J Ricquart (Hantong Books 1988)

1. The Olympic Museum in Jamsil is an awesome encapsulation of the Olympic narrative as told by the Korean government, and that narrative is followed by people who have talked with me about the Olympics with surprising consistency.

2. Before the '88 Olympics, South Korea didn't have diplomatic relations with many socialist countries.  After the Olympics many of those countries established diplomatic relations with Seoul.  That they committed to attending may or may not have been because Seoul was at least engaged in talks with Pyongyang about holding some events in the North, though that didn't pan out.

It didn't pan out because North Korea was being over-demanding, intransigent, and arrogant.  They wanted to host either the opening or closing ceremonies (pretty damn big deal) and started building a stadium before having confirmed shared hosting duties. NK also assumed the North Korean team soccer would be granted an automatic berth in the Olympic tournament, as a host country, so didn't even bother to send their team to a qualifying tournament in (I think it was) Malaysia. FIFA, miffed at the arrogance, disqualified them from the Olympics.

Ever since the humiliation of that disqualification, North Korea has been a humbled state, and has engaged in international discussions with much less pride, willing to be flexible, and compromise.  It's been impressive to see them back off from that off-putting, screeching brinksmanship they used to do.

(source)

(source)

3. My own thoughts, in regards to the "'88 Olympics made Seoul an advanced nation" meme:

IF we accept the eurocentric model of "development into an advanced nation" and the eurocentric definition of what an "advanced nation" is... (after all, the IOC and FIFA and the like are western institutions - it's no surprise they use Western criteria to determine which nations are "advanced" and award them hosting rights)

Landing an event like this DOES require a certain level of achievement/skill in two main areas: infrastructure development (to build facilities and handle logistics) and diplomacy (to 'sell' my country to the committees that choose the next host).  That's all that hosting rights proves for SURE about a country.

But my own analogy is this:

Hosting the olympics for a developing country is like an adolescent buying a car with his/her own money. It doesn't CAUSE them to become an adult, and it doesn't automatically make them an adult, nor is it a prerequisite: another kid who never buys their own car isn't thereby disqualified from becoming an adult...

The official Olympic poster: 

but it certainly can be a powerful sign of a kid's intentions to act, and probably also desire to be treated like an adult, and it makes a strong statement of that to everyone around.  Sure, uncle Vernon might grumble that little Annie's not mature enough to own a car, and there might be a family discussion about Annie's shortcomings along the way (just as people grumbled about Korea's dictatorial political culture, and street protests, and North Korea stuff, just like they grumbled about Tibet and political prisoners in 2008), and young Annie might wrap the thing around a telephone pole... but the way she pays for, maintains, and uses her car might also be a way for all the adults around her to note, and recognize, that she's an adult, and for some adults, and many of Annie's peers, and maybe for Annie herself, that'll be a sure sign she's crossed the threshhold.

If you want to learn, literally EVERYTHING about the '88 games, you can go here, and download the two-volume, 1500+ page official report written by the Korean Olympic Organizing Committee, in .pdf form. Pictures in this post are screenshots taken from the .pdf.

I like these versions of "Hodori" the Seoul Olympic mascot.

Korea did an interesting job of presenting itself as a modern, developing, and also ancient culture, all at the same time, during the Olympics.


The Olympics have had a pretty troubled history of scandals, boycotts, tragedies, dumb moves, more scandals, and the like... but the fact that countries on both sides of the Cold War attended the Seoul Games (only Cuba, Ethiopia, and North Korea boycotted) might have been the beginning of the era we now experience, where Olympic attendance is pretty much taken as a given.

It used to be that who hosts the olympics was the stage for national rivalries (hence the cold war boycotts) but now, it seems that rather than hosting and boycotting the olympics, the main arena for international competition and bragging comes from who wins the most medals.  At least that's how it looks from here.

Let me tell you about Mansplaining. I'll lay it all out for you in simple terms.

Before we get into the REAL topic... some word play.
The two longest one-syllable words:
screeched - screeched is one I found when I searched.
strengths - I came up with this one on my own in University.

Next: these words are fun to say, but their meanings are kind of gross. I just don't know what to do.

1. syphilis
2. gonorrhea
3. mansplaining

I'd never heard of mansplaining (more here) until I started reading some of the articles linked by various blog friends on various feminist topics... but I think it's an awesome word for the not-awesome practice of a man condescendingly explaining gender relations with the kind of attitude that screams, "Because I am male, and therefore logical, unlike you emotional females, I understand everything about your situation, and I'd like to set you straight on a few things while revealing my prejudices and ignorance of the topics you're trying to discuss."

(privilege-denying dude)

Is there an equivalent for when the privileged one begins explaining, condescendingly, the details of the not-privileged one's life to him/her? (WASPsplaining? oppressorsplaining?)



Or the neocolonial one explaining people's cultures to them? (Colonialisplaining?) My first three years of conversations with Koreans in Korea were mostly the story of me explaining the easy ways Korea could fix itself, if people would ONLY listen to me.

Of course... the WAY one discusses one's ideas is as important as the content...

I think I actually said this, or something close to it, to someone at one point:

You can make your own "Privilege denying dude" at memegenerator.net - one of the greatest websites ever.

Obangsaek and Royal Asiatic Society Events on Wednesday

Two events going down this Wednesday that you might like to know about:

1. "Project Obangsaek" at 7:30 is having a launch party... the lovely Nanoomi people are making a few presentations about building cultural bridges between expats, non-Koreans, and Koreans.  Obangsaek is a group dedicated to presenting the modern, actually interesting world of Korean culture and life to the world outside, lest the old men making tourism policy convince the world that there's nothing to Korea except bronze dishes, hanbok, overpriced fermented side dishes, and four-hour long spoken-word performances drum accompaniment. It's led by Benson Lee, whose latest film you may have heard of: Planet Friggin' B-Boy! (on IMDB) (Trailer)

2. The Royal Asiatic Society (a super-cool group of super-long-term scholars, koreaphiles, and other such People Who Know A Lot About Korea And Have Been Here A Bloody Long Time (also known as the highest concentration of advanced Korean Studies degrees in one room outside of an academic conference) is having a talk about a topic of much interest to many of us: Korean film!  The Topic is

Before the Korean Wave: Treasures of Classic Korean Cinema and a fella named Dr. Earl Jackson Jr., will be giving brief overviews of three of the very important Korean film directors who laid the foundation for the excellence in film that led the first swoosh of the Korean wave.

It's on the second floor of the Somerset Hotel, near the north end of Insa-dong, at 7:30pm.  More information here.

Performing Nation-ness... Google Scholar Brings It!

So... with my grad school courses, I have access to all kinds of badass academic databases like EbscoHost (which generally rocks) and Jstor and whatnot... they don't quite pool EVERY journal and article, but they cover most of the bases between them, and the journal stuff is fun. You know: for nerds like me.

Well... the topic I'd like to write on for one of my classes is this:

During mega-events like the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup, host nations get a huge stage on which to present their cultures.  That's all well and good... but especially when those countries aren't part of the commonly accepted "West" (and sometimes even then), such events are also seen as opportunities for those countries to demonstrate that they're a "major player" and to prove their nation's level of "advancement" (whatever that means) -- think about how Beijing used the Olympics as much as a showcase of "rising China" as it was a showcase for athletes and sports and stuff.  Part of Seoul 1988 was the Seoul "Look How Far We've Come" Olympics, and such a practice goes all the way back to Mexico (1968) (where folks were trying to get Mexicans to behave to "international standards" as well "Teaching Mexicans How To Behave: Public Education on the Eve of the Olympics").

Add to that the way sports are a GREAT arena to generate nationalist feeling, and to put together nationalist stories, and a country hosting a big event like the olympics is in a unique situation where the leaders/event organizers can work on changing the behavior of their citizens in order to meet "international standards" -- I'm working on digging up material about China's attempts to curb "rude" behaviors during the Beijing olympics, so as not to offend international guests, and I'd like to talk about Korea's own attempts to "meet international standards" (whatever that means, and whatever those are), in order to put Korea's best foot forward to the world, in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and the 2002 Korea/Japan world cup. I think it's interesting that part of creating one's own national story can (in the case of such a mega-event) be a kind of performance for an imagined audience (not all of it was, but part of it was)... and that the performance of one's own culture can, at the same time, change one's own culture.

For my paper, one of the articles I really wanted to look up was titled "Performing Nation-ness in South Korea During the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup"... for obvious reasons.

But Ebscohost didn't have the full text available.  Crap.

...but Google Scholar did!  I never expected in a decade that Google Scholar would have, for free, something the very extensive (and expensive, university sponsored) database didn't have.

So... cool.  And you can read it yourself here.

And these are the things that make me excited these days.  Also, the dog farted yesterday. It was funny.

The comments are open. You're free to call me a nerd.

Or even better, if you have links to Korean editorials, video clips of PSA's about "representing Korea to the world" during the 2002 World Cup or 1988 Olympics, or buzzwords, key phrases or slogans that'll bring them up for me while I search, you know, you can tell me about them, too.  I'll find them on my own if you don't, but if you have that stuff at your fingertips/in your memory anyway... cool.

Seoul is ASKMEN.com's 6th Best City to Visit

ASKMEN.com, the website equivalent to Maxim magazine, just listed Seoul as the 6th best city in the world to visit. Also: the top city in Asia, beating out Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Shanghai (none of which ranked, and all of which were also beaten by Beijing and Bangkok)

So... eat your heart out, lonely planet. And maybe next time another website says "Seoul Sucks," City friggin' Hall won't feel the need to act as if it's the end of the world.

Seoul's score was 80.2/100, and here were the criteria:

I like Seoul, too.  :)

surprisingly frank discussion of prostitution in Korea

Go read it.  I like especially where it places blame.

MinJeong Kwak (민정곽) at KCC Switzen All That Skate (Yuna was there too)

Last night I saw Kim Yuna at the KCC Switzen "All That Skate" Ice Show.  Wifeoseyo somehow scored tickets, and it as a seriously awesome show.

I'll put up more video when I have time to post it -- I didn't get everything, because readers, I love you all, but there are times when I'd rather focus on experiencing something, than focus on recording the experience in order to share it with you.  

However, a pleasant surprise, for me, were the performances of the two other Korean skaters at the show: Hae jin Kim  is a young up-and-comer who was quite good at using her movements to tell a story - she was cute as anything - and Minjeong Kwak 민정곽 has the chops, folks.  She, too, is very expressive, and really fired the crowd up with her charisma.

She was also at the center of two of the best moments of spontaneous fun: 1. after her show, her interaction with the cameraman on skates was the beginning of a kind of a running gag where skaters had different interactions with him - avoiding him or turning their back on him, or skating in the opposite direction, etc., each time drawing a laugh from the crowd.

2. After taking her bows, she headed for the offstage exit... at the wrong end of the ice.  Cracked herself, and the audience up.  So... she's cute.  In that "tell me about your cute niece" way.  Really cute.

Steve Earle... Seriously?

I like lots of music that my snobby friends consider "cool" and I am well capable of dropping the right band names to establish my "cred" (whatever that's worth), and I totally liked Sixpence None The Richer back when they were underground.

But sometimes I'm also a sentimental old crow, and buddy, you've got a heart of stone if this song doesn't turn you into butter. It's about the only Steve Earle song I like, but I sure like it.  It's also one of the better melodies I've come across: there are tons of songs that are great, but absolutely unhummable, because the music's awesome, but the melody... isn't. (In Mumford & Sons' defense... MELODY!) And other songs are nice, but the melody's so repetitive that it'd boring to hum. (coughPianoMancough)

Anyway: a lovely melody, and heartbreaking lyrics: get goopy with me.  Steve Earle, Goodbye.

A Goldmine for Teacher Resources

Really, I should post this link once a month, just for good measure.

Jason is a former K-blogger, and KOTESOL member, now living in China.  While in Korea, he worked in Korea's public school system, and in his spare time (??? I hope he got paid for everything he did), he compiled the most extensive one-man compilation of living in Korea materials you can find.

His blog contains upwards of 300 pages worth of instructions, links, and suggestions that a first-time public school teacher might need.

It covers coteacher issues, lesson planning, survival in Korea, dealing with students, websites you should visit, books you should buy, handouts, pedagogy tips -- seriously, almost anything (a public school teacher) can think of.

Most of it's relevant for teachers at different levels, too.

So go read. Explore.  Benefit from the work Jason did.  And maybe leave a thank-you comment.

Here's the link. The work is under creative commons copyright, so give him credit, but share it widely.  Poke around his site. It's a goldmine.

Been taking things too seriously lately.

But I finished midterms today!  Wrote three huge pages, double-sided, on modernity, theoretical discussions of construction of history, narrative methods, sources of meaning, and various human interactions with dominant and peripheral cultures.

Hella fun.

My favorite articles from the first half of the semester:
Stephen Tambiah Transnationalism, Diaspora and Multiple Modernities (subscription needed to access the full articles. sorry) -- summary: though we think of diasporic communities as moving to the "developed" world and becoming assimilated, often that is not the case.  Diasporic communities find really interesting ways to connect with their homelands, with each other, with their host cultures, and with other diasporic communities, in ways that can redraw their new home landscapes.  Their flows of affinity, connection, and resources can also greatly benefit the home land, as community members abroad use their new talents connections and resources to help preserve the way of life of those who remained in their ancestral homes.  Modernity does not take the shapes we expect it to.

Isn't this a Korea blog?  Tie it in, Roboseyo!
The disaporic communities of Koreans around the world add an interesting dimension to Korea here, in the "center" of Korean culture: the worldwide network provides an interesting variety of relations with the home culture, and each inform and add life to each other.

Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everday Life -- Though dominant cultural forces are indeed impressing their will on populations and cultures outside of the main power/influence centers, those "receiving" cultures do not find themselves disenfranchised, or with their cultures suddenly co-opted, subverted, or vanished.  Rather, the technologies ideas, etc. of the dominant cultures and power centers are taken into the local cultural matrices in unique ways, and are adapted to the ways of life already practiced by people.

Isn't this a Korea blog?  Tie it in, Roboseyo!

Korean Culture Is Not Disappearing.  It's taking new forms, and it's re-forming the cultural elements that come to it, in order to fit them into the systems and ways Koreans already live.

Wheee!