True Fact

Marvel movie trailers are ten times more entertaining than anything the DC universe has ever produced.

And I'll have you know I actually liked Zack Snyder's Watchmen.

Wake Me When It's Over

One of my simple pleasures is ordering English language books from Seoul every few months.  Lately I'd been thinking I should push myself to finally get to the six or seven Philip K. Dick novels I've never read (I blame Bladerunner 2049) but a small piece of my lizard brain suggested that dystopian fiction isn't really necessary right now.

Between Trump, a GOP that is officially A-OK with pedophilia and literal Nazis, and North Korea mastering ICBM's, we're living it.  Living it good and hard.

Too Soon?

I'm not _entirely_ joking when I say that death from a NK nuke is preferable to three more years of Trump and a pro-pedophile GOP.#tcot#MAGA@realDonaldTrump

— Antifa James (@wetcasements) November 29, 2017

Korean Weddings

I guess it's strange that after eight years in country, I went to my first Korean wedding only this past Saturday.  Maybe it's because I'm 43 and destined to die alone and eaten by my cats (just kidding -- I don't own any cats!) while the prime marrying age in South Korea is definitely late 20's / early 30's (and even that's changing quickly.)

A friend, coworker, and former adult student finally tied the knot (he's a few years younger than me so, as mentioned, an older marriage) and I was happy to share in his celebration.

Anyhow, there were things I knew going in and things that genuinely surprised me.

1)  Korean weddings are huge.  Everybody knows that, but it isn't until you go to one that you realize how true the following cliche is -- Western marriages are between two people, Korean weddings are between two families.  As best I could tell, there were at least 200 people there and many of them were standing on stage for pictures (immediate and more distant relatives, not just friends and coworkers like me).

2)  Korean weddings are fast as hell.  The ceremony itself was over in less than 20 minutes.  Also, they typically take place in dedicated wedding halls rather than churches.  So for the reception you just walk up a flight of stairs rather than drive to another hotel or restaurant.  Easy peasy!

3)  Korean post-wedding picture time is excruciatingly slow.  I don't blame anyone for wanting quality photos of their big day, but picture time went on for almost forever (at least twice as long as the wedding itself).  You've got the full on family pics, then the more immediate family shots, all the way down, finally, to bride and groom shots.  And since you aren't supposed to go eat until photos are over, hundreds of people are just milling around checking their cellphones.

4)  Korean wedding halls are huge.  So, it's your special day?  What better way to celebrate then getting married simultaneously with three or four other couples!  Again, Korean weddings are fast and feel a bit less "personal" than Western weddings, but that's the way it goes.  And frankly, having sat through some incredibly long Catholic weddings in America, the speed thing isn't all that awful.

Boring But Content Holiday Update

MERRY THANKSGIVING I WANT TO FUCK ALL YOUR MASHED POTATOES

— Antifa James (@wetcasements) November 23, 2017

It's a quiet Thanksgiving day  here in lovely Daegu.  I was in the office making plans and copies for next week, with the final exam a mere two weeks away.  I wrote a genuine snail-mail letter to my Dad which I'll drop in the mail tomorrow, and I'll give him and my sister a call.  I'm headed to my first Korean wedding this Saturday, that of a co-worker who also used to take my adult class.  I'm about to finish Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which is good enough that I'll be ordering the rest of the trilogy from Seoul soon enough.  I'm sure there's some Western bar or hotel nearby doing a "Turkey Dinner Buffet" or something but I've always found those things kind of sad.  I'll have some tofu and kimchi for dinner, and probably a can of beer because that's how I roll.

Life is boring.  Life is good.

Yes It Was Racism, Stupid

If you're only going to read one "Yes, it was racism and not the economy that got Trump elected, stupid" piece I'd recommend this one by Adam Serwer on "The Nationalist's Delusion."  Short version:

"One hundred thirty-nine years since Reconstruction, and half a century since the tail end of the civil-rights movement, a majority of white voters backed a candidate who explicitly pledged to use the power of the state against people of color and religious minorities, and stood by him as that pledge has been among the few to survive the first year of his presidency. Their support was enough to win the White House, and has solidified a return to a politics of white identity that has been one of the most destructive forces in American history. This all occurred before the eyes of a disbelieving press and political class, who plunged into fierce denial about how and why this had happened. That is the story of the 2016 election."

Extended version:

"Trump’s support among whites decreases the higher you go on the scales of income and education. But the controlling factor seems to be not economic distress but an inclination to see nonwhites as the cause of economic problems. The poorest voters were somewhat less likely to vote for Trump than those a rung or two above them on the economic ladder. The highest-income voters actually supported Trump less than they did Mitt Romney, who in 2012 won 54 percent of voters making more than $100,000—several points more than Trump secured, although he still fared better than Clinton. It was among voters in the middle, those whose economic circumstances were precarious but not bleak, where the benefits of Du Bois’s psychic wage appeared most in danger of being devalued, and where Trump’s message resonated most strongly. They surged toward the Republican column.

Yet when social scientists control for white voters’ racial attitudes—that is, whether those voters hold 'racially resentful' views about blacks and immigrants—even the educational divide disappears. In other words, the relevant factor in support for Trump among white voters was not education, or even income, but the ideological frame with which they understood their challenges and misfortunes. It is also why voters of color—who suffered a genuine economic calamity in the decade before Trump’s election—were almost entirely immune to those same appeals."

It's really worth reading the whole thing.

Three Ways Of Looking At The Death Of Charles Manson

1)  I grew up thumbing through my older sister's copy of Helter Skelter, the best-selling overview of the Manson Murders.  The black-and-white pictures of the crime scenes were absolute nightmare fuel to a ten year-old me.

2)  Here's a great piece that puts Manson into the cultural context of California in the late 60's:

"For the uninitiated, the story goes something like this: Toward the end of spring, Wilson picked up two young hitchhikers, Patricia Krenwinkel and and Ella Jo Bailey, both of whom turned out to be members of Manson’s cult. He dropped them off, but soon encountered them again. The trio headed back to his mansion in the Pacific Palisades. Wilson left to record with the rest of The Beach Boys, and when he returned, he was greeted by a crazed-looking stranger in his driveway. The man was none other than Manson himself, and to assuage Wilson’s apprehension, he reportedly knelt down and kissed his feet.

The next few months saw Manson and his cadre of women moving in with Wilson, who allowed them to leech from his superstar status in exchange for group sex and servitude. The two even began collaborating together musically, so much so that Wilson introduced Manson to The Byrds’ producer Terry Melcher."

Manson and his cult decided to murder Melcher.  Melcher wasn't home.  Roman Polanski was renting the place out and he wasn't home either, but his very pregnant wife and some of her friends were.

3)  And perhaps most intriguing, how science fiction authors Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard gave us Manson in the first place:

"In 1963, while a prisoner at the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island in Washington state, Charles Manson heard other prisoners enthuse about two books: Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and L. Ron Hubbard’s self-help guide Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950). Heinlein’s novel told the story of a Mars-born messiah who preaches a doctrine of free love, leading to the creation of a religion whose followers are bound together by ritualistic water-sharing and intensive empathy (called 'grokking'). Hubbard’s purportedly non-fiction book described a therapeutic technique for clearing away self-destructive mental habits. It would later serve as the basis of Hubbard’s religion, Scientology.

Manson was barely literate, so he probably didn’t delve too deeply into either of these texts. But he was gifted at absorbing information in conversation, and by talking to other prisoners he gleaned enough from both books to synthesize a new theology. His encounter with the writings of Heinlein and Hubbard was a pivotal event in his life. Until then, he had been a petty criminal and drifter who spent his life in and out of jail. But when Manson was released from McNeil Island in 1967, he was a new figure: a charismatic street preacher who gathered a flock of followers among the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco."

Living The Dream, Always Living The Dream

About to do a unit on health and body w/ adult students. Can we make it 50 min w/o discussing diarrhea? Doubtful!

— Antifa James (@wetcasements) November 21, 2017

You Stupid Donkey!

Where to begin?  Gordon Ramsay, about ten years past his cultural expiration date, has been in Korea promoting Cass, a local beer that's about as light and flavorless as can be (making it not much different than, say, Budweiser).

But controversy was stirred when Gordon seemed to go a little bit too far in his praise of a brew which is, by all objective measures, not the most flavorful.

Make no mistake -- Gordon Ramsay is a true asshole.  But I've actually gone out of my way to defend Korean beer (i.e., watery lagers) before (over at my old place, in fact).  The Gor-dog is absolutely correct in stating that the spicy, complex nature of Korean food really pairs best with a simple, non-fussy alcohol (see also soju, which is basically a more flavor-less type of Korean vodka).

When tucking into a grill-full of sweating pig intestines (also from the old place), a bold red, sweet white, or dark Guinness is the last thing you'd want as a drink pairing.

That said, what is questionable to me is the notion that G.R. drank the watery domestic stuff before Cass started paying him to drink it (or at least to pretend to).

And yes, North Korean beer is superior to South Korean beer.

Succinct, Curmedgeonly Post About Music From Over 20 Years Ago

Monster > Automatic For The People

"Strange Currency" > "Everybody Hurts"

"Tongue"?  Maybe the prettiest song R.E.M. ever recorded.

"Let Me In"?  Maybe the saddest song they ever recorded.

"King of Comedy"?  Obviously, a huge dud.  But the rest of it holds up nicely.

Automatic was kind of soft and boring in ways Monster was hard-edged and intentionally fucked up and ugly.

Five Things South Koreans Are Great Big Babies About:

1) rain
2) drinking cold water in fall or winter
3) using soy-base sauce when you’re supposed to use gochu-base sauce on your raw fish
4) a single bug flying into a room in the middle of class (literally ear-splitting shrieks of despair, and the rending of garments)
5) minor earthquakes

We had a small one yesterday afternoon and my college cancelled everything.  I'm guessing if this had happened last year before Trumpolini and Kim Jong-un started shamelessly flirting with each other we probably would have just brushed it off.  (We actually had a few small earthquakes last semester but they weren't nearly as big of a deal.)

"lots of all three"

"Blood and Roses was a trading game, along the lines of Monopoly.  The Blood side played with human atrocities for the counters, atrocities on a large scale: individual rapes and murders didn't count, there had to have been a large number of people wiped out.  Massacres, genocides, that sort of thing.  The Roses side played with human achievements.  Artworks, scientific breakthroughs, stellar works of architecture, helpful inventions.  Monuments to the soul's magnificence, they were called in the game.  There were sidebar buttons, so that if you didn't know what Crime and Punishment was, or the Theory of Relativity, or the Trail of Tears, or Madame Bovary, or the Hundred Years' War, of The Flight into Egypt, you could double-click and get an illustrated rundown, in two choices: R for children, PON for Profanity, Obscenity, and Nudity.  That was the thing about history, said Crake: it had lots of all three."

-- Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

Living The Dream, Part Infinity

It's only November and the heat is on in the college library. WHAT STRANGE AND AUSPICIOUS FUCKERY IS THIS, KOREA?

— Antifa James (@wetcasements) November 15, 2017

Further Adventures In Bad Wrong South Korea

A group of South Korean nurses were coerced into wearing hot-pants and tube-tops and "sexy dancing" at a hospital talent show:

"The incident was initially exposed in a KakaoTalk open chat room hosted by the civic organization Gabjil 119 since Nov. 1, when a nurse expressed her discomfort with having to wear explicit clothing for the event. More than 100 nurses from the institute joined the chat room to write their complaints and receive legal advice from the organization’s lawyers and labor union experts.

Some nurses, however, are skeptical of the effectiveness of the investigation. 'What’s the point of the investigation when all the supervisors are going to be monitoring us?' wrote one nurse in the open chat room on KakaoTalk. She added, 'I heard the person carrying out the investigation from the ministry is a friend of the hospital.'

Many employees suggest taking stronger measures by creating their own labor union to fight the institute."

Sexism is global, and the reckoning against sexism should be as well.

America, The Beautiful

2017:

The year the American media actively praised (some of) the Republican Party for taking a stand against pedophilia.#tcot#MAGA#jesusfuckingchrist

— Antifa James (@wetcasements) November 14, 2017

Hikin' and Templin'

I had a really nice trip on Saturday to the nearby city of Pohang, on the east coast.  Me, my boss, my foreigner co-worker, and a group of exchange students from Vietnam went to a temple and then hiking up to a series of waterfalls.

Thing is, I've still got pictures from my visit to Tokyo last month that I need to go through and put up.

Rest assured, the fall colors were outrageous.  Korea does this season real good, as usual.

So Long, tumblr

My tumblr was wiped out over the weekend.  Either it was hacked (not very many followers, so doubtful) in which case I apologize if anyone got spam or porn, or tumblr was just being tumblr.

And since tumblr is now banned on my office computer due to South Korea wanting to censor it (there are obvious work-arounds, but still) I probably won't be going back.

Which is kind of a shame.  A lot of ex-pats in South Korea these days use tumblr instead of more conventional blogs, but at the same time anything that reduces the amount of time I spend online is probably a good thing.

Still waiting to hear from tumblr support.  Given their rep though, I'm guessing I never will.

"Just Corny"

"Konglish" is the phenomenon of Koreans using English language words, or even whole expressions, in contexts that native English speakers wouldn't understand.  (Wikipedia is a good place to look it up.)  And while crimes against English are nothing new in South Korea, the significance of Konglish for marketing luxury apartments is:

"The situation is the same for an apartment complex in Godeok, eastern Seoul. The apartment complex, which is being reconstructed by a consortium led by Daelim Industrial, is named Arteon, a combination of the words 'art' and 'theon,' or godly in Greek.

Samsung C&T also named the reconstruction of Gaepo Jugong 2 Danji apartment, which will be completed in early 2019, Raemian Blesstiage, a combination of 'bless,' and 'prestige.' The company was especially keen to emphasis the prestige of the complex, and also considered luxtiage, trinitage and forestige as potential names.

'The idea that mixing English words with good meanings makes [the apartment complex] more high-end is just corny,' said a Raemian Blesstiage apartment owner."

A lot of foreigners, and in particular no small number of anal-retentive English teachers, seem to get personally offended by Konglish.  Of course, Konglish isn't for them, it's a marketing strategy to connote something exotic, elegant, or expensive (think of the use of French and Italian in America to signify luxury or fashion) to potential Korean-speaking customers.

Still, it's impossible not to cringe at some of the terrible names Korean marketing gurus are able to come up with.

While not quite Konglish and more of a translation error, the local beauty supply chain "Skin Food" is my favorite example.

Misogyny Or Racism? In America, Take Your Pick!

It’s been a good night in America with Dems both mainstream and progressive winning lots of seats at the state level.  But there’s also a lot of talk as to how badly Hillary “under-performed” in 2016.

Obviously, her campaign was far from perfect.  But also, it’s a really long-winded way of saying that way too many Americans (including, unfortunately, many women) will vote for shitty men before they’ll ever vote for qualifed women.

Which is to say, getting a black person elected president was doing the impossible.  But finally getting a woman elected might be an even bigger hill to climb.

Optimism? How Does That Work?

Good news out of Virginia and other states tonight.

My only hottest of takes: there is no such thing as an "off-year" election.

The 2018 midterms will be here before you know it -- register to vote here.

And a friendly reminder to expats like me that voting from abroad is much easier and faster than you might assume.  To quote the great political philosopher Shia LeBeouf, just do it!

Country Life

The fact is, if I only taught college students I'd probably have moved back to America and opened a Chipotle by now.  I also teach adult students, and they bring a nice balance to my work life.  They actually want to learn English, as opposed to, well, a healthy majority of my college students.  They are majoring in medical disciplines and I can't blame them for focusing less on their non-major subject of English.

In addition my adult students will ask me and my other foreigner co-worker out once in a while, maybe just for beer and fried chicken to longer trips out to the country for hiking or walking about.  After, we often go out for beer and fried chicken.

Anyhow, two weekends ago we went about 45 minutes outside of Daegu to a retired student's newly restored country house.  It was absolutely beautiful, with a full garden out front and a feral cat and her babies who had recently "adopted" the house as their new residence.  After walking around a bit we went to a restaurant called "Old Road" (in English).  And I was greeted by walls of absolutely brilliant vinyl.  Now, most of these albums were reissues so maybe a true vinyl-collector would scoff, but to be in the middle-of-nowhere outside of Daegu and find these kinds of (very American) treasures was a highlight for me.

The beer was very good.  The fried chicken was just O.K. but the setting made up for it.

And supposedly we're going back in a few weeks to help participate in tofu-making.  (If this is all a setup to turn me in to cheap labor, I have no problem with it.)

Oh, and they had a piano that my foreigner co-worker (who has a Ph.D. in music) got to entertain the restaurant with.

It was a great time and I promise my next ten posts will go back to how horrible the world is and how we're all about to die.