Supreme

John Coltrane, "Untitled Original 11386"

The story behind the recently released "lost" John Coltrane album is fairly interesting by itself.  The few tracks I've been able to listen to on Youtube are incredible.

Private Son

Another interesting thing about (male) athletes in South Korea is their fraught relationship with mandatory military service.  Korean men have to serve two years before they turn 28, but exceptions are made for exceptional performances in international competitions, including winning Olympic medals.  So South Korea failed to advance to the round of 16 in the World Cup, and Korean star footballer Son Heung-min (25) will have to give up two years of his career (and two years salary, of course) to do his duty.

Alas, some cheeky Korean netizens have put together a petition that would allow them to do a four-year tour and allow Son to continue racking up goals in England.

It's a genuine burden on these athletes to have to serve at basically the peak period of their physical abilities, but nationalism and a sense of obligation to the country are as strong here as they are anywhere else.

"extravagant ginger bouffant"

Life is still awful but hey, South Korea beat Germany in hella dramatic fashion.  A nice story from all this involves Korean keeper Cho Hyun-woo:

"Not until Goretzka met a Joshua Kimmich cross with a flicked header three minutes into the second half was there a real sense of German threat. Cho Hyun-woo, though, leapt to his right to claw the ball away. The Daegu FC keeper came into the tournament as third choice before being surprisingly selected for the opening game because he is the tallest of the three keepers and the coach, Shin Tae-yong, was obsessed by Sweden’s height. Cho then gained a cult status in South Korea, where his extravagant ginger bouffant has earned him the nickname 'Dae-hair', taking the Korean word for 'great' to create a pun on De Gea."

Daegu FC (my hometown team) is a minnow among the slightly larger minnows of the K-League, or Korean Professional Soccer League.  Rumors are spinning that Cho will be moving to a Premier League team soon, and that's huge for any Korean soccer player.

Germany's meltdown is really something for the history books though.  For that much talent to accomplish so little is truly astounding.

That said, I'm picking Belgium now but will root for Mexico and Japan.

Simple Thought

Barack Obama is doing exactly what he should be doing -- enjoying his life, making way for a new generation of younger Dems, and _not_ saving White America from fucking everything up yet again.

— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) June 27, 2018

"Mama here comes midnight / with the dead moon in its jaws"

Songs: Ohia, "Farewell Transmission"

1)  I have a really terrible habit of coming to love certain musicians and bands a few years later than I should.  I grew up in a DC suburb and graduated from a DC high school in 1992, but never went to a Fugazi or Jawbox show.  I went off to rural Ohio for college (Go Lords!) and promptly became a huge Fugazi / Jawbox fan (along with other DC greats like Shudder To Think and Nation of Ulysses).  So I came back to DC in 96 and made plenty of trips to places like the 9:30 and Black Cat to make up for lost time.  All of which is to say, Jason Molina graduated from Oberlin the same year I did from Kenyon.  I've been listening to a lot of his stuff lately, and vaguely remember two different weekend trips me and some friends made up there to drink and get high and try and get laid.  I'd like to think I might have bumped into him in a dingy dorm room or coffee shop at some point, but I have no fucking idea.  I did see him play once as Songs: Ohia in or around 2000 at James Madison University at a big old music showcase.  I don't remember much of it.  Q And Not U are much better than these sleepy hippies, I thought at the time.

2)  Things are really terrible right now, aren't they?  Some things I've had my first experience with in 2018:

Anxiety attacks! (like, real ones)

Insomnia! (like, the real shit)

Realizing that in fact, if your highly educated father's media intake is composed of FOX News and Rush Limbaugh for two decades or so of retirement, he will become increasingly paranoid, unpleasant, and difficult speak to for more than five minutes!

More Incivility Now, Please

Hamilton Nolan on the sudden outbreak of Pearl Clutching idiocy after a few known Trump Employees (i.e., Fascists) were heckled out of restaurants (emphasis mine):

"This is all going to get more extreme. And it should. We are living in extreme times. The harm that is being done to all of us by the people in the American government is extreme. To imagine that Mexican immigrants should happily cook for and serve meals to people who enable a man who is determined to demonize and persecute them as subhuman criminals is far more outrageous than the idea that those enablers should not be served in restaurants. I do not believe that Trump administration officials should be able to live their lives in peace and affluence while they inflict serious harms on large portions of the American population. Not being able to go to restaurants and attend parties and be celebrated is just the minimum baseline here. These people, who are pushing America merrily down the road to fascism and white nationalism, are delusional if they do not think that the backlash is going to get much worse. Wait until the recession comes. Wait until Trump starts a war. Wait until the racism this administration is stoking begins to explode into violence more frequently. Read a fucking history book. Read a recent history book. The U.S. had thousands of domestic bombings per year in the early 1970s. This is what happens when citizens decide en masse that their political system is corrupt, racist, and unresponsive. The people out of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction. The day will come, sooner that you all think, when Trump administration officials will look back fondly on the time when all they had to worry about was getting hollered at at a Mexican restaurant. When you aggressively fuck with people’s lives, you should not be surprised when they decide to fuck with yours."

Of course the media hasn't spent much time talking about the context of these incidents -- the restaurant business in America is built on the backs of immigrants, legal or otherwise.  I doubt the likes of Sarah Sanders or Stephen Miller would be aware of this, but even someone like me with just a few summer vacation's worth of experience bussing and serving knows this.

And if kids being stripped from parents and put into cages isn't enough of a call for "incivility," what the hell is?

I'm from the D.C. area and as Nolan points out, there's nothing more D.C. than coming home from your well-paid lobbying or journalism gig and thinking that racist, anti-immigrant policies are just abstractions to be written up in win-lose columns, not instruments of power that destroy lives.

More incivility now, please.  The more the better.

Update:  Amy McCarthy is also very, very good on this:

"Some posit that being discourteous will somehow make them less likely to 'come around to our side.' But would they have anyway? Is sitting down to a plate of fajitas somehow going to make Kirstjen Nielsen — who, as the head of the DHS, has been instrumental to what can be described, without hyperbole, as ICE’s reign of terror — recognize that immigrants are humans? The idea that the right platter of queso fundido, served with a smile, could convince Nielsen to stop enforcing the administration’s inhumane policies feels naive at best.

It’s not a little curious to argue that an administration that has completely shattered countless norms surrounding political discourse and basic decency, or that people who dehumanize others, are owed civility, to say nothing of the right to hospitality — the very thing they are so committed to denying to other people. The prevailing, Danny Meyer-style approach to hospitality in the restaurant industry— 'enlightened hospitality' — makes room for not serving people who are actively engaged in harming others; it encourages restaurateurs to consider how their overall product makes a customer feel, and to build a culture that empowers their employees. What kind of hospitality is owed to a fascist in your restaurant? On the other hand, is it hospitable for a restaurant owner to subject her immigrant employees to a person who refers to immigrants as an 'infestation,' as Trump has?"

This is basically a logic two-for-one.  By definition no, you don't owe fascists or racists your civility.  And second, it's only in the fever-dreams of Beltway pundits that "shrill" lefties start acting nice and Trump voters magically scratch their chins and ponder the benefits of a Kamala Harris presidency.

Old School

The tradition of Korean shamanism is still alive, even for people who grew up outside of the country:

"From a young age, Soholm says she’s been having mystical dreams, dreaming about making contact with the spiritual world. As she got older, she began dreaming about things that would happen in the future. 

'If I meet somebody, for example,' said Soholm, 'I would have a dream about them and get information about them that they didn’t tell me. I began to have such intuitive knowledge and they’ve just been growing stronger and stronger as I got older.'

Usually, those who felt tormented by a so-called spirit illness in Korea look for different ways to be treated, but end up admitting that the affliction marks a call to become a shaman, or mudang in Korean, and receive naerimgut. 

Her spirit illness hasn’t been as serious as other traditional shamans, but Soholm says her health has been deteriorating, especially after deciding on the naerimgut date. 

'Deciding on receiving naerimgut took a long time for me because I never considered myself that way. I thought I was just intuitive,' recalled Soholm. But after years of research and interviews she did with Western shamans, she realized that the stories she gathered mirrored her life."

Pity The Fascists

The thought of Republican business owners going bankrupt do to Trump Tariffs and having to live off of frozen pizzas and ramen.... does not bother me at all.

— Stormy Jamesiels (@wetcasements) June 24, 2018

This Is Also America

So much winning it hurts:

"'Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,' said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. 'Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn’t really move. . . .  They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on.'

In addition to the children’s first-hand, translated accounts in court filings, a former child-development specialist who worked inside the facility independently told The Associated Press this week that she saw kids there with bruises and broken bones they blamed on guards. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the children’s cases.

In court filings, lawyers for the detention facility have denied all allegations of physical abuse."

Abu Ghraib, but for children.

This Is America

Rosaries confiscated from immigrants at the Arizona/Mexico border. [via @MikeOLoughlin] https://t.co/OP0jLhU3m1 pic.twitter.com/JJv8HHDbhh

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) June 11, 2018

"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer"

Fascism is here.  It is now.

The Milkshake Has Been Drunk

Jonathan Freedland on Trump's normalization of a genocidal dictator:

"So Kim leaves Singapore having gained much of the international legitimacy the dynastic dictatorship has sought for decades. But the gifts from Trump did not end there. He also announced an end to US military exercises in the Korean peninsula – the 'war games' which he said were costly and, deploying language Pyongyang itself might have used, “very provocative”. Trump also hinted at an eventual withdrawal of the 28,000 US troops stationed in the Korean peninsula.

And what did Kim give Trump in return for this bulging bag of goodies? The key concession, the one Trump repeatedly invoked, was a promise of 'complete denuclearisation'. Trump held this aloft as if it were a North Korean commitment to dismantle its arsenal, with work beginning right away. To be sure, such a commitment would be a major prize, one that would merit all the congratulation a beaming Trump was heaping on himself. But this is where you need to look at the small print.

First, the text itself says merely: 'The DPRK commits to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.' Kim has promised not 'complete denuclearisation' but simply 'to work toward' that end. Negotiators the world over know is the fudging language you use when you’ve extracted something less than a real commitment. Kim has offered only an aspiration, with no deadline or timetable, not a concrete plan."

It didn't take a genius to see this coming -- KJU got everything, Trump got a photo-op, and the long terms prospects for peace on the Korean peninsula are no different than they were last week.  Given how Trump is effectively writing South Korea and Japan out of further negotiations (another huge win for Kim), they may be far worse.

Baby Bust

For all of the political animosity between South Korea and Japan, one thing they share is a looming demographic crisis as their respective birth-rates plummet.  One Japanese village has taken the step of putting together a "Mr. January" style calendar to reach out and entice women to move back to the middle-of-nowhere:

"Finding a partner in Otari, a village in Nagano prefecture in Japan’s northern Alps known for its dramatic scenery and some of the best skiing in the country, is proving a thankless task for Kobayashi and his friends.

Its population is about a third of what it was in the 1950s; in the past decade, the number of residents has fallen from 3,734 to 2,795, including fewer than 180 children of primary and middle school age.

According to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, its population will fall to just over 900 by 2060 if current demographic trends persist. As of last March, just 275 men and 218 women in their 20s and 30s lived in Otari.

Young women are more likely to leave in search of jobs, and perhaps a partner, while the men are expected to stay and inherit family farms and businesses, leaving them with little prospect of marrying and having children."

The article says very little about immigration, which is really the only serious solution for either country.

Standards

Anthony Braxton and the Fred Simmons Trio, 9 Standards (Quartet) 1993

It's make-up week, so we're reviewing for next week's final exam.  It's a pretty easy week for me, since we're just going over old material, doing a very brief reflection activity, then I'll bribe my students to raise their hands on a few worksheets with choco-pies (make that banana-choco-pies because that's how I roll).

Next week my college classes will be finished but I'll have to grade tests, which is no fun.  But it does mean the beginning of summer vacation, and buying a ticket to visit home in August.

Meanwhile I guess Trump declared war on Canada or some such.  Really bodes well for him dealing with perhaps the knottiest foreign policy situation in the world today re: North Korea.

Because he is a great big whiny asshole, obviously.

Not Again

RIP Tony Bourdain.  I loved your books.  You seemed like a mensch who was kind of a dick at times, but hey, that's life.  I'm sorry you left so soon though.

The Utter Brutality Of Daegu (Almost) Summer

Husker Du, "Celebrated Summer"

I'm in the office on a Friday after teaching a bunch of make-up classes.  This semester has had a ton of random mid-week holidays and has pretty much turned my schedule into a mess.

I'm finally done for the day, but my office air-conditioner is better than the one I have at home.

And it's technically not even summer yet.

I am a great big sweaty baby.

Notes From Dumbfuckistan

America can't get any stupider under the Great Orange Shart Cloud, can it?

Yes.  Yes it can.

Update: This video of Eagles player Malcolm Jenkins dealing with the press is incredible and perfect.

Also, Drew Magary is indispensable.