Happy New Year

Here's your good luck blood sausage for 2020, Year of the Rat (Metal).  Notice the paper cup of dirty-water fish cake juice.  If you told me this would become one of my favorite meals in South Korea I'd have called you a liar ten years ago.

I went downtown yesterday and bounced around, enjoying the Christmas lights and still not understanding the appeal of hyper-sexualized high school girls lip-sychning to K-pop.  I met some friends for beers, snacked on blood sausage (I know it doesn't look like a snack, but it only costs $2.50), and finished the night with a not that satisfying vegetable curry.  I came home and played some Judgement (by the Yakuza series makers, and it's predictably excellent) and, well, went to bed.  This is New Year's at 45, kiddies.

Happy New Year, stay safe and healthy in 2020.

"man's testicle alone"

Graphic designer Vaughan Oliver has passed at 62.  And honestly, I'd never heard his name before.  Turns out, he was a titan of 80's and 90's album design:

"His most famous 4AD designs include Doolittle and Surfer Rosa by Pixies, Treasure by Cocteau Twins and The Drift by Scott Walker; he also designed album covers for artists outside the label, such as Bush’s 1996 US No 1 album Razorblade Suitcase, and Crazy Clown Time, the 2011 album by film director David Lynch.

4AD band the Breeders wrote 'you will be missed' and posted concept artwork for their single Cannonball, featuring the image: 'Man’s testicle alone (pushed through a piece of card to ensure its loneliness)'."

 If you design the cover of Surfer Rosa you are forgiven as many Bush covers as you want.  It's science.

Of Landlines and Family Cohesion

Julia Cho makes some strong arguments for how the rise of the mobile phone has "diminished" the closeness of families:

"Over the course of the 20th century, phones grew smaller, easier to use, and therefore less mystical and remarkable in their household presence. And with the spread of cordless phones in the 1980s, calls became more private. But even then, when making a call to another household’s landline, you never knew who would pick up. For those of us who grew up with a shared family phone, calling friends usually meant first speaking with their parents, and answering calls meant speaking with any number of our parents’ acquaintances on a regular basis. With practice, I was capable of addressing everyone from a telemarketer to my mother's boss to my older brother's friend—not to mention any relative who happened to call. Beyond developing conversational skills, the family phone asked its users to be patient and participate in one another’s lives.

Cellphones, which came on the market in the ’80s and gained popularity in the ’90s, rendered all of this obsolete as they displaced landlines. When kids today call 'home,' they may actually be calling one parent and bypassing the other; friends and bosses and telemarketers (if they get through) usually reach exactly the person they are hoping to speak with. Who will be on the other end of the line is no longer a mystery."

So basically, the rise of cell phones has even diminished our social skills in general.  I can't say I disagree.

"as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in meh"

I thought The Last Jedi was pretty good.  It took chances, at least, whereas Force Awakens was just a New Hope re-do.

And there are a lot of dickless fanbois out there looking for any excuse to trash a movie featuring a woman and a black dude as heroes.

That said, Rise of Skywalker sounds like a complete mess.

Can we admit now that J. J. Abrams has always been a bit shit?  I mean, he knows how to make a movie look good but that's about it.  His Star Trek films were completely forgettable.

Anyhow, lurvely South Korea won't get the film until January 8th.  I guess I don't need to hold my breath, but I still want to see it and get on with my sad, nerdly life.

"When you’re waiting for a bus to your second job. . . ."

Amanda Mull on how "Social Media Made America Tired of Rich People," and why that's a Very Good Thing:

"At first, people responded to these kinds of social-media boasts with a mix of fascination and revulsion—plenty of clicks, likes, and guillotine jokes. But the trend persisted, and was even adopted by plenty of adults, as wealth inequality, student debt, and housing costs all soared. Such constant proof of how rich people really live made young people resent them. In a recent poll by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, a majority of people under 30 said that rich people amassed their fortunes by taking advantage of others; the poll also found that the same age group was the only one in which favorable attitudes toward socialism edged out those toward capitalism. When you’re waiting for a bus to your second job while looking at photos of teenagers taking a helicopter to the Hamptons, it might be hard to hold on to the old idea of American meritocracy, or believe that the wealthy really are better than you.

Indeed, the Democratic presidential candidates who stand furthest to the left—Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders—enjoy the largest proportion of youth support, which they gained through promises to do things such as tax the wealthy and pursue universal health care. Buttigieg and his defenders have either failed to fully detect the cultural anger toward the upper class or simply made a calculation and decided that the money is worth it, and that the power they’re tapping into isn’t going anywhere. Either way, the country’s elite will have to figure out how to address those who demand answers. The internet lifted the veil, and now everyone knows what’s behind it."

Say what you will about Marie Antoinette, but even she at least proposed an alternative, however outlandish, for bread.  With our current Silicon Valley overlords, or more traditional fail-spawn of the rich, no such luck.

"stop nudging and begin fighting"

Alex Pareene pulls no punches when it comes to the failures of American Liberalism (including Obama) over the past decade:

"The Democrats’ fecklessness, in other words, did not flourish in a partisan vacuum. It has been, at every juncture, inspired and influenced by the complete failure of the right to self-police. The American right, like the housing market and the banks and the hedge funds and the health insurers and providers, simply could not be induced to check its basest instincts in the face of an opponent that staked its entire political credibility on the promise that it could make Republicans fall in line with realigned incentives or One Weird Trick. If liberals want to get the next decade right, after the previous one in which we repeatedly failed to save the world while telling ourselves we were doing so, we will need to stop nudging and begin fighting."

Obama brought knives to gun fights for eight years as president.  Deep down, he's an obviously intelligent and well-meaning guy who thought, as many left-of-center folks still do, that our inherited "small-D" democratic institutions could (would?) save us.  I mean, if only that kindly Joe Biden becomes president or that Nice Young Man Pete Buttigieg, I'm sure Republicans will ease their stranglehold on the Senate and go back to working in good faith with Dems on a bipartisan basis, right?

And yes, the ACA was an objective, hard-fought victory.  But we either move forward to stronger forms of national healthcare, or simply lose it all the next time Republicans run the House.  There are no longer permanent victories for Democrats.  With an extremist right-wing Supreme Court, a President Warren (still my favorite, fwiw) or Sanders could simply have a relatively progressive agenda go through Congress (with 50 votes in the Senate) wiped out by judicial fiat.

Hoping For Better in 2020 And Beyond

Darlene Love, "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)"

I've linked the incredible last Letterman appearance version of this song plenty of times on this here blog, so as we enter 2020 let's go with Phil Spector's original.  Ms. Love's dynamic vocal range actually comes through a bit better here.  (Hell, even Bono is capable of good taste sometimes.)

Grading is finished.  In typical Because Korea style, I was not informed of a pretty significant change to our grading curve policy.  This means next week I'll be getting some angry calls from students who deserved "A"s but will end up with "B+"s.

I'm still planning on going downtown tomorrow night for Christmas Eve beers, with a tentative plan to meet up with my boss and his family for coffee.  I'll call my sister, and then my dad even though it's stressful to think he might ask me about impeachment.

Every year I usually buy myself something nice as a present and this time around, I was honestly stumped.  I'd like to think my recent interest in minimalist survival videos had something to do with it (not kidding!), and I can always use a new pair of jeans or a dress shirt.  But in terms of, say, a 250-400 dollar indulgent purchase for myself, I just wasn't feeling it.  (Last year it was a Freitag messenger bag which honestly I haven't used that much.)

I mean, the world is literally on fire.  Peace on earth and goodwill towards all but Jesus, are we really going to make it to 2030 without major civil wars, resource-based wars, and massive depopulation events, animal, human, and otherwise?  I honestly doubt it.

So Merry Christmas from South Korea, for what it's worth.  We all deserve better than the last few years, that's for damn sure.  Stay healthy, and keep fighting despite the fact that the worst is yet to come.

"not just by guns and the police, by all sorts of structural violence"

Cleveland is home to one of many urban "food deserts" throughout America.  A group of local activists are taking positive steps to change things for the better:

"'People of colour are constantly under attack, and not just by guns and the police, by all sorts of structural violence like corruption, food deserts, educational and health inequalities,' said Amanda King, founder of Shooting without Bullets, an arts and social justice organization in Cleveland.

Rid-All’s ethos is community building through education and experience: over the past decade, hundreds of Clevelanders – mostly African American men – have completed its urban farming training programmes, including most recently a group of veterans with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Aided by an army of volunteer sustainability converts, the farm has become a community hub, hosting vegetarian food festivals, weddings, cooking classes, school visits and guided tours."

There's a lot to cheer for here, obviously.  And this was a relatively tough article for some of my students, since one of the great things about Korea is that you can find fresh, cheap produce being sold on sidewalk corners easily, or even in roving blue Bongo trucks.  (The stinky ones sell fresh seafood, even.)  The idea of a blighted neighborhood with no fresh produce options is simply unthinkable throughout the developed world, except America.

Nobody should have to struggle for access to reasonably affordable, fresh produce, especially children who are developing eating habits (good or bad) for life.

"Can't Get Started With You"

Oscar Moore, Presenting Oscar Moore

I just taught my last class of the semester.  Next week I have to enter grades into the college computer system, then work up hard-copies of those same grades Because Korea.  I'll continue teaching adult student classes through January.

I have zero plans for Christmas next week, but I'll probably make it downtown to Slightly Above Average Korean Foreigner Bar (it's actually quite good) and drink some beers.  My boss said he'd be downtown with his family (two grown sons, one of whom just completed military service) so it might be nice to bump into them.

Trump has been impeached.  I mean, it was the right and necessary thing to do but let's face it -- Republicans exist in a separate reality now, and there's no going back to pre-Trump.  (And let's be honest -- they were just as nutty and racist and anti-majoritarian back then, they just were afraid to say the quiet parts out loud.)

The new Star Wars apparently won't come to South Korea until January, which is some bullshit.

Somehow, I shall endure.

"unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre"

Scott Bradfield on classic American science fiction and its "wonderful mistakes":

"The science fiction novels of the 1960s—as this two-volume collection of eight very different sci-fi novels testifies—remain enjoyable because they got everything wrong. They didn’t accurately predict the future of space travel, or what a postnuclear landscape would look like, or how to end intergalactic fascism. They didn’t warn us against the roads we shouldn’t travel, since they probably suspected we were going to take those roads anyway. And they definitely didn’t teach us what a neutrino is. But what ’60s science fiction did do was establish one of the wildest, widest, most stylistically and conceptually various commercial spaces for writing (and reading) fiction in the history of fictional genres. Each book is unpredictable in so many ways as to almost constitute its own genre."

There were some really terrible arguments against the perspicacity of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale because Gilead wasn't a 100% accurate portrait of 2010's America.  Of course not, stupid, that's not and never has been how great dystopian fiction works.

Similarly, it's absurd to judge great speculative works of literature on a scale of did / did not happen.  To broadly paraphrase Samuel Delany, good science fiction is more about our present circumstances, scientific or political, than anything else.

Watchmen (The TV Series, With Spoilers!)

I tweeted out my feelings regarding the finale of Watchmen and I guess I'll replicate most of them here.

The final episode was good.  Visually, the series has been great all along.  Thematically, working race into the mythos has been rewarding, and the acting has also been good.

But the writing?  Not the dialogue, but specifically the world building and plot structure?  There are just a lot of things that didn't fly with me.

Off the top of my head, Sister Night seems way unmoved by the fact that so many of her fellow police officers were just murdered with frozen squid-creature babies.  While Doctor Trieu is problematic, why do we have to take Veidt's word that she'd not help save the world from war and global warming?  Why does it take until the last episode to remind us that we're supposed to care about Sister Night's three kids?  Why is Looking Glass still a nothingburger of a character?  Why does Laurie seem to not care that much that her dildo model / past boyfriend is being disintegrated?  In a series based on the white terrorism of the Tulsa race riots, why do we so quickly gloss over the inherent racism of a U.S. occupation of Vietnam?

I never watched Lost but I get the feeling if I had, I'd have many of the same feelings.  This show was the product of some amazing brain-storming sessions, no doubt.  There are great ideas here, but also mediocre and problematic ones.  But hey, let's throw everything together and see what sicks, coherency be damned.

In a TV world of endless seasons, and a movie world of endless sequels, you can get away with this but only for so long.  Then you get shit-canned, and all those "interesting" plot threads turn into a heap of unfulfilled pretension, overnight.

The last two episodes move the dial over into "interesting but heavily flawed, and not worthy of a second season" territory for me.  I'm glad I followed through with all nine episodes, because around episode five I honestly wondered whether I could be bothered to even finish watching the series.

Make of that what you will.

USA! USA!

The next time somebody asks "How can we possibly afford universal health-care?" or even, god forbid, free lunches for poor kids, remind them that America has occupied Afghanistan (and Iraq) for two decades now, trillions of dollars were flushed, and every bit of "progress" made was a complete fucking lie:

"What’s more is that this military-industrial-congressional complex is largely insulated from public accountability, so what’s the incentive to change course? The Pentagon’s entire budget operates in much the same way: unprecedented amounts in unnecessary appropriations resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. Yet Congress continues to throw more and more money at the defense department every year without ever requiring it to account for how it spends the money. In fact, the war in Afghanistan is small potatoes by comparison.

The bottom line is that the Afghanistan Papers clearly show that a lot of people were killed, injured and subject to years, if not lifetimes, of psychological trauma and financial hardship because a bunch of men – yes, mostly men – in Washington didn’t want to admit publicly what they knew privately all along. If we don’t start holding these people to account – and it’s not just about Afghanistan – the DC foreign policy establishment will continue to act with impunity, meaning that it’s probably more likely than not that in 50 years there’ll be another batch of 'papers' revealing once again that we’ve failed to learn obvious lessons from the past."

I'm old enough to remember when any criticism of the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were met sincere, doe-eyed questions to the extent of "Why do you hate America and our freedoms?"

Trying Not To Be A Grinch This Year

Christmas Songs, ranked:

5) "Silver Bells" but only Slayer version
4) "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) any Darlene Love version
3) "Little Drummer Boy" but only Bowie/Crosby version
2) any GG Allin song
1) "My Humps" any version

— James-A-Claus (@wetcasements) December 10, 2019

Five Great Movies From 2019! (With Spoilers!)

I'm often happily surprised by the quality of English-language movies which make it over here to lovely South Korea, but then again I do miss a few "artier" ones. (The Lighthouse, Jojo Rabbit, and The Last Black Man in San Fracisco to name three.)  Anyhow, here are five movies I saw in 2019 that I think everyone should see at least once.

5.  Midsommar -- If you witnessed a brutal ritual human sacrifice, would you run the hell away and contact the authorities, or stick around for a bit?  Midsommar asks a lot of you to "buy in" to what's going on, but throw in the Platonic ideal of a shitty boyfriend, overly competitive Ph.D. candidates who have stumbled onto the ideal dissertation material, and the disconcerting spectacle of preternaturally gorgeous Swedish people engaged in heinous depravity, and oh what a movie you've made!  One that I admire, but never want to watch again!

4.  Parasite -- Obviously this Korean film winning the Palm d'Or was a huge deal here.  It's at turns dark as hell but also hilarious, and there's a certain matter-of-fact quality that stuck with me, a sense that class-based cruelty in as inevitable as bad weather.

3.  Us -- I had some serious Twitter-fights about this one, because I think it's better than Get Out (which was truly excellent).  Granted, I'm an 80's kid who actually participated in Hands Across America, so maybe that made the difference for me.  Not sure why so many people mentioned that having an underground "mirror" all of humanity would be impossible.  Symbolism, people!  Symbolism!  And about class, not race this time.

2.  High Life -- Wiki says this came out in 2018, but it's being included on a lot of 2019 lists and that's when I saw it, so there you go.  I saw this after the kind of interesting but also very dull Ad Astra and found it a compelling "answer" of sorts to the same questions regarding the infinity of space travel versus the claustrophobic nature of human relationships, family or otherwise.  But High Life, not an easy film to watch by any means (TW for violence, rape), takes a group of condemned criminals and roils and shakes in violent, chaotic waves where the former film sees fit to give trite little reassurances.  High Life blooms into a finale that's as disturbing as it is beautiful.  This is a sci-fi classic as far as I'm concerned, up there with Annihilation in terms of movies that didn't get nearly enough credit or attention.  Also, a great soundtrack.  Robert Pattinson has a great voice.  (Not joking!)

1.  Once Upon a Time in Hollywood -- QT's best film, hands down, bringing together his long-time obsessions with violence, pop culture, and the act of  film-making itself into something approaching pure allegory as washed up star Leonardo diCaprio seeks, struggles, suffers, and ultimately earns a passage into the Hollywood version of salvation.  (That last few minutes of the film, getting invited "up the hill" to still-alive and still-pregant Sharon Tate's mansion?  Yup, that's Rick Dalton ascending into heaven at the invitation of Mary, mother of unborn Hollywood Hills Jesus.  Duh.)  Also, another great soundtrack.  Also, the "Easy Breezy" sequence with the female child actor, and Leo breaking into tears?  Pure genius.  The hippies tried their damnedest to kill "Old Hollywood," and at least within this powerful vision (revision?), they've failed horribly.

The Taste of Freedom

Choco Pies are ubiquitous Korean confections, consisting of a marshmallow core surrounded by cookie and chocolate.  I've always found them a bit stale-tasting, but not too bad if you dip them into hot coffee or tea.

Anyhow, they also helped win the Cold War (slight hyperbole):

"Choco Pies have been manufactured in Tver, which is north of Moscow, since 2006. Orion later opened a second factory in the country in Novosibirsk, Siberia. Both make pies, biscuits and chocolates, and Orion is expanding the Tver plant for the European market.

The company sold 700 million Choco Pies in Russia in 2017, and its sales there were 60.6 billion won ($54 million) in 2019 through October.

The arrival of Choco Pies coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The country lacked a developed food sector, and the snack was one of the foreign products that met the pent-up demand following 70 years of communism.

Localized marketing is seen as a major contributor to the lasting popularity of Choco Pies in Russia."

Of course, Choco Pies got nothing on the story of Gorbachev and Pizza Hut.  And nice to think of them as "Korean Burgers," as Russians apparently do.

Impeach, Of Course

Obviously the Senate isn't going to turn against Trump.  But I see two tactical things that are definite victories for Dems lately.

One is that, while Cheeto Hitler is going to again invite Russian help to rat-fuck 2020, at least it's more or less an open secret now.  Facebook is still right-wing poison, but at least nobody will be shocked -- shocked! -- that Mark Zuckerberg is a Trump supporter (since it's better for his bottom line).  And Twitter will continue to Twitter, too, but I'd like to think the law of diminishing returns will be in effect.

Second, the Dems had to move forward with this.  To do otherwise (and remember it took longer for Pelosi to get to this point than a lot of us wanted) would be to surrender.  And if there's any lesson to be drawn from the last three years, it's that you fight a bully -- you punch back as hard as possible -- you never show weakness.

I'm still thinking it's 50/50.  And it's really not even worth guessing what's next until Iowa and New Hanpshire, other than that Buttigieg is pretty much all of Obama's worst neoliberal impulses with none of the inspirational upside, Biden is too old and creepy, and Sanders will never motivate non-whites in the numbers necessary to get him across the line.

I'm still with Warren, fwiw, and hoping her ground-game will help her surprise us all in two months.

At the very least we'll have a bit of clarity, and that's got to count for something.

The Future Is Here, And It's Buggy As Hell

The first fully automated convenience store has opened up near Seoul.  The article refers to it as an "A.I." store, which is a popular term in Korea but also over-used.  (The store can have a Turing-level conversation with me?)  Anyhow, it's going about as well as you'd expect:

"AI is changing the landscape of the retail industry and consumer behavior, but the technology is not perfect. To enter this store in the first place, a customer must sync a credit card or a debit card to the SSG Pay app and get a QR code.

However, on the day of the visit, a QR code couldn’t be generated on the reporter’s iPhone for an unknown reason. We could finally enter the store using the Shinsegae I&C PR manager’s QR code on her smartphone.

According to Shinsegae I&C, these limitations will be overcome after AI sharpens its technology over time through deep learning.

The AI failed a number of stress tests. It was unable to conduct a proper checkout twice when it was given eight unusual checkout situations. In one case, the reporter took a sip of water from a bottle and left it in the store. No charge was registered."

Obviously the bugs will be worked out, and in a country with many avid early adopters this is probably what the future looks like -- no cashier, no cash stores where angry machines will beep at you and then lock you in just because fuck you.

Good times.

(Is it clear I'm really not a fan of any of this dehumanizing, anti-labor bullshit?)

Gold Spoons, Dirt Spoons

In South Korea, "Gold Spoons" are what we Americans would call "Silver Spoons," and "Dirt Spoons" mean "no spoon at all."  Anyhow, younger Koreans are fed up with a society where neither right-wing nor left-wing politicians are interested in helping them achieve a better future:

"'If I try hard enough and get a good job, will I ever be able to afford a house?' said the 25-year-old, who lives in his small, cluttered room where clothes were piled on the bed. 'Will I ever be able to narrow the gap that’s already so big?'

The concept of dirt spoons and gold spoons, as those from better-off families are known, have been around for many years but exploded onto the political scene in recent years, undercutting support for liberal President Moon Jae-in.

Moon came to power in 2017 on a platform of social and economic justice. Yet halfway through his five-year term, he has little progress to show the country’s youth who have borne the brunt of deepening inequality."

Is there any wealthy country these days where people are generally optimistic about their economic futures?  I can't think of one.  Something something "lives of quiet desperation" something.

Thanks, Capitalism!