Domestic Sweat

The Korean National Folk Museum is holding an exhibition on the history of the Korean kitchen:

"Kwon started cooking for a family of five on her husband’s side when she got married to him at 17. The mother-in-law, she said, was never present in the kitchen.

'It was solely my responsibility to cook and feed everyone, from the crack of dawn to sunset,' she said.

The case was not too different for 74-year-old Choi Young-ja, who got married at the age of 23 in Yeongdeok County, North Gyeongsang. Following the traditions, she went to live with her husband and his extended family.

From day one of their marriage, she had 10 mouths to feed.

'There was no running faucet at the time, so you had to go to a well nearby and get the water early in the morning to cook breakfast,' Choi told the museum. 'After they’re done eating and you’ve done the dishes, it’s time to cook lunch already. So you get busy in the kitchen again. Then after lunch, it’s again time to cook for dinner. Women couldn’t escape the kitchen.'

'Sometimes it got so hard that I thought I was going to die from all the work,' she said. 'I wanted to run from everything. But what can you do, that was life for most of us back then.'”

As in Western kitchens, the great paradox was that as brutal as kitchen work was, it was also a space of some privacy and autonomy for over-worked women.

Various Food Comas

It's the last week of adult / continuing education classes at my college, and in Korean style I'm being treated to multiple free lunches and dinners by my students.

I mean, free is good but at times I definitely feel like I'm a calf being fattened for the slaughter.

Happy New Year, Again!

Happy Year of the Rat y'all!

Rats are considered friendly, adaptable, and alert! They "carry salt all night" to feed their family! They can also be stubborn though!

— 2020 Is Already Bullshit James (@wetcasements) January 24, 2020

"the right amount of muscular and healthy"

Ssireum is Korean traditional wrestling (kind of like sumo, but the dudes aren't nearly as big) and it's having a growth in popularity due to, scientifically speaking, the hottiness of the hotties involved:

"There was a time when ssireum was so popular that the champions became TV stars, like Kang Ho-dong and Lee Man-gi, during the 1980s and 1990s. Although the sport’s heavyweight athletes were its most recognized figures, many were turned off by watching the large men fight each other. Plus, ssireum has long been thought of as a sport that only older folks enjoyed watching - until now.

KBS2’s new show 'The Ecstasy of Ssireum' (translated) began on Nov. 30 and features 16 lightweight athletes who compete against one another to become the show’s final champion. Featuring not only matches between the wrestlers, but interviews with each contestant as well as detailed explanations of each technique used during matches, the show will air its fifth episode this Saturday at 10:35 p.m. The show’s ratings reach only a modest 2.4 percent on average so far, but the comment section of the show’s clips on YouTube is filled with fans supporting the show.

The video that first attracted viewers to the world of ssireum was a clip from Aug. 8, 2018, of the final round of the '15th Haksan National Ssireum Competition' held in Gimcheon, North Gyeongsang. The two wrestlers - Hwang Chan-seob and Kim Won-jin - each had physiques that caught people’s eyes for being the right amount of muscular and healthy, bringing about the heated reaction to the video. The humorous comments were soon made into memes and passed onto other sites and communities."

I mean, why not?

Foosball II

Well, at least I got one team correct re: the Super Bowl.

Who would of thought the Titans were actually good?  Or that San Francisco can win a game with only eight pass attempts?

Anyhow since nobody asked me, Chiefs 35 -- 49ers 17, but I hope Richard Sherman gets at least one pick.

"mom-roach"

More and more businesses in Korea are moving towards a "kids-free" model:

"'I just had the worst experience in the theater watching ‘Frozen 2,' one person tweeted on Jan. 3. 'This kid walked around bouncing his hand on everyone’s head, threw the empty popcorn bag over the seats in front of him and put his feet up on the back of my seat. And guess what the mom did? Nothing. I can tell why some people want no-kid zones in theaters.'

Comments online calling for no-kid zones often refer to the mothers who fail to take better care of their children as 'mom-roaches.' The word is slang, written as mom-choong in Korean, and was translated into mom-roach by Jamie Chang when she translated the word in Cho Nam-joo’s popular novel 'Kim Ji-young, Born 1982' (2016).

Those who used 'mom-choong' were called 'child haters' in response in some heated online discussions about no-kid zones.

But when the Korea JoongAng Daily spoke to a number of parents with young children recently, as well as a few owners of businesses that have gone kid-free, we found the issue to be not so black-and-white."

I'd only add that in an article about parents, kids, and etiquette in South Korea, the examples given are almost exclusively about moms.

Where the hell are the dads?

Best Picture Nods For 2020

The List.

I really, really liked Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

It's nice to see the Korean sensation, Parasite, up there.

Joker was a hell of an acting performance but not much of a film, as a whole.

I really want to see Little Women and 1917 but as I've mentioned before, it's hard to tell what English language films will make it to South Korea.

I also missed The Farewell, and was expecting it to make this list.

Ford vs. Ferrari was fun but kind of dispensable.  Christian Bale is there, I guess.

Jojo Rabbit was also good but a little surprised to see it here.

Midsommar might not be best material for Best Picture, but I hope it wins something.

The Lighthouse should be on here but it's far too weird I guess.

High Life was the best film I saw in 2019, but apparently it came out in 2018.

My filmic opinions, y'all.  On the internet.

R.I.P. Neil Peart

Rush, "La Villa Strangiato" live

Sure, the Ayn Rand stuff early on was a bit much but who hasn't been in their early 20's before?

Objectively speaking, Neil Peart took the modern trap kit (bells and whistles and all) as far as possible in the context of rock music.

More personally, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the music or larger entertainment industry who ever had anything bad to say about him, and his life was far from easy.

Fuck cancer, and long live musical geniuses, weirdos, and misfits.  Long live "over-doing it" once in a while.  Long live choice moments of excess.

Battle of the Nomz

Opening a successful restaurant is never easy, but in ultra-competitive South Korea it may be more difficult than in other places.  To varying degrees, new start ups and uses of information technology are trying to help out:

"Blue Night, another Korean start-up, was founded by a pub owner. Kim Yong-jin, CEO of the company who started a pub after quitting his job as a researcher at Samsung Electronics, realized that keeping track of the clock in and out times of employees and their payrolls was harder than he imagined. That is why the CEO created an application called Albam, which automatically records employee attendance, shifts and the wages. Used by more than 100,000 businesses, the application calculates actual payroll by taking legally-mandated paid holiday hours, social insurance and tax deduction into account. The service is free for private businesses.

'Collaboration of the food service industry and start-ups with data base AI technology can enhance the chance of survival for those starting new businesses as not only tastes but improving customer service can lead to "good business,"' said Hong Tae-ho, professor of business administration at Pusan National University."

Optimistically, there are some good ideas here.  Realistically, location location location will always outweigh any cutting edge app.

Splish Splash

South Korea has a rich history and culture involving public bath houses.  Like a lot of interesting things about the country, modernity is killing many of them off:

"'We’re talking about the smaller bathhouses, the ones that we used to have just a few steps from our homes,' said Yoon Sung-yong, director-general of the museum in central Seoul. 'Growing up, going to public bathhouses was a special occasion, a stop we’d make especially prior to Chuseok [harvest holidays] or Seollal [Lunar New Year’s Day in Korea]. But with the franchise, large-scale sauna businesses taking over the industry and less people finding the need to bathe outside of their private bathtubs at home, smaller public bathhouses are closing down around us.'

From the late 1990s to today, around 3,000 public bathhouses closed down around the country, according to the museum.

'There have been studies before about how people practiced bathing regularly in the ancient times up to the Joseon Dynasty [1392-1910] and about the Japanese bringing their culture of public bathhouses into Korea during their occupation of Korea [1910-1945],' Yoon said. 'But the studies stop there. We decided to collect more recent records of public bathhouses and the culture built around them in Korea.'"

First off, I've never been to a jim-jil-bang myself.  Like most Americans (Westerners in general?) I grew up with pretty easy access to hot showers at home, or at a gym.  (Interestingly, one of the reasons public bathhouses became popular in the first place was to provide clean water to poor folks in order to fight cholera outbreaks.)  However, every foreigner in Korea knows that if you need a place to sleep off a night of drinking until the trains start running again, these are the places to go.

Second, our class got bogged down right away in the differences between public bathhouses and "saunas."  I explained that in English (via Swedish) saunas are steam rooms, not necessarily baths.  But if I understand correctly, Koreans would use the word sauna to mean something like high-end bathhouses, that often include attached gyms and health clubs as well.

But the students agreed that the small, local bathhouses that they grew up frequenting are now disappearing, and the higher-end, multi-service ones are what remain.

Foosball

I thought I was done with the NFL but dammit if the playoffs haven't pulled me back in.  And you should know I'm pretty much always wrong about these things, but here go my predictions:

San Francisco over Minnesota.

Ravens over Titans.

Chiefs over Texans.

Seahawks over Packers.

On to:

Ravens over Chiefs.  (This would be the most entertaining match-up of the playoffs, IMO.)

San Francisco over Seattle.

Super Bowl:

Ravens over San Francisco.

It's fun to see how wrong I'll be, and I'm bummed the Saints went out so early, but there are some really good young quarterbacks to watch here.  Also, fuck Tom Brady, Dan Snyder, and the entirety of the Dallas Cowboys.

"commodities from whom a few powerful agencies can squeeze as much income in as short a time as possible"

As we enter 2020, suicide and celebrity suicide remain huge problems in South Korea.  Kim Dae-o writes things are actually getting worse, not better:

"South Korea’s entertainment industry itself has to bear a lot of the responsibility. It treats celebrities as commodities from whom a few powerful agencies can squeeze as much income in as short a time as possible. Many celebrities are spotted as children and are not taught valuable life skills, only how to sing and dance. The situation is worse for female celebrities, with the public more interested in every salacious detail of their lives.

We also have to understand why people feel moved to post vicious comments online. Our freedom of speech and privacy laws that allow commenters to remain anonymous need updating. At the moment in South Korea, someone who urges another social media user to die is fined an average of just $2,000 for their first offence."

It's economic, it's cultural, and it's a public health issue, and nobody knows what an effective answer would look like.

Ugh

My college waited until the first week of January, which also happens to be the first very cold and wet week of winter, to replace all the heating / AC units in my office building.

They had all of fall to take care of it but no, this is the week you get to suffer.

"mostly unready to confront it even as it has become unmistakably what it is"

When it comes to the dumpster fire that our American national media has become with its instinctive "both-sides-do-it" bullshit, Joan Walsh gets it:

"But I need to come clean with a 'both sides' of my own. My party, the Democratic Party, was utterly unprepared for the carnival of racist bigotry the Republican Party was becoming, and remains mostly unready to confront it even as it has become unmistakably what it is. After Obama’s insufficient stimulus (I know, he didn’t have the votes for more, but he didn’t need votes to at least talk about what economic recovery, and more important, economic justice in the wake of the financial meltdown required), he pivoted to preaching deficit reduction and attempting a bipartisan 'Grand Bargain' that would have trimmed or gutted Social Security and Medicare. (Which makes me rejoice that at least in one case the GOP defeated my president.) We suffered through Obama’s Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission and endured idiotic movements like 'No Labels.'

And when a thoroughly compromised bipartisan immigration reform bill passed the Senate in 2013, only to be locked up in the Tea Party-controlled House, not enough of us realized that the GOP was on its way to becoming a nativist party. It didn’t happen when Trump descended that gilded escalator and called undocumented Mexican immigrants 'rapists' and 'criminals;' it happened when Senator Jeff Sessions and Santa Monica’s white nationalist Stephen Miller took charge of GOP immigration policy. Still, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been told in a television debate that Democrats don’t 'want' comprehensive immigration reform, or else a bill would have passed. 'Both sides' profit politically from the immigration stalemate, we’re told.  I calmly recite the terms of that 2013 'compromise' to pundits who should know better — usually to no avail. That’s how a country that once protected young 'Dreamers' wound up putting brown kids in cages instead."

It's really quite simple -- you don't negotiate with hostage takers.  Obama thought it was possible, but seemed to wake up a bit during his second term.  Biden (groan) still thinks it is.

The Republican Party, and specifically Mitch McConnell in the Senate, have broken the system.  And come November 2020, we either get to keep a semi-functional Democracy or we get four more years of Trump, which means at least a generation of Trumpism via the Supreme Court.

2020!

Hey fam just wanted you all to know that my 2020 raw-cookie-dough-and-whiskey-only diet is going pretty well so far.#health#winning#newyearresolution#healthandfitness

— Baby New James (@wetcasements) January 2, 2020