How Are Things In Daegu, James?

I'm running out of Netflix and porn you guys help.#Daegu#coronavirus

— 2020 Is Already Bullshit, James (@wetcasements) February 28, 2020

This Town

It's a cliche I know, but lurvely Daegu is a complete ghost town.  The convenience stores and supermarkets are open, but 80% of the restaurants are closed.  Some of the delivery places seem to be doing some business, which makes sense.

Update From Daegu Re: Coronavirus

Minutemen, "Corona"

"The people will survive. . . ."

1)  Masks are scratchy and, at least in Korea, too small for my big foreigner gorilla head.  I had to stop in to about five different convenience stores before I could find one still stocking them.  I purchased three brands, knowing at least one of them would be too small.  (I was right!)

2)  People in Daegu are, unsurprisingly to me, cool and calm.  Koreans can be notoriously paranoid about sickness and disease, but at the same time a sense of shared sacrifice (no big public events, staying home instead of eating out, not freaking out every time North Korea does something dangerous and /or stupid) pretty much defines the nation.

3)  Speaking of which, I feel much better here than I would in my home country of America (where they still have measles outbreaks for fuck's sake).  The national health care system here is excellent and comprehensive.  Koreans actually go to the hospital when they're sick, as opposed to first figuring out if they can afford an E.R. visit.  (I'm reminded of the time a friend of mine in college tried to convince us all that a roll of duct-tape was all he needed to take care of two crushed fingers on a rugby field.  Good times.)

4)  Staying with the  positive, the disease vector in Daegu has so far roughly stuck to 75% of cases related to the same biazrro Christian cult known as "Shin-chun-ji."  Yes, bizarro Christian cults are also a thing here and there are reports that this church had a training / recruiting center in Wuhan, China, the center of the outbreak.  So to go against point number three a bit, there are concerns that people in the church are hiding or under-reporting their illnesses due to Messianic delusions because Jesus.

5)  In a time when ultra-nationalism seems triumphant in America, England, India, Hungary, Russia, etc., it sure seems short-sighted to think that your patriotism trumps (ahem) the fact that millions of folks travel daily between nations, and that any solution to future outbreaks won't require, by definition, coordination between doctors and scientists in different countries.  This requires a base level of goodwill and transparency between nations, something in sadly short supply these days.  And let's face it, viruses are smarter than humans are.  This will happen again.

6)  Restaurants and cafes are getting hit really hard.  "Marts" (neighborhood grocery stores) and "Shu-pas" (supermarkets) are doing really well, especially after five p.m. when people head home with no plans to dine out.  Lots of masks at first, and lots of instant noodles and comfort snacks being sold now.  (Portable, long-lived, not the worst survival foods you can think of.)

7)  March is when Korean schools open for the year, as opposed to September.  So this is all a bit of a bigger inconvenience that you might expect.  Public schools are opening a week late (March 9) while colleges and universities like mine are opening two weeks late (March 16) three weeks late.  Nobody's complaining, however.

Is it a coincidence that a month ago I started Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt?  (An alternative history of The Great Plague, basically.)

Inside Jappaguri

In lighter news, here's a great piece -- 12 things you might have missed in Parasite.

Hangin' In There

#Daegu update: pic.twitter.com/E9dKa5uPjK

— 2020 Is Already Bullshit, James (@wetcasements) February 21, 2020

Lurvely Daegu!

Oh, hi there apparently a church in Daegu is the center of the coronavirus outbreak in South Korea.

Small Political Thought

Michael Bloomberg is the ultimate shit sandwich.

"I, who had naively believed in peace and love"

I mentioned how much I enjoyed Trina Robbins' memoir Last Girl Standing.  In light of the recent success of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and it's arguably problematic handling of hippies, Manson, and the far left in general, here's another passage worth quoting:

"In August 1969, beautiful actress Sharon Tate, almost nine months pregnant, was murdered in Los Angeles along with a group of her friends, all stabbed multiple times.  In November, the killers were found: a hippie commune of young men and women, but mostly women, led by a charismatic madman named Charles Manson.  I was horrified, but to a lot of hippies guys, including some of the underground cartoonists, he became a kind of cult figure.  Here was a guy who not only convinced women to sleep with him and whatever pals he had, but convinced them to kill for him, too.  They thought he was cool!  Kim [Deitch] was one of those guys who thought Manson was cool; so was his sometimes-cartoonist, drug-addled brother Simon, and so, it seemed, was Crumb, who drew comics obviously inspired by Manson.  He drew a cover for Print Mint's San Francisco Comic Book Club in which a Mansonesque guy hypnotizes a nubile teenybopper, and another comic in which the same Mansonesque character has brainwashed his chick followers into killing each other.  That one ends with a pile of naked women's bodies, on top of which sits the Manson character, fucking the dead bodies.  And it was supposed to be funny!  I, who had naively believed in peace and love, was beginning to realize that there was a lot of hostility toward women in these guys."

I generally find games of punch-the-hippies (pretty much the national past-time of even "centrist" news sources like CNN or MSNBC, or The Washington Post or New York Times) to be, at the very least, incredibly tedious.  But I don't think that was at all what Tarantino was up to in OUATiH.  His point was centered around changes in Old, Classic Hollywood and the New Wave represented by no other than Roman Polanski himself.  It's the two "old school" actors who heroically "save" the New Wave by, indeed, murdering the fuck out of those silly hippies.

I mean, there's a hell of a lot going on the last 15 minutes of that film.  To say that Tarantino is endorsing a punch-the-hippy world view, let alone a reactionary one, is only one piece of a larger whole.

Anyhow, I think Robbins has an important insight here (as does the rest of her book) as to how for men in the counter-culture free love meant just that -- non consequential hook-ups.  For the women,  they were welcome to as much sex as they wanted as well, but were still expected to make the beds and do the dishes and raise the babies, alone.

Better Safe Than Sorry

No surprise here, but my college is joining almost every other college and university in South Korea by delaying our opening by two weeks due to coronavirus.

There will be some definite scheduling headaches but it sounds like we can mostly get by just going an extra week into June.

FYI, the Korean spring semester is when the school year starts in Korea, as opposed to September.

Hell Is Other People And All-You-Can-Eat Buffets

I guess I'm one of those smug, disdainful libruls who has always considered cruise vacations to be prolonged bouts of imprisonment rather than an actual good time, a boring person's idea of an exciting trip.  (Objectively speaking, cruise ships are absolutely horrible for the environment.)

Still, I hope the hundreds of folks currently trapped on various cruise ships due to the coronavirus make it home safe.

But this homeboy will stick to land for now.

definitely not "all on acid"

"I visited the offices of Marvel Comics, and wrote my visit up for the LA Free Press.  It was almost as easy to visit the Marvel offices in 1966 as it had been to visit the Mad offices ten years earlier.  Flo Steinberg (although I didn't know at the time it was her) was sitting at the front desk, subbing for the receptionist who was on a break.  I told her the purpose of my visit.  She took one look at me -- I was wearing the shortest miniskirt in New York City -- went back to the bullpen and told them, 'You gotta see this.'

Stan Lee was nice to me.  Everybody was nice to me.  Roy Thomas showed me around the office and took me to lunch.  I took one look at the guys in the Marvel bullpen, with their pens and pocket protectors, and realized that they were definitely not 'all on acid.'  Later, in the subway, on my way back to Marty's, I ran into Marvel writer Denny O'Neil, the only guy in the Marvel office who had looked the least bit bohemian.  He told me that once he had worn a 'Legalize Pot' button to the Marvel offices, and Stan Lee had told him to take it off, please."

-- Trina Robbins, Last Girl Standing

This was a fantastic read by an artist who started off in the world of underground comics and later became the first female to work on the mainstream Wonder Woman series.  Along the way, she was a successful fashion designer (made dresses for Cass Elliot), a friend to many in the 60's counter-culture in New York, San Francisco, and L.A., slept with Jim Morrison (not surprisingly, he turned out to be a total jerk), and later in life, a breast cancer survivor.  Highly recommended!

The joke in this passage, if it isn't clear, was that the guys behind the cosmic weirdness of Doctor Strange and Fantastic Four (Jack Kirby, basically) must have been doing no small amount of hard drugs.  Turns out, they were basically squares.  Very talented and creative ones, no doubt.