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Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Wonderchicken

January 20, 2004 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 128 Comments

I’ll be 40 years old next year, but I don’t, despite my worst fears, feel anything like that ancient. Thanks to my greatly reduced intake of things that are bad for me (from apocalyptic to merely terrifying), I feel physically better than I did throughout most of my 20s and early 30s. Ten years ago, my friends and I were already referring to ourselves as ‘aging punks,’ and possibly the only thing that has changed in that description, for me at least, is that ‘-ing’ has become ‘-ed’. This will become relevant, trust me.

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco,
this ain’t no fooling around
This ain’t no Mudd club, or C. B. G. B.,
I ain’t got time for that now
–Talking Heads, Life During Wartime

I’ve been casting about for a way to frame my thinking about weblogs and weblogging lately, as I’ve watched with a mild dismay apparently shared by others down the street about the way in which the tang and tenor in our neighbourhood of neighbourhoods have been changing in these post-blogdiluvian times. I hadn’t found the key I needed until this morning, and it was, amusingly, courtesy of Dave Winer.

(Now I have had my run-ins, as have many, apparently, with Mr Winer, for reasons I won’t bother detailing, as I am trying in many ways to be a better man — angry, cantankerous and likely to erupt in spontaneous ranting at any moment, sure, but a better angry man — and there’s no need to re-open old wounds. Suffice it to say that what follows has nothing to do with my personal feelings about Dave. No part of it should be construed as an attack on him, although it is always possible he might perceive it as such. That happens sometimes, I’ve noticed. The truth is that I’ve quite happily avoided thinking much about him, and presumably him about me, since back in October 2002. And that’s just fine. )

I have to thank Mr Winer for dripping that last droplet into my mental beaker, the one that supersaturated the solution and turned it crystalline with a barely audible thwonk!
When I got into the weblogging thing, yaar, back in the year of our lord 2000 I think it was, somewhat late to the party but carrying a few six-packs of the good stuff to ease the trauma of my gatecrashing, I was totally unaware that there were communities of people that had banded together, and who were as taken as I with the promise of it all. I was unaware that there were already stars in the personal-website firmament, unaware that there even was a firmament. I just stumbled onto Blogger somehow, drunker than a cheesetester on good scotch as I recall, and my geek cilia started wiggling, and off I went.

I didn’t know there were people building their own tools to make it even easier to become part of the revolution, to fling open those doors, to take over the world by giving everyone who might have something to say a way to say it and a stage on which to do it, regardless of how or how well they were going to say their piece. Voice, all of that. Access to the internet was the price of entry, of course, but the democracy of it all was breathtaking, even if it was democracy for rich kids, for the most part. That’s always been the way of it, after all.

It reminded me of punk rock. When I first encountered punk, back in 1982 or ’83, after having grown up in a tiny, media-starved and desperately uncool (if green and pleasant, at least away from the sawmills and clearcuts) northern village and having moved to Vancouver to go to university, the proverbial scales fell from my eyes. Thtink, plink. Berserk autodidact that I was, I’d already developed an effective sneer, a deep distrust and dislike for authority and political chicanery, a habit of arguing mercilessly and cruelly if the matter at hand was something I believed in and merely arguing vociferously if it wasn’t, and a nihilistic, risk-addicted, maniacally-boozing demeanor. I had, at the age of 18, though, not yet discovered that there were tens or hundreds of thousands of others with the same sorts of unpleasant societally-discouraged aberrations, and they’d been gathering together and making this mad, loud, ramshackle, gloriously angry music for years already.

I loved it. The music, not so much the fashion. I knew folks who went in for the whole ‘punk look,’ and I thought they were a bit laughable, but harmless, as long as they loved the music and the community. Pose(u)rs, was the word, but I kind of felt that those who called other people posers were almost as destructive to the spirit of the thing as the fashion-victims themselves. (Mark me, here. I’ll come back to this.) So I wore a leather jacket, and messed-up jeans, in pretty much my only concessions to the fashion side of the scene, and grew my hair hippy-long, which was anti-punk to be sure; I drank and did scary stupid dangerous things, and went to gigs, bothered my neighbours with bootleg cassettes cranked to the nuts, and papered my walls with gig posters, and made friends with musicians, and ate chemicals, and reviled the nazis, and generally gloried in what I’d been missing in my sh-tty little northern town throughout my teens — a sense of community, and more specifically a community to which I was happy to belong. Not a community of redneck wife-beating millworkers, this time, although it must be said I had many friends back in that segment of society too.

I felt much the same way about the weblogging thing, a couple of years back, especially when my writing began to get noticed and linked and emailed-about and commented-upon by people whose writing and thinking I in turn respected, and I started to understand how many communities there were within the greater world of the webloggers. There was a wild spirit of creativity running through the wires, it seemed to me, and I found myself a part of a loosely-joined (nudge, wink) group of dauntingly smart and well-spoken people, who didn’t seem, for the most part, to object to my more outrageous turns of phrase. I joined Metafilter, not long before it stopped becoming a Name Brand Weblogger Hub and grew into more of a general in-love-with-the-web community weblog in its own right, which introduced me to a whole constellation of bright webby people. It was exhiliarating, in much the same way as the World Of Punk had been as it opened up to me almost 20 years earlier.

It was welcome, too, because having lived the life of a real-world wanderer for the previous 15 years, a sense of community, community less transient than a group of backpackers coming together randomly in a bar in Indonesia or somewhere… well, that was something I was sorely missing. This parallel I felt to the alt-rock scene in which I forged my young identity all those years back was in no small part, I realize in retrospect, a driver for my over-the-top reaction to a nuts-and-bolts piece of writing by Megnut way back when (here, here, here). It was to me, I see now, as if a snide critic — no worse! a punk-rock luminary — had described the essence of punk as ‘play loud, fast and sloppy, behave outrageously once in a while, and throw in some random lefty politics and unfocussed anger, and bob’s yer uncle!’ It felt like the kind of reduction to appearance over substance that has always enraged me, and is something that even today I rail against as a core failing of Korean society, for example. Not that that’s what Megnut was guilty of in any sense, perhaps, but it pushed my buttons, and now I see why.

Anyway. These weblog people I found myself (virtually) amongst had banded together, it seemed to me, in part because people do that when they’re exploring new frontiers, when they’re not entirely sure of how to proceed but are in love with the new potential they see for a life lived in a way a little less ordinary, and when they suddenly find that there are other people out there who are doing the same thing. Out on the fringes, singing their songs.

Of course, bands break up, and personalities clash, and egos swell, and guitar players want to be front-men, and drummers explode, and new bands form, and old bands fade away and re-emerge years later to do farewell tour after farewell freaking tour. It is natural.
The weblogging gangs of old, the ones I felt a part of, well, they still are loosely bound, but the threads are so thin now that they are almost invisible.

It was, for a while, as if we were all fans of the punk, you see, together out there on the floor, drenched in sweat, pogoing, hurling beer cans, singing along, not really caring which band was up on the stage, just loving the hum and the throb and the tribal feeling of it all. Now it feels as if many of us have become fans of various specific bands, or have started our own and are struggling to gather our own crowds, or have decided to just keep it in the garage where it belongs, and damn having an audience. We don’t have time to go to each others’ gigs anymore. When everyone is in a band, there’s no one left to watch the shows.

That almost inevitably leads to irrelevance, though. Survey says. You sell yourself to the record company to try and get a distribution deal, you start to watch what you say, you suck up to the Big Boys, and try to be seen in the right places with the right powder dusting your nostrils. You lose the holy fire, you start thinking in terms of ‘product’, you tell yourself you’re going to ‘change it from the inside,’ but you’re part of the machine now, and it’s too late for you.

Okay, it might be time to try and pull the threads together, here.

Now, Dave Winer said

More proof blogs aren’t parties, they’re publications. If you try to make it social, about friends, and parties, you end up with a party where a lot of pre-adolescent males bark at each other, and a few hawkers try to sell penis enlargers, and no emotionally whole adult would be caught dead at. I been down this path. The road leads to Slashdot.

Aside from being primly elitist, this is just plain wrong from all sorts of angles, but I think provides a decent illustration of what I’ve been trying to say. Again, it helped me figure out my misgivings about the current State of The Blogs, so I thank him for saying it. So, you know, it’s good, even if I think it’s completely wrongheaded.

Let’s look at it – first, the idea that weblogs are anything that can be expressed in one word (like ‘publication’), or even in the air pocket that sits in the middle of a falsely dualistic opposition between two unrelated words (like ‘party’ and ‘publication’), is bollocks. But never mind the bollocks, here’s the wonderchicken.

What really bothers me is that Dave is generally perceived, with good reason, even by those who dislike the man, as an Elder Statesman of sorts. Hell, he’s been anointed by f–king Harvard, right? What else would I expect him to say? That weblogs are like snorting coke off the bellies of teenage hookers? You can’t get much further from the punk DIY ethos than Harvard, right?

I would expect, I suppose, that rather than saying ‘weblogs are not X, they are Y’ that he’d say ‘Weblogs are whatever the hell you want them to be. Go mad with creative ferment, young ones, unleash the furies, rewrite yourselves and the world, make what you will of these tools and this time. Now, my weblog, that’s a publication, not a party, but your mileage might vary.’
Perhaps that’s what he meant.

Look, I agree with Dave Eggers about saying ‘no’ —

No is for wimps. No is for pussies. No is to live small and embittered, cherishing the opportunities you missed because they might have sent the wrong message.

— it’s something that I wrote about in the sort-of eulogy I wrote for my friend Rick, who died after the Bali bomb in 2002, something that he believed, and something I have believed for many, many years too. Say yes, say it again, sing it, scream it, or get out of the way, grandpa. It was not the shouted nihilistic ‘no!’ that attracted me to the ideas underpinning the flowering of punk rock decades ago, it was the implied bellowed ‘yes! we’ll rebuild our lives the way we want them!’ that I loved. And that I mourned, as it became a fashion, a commodity, and sank back underground again. But the lesson never left me.
Weblogs are a party, damn it, and sometimes they’re publications too, or instead, and sometimes they’re diaries, sometimes they’re pieces of art, sometimes they’re tools for self-promotion, sometimes they’re money-maknig ventures, sometimes they’re monuments to ego, sometimes they’re massive wanks, sometimes they’re public services, sometimes they’re dedications of faith, sometimes they’re communities. Always, they are a public face, one chosen and crafted to varying degrees, of the people who write them. They are avatars, masks, or revelations of our deepest selves. They are political or philosophical, merrily inebriate or sententiously sober. Do not listen to those who would tell you what they are not.

These people will destroy your soul. Classification is for insects.

My name’s wonderchicken, and I am a wild party.

It is the rising current of feeling that weblogs aren’t a party (or aren’t journalism, or aren’t a floor wax, or aren’t a dessert topping), that they’re something important and serious, that is seriously harshing my buzz. “Let’s all take this more seriously”, is the message I get from far too many these days, “because then, well, what I do must be Serious Stuff, right? We’re all adults here, aren’t we?”
Stop it, you bastards.

Your $500 blog conferences, your NeckFlex For President consultancies, your sad tawdry whoredances with the old media moronocracy devil, your repetitive linkery to the same tired wanna-be self-declared pundits you met at the last convention, your careful management of a media face that is, in the end, marketable, it makes me want to puke. It kills the spirit of this thing that I was so in love with, and turns it, as avarice and self-regard always does, to sh-t.

I’m not actually saying stop it, when I say stop it, of course. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, and all that. But I am regretful, and resentful, even though I know that it’s inevitable. It is the way things go, in this cashed-in century.

I also know that, as with the music, those who became part of this wild whirlwind, not for fashion or self-aggrandizement, not for power or money (although perhaps for the blow-jobs and free drugs, for which, it must be said, I’m still waiting in vain), but because they had burning gods inside them that were clawing at the inside of their foreheads screaming to get out, well, they’ll continue to create, and more and more they’ll point and chuckle indulgently and ignore the Self-Selected and the Sententious. And the SSS will recede, blithering, from the core of the living culture, until, once again, they are irrelevant. The script-kiddies are right, you see, but only about some of us.

Punk can also be about Wittgenstein. Don’t get me wrong – housewives can be punk, and librarians, priests and, crikey, even known homosexuals can be punk! Can Harvard be punk? Well, yeah, maybe it can be too. Maybe.

Jeneane suggested that the scriptkiddies enjoy more sense of community than us old compatriots do at the moment, and you know what? She’s right. Why? ‘Cause they’re still punk, and our little revolution is being marginalized and co-opted by the climbers.

I’m not suggesting that weblogs should literally be punkrock, right? OK? Geddit? I’m just talkin’ here.

I have no problem with Joi Ito either, although I point at him above — I listened to the Chris Lydon interviews a while back, and he is someone I think I’d very much like to know, based on what he had to say. I haven’t been reading his writing, much (or much of anything blogly until I started again recently, to be honest) although I do plan to start. I found myself nodding as I listened to him talking, and backtracking to listen to some bits again. I rarely do this. I’m not used to people being smarter than me. He represents a new bird, to me, and one that is punk in the best way, in the way I loved the most way back when, in the smart-as-hell Hüsker Dü kinda way. At least I hope that to be true.

In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, as the wave of co-optation and consolidation swings through the communities. But what he had to say and the elegance and clarity with which he expressed it was, for example, in stark opposition to the way that Glenn Reynolds, who, although he may or may not be a plodding thud-dullard, certainly sounded like one when he parried an unwanted political observation of Chris’s with ‘No, no, that’s…no. No. Durrrr.’ Repeatedly. I imagined him with fingers in his ears, going ‘nyah nyah I can’t hear you’. (I exaggerate for effect, a little, perhaps.)

We could use more like Joi Ito, I reckon.

Still, there is something he wrote recently and that I am compelled to disagree with that must be woven into my story here. Joi echoed (and Shelley pushed back against) that old chestnut from Rebecca Blood (amongst other ‘write better’ type stuff), and proposed that those who are ‘serious’ about their weblogs should endeavour to write well. I say the hell with that. Write well, write badly, whatever, just create. If you are saying things that stir people, they will respond.

If you can’t write well, write with such passionate muscularity that people stand back and go ‘whoa!’ Make things, reach out to people. If you write well, keep doing it, and get better, and don’t kiss ass for personal gain. If not, just go, bash that keyboard, make a hideous, amateurish squall, one to which, if it has some kernel of glorious truthtelling, people will respond. The mass amateurization of nearly everything is good. If you’re a gifted amateur, the world will beat a path to your, er, door.

But let me return now to my mention, far upstream, of how I had little love for alternato-types who pointed, all j’accuse-y, and called other people ‘posers’, back in the day. It is, and was, almost as lame as calling someone a ‘sell-out’. It may seem that that’s what I’m doing here, pointing the Big Foam Sell-Out Finger, but I’m not. I’m just stirring the pot. Things have gotten f–king boring around here lately, and some egos are way out of control, and who better than the wonderchicken to try for a little reality-distortion-field adjustment?

If David Weinberger (to pick an example) wants to shill for Dean, more power to him, by crikey! I’d give my left nut to see the Bushbot gone, too, of course, but I’m not so sure that Howard Dean is the solution. Armed insurrection, now, that might be a noble cause…anyway, I still love reading what he has to say, when I occasionally swing by JOHO. If Dave Winer wants to ponce around Harvard (as long as he’s not telling me what a weblog isn’t), then I say ponce away! You go, girl! If this guy thinks blogging should be all about ‘creating value’ and ‘return on investment’, well, why the hell not?

OK, on second thought, that last guy needs to be slapped in the head.

Still, my point is that even if you are puerile enough to believe that someone else ‘selling out’ hurts you somehow, well, that’s pretty hard to justify, son. See also : nuh-uh. When someone stops fighting against the current, goes limp, and, you know, gets a hog rectum implanted where their mouth used to be, or goes the full cortical advertising-augmentation route, starts serving the Machine and wiping their chin with toilet paper, well, hey, it makes the rest of us look better by comparison, doesn’t it? Hell, at least I’m not one of those pigbuttmouth people with those creepy whipcord antennas, right?

Another quote from Eggers —

There is a point in one’s life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. One worries whether or not wearing a certain shirt means that they are behind the curve or ahead of it, or that having certain music in one’s collection means that they are impressive, or unimpressive.
Thankfully, for some, this all passes. I am here to tell you that I have, a few years ago, found my way out of that thicket of comparison and relentless suspicion and judgment. And it is a nice feeling. Because, in the end, no one will ever give a sh-t who has kept sh-t ‘real’ except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things. The keeping real of sh-t matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It’s fashion, and I don’t like fashion, because fashion does not matter.
What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people. What matters is that it will stand forever, long after any narrow-hearted curmudgeons have forgotten their appearance on goddamn 90210. What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it. What matters is that you want to see and make and do, on as grand a scale as you want, regardless of what the tiny voices of tiny people say. Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a f–kload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

And that, my friends, is Punk f–king Rock.

Punk got co-opted and marketed and corporatized, and it damn near died, as all Big Ideas do. That’s not to say that small-p punk is not still alive. It is, down in the ditches, where the spirit that drove the rage has morphed and moved on and dropped back under the monkeymass radar. Music and community is being made now that might not fit so easily into the same easy label, but there are folks out there making stuff that builds on and extends the best of the punk alt-rock scene from 20 years ago and more. Some of ’em are more relevant than others, sure, but the passion’s still out there. The anger, the love, the frustration, the woohoo. The party rolls on, even though the faces have changed.

Weblogging is also being co-opted and marketed and corporatized, but it won’t die either. The small communities that grew out of earlier days are being diluted and voices are growing fainter, partly because of the natural life cycle of these things, and partly because there are those who are making it palatable and bland for the media moronocracy to digest, and that’s what the media moronocracy wants, so that’s what it gets.

Jeneane said it too, and Shelley echoed it

You see, there was nothing to gain through blogging in the early days. It was my voice informing her voice informing his voice: our whole was greater, but our parts were pretty cool too. There was nothing to lose, specifically, or to benefit from. There weren’t as many pundits and VCs and CEOs and politicians and top dogs playing. WE were all top dogs by virtue of being someplace those types weren’t.

Although its public face may suck pretty bad for a while, and you may need to dig a bit deeper to find its soul, there will always be those in the Fields of Blog who will tell you what they really think, and some of those will move you while doing it, regardless of how well they write. And they’ll do it without having to look over their shoulders. ’cause it’s a f–king party, pops, and you’re invited.

Uncle Fucka Exegesis

December 2, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 5 Comments

After much deliberation, after pondering, both weak and weary, after tugging my beard like the retro-sage in a technical age that I fancy myself to be, after eating a couple of eggs boiled in spiced soy (oh, yeah, baby), I have come to the inescapable conclusion that ‘Uncle Fucka‘ is possibly the greatest song ever written.

A brief reminder of the powerful and affecting lyrics :

[Terrance:] Shut your f–king face uncle f–ka
You’re a cock sucking ass licking uncle f–ka
You’re an uncle f–ka, yes its true
Nobody f–ks uncles quite like you
[Phillip:] Shut your f–king face uncle f–ka
You’re the one that f–ked your uncle, uncle f–ka
You dont eat or sleep or mow the lawn,
You just f–k your uncle all day long
[farting noises]
[Terrance:] Hmm!
[farting noises]
[laughing]
[farting noises]
[Some Guy:] What’s going on here?
[farting noises]
[Man 1:] That’s garbage!
[Man 2: ]Well, what do you expect — they’re Canadian.
[People:] OOOoooooooooooooh
f–ker f–ker uncle f–ka uncle f–ka f–ka f–ka f–ka
[T & P:] Shut your f–king face uncle f–ka
[Terrance:] uncle f–ka
[Terrance:] You’re a boner biting bastard uncle f–ka
[Phillip:] You’re an uncle f–ka I must say
[Terrance:] Well you f–ked your uncle yesterday
[Everyone: (laughing)]
[People:] Uncle f–ka… thats
[Everyone:] U-N-C-L-E f–k you Uncle
f–kaaaaaa…
[Phillip:] Suck my balls!

From the opening strains to the final testicular injunction, this piece of music speaks of humankind’s chthonic impetus to understand its place in the world, to rend the veils that separate us from a direct apprehension of the divine. Perhaps Terrance and Phillip are telling us that through the f–king of uncles, a sacred understanding may be achieved. William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, said :

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water.

The road of excess is the road upon which Terrance and Phillip gambol and fart prodigiously, boner-biting their way to the palace of wisdom. Uncle f–kers, yes indeed, they embrace all within the scope of their gaze, with both love and scorn. Their joyous farts and caustic abuse remind us of the Rabelaisian island of Ruach,

They neither exonerate, dung, piss, nor spit in that island; but, to make amends, they belch, fizzle, funk, and give tail-shots in abundance. They are troubled with all manner of distempers; and, indeed, all distempers are engendered and proceed from ventosities, as Hippocrates demonstrates, lib. De Flatibus. But the most epidemical among them is the wind-cholic. The remedies which they use are large clysters, whereby they void store of windiness. They all die of dropsies and tympanies, the men farting and the women fizzling; so that their soul takes her leave at the back-door.

and point with gleeful loathing thereby at our folly and failings. They f–ked their uncles yesterday, our hyperkinetic flatulent Canadian duo, reminding us of the gloomy conclusion of Ivan Karamazov: “If God is dead, all is permitted.”

Is there a god who would allow uncle-f–king? Is the god who would have prevented such things indeed dead, and is all, in fact, permitted? Terrance and Phillip have no answers for us, as they caper and cut the cheese, only questions, questions with which the great minds of our civilization have wrestled for centuries, fruitlessly.

In the end, perhaps, like Neitzche, they hail the dionysian, as the true source of art, and as deliberate affront to the illusory appollonian order imposed by our minds on a chaotic universe.

Either way, as Walter Kaufmann said of Neitzche, so can we say of Terrance and Phillip, our foul-mouthed flatulent flip-top-headed Canadian friends :

[Their] phrases, once heard, are never forgotten; they stand up by themselves, without requiring the support of any context; and so they have come to live independently of their sire’s intentions.

Suck my balls.

Death and Bali, A Year Later

October 11, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 15 Comments

It’s been exactly a year since the bombing in Bali that killed my old friend Rick Gleason and 201 other people.
Is there a statute of limitations on mourning? Should there be? If we stop feeling that skip in the heartbeat and stab in the gut when we think of someone we loved who was killed, have we stopped caring? Should guilt then rush in? Should we try to leave behind our grief, and get on with it? What is left of the dead one, a year after they’ve gone, in the world? What do we learn from their lives, what can we learn? What have I learned?
A year on, I wish I could say confidently that I’ve consciously changed my life for the better after Rick’s death, taken the lessons his life and his sudden death taught me, plowed up some fertile ground. I wish that in the decisions I’ve made in the intervening twelve months, a reflection could be seen of some nebulous tribute to him, and the things we both believed about life. Maybe it’s there, and I can’t see it. When you’re too close to the mountain, you can’t see how high it really is.
I’ve lived my life with death all around me — not in the way that the billions of poor people on this planet do, perhaps, with family members dying slowly in the corner of the shack, or ripped apart under American bombs — but with frequent visits from the reaper, until he became a familiar presence in my life, neither feared nor hated. I have no fear of death, but I resent it, and the curtain it throws around our brief little lives.
My father died when I was about five years old, my younger brother, right in front of me, a few years later. Aunts and uncles, great- and otherwise, died with regularity through my teens, as did my dearly-loved maternal grandfather. The rest of my grandparents were gone by the time I was in my mid-twenties, and then my step-father, who’d married my mother not long after my father’s death 20 years before, also died. I have friends who never lost a family member or dear friend until their mid-thirties, for whom Rick’s death was a shock more singular, and I always wondered how they thought about death. Did they fear it? Do they hate it more now, or less? Do they put it from their minds, and go on with the humble daily things, keeping the stink of terror well hid?
Scars were left on me in the wake of those deaths in my young life, furrows and welts in my brain some of which are even now just working their way into the light. This is as it should be. My great and abiding love for the drink, moderated and benign as it has become in my later years, as much passed on genetically and nurtured environmentally as it may be, certainly has some roots there. My fear and loathing of the very idea of having children, absolutely. My carefully-chosen expatriate existence, yearning contrapuntally as I sometimes do for the deep, cold coniferous forests of my youth. The vigour with which I counter those who I perceive to be attacking me, yes. All of these and more. I have made my peace with the ghosts, made it many years ago, and carry my wounds with awareness and a quiet understanding that what happens is good by virtue of the sheer fact that it has happened, and that to claim otherwise and rail against our experience is to refuse life, and shrink from it. To say no, rather than yes.
But Rick’s death marked me, more than I could have expected. I still feel that weightless skip in my heartbeat, that stab in the gut, when I think of him. One year on, there are more questions than ever, about what my life is to mean to me, and what it has meant. About what is important, what is indispensable, and what is good. About how to reconcile a love for individuals with a deep, heart-squeezing loathing for humanity, and particularly for the sort of people that knocked down the World Trade Centre, that set the bomb in Bali, and that ordered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. About the preachers and the haters, the ideologues and the god-fearers, the killers and the martyrs, and about how deeply stupid and damaged, greedy and afraid they must be.
And in the end, of course, I’m left with more questions, and I’m left with a rising knot of choking rage and resentment that I consciously push down, squeeze back, and try to transform into something useful, into words and actions that don’t feed the killer monkeys, that keep the bloody chaos at bay, and I’m not usually very successful.
I said this, about 18 months ago, long before my friend’s death :

To regard the death of those you know and love as a natural thing, to turn the painful experience of their loss into something that enriches and strengthens your own life (because, face it, they ain’t got one anymore) – that’s the mostly truly reverant eulogy and memorial one can make. Which is trite, perhaps, but people seem to forget it, again and again.

and I suppose I still believe it to be true.
But Rick’s murder marked me, more perhaps and nearer the surface than any death I’ve lived past since I was very young. I suppose I am a better man because of that mark. I would be a happier man, and one less uncertain and questing, if it had not happened. Would that Rick were still walking around in his loose-limbed way, falling in love at the drop of a hat, laughing and drinking and seeing. Would that he could share a drink with me tonight.
But that is not the way it happened, and I’m still not sure of how to live with that.

Biting Through Meat

October 5, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 11 Comments

The sound that is made when you are biting through your own flesh is a little like that of thick rubber being torn. It’s wetter, and when you hear it inside your head, it’s kind of terrifying.
I bit a hole about the size of a dime deep into the top of my tongue, near the centre, the other day. I don’t know how the hell I managed to do it. I was eating some soon-dae (potato noodles spiced and stuffed into pig intestines, with boiled, sliced organ meat on the side – tastier than it sounds) when suddenly the molars on the right side of my mouth met a bit more resistance, there was that odd sound, loud enough that my wife beside me started and stared, and the hot, salty flood started. No pain, not right away.
I went to the bathroom and let a mouthful of blood pour out — a real Wes Craven moment, which made me once again wish we could afford that digital camera I want — and had a look. Great meaty flap, deep hole, reddish-black blood gushing out. Cool.
I hate doctors, so I applied ice and didn’t eat for a few days. The nub of flesh that pokes up out of the scar and the crater beneath it will be with me for life, I suspect. This is, in its way, good.
The sound that the small bones in your foot make when they break are not so much a crunch as a crack, startlingly loud. About 3 months back, I drove the corner of a doorjamb between my third and fourth toes on my left foot as I walked calmly into the bedroom to get the ironing board. Broke both toes, and a couple of bones in my foot as well, judging by feel. I did the ‘apply pressure/apply ice/elevate above your heart’ routine to minimize swelling, and bound the toes together.
I hate doctors, so I self-medicated, went back to work the next day, and limped around for the next 6 weeks or so while my foot slowly changed colour. I don’t think some of the bones set properly, and the area is still a little tender if I poke or prod it the wrong way. This is, in its way, a valuable reminder to watch where the hell I’m walking.
I’m not sure precisely what led me to my wholehearted loathing of the medical profession, although I do have a few ideas as to the antecedents.
My hometown, an island of a couple of thousand brave and drunken souls isolated in a sea of trees way up in the part of British Columbia where the map merely notes ‘Here Be Monsters,’ was served by an odd, sullen, ragtag crew of medical practitioners over the years I grew up there. Most were South African, and were bound by contract to be there in order to get their residency in Canada. How much our town benefitted from the Immigration Department requirements that doctors migrating to Canada spend their first few years dealing with family violence and alcohol-related injury in the Boonies was debatable, perhaps. Still, they were a novelty, with their funny accents and poorly disguised, simmering resentment.
I particularly remember one Vietnamese doctor who was, in fact, one of my favorites (and a rarity in a town where there was precisely one Asian family – the Chinese folks who ran two of the half-dozen restaurants), and who, thanks to his redneck comedy gold inability to pronounce /r/ and /l/ according to my expectations, precipitated one of the funniest conversations in which I have retrospectively been involved when he handed the 10-year-old me a plastic cup and a small wooden ice-cream spoon and asked for what I swore was a ‘stew’ sample.
One of the various medical mistakes, blunders, and life-threatening f–kups (back before the first thing I did upon injuring myself was Google up some advice) that I was either the victim of or a witness to was, for example, my bottomless prescription for tetracycline (a broad-spectrum antibiotic) as a teenager, intended to combat the Aetna-shaming eruptions that my face and body produced. Not on-and-off, but on, for years, nonstop. My body, strong as it is, is still paying the price for that. And this was in the early 80’s – not before medical thought had come around to understanding that continual massive doses of antibiotics might just have a deleterious effect on the patient overall.
My step-father, who pulled Dad Duty from not long after my father died until about 20 years later, died, I am certain, as a direct result of the interactions in the cocktail of drugs prescribed by his doctors — by this time another ragtag gaggle of Africans, mostly — but not after going quite mad beforehand. Or if not bibbledy-bibbledy mad, so far sunk into full blown paranoid delusions that it was painful to carry on a conversation with him on anything but the most trivial matters.
My current step-father, ‘Ol’ Number 3,’ a tough, boozy, no-bullsh-t ex-cowboy, experienced runaway heart fibrillations and tremors and pitty-patting for more than four months this year, to the extent that any kind of physical labor would sometimes make him lose consciousness. This was deeply embarrassing to him, and made life extremely difficult for him and my mother. He visited the docs over and over again, several times a week, a situation made more difficult by the 140 km of unpaved road between the fishing lodge where my folks live and the nearest town. Bamboozled, they merely scratched their heads in confusion, and ordered more tests. Finally, after months of this, unable to take it any longer, he just stopped taking his meds (including the new ones the doctors had prescribed), and the problem simply went away.
(There are more stories, and I’m sure you have a few too. C’mon – share!)
To hell with doctors. They can keep their pills and their guesswork. Unless I need a limb sewn back on, I’ll be taking care of myself. This attitude draws great chagrin from the wife, who is a big believer in the power of The Doctor, like most Koreans I’ve known, who tend to run in panic to the nearest doctor (and Korean doctors are a worry in and of themselves, let me tell you) if something flies out of their noses when they sneeze.
I tell her that whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. I’m certain, as she shakes her head in annoyed bemusement, that in her mind she replaces ‘stronger’ with ‘stupider.’
I can live with that.

A New House and A Walk In The Woods

September 23, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 8 Comments

I learned an important lesson about living in Korea today, and I learned it at the point of a gun, which may just make it stick for a while, for a change.
Most people who come to Korea to teach, whether at a hakwon (the catch-all term for the private-study schools that can be found literally 10 to a city block, catering to the monomania not for quality but quantity of education here in Korea, many of which specialize in English and employ most of the short-termers in Korea), or a university or foreign school, or in-house at a company, or somewhere else entirely… most of them are provided with housing.
This is, few actually realize, mandated by the legislation controlling E-2 (English Teacher) visas. Which is not to say that this legislation is universally obeyed (‘rule of law’ not being a concept that has caught on to any great extent in Korea thus far), of course, but it goes some way to explaining why the feared-and-loathed, almost invariably dishonest and money-grubbing hakwon owners actually do something that does not financially reward them in any tangible way. That is, provide housing for their English Monkeys.
There are some decent private schools around, and a fair number of goodish universities, at least in terms of working conditions, and they do occasionally provide their foreign employees with reasonable accommodation. Some very few go one better, and provide housing that is very comfortable indeed. This is the exception, rather than the rule, naturally.
Back when I was a bachelor in the mighty metropolis of Busan†, I lived for nearly two years — although I was working for one of the better schools — in a 3 metre by 4 metre closet in which there was room for a bed, desk, fridge, (and a few dozen empty bottles, of course), located right beside a textile factory. By right beside, I mean that my one window looked directly into a window on the factory floor, about 18 inches away. Right beside.
[†I liked it better when Busan was romanized as Pusan, and pronounced Poosan by foreigners, ‘san’ being the Chinese character meaning ‘mountain’, and I could thus refer to the city as ‘Poo Mountain’ and actually be able to explain why without being quite as longwinded as I am right now. ‘Boo Mountain’ just doesn’t have the same sophomoric poop-humour ring to it.]
The chatter of hundreds of sewing machines didn’t actually bother me much, as I was too regularly and fully inebriated at that point in my life to care, and rarely at ‘home’ other than to sleep, anyway. Life was good, in a dissipated and decadent, perpetually-sozzled sort of way. It was the last gasp of a bachelorhood that was becoming less amusing, rapidly.
The last couple of years, though, have seen my wife (who I met as I was leaving behind that rocket-fueled lifestyle) in the lap of relative luxury, in Australia, and after our return to Korea, in the two large, brand-new apartments which were provided by the university where I worked until recently.
The other reason for schools to offer accommodation when you take a job with them — the one that people usually assume to be the primary one — is that it is effectively impossible to find your own, as a non-Korean. This is in part a manifestation of the blithe racism that informs much of mercantile Korea’s dealings with us hairy barbarians, and in part a reasonable response to the infamous behaviour exhibited by most GIs and many young, inebriate, wacked-out English teachers (of which I was once one, with a vengeance). Stereotypes exist for a reason, after all. Not what you’d call most-favoured tenant types, most non-executive expats in Korea. If you’re married to a Korean, yes, but alone : nuh-uh, unless you want to rent a room in one of the ubiquitous yogwan f–k-hotels on a monthly basis, which many single guys do.
I’ve known some of them, guys who were capable of ignoring the nasty omnipresent fug of stale semen and cut-rate detergent, the dim green and pink lighting (creating that ambience of a festive abbatoir that just screams romance) and the weekend puddles of pinkish kimchi vomit in the hallway, the drunken screams and shouts from 11 pm to perhaps 3 or 4 am each and every night from the short-timers. Better than we deserve, though, I’m sure.
So when my contract wasn’t up for renewal (for reasons that boiled down to my lack of over-demonstrative lovin’ for the baby jesus™, basically) last month, it was a particularly stressful time, as I was forced not only to look for other work, which would then allow me to get a visa, but to do so before the beginning of September, in order for us to actually have somewhere to live (and put our worryingly large collection of furniture).
The right job didn’t materialize, and in between our chicken-little panic-stricken thoughts of bailing to Canada, or Mexico, or Thailand, or anywhere, really, we decided the cheapest and wisest option was just for me to do a visa run to Japan (Canadians get 6 month tourist visas here, on entry) and come back, and to rent our own house. That sounds blindingly obvious to the good people out there in Normal, Illinois, I know, but being locked into the mindset of job=visa=house, it really hadn’t occurred to us. Plus, I was kind of keen on hitting the beach somewhere, somewhere other than Korea. She Who Must Be Obeyed had predictable thoughts on that idea, unfortunately, and the plan was dismissed out of hand.
So we wandered hither and thither and even over yon a bit, looking for places to live, even as I was going to first and second interviews with likely employers and finding them all wanting, in one aspect or another. Seoul, for those of you who might wonder, is not small. Hither is about 3 hours from yon, and thither is another couple of hours beyond that.
Anyone who’s been reading the ‘bottle for any length of time knows how much I loathed the industrial nightmare of an area where we used to live, nuts deep in garbage and banana-peel-slipping-around on the constellations of comedy throat oysters horked up by the denizens of Gunpo City, south of Seoul, near Suwon. It was true that most of the other places around the city and its skirts that we looked were somewhat nicer, but mostly only in degree. Unpleasant, of course, but less so. Not precisely enticing, particularly when I had been thinking along the lines of Koh Samui or Whistler or Zihuatanejo.
Until we found the area we’re living now. I’m telling you, angels descended and blew their tinny trumpets in my ears (not unlike the appearance of the choir invisible when I first used an electronic bumrocket bidet machine in Japan on my subsequent visa run) when we started looking around here. It is the first place — anywhere in Korea — that I’ve seen that shows evidence of actual urban planning, where things are built on an almost-human scale, neither crowded together like barnacles nor consisting of massive slabs of concrete looming over massive courtyards of concrete, brutalist Pyongyang penile-surrogate stylee. No, this area was clearly designed for cyclists and walkers as well as cars, and isn’t outright antagonistic to its residents, unlike most other places in Seoul I’ve been.
Seoul is a city (like every other urban environment in Korea) that hates its residents.
I could tell this suburb was different, though, as soon as we’d walked around a bit. About as far to the west of downtown as we were to the south in Gunpo, I saw the full bike-racks beside the subway station (something I’d never seen before in Korea, as there are few cyclists in most places, it being simply too dangerous and heavily trafficked to bother) and tree-lined paths winding through each block, expressly for pedestrians. Trees everywhere, in fact, not just on top of the fortunate stubs of mountains that hadn’t yet been leveled to feed into grinders and rise again as the vast human beehives where 70% of the population of the country live. Wide, straight roads. And, astonishingly, people who didn’t perform the ‘oh-my-god-he’s-not-Korean‘ doubletake that had left me so unwilling to dare set foot outside our apartment for the last couple of years.
Even my wife, who’s spent almost her entire 31 years in Korea, said she didn’t know there were places like this here.
So we found an apartment, in one of the newer style buildings that have started springing up all over Korea, geared to singles and young couples, called ‘Officetels’ in Konglish. Basically — and completely unlike the standard, cookie-cutter ‘apart’ concrete beehive family apartment buildings that rise everywhere out the earth like buboes on a plague victim — they’re like western-style apartment buildings, down to the gardens on the roof, the hot-water-on-demand, and the emphasis on sky-light, and air, and brightly lit cleanliness.
We found a small loft, with west-facing 4 metre windows taking up one entire wall, and rather than sucking car-exhaust from the perpetually-roaring highway that was behind our first apartment, or looking straight into the baby-factory slum windows over which our second apartment had a glorious low-rise, low-rent panorama, I can watch the sun go down out over towards the West Sea. I honestly never thought we’d live in such a lovely place, here in Korea. I hadn’t thought they existed, except for the rich in downtown Seoul, and on TV. We gave our huge fridge and washing machine to the wife’s bachelor brother, and left some furniture in the apartment for the new (cheaper and more malleable, more bible-thumping) university hire to use (rather than just chuck it all), and moved on up. To the top. To a deluxe apartment. In the sky-eye-eye.
It’s no Sydney, or Vancouver — hell it’s not even Toronto — but it’s pretty nice.
One of the only good points of our previous university-supplied place, other than the fact that we were first to live there and thus didn’t need to deal with filth, was the proximity of a small mountain ridge, up and along which we (and thousands of others, it seemed) could walk, escaping the apocalyptic vision, if not the all-pervasive noise, of the concrete wasteland that is Gunpo. That was pleasant, and walking there in unaccustomed green along the trail that wound its way a few kilometres along the ridge was enough to recharge my batteries, at least when there weren’t too many shrieking, pudgy children up there too, dragged away from their computers and compelled to exercise by their parents.
The new area, Songnae, has a few wooded mini-mountains within walking distance as well, and I resolved today, after failing to find my way through a military base to a likely trail at another nearby mountain to the west, last week, to attempt to find my way up the even closer megahillock to the south. The wife begged off, and I headed out, with my usual lack of preparation. I crossed the subway tracks – on the surface, this far from downtown – and wandered around for a good hour before I found a trail that led upwards.
The weather has been flawless for a good week after a miserable summer – unsmoggy blue skies, dotted with fluffy cumuli, hot sun cool shade. It was gorgeous today; the sun spattered through the leaves as the wide trail wound its way up to higher heights, at a much steeper grade than our old daily walk in Gunpo. I got past the thundering-heart first ten minutes, and fell into the euphoric groove that exercise almost always brings, when I’m out in nature, senses heightened, brain clear. There were only a couple of people around, trudging down as I headed up. Past small plots of vegetables the trail rose, and soon became almost alpine, studded with those massive, rounded rocks protruding from that tightly-packed, cafe latte-coloured dirt that always make me think of Korea and Japan. The perfume of pines baking in sunlight. I was happier than I have been in a while, and it was good.
I reached the first summit, and there were a number of smaller trails heading off from the glade atop the ridge, wandering off to various points of the compass. Thinking one might lead to a vantage point unscreened by greenery, where I could get a good look at the geography of our new home, I struck out along one of the paths, towards the sinking sun. I realize now that that military base I’d been unable to find my way around last week was to the west, too. You know, the direction I was walking.
After about 5 minutes of blissed-out traipsing along the trail, all Homer-in-Chocolate-Land, and before I quite knew what was happening, there were shouts in Korean, and as I abruptly came back to earth, I noticed in quick succession that: the clearing ahead of me had a tall chicken- and barbed-wire fence along it, that there various dishes and antennae and stuff behind that, and that the half dozen camo-clad Korean men approaching at a trot were all carrying weapons that I could only presume were automatic.
My crappy command of Korean being what it is, I had no idea what they were saying, but from their tone I could infer that they weren’t asking me in for a cup of tea. They were young, of course — just the age of many of my university students, and no doubt doing their two years of compulsory military service and quite happy to have pulled light duty sitting on top of a mountain somewhere. Nonetheless, their excitement coupled with their tendency to gesticulate with their guns was making me a wee bit nervous, I have to admit. In response to what I thought was an inquiry as to precisely what the f–k I was doing, I shrugged, and made the two-fingers-walking gesture, which in conjunction with a goofy grin and vacant swinging of the head, as if communing with butterflies, was what I hope was the universal sign-language for ‘just, you know, wandering around, being a nature-boy doofus’.
They peppered me with more questions in Korean, none of which I understood sufficiently to make any attempt at answering, in sign-language or otherwise, and eventually the eldest, who couldn’t have been more than 25 or so, said “OK” quite clearly, waved the back of his hand in the general direction of the trail along which I’d been walking, and said something in Korean which, near as I could tell translated roughly to “Get the f–k outta here, and you’re lucky we don’t arrest your ass. Sir.”
I got the f–k out, and continued my walk, no worse for wear, up into the almost-alpine and the green, blue and white, being extra-careful to stick to the main trail.
And so, my lesson for the day, one that all Koreans seem to learn at some point: stray from the well-trodden path at your own peril, smart boy. A lesson that came complete with a moderately-sized brown spot in my boxers, for punctuation.

Japan Rocks Part Two

September 14, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 24 Comments

Part One can be found here.
Back to the capsule hotel I went, almost skipping with glee. I dropped my shoes in a locker this time, dropped the locker key at the front desk, retrieved my wristband key from one of the desk clerks, and rode the Super Fun Luxury Lift to the 6th floor. I figured I’d drink a couple of Asahis, then go exploring.
Back at the room, I closed the accordion door, climbed the metal ladder into my top-bunk capsule, leaned back, switched on the TV that protruded organically from the plastic wall of my coffin, cracked a can, took a deep and almost orgasmically satisfying pull of my long-anticipated Asahi, set it down on the little extruded-plastic shelf to my right, grinned and sighed.
Pushing a little metal chicklet set into the airliner-like control panel cycled me through the TV channels on my 7-inch monitor. There were a couple of scrambled stations in the line-up, tantalizing, flickering shards of heaving pink and purple meat, the audio tracks for which were subdued sighs, gutteral man-grunts, and the occasional squelch. Either the Abbatoir Channel, or The Legendary Japanese Porn, apparently. The girl at the front desk hadn’t been taught how to say ‘You want porn with that?’ in English, I guess. I was briefly disappointed, but I figured drinking and smoking were vices enough for a short 12 hours in-country. No big deal, and although I can’t say that I wasn’t curious, I also wasn’t curious enough to go down to the desk and ask, possibly in pantomime, please may I have some porno?
I spent the first beer fiddling with switches (something from which it is apparently in my genetic code to derive great pleasure), channel-surfing, adjusting the air-con nozzle just-so, and the second beer watching some kind of top-20 countdown of neat shops and restaurants in (I believe) Tokyo.
It was time to explore a bit, I reckoned. Also, I had to take a crap. You know how that is.
There were a few more guys around, sitting in front of the pedestal ashtrays in the smoking lounge near the elevators and getting drinks from the vending machines, than there had been before, and they were all wearing identical pajamas. Ding! A light went on, and I suddenly realized what that pile of cloth had been, the one I’d dumped on the tiny desk in the room in my rush to climb up into the capsule and play around. I went back to my cubicle, stripped down to my boxers, and put on the 3/4 length jammy bottoms and v-neck top. They actually fit pretty well, which surprised the hell out of me. I am not a small man, and I’ve been lifting weights again for the last couple of months.
Suitably attired, and feeling like a million bucks, I made my way back to the toilets. You could have eaten off them. No, seriously. If there’s anything I like better than a cold beer, it’s a clean bathroom. I blame my mother for this minor quirk. She’s a very clean lady.
Attached to the side of the porcelain pot was one of those electronic bidet machines that are getting so popular in Korea, but that everyone (or possibly just me, I don’t know) associates with weird Japanese poophole fetishism. I’d never used one, although I’d tried the low-tech variety of bidet in Europe when I was travelling there, with, shall we say, mixed results, usually involving too-cold water and Extreme Scrotum Tightening. (“Next up on ESPN : EXtreme Scrotum Tightening! Brought to you by Asahi Beer!”)

I was feeling adventurous, and mildly euphoric from the first couple of Very Large Cans. After nature had taken its course, I centred myself, as it were, chose a button at random, and pressed it.
Wahhhh-ahhhhh! The angelic choir descended, I’m telling you. The portal to a new world opened briefly, as water warmed to a perfectly refreshing temperature cascaded and burbled playfully around my grateful sphincter. It was pure bliss, for about 20 seconds.
Aware that it would sound a bit strange (and that I might be arrested) if I were to just sit there and hit that button over and over again for the next several hours, like the wirehead monkey hitting the button for the electrical jolt to his pleasure centre, oblivious to the world, I reluctantly patted dry and padded out, casting wistful glances back at the stall. Maybe I’d need to do a #2 again later. Maybe. Hopefully.
Walking with a new spring in my step, I hopped on the elevator, and rode up to the 11th floor. As expected, the shower facilities were well-stocked with towels and lotions and unguents of all sorts, spotlessly clean, and brightly lit, in a welcoming, warmly incandescent kind of way. Not only that, but there was a sauna, all marble pools and steam and cascading water, which I vowed to try in the morning, if I had time.

The restaurant on the floor below was similarly excellent in appearance, with a bar and a menu card chock-a-block with enticing-looking dishes.
I had an appointment with 6 more rapidly warming cans of beer, though, and beer trumps food, always. Besides, the shouted greetings from the employees anytime someone came in the door, as in Korea, put me off.
Back in my capsule, butthole absolutely singing, I cracked another can, and switched the TV on. It was about almost 9pm by this point, and although I had to get up in less than 9 hours, get on a flight back to Seoul and convince immigration that they should let me in again with no visible means of support, I was feeling frisky, if not frisky enough to do anything but drink in bed.
That’s when Japan suddenly became the Greatest Country In The World, a status for which, in my mind at least, it had already been building a good case for candidacy.
There was a show on for about an hour that involved really goofy costumes, senseless violence, public humilation, sumo wrestlers, fat guys dressed like sumos wearing Elvis wigs and riding motorcycles in quarries, more random violence, and it was the funniest.thing.evar. No, really. Dumber than dumb, but beautifully so, if you know what I mean. One segment involved one of the fat shameless guys wearing a radio earpiece and acting out the instructions of his controllers in front of a department store, which would be less funny and more of The Usual TV Crap if the people watching weren’t Japanese. That somehow made it comedy gold for me, as did the fact that half the time you almost couldn’t see the poor guy through the crowds of onlookers, every single one of whom was pointing their mobile phone camera at him, snapping digital pics like no tomorrow. I laughed until tears came, and that doesn’t happen often, dour bastard that I usually am.
But for all the fun inherent in that program, the moment of truth came afterwards. This is primetime Saturday night, keep in mind. The show, which lasted two hours or more (things got a bit fuzzy there towards the end), was called The Poetry Bout.
It was a tournament, with the loser of each two-person bout knocked out and progressing to the next round, of Poetry Reading. Poetry! On a Saturday night! On TV, with flawless high production values, in front of a rapt and appreciative live crowd! With (what I presume were) celebrity judges and just-plain-folks, singly and in groups, in bars and homes, butchershops and schools and street-food places all over the country, via live video, giving their own commentary and votes for the winners of each round. The contestants were anywhere in age from middleschool to retiree, male and female, some eliciting laughter, some tears, some a kind of liquid silence, all clearly in love with language.
It was riveting. I didn’t understand a goddamned word, but I was glued to the set, rooting for my favorites, for a couple of hours and several more of those Very Large Beers. As the winners of the preliminary rounds went on to challenge winners of other heats, I began to become familiar with their style, and was surprised for example when a happy funster would change strategy, and pull a change-up with a poem all serious and heartfelt, instead. This, the beer was telling me, was the way poetry was meant to be appreciated – not on the page, all dismembered and nullified with dead-soul dissection, but as music, incomprehensible, glorious music, in front of a crowd that laughs and cries and farts along with the poet.
And, you know (apologies in advance to Dan, if you read this), I f–king hate poetry sometimes, unless it’s being subverted by someone like Buk. This is how much I liked this show.
The final round, although some of the oldsters and art college types had put in a good showing, was between a teenage boy and a teenage girl. She, I think, for no real reason that I can tell, was the better poet, but he frequently made his listeners both laugh and shed a tear in a single poem, and, although shy and involuted, was clearly their favorite.
When it was over, I had to go out to the lounge and smoke a cigarette, and think about what I’d seen. It seemed to me if as I’d seen something about Japan, no doubt glamourized and stage-managed and cheapened in the way that television does, but something that I had not expected. I couldn’t imagine the same thing happening, or being watched, in Korea, where the fake, the maudlin and the sentimental trump the real as a matter of policy, and though that’s what Canada may be like in my distant, half-fantasy memories of the place, I know for truth that the latest tits-and-explosions import from America is more likely to be greeted with enthusiasm there.
This wasn’t a niche show, for intellectuals and fruitbats – there were people from all walks of life watching this thing, cheering and high-fiving, of all ages, and it didn’t look like they were doing it to the insistent flashing of APPLAUSE prompters, either.
I stayed up, smoking in the lounge and finishing my last couple of beers, and thought about it a bit, and decided that I would have to write about it, start writing yet again, because, damn it, I realized that I wanted to be one of those poets too, up in that ring, and I wanted to try and make people laugh and cry with my words.
And so here I am, back in the saddle. I hope you like my poem.

Japan Rocks Part One

September 12, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 32 Comments

Japan rocks.
No, really. I have a few friends, virtual and otherwise, over there, and they are quick to jump up the ass of anyone who’s drunk the kool-aid and open their umbrellas. You know the type of travel-fanboys I mean, and my friends love to hate – men, mostly, who go to or end up in Japan to find something that they’re missing for some reason, something they can’t find wherever they are. These guys tend to fall in love – with the mythos, with a woman, with the culture, with the history, ex post facto or otherwise – and either sooner or later begin to buy into the casual Japanese certitude that the Japanese are just better than you. Better, stronger, faster, with tentacle and dismemberment porn that makes the next best tentacle and dimemberment porn offerings look like Curious George Goes To The Hospital. These fellows tend, in time, to become those annoyingly smug expats-in-Asia who are determined to overlook anything unpleasant in their adopted home, to blame the outsider, to spout platitudes that regardless of their high-minded elegance come down to ‘it’s not better or worse, it’s merely different.’ You know – the kinds of guys you want to bust in the f–king chops half the time, if only because they speak the language better than you do.
So, anyway, these friends of mine who’ve been in Japan for many years, they tend to have little patience for the kind of rah! rah! Japanophilia that I’m about to display, and for that I am profoundly sorry. All I can say is that I only spent somewhat more than 12 hours there, and the bulk of that was while I was slightly inebriated, so how much of the bad stuff could I reasonably have seen? I haven’t drunk the kool-aid, but I did drink the beer.
After getting rectally roto-rootered by my last employer and not finding another reasonable job before the contract term expired, I had to make a visa run and come back on a tourist visa, and the cheapest flight I could get was to Fukuoka. Sitting at the superb, gleaming new Incheon international airport, I noticed a flyer from Onse Telecom that said that wireless broadband was available in many of the departure gates, and if you didn’t have a laptop to take advantage of it, you could just come over to the desk and they’d give you one, for free.
This I promptly did, handing over my passport and getting a snazzy Samsung laptop in return. Good deal. I went back downstairs to the Burger King beside Gate 30, bought my first greaseburger in a few months, fired up the computer, and went surfing. I tried searching a bit for some hotels,but quickly got bored and just figured it would be groovier to do my usual trick from back in my backpacker days : show up with no pre-planning whatsoever, and see where the fates and random quantum flux took me. Instead of being prudent, I spent the next while posting snarky comments at Metafilter, until boarding time. It was about 4:30 pm, and my return flight was for 9 am the following morning.
A bumpy 90 minutes or so later, through red-lit thunderheads and millefeuille nimbostratus, across gut-levitating canyons of air – my favorite part of flying, those landscapes of cloud – we were glidepathing down into clean, green Fukuoka. It was overcast there, too, and more than 30 degrees, but I was pleased as I stepped out of the plane to find the air free of that horrendous fug to which one grudgingly becomes accustomed in Seoul.
I made my way through customs – the guy finding it odd that I only had an overnight bag, and amused when he found my two cup ramyeon packages inside – and straight to the hotel booking desk. Everyone on the various fora I’d checked before I’d left had said that the women who staffed that desk spoke excellent English, and were invariably helpful.
The girl there spoke English alright, but, in that annoyingly reticent way in which the Japanese break bad news, informed me that there wasn’t a single goddamn room left in the whole city.
Ah, sh-t.
She gave me a list to try and call myself, and after a few unsuccessful attempts punctuated by those pregnant silences that I was already starting to figure out were the Japanese equivalent of ‘sorry, buddy, you’re screwed,’ I figured I’d just have to wing it.
The shuttle bus to the domestic terminal, the subway two stops to Hakata, the centre of the action in Fukuoka.
By this time I was feeling a bit gritty-eye tired, sweaty, grumpy and increasingly sure that I was going to end up sleeping in a seat at the airport and looking like a rumpled rummy when I tried to get back into Korea the next morning. I’d done worse, years back when I had the youthful energy for travel hijinks of that sort, but these days I’m more into the Good Sleep than the Amusing Anecdote.
So I started walking around Hakata Station. The first five hotels I dragged my ass into knew what I was going to ask before I asked, and were already shaking their heads, politely, by the time I’d gotten to the desk and asked it. The two guys behind the desk at the sixth actually chuckled a bit at my stupidity – by this time I was drenched, both in sweat and by the steady rain that had started to fall, red-faced and getting extremely grumpy indeed – and I was about ready to give up and try the 5-Star (and probably more expensive than my plane ticket) Hotel Nikko.
I went into the 7-11 on the corner, bought a pack of cigarettes, and had my first sober smoke in more than three years. That helped.
As I did so, I noticed that the place across the sidestreet from me was a lobby of some sort – Hotel Cabinas Fukuoka, it said! ‘Cabinas? Capsule hotel? Yes! I’ve been wanting to stay in one of those since I first heard about them!’ thought I. I looked around for about 5 minutes trying to find somewhere to get rid of the cigarette butt – the streets were clean, and I was damned if I was going to mess them up by doing anything worse than dripping sweat on them – and then shuffled, chafing and praying, into the lobby.
One of the girls at the desk took one look as I stumbled into the lobby and – politely, mind you – said ‘Shoes…shoes please!’

Great. My first faux pas already. You were supposed to take your shoes off at the front door, before you even got into the lobby! That would have made more sense in Korea, where horking up throat oysters on the street is an Olympic-level sport, and wearing your mucous-encrusted shoes inside would definitely be unhygienic…but fair enough. I backed up to the door, quickly, mumbling ‘sorry, sorry’ while the couple of Japanese guys in pajamas in the lobby eyed me suspiciously for a moment or two, then went back to their newspapers.
I took off my shoes, came back to the desk. “Do you have any…umm…spaces?”
I almost kissed her when she said “Of course!” and pulled out a laminated menu showing two kinds of capsules – one in a little room of its own, and one set into a locker-like bank of them, 2 high. Even the ‘deluxe’ was well under the price I had expected to pay for lodging, and I immediately and gratefully pointed to the bigger one. It was 4300 yen – about $50 for the night, Canadian. Woohoo! There’s some beer money, right there, thought I.

She took my details and my cash, showed me the locker room off to the side of the check-in desk where I could put my shoes, gave me a plastic wristband with a key attached, told me about the sauna and showers on the 11th floor and the restaurant on the 10th, and wished me a pleasant stay, all in accented but excellent English. She was prettier than heck, too. Things were looking up.
This place, I neglected to mention, was nicer than most $200 a night places I’ve seen in Korea. Brightly lit, impeccably, spotlessly, surgically, clean, brand new. I’m a sucker for luxury – even faux luxury, to be honest – and although this was to all intents and purposes budget accommodation, cheaper than anywhere else I’d heard of in that city, it was nice. Really, really nice.
I took the elevator to the 6th floor, and through a set of glass doors was a set of corridors lined with capsule-rooms. Each one was a tiny hotel room, basically, with a folding, accordian door panel. Inside were a desk, built into a closet unit, and a capsule unit either in the top or the bottom. Mine was set into the top.

The capsule itself was a single piece, injection-molded plastic coffin, with a video screen, alarm clock and radio, aircon control, speakers behind either ear, and amidst a profusion of knobs and switches, a large red button labelled in Japanese only, that I thought of as the ‘ejection button,’ and was sorely tempted to press, later that evening.
I pulled shut the accordion door, doffed my sweat-soaked business shirt and tie – I always fly with a tie, and find it helps to smooth my way through immigration – pulled on my old friend’s band (‘MARY’) t-shirt, and went on the hunt for beer. Nobody even looked at me. No stares, no ‘Oh my god – it’s a foreign devil’ in the local lingo, no double takes or furtive muttering and pointing. None of the stuff, in other words, that I live with every time I leave the house in Korea.
I walked around for a bit, and marvelled at the cleanliness and order of the area. This was beside the biggest station in the city, bus and subway, the sort of area you’d expect to be heavy with The Scuzz, but it was downright pretty, by night at least. I imagined living there, and somehow managed to do so, as I often do, without concurrently entertaining any discouraging notions of work or budgetary constraints or anything of the kind. In my ‘let’s imagine that I live here’ games that I unfailingly engage in whenever I happen onto somewhere nice, reality rarely intrudes.
Back to the station I wandered, after that short look around, and although none of the 7-11ish convenience stores had had any beer to sell, to my transient chagrin, and there were none of the vending machines I’d heard so much about, there was a little hole-in-wall place that had a cooler full of beer, that I somehow navigated to flawlessly once I’d booted up the beer-radar, as if I’d been following the map to the Pirate Treasure. Big black gothic-font beery ‘X’.
I am inordinately fond of Japanese beer, especially Asahi. I’d been all a-drool all day thinking about it, after endless months of choking down the Korean swill that passes for lager there. I bought Eight Very Large Cans, just to be sure. Better to have too much than too little is my thinking when it comes to such things. The girl behind the counter didn’t even bat an eye. I was beginning to love Japan by this point, with a love deep and true.
As I left the station, there was a band busking outside the entrance. It is possible that my recent successes in securing lodging and sweet sweet beverages was rosying up my outlook a bit, but i swear they were the best band I’d heard in years. This judgement may also have been due in no small part to the fact that they were also the first band I’d heard in years. (There are no buskers in Korea, good, bad or otherwise. Beggars, yeah, who somehow can afford mobile freaking karaoke machines into which they wail their maudlin songs, lying prone on the ground, wrapped in black rubber, presumably entreating passers-by to give them some money so they’ll shut the f–k up. Never mind, I’m getting sidetracked…) A friend was passing out flyers, and they were called Chaba, and their website is here. After a couple of songs, a couple of cops came up and good-naturedly shut them down, and though I was tempted to follow them and listen some more, I had a whole bunch of cold beer gently sweating in a plastic bag, and I was thirstier than hell, and had to be on an airplane in approximately 13 hours.
Part Two, in which I wear pajamas, drink beer and listen to Prime Time Poetry in a language I don’t speak, and love it, is here.

What do you do?

June 3, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 8 Comments

You ended up working for people you hated, and you found the massive inflow of cash thrilling but completely unrewarding. You felt like you had pissed away years of your life building some inconsequential piece of software that would never see the light of day anyway. You felt an urge to actually do things for people, to do something that might leave a mark of some kind on someone. On anyone. Something that felt real, or at least realer than the corporate office-politics circle jerk that had turned your sense of work as play into a daily grind as your friends quit, or were made redundant, or just gave up and waited for the foundering ship to finally sink. Endurance counts the most, Bukowski always said, but you were just too damn tired of spinning your wheels 80 hours a week, and getting shunted to the sidelines by incompetent technocrats who felt threatened by you. So you left your freakishly high-paying job, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. People thought you had taken leave of your senses.
And you went back to a place you had publicly reviled, a place you’d spent hours (days? weeks? months?) complaining about, a place in which the swarming multitude of infuriating details that assaulted your senses on a daily basis had driven you to drink for all the wrong reasons, a place where in weaker moments you felt sure that you’d had some of the life drained out of you, unrecoverable, into the smoggy night. But to a job teaching again, chasing the noble dream again, at a university, poorly-paid, yes, but where you could make a difference, you thought, where you might see in the eyes of your students that your labours were appreciated, that you would, at least by a few, be remembered. Where much of your time would be your own, and you could stretch out, grow your mind, cultivate your soul.
Dreamer. Pretty soon, predictably, you grew weary of that, too, and wondered what the hell would ever make you content.
And now, there’s an offer on the table to go back, reverse the clock, and join the racing rats once again. You’re sorely tempted, and you are annoyed with yourself for being so easily led. And afraid that if you don’t grab the ring again, don’t say yes each and every time to the possibilities life offers you, that life will stop offering you those chances, fold closed the kimono, and it will all be over.
And you realize, in your confusion and doubt, that all you really want is to go back to that bamboo hut – the one in Fiji, or the one on Flores, or the one on the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo, or the one you have kept in your mind like a mantra manifested since you first hurled yourself out on the road – the one on the new-moon arc of powdery sand, beneath the coconut palms, the one you’ve dreamed about over and over again. You can almost picture yourself sitting there again, deeply tanned, drinking a beer, the good hot smell of your own baked-off sweat, the dried-seawater tautness of your skin, natty dread, nothing going through your mind other than the colour blue, a deep and throbbing hum, and a set of gentle animal hungers. In the moment.
And then the phone rings.

Hangul Part One

May 11, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 14 Comments

This is the action-packed Part One of my long-promised review of Hangul, the Korean writing system. Even with the liberal lashings of foul language and obscene anecdotes, it may bore the tits off you – if so, feel free to either skip it entirely or send me the bill for the mammary reattachment procedure. (It will help to have Asian fonts installed, as explained here, but is not essential. My next post in the series will require them, though…)
Chinese writing in its various historical manifestations has been known and used in Korea for more than 2 millennia, dating back to the time of the Chinese occupation of northern Korea from 108 BC to 313 AD. By the 5th century CE, the Koreans were starting to write in Classical Chinese – the earliest known example of this dates from 414 CE, and by the 7th century, educated Koreans were speaking Korean and writing in Chinese. Later, three different systems for writing Korean with Chinese characters were created and adopted to various degrees : Hyangchal, Gugyeol and Idu.
The Hyangchal (ÃâÂ¥Ã¬Â°Â°) system used Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Korean, and was used mainly to write poetry. (A similar system in use in Japan at about the same time, known as man’yogana, eventually evolved into hiragana, one of the syllabaries used to write modern Japanese. Man’yogana was developed under the supervision of Koreans in the Japanese court.) The Idu(Ã¬ÂÂ´Ã«âÂ) system, created in the 8th century by scholars of the Shilla Dynasty, used a combination of Chinese characters and special symbols to indicate Korean verb endings and other grammatical markers, and was used in official and private documents for centuries thereafter. Gugyeol (ÃªÂµÂ¬ÃªÂ²Â°) was introduced in the 13th century, and was basically a simplification of some Chinese characters in an attempt to remove some ambiguity arising from the use of some Chinese characters for their sounds and others for their meanings.
China has always been the great civilization next door in Asia, a very big brother sometimes benevolent and more often not, the source of cultural borrowings for all of its smaller neighbours, including the Koreans, and for much of Korean history the language used for learned, official purposes in Korea was Chinese, in somewhat the same way as medieval Europeans used Latin.
By the 15th century, though, it was time for Korea to find a way of writing their own language that was more appropriate to its own sounds and grammar. It could be argued that Koreans had limited need to write their language down up to this time and for a some time afterwards, and when they did, it was sufficient to use Chinese writing to spell it out, but Chinese and Korean were and are very different languages. Korean is a subject-object-verb language, for example, and has a rich system of postpositional case markers. Chinese, a subject-verb-object language, does not. Korean has a complicated system of honorifics, part of which is expressed as verb endings. Chinese does not, and doesn’t have any characters to represent these verb-ending morphemes.
The Korean writing system Ãâ¢ÅÃªÂµÂ´ (hangul) was finally created in 1440s, through the patronage of King Sejong, the fourth king of the Choson Dynasty, who ruled from 1418-1450. The new script was easy to learn – a matter of hours in many cases. (Hell, I even developed basic reading skills years ago after a couple of beer-fueled sessions at my favorite bar!) It was elegant, scientific, rooted in philosophy and study of the phonemes of spoken Korean, and is truly a thing of beauty. At the time, it was called ÃâºËÃ«Â¯Â¼Ã¬ â¢ÃªÂ¸Ë(hunmin jeongeum, or ‘proper sounds to instruct the people’). According to King Sejong’s preface to the book in which it first appeared in 1446, the invention of the script was nationalistic in intent, devised to enable the Korean people to write their own language without the use of Chinese characters. He states, in immodest Kingly (but surprisingly egalitarian) fashion :

“Being of foreign origin, Chinese characters are incapable of capturing uniquely Korean meanings. Therefore, many common people have no way to express their thoughts and feelings. Out of my sympathy for their difficulties, I have invented a set of 28 letters. The letters are very easy to learn, and it is my fervent hope that they improve the quality of life of all people.”

possibly starting as a side-effect the long and treasured tradition of Korean men taking credit for the hard work of their underlings.
Even after the invention of the Korean alphabet, though, most Koreans who could write continued to write either in Classical Chinese or in Korean using the Gukyeol or Idu systems – the new script was seen to be the province of people of low status : women, children, and peasants, those who did not receive the necessary years of education required to learn to write Chinese.
Reading and writing weren’t the only political issues with regard to the language at the time, of course – spoken Korean at the time was basically a vernacular, used mostly for more homely means. Chinese was still mainly the language of power, of art, of loftier pursuits. With the similar (and certainly more despised) position of Japanese as the language of power during the brutal occupation of Korea during the first half of the 20th century coming hard on the heels of the collapse of the Choseon Dynasty, the idea that Korean (both written and spoken) should be the common language of all levels of society is still a relatively new one. Ideas like universal literacy and egalitarianism weren’t exactly popular ones in the society of that time (nor were they for the 5 and a half centuries after King Sejong, for that matter).
When Korean was written in the newly devised hangul script, it did still make sense for Chinese loan words, of which there were and are a multitude, to be written in their original Chinese. During the 19th and 20th centuries a mixed writing system combining Chinese characters and Hangul became increasingly popular, and literacy rates rose precipitously (as much as a consequence of changes in society as anything else, of course), until today, when the literacy rate in Korea is amongst the world’s highest. Although it has been fading since 1945 (and was outlawed in North Korea in 1949) the use of Chinese characters still persists today – the front page of many South Korean newpapers today are littered with Chinese characters, although to a lesser degree than they were even 10 years ago.
Stay tuned for Part Two, coming as soon as I bloody well feel like it, which in addition to details about the writing system itself, will include naked pictures and senseless violence! Or not. I haven’t decided yet. Please feel free to point out any factual inaccuracies – I am well aware that there are many folks around with more knowledge of this subject than I could possibly lay claim to.

Deathwatch

April 30, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 18 Comments

I brought this up in a Metafilter thread recently, and was, if not shouted down, at least soundly spanked. While there have been 321 deaths thus far as a result of SARS, the World Health Organization has recently mentioned that there are over 3000 children dying every day from malaria at the moment, in Africa alone.
That’s a lot of dead babies, friends.
I will hasten to note that I do think SARS is a worry, and is not solely a media-homunculus, shoved into the spotlight to terrify and entertain us until the next Big Scary Thing comes along. It is a Big Scary Thing in its own right, and will hopefully be contained before it becomes Captain Trips.
Nonetheless, I thought a few illustrations might help to put things into perspective. If we set SARS Patient Zero have occurred on February 12 of this year, these are the way the numbers look as of April 28 2003, according to the WHO. Each tiny black dot is a human life.

Deaths from SARS, February 12 2003 to present : 321

Let’s have a look at some more happy fun numbers!

Linguistic Relativism and Korean

April 23, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 39 Comments

[Warning : this is long.]
An email exchange with Kevin Marks a few weeks ago got me thinking more about one of the theories of linguistics that I’ve always taken for granted as a given. Only now as I am about to begin graduate level work in the subject am I realizing the degree to which various researchers in the field disagree about it. Of course, as is undoubtedly the case in most academic fields, there is disagreement about pretty much everything.
The following is probably of little interest to those not interested in linguistics (although may be of some small interest to those curious about the Korean language), and may best be skipped entirely. I am, however, keen to hear what people think, if they are interested in this field at all, so rather than keep my response restricted to email, I’ve decided to post it here. I suspect that it doesn’t even answer the question that Kevin put to me, which was ‘I’d like to hear a cogent argument for (the validity of linguistic relativism),’ if I understood it correctly. More of a wee survey for my own interest. Ah, well.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is variously referred to as the ‘Whorfian Hypothesis,’ ‘linguistic relativism,’ and ‘linguistic determinism’ (a description of the strong formulation meant by implication to be a bad thing, I think) concerns the relationship between language and thought, and suggests in its strongest form that the structure of a language determines the way in which speakers of that language perceive and understand the external world. This formulation is generally understood by many to be untenable, but the hypothesis also exists in a weaker form : that language structure and content does not determine a view of the world, but that it shapes thought to some degree, and is therefore a powerful impetus in influencing speakers of a given language to adopt a certain world-view.
A possible opposite claim, from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, is that the thought (and thus culture) of a linguistic group is mirrored in the structure and content of their language, that because they behave and understand things in a certain way, their language reflects those behaviours and understandings – the idea that language is molded, if not determined, by culture.
Two quotes from the linguists whose names are most closely associated with this idea, the first from Edward Sapir (Language, 1929b, p. 207) :

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language that has become the medium of excpression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsiously built up on the language habits of the group…We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.(Sapir, E. Language, 1929b, p. 207)

Benjamin Lee Whorf, who was a student of Sapir, went further than the ‘predisposition’ suggested by his teacher, and proposed that the relationship was a more deterministic one :

the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions that has to be organized by our minds — and this means largely by the linguistic system in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way, an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.
(Whorf, Benjamin, (1956). In J, Carroll (Ed.), Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Whorf does not go so far as to say that language structure totally determines the world-view of a speaker here. He does add, though :

This fact is very significant for modern science, for it means that no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free. The person most nearly free in such respects would be a lingusit familiar with very many widely different linguistic systems. As yet no linguist is any such position. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all obcervers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are simialr, or can in some way be calibrated.

This last is where the argument runs off the rails for me, at least the argument in which I have any interest. It is also the portion of the idea upon which most critics focus, and which was fueled by the Great Eskimo Snow Silliness set off in great part by this :

We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow – whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.
(Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1940. Science and linguistics, Technology Review (MIT) 42, 6 (April))

and which has been discussed at length in many places, including, cogently here, for example.
To most people, particularly those with little knowledge of Hardcore Linguistics, including myself, the weaker form of Sapir-Whorf seems self-evident. Of course the words we use, the words we know, have some influence on the way we think! The very fabric of our cognition is language, it might well be claimed (but of course that would be a claim that would meet great opposition as well). There is, predictably, great argument about what constitutes ‘mentalese,’ the native language of our minds, as it were). Do words determine the shape of our thoughts? Well, it seems equally clear that that’s nonsense, and though it may and can be argued, it must be said most people don’t bother to try.
Steven Pinker, who was the entry point to the brief exchange between Kevin and I a few weeks ago, calls the idea ‘linguistic determinism,’ and argues as most do that the strong version is nonsense. A student of Noam Chomsky, he works from Chomsky’s idea of ‘Cartesian linguistics,’ that the brain has a ‘hard-wired’ built-in language acquisition device with an understanding of ‘universal grammar’, and suggests that language acquisition is an instinct. If we accept that language is an instinct, as Pinker and his mentor Unca Noam argue, it seems as if we must reject the proposition that language shapes thought. Some consequences of this :

Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular wisdom, especially as it has been passed down in the canon of the humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use symbols: a three-year-old … is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs and the other staples of the semiotics curriculum[…]
[…] Once you begin to look at language not as the ineffable essence of human uniqueness but as a biological adaptation to communicate information, it is no longer tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not.
(Pinker, S (1994). The Language Instinct New York: William Morrow and Company Inc.)

In this, Pinker seems to be arguing not only against the idea that culture shapes language, but also the against idea that language shapes culture (by shaping thought). The use of the pejorative ‘insidious’ is a little unnecessary, but I’m not one who should poke people with sticks for using flowery language.
In his discussion of the idea, Pinker suggests three possibilities for interpretation:
(a) identicality: that language determines thought precisely, word-for-word;
(b) concept determinism: language determines (to an unspecified degree) what we
can think (doubleplus ungood!);
(c) linguistic relativity: that the form of our language (merely) influences what we tend to believe.
In Chapter 12 of The Language Instinct (quoted to me by Kevin), it seems that Pinker does concede the weak form :

Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labelling them for the sake of labelling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge customs and values of those around them.

Some commentators apparently do not take this as evidence that Pinker is admitting the weak formulation (c, above) of Sapir-Whorf. As I do not have access to a copy of The Language Instinct (no English language libraries and no damn money!), I’ll have to take their word for it.

The amount of time and energy that’s been expended on arguing about how vocabulary effects cognition surprises me, frankly. I think there’s a much more interesting discussion about grammar and deeper structures here that often seems ignored, at least in what reading I’ve managed to do.
The effect of such things on language users seems to me to be more pervasive and more subtle than simple differences in richness or breadth of vocabulary, on which most work and thought has seemed to focus.
One reason I believe this to be so is as a result of some of the fundamental differences in language structure between Korean and English (and to a great extent, the other European languages with which I have some familiarity). Please note that I neither claim to be a expert in Korean language (more of a lazy amateur), nor have I conducted any experiments or formal observations. First, some background. There are three ideas with some circulation about the earliest genetic relationship of Korean with other language families : 1) the traditional view that Korean is an Altaic language, sharing its origins with Manchu, Mongolian, and Turkish, amongst others; 2) the proposition that Korean has its origin in two language families, Altaic and Polynesian; and 3) the view that because of insufficient evidence to support a definitive relationship with other languages, Korean is a language isolate.
Regardless of its origins, Korean does share a number of features common to Altaic languages : words are built by agglutinating affixes, vowels within words follow certain rules of harmony, and articles, relative pronouns, explicit gender markers, and auxiliaries are not found.
Although Korean is not related to Chinese, as a result of history and geography more than 50 percent of the words in the Korean dictionary are of Chinese origin. Most legal, political, scientific, religious and academic vocabularies, as well as Korean surnames, and increasingly at present given names, are based on Chinese borrowings and can be written with Chinese characters, although meanings and pronuciations have often shifted as they have been adopted.
Although some basic words for body parts, clothing and agriculture are shared between Korean and Japanese, and other similarities exist, including grammatical structures similar enough that word-for-word translations between the languages is relatively easy, it is still uncertain whether the similarities are genetic or come as a result of historical borrowing between the two. Many features of Korean separate it from English and other Indo-European languages. Some of the most important of these (for my discussion here, at least) are the use of honorifics, relationship words, and different levels of speech (others include articles, plural markers, pronouns, adjectives, verb forms, demonstratives and so on).
Honorifics are markings for nouns and verbs that express the speaker’s attitude toward the addressee and the person who is being spoken of. Relationship words are blanket nouns denoting relationships between people that are commonly used in informal conversation between people, rather than given names – older brother, younger sister, uncle, auntie, grandmother and so on. (In the slummy, thin-walled building I used to live in in Busan, it was de rigeur on Saturday nights to hear sounds of passion and female cries of ‘Opa! Oh, opa! (older brother)’ from the playboy-next-door’s apartment.) These extend to the common practice of referring to a woman as ‘so-and-so’s mother,’ rather than using her given name.
There are four main levels of speech – polite-formal, polite-informal, plain, and intimate style – from which a speaker chooses, generally unconsciously, in everyday speech. The rules which determine the appropriate choice in conversation derive from the arcane art of knowing the ins and outs of the complex sociocultural fabric of Korean. It is equally inappropriate (in general) to address an older non-relative informally as it is to address a child with the polite-formal style, and mistakes like this may constitute a social breach (although it is generally understood that non-native speakers might make such mistakes). Depending on the relative status of the speaker, the person spoken to, and the person or thing that may be spoken about, the speaker can choose different words and forms to express intended meaning. For many basic verbs like eat, sleep, or give, at least two Korean words are available, each reflecting a different status of the subject or object of the verb. Each verb in Korean is further altered by a choice of grammatical affixes, adding not only grammatical information (such as tense), but carrying different levels of respect, deference, or politeness. Many nouns that refer to kinship or the household alsohave plain and honorific versions, the latter of which are used speak of another’s house or relatives, and the former of one’s own.
How does all of this relate to my earlier discussion of Sapir-Whorf, and considerations of how much and in what manner language may shape thought, and whether culture (loosely) determines language stucture, or vice versa? Don’t worry, I’m getting to that.
Korea is widely acknowledged to be the most Confucian nation in the world technically neo-Confucian, but there’s no need to split that particular hair here). Confucius focused on the need to maintain social order though willing or unwilling submission to the five primary relationships :
1) Ruler and subject
2) Parent and child (teacher and student)
3) Husband and wife
4) Older and younger person
5) Friend and friend
All of these relationships are explicity hierarchical, excepting, significantly perhaps, the last, although friendship of a Confucian bent is a considerably more meaningful proposition, it may be argued, than ‘buddies’ in North America might be.
Appropriate behaviour is expected for participants in each of these relationships, and the language used must be similarly hierarchical :

…a son should be reverential; a younger person respectful; a wife submissive;a subject loyal. And reciprocally, a father should be strict and loving; an older person wise and gentle; a husband good and understanding; a ruler righteous and benevolent; and friends trusting and trustworthy. In other words, one is never alone when one acts, since every action affects someone else.

Although as in many nations, the strength of these traditional beliefs is fading, Confucian tenets still underly a great deal of the conscious and unconscious expectations of social behaviour, and deeply influence the relationships between the sexes and the generations.
The question that interests me, then, is this : do structures and forms like these in the Korea language shape the way in which Koreans think, particularly in terms of their relationships not so much to the world but to the people in it, to such a degree that we can say that language has given them a world-view substantially different than, for example, my own, as an English native speaker? It certainly seems so, to me.
Language is a tool for communication, a social construct, and it seems somewhat pointless to argue about what nouns one uses, and whether the presence or absence of a given bit of vocabulary in one language or another either permits and limits one’s ability to think about it. This may be so, but I don’t think it’s very interesting, except in the abstract.
More interesting to me is the idea that the structures of a language – in this case Korean – may expand or limit the way in which one thinks about something much more important than snow (for example) : how one fits into society, and how one interacts with other humans. That Koreans really do think differently about these things, and that this may spring (entirely, partially, as much or less so?) from their language.
Is this a valid argument for a weak form of lingustic relativism? Is it even something that comes under the Sapir-Whorf rubric? I’m not sure. An opposite, equally important question is this : is it the case that the language has come to have the form it does as result of culture and belief, rather than the opposite? Confucius was Chinese, after all, and from an entirely different language group!
Again, I’m not sure. The correct answer is usually ‘a little from column A, a little from column B’, I know. Like I said, though, I’m an amateur who hasn’t taken a single course in this stuff (yet!). So I’m curious about what you might think, dear reader, whether you’re a full-fledged linguist (like languagehat) or just, like me, an enthusiastic dabbler.

Oh, It's All So Icky

April 8, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 11 Comments

So I heard some people are averting their eyes, avowing that they’ll Blog No More about all the War and Death and Ugliness and Ickiness; telling us that they feel they must disengage from the angry and divisive back-and-forth bayonette to the guts wartalk flying back and forth across the blogosphere lately. It’s just so taxing. Too much, too wild, too real, too damn disruptive to quiet contemplation and coffee consumption. The voices who shout out against war are all but indistinguishable in their stridency from the voices who cheer the Forces of Freedom, darn it! I thought all that fact-checking of their asses would be fun! It’s all so easily parsed, too obvious – I know the forces of Good are the Forces of Evil, sometimes, silly, and the Evil Doers are still there, darn it, and the Doers of Good are semi-plus unbad, well, at least sometimes, and I weary of explaining it all to my loyal readers, and besides all this typing is making me tired already, especially when some random Googlenaut winds up at My Personal Website with a search for “America Number One” +pussy -cheeselogs and leaves a comment that makes me feel like my carefully chosen words are all pearls-before-swining themselves, and I just can’t do it any more, I need to find my happy place….
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m thinking you can go f–k yourselves, you lame sh-tmorsels. Grab some anger [mp3 – 2Mb] and ride it into the dirt, or step the f–k back.

(If this is unfair to those who have made a firm stand against making a firm stand, well, tough sh-t is all I can say to you this evening, my friends.)

Free

March 25, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 10 Comments

[Note in Big Friendly Letters for the Intelligence Impaired : The piece below was recently reproduced in toto (which is intensely annoying in and of itself) at Indymedia by someone, and characterized as actually being in support of this corporatist misadventure of a war. It’s not, damn it, and that might have been clear if my unknown copy-and-paster had actually bothered to read beyond the first paragraph, or scrolled down a post or two. Disappointing.]
—
You know, I’m starting to get behind this whole War thing. I feel it in my belly now, I feel the twist down deep in there, down where the root of my cock would be, if it had a root. I feel the warm throb with each heartbeat thrum and flash of ordnance.
It gets me hot.
I’m getting excited about the killing. I wasn’t too thrilled with it at first, you know, cowardly america-hating lefty cheese-eating appeaser blowhard anti-warblogger f–kwit that I am. I was tremulous and girly, but now that the blood is flowing, and the guns are shouting their wordless chants, I’m starting to like it. I want to see more! I want the news to turn bad and then worse. I don’t want your brave boys or mine to come home, wrapped in glory and squinting through a cake of Euphrates dust – I want them to stay and fight and die, for me, yes for me, and for glorious freedom. I want them to stand there arch-backed and unbowed in the sand with the grieving sun behind them – erect – and clutching a flagpole, with old glory streaming out behind. And then I want to see them blown to pieces.
I want a conflagration! Firestorms! God damn it, if it’s war then let it be war! Let’s rub our noses in it, roll in it like a dog in its puke, let’s stare at ourselves red-eyed in the mirror and think about what we really are, and what we love, and who we fear. Let’s take it to the next level! Let’s roll! No pain no gain! Just do it! Semper fidelis! Give me the shrieks of the wounded, the gentle Protestant sobbing of heartbroken heartland mothers, and the keening of those strange burkha’d women gathered around the corpses of their sons, too.
I like this war. I want more of it. I want Iraqi Freedom now, and I want it without pickles or mustard, you minimum-wage retard. I want Iranian Freedom too, with some Freedom Fries on the side, and then I want some goddamned Korean Freedom, served up sizzlin’ hot, with kimchi-fart afterburners switched on as the walls fall down around me. Free the world, George! Free us all! We want to be free! My huddled masses, they yearn for some down-home, Texas-style freedom! Freedom from care, freedom from want, freedom to shop, freedom from thought, freedom from life. Free us from our lives, America, free us all. Fight for peace, because peace is almost as good as freedom!
Void where prohibited by law.

Death Rulez, d00d

March 18, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 8 Comments

I am often inclined to think, all Sturgeonesque, that 90% of everything is crap, and that goes double for poetry. Which would mean, of course, that 180% of poetry is crap, which may be overstating the case somewhat, but that feels like a comfortable number to work with, so I’ll let it stand.
A case in point is this Harold Pinter poem rescued from a slightly-less-than-customarily-dumbass (at least recently) Metafilter thread. Harold Pinter is apparently some Poet of Significance, about whom I know very little, as I ain’t got me mucha that there book-larnin’. Anyway, have a read :

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America’s God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn’t join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who’ve forgotten the tune.
The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America’s God.

Now, I don’t disagree with the sentiment expressed here, as you might guess. Yes, America and their God are doodyheads supreme, and a force for death and evil in the world today. That’s a given, isn’t it? And, hey, I like the loping metre – badum badumdum boop. It’s bouncy, yet martial! Just right, as Goldilocks might exclaim.
What amuses me is that this Great Author’s Poem falls in quality somewhere between lame old Satan-cheering Iron Maiden lyrics, say, and a quote from Cannibal Corpse [warning : rather icky, but may assist in understanding American culture] . You know, I wouldn’t take issue if Pinter’s tripe weren’t meant to be Art, High and Holy. No one listens to Cannibal Corpse (or at least, I wish no one did) expecting a literary artgasm, I don’t think. But oor Harold?
Well, stuff like “The riders have whips which cut. Your head rolls onto the sand Your head is a pool in the dirt Your head is a stain in the dust” goes quite nicely alongside other stuff like

Slaughtered enemies scattered
Trail of death they walked
Drenched in their own blood
A sound of thousands fills the sky
A death that comes so clear
When the rain of fire falls
Flames that will consume
A boiling death appear
The last second alive

Quick now, was that Harold, or the merry pranksters from Vomitory? And does it matter? Admittedly Mr Rundqvist, Vomitory’s wordsmith, has a few problems with getting those nice bumpedyboop rhythms going, and may in fact have a few problems with english as a second language, but I’m willing to bet there are a whole lot more people chanting his songs than dear old Harold’s.
Which may not be the point. You tell me. 250 words or less, due by Friday. Heh.
I wonder, as an aside, how many of the foolish young soldiers going to risk their lives for f–king nothing in Iraq listen, teeth gritted, to mutant scum like Cannibal Corpse and their grindcore ilk? That might be an interesting statistic.

Anti-America

March 11, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 35 Comments

Shelley speaks, in pellucid and evocative language, of the tensions between the individual and community, conflicts between the strength of uncompromising individuality and the sense of responsibility to others, which are often expressed in ways contrarian and discordant. If you read her words often, you know that she cherishes this part of herself, and is proud to be the one who pushes back, who questions, about matters political and gender-related, about issues social and relating to the blogosphere, and this is one of the things many other people cherish about her too. I’m glad – more than glad, I’m indebted in a multitude of ways and even if I disagree with her on the details deeply grateful – that she is around to kick against the pricks, as exhausting and demoralizing an avocation as that is.
One of the many reasons I feel indebted to her (and to others around the ever-more-loosely-joined virtual neighbourhood of which I feel a part) is that she kickstarts thoughts in me, and if I’m at the precise juncture where the caffeine has overcome my natural lethargy (like right now), I’m liable to write about them. The exercise of deciding whether this is a Good Thing or not is left to the reader.
The following is long and personal, and no doubt philosophically suspect. So sue me!
Particularly in these difficult days, people accuse me of being anti-American, and I invariably admit that I am, although perhaps not in the sense in which they mean it. The phrase anti-American almost certainly means different things to different people, and in different languages (long ramble about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis excised – I’ll leave that for another day). Occasionally I’m even asked why, although this is rare, and like dg here, it’s usually as part of a low-intensity injoke that bounces around Metafilter occasionally : ‘Why do you hate America so much?’
I wish I were able to trace back to the beginning my first stirrings of anti-American sentiment, way up there in my Northern BC village. That sort of thing is a fool’s game, though, particularly when your long-term memory is as wildly inaccurate as mine. We only got two television channels up there – CTV and CBC – and so there was no nose-upturned pseudo-intellectual pooh-poohing of American entertainment, though you can be sure I affected a whole range of other arrogant smartboy behaviours, feeling as I did a lone island of brilliance in a sea of millworkers and fetal alcohol syndrome genetic sports.
The second album I remember buying was The Clash’s London Calling – perhaps that was the trigger.
With lyrics like

The judge said five to ten-but I say double that again
I’m not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown
Kick over the wall ’cause government’s to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D’you know that you can use it?
The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there’s nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don’t owe nothing, so boy get runnin’
It’s the best years of your life they want to steal
You grow up and you calm down
You’re working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown
You’re working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
You made your first kill now

it fired me up in a way that I still feel, bowel-deep and still burning decades later. But really that album, political as it was, had very little in the way of attacks on America itself – it chose broader targets, and knocked them over with rakish, snarling aplomb.
Like Shelley, I read Ayn Rand as a teen too, and everything else I could get my hands on, which, thanks to a mother visibly relieved that I was more interested in books than cars, was almost everything I could think of, but it didn’t leave much of a mark on me, I don’t think. Similar expressions of libertarian ideals in Heinlein’s juvenilia and other SF novels did leave their mark, though. I remember quoting him, sneeringly, over the years : ‘specialization is for insects.’ But I was too interested in individuals (which I mentioned in another context, in a post of which I’m particularly proud, here) to care much about -isms. This decision, this disdain of politics, has stayed with me to this day.
So how does a disdain of politics and a Clash song jibe with a repeatedly-reiterated anti-Americanism? I’m getting to that, honest.
One of the things that Shelley’s piece today started me contemplating was how my feelings on individuality differ from the ones she expresses so well, and how imagining myself as a contrarian (if people-loving) curmudgeon all these years has molded my life. When I think about it, lyrics from another song bubble up into my mind, and I suppose they express the root of my feeling as well as anything else :

I thought thought that I could find a way
To beat the system
To make a deal and have no debts to pay
I’d take it all take it all I’d run away
Me for myself first class and first rate
But all that you have is your soul
Here I am waiting for a better day
A second chance
A little luck to come my way
A hope to dream a hope that I can sleep again
And wake in the world with a clear conscience and clean hands
‘Cause all that you have is your soul

All my life, I’ve fashioned myself as the Outsider, the exile, the individual, rugged or otherwise. I feel little to no obligation to any sense of community, other than that which is mandated by my own sense of what is right. It has roots, no doubt, in childhood bereavements, and first saw the light when a psychologist diagnosed me as a kindergarten sociopath. It matured with the fingernails-ripped-out clawing at the well-walls of my hometown – let me out! – and has evolved slowly since. It’s led to me to live as an expatriate all over the planet for most of the last 15 years, complaining about my new hosts, wherever they have been, and equally kept me from returning home. It’s made me unwilling to consider myself part of any group larger than a self-selected circle of close friends, virtual and otherwise. It’s led me inexorably to spending a significant portion of my waking hours in front of a computer, typing my life out for people I have never met.
But it’s also made me a better man, in many ways, I think, if a somewhat solipsistic one. I do believe that all you have is your soul, and that, absurd as it seems, is true even if there is no such thing as a soul. That’s an argument I’m not interested in, as it simply doesn’t matter. But I believe that once you have done your best to detach, in best buddhist fashion (though I hasten to add that I am no more a buddhist than I am an evangelical christian) – detach from political or religious affiliation, from outmoded and useless labels like ‘left’ and ‘right’, from exhortations to patriotism and considerations of race, from fretting about whether this group or that is disadvantaged or exploited – and tried to live according to the dictates of your conscience and love and do what good you can for those you know….well, we all want that, in one way or another, don’t we?
At the end of the day, ignoring the clamoring of the crowds to join in and be a part of something is the strategy of the hermit, and I am no hermit. I partake, joyfully or furiously, depending on the provenance of the brain chemicals circulating intraskull, with as much enthusiasm as someone might who defined themselves by their job, or their religion, or their gender, or their sexual preference, or their nationality, or their political affiliation, or their race.
So why do I hate America so much, though I’ve said over and over again that I love many American people? Because America does evil, and I cannot help but hate that which does evil, all the while knowing that it is evil. There’s no need for me to recite the litany of Terrible Wrongs that America has done – no matter how you sit on the love/hate/fear/security map, you know those things of which I speak.
This is not to say that other nations, other governments, other groups political or otherwise, today and in the past (and no doubt far into the future) have not done great evil. Cambodia, Germany, Japan, Rwanda, Russia, El Salvador, Guatemala…. any of us could go on, endlessly, and point to massive evils that, in sheer scale if nothing else, dwarf the worst that anyone could accuse America of.
For me, though, disappointment is the key to my dislike of America. Deep, weary, beaten-down disappointment. Disappointment at the massive disconnect between the way that America portrays itself, and the way that many Americans who are ignorant of both history and geography perceive America. Regardless of how shocked people may have been at the million corpses littering the ground in Rwanda a decade ago, I believe that were the blood of those multitudes on American hands through action rather than inaction, the shock and outrage would be many times more powerful. When I was young I expected – and many people, American and otherwise feel the same – that America would always be a force for good in the world. Americans are supposed to be heros, damn it! That’s what their movies tell us, and their television, and their news agencies and their government. That’s what their duplicitous sold-out scumbag of a president keeps repeating in halting tones when they trot him out to read another script about ‘smoking out the evil-doers.’ And nothing, we all know, is as disappointing as a fallen hero.
(Of course, you can probably guess that I directly blame George W Bush and his administration for the death of one of my best friends, as much as I blame the sack of sh-t who set and detonated that bomb in Bali. They loaded and cocked the gun – that little Indonesian just pulled the trigger. Their bumbling PR-driven war in Afghanistan drove al Qaeda members to Indonesia, the nation with the largest Muslim population on the planet, where those escappes were no doubt instrumental in the murder of all those people in Kuta. My resentment of the abject stupidity of the conduct of the little Bush-te revenge-war has only honed my anger and resentment and disappointment to a fine edge.)
But to people not dependent on their politics or their nationality to define themselves, to someone for whom identity is not built on ideas and groups outside of him or herself, the words of Official America are at so far a remove from the realities that anger and disappointment are the only responses that seem rational. Anger that wrong is being portrayed as right, to the apparent unquestioning satisfaction of many who would fight evil if they recognized it. Disappointment because America, the great power of our world, could do so much good, and instead has been locked into a path that will bear bitter fruit for everyone for as far as the mind can see into the cratered, smoke-shrouded wasteland of the future.
I love Americans, many of them. I hate America because through those who lead that powerful nation, it seems to be hellbent on making a world that is worse in every way that’s important for most of the people in it. And I feel this way not because I am Canadian, or ‘lefty’, or religious, or anything else other than who I am. I hate America because I want so desperately to love it.

World of Assholes

March 8, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 21 Comments

Like everyone else, I noticed Dr Weinberger’s and Doc Searls’ World of Ends this morning, linked from Bb. I have taken the liberty of making a response, of sorts, in the form of a satire fetchingly entitled – in true profane wonderchicken style – ‘World of Assholes’.
Although I do disagree with many of their points, I recognize the good will in their intention, and intend this in turn as good-natured if pointed ribbing, not ideological warfare. Manifestos by their very nature invite a kick in the ass, though, and I’m willing as always to step up to the plate. (And mostly I was just annoyed that I didn’t get one of those emails Shelley mentioned. Heh.)

[box type=”shadow”]

The Nutshell

The Internet is complicated.
The Internet isn’t a thing or an agreement : it’s a place.
The Internet isn’t stupid, but it’s filled with stupidity.
Adding value to the Internet adds to its value.
Value on the internet goes unnoticed unless some high-traffic node connects it to the mainstream.
Money moves to the greedy.
The asshole of the world? Nah, the world of assholes.
The Internet’s three vices:

a. Americans dominate it
b. The wealthy populate it
c. More inhabitants does not automatically mean more value, except to those who want to sell you something

If the Internet is so complicated, why do so many seem driven to try and simplify it?
Some mistakes we can stop making already.

[/box]

1. The Internet is complicated.

The internet is probably the most complicated thing in history, although it’s built on technology (TCP/IP) that is deceptively simple. Confusing the technology with the creativity and conversation is like confusing the truck with the beer it’s carrying.

2. The Internet isn’t a thing or an agreement : it’s a place.

Actually, it’s probably all three, but aphorisms have to be pithy, so you’ll excuse the confusion. The best way to understand something that’s complicated is to examine the metaphor or metaphors one uses to describe it or think about it. In America, football is a metaphor used to think about business, and war is a metaphor used to think about football, for example. This helps us to understand why bombing the living sh-t out of Iraq will magically make problems with the economy go away.
The internet feels like a place to most people – an environment that exists out there independantly of whether of not they are participating in it. The wires and servers, the hardware and the software – the things give the protocols a way to interact. The protocols are an agreement, and they allow the space to exist. The space is where we exist when we are on the net. See also : highway, truck and beer.

3. The Internet isn’t stupid, but it’s filled with stupidity.

The internet isn’t about packets, it’s about people. Just like in the real world, many of those people are egregiously stupid, and say and do stupid things. There are a few barriers to entry – literacy and money are two, for example
– so this makes the situation slightly less excruciating than it is in our daily lives offline.

4. Adding value to the Internet adds to its value.

If you change something about the way the internet works to favour a certain way of communicating or a certain technology, you may well be having a negative impact on other aspects of the environment. If all you are doing is adding something, however, the expected rules apply. More is, however, not necessarily better, for anyone except those who want to make money. See also : 8c.

5. Value on the internet goes unnoticed unless some high-traffic node connects it to the mainstream.

It’s entirely possible that the most brilliant minds of our generation are out there in the net hinterlands, exposing their genius for the world to see, and nobody is seeing it except the googlebot. Unless a higher-traffic node or nodes of the net (with a human intelligence in the driver’s seat) notes and disseminates the value that is being created out on the edges back into the middle and out again, nothing happens, and our new Shakespeare or Einstein labours unnoticed.

6. Money moves to the greedy.

If value goes unnoticed until the Big Nodes notice, then you or your product needs to get noticed by the central hubs somehow. Once that happens, the greedier you are, the more you’ll make. Mostly it’s about knowing the right people, just as it is in Real Life.

7. The asshole of the world? Nah, the world of assholes.

Because the internet is a place, it’s populated by all sorts of folks : the good, the bad and the fugly. Many people with even a shred of decency and integrity left bemoan the cesspool of evil, filth and stupidity that much of the internet has become. For some, the metaphor we used to use to describe my end-of-the-world hometown when I was young might be appropriate : The Asshole of The World.
This comes as a natural consequence of human nature, of course, and is to be expected. Just as in any other place, there are the good neighbourhoods and the bad, the saints, the sinners, and the scumbags. The internet may route around damage, but it builds a bus route directly to porn and cheap laughs. (You got here, didn’t you?)
Regardless of whether the internet is the rectum mundi (ahoy! fake latin to port!) or not, the place is unimportant without the people who populate it. Unfortunately, just as in real life, many of them are deeply unpleasant : the world of assholes.

8. The Internetâs three vices

So, those are the facts about the Internet. See, I told you they were complicated.But what do they mean for the behavior of the corporations and corporatists that keep trying to make the internet into a mall or a propaganda tool or a surveillance network?
Here are three basic rules of behavior that are tied directly to the factual nature of the Internet:
a. Americans dominate it
b. The wealthy populate it
c. More inhabitants does not automatically mean more value, except to those who want to sell you something
Let’s look a little more closely at each…

8a. Americans dominate it

Americans, with their brash ways, their aspirations to Empire, their big hair and good teeth. Ah, those wacky Americans. They built the internet, and they’re determined to make it a mirror of their crumbling society. It’s a safe bet they’ll succeed.

8b. The wealthy populate it

Not too many poor folks on the net. Damn near none, in fact. Most people who can’t find enough fresh water to drink on a daily basis (well over half the population of the planet) don’t have access to a personal computer. And the wealthy got wealthy f–king the poor, personally or by proxy, so nothing’s new there.

8c. More inhabitants does not automatically mean more value, except to those who want to sell you something

A virtual space cannot get overcrowded, but it certainly can get messy and loud. But more people online means more targets for marketers, more data for surveillance units, more money for telcos. Go go go!

9. If the Internet is so complicated, why do so many been seem driven to try and simplify it?

There’s money and recognition in talking down to people.
Could it be because the three Internet vices are the exact analogue of how governments and businesses view the world?
Americans dominate it: The American government (and many of its people) are keen to dominate the world politically, militarily, and economically. Why should the net be any different?
The wealthy populate it: If you haven’t got enough money to buy my products, then f–k you.
More inhabitants does not automatically mean more value, except to those who want to sell you something: More human targets mean more sales, and more data for the Information Awareness miners. If they’ve got the money to get online, they’ve got the money to buy stuff, and if they’re breathing, they’re quite possibly a threat to the American government.

10. Some mistakes we can stop making already.

Enough already. Let’s stop banging our heads against the facts of Internet life, and go outside for some fresh air.
We have nothing to lose but our cupidity.

Dirt Stick Stone

March 4, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 8 Comments

About a year ago, I squeezed out the following brainfart

…is it only a matter of time until Hollywood starts regularly hiring hundreds of blogtemps to fire up new weblogs, post furiously and praise to the skies the latest piece of crap opus by Jerry Bruckheimer or some other purveyor of soul-destroying cinematic garbage, interlink to themselves and a few ‘a-listers’, start offering large cash incentives to Kottke and Rageboy and other high-traffic blognodes to link back to the rent-a-bloggers, and watch the Google rank for their new Product soar? Or record companies to promote their wares? Or governments? Are recent, highly-successful experiments in spiking the GooglePunch like the recent one by Matt Haughey the tip of the iceberg? How soon before big business catches on, before the Office of Strategic Mind Control realizes the subtle power (if they haven’t already) of the interconnectedness of blogs and begins working blogspace like the infopimps they strive to be? Before this ‘place’, too, becomes branded and corporatized? (Forget the stone-knives-and-bearskins, bandwidth-wasting crudity of banner ads – savvy marketers will work the medium, pimp the actual hyperlinks, and tickle Google till it quivers, moans, and page-ranks, gratefully. Linkwhoring could become a serious business. Perhaps we could form a mafia, a Blogga Nostra, and skim a little of that corporate cream off the top, broker linkage deals, extort flame-protection money.)

And today, as weblogorrhea reaches epidemic proportions, Dr Pepper’s soulless, clue-deficient marketing shills are actually giving it a go, boys and girls.

Next comes a blog-related twist on viral marketing — recruiting ‘key influence bloggers’ to promote Raging Cow by sharing their enthusiasm, linking to the site and distributing special screensavers, banners and skins. Beginning with an initial group of six people in their late teens and early 20s — flown to Dallas with their parents for an induction session — Dr Pepper hopes to develop a ‘blogging network’ to hype Raging Cow and “be part of the ‘in the know’ crowd,” says its brand-marketing honcho Andrew Springate. Those spreading the news via their blogs won’t disclose their flackitude, says Springate, because officially they’re not paid Dr Pepper employees; they only get promo items like hats and T shirts.

*Takes off tinfoil helmet*
Doc Searls is quoted as saying in response to this : “In my view blogs are the antidote to viral marketing.”
In my view, this clumsy teentastic attempt at manipulation – more likely to attract attention to itself (which, let’s face it, has got to be the real goal here, rather any genuine attempt at marketing juice thanks to the efforts of some cadre of hiphop dipsh-t teend00d bloggers pimping their avatars for some gear – it’s a metacampaign, kids!) and spawn subtle and inventive imitations as a result of the MSNBC article and other media attention – is the first salvo in a coming war of web words. Blogs aren’t the antidote to viral marketing, they’re the petri dish where the virulent brain-colonizing memetic equivalent of Ebola will be grown. Call it wEbola, and reach for the mental prophylactic of your choice. At stake are our very souls!
That’s complete bullsh-t, of course. I’m just flinging hyperbole around to make this all seem a little more interesting, you know, ’cause I can. The truth is, even if I do disagree with Doc’s quotable quote there, if I should happen across a weblog pimping some craptacular, pointless and inevitably unnecessary new product (“Buy this crap! Buy it you f–kers, or we’ll lose our jobs and have to whore out our children!” – now that’s a marketing campaign I could respect), well, *click*
Heck, I even refuse to read weblogs that perfunctorily link to Amazon, for christ’s sakes, never mind ones that are busy flogging some sh-tty sugar drink. But this sort of thing is going to get more sophisticated, mark my words, brothers and sisters, and more insidious. The marketrons will continue to colonize the new frontier. I have seen the enemy and he is us.

Pray For Death! Pray!

February 7, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 6 Comments

Thanks to the eternally irate Mr Golby for this little nugget.
Yes! Bless us, lord! Let’s pray for our troops, pray for our politicians, pray that the bleeding hemorrhoids that have been plaguing us will disappear, let’s pray that those pesky raghead pagan f–ks die in their thousands, let’s pray that more war will stop war, let’s pray that killing will put a cap on killing, let’s pray that the sweet light crude manna will continue to pump through the fiscal veins of our great nation, let’s pray that our god has a bigger dick than theirs, let’s pray that the dazed halfwit apathetic scum that allowed us to take over the most powerful country in the world won’t wake up and cut our throats like the vermin we are, let’s pray goddamnit, let’s pray the great game will continue, let’s pray that jesus doesn’t f–king come back and rip us from crotch to sternum like trout, let’s pray, let’s pray, let’s get down on our knees and pray to something bigger, let’s pray, let’s pray our children don’t have to do the same evil things we did, it’s not our fault, god, please, it’s not our fault, we’re not bad people, we just did what we had to do, what we were told to do….

[Audio : Dead Kennedys – Kinky Sex Makes The World Go ‘Round]

Masks and Mirrors

January 28, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 4 Comments

This is going to be one of those posts that starts : “So, I….”
I usually hate those kinds of posts.
So, I get an EGR send in my inbox today. Rageboy – or Locke, or whichever mask he was wearing when he hit ‘send’ or ‘go’ or ‘cry havoc’ or whatever the button said (assuming that both personas are masks, to one degree or another, and assuming that it was an actual button he pressed) – included a couple of quotes in the header, and I got as far as

“Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality.”
– Carl Gustav Jung

before I got distracted, as seems to happen so often to me. All that youthful experimentation has left me with an attention span that is somewhat unreliable, I’m sad to report. Don’t worry your pretty heads, though, dear readers : I make do.
So, this Jung quote (I did read a lot of Jung when I was young – har!) is one that I’ve never run across before, oddly, unless of course I did run across it, but forgot about it because I was in the middle of one of those youthful experimentation sessions I mentioned above. My memory has a few holes in it too, unfortunately. Again, though, I make do.
It resonated in the echo chamber behind my nose and I was keen to see what had been said, and when, and by who. It seemed to apply to something I’ve been turning over in my mind lately : one thing that a filthy foreigner in Korea who spends any time watching his hosts will learn quickly is how inspidly sentimental these folks can be. I loathe sentimentality, but I’m keen to understand more about it, ’cause, you know, I’m such a groovy guy. The other bit of data is the fact that Korean soldiers, in the Vietnam War and elsewhere, were universally feared for their ‘casual brutality’.
So, off to Google. Shiver me timbers, boy wonder, who should be at the pole position for this interesting phrase, gunning his virtual engines, but the excellent Jonathon Delacour!
He was talking about warbloggers in his post, which interested me not at all at that moment – “We’re on a mission from God, ma’am.” – but he does quote the equally splendid Joseph Duemer :

Sentimentality is the substitution of emotion for intelligence; sentimentality requires of the reader assent to heightened feelings not legitimated by the matter at hand; sentimentality seeks to manipulate the reader’s emotional response by calls to conventional wisdom or attitudes; sentimentality seeks approval by reference to the vast warm blanket of majority opinion; sentimentality never, ever risks the disapproval of any member of its intended audience.

Now this sounds like the kinda dirt I’m trying to dig up, here, tonight. This sounds like words I can get behind, and apply to something that at least has the odor of insightfulness.
But then, I notice this in the comments :

At least part of the problem here is that Duemer’s, and Jung’s, definition of “sentimental” is contrary to the definition held by 99% of Americans.
“Sentimental” has positive connotations, not negative ones. We associate it with things we know are not necessarily true but things we would love to believe.
Things like Santa Claus, things like joyous Thanksgiving reunions with loved ones, even if we only love them at a distance, are considered “sentimental.” Even when we consciously know these things are not entirely true, we would like to believe them and see nothing wrong in believing in them.
Kitsch at least comes closer to the meaning Duemer is assigning to “sentimentality” because it has somewhat negative connotations for most, though certainly not all, people.
People are going to resist transforming a word they have positive connotations with into a negative idea, even if they might otherwise be convinced that the argument itself is sound.

and I wonder if that’s true. Does sentimentality have a positive connotation for most Americans? And how about for Koreans? And am I unusual in hating it so?
Back to Google I went, feeling the need to dig some more, and came up dry. Serried ranks of quotable quote pages, with no commentary to sink my nose into, truffle-hunting webpig that I am.
Then I tried a bit of wiggling with my search terms a bit, and found this :

In his overview, [Dr. Luke Kim, whom many regard as the godfather of Korean American psychiatry says] Koreans regard cheong (he spells jeong) as “one of the most important ingredients that would make [Korean] lives enriching and meaningful.” He agrees there is [no] equivalent English word that translates the meaning exactly.
“However,” he says, “Jeong itself embraces all the meanings to such words as feeling, empathy, sympathy, compassion, emotional attachment, trust, pathos, tenderness, affinity, sentiment and even love.
“If I were to choose one English word among these, I would choose the word empathy.”
Kim observes that Chinese, Japanese and Koreans all share the general concept of jeong with a somewhat different emphasis in its concept.
“For example,” he observes, “Koreans tend to stress the aspect of emotional attachment and bond, while Chinese emphasize the aspect of loyalty and reciprocity.
“The Japanese equivalent word – Jyo -tends to emphasize sentimentality.” Jyo-ni-moroi means one is weak and vulnerable with sentimentality.
Jeong among Koreans denotes a special interpersonal affective bond: a trust and closeness between two individuals. Thatâs why, Kim believes, Koreans attach great importance to the presence or absence of jeong in their relationships with a person such as mother-child (mo-jeong), two lovers (ae-jeong), or two friends (woo-jeong).

This set me back for a minute or two, and led me to remembering my wife’s stated reason for sticking with me, when asked why she had a couple of years ago, despite her parents threatening to disown her, in the face of her friends’ avowals that she was nuts to shack up with a nasty foreigner, ignoring the stares we got when we walked arm in arm down a Korean street. She said that she remembered me saying one night not long after we first got together something along the lines of :
Love is love is love. Mother for child, friend for friend, lover for beloved. It’s all one, even if it is different in the ways that it is shown and shared.
That simpleminded belief of mine dovetails micron-close with this ‘jeong’ idea, doesn’t it? Not that I had the faintest idea at the time that such a belief existed and was so important to so many Koreans. It’s not particularly insightful, certainly, but it’s true, or true at least for me, and that’s more than enough. It was enough for her, too, it seems.
So. At this point I kind of ran out of steam. I lost track of what I had been thinking about when I went off searching for some background on the Jung quote (which was probably going to end up in something mean-spirited anyway) but I ended up remembering something that has made me a better man.
And Rageboy? Well, I guess I gotta thank him, for starting me wandering down that track this evening, which ended for me in a happy memory and a cuddle with my woman. And feel ‘jeong’, a bit, for the guy, because the very public road that led him to his pressing that ‘send’ button today hasn’t – at least as far as I know – as happy an end as my short road did tonight.

We're a Happy Family!

January 11, 2003 / stavrosthewonderchicken / 12 Comments

I was a little let down, as the taxi pushed through the rain into downtown Vancouver, at how little had changed. This feeling intensified over the next few days : other than a few new buildings scattered here and there, and a new colour scheme on the buses, it seemed to me as if nothing much had changed in Vancouver in the five years since I last set foot in the homeland. In fact, not much that I could see had changed in the 20 years since I first moved there as a thirst-bedeviled freshman.
After living in Korea, where the entire country reinvents itself every five years or so, and the one constant is change and ferment and fresh concrete flowering skyward fast as bamboo, it was a little disconcerting. I had never thought of Canada as…well, stodgy, until now.
But over the next couple of weeks there, I noticed that at least one significant thing had changed, other than the amount of grey hair on friends and family.

“And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.”
-Brave New World

I had read that the drug companies were getting more aggressive with their carpet-bomb marketing in North America over the past few years. Read about the scattershot Ritalin-dosing of children, read about the emergence of the Prozac nation, read about the drug companies inventing ‘female sexual dysfunction’ in order to manufacture a market for more of their pills. But I wasn’t prepared for the fact that there wasn’t a single commercial break that I can recall on network TV over those couple of weeks that didn’t have at least one drug advertisement. When did heartburn become ‘acid reflux disease’? How many cold medicines do people actually need? ‘I love my Tylenol PM‘? How putrid is that? f–k you lady, why don’t you try loving your children instead (yelled I at the television screen, much to the long-suffering chagrin of my lady love). There were ads flogging drugs for conditions I haven’t even heard of, ads with happy grinning families running across manicured green parkland with their lassie-like dogs, free of the ravages of anal warts or whatever the hell had been plaguing them before Smithcline-Beecham showed up on the scene.
Now, I’m not one to claim, ever, that drugs in and of themselves are a bad thing. Better living through chemistry, say I. But I’ve always been more inclined to think that the body should be allowed to deal with minor illnesses on its own, and that drugs are better employed in the context of recreation than medication. Indefensible position perhaps, but I don’t really give a sh-t. Unless I’ve got Ex-lax™ to ease the way, of course!
I also have a strong tendency to think that the habit of medicating for every minor complaint is a sign of weakness, and creates and fosters weakness, and weakness is bad. Weakness in mind or body invites the triumph of evil men, evil deeds and thoughts. But that’s a whole other rant, perhaps.
So, anyway, unprepared as I was for the constant deafening barrage of druggy blandishments on the TV, I was substantially less prepared for the fact that half the f–king people I know are apparently now on SSRI’s : you know, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Prozac™ and Zoloft™ and Paxil™ and I don’t know what-all else. When did this happen? When did all these people decide that they couldn’t handle their lives anymore without being constantly medicated? Or when did their drug company whore-doctors convince them of it?

“All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”
-Brave New World

Now, look, I know (based on extrapolation from what I’ve seen amongst friends and relatives recently) that probably half of the people reading this are on scrips for one of these drugs, too, and I don’t want to antagonize or insult unduly. There are, certainly, some people for whom these ‘miracle drugs’ (given us by the gods) are a means by which they can live a normal life, overcome the ravages of aberrant brain chemistry, fight clinical depression.
But I’ve got to think that there are way too many folks out there who are just too goddamn lazy and irresponsible to take responsibility for their own mental states, just like there are too many people who think of themselves as victims, who blame their parents or their spouse for their problems, who refuse to take responsibility for their actions, who don’t vote and then complain about the government they get (and so richly deserve), who drive an SUV because, hey, if I get into an accident, it’s the other guy who’ll get hurt, who dismiss concerns about environmental degradation with a wave of the hand and a demand for incontrovertible proof…
Sorry, I’m ranting again.
But hell, I’ve taken just about everything there is to take at one time or another, and I didn’t do it to escape, I did it to explore. Hooray for me, right? Well, sure, why the hell not? I reckon that if your life is bad enough that you have to stay perpetually medicated, you need to change your life, change your doctor, get off the SSRIs, and get the hell out of the house. Find some people to drink a beer (yes, I see the irony) with and dance in the rain on a beach somewhere. Find someone new to have sex with, if that’s your thing. Climb a mountain, sail a boat, or if you’re too fat or lazy or poor to do that, find someone who loves doing it, and ask them about it, and watch their eyes as they describe the joy it gives them, and find something that makes you feel that joy too. Something other than chemicals.
You know, unless you really are f–ked up. In which case, pop those puppies like gummy bears, I say.

Emptybottle.org

the bottle is, you know, a metaphor

Category: Uncrappy