Emptybottle.org

Another hellish morning at Club Korea. A dense layer of smoke shrouds everything this morning, scraping your throat with every breath, reeking of burning plastic. Coal smoke, quite possibly. I imagine this is what London must have been like in the middle days of the Industrial Revolution, when the air and water was foul, life was cheap, and no-one gave a rat’s ass about anyone else, particularly if they were perceived to be lower on the pecking order.
I’m grumpy today.
Had a new and potentially useful idea (in understanding this place) late last night on the way to the subway stop. It seems unlikely, despite the repeated avowals of pissed-off waeguk here, that Koreans, Korean men in particular, are all stupid. Look what they’ve managed to do in 50 years…(but don’t look too closely). But the Korean imperative : work work work may have something to do with the fact that if anything needs doing here it gets done badly, at the last moment, or not at all. Everyone’s too f–king tired! Sixteen and eighteen-hour days, 6 days a week, has drained the ability of the vast majority of people here to think ahead, think clearly, think at all. Thinking of people as stumbling in a blind, sleep-deprived haze makes many things about the disorder and seeming lack of will to address that disorder much clearer.
Just a thought.

SBS television, one of the big three networks, has it’s new slogan, revolving around at the start of the news in that unintentionally-retro-environment-mapped-metallic-3D-letters-from-the-80’s-kinda-way : “Humanism through Digital”.
This annoys the crap out of me. Even ignoring for a moment that digital is an adjective, for chrissakes, what the hell is that supposed to mean? How is it possible, I keep wondering, for companies that employ thousands upon thousands of employees, that are ostensibly sophisticated and modern, that presumably can employ people to check the surprisingly large amount of English in use, how it is possible for them to allow such egregiously (my Wonderchicken Word of the Week™) mangled Konglish to escape into the wild?
I know the answer of course. Old Korean men. f–k, how I hate them with a white-hot eye-popping passion. Take their blithe conviction that the world revolves around them, sprinkle with the assumption that the sun shines out of their asses, and slather the whole lot in Confucian Gravy, and it’s a Nasty Casserole.
As an aside, it’s always annoying to me when I find myself living a cliche. Today’s cliche : the young rebel looks in the mirror one day to find that he’s become part of the machine he despised. He’s now The Man that the new young rebels loathe.
*sigh*

Never heard of this one before, and it may be apocryphal : in China, one of the many interesting culinary treats about which I’ve never before heard (we all know about the monkey brains and birds’ nest soup, of course) is Bat Poop Soup.
I’m sure that the actual Chinese name for it is less amusingly euphonious, but there you go. The really interesting part for me is that the bat poop itself is not the thing that is considered to be the Good Bit. The Good Bit is the fact that apparently a certain species of bat is known to eat an enormous number of mosquitos, and the resultant excreta of said bat species contains a large quantity of…mosquito eyeballs!
Typing this out, I’m realizing how stupid it sounds, but the student of mine who told me about it swears on his momma’s longlost hymen that it’s true.
Well, not really, but ya know what I mean.

The first in what will doubtless be a long series of editorials in The Korea Herald recently about boshintang. Boshintang is, of course, dog soup. During the Olympics in ’88, which was the last time most people were aware of Korea’s existence, there was the predictable flap about the cooking and eating of cute little doggies, and a larger one when a little digging revealed that the favored way for killing them doggies before boiling them up was to beat them to death, slowly, as this tenderizes the flesh and supposedly increases the libido-enhancing effect. The practice was officially outlawed, the restaurants hidden in back alleys, and Korea was officially no longer a dog-eatin’ haven. Crap, of course. Even a cursory glance around any neighbourhood, including mine, will reveal boshintang restaurants all over the damn place. And the smell, is, well, a bit icky.
I’ve got no problem with people eating dogs, if they want to. sh-t, I’ve done it.
The point of the editorial, mentioning that the World Cup committee has actually made some sort of official complaint about the practice (for unknown f–king reason they feel they have a right to comment on it), was that no one should be able to tell Koreans what they should and should not eat, and further, that it’s one or two particular breeds that are raised specifically for Good Eatin’. People around the world kill and consume some oddball stuff, and if you look too closely at our treatment in North America or Europe or elsewhere of ‘meat animals’, the picture is none to pleasant. The article did go on to say, though, that the pathetic belief that beating a dog to death is a good way to render it ready for the pot has got to stop, as has the childlike magical thinking that somehow dogmeat is going to make your little weiner stiffer.
Sadly, I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.

As I stood on the subway platform this morning, waiting for the train, surrounded by swirling clouds of smoke and brownish particulate fog and the snort-hork-spit of dozens of Korean men casting throat-oysters onto the concrete, for some unknown reason they decided to play music, for the first time since I’ve been using that station.
Their choice of tunes : “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”, loud, trebly.
The feeling was stunningly close to an acid flashback. For a few seconds, I was reeling, and the faces staring at me (as they always do, living as I do in a place where there are no other foreigners) seemed malevolent, and the yellow-brown sunlight filtering through the clouds of smog flickered.
I’m afraid I’ve walked through the portal into bizarro-world. That would suck. Unless the beer’s good. Then I can live with it.

All of the subway cars have stickers up on the wall near the doors, often several layers of them. Some have these old peeling, faded ones, with incredibly crap typesetting and primitive line drawings, with as few words as possible, indicating, for example that one should not bring gas cans aboard, as the fumes might bother people, or if you see a bomb (and amusing, two-sticks of dyamite, curly wire and alarm clock affair) that you should Definitely Not Touch It.
These are the ones from 10 or 12 years ago.
The new ones have a hip, Gen-X looking guy doing a punk-rock-yell-face, as photoshopped-into-darts cell-phones zero in on his spiky ‘do. These ones are telling you to turn down your cellphone ringer.
A decade is a long long time here.

There’s a push on to drop from a 6-day work week to a 5-day one in Korea, and it surprises me to hear that there’s a fair bit of resistance to the idea. Some of the most vocal opponents are Christian organizations. Dire predictions of the collapse of the country are being sounded, some of them coming dangerously close to verbalizing the kind of chauvinism that usually runs below the surface here. An example : “We know fully well that the present status of churches in western countries (whose congregations are dwindling) is not unrelated to the five-day workweek system.” Not unrelated, indeed. Idle hands are the devil’s boxer shorts.
In a related note, the male half of the young couple (a bit younger than us) who live in the apartment across the hall, has been spending no more than 5 hours a day at home for over a year, apparently. This five hours includes 4 hours sleep, and is the total time he is not either commuting or working. He makes less money than I do, and he’s happy to be doing it.
Sometimes, my mind reels. Other times it just kinda sashays around, coyly.

“Culture shock, then, is thought to be a form of anxiety that results from the loss of commonly perceived and understood signs and symbols of social intercourse. The individual undergoing culture shock reflects his anxiety and nervousness with cultural differences through any number of defense mechanisms : repression, regression, isolation and rejection. These defensive attitudes speak, in behavioural terms, of a basic underlying insecurity which may encompass loneliness, anger, frustration and self-questioning of competence. With the familiar props, cues, and clues of cultural understanding removed, the individual becomes disoriented, afraid of, and alienated from the things he knows and understands.”
-Peter Adler
I recognize that I’ve been overwhelmingly negative-sounding in the last while when I speak of Korea, and I know why. In time, with a few more non-smoggy days, I’ll get better.

It’s interesting how the Korean laser-like focus on appearances, frequently at the cost of much interest in substance, manifests itself in some areas of life and not others. People are generally fastidious about their personal appearance. The face they present to the world must be as affluent as possible. Women are still almost universally obsessed with potions and pomades to regain youthfulness, despite the enviably graceful way that they tend to age. (Although it must be noted that chain-smoking, soju-swilling men tend to age fairly badly). The surface appearances of appropriated western or Japanese cultural items are mimicked rigorously, but the meaning behind it is almost entirely lost, or deliberately subverted. A stage performance of heavy, industrial Nine-Inch-Nails-like music by a pvc-clad singer is backed up by a troupe of dancers.
But this careful attention to surface appearances diverges radically when it comes to your surroundings here. Piles of garbage are everywhere, as are puddles of vomit, even in residential areas, that attest to the excesses of the night before. Construction is slipshod, somehow temporary in appearance. Windows, even on shops that have opned that very day (such as the 3rd generation wireless mobile shop at the subway station where I live, which opened last night) are streaked and dirty, and left that way. Litter abounds, and people casually throw more atop it. Men hork and spit great nasty oysters of mucous on the sidewalks, everywhere, which makes it not only traditional, but downright mandatory to take your shoes off when entering someone’s house. Industrial filth and noise back onto residential beehive towers at random. Streets are unnamed, and addresses as we are accustomed to in the west simply do not exist. Traffic rules tend to be a matter of ‘whatever feels right’ rather than any enforceable set of regulations.
So why is this? Why is there this enormous gap between the attention paid to detail and appearance at one end of the spectrum, and what would seem to be a complete lack of it at the other? And why is it so obviously different than the (perhaps cliched) approach of the Japanese, who ostensibly have a greater focus on harmony and order in their surroundings?
I don’t f–king know.

Posted this to the SA forums, in response to a question about how the Germans and Japanese portray WWII in their history books. Mirror just for the hell of it. Me = drunx0red.

Interesting thoughts on Japanese ‘inner wildness’. To an extent, a similar kind of thing applies here in Korea, but there is a greater tendency to act out here, and emotional displays and public sentimentality are de rigeur. Value is placed on honesty of feeling, and directness of expression of that feeling, but only between peers. The Confucian vertical striation of society, built into the language and the socialization as it is, means that most of the time in people’s lives outside their homes, they must behave in the manner expected.
Ahh f–k it. Lecture mode.
Koreans love to drink – they are called by some the ‘Irish of Asia’. Part of the reason for that is that emotional connections are vitally important here, but often, thanks to the rigours of behavioural expectation, those connections can only happen with the lubrication of alcohol.
That’s cool with me.

North [Korea]’s totalitarian regime has given the title of hero to a woman who gave birth to eight children, a woman who donated 500 pigs to military units over 20 years and soldiers who supposedly jumped into a fire to save a portrait of the nation’s late founder, Kim Il Sung….Last week, the country named a 15-ton pneumatic hammer as a national hero for “producing many parts necessary for railway transportation and the industrialization of the country,” according to state-run media.
There’s f–ked-up, and then there’s just silly.

Just to prove that I’m not always a snarky bastard when it comes to stuff Korean, here’s some interesting art-flash pieces by Chang Young-Hae.

Minor, mildly amusing fragments :
At Carrefour today (the French Costco, near as I can tell. God knows why they’re here in K-land), noticed some condoms (from Japan, as all condoms sold here are) whose brand name was ‘Long Time’. Given the whole ‘Love you longtime, GI’ Asian whore meme that seems to be everywhere, perhaps not the wisest choice.
Two related notes – it’s enormously gratifying (pun intended) to find that ALL Japanese condoms (that I’ve seen anyway) are teeny-tiny and not really big enough to fit on even my stolidly average-length knob.
Carrefour in Korean characters is pronounced Cah Ruh Poo. I would find that funny.

Hanguk-mahl (the Korean language) isn’t as hard as Japanese, I don’t think, but it’s certainly no picnic.

On the subway : Ad, apparently for lipstick, with the large logo at the bottom, underneath the pursed-mouthed hottie – Brown Love Letter. Kinda-tarot card in the background with a sad woman holding what looks like a giant turd. A tagline in the upper right corner exhorts : Be Pretty, Girls!
No further comment.

“The wisdom of the Korean people can be seen in salted shrimp” – Geo Korea, on Arirang Network.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
*grins, drinks, burps, eats a salted shrimp*