Korea

Korea is a magic, mythical, cheaper funland than Japan, or at least that is how Arirang portrays it. But I'm not talking about the wonders of Daewoo products, Super Junior, or clever word plays with Seoul (Seoul of Asia anyone? snicker away), I'm talking about that other Korea, the one that time forgot, the one that still pines away for a workers paradise on earth.

I'll admit, most of my knowledge about North Korea or The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea as they call it is limited to murky stories from refugees, National Geographic TV specials, Team America and Wikipedia. Fairly slim to say the least.

However, given all the attention the DPRK is getting these days, I'd like to offer myself as a commentator on the situation. I'm sure I could speculate with the best about life in the hermit kingdom, motives for the saber rattling, and just why those two cute as a button journalists were kidnapped. I figure it won't be long before they call me anyway, with CBS putting up VICE editor Shane Smith as a DPRK expert. His qualifications? A VICE piece over a year ago where him and some other Canadians attempt to visit the DPRK. I remember the piece because they hung out in the northern China swinging city of Shenyang. 

While I was in Shenyang, I used to teach at one of the school's branches that was in the embassy district. A term I use loosely as it consisted of one block that housed consulates for Russia, the Koreas, the U.S. and Japan as I recall. All shitty little squat buildings surrounded by a high wall and serious looking guards in uncomfortable uniforms.

You can tell the U.S. consulate/embassy wherever you go. It's the one with the most amount of people and the one that's always forted out for ragnarok. The DPRK consulate however, looked like a display house. Empty rooms and no curtains. The lights were on and nobody was home. The Chinese guards out front never flinched, but they were the only signs of life. And of all the times I walked to and fro, over the course of a month or so, that's the way it was. It was the spooky old house at the end of the lane. To top it off, the other end of the block, catty-corner from the South Korean consulate was a Swiss restaurant. Swiss. As in Switzerland. As in the purveyors of bank accounts, cuckoo clocks and army knives. It was built up like a chalet too. It was mental. Every dish had cheese as I recall. I tried to picture the DPRK folks coming out for their one guarded night out on the town to experience some imperialist debauchery and huddling into that chalet, pilling on the cheese. But such is Asia, and such is globalization I guess. 

I don't know if I've ever met a North Korean before. I've known plenty of people who went to the border, the Yalu River. The Chinese actually have boat tours for foreigners eager to point and gawk. Kind of like Bird In Hand or Intercourse PA if they were nuclear states with a hard on for imperial corruption(Social Evils as they call them in Vietnam). None of my friends ended up being kidnapped though. My wife was shushed at the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum though.

So that's it I guess, I want to be a pundit and claim some more of my 15 minutes. I know a thing or two about a thing or two.

Thailand

Like many people of my generation, our first exposure to Thailand was through the final characters of Street Fighter 2. Not much thought about the geography was spared as these characters were ridiculously(and plain ridiculous) difficult. A military dictator with a glowing fist? Yeah that's Thailand.

But it isn't.

Thailand is quite a place beyond expectations, somehow sleazy, seedy and clean and orderly at the same time. Thailand was never colonized but drives on the other side of the road. They've had more elected leaders than I've had birthdays, but still have a solid monarchy. They're poor and rich at the same time, the most developed nation after Malaysia at their end of the world, which is a multidimensional statement.

Recently Thailand has had a rough patch of sorts. Probably starting with the tsunami a few years ago, leading into the leadership crisis of last August and up to now, yesterday in fact with Buddhists(what the fuck?) bombing a mosque in peninsular Thailand(the part that runs into Malaysia). Thai politics are a murky affair with only two constants. The monarchy isn't going anywhere and the military will overthrow you if you can't get your shit together. There is no on paper part of this, but it works rather well as a system of checks and balances. 

The turmoil of the last year so to speak has derailed the tourism recovery that was almost complete in the aftermath of the tsunami. Nothing like being swept out to sea to scare off partying Americans/Australians and pasty Europeans. Then in August the legitimacy of the prime minister was called into question after the guy who installed him fled under embezzlement charges. The people took to the streets and occupied government buildings, CNN and BBC broadcast chaos and mayhem, neglecting the fact that it was Thais against Thais. Everybody knows tourists are the economy and it makes no sense to chase them off. This was the backdrop to my wife and I's marriage actually. Smiling Thais warmly reassuring us that foreigners are loved. But that nonsense doesn't play well on the TV and so pasty westerners "looking for adventure" decided to play it safe (In Mexico?). The final nail in the coffin was the occupation of the airport by opposition supporters. Sure the airport was closed down and chaos reigned, but the protesters apologized, attempted to explain themselves, and handed out bottled water to stranded tourists. Probably why I will always have a soft spot for Thailand.

More of the usual ensued in the following months, a new PM was elected sort of and just as things settled in, the party that was initially protested against(under suspicion of illegitimacy) suddenly starts taking to the streets in protest themselves. Confused? I break it down and keep track of it like this: The initial wave of protesters back in the fall of 08 wore yellow and all their banners where yellow. This recent wave of protesters handily wear all red and have red banners. Reds and Yellows. Again Thailand makes it so easy for us foreigners.

But again, protesting doesn't play well on the global news services and the westerners get skiddish rather easy in this post 9/11 world. Not me, nor my wife. Thailand holds the promise of lax censorship laws, Burger King, sidewalks, and ladyboy cabaret. With the Bacon Cheese Whopper and clothing that fits in mind, we took a weekend to Thailand 2 weeks ago, in the midst of a lull in the Yellow/Red protest/counterprotest cycle. 

It was a ghost town. A really desperate ghost town. The problem is, and what the Yellows and Reds seemed to suffer an amnesia about, is that Thailand is a tourist destination. Tourism is the constant income source over the fast buck of cheap labor. Well, with both shot in the foot and limping off, Thailand doesn't have much to do. Crowds of hawkers with no one to sell shit to, attractions with nobody to go to, and the ladyboys singing Tom Jones to one sleazy looking North American and a lone Korean businessman. The protesters, Red or Yellow were and still are upper middle class. Doctors and Lawyers and Students who could afford a few days off to make banners and stick it to the man as such. The pirate DVD sellers, the hemp bag hawkers and the ladyboys don't have that option. Everyday is a hustle, and the bourgeoisie in their need to loudly let their indignity be known have scared off the very people who made them. Those dollars, and they are dollars by and large (or Euros) drive the economy. They're not always 100% on the legal, but once they are in the economy, they tend to stay domestic. 

Nobody could predict that the global economy would choose the pre holiday season to melt down, but to launch on a good clean government bullshit campaign in the midst of this century's Great Depression seems suicidal, or masochistic. Or both. But, as I've seen firsthand, it's those at the very bottom, the people, man, woman or both who are suffering. 

Stop Making Sense

Watching the series Stargate SG-1 has been a healthy source of discussion between my wife and myself recently. Topics from Richard Dean Anderson (who might be another candidate for my Scott Bakula film idea if Mr. Quantum Leap falls through)to the burgeoning British Columbian film scene(like Hollywood, but with more of that back yard Christmas lights and Handycam feel). 

Of course there are the holes in the plot, some of them big enough to hide an F-350 SuperDuty in (honestly who bounces around to other planets without basic antibiotics?), but otherwise it's a great way to lose an hour. Much better than anything Nicolas Cage has put out in the last ten years (I'm dying for the sequel to Con Air after sitting through The Knowing). Mostly Stargate SG-1 is a great excuse to build on those wacky episodes of Star Trek like when they all ended up in 1920s Prohibition. Aliens that are actually humans (boy does that save on the budget) and any excuse to put Armin Shimerman into a costume.

Stargate SG-1 (and a couple of highballs) made me think of time travel, and of a incident a few years back. I used to go to a fair number of music majors' recitals and whatnot at the university in my home town (didn't go to the ones at the university I actually attended, because well, it wasn't as "dangerous" I guess). I did a lot of stuff at the university in my hometown out of perceived entitlement, "sticking it to The Man" sort of shit. Anyway, I was walking out semi satisfied when I brushed past a dude. I looked the guy in eye, and for some reason I was convinced this was me for another Sliders-esque reality. My own personal end up in the past and dress up and have an easy to swallow philosophical moral or contemporary societal critique all within an hour of network programming. 

This dude was the reality where I did chores, enjoyed jam bands and drove a late model Lexus. The reality where I had kids with banal names and went to asshole factories like the above mentioned university. I dutifully sold all my Alice In Chains CDs when I got "serious" and secretly hoped that the kids would rebel a little more thoughtfully than smoking shitty pot and endorsing the Carson Daily Lifestyle. This dude sort of begged me not to become him, and so I retreated to the jungles of Southeast Asia.

I think if I had put a Flux Capacitor into my 89 Civic and managed to get it's 4 cylinders up to 88 MPH, what would happen? If I was to slip back into 1995 and give myself stock tips and a talk about the underground music scene, would it help any? Or would this sudden injection of cool on 13 or 14 year old me create a coolness imbalance in the Earth's magnetic field and turn the future into this sprawling Terminator future, where machines with red eyes play In On The Killtaker and quote John Cusack as they drive over human skulls? Would it?

Maybe it's early signs of Swine Flu, which the media blitz on has reminded me of what a great movie 12 Monkeys is and how little I realized it when I saw it. This in turn reminds me of how difficult it would be to find a copy of 12 Monkeys here in Vietnam because the natives don't watch anything beyond the level of a 12 year old girl and the tourists and expats all want to watch deplorable shit like The Knowing. At least I can sit around watching Stargate SG-1, thinking about all the wonderful planets out there that look like British Columbia.

The Entertainer

One of my most favourite verses, and poignant critiques (the most to say in the least amount of time/sub textbook length) is in Billy Joel's  The Entertainer. He's lamenting that his life's work, his magnum opus, is "cut down to 3.05". While not commenting about length equaling an automatically great piece of art, indeed one of the most significant works in the history of American Underground music is Minor Threat's "Straight Edge", which is only 45 seconds long. I often complain that in film today, that the current trend of making big budget films longer is merely a disguise for lack of content. I lament the death of the 90 minute action film. The come around on this is a problem I've suffered with this blog. Two actually.

1) No reader comments

2) Despite an almost infinite amount of time to find, process, discuss, digest information, I personally have less to say in an even less than coherent fashion.

The recent posts, few that they are, have been long, perhaps longer than necessary, owing to an introduction or demonstrating a historical predilection for long windedness. So lets today break it down in 3.30 type segments, as that is more or less the idea length for a cross format radio "hit".

Due to the amount of free time and the general state of the world (and living in a former combat zone) I've been playing multiple combat simulation games for Playstation 2. The conclusion is that despite combat being a part of everyone's life everyday (either you are participating directly, i.e. shooting people or you are indirectly participating: playing Call of Duty, watching the History Channel, or demonstrating against Darfur). Combat is inescapable, which for me, highlights the choice to make these games so blatantly "unrealistic". I worry about the historical and even psychological ramifications of this. Even such violence driven fair as the Rambo series didn't escape from the fact that war is bad, and it will fuck you up. Despite blowing up a small town and kicking Brian Dennehy (and a young David Caruso) to the curb, Rambo ends up in rumpled, hysterical tears at what Vietnam did to him and his squad. There is no such scene in Call of Duty or SOCOM Navy Seals.

My wife and I regularly drink in an Irish themed bar, run by a Vietnamese woman and her Singaporean husband. An American and an Australian, in an Irish Pub in Vietnam run by... well you get the picture. This is the stuff that Thomas Friedman built his career on, what allows him to write shit like The World is Flat and be quoted and cited by budding historians, economists, and political science majors. Globalisation is doing some really weird shit in really weird places. And I don't think the good quite outweighs the bad yet.

My wife and I went to a music festival this past weekend put on by a motorcycle club and a land mine awareness charity. The bill was almost all southeast Asian, with New Zealand and Australia contributing. The most obvious thing for me was that only one band on the bill was made up of exclusively folks from Vietnam. And this band sucked ass. It was the worst elements of post Nirvana Alternative and Metal all on one stage. It shat me this was the best the promoters could come up with, but also leads me to the question was this the ONLY thing the promoters could come up with? I can't believe that a nation with as much of the population being under 30 as Vietnam doesn't have a more present youth culture. Or to put it in Punk Rock terms, that the kids don't have anything to say. Personally or politically they are silent. The best band at the fest was I Am David Sparkle, who despite the lackluster handle, killed everything and didn't use a single word. The other bands, from places such as Thailand, Philippines, Singapore (where I Am David Sparkle hail from), were competent bands with an earnestness that I could get behind even if the music didn't move me. This is missing from Vietnam.

And there it all is.

Everything's Gone Green

I can never remember when Earth Day is, and I suppose really it doesn't matter much.  Thinking "green" tends to be a luxury for those who can afford the privilege. The attitude in the developing world is that green initiatives are seen as new tools to arrest development. The idea is that the developED world got to be developed by raping and pillaging (maximum use of resources) so why can't the world's developING populations do the same? We set the example and monkey see, monkey do.

Not a day goes past where I don't see somebody dumping coolant in the gutter, pissing on temple walls or trying to drive a Hummer down a 700 year old street. Supposedly there are mountains around Hanoi, but I've only seen them when I've been 5 kilometers out of town. The lake that I live on is full of trash and human shit, it regularly has dissolved oxygen fluctuations that result in massive fish kills. People run air conditioners with the doors and windows wide open. Cheery isn't it?

Here's a bit from an Earth Day past:

I visited Centralia the other night, how about that's my Earth Day celebration. I cannot think of a greater convergence of environmental, economic, cultural, and class issues that are more than slightly pressing in one small forgotten town. It's all there plain as day. The local youths, bored and resigned to floundering lives, drink away their future and toss the glass to the side, as the sulfur steam pours from open sores in the dirt. A thriving town of multiethnicity robbed of a future so I can leave my lights on all night. The decaying Euclid haul trucks sitting in their oil and coolant like old people wasting away at a nursing home, shitting themselves out of neglect. The sound of the metal rusting screams that once, I was important, I made a few people alot of money. I was powerful and mighty. The men who made me, who owned me and drove me are gone, perhaps decaying not far from where I return back to my base elements. The screen doors on the few abandoned houses that remain, keep a beat for the screams of the 785Cs that toil barely a mile away.

The sounds of leviathan pieces of machinery provided background as I looked at tombstones that bore names I could not pronounce, yet lived about as long I have if they were lucky. Their lives lived with little control over their fates. Dictated by the "market", "what's good for the company", and "tough times". Cannon fodder for the economy. The world was the neighborhood, but the neighborhood was the world. Drinking away the chronic aches and pains, praying to the vague notion of god to save you from the equally vague notion of the economy.

 

Dad's Army/Hogan's Heroes

I decided that I'd had enough of the Grand Theft Auto series after I reached a crescendo on par with the last movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I knew I had gone as high as I could as I did doughnuts over a drug deal gone bad in my 1989 Honda CRX clone as Rod Stewart's "Young Turks" blazed on. Somehow I knew it would never be this good again.

With Iraq, Afghanistan, Pirates, North Korea and watching Over There in it's entirety (and well, living in MF'n Vietnam), I decided to get a hold of some combat simulations, 1st person shooters, whatever the kids are calling them these days. I bought as many SOCOM, Call of Duty, and miscellaneous others that I could find. The others included a modern battlefield type one(which subsequently didn't work, perhaps the biggest political statement out of all of them) and a American Civil War game (wins the WTF? category and also turns out to be my favourite). 

Lets start with the Call of Duty series, or as I like to call them: An Afternoon of Programming On The History Channel: The Video Game. You guessed it, Call of Duty focuses on World War II. You jump characters and theaters, it starts off in the Pacific Theater, moves to Europe and then back to the Pacific. 

As a disclaimer I should note that I to this day hold the Super Nintendo as the penultimate video game platform and had an 8 year isolation from console gaming in the late 90s to mid double 0's. Gaming for me then was Sim City. Coming back into modern console gaming I found that there are many more buttons crammed onto the controller now and much more is expected than point and shoot and jump. I thought that GTA had prepared me for this, but Call of Duty proved otherwise.

The controls proved to be clumsy and unintuitive at best (I think the ISO needs to develop a standard for what buttons shoot and reload). The character moved like a fat guy holding in a Burger King shit, not the best when storming a machine gun nest. Coming off the GTA series I found the environment a little constrictive too, but then most of the Pacific Theater was on islands smaller than Lycoming County PA. My Commanding Officer sounded like R. Lee Ermey which added a touch of class. It feels like a lot of the budget of the game went into weapons, the sounds and the physics of period weaponry. 

Call of Duty 3 was no better, it was like being stuck in a rat maze surrounded by people doing awful Robert De Niro and Matt Damon impersonations. The game play was slightly better, but all of the Call of Duty games have this nasty way of fragging the player in that it's easier to pick up a hand grenade than it is to get rid of it. Much of the same could be said for Medal of Honor series of games. Same shit, different buttons and character actors.

The SOCOM series, or everything that is in some way distantly related to Tom Clancy (which should tell us that it's strictly fiction), was much more challenging, and not in the way the game makers intended. In SOCOM Navy Seals (ooooo Navy Seals!) Combined Assault, one plays as a member of the highly elite and expensively equipped Navy Seals Special Operations team. This in turn means that every time one goes into battle it involves a whole Best Buy full of pointless electronic extras. Tasers, GPS devices, night vision goggles, binoculars, shit, shit and more shit. It made me long for the Ye Olde Days, when it was one man and a musket. SOCOM involved the least amount of actual combat and the least fun value. More time was spent on "goals" and trying not to shoot the AI players who went they weren't standing in front of my rife, came around on my flank and were promptly shot for being mistaken as enemy combatants. 

The Civil War game I found was actually co-designed by The History Channel, dispensing with any middle man. It also was the easiest one to learn the controls for and get down to what these games are all about, the kill. The game is played out over various episodes from the actual American Civil War, but not in chronological order, and not always for the same team. Sometimes I was a Y'all'n southern gentleman and the next mission a right good Yankee. But as I said, the fun was in the pure shooting and killing. No bullshit, bare minimum objectives and only one weapon to choose from at a time. No sidearms, automatics, bazookas, kazoos or bells and whistles, just a repeating rife and righteous glory. Or something like that.

The real failure of all of these games and perhaps the genre as a whole in my opinion is that the fail to deliver the reality of war. This is "war" as imagined by Risk playing Tom Clancy reading armchair riders. People who continue to promote this Flying Leathernecks vision of modern combat. Nowhere in these games did I burn villages, have my weapon jam, endure a jingoistic CO. I did not shoot at kids, coked up with no future and a Chinese made RPG. I did not yank gold fillings nor cut off ears. I didn't sit and watch as tank crews burned alive. I didn't, after the mission was over, get blinding drunk, beat my kids and caterwaul like Jim Morrison after the 5 minute mark in The End. My platoon wasn't suicide bombed and I didn't trip over CNN pretty boys trying to get journalist credibility, feeling guilty that all the "good" wars are long gone. These games are the only games that are sold and consumed in Asia now, beating out everything except the soccer/football games. These selective episodic versions of history, with all the horror and ambiguity forgotten about. It weighs on me as I find that I want to pull a Private Pyle on the R. Lee Ermey character in Call of Duty.

No none of that sort of "reality" got in my way. Maybe I'm too old for video games any more, or maybe my niche is is fighting the War on Drugs with a monster truck and Journey's Escape album. But then I had to explain that Cabela's Big Bass Adventure wasn't a real fishing simulator because you fished without two cases of Schaffer tall boys and didn't say "fuck it" at 2pm and head down to the VFW.

Welfare Love

I'll offer this link to a piece about Dubai as a conversation starter:

Dubai

It was a rather thorough article, although I'm not sure if I agree about some of the authors conclusions and the overall tone suggests that the author really didn't want to go to Dubai anyway.

The developing world is like the Wild West. Anything goes, and anybody makes anything go. The miscreants, sociopaths, criminals, dreamers, delusional and desperate are the ones that end up on any frontier. They are forced out either literally or by societal norms. England used Australia as one big Section 8 style housing project for 100 years. Imperial Spain gave ships and crews to all of it's psychopaths in order to conquer "the new world" and America sold it's poor on the vision of The West as not a treeless mountain desert with people who already thought of it as theirs, but as a paradise that God himself thought America should give them.

We probably aren't the shining beacons of all development has to offer, but then again the not so bright side has often pushed us here in some way or another. Fast money, easy non permanent immigration, just even the prospect of a job in some cases. 

Most of the time it's not the Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now equation that I relate to, it's more often the Robert Redford of Jeremiah Johnson. You take to the edges of society because they don't want you, and by the time you've figured this out, you really don't want society much either.

As to me currently, I'm watching the entire Star Trek original series and here's one observation thus far: Modern 1 hour television series, when issued on DVD work out to between 44 and 47 minutes. Star Trek works out to between 53 and 55 minutes an episode.