Asia – Page 2 – Josh Philip Ross

January 29, 2018

Unleashing Korean Productivity

Once again, Bloomberg has rated Korea as an innovation hub. And once again, Korea’s weakest statistic is productivity per worker, though a jump from 32nd place to 21st is impressive.

So what gives? After more than a year at Samsung, I see two main causes of Korea’s low worker productivity. The first, most obvious cause is long hours. Many Koreans (though, thankfully, not those in my division) feel like they have to get to work before their bosses and leave after, regardless of whether they have anything important to do. They put on a show of being at work for very long hours, but exhausted workers don’t actually produce very much. They’d be more effective if they just went home and slept.

This culture, thankfully, is changing. The president is pushing policies to limit excessively long hours, and companies like Samsung are making changes. In my division at Samsung, it’s now against the rules to work more than 52 hours in a week — still a lot of hours, but it means you can’t put in 12-hour days and then come in on the weekend without a notice getting sent to HR and the CEO. There are twice-a-month events called Smile Day, when you’re encouraged to go home early, and Wednesdays are Family Day, so people are also pushed out the door a little bit. And vacation days are mandatory: if you don’t take them by the end of the year, you’re actually not allowed to come in to work until they’re all gone. None of these reforms is a magic fix, but they’re helping to push the culture away from overwork and toward more efficient time management.

The second cause of low productivity is perhaps harder to pinpoint, and harder to reform, but I think it has much to do with the top-down, authoritarian culture that still rules many companies. Workers put in a lot of effort do get something done, only to be told to do it all again differently. I’ve worked on projects that carried on for months in a state of constant crisis, everything needing to be done immediately even though the release date was still far in the future. Instead of “measure twice, cut once,” it was more like “chop everything to pieces and glue it all back together,” and we did it over and over again. The final result was the sloppy hodge-podge you would expect.

This too is changing, though maybe not as visibly or as quickly. The leader of that project was edged out, and there’s a notable lack of panicked frenzy these days in my division. When workers are given the time and space to think and to do things right, they produce greater value. Just think what we could do if we added that latent worker productivity to the many factors already standing in Korea’s favor!

January 1, 2018

The New Year of No Particular Ambition

Last year, after a tedious New Year’s Eve party, I nearly ended up in a fistfight over a taxi.

The year before that, I stood on a cold, rainy beach in Da Nang, enduring hours of Vietpop for what turned out to be one small firework. The highlight of the evening was hearing my Vietnamese girlfriend declare that “Vietnam has the most beautiful bitches in the world,” by which she meant beaches.

In past years, I’ve been to countless forgettable parties, paid too much for mediocre dinners, wasted a grim evening at Menahata Bulgarian Bar that was not at all like the video for Start Wearing Purple. I welcomed the millennium at my cousin’s house in Washington, DC, where she had forgotten to throw the party she’d invited me to because she’d just had a baby. About the only really fun thing I can ever remember doing for New Year’s Eve is going to concerts for bands I would’ve loved seeing any night of the year. Mostly Primus. Although it was after one of those concerts that my car caught on fire.

Refugees

Because New Year’s Eve is so artificial and forced, it’s pretty much the opposite of spontaneous or interesting fun. It’s fitting that the most famous New Year’s Eve celebration involves plastic celebrities in a fake place full of revelers who endure hours of frozen huddling without access to toilets. It’s like a North Korean performance of fun. If the Times Square revelers were refugees, Amnesty would complain about the conditions. And then Jenny McCarthy would try to stop Doctors Without Borders from vaccinating the children.

Because New Year’s Eve is so overhyped, everyone tries way too hard. Because so many people are trying so hard, there are too many events and parties, and the energy gets diffused. You end up at a bar or a party where the hosts are freaking out all night that not enough people have shown up, and everyone attending is worried that something way better is happening somewhere else without them, and the people working hate that they’re working on New Year’s Eve. If you’re with a date, there’s way too much pressure, and the people without dates are all setting the bar way too high. Then it’s midnight and nobody knows what to do, and then the party is over.

No uniformed personnel

My family has had some terrible luck with New Year’s Eve. My grandfather had more than one New Year’s Eve heart attack that landed him in the emergency room. Once my mom got a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, and the paramedic apologetically asked her if she’d been putting anything interesting up there (she hadn’t).

One year my brother got his car stuck in the mud. A cop saw the car and called my parents. When my parents asked if anyone was in the car, the cop said he didn’t know because he didn’t want to get his boots muddy checking the car. Turns out my brother was fine and had just decided to sleep there until morning, but since then my parents have considered it a good New Year’s Eve if they’ve avoided speaking with any uniformed personnel.

A quiet new year

This year — during my year of no particular ambition — I spent New Year’s Eve at home, by myself. I ordered in. I binge-watched Parks & Rec. I took a nap, and later I took another nap. I had a bath, listened to some jazz, and then I watched the ringing of the Bosingak bell on Korean TV. For a while at midnight I could see some fireworks in the distance from my balcony. My New Year’s Eve was quiet and relaxing, cost very little, and exceeded my expectations.

This morning I woke up, made myself a cup of coffee, and watched the first sunrise of 2018.

Happy new year.

November 25, 2017

Beautiful Bombs

Go see 아륾다운밤 (Beautiful Bombs).

Go see this fun, gloriously dopey little indie band while they’re still fun and indie. Go see them while they’re still playing in no-cover Hongdae basements and about half the crowd is their moms and the other bands on the bill and their songs are still about being rock stars and how nice their grandmothers are (really).

I went to see Beautiful Bombs for the second time last night, where they were the opening act at their own single release party, inside a club smaller than the old Berkeley Square, for those who remember such things. Korea has what must be the politest punk scene in the world, so there was none of the skeeviness that hung around the old clubs I used to go to in my Bay Area youth — the Stone, the Omni — and of course clubs these days are smoke-free and have good digital sound systems and I’m not stoned, so everything’s a lot less blurry than it was back then. But Beautiful Bombs brings some of that energy. They’ve got the tight bounce of a band that really, really likes playing together, and their lead guitarist is pretty amazing. He reminds me of Slash, which is an idiotic thing to say, but I’m saying it because I’m totally fanboy crushing over an indie club band. If I were 17 and in high school, I would put a Beautiful Bombs logo sticker on my binder, and if you mentioned it because you knew who they were, we would be friends.

There were other bands too. 아디오스오디오 (Adios Audio) is a guitar-keys-drums trio whose lead singer has a Busan twang, and they play what she called “emo-core,” which is less bad than it sounds. She has a clear, powerful voice and writes lovely melodies, and you can hear the Jaurim influence, which isn’t a bad thing. 레드닷 (Reddotts) was the rare Korean band that brought a little bit of rock-and-roll menace to the proceedings. They’ve got a dirty groove and a tiny little tatted-up bass player who’s only about as tall as her instrument, and they’re also pretty worth seeing. And ABTB, the most professional of the bunch, reminded me a lot of those late-nineties bands I never got into, like Filter and Tool and whatnot, and they were very loud, and we left after their first or second song.

But I’m all about Beautiful Bombs. Go see them while they’re still fresh and happy and playing music because they love it. Go see them before the guitarist gets poached by some older, richer, boringer band that pays better, or the singer faces reality and joins his dad’s company, or some Korean record exec convinces them to make one of those terrible OST ballads with the video that starts with a bunch of text to let you know it’ll be a terrible OST ballad. Go see them while their following is still so small that they’ll recognize you if you show up a couple times.

You’ll have fun. They’ll have fun. And what else is there, really?

November 25, 2017

Korean Hit Parade

I’ve been listening my way through the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 for each year, going back to the early 1950s (when there was, blessedly, only a year-end top 30). I’m now up to 2000, and it’s been an interesting journey — something I should write about sometime.

Well, today I discovered that Korean streaming music service Melon has something similar: charts of top Korean hits by year going back all the way to 1964. (Before that, Koreans just listened to the sound of their own poverty, I guess.)

Should be an interesting musical journey to see how Korean popular music changed over the years.

November 14, 2017

Giving Back to Southeast Asia

I was very fortunate to be able to take time off and travel for 202 days in Southeast Asia in 2015-2016 — mostly in countries where the dollar stretches pretty far because of the disparity in wealth between the country where I happened to be born and the places I was visiting. I decided to give back, in a small way, by pledging a certain amount of money to charity for each day I spent in each country.

Thailand: 72 days

Because I spent the most days in Thailand, I split my donation between two charities.

My closest Thai friend was, like many Thais, reverent toward the royal family. I have my own outsider opinions about all that, but I respect my friend and her values for her own country. The Association for the Promotion of the Status of Women, under royal patronage, provides emergency shelter, health services, vocational training, and many other services to women in Thailand.

The SET Foundation gives scholarships to those in need, with the unique principle of supporting students for a full twelve years, from elementary through collegiate studies, rather than just for a semester or two.

Malaysia: 11 days

As you travel Malaysia, it’s hard not to notice the oil palms: acres and acres of them, a giant monoculture dominating the landscape. I didn’t visit Malaysian Borneo on my trip, but I went there recently, and I discovered the Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre, which helps orangutans who’ve lost their mothers to recover and prepare for reintegration into the wild. Malaysia’s unique wildlife is precious and under threat — the oil palm plantations are pressing in, and the lumber industry wants what trees are left — but places like the Sepilok Centre have the potential to drive up the economic value of conservation and diversify the local economy by bringing tourism. And in the meantime, the preservation and restoration work they do is saving unique animals in a unique environment.

Vietnam: 44 days

I met my friend Christina Bui in Myanmar through a chain of travel connections, and ran into her again in Saigon and Hanoi. She works at Pacific Links Foundation, which helps to protect people in Vietnam from human trafficking — being forced into factory work, domestic work, and the like — and empowers women and communities in Vietnam. Slavery is bad and Christina is good, so this was a pretty easy choice.

Myanmar: 23 days

Yangon is a time capsule. Decades of misrule have had the perverse effect of preserving the older part of the city much as it was under British colonial rule. Yangon Heritage Trust is working to preserve and restore the city’s remarkable architecture before it all gets torn down and turned into KFCs, and I hope they succeed in making Yangon the gem of a city that it deserves to be, like today’s Hoi An or Penang but on a much larger scale. (Nothing specific against KFC, by the way. I threw up in the bathroom of the Yangon KFC and they were very polite about it.)

Cambodia: 8 days

Cambodia is rife with terrible NGOs and scammy voluntourism projects, so I wanted to find an organization with a good rating on Charity Navigator, and Cambodia Children’s Fund has that. They take “a holistic, family-based approach” to childhood education, which is sorely needed in this poor and damaged country. They recognize that there are root problems like hunger and violence that can undermine education, so they try to deal with all of these issues as they help young people get the schooling they need and deserve.

Laos: 23 days

Perhaps the most dangerous thing I did in Southeast Asia was go for a walk in Laos.

Laos has more unexploded ordnance (UXO) per capita than anywhere else on earth, a sorry result of a decade of American bombing during the Vietnam War. On a tour of the Plain of Jars, on a trail that was supposed to be cleared, my guide suddenly jumped back and pointed. “That’s a cluster bomb detonator.” He then told me how his brother died: he’d gone fishing and was cooking up his catch in a rice field when the heat triggered an old pineapple bomb that took his head off.

I split my Laos donations between two organizations that deal with the ongoing disaster my country left behind. COPE gives people their lives back by providing prosthetics and rehabilitation to UXO survivors and others with mobility-related disabilities, while the Mine Awareness Group (MAG) works to demine Laos (and other places) and educate the local people about how to avoid UXO accidents, thereby reducing COPE’s potential clientele. I saw both organizations at work in Laos, and at one point even had to stop driving while MAG blew up some UXO they’d found in a field — a field that, when cleared, could provide food and income to a Laotian family.

Indonesia: 18 days

Yayasan Usaha Mulia (YUM) – Foundation for Noble Work has been around a long time and does holistic community work focused on education and alleviating poverty. Finding a good charity in Indonesia — especially one that wasn’t religiously based — was a bit difficult, but YUM seems to have a decent track record.

Singapore: 3 days

For Singapore, I cheated. Singapore is a wealthy country, so there’s not a tremendous need to give there. Instead, I donated to Singapore-based Choson Exchange, an innovative NGO that supports North Koreans with hands-on entrepreneurship training, helping to create an ownership culture and a better standard of living for North Koreans. I’ve met the founder and some of the team, and they’re passionate but not naive about what they’re up against. I admire what they do and wish them success.

November 5, 2017

Climbing Gwanaksan

On a cool, bright autumn day, my friend and I set off for a hike up Gwanaksan. We started at the entrance to the mountain near Seoul National University (after some morning confusion in which my friend went to the subway station for Seoul National University of Education instead). The road was thick with hikers in their gear, ready to take on Seoul’s second-highest mountain.

Armed with KakaoMap, we plotted a route. Everyone seemed to be headed along the road, but that looked like the longer way to the peak. If we cut across a stream and along the top of the SNU campus, there was a more direct trail.

We followed campus streets until KakaoMap indicated that we should make an abrupt turn up a steep embankment and into the woods.

That the trail was little more than lightly ruffled underbrush should have been an indication that we weren’t on the best of all possible routes. And we had somehow neglected the very obvious geometrical reality that a more direct route up a mountain is also a steeper route.

The hike was rough at first, but not impossibly so. It was just steep and not well marked. We climbed quickly, and soon we had spectacular views of the mountains and Seoul beyond.

But then things got tricky. Time and again we came to a granite outcropping with no clear way around, and each time the GPS showed that the path was straight up. These rocky passages were scary, with scrabbles along cliff edges and places where the only way forward was to grab a tree branch or a bit of rock and pull ourselves up. We kept going in part because the thought of turning back and going back down all these rocks was scarier than pushing on.

Eventually we came to a point of no return. There was a thick knotted rope hanging down a flat granite face, and also a kind of metal stirrup hanging from a chain, meant to be used as a foothold. It was dangerous. If we lost our grip, we would be falling straight down the rock, and the momentum would probably throw us further down still, over several succeeding cliffs. My friend went first and made it up, tugging hard and ignoring the stirrup. My adrenaline surging, I followed. There was no turning back now.

The hike continued, up over still more improbable rock faces, but at last our route merged with a more popular trail, and we were again surrounded by hikers. There were more passages with ropes and cables, several of them terrifying. I was glad I had my hiking gloves.

And then at last we emerged up at the peak, craggy and beautiful and topped with an elaborate weather and transmitter station.

It felt like getting back on solid ground after being at sea. From here on out, it was all marked trails with built staircases or stairs cut into the rocks, as we made our way to the spectacular Yeonjuam shrine.

We watched a cat leap among the cliffs, then made our way up, stopping to buy popsicles before entering the shrine and watching people bow as an amplified monk chanted.

From there, it was a long walk down the mountain again, this time on a much longer and less difficult path, until at last we emerged in Gwacheon and had ourselves a well-earned dinner of galbi-tang (beef rib stew).

Today, absolutely everything hurts, especially my right ankle, which I twisted on the long walk down when I was tired, and my right wrist, which took a lot of weight on those desperate tugs over boulders. Korean mountains are not high, but they’re no joke. I’m glad I took on that particular route up Gwanaksan, and I hope I never do it again.

August 11, 2017

The Korean Situation

I’m scared. I’ll admit it.

I don’t think anything is about to happen, and I have reasons for that. South Korea is going about its business as if everything is normal, because what the hell else can we do? But it’s unnerving to have talk of fire and fury directed at the place you live. I’ve started thinking about what I’d do if I had to leave.

Setting aside the rhetoric, though, it doesn’t appear that either the United States or North Korea is preparing for an actual war. The US has sent some planes our way, but that’s about it. No carrier group, no calling up of reservists like before the Gulf War and the Iraq War, no massive movement of troops or materiel. Soldiers in Korea and Guam are still in their barracks. (For what it’s worth, moving any great number of troops into South Korea would require at least the tacit approval of the government here, which has a pretty serious stake in not getting its country destroyed.)

On the North Korean side, I haven’t seen any reports of big troop movements: no tanks massing by the DMZ, no large-scale mustering, no panic in Pyongyang.

The biggest sign to look for — and there’s no hint of it — is a move to begin evacuating American citizens. There are well over a hundred thousand of us here, including diplomats and their families, and the US is likely to want to move us out of the way before doing anything big. So for the moment, at least, nothing big seems to be planned.

But it’s the small and unplanned that scares me. A planned large-scale war is something Trump’s generals are very unlikely to encourage, but I worry that our president might order a missile strike on impulse, without waiting for our military to be ready for North Korea’s response. What that response would be, we can’t know. It could be anything from total silence to a strike at Guam to a massive bombardment of Seoul.

I don’t think any of this is likely, mind you. But it’s not pleasant to consider the odds, or to keep hoping that something serious happens somewhere else in the world to distract the president. I hope this passes soon, and we can all move on with our lives.

July 16, 2017May 11, 2020

How to Respond to Hate

A couple of weeks ago, my sister and her husband, Shoshana and Ari Simones, came home from vacation to find a swastika and “JEW” spray-painted on their mailbox and on the fence beside their home.

This is in Phoenix, Arizona. This is in 2017.

This is a symbol that represents a policy of extermination of Jews through mass murder. It’s not nice to discover that someone who knows where you live wants to see you killed.

“We’re not afraid, we’re not ashamed”

A first instinct is to want to make it disappear as quickly as possible. A kind neighbor covered it with paper, and after calling the police, even tried to get it cleaned up before my sister and her husband got home. Although it’s probably good that she didn’t.

With great bravery, strength, tact and intelligence, my sister and brother-in-law decided to leave up the graffiti and go public.

With help from the Arizona Anti-Defamation League, Shoshana and Ari began talking to the press — AZ Central, ABC 15, Fox 10, 12 News, and more — making sure that the coverage always noted this was not an isolated incident, but part of a spike in anti-Semitic acts in Phoenix this year. Eventually the story went national, reaching the USA Today. “We’re not afraid,” my sister said, again and again. “We’re not ashamed. We’re proud Jews.”

The response from the community, at every level, was a rebuke to those who would intimidate and threaten Jews or other minorities. From the very beginning, to their credit, the Phoenix Police Department took the incident seriously, referring it to their special bias crimes unit, and the FBI stepped in as well. And the mayor of Phoenix, Greg Stanton, gave Shoshana and Ari a call to express his support. At a more local level, neighbors sent flowers, came by to ask if there was anything they could do, sent notes of support. Strangers became friends.

“I definitely smile when I see it”

Of course, my sister and brother-in-law weren’t going to leave up a symbol of hate forever. But rather than cover it up as if nothing had happened, they decided to throw a party, inviting the community to come and repaint their mailbox with messages of love and inclusion.

From a symbol of hate, Shoshana and Ari brought the community together and created a symbol of joy. “I definitely smile when I see it,” my sister told AZ Central.

It’s notable that in the middle of all this, after Shoshana and Ari said they’d leave up the word “JEW” and write “PROUD” above it, someone — presumably the perpetrator — came in the middle of the night and covered over the graffiti with what appeared to be the same black spray paint that had been used in the first place.

It’s impossible to know why. Perhaps the perpetrator felt ashamed. Maybe it was a local kid whose parents got mad and made him cover it up. Or maybe the perpetrator was angry that his act, far from creating the intended fear and intimidation, was turning into a rallying point of support for Jews.

My friend Alena Tansey works for USAID, has been stationed in conflict and post-conflict regions like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, and studied genocide prevention at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. I talked to her about what happened, and she said that the best response to hate crimes isn’t to ignore them, and it’s not to be shocked, either. Instead, it’s best to acknowledge that these things happen, see any larger pattern that they might be part of, and then do whatever possible to empower the victims and disempower the perpetrators.

Which is exactly what Shoshana and Ari had done, and I couldn’t be prouder.

Do a mitzvah

Shoshana and Ari also made a request of the community. The “entrance fee” for their party was one good deed, or mitzvah, as we say in Hebrew. They asked people to join them in spreading light. So if you’re horrified by the act of hate that started this whole thing, please take one conscious action to bring positivity into the world. I’d be delighted if you could share it with me here.

For me, here in Korea, my good deed was to stand up and be counted at the Seoul LGBT Pride festival this weekend (I’ll have more to say about that soon). Like Jews, LGBT people are often the targets of hate, and the thousands of angry protesters outside Seoul Pride were intimidating, to be sure. But there was joy and celebration in the face of it. Despite the pouring rain, tens of thousands of people came to express themselves and their support for a more inclusive society at the largest LGBT event in Korea’s history.

There is no way to prevent every last incident of hate. The real danger, though, is not in these acts of hate themselves, but in the silence that too often surrounds them. We must stand up as individuals and communities to counter fear with love.

July 9, 2017July 9, 2017

A Communion of Music

As a destination, Daegu doesn’t have much to recommend it. I’d come down from Seoul for one reason only: to see my friend Dong-Won Kim accompany the great pansori singer Bae Il-dong. So when we arrived at the address Dong-Won had sent us, far on the outskirts of Daegu, and found ourselves in the office of a loan shark next door to a tire shop, I was not amused.

After some frantic messaging, we got an updated address that took us deep into one of those ubiquitous beige apartment complexes, and at last we spotted Dong-Won waving his arms on the far side of a parking lot. With Korean musicians, it’s always a little yeogi-cheogi, a little here and there. But perched above a GS25 convenience store in the unlikeliest spot was this delightful little music cafe with an upright bass against the wall and a pair of master musicians getting ready to perform.

We were exactly nowhere, which is where a lot of the best things happen.

Intangible

We arrived in the middle of a screening of the documentary Intangible Asset No. 82, which tells the story of an Australian jazz drummer who comes to Korea in search of an elderly percussionist he’s obsessed with. Dong-Won becomes his guide, introducing him to some of Korea’s finest musicians — including Bae Il-dong — and providing about the best possible introduction to Korean traditional music.

When the film was over, I at last got to hear Bae Il-dong in person. His voice is an extraordinary instrument, raw but supple. There’s nothing showbiz about what he does. His only real trick is absolute mastery of his art form born from total dedication. He once spent seven years singing at a waterfall to develop his voice and find his sound.

Pansori is a storytelling art form, born as a communal activity among the lower classes in Southern Korea in the 19th century, full of humor and pathos, moments of sorrow and moments of joy. Il-dong sang a famous piece in which an old, blind man is reunited with the daughter he thinks he sent to her death — a shock so profound that he recovers his sight. The performance was vivid enough that my friend could grasp the gist of it without understanding the words.

As for me, I was startled by how much I did understand. During the film and the concert — which had a lot of lecture mixed in — I became my friend’s Dong-Won, leaning in to let him know what was going on. And for the first time, I found myself following along with the words of the pansori, even laughing at a few of the jokes I caught.

Community

After the concert, heaps of food were brought in — hearty, traditional Korean stuff — and everybody stayed on to eat and drink together. Dong-Won explained that Korean music is communal, in which the musicians don’t just transmit emotion to the audience, but share in a collective emotional experience.

After a little while, an emcee got up and began to chatter. Dong-Won explained that he was actually a fine musician and dancer who’s known for his skills as a clown and comedian, and soon it was clear what he was up to. He started pulling people up from the audience and getting them to sing: traditional songs, sometimes with Dong-Won pressed into rhythm accompaniment or with a guitarist picking out some backing chords. And these people knew their stuff. No one was at Bae Il-dong’s level, but these were people who’d spent time learning Korean traditional music and dance. Or some of them were, anyway. As the evening went on, the emcee made sure everyone got a chance to do something, whether it was singing an old pop tune or doing a little dance. I got up to dance too, showing off what I can remember of my Korean moves and then putting on the traditional grandfather mask and doing the requisite drunkard’s dance.

Eventually my friend grabbed a guitar and sang some classic rock — Oasis, Pink Floyd — while Dong-Won played the box and I had some fun thumping along on the janggu. It’s not every day you get to play with a member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, so you’ve got to grab the opportunity when it comes. My friend sang, I drummed, people danced.

The road to nowhere

I said at the start that the best things often happen exactly nowhere. I’m thinking of a night in the little Burmese trekking village of Kalaw, where some guys at the back of a bar called Hi Snacks & Drinks got out acoustic guitars and sang the night away. I’m thinking of a pansori festival I saw on the banks of a river somewhere in Jeolla province when I lived here as a teacher. I’m thinking of a night spent in an obscure temple with just one other person — my Swiss shaman friend — sitting by the pagoda under the moonlight and listening to the chorus of cicadas and frogs. I’m thinking of northern Laos, where nothing happens, and of the house where I grew up in Marin County, California.

At the heart of Korean music is cyclicality: strong and soft, yang and yin, breath in and breath out, in every note and movement. Right now I’m leading just about the most yang existence imaginable, living in Gangnam and working for Samsung, but there’s an undertow of yin that’s calling to me.

“So save your money and then run away!” Dong-Won said, when we had a chance to talk about it.

Maybe.

“You and I have the same blood type,” he said. “Blood type W. Blood type wind.”

In the film, Dong-Won used a different metaphor from nature: you can be a lake, or you can be a river. A lake stays where it is, but a river is always carving out new paths, flowing where it’s never flowed before. Yeogi-cheogi.

He could have added that a river does this by letting go, not by force of will. I suppose that to heed the call of the yin is first of all to stop worrying about the yang. Things will go how they go. My life has taken enough surprising turns that if I go back over it in five-year increments, I realize that I never really had any idea what was coming. Why should now be any different?

June 10, 2017

Seoul Jazz Festival 2017

Over a glorious weekend of bright sun and clear skies, a corner of Seoul’s Olympic Park played host to the Seoul Jazz Festival. Spread across three indoor venues and one outdoor main stage, the festival was extraordinarily well run: good sound, shows that started and ended on time, few serious lines, minimal hassles. Because Koreans are mostly pretty honest and not prone to public violence, security could be handled by college kids doing cursory bag and wristband checks at the entrances to venues, while the main pavilion was technically outside of any restricted area and open to the public, and you could go a little further to the local convenience store if you wanted to. Across two long days, I saw no drunkenness, no violence, no real incidents of any kind. Well done, Korea!

There was no way to see all the performances, of course, because of all the overlapping shows. But here’s what I did see.

Day 1

Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble: Good Latin jazz of a thinky variety. Arturo is a helluva piano player, and he’s got a trombonist who can make Korean girls scream.

Echae Kang: A singer and violinist who does alternative rock that’s reminiscent of Jaurim. She’s definitely got something going on. Tremendously charistmatic, and her band is also very good. Definitely worth checking out.

두번재달/2nd Moon: So the schtick is that the singer is a young, handsome guy who does pretty traditional pansori — a traditional style of story singing — while the backing band plays a mishmash of folky Americana. The hall was packed and the Koreans seemed to go for it, but it left me cold. The pansori singing was good but probably wouldn’t have seemed extraordinary in a traditional setting, while the backing music was undistinguished, and the combination never melded into more than the sum of its parts.

Lianne La Havas: The highlight of the day and the most delightful surprise of the festival, Lianne La Havas is a British soul singer of Jamaican and Greek parentage. She played solo, just her voice and some very, very hip guitar playing. She sang mostly her own songs but also covered “Say a Little Prayer,” and it takes some guts to tackle a song everyone knows from the Aretha version. Her sense of rhythm is unerring, her lyrics are smart, and the songs are excellent. She reminded me at turns of Sade, Ani Di Franco, and Bill Withers.

Part of the charm of her set was her evident surprise and delight at finding a passionate fanbase in Korea. Crowds of Korean girls were singing along, hanging on her every word, calling out for favorites or just shouting that they loved her. I noticed this with a lot of the musicians, actually: they seemed very, very happy. Apparently the Seoul Jazz Festival treats its performers right, and it’s probably a relief, when your booking agent has told you that you’ll be playing at a park in the afternoon in South Korea, to discover an entirely professional setup with great sound and support.

지코/Zico: Korean hip hop. Unmemorable stuff for kids.

Avishai Cohen Quartet: Thorny, confrontational Israeli jazz with none of the decorum and studiousness that can make a lot of American and Scandinavian jazz these days so toothless. This is not easy music. Cohen takes traditional jazz and fragments it into shards, but his musicians have the rigor to hold the pieces together, and Cohen’s plaintive tone on the trumpet is what Miles Davis might have sounded like if he’d grown up hearing the shofar.

Day 2

오프온오프/OFFONOFF: Off off off.

Squirrel Nut Zippers: I saw the Squirrel Nuts way back in the 1990s, during the swing revival back then. Like me, they’re a lot older now. They still put on a great show with lots of energy and loopy antics, and they still suffer from the same fundamental flaw they’ve always had, which is that they’re just not such great musicians. They play swing with the skill of a ska band, and it’s not quite enough if you’ve grown up on the Count and the Duke and know what swing sounded like in the hands of people like Ben Webster and Lionel Hampton and Sweets Edison, et. al. The Squirrel Nut Zippers are the cotton candy of swing: colorful and fun, but they leave you hungry and slightly queasy.

Cecile McClorin Salvant: Salvant is a serious and skilled jazz musician of a particular sort. She grew up on classical and came to jazz late, and her approach — fishing up obscure old songs, often focused on the travails of underprivileged women of color — can feel like a graduate seminar on intersectional feminism. There’s something pedantic about it, and the music and musicality can seem secondary, even if the level of skill is hard to argue with. It never caught fire for me.

Tower of Power: Ho. Ly. Fuck.

Go see Tower of Power. Do it now.

Tower of Power, the Soul-Funk institution from Oakland, is in its 49th year and still has three of its original members. This won’t go on forever. On records they can sound a little wan, a little too smooth. Live, they’re something else. How these old dudes have this much energy, this much funk, this much soul, I don’t know. But they do. The horns are legendary and deservedly so. The bass player — still an original member — is slinky and groovy like funk base oughtta be.

Tower of Power has always been a backing band, the JB’s without a James Brown, and their singers over the years have been better and worse. Their latest singer is phenomenal. Marcus Scott is a Memphis soul singer in the Otis Redding vein, a showman with tremendous range and a master soul man’s consummate skill in whipping the crowd into a frenzy. His dance moves, his passionate patter, his descents from the stage and into the crowd had the Koreans going nuts, and I think it would’ve worked on anyone anywhere. With the giant force of Tower of Power behind him, Scott put on a glorious show that had everybody jumping. It’s this — soul, funk, sweatin’ it out — that makes me proud to be an American. This is our gift to the world. (The Koreans knew it, too, and I was impressed that a few guys behind me knew the words to every song.)

Zion T: The Korean pop and soul singer didn’t exactly follow Tower of Power — he was in another venue — but because Jamiraquoi dropped out for health reasons, much of the Tower of Power crowd went to see Zion T right after. A smart and savvy singer who writes good songs, he managed to hold his own. We stuck around long enough to hear a couple of his biggest hits, “This Song” and “Seethrough,” before heading out and calling it a night.