Author: Josh Philip Ross

This weekend, BAM Cinematek in Brooklyn is showing a retrospective of the films of Korean director Park Chan-Wook. The only one of his movies I’ve seen is Joint Security Area (better known as JSA among Koreans), which begins with a murder at the border between north and south Korea and gradually unfolds into a fascinating exploration of the tensions and loyalties of the young soldiers who face each other each day across the border.

The film is definitely worth seeing if you’re interested in South Korean perceptions of the north. Enormously popular when it was released a couple of years ago in South Korea, JSA takes a perspective that is popular with the younger generation of South Koreans, casting the ongoing struggle between North and South as a sad, anomalous and artificial division of two populations that are essentially in sync. Whether this is actually true is unclear — I’ve read that defectors from the north have had a difficult time adjusting to life in the south, and we can only guess at the extent to which indoctrination and separation has made northerners different from southerners. Still, JSA gets at the deep sense most Koreans have that they are ultimately one people, that reunification is a historical inevitability.

Plus it’s a gripping film, and it involves Chocopie, so how can you go wrong?

Okay, so I feel like it’s time to put in my two cents on The Gates (which, for those of you who live on the moon or are reading this 400 years after I wrote it, is the big Christo project that has lined 23 miles of Central Park with orange vinyl gates draped with orange vinyl fabric).

As a work of public art, The Gates was startlingly controversial, and I think that the controversy is perhaps the best way to approach the art itself. There seemed to be four classes of complaint against The Gates. The first is that it was a waste of the city’s money, the second was that it wasn’t something else, the third was that it wasn’t anything, and the fourth was that it was ugly.

The first complaint, of course, is false: the Christos financed the project themselves, and not a penny of city money was spent. The second complaint, however, gets at what made this installation different from so much public art in New York city. I heard various versions of this complaint — that the Christos should have let people graffiti the gates, that the $23 million they spent was a waste of money, that it’d be great if they allowed other artists to put their work (read: more likeable work) in the park, that the only good thing about The Gates was the way they got people talking about public art. The Gates seemed to generate a kind of furious looking away, coupled with a kind of inspirational force that pushed people to imagine their own works of art.

As I kept hearing this variety of complaint, I began to think about other public art in New York City, which generally does not drive people to demand something else. From the high art of Jeff Koons’s Puppy at Rockefeller Center, to the charming rotundities of Tom Otterness along Broadway, to the lowbrow Cow Parade, the dominant mode is cutesy. In the subways, too, we find images of fuzzy ducklings reenacting the first subway ride. I have no particular problem with cutesy public art, but its ubiquity suggests that New Yorkers — or at least the New Yorkers who decide on public art — have grown nervous about anything ambiguous or provocative, anything that startles without providing a ready resolution. In other words, about art.

The Gates was resolutely not cute. Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their artistic pretentions may be cute, but neither the actual structures themselves nor their collective presence were the least bit likely to induce the warm fuzzy feeling we get from looking at a flowery puppy, a colorful cow or a sad rotund bear. In keeping with Christo’s long history of wrapping and obscuring, The Gates presented instead a kind of blankness, which is why people felt so compelled to imagine other things onto them. Without actually wrapping anything, The Gates achieved the effect of wrapping. And this is the source of the third complaint: that they weren’t anything, that anyone could have done it, that there was nothing artistic about it.

Christo’s work is, it must be admitted, not the sort of thing that takes a craftsman’s hand. At this point, however, post-minimalism and post-earth works and post-Jeff Koons — indeed, post-R. Mutt — I think we can accept that an artist needn’t be a craftsman. And, considering the sheer scale of the work, not to mention its power to draw hundreds of thousands of people to Central Park in February, it is resolutely something, not nothing.

Nor is it quite the blank slate some people insisted they were seeing. The color was billed as saffron, but it was, rather, the color of traffic cones and other obstructions. One could be either horrified to find this color of inconvenience strewn about the park or thrilled at how it had been transformed. It is also the color of torii, the orange gates that sometimes line the paths to Shinto shrines in Japan. Like torii, The Gates felt like a sanctification of the environment in which they were placed, and the hushed spectators tended to respond as if they were witnessing or participating in some mildly sacred ritual. What gave added strength to this feeling was the sheer beauty of the work itself.

So some people thought they were ugly. I went to see The Gates in the new-fallen snow on Presidents Day, and they were not ugly. The stands were a bit inelegant, but the sight of the fabric billowing out in the breezes, of the light filtering through them, of the trails framed in them and the wild tangles of bare branches highlighted by the angularity of the arches, was beautiful. The Gates were what they were, and if you were willing to be there and experience them as that, without demanding that they be something else, they were startlingly lovely. They achieved what minimalism can at its best, transforming and intensifying an environment to create a new experience. This effect of minimalism tends to fall flat in museums, where the space is carefully decontextualized to begin with, so that there is nothing for the art to transform. In Central Park, it had a transcendent quality that I was glad to experience. And if there was no deeper meaning beyond a bit of narcissistic Central Park worship, so what?

For those of you who have bookmarked either [the palaverist] or [UNist] directly, I recommend that you change the bookmark to http://www.palaverist.com. Thanks to the glories of RSS, the homepage now shows the latest posts from both blogs, so you can see if there’s anything new and click accordingly.

Laughing at foreigners’ fractured English may be a bit puerile, possibly even mean. But hey, the stuff is funny, and the rest of the world gets its revenge whenever we try to speak their funny languages.

In any case, I bring this up because I wish to share with you Mayor Chang-Geun OH’s charming message of welcome to his little island of “mysterious Ulleung-do,” which sits off the coast of Korea, in what the Koreans call the East Sea and the rest of the world calls the Sea of Japan (but that’s a discussion for another time). Never mind why I was looking up Ulleong-do. Just enjoy, and sic.:

Hello.

This is Chang-Geun OH, Mayor of Ulleung County.

We sincerely welcome for your visiting to our internet homepage.

Ulleungdo is the only island county in the East sea with the mystery of ancient times and the living beauty of nature.

Inhabitants of Ulleung county have played a role of guarding the East sea for a long time.

By developing blessed sightseeing resources harmoniously with Ulleunggun Inhabitants, we will make “The International ocean resort” , and open the new millenium era with it.

We hope that you will have fantastic tour to visit our county.

You can not only see the beautiful sea, evergreen forests and fantastic rocks and stones, but also enjoy special products such as cuttlefishes, pumpkin taffy, and wild greens etc.

We promise to offer you more useful and various information in this homepage.

Thank you.

No, Mayor OH, thank you.

Okay, so while my interest in Asia is not primarily romantic (although I did get to Korea by following a girlfriend), I admit that it’s something of a stereotypical pattern: cf. this post on Overheard in New York.

And while my obsession isn’t romantic, it’s definitely Romantic. In trying to trace the roots of my interest Asia, I’ve come to believe that the English Romantic poets deserve much of the credit. Poems like Shelley’s Ozymandias, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and especially his Kubla Khan, gave me a taste for the Exotic East. So yes, I was thoroughly Orientalized. I’m not sure this is so terrible as I was led to believe in college. After all, these poets were passionately interested in the East, which is why they attempted to reckon with the aspects of the East that they found most different from their own world. This strikes me as a fundamentally sane approach — far more sane than it would have been to try to catalog what East and West had in common, although that effort became necessary as time went on.

And by the way, after you’ve reread Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, take a look at the source material, from the straightforward writings of Marco Polo:

CHAPTER LXI.

OF THE CITY OF CHANDU, AND THE KAAN’S PALACE THERE.

And when you have ridden three days from the city last mentioned, between north-east and north, you come to a city called CHANDU [Xanadu], which was built by the Kaan now reigning. There is at this place a very fine marble Palace, the rooms of which are all gilt and painted with figures of men and beasts and birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers, all executed with such exquisite art that you regard them with delight and astonishment.

Round this Palace a wall is built, inclosing a compass of 16 miles, and inside the Park there are fountains and rivers and brooks, and beautiful meadows, with all kinds of wild animals (excluding such as are of ferocious nature), which the Emperor has procured and placed there to supply food for his gerfalcons and hawks, which he keeps there in mew. Of these there are more than 200 gerfalcons alone, without reckoning the other hawks. The Kaan himself goes every week to see his birds sitting in mew, and sometimes he rides through the park with a leopard behind him on his horse’s croup; and then if he sees any animal that takes his fancy, he slips his leopard at it, and the game when taken is made over to feed the hawks in mew. This he does for diversion.

Moreover [at a spot in the Park where there is a charming wood] he has another Palace built of cane, of which I must give you a description. It is gilt all over, and most elaborately finished inside. [It is stayed on gilt and lackered columns, on each of which is a dragon all gilt, the tail of which is attached to the column whilst the head supports the architrave, and the claws likewise are stretched out right and left to support the architrave.] The roof, like the rest, is formed of canes, covered with a varnish so strong and excellent that no amount of rain will rot them. These canes are a good 3 palms in girth, and from 10 to 15 paces in length. [They are cut across at each knot, and then the pieces are split so as to form from each two hollow tiles, and with these the house is roofed; only every such tile of cane has to be nailed down to prevent the wind from lifting it.] In short, the whole Palace is built of these canes, which (I may mention) serve also for a great variety of other useful purposes. The construction of the Palace is so devised that it can be taken down and put up again with great celerity; and it can all be taken to pieces and removed whithersoever the Emperor may command. When erected, it is braced [against mishaps from the wind] by more than 200 cords of silk.

The Lord abides at this Park of his, dwelling sometimes in the Marble Palace and sometimes in the Cane Palace for three months of the year, to wit, June, July, and August; preferring this residence because it is by no means hot; in fact it is a very cool place. When the 28th day of [the Moon of] August arrives he takes his departure, and the Cane Palace is taken to pieces. But I must tell you what happens when he goes away from this Palace every year on the 28th of the August [Moon]….

But I must now tell you a strange thing that hitherto I have forgotten to mention. During the three months of every year that the Lord resides at that place, if it should happen to be bad weather, there are certain crafty enchanters and astrologers in his train, who are such adepts in necromancy and the diabolic arts, that they are able to prevent any cloud or storm from passing over the spot on which the Emperor’s Palace stands. The sorcerers who do this are called TEBET and KESIMUR, which are the names of two nations of Idolaters. Whatever they do in this way is by the help of the Devil, but they make those people believe that it is compassed by dint of their own sanctity and the help of God….

There is another marvel performed by those BACSI, of whom I have been speaking as knowing so many enchantments. For when the Great Kaan is at his capital and in his great Palace, seated at his table, which stands on a platform some eight cubits above the ground, his cups are set before him [on a great buffet] in the middle of the hall pavement, at a distance of some ten paces from his table, and filled with wine, or other good spiced liquor such as they use. Now when the Lord desires to drink, these enchanters by the power of their enchantments cause the cups to move from their place without being touched by anybody, and to present themselves to the Emperor! This every one present may witness, and there are ofttimes more than 10,000 persons thus present. ‘Tis a truth and no lie! and so will tell you the sages of our own country who understand necromancy, for they also can perform it.

Makgeolli seller.On Wednesday afternoon, we had a small party in the 7th-floor library to celebrate the new year, where the spread was different from the usual reception catering we get. Different and more Korean. There were oranges, an East Asian new year tradition; tteok in numerous varieties; various Korean snack foods, like spicy potato sticks and squid crunchies; and plastic milk bottles that had been filled about a third of the way with rice, then the rest of the way with sugar-water. This concoction, I was told, is the basis for a sour, milky rice wine called makgeolli, which is often home-brewed and sold in two-liter soda bottles. At this stage, it was a pleasant, sweet beverage with no alcohol.

Today for lunch we had a reception to push the South Korean candidate for the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which meant the usual array of dumplings, smoked salmon, sushi, stewed beef, fruit, pastries and tteok that I’ve come to recognize as our standard reception fare. The crowd today was heavily international, because it’s the votes of other countries that we’re trying to win. From what I understand, South Korea has a couple more such candidates — judgeships on the International Criminal Court and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea — so there will be more receptions to come. Which, for me, means free meals.

As a followup to my previous post on the situation in Nepal, I want to share with you an email that I received today from the CIWEC Clinic, which offers a bit of hope:

This is a short note to let everyone know that all communication services including telephone and internet have resumed in Nepal. Mobile phones are expected to be off for an indefinite period of time. The streets of Kathmandu are safer than ever before. There have been no bandhs or strikes and a positive mood prevails in the valley.

The Himalayan Rescue Association (HRA) aid posts in the Everest and Annapurna regions in Pheriche and in Manang will be open for the spring trekking season. They will have their own communication systems in place. Tourists planning to come to Nepal for trekking need not cancel their travel plans. The overall security situation in the country seems better and not worse. There are several mountaineering expeditions that will be here for the spring climbing season.

Political party leaders are under house arrest and are starting to be released. We are hopeful for lasting peace in the country.

With warm regards to everyone,

Prativa Pandey, M.D.
Medical Director
CIWEC Clinic Travel Medicine Center
Kathmandu, Nepal

Unfortunately, the latest BBC report is less optimistic. The problem remains that the democratically elected government has utterly failed at two of its most fundamental responsibilities — maintaining a monopoly on violence and holding elections — but the unpopular King Gyanendra is pretty clearly in violation of the law, there’s not all that much to indicate that he can handle the Maoist rebellion either, and his takeover only exacerbates the failure to hold elections. The ambiguity and intractability of the situation is reflected in the discussions on nepalbbs.com, where people are less for or against the king than somewhere in the middle, disappointed with the parliament, disheartened by the rebellion, disturbed by the king’s suspension of civil liberties, and uncertain what should be done.

Bowing to elders on the new year.Today is the East Asian lunar new year — what most folks think of as the Chinese New Year, because it was the Chinese lunar calendar that was adopted in Korea and Japan (much the way that Western countries adopted the Catholic calendar). In Korea, the holiday is called Seol (pronounced Saul) and observances are centered on the family, sort of like our Thanksgiving. Koreans return to their family homes, where they traditionally feast, provide offerings to their ancestors and ritually bow to their elders. A traditional food is tteok (pronounced duck), or pounded rice cakes, similar to the mochi that is eaten in Japan on the new year (and that causes several choking deaths each year, so be careful if you partake).

The traditional new year’s greeting in Chinese is gung hay fat choy, and I feel confident that this is actually true because I heard a couple of Chinese women at my Korean class last night say it to each other, and when I asked, they told me it was correct. The Korean greeting is a bit more complicated. Are you ready?

Saehae pok mani padeuseyo.(Remember that eu is pronounced like the u in put.) The greeting means, literally, “May you have much luck in the new year.”

For a whole lot more information on Seol, including some fun stuff on the traditional game of yut, check out this page at ClickAsia.com.

As promised, here’s a review of Cyber Groove, the Windows-based knock-off of Dance Dance Revolution, the increasingly popular dance video game.

So Cyber Groove is good, although not as good as Dance Dance Revolution proper, the most important differences being that the interface is less graceful and the number of songs is far more limited. Still, you get to dance to Tub Thumpin’ and YMCA, as well as 14 other tracks, and the difficulty level can be complexly modified by fiddling around with various menus. Also, unlike the pads for DDR, which come with instructions warning against sock-wearing, Cyber Groove’s plastic pad pretty much demands socks, because otherwise your feet tend to stick.

Still, Cyber Groove offers all the challenge and fun of DDR, along with the exercise — a couple of rounds, and I can definitely feel my heart pumping, not to mention that pumped feeling in my calves.

I keep talking about these dance-based video games as if they were somehow worlds more fun than other video games, but it occurs to me that this might not be true. I love video games, which is why I don’t play them. A good game has the power to absorb me for hours on end, until I look at the clock and realize I’ve been playing for 14 hours straight. I don’t want to devote that kind of time to video games, so I avoid them. (I allow myself rounds of Minesweeper at work, but only because I can trust myself to lose interest after a short while.)

So Cyber Groove is absorbing like Tetris, but there are two factors that make it more acceptable to me: 1) it’s healthy exercise for Jenny and me, and 2) physical exhaustion limits the amount of time I can devote to the game. If I ever get to the point that I can play for four hours solid on the highest setting, I will have developed legs like these:

I find this unlikely.

From what I understand, there are other versions out there as well, including one that you can plug directly into your TV (in stocks!), but the TV-only model, I have been told, gives you 16-bit sound, which means you’re dancing to an Atari 2600 game.