Author: Josh Philip Ross

Topic: Culture

DDR dance pads.If you’re not familiar with Dance Dance Revolution, you probably will be. It’s that game you may have seen at the mall or at Coney Island in which some kid does impossibly complicated dance moves to the beat of some dreadful techno song. And it is, as advertised, revolutionary. Part hopscotch, part Tetris, it’s a video game that your girlfriend wants to play as much as you do. It’s a video game, moreover, that is actually healthy to play.

I first played DDR in arcades in Korea, where I was struck that there were video games to teach you how to dance. Along with the karaoke systems that gave you a score for accuracy (but not interpretive genius), I felt this went a long way toward explaining the quality of Korean pop videos. The way it works is that there are four arrows on the floor pad — up, down, left and right — and corresponding arrows scroll up the screen. When they cross a certain point, you have to step on the pad indicated. Sometimes they come in combos, which involves jumping on two arrows at once.

The game was fun in Korea, but we were never keen to hang out in video arcades. What has turned me into a Dance Dance Revolutionary is my friend Daniel’s purchase of the game for his girlfriend. Our entire circle of friends is now hooked. Daniel and his girlfriend got so gung-ho, in fact, that he actually bought a pair of fancy dance pads so that he and his girlfriend could play simultaneously, in battle mode. On Saturday night, as the blizzard thickened, a whole bunch of us gathered at Daniel’s, and using all three pads, we Danced Danced Revolted the night away, occasionally pausing when our feet were overheated to run barefoot through the snow in Daniel’s yard. (Those of us who were too pooped to keep playing went in the kitchen and discussed Security Council reform, leading one guest to complain of severe cognative dissonance as he walked across the apartment.)

Dance Dance Revolution may be the perfect game for my generation, arriving at the perfect point in our lives. We are now hitting that age where nature, left to its own devices, will make us progressively uglier over time. But if you’re not involved in some kind of challenging organized sport, exercise can be excruciatingly dull. StairMasters and exercise videos are less intellectually challenging than flossing. DDR, on the other hand, is compelling in a soothingly familiar way. The challenges are familiar from other video games, which also require that you coordinate actions according to rhythmic indicators. The main difference is that you operate the controller with your feet, which means you can get a cardiovascular workout while you play. This is more or less perfect. It’s also appealing to both men and women — a rarity in video games, but incredibly helpful for the increasing percentage of folks my age who are in long-term relationships. And unlike Tetris, that other gender-neutral video game hit, DDR encourages multiple players. Even if you only have one dance pad, you’ll want to switch off, just to give yourself a physical break.

Having joined the Revolution at Daniel’s, Jenny was agitating for a Revolution in our own home. Unfortunately, this would have meant buying a whole gaming system, which is more of an investment than we were willing to make. Lucky for us, there is Cyber Groove, a blatant rip-off for the PC. Ours has shipped; I’ll keep you posted on whether it actually works, and how well.

On my way to lunch at the UN cafeteria, I happened to catch Senator Barbara Boxer, live on CNN, letting Condoleeza Rice have it during her confirmation hearing. Senator Boxer repeated Condie quotes from various times that contradicted each other, suggesting that Rice’s loyalty to the president and to her duty to sell the war “overwhelmed [her] respect for the truth.”

Rice responded by saying that she never lost her respect for the truth. Then she declared that “I really hope that you will refrain from impugning my integrity.”

Now, this has been a recurring problem with criticism of the Bush administration: they lie openly, but it’s considered impolitic to say so. So the exchange looks like one in which Senator Boxer makes the relatively weak charge that Rice’s “respect for the truth” was “overwhelmed,” while Rice makes the more pointed charge that Boxer is “impugning my integrity.” It makes Boxer look less straightforward than Rice, which is exactly wrong.

At this point, we should take off the kid gloves and just say people are lying when we catch them at it. Enough.

Are you ready?

“His Augustness Truly-Conqueror-I-Conquer-Conquering-Swift-Heavenly-Great-Great-Ears.”

That’s from the Kojiki, an eighth-century Japanese compilation of origin myths. If it helps, HATCICCSHGGE was born in the following manner:

The august name of the Deity that was born from the mist [of his breath] when, having begged the Heaven-Shining-Deity to hand him the augustly complete [string] of curved jewels eight feet [long] of five hundred jewels that was twisted in the left august bunch [of her hair], and with the jewels making a jingling sound having brandished and washed them in the True-Pool-Well of Heaven, and having crunchingly crunched them, Susa-no-o blew them away, was HATCICCSHGGE.

There, didn’t that help? I thought so.

If you’re a man in New York and you want a haircut, you have basically three choices: you can go to one of the zillions of hole-in-the-wall barbershops run by bald immigrant men who may or may not know how to cut hair; you can spend a fortune at a fancy salon for what is, in the end, basically just a trim; or you can go to one of the mid-range chains.

Today I opted for door number three, stopping in at the nearest branch of Dramatics NYC. It was a curious experience. Unlike Jean Louis David, which opts for a kind of low-key haircut-factory feel, Dramatics pretends that it’s a flash salon, complete with techno, a couple of candles by the register and a chesty English girl behind it, and flat screens showing some incomprehensible melange of terrible architectural haircuts and children dancing. What’s really bizarre, though, is that they make their hairdressers take stripper names: the women are Spirit, Astral, Dream, Vogue, Spring, Glitter, Lavender, Fatimah Sunshine and Lexus. I shit you not (scroll down). The men are Flex, Blade, Ace, Ceasar (sic) and my stylist, Runner, who spent much of the haircut telling me about his multiple ex-wives, his life as a busker living in Marin and his exploration of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, not to mention the various addictions he no longer indulges in, having replaced them with the endorphin rush of running (thus the name). He seemed a little high as he trimmed away, and the way he spritzed my hair with … with … well, with something, and then gave his own hair a hit reminded me of the archetypal stoned doctor who takes tokes off the anesthesia mask while working.

Despite all this, or maybe because of it, I wound up with a really nice haircut. Strange but true. If you’re looking to have a mildly surreal time while you get your hair expertly trimmed, you could do worse than to visit Dramatics on Second Avenue. And it’s just five dollars extra to make an appointment with Runner himself (who did, to his credit, inform me that his real name is Tony).

The International Herald Tribune reports on a nonverbal Korean stage show called Jump, which is based on Korea’s national martial art, tae kwon do. Capitalizing on the success of Nanta, a Stomp-like show that has toured internationally as Cookin’ (and which I saw in Seoul and highly recommend), Jump is mounting its own international tour. I know that New York City is something of a cultural backwater, but let’s hope it comes to our little town anyway.

So I think yesterday I actually played a role in formulating a substantial policy.

Here’s what happened. As I’ve discussed, Security Council reform is a major issue right now for the UN generally and for South Korea in particular. The so-called Coffee Club, a loose affiliation of middle powers including Italy, Pakistan and South Korea, is pushing hard for Model B (expansion of the Security Council by adding new third-category elected seats) over Model A (new permanent members).

In a demarche over the past couple of months, Coffee Club ambassadors have been talking to foreign ministries in every world capital. Unfortunately, they’ve been bolstering their arguments either with an outdated position paper from before the publication of the Report of the Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change or with non-papers developed by individual countries. (A non-paper, as I understand it, is an airing of ideas that is not meant to be taken as a final statement.) Thus ambassadors from these middle powers are presenting similar but not identical arguments and proposals in different capitals.

Yesterday I was asked to prepare talking points for Ambassador Kim in his efforts to convince like-minded countries to develop a single, unified position paper. Mostly the talking points were dictated to me by one of the counsellors, and my role was primarily to put them into clean English. In one instance, however, in the section where we outlined what would actually go into the position paper, I changed the wording of a particular argument to make it much stronger. When the counsellor questioned me on the change, I gave him my views on this particular argument and on why I felt we needed to be forceful about it, and he came around to my point of view. “I’m convinced,” he told me. “I think we should send you as ambassador.”

This is a very small piece of something very big. On my recommendation, Ambassador Kim will work from talking points that suggest that the position paper should take a strong rather than a soft approach to this particular matter. This position paper, if it is written, will be presented to senior government officials worldwide and may influence the future shape of the Security Council.

My role is tiny, but it’s in there. I’m excited to say that for the first time, I touched policy.

The New York Times today has a article on tofu, with a mouthwatering picture of Korean sundubu chigae (soft-tofu stew). If you’re used to the standard spongy tofu from the supermarket, you might wonder what the fuss is about. But fresh, silky-smooth sundubu is to the spongy stuff as maguro is to a can of Bumblebee.

If you’re looking for a place to sample the smooth stuff, I have a friend in Utah who might be able to give you directions to an excellent dubu restaurant in Suwon. However, if you’re looking closer to home (well, my home, anyway), I have it on good authority that Cho Dang Gol does it right.

This morning as I got off the F train at Second Avenue, I witnessed a curious religious stand-off. On the First Avenue side of the token booth area, there was the usual collection of little old Hispanic ladies primly gripping their copies of Watchtower and casting slightly superior gazes at the commuting damned. On the Allen Street side, however, things were livened up considerably by a trio of Hare Krishnas — or members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, as they are more formally known — who were ringing bells and chanting cheerlessly in the morning cold and damp.

Of course no one went near either group, but it was sort of fascinating to watch these two diametrically opposed clumps of religious fanatics go about their business, ignoring each other as carefully as passers-by ignored them.