All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
More soon.
If you’re feeling particularly perverse, you can even send an email to North Korea. Which raises important questions of etiquette: is it “Dear Dear Leader,” or just “Dear Leader”?
More and more, South Korea seems to be the best model in East Asia. Taiwan has followed a similar path from pro-development nationalist dictatorship to democracy; one hopes that China is in the process of following suit, and that North Korea — perhaps one day after the Dear Leader has gone to the great gymnastics festival in the sky — will one day follow suit as well. If Korea is to be unified successfully, the North will require extensive economic development and reeducation. Those processes will either happen gradually under North Korean rule or more suddenly under South Korean colonization should the North either invade the South or collapse. While the former choice runs the risk of strengthening the North Korean regime, the experiences of South Korea, Taiwan, and hopefully China will demonstrate that it is better to engage and develop under dictatorship than to preserve the North’s isolation and await its total collapse.
This quote, from Vice President Dick Cheney, is taken from a recent Jane Mayer piece in the New Yorker about Ahmed Chalabi. The veep is talking, of course, about fixing Iraq — correcting the error of the first Bush White House, which left Saddam Hussein in power after the Gulf War. But Cheney’s words could also stand as an epitaph for our current war and occupation, in which mistake after mistake has been made, from intelligence failures to poor tactical planning, from allowing postwar looting to dispanding the army, through Abu Ghraib, and on and on until we find ourselves in the present mess, with no light at the end of the tunnel yet visible. Unfortunately, I agree with Cheney (for once): it’s rare that you get a chance to go back and fix a mistake, which makes it even less common that you get to fix ten or twelve in a row.
I have my doubts about whether any U.S. administration can pick up the pieces now. So many things have gone wrong, and so little has been done to correct them, that it may be too late. We may lose this war. At best, we might hope that Europe will bail us out. At worst, we will linger in Iraq for years, racking up American and foreign casualties, before finally withdrawing in shame and chaos.
Very seldom in life do you get a chance to fix something that went wrong.
I suppose it’s a sign of the times that upscale Nussbaum & Wu will now be the principal purveyor of bagels near Columbia. The university, which also happens to be one of the biggest landowners in the city, has been engaged in a gentrification campaign that will soon push the entire neighborhood beyond the price range of the students, forcing them back into the dreadful dining halls. I remember when Columbia raised the rent on College Inn, claiming that the neighborhood didn’t need yet another diner; a couple of years later, College Inn’s old site was occupied by a newfangled, much more expensive diner of the sort that has an Elvis clock with swinging legs to let you know that it’s a hip retro establishment and not a place for good, hot, cheap eats.
In any case, Columbia Bagels will be missed.
At one point in his adventurous life, Harlan was granted the title of Prince of Ghor, to be passed down to his descendents in perpetuity. Now the BBC has found his heir: American actor Scott Reiniger, who played Roger DeMarco in George Romero’s 1978 horror classic, Dawn of the Dead.
Which raises the question: would you rather be trapped in a shopping mall surrounded by zombies, or be the ruler of an unruly province in Central Afghanistan? I’d go with the mall, because your chances of survival are slim either way, but at least the mall would have a well-stocked food court.
At present, though the treaty his great-great-great grandfather signed is still in effect, Reineger says he has no plans to assert his claim to the throne.
So Tom Ridge and his flock of geniuses over at Homeland Security have announced that Al Qaeda seems to be planning some sort of major terrorist attack in the U.S., and that “They want to do something spectacular.”
Holy shit! How much do we pay these wizards to tell us what we already knew? I mean, this is like the National Weather Service announcing that there’s a credible chance of a hurricane hitting the U.S. sometime this year: it’s obviously true, a little bit scary, and totally useless.
Gosh, I’m glad we spend our taxes on this crap instead of actually defending ourselves.
Our presence at the performance was a bit of a fluke. The International Sejong Soloists are a conductorless string orchestra whose 22 members (15 of whom were on stage Friday, including eight women and seven men) manage to be from eight different countries. They were founded in New York, but their artistic director, Ho Kyang, is Korean-born Julliard professor, and the group takes its name from King Sejong, renowned as Korea’s finest ruler, as the inventor of the Korean phonetic alphabet, and as a patron of the arts and humanities. This tenuous connection to Korea earned them the sponsorship of the Korean Cultural Service, an adjunct of the Korean Consulate General in New York. One way they promoted the concert was to send silly quantities of free tickets to various people at the Korean Mission to the UN, so at about 4:30 on Friday, Counsellor Hwang called me to offer me four tickets to the show. Of course, I jumped at the chance to go to Carnegie.
We expected a pleasant evening of classical music. What we did not expect was the astonishing brilliance of the performance. The Sejong Soloists’ first piece was also the most challenging work of the evening, Penderecki’s Sinfonietta for Strings, which opens with a furious “chug! chug! chug! chug!” as everyone saws away at once — an especially impressive way to start out when there’s no conductor. The piece then begins to build itself up slowly, like a construction project, with a delicate descending-triplet motif being passed from musician to musician, down the rows. This is one of those exquisite elements that can’t quite be reproduced in stereo recordings, and it was beautiful each time it happened. The piece also offered opportunities for several members of the group to perform complex solos, and they were all technically precise but rich in soul and passion. Still, what was most amazing was the cohesiveness of the group throughout this rhythmically challenging piece. It was a bravura opening, and we were hooked. “I think this may be the best chamber performance I’ve ever seen,” I told Jenny, “but I haven’t seen that many.”
“I have,” she said, “and yeah, I agree.”
Next came a couple of Stockowski orchestrations of Bach — very pretty, but not interesting enough to get the voice of Mickey Mouse crying, “Mr. Stockowski! Mr. Stockowski!” out of my head. Then the group was joined by the Taiwanese violinist Cho-liang Lin for two Vivaldi concertos — you know, the ones with the fast movement, the slow movement, and then another fast movement, where the violinist plays a bunch of arpeggios? Right, those two. They were, well, Vivaldi, which means they were pleasant enough and that I’d heard them before, even if I hadn’t. The soloist did some impressive finger-dancing, but he tended to rush and seemed inelegant against the backdrop of the extraordinary group of young musicians supporting him.
After an intermission, the Soloists (but not the soloist) returned for their final piece, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48. This is something of a warhorse — though not as much as his concurrent composition, which he hated, the 1812 Overture — but there was nothing tired or trite about the Sejong Soloists’ performance. The Valse danced deliciously, and the Finale: Tema russo was simply gorgeous. They managed to give Tchaikovsky the lushness he deserves, but without sacrificing depth or meaning.
There was, strangely, no encore. But the performance was enough. If the International Sejong Soloists come to your town, go see them. They are an extraordinary group of musicians, and pretty much the only classical ensemble (including the New York Philharmonic) whose performances I would specifically seek out. I encourage you to do likewise.