Author: Josh Philip Ross

The Year of the Dog is on the way! Explore Chinatown has a good rundown of events:

3rd Annual Lunar New Year Flower Market
Friday, January 27th, Noon – 10:00 p.m.
Saturday, January 28th, 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Columbus Park

New Year’s Day Firecracker Ceremony & Culture Festival
Sunday, January 29th

• Firecracker Ceremony: Noon at intersection of Mott & Bayard Streets
• Culture Festival: 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. at intersection of Mott & Bayard Streets

7th Annual Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade

• Parade: Sunday, February 5th at 1pm starting at Canal & Mott Streets
• Culture Festival: 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. at Mott & Bayard Streets

More details at gonyc.about.com.

How The Lord of the Rings should have ended (WMV video file).

After running for a bit over a year, UNist is closing its doors, to be folded back into [the palaverist]. This site will hang around as an archive, but if you crave obscure Koreana and semi-insider pontifications on the UN, [the palaverist] is now the place to go.

A while back, I started a separate blog for politics, UNist. It’s had a nice little run, but I’ve found that lately I’ve had not much to say on the UN, and a lot of what I’ve had to say on Asia could just as well go in this blog, especially when it relates to Asian events in New York. Besides, I’ve begun to suspect that my loyal readers here never bother to go over to UNist anyway, so it’s sort of pointless.

So UNist will live on as an archive, and Palaverist will get a bit more political, and will occasionally venture into abstruse UN stuff. Onward and upward!

Last night, Jenny and I finished watching the Special Extended DVD Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Which, of course, kicked ass, and with all their added length and exposition, managed to hold my attention more firmly than the theatrical releases.

I haven’t yet gone through much of the documentary material, but I did watch a short piece on J.R.R. Tolkein. I was struck by his insistence that The Lord of the Rings isn’t allegorical, which struck me as nonsense until it was explained that by allegory, Tolkein meant a one-to-one mapping of one narrative to another. The claim he made for The Lord of the Rings was that rather than allegory, it had applicability, by which he meant that you could see real events reflected in it, and that is certainly true.

One could, in fact, go on and on about the myriad ways in which The Lord of the Rings is applicable. I want to focus on a few applicabilities that occurred to me this time through.

First, there is a recurring theme of grossly outnumbered armies surrounded by vast hordes of filthy, half-human enemies. These outnumbered armies nevertheless prevail because of several key factors: 1) they are garrisoned in forts, 2) they’re better than the enemy at forming and maintaining lines, 3) they have noble courage, and 4) there is always the hope of reinforcements. These are the virtues of the British Empire at its height, particularly in terms of Great Game engagements in far-flung outposts.

Indeed, the resonance of the Great Game was the second applicability that I noticed. Frodo and Sam’s journey into Mordor shares a resemblance with the secret missions of disguised pandits into the cold, arid wastes of Tibet, and all the hard riding and secret messages and complicated efforts to win the support of local kings would be familiar to anyone who had read about T.E. Lawrence or Britain’s campaigns in Afghanistan or any of the intrigue of the First World War, as exemplified in John Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels, which were enormously popular in the years between the wars.

The third applicability was Tolkein’s understanding of the devastating effect of air power. You don’t find much in the way of aerial bombardment in ancient epics, even ones with flying creatures. In Tolkein, and especially in Peter Jackson’s imagining of the big battles, the terror of low-flying Nazgul is evident and resembles the strafing and haphazard bombing of World War I more than the coordinated and massively destructive air campaigns of World War II. (It’s the Great War, of course, in which Tolkein actually fought.)

As I said, one could go on like this forever, but those are some of the aspects that stood out to me on this viewing.

A little over a year ago, sometime in November of 2004 or so, I started on a reading project intended to give myself a grounding in East Asian history.

I had started on A New History of Korea, by Ki-baik Lee, and quickly found that in order to understand Korean history, I would need a grasp of Chinese and Japanese history as well. So I began to read China: A New History, by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, as well as A History of Japan, by R.H.P. Mason and J.G. Caiger. Then I decided to supplement this reading with four volumes I had kept on my bookshelves since college, when I had largely failed to read them: William Theodore de Bary’s indispensible collections, Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume I and Volume II, and his Sources of Japanese Tradition, Volume I and Volume II, which provide translations of original materials that trace Chinese and Japanese thought from their earliest origins to modern times. And once I had decided to read the Chinese and Japanese sources, I obviously couldn’t neglect the Sources of Korean Tradition, Volume I and Volume II, Columbia University Press’s more recent addition to its excellent Sources series (which also includes Sources of Indian Tradition).

Altogether, this added up to 3,829 pages. Considering that I lingered over them for well over a year — putting them down for stretches of time, especially during the hectic autumn of last year, when I was the sole speechwriter during the busy season of UN committee work and reform efforts — this is not exactly proof of my speed-reading abilities. On the other hand, it’s not always easy to face another 40 pages of Neo-Confucian debate on whether the universe is made of principle or force, or another 30 pages of medieval Korean proposals for land reform that not even their authors took seriously.

Still, there is reward in having delved even into these obscure and difficult corners of East Asian thought. And then some sections were genuinely fascinating, like Japan’s strange origin myths, the struggle of the Chinese to come to terms with the West, or Korea’s furious rejection of Japanese colonialism. And the overall picture is one that will help me greatly in understanding the Koreans I work with and their views of themselves in the world.

Having spent so much time exploring East Asia from the inside out, I have now turned to The Korean War, by Max Hastings, and the shift in perspective is a bit dizzying. To have read Korean accounts of their jubilation when the Americans arrived to liberate them from the Japanese, and then to read of the Americans’ utter bafflement at what they found in Korea, is to be reminded how little Korea registered in the consciousness of most people in most parts of the world. When it came into focus, it was as a pawn in Great Power politics — just as it had been earlier, in the wrangles among its neighbors, Japan, China and Russia. It’s weird to go back to the American sense of Korea as an alien land, its people at least as baffling as those of Afghanistan and Iraq strike us today. But the combination of perspectives, interior and exterior, will hopefully give me a fuller sense of how Korea’s unique history is connected to the broader world.

As you probably know by now P.A.R.O.D.Y., a fake anti-goth website for which I wrote the text as part of the promotion of the Blair Witch Project, has taken on a life of its own.

Well, now you can enjoy that afterlife the way I do: with high-quality flames from confused teenagers! Introducing … (drum-roll please …):

[p.a.r.o.d.y. flames]Here I have begun to collect those emails that I still have on P.A.R.O.D.Y., and I’ll post more as they come in (and they will). Anonymously, of course. But I feel that these people have gone to the trouble to respond seriously to our little joke, and the world deserves to know.

Things are going badly for Nepal. The BBC reports on clashes in the streets between security forces and opposition activists who are calling for democracy. The government has set curfews, which have hurt tourism, a crucial business in Nepal.

One wonders what King Gyanendra is thinking.

 

Ramsey Lewis: My Love for You (Debra)
Laurindo Almeida and the Bossa Nova All-Stars: Desafinado (Readymade)
Rasputin’s Stash: Mr. Cool (High 5)
Bernard “Pretty” Purdie: Soul Drums (Devil’s Haircut)
Mantronix: Needle to the Groove (Where It’s At)
The Frogs: I Don’t Care if U Disrespect Me (Where It’s At)
The Care Bears: (Title Unknown) (Beercan)

While listening to Beck’s “Where It’s At,” did you ever wonder what exactly was playing on those two turntables? Back in 1996, when the sample-laden Odelay first came out, I sure did. There were a couple of samples, though, that I happened to recognize right away: “I’m a nasty, nasty man,” from “Hotwax” and the “No jive/Gimme five!” horn break from the first minute of “High 5 (Rock the Catskills),” not to mention the idea that one could drive a pig, came from an obscure funk group called Rasputin’s Stash, whose record I had fortuitously discovered in my parents’ extensive collection just months before Odelay came out. It was great stuff, and I wished there were some way I could hear the sources for some of the other samples strewn through Beck’s new album.

Well, now you can! Thanks to the Internet, I was able to suss out these tracks that provided samples for Beck songs, and now here they are for your listening pleasure.