Author: Josh Philip Ross

The Korean Cultural Service in New York has announced two wine-tasting events that will have a Korean angle:

Wines of the World: On Wednesday, December 7, the 92nd Street Y will hold a lecture and tasting of international wines, including wines from Korea.

Taste of Korea 2005: Munbaeju, Korea’s Wine Treasure: On Thursday, December 8, at the Korean Cultural Service, will be a tasting of Korea’s “important intangible cultural property number 86-ga,” munbaeju. Click Korea describes munbaeju as “a traditional liquor made of malted wheat, rice, and millet which originates in the Pyeongyang region of North Korea. It is famous for its fragrance[,] which is said to resemble the munbae rose, hence its name. The alcohol content is around 40%.” More entertaining is this blurb from the government website of the Jung-gu district of Seoul:

This is the alcoholic emitting the perfume of fruit of Munbae tree(similar to pear). April or May is the proper time to make it and it takes approximately 4 months to mature. The characteristic of Munbaeju is to make the fragrance of fruit be emitted without using Munbae fruts at all. There are two ways of making; one is to use yeast and the other is to use white chrysanthemum. The color is light yellowish brown and it is a kind of Soju with 40 degree of alcoholic ingredient. At present, a person who possess the skill to make it is Lee, Gichun, who received the brewing skill continued to his farther from his grandmother.

Sic, which is probably how you’ll feel if you get drunk on the stuff. As for “the alcoholic emitting the perfume of fruit of Munbae tree,” that would’ve been an improvement over the alcoholics emitting the perfume of soju, kimchi and cigarettes, a heady bouquet often found on the Seoul subways early Sunday morning, as stuporous salarymen made their way home after a night spent sleeping it off at the bathhouse.

Hey, you think the Jung-gu government is hiring English editors?

The New York Times today devotes its lead editorial to bitch-slapping John Bolton, claiming that his bluster and bullying are derailing a reform process that the United States actually supports and giving ammo to those who oppose serious change. In my view, the Times is pretty much right on.

(Oh, and I just got a call from one of the diplomats asking me what is meant by the sentence, “America’s most successful U.N. ambassadors … have known how to harness American power to patient, skillful diplomacy.” I had to admit that this one threw me a bit as well. Are we using patient, skillful diplomacy to drive American power or vice versa? The language supports the first interpretation, but that doesn’t make much sense conceptually. Anyway, an odd sentence, but a forceful editorial.)

Reuters is reporting that North Korea is ready to scrap its nuclear program in exchange for better relations with the United States, Japan and South Korea. This is a bit of a shift from the DPRK’s earlier stance that it would give up its nuclear weapons only if it received a light-water nuclear reactor for power generation, something the United States has been understandably reluctant to provide.

As is so often the case with North Korea, the information arrived in a roundabout way: South Korea’s Grand National Party, the main opposition party, announced in a public statement that Ambassador Ning Fukui, China’s envoy to Seoul, had said that North Korea was ready to dismantle its nuclear program.

No one yet knows the source of Ambassador Ning’s view, or even whether he really said what he’s been quoted as saying. If it’s true, however, it bodes well for future talks, which will probably start up again within the next month or so.

It’s widely understood that if you want to control a country, you need to control its media. The disastrous rise of Serbian nationalism wass aided and abetted by Yugoslav state television, while in Rwanda the call to genocide was put out over the radio.

The United States has a more diverse and complex media market than either Rwanda or Yugoslavia, of course. But in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing reports on the conservative takeover of American radio, starting with the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987:

Introduced in 1949, [the Fairness Doctrine] required TV and radio stations to cover “controversial issues” of interest to their communities, and, when doing so, to provide “a reasonable opportunity for the presentation of contrasting viewpoints.” Intended to encourage stations to avoid partisan programming, the Fairness Doctrine had the practical effect of keeping political commentary off the air altogether. In 1986, a federal court ruled that the doctrine did not have the force of law, and the following year the FCC abolished it.

At that point, stations were free to broadcast whatever they wanted. In 1988, several dozen AM stations began carrying a show hosted by a thirty-seven-year-old college dropout named Rush Limbaugh.

This leaves open the question of why conservatives have exploited the post-Fairness Doctrine media landscape so much more effectively than liberals. But if you’ve ever wondered why the tone seemed to change in Washington sometime around the first Bush administration, the abolition of the Doctrine is the reason. It has opened the door for people like Mark Levin, “a lawyer turned talk show host who specializes in right-wing name-calling (he called Joseph Wilson and his wife ‘finks,’ Judy Miller ‘a rat,’ Ted Kennedy ‘a lifelong drunk,’ The New York Times the ‘New York Slimes,’ and Senator Charles Schumer ‘Chucky Schmucky’).” That kind of invective has become painfully common in our political discourse (the left does it too, though usually with more wit and tact, and to much smaller audiences).

How can this trend be countered?

For those of you still deciding what to get your loved ones for the holidays, some recommendations with an Asian theme.

The Engrish.com Store offers a wide variety of T-shirts, stickers, Christmas cards and other items festooned with the disastrous English (a.k.a. “Engrish”) to be found in Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. Where else can you get a hoodie that says, “POISONOUS & EVIL RUBBISH”?

Kiss Me, I’m Korean T-shirts are great if you’re Korean and would like to be kissed.

If you would prefer to sport the Korean language, cafepress may have the treat for you. According to my personal translator, it’s written in old Korean, from the time of King Sejong, and says, “The Korean language is different from Chinese; the sounds and letters don’t match.” It’s presumably taken from an early text promoting hangeul, the Korean phonetic alphabet.

The SurviveKorea.com Shop is another dispensary of East Asian oddities, this time specifically designed to freak out the Koreans around you.

At Soccer Goods Shop you can get a “Be the Reds” Korea World Cup T-shirt ($9.49) or an official Korean national team jersey ($89).

One World Gear offers T-shirts celebrating every country, including Nepal, India, South Korea and even North Korea, for those with a sick sense of humor or a desire to get a personal FBI file started.

KaiMart has Pucca gear, including Christmas cards, while Egift Mall has Pucca gear, including item to end all Pucca items: a messenger bag, complete with the official explanation of Pucca and Garu.

Finally, for T-shirts designed by a Korean living right here in Brooklyn, check out Enamoo, on Smith Street.

Click here for information about Korean wine tastings on Wednesday and Thursday evenings.

So it looks like the serious issue this season is cannibalism. A media watchdog group is warning of video games that feature cannibalism, particularly in a game called “Stubbs the Zombie.” The makers of the game respond by arguing that because Stubbs is a zombie, his bloody devouring of human flesh is not, in fact, cannibalism.

Meanwhile, Samantha Bee, in a recent Daily Show piece called Flesh in the Pan, profiled Mark Nuckols, creator of a product called Hufu, which is tofu textured and flavored to resemble human flesh.

This raised an obvious question, never asked during the interview, which is how Hufu’s designers knew what flavor and texture to aim for. According to Hufu’s FAQ, “The taste and texture of Hufu are the result of painstaking research and extensive testing in our kitchens” — a non-answer if ever there was one. Exactly whose pains they were taking is not clear.

Enjoy.

It is generally in times of stress and trouble that people turn to messiahs, but the Nepali “Buddha boy” is something stranger still: a messiah who will submit to scientific verification.

The 15-year-old has been sitting under a peepal tree for six months, supposedly without eating or drinking. He has also been bitten by a snake — twice. Not surprisingly, he’s become an object of pilgrimage (and attendant donations and commerce), and some have come to believe he’s the reincarnation of the historical Buddha. Now local leaders are going to allow scientists to study the boy, though without touching him. If nothing else, they can watch to verify whether he indeed remains in meditation all night.

It’s stories like these that remind me just how different and alien Asia was when I lived there. It made me remember an incident on our visit to Patan (scroll down to “Is It Real?”), in the Kathmandu Valley:

A boy in the square pointed us toward a monumental carved doorway into the courtyard of an adjacent palace. “Come see! Ritual!” he shouted. Inside the courtyard we discovered a mostly Nepali group of spectators ringing a troupe of masked dancers who shivered and twitched to the rhythms as several young men played bell cymbals and an older man drummed and crooned a strange wordless chant. In the center, one dancer paid elaborate homage to the bloody severed head of a buffalo, next to which an assistant held a butter torch. Eventually the dancers were all given swords covered in tikka (colored powder used for rituals), and they began a slow, whirling group dance.

I can make guesses as to what the ceremony was about, but what stands out is its very strangeness — the wild, matted hair of the masks; the old men underneath dressed as tribal women with earings and bracelets and necklaces; the hypnotic clang of the cymbals and the ragged line of the old man’s wordless singing; the raw power of the sacrificed head still trickling blood.

It was moments like that, or being told matter-of-factly about reincarnations and miracles at Kopan Monastery, that made us realize we had stepped into a different world that seemed to function by different rules than the ones we knew and accepted.

I didn’t believe in miracles, and I still don’t, but it was also ridiculous to imagine that all these earnest monks were simply lying. So what was going on? I don’t know. Indeed, if you’re looking to not-know, I strongly recommend a visit to the Indian subcontinent. There is value in discovering the limits of your own explanations for things. Ideally, instead of lunging for some new set of explanations, one can learn to accept a level of ambiguity, complexity and obscurity. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know.

Joanna Newsom: Bridges and Balloons

CocoRosie: Butterscotch | Haitian Love Songs

Chad Van Gaalen: Blood Machine | Traffic

I first heard of Joanna Newsom from Moistworks back in June, and then just recently caught her video on New York Noise (you can see it here). What is most immediately unusual about her music is that she is a harpist, while her childish voice and otherworldliness bring to mind both CocoRosie and fellow San Franciscan Noe Venable. (Indeed, both Noe and Newsom fit into a certain template, perhaps more common in the Bay Area then elsewhere, of the pretty young woman who is both a mystic dreamer and fiercely ambitious in her crafts; it’s a type I’ve had a tendency to fall for.)

Various people have tried to pin a name on what is beginning to look like some kind of a scene. Some have called it “freak-folk,” while the BBC calls it “the new weird America” and scoops Devandra Banhart into the pile, although I find his work a bit pedestrian. A better bet would be Chad Van Gaalen, although he’s Canadian. His song “Blood Machine” is a bit of sci-fi weirdness that manages to be heartrending, like a Ray Bradbury story.

I don’t know whether all these disparate artists are tapping into something common, or whether this uptick in weird Americana — also exemplified by the White Stripes — is just a coincidence. But there does seem to be something in the cultural moment that calls for either gnomic retrenchment or deadpan irony, or perhaps both at once.

In any case, the artists in today’s post have an intimacy to them, a secretiveness almost, that feels right for this season of long twilight and cold nights.