There’s a scene in Parasite where fumigators come to the alley where the Kims live, spraying white clouds of insecticide. “Do they still do t hat?” someone asks. It was, among other things, a callback to Bong’s first movie, Barking Dogs Never Bite. In that film, kids ride their bikes in the poison wake of a fumigation truck, and a character disappears in the toxic fog. Those trucks were a real thing, at least in those days.
The unjustly neglected Barking Dogs was the first Korean film I ever saw. It was part of a Korean film festival in New York City in 2001, which I attended so I could learn something, anything, about the country I’d be moving to a couple of months later. No one knew much about Korea then. There wasn’t yet a Korean wave. No one talked about Korean fashion or makeup or hip-hop or dramas. All of that was in the future. But I was pretty sure I’d just seen a great film, and when I moved to Korea, it came back to me again and again. Somehow it captured perfectly the texture of Korean life in those days.
As the Korean wave crested, other films and directors got more notice, especially the brilliant Park Chan-wook. But for all the flash and dazzling weirdness of Oldboy and the rest of his Vengeance series, I was convinced that people were missing out on Korea’s greatest filmmaker. I went to see Bong speak at the Korea Society in New York a few years ago, and he drew a crowd of dozens. He was affable, charming, humble, and quietly very, very smart. Like his movies.
I’m glad that he’s getting the attention he deserves at last, and not for one of his crossover films — his English-speaking characters have always felt wooden to me — but for a movie rooted in the textures of actual Korean life (and starring longtime Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho). It’s a proud moment for Korean cinema and culture, and one that I hope will draw viewers to Bong’s other films, and to the work of other Korean filmmakers and artists.
If you have ever been to a store in December in the United States (or a great many other countries), you have heard what I think of as the Retail Christmas Soundtrack: Last Christmas, All I Want for Christmas Is You, et. al. It’s mostly terrible. Even that John Lennon Christmas song is kind of terrible. Since I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, none of this stuff evokes childhood memories of gifts and treats. It just reminds me of sweating through my jacket in a long line in a dingy Duane-Reade or in the overcrowded, fluorescent-lit bowels of some now-defunct retail chain like Woolworth’s or Lechters.
It turns out there’s actually a lot of good Christmas music out there if you look a little, everything from jazz to soul to funk to folk to blues to reggae, some of it genuinely moving, some of it just fun. I’ve included stuff I think is actually worth listening to even if Christmas isn’t really your bag.
There’s the Nutcracker Suite, which is scientifically proven to be the best Christmas music there is. There’s a lot of jazz, like Oscar Peterson’s Christmas album and Ella Fitzgerald’s, which are good because everything Oscar or Ella ever did was good. There’s a lot of blues and a lot of soul, including James Brown’s weirdly compelling Christmas music. There’s that new John Legend album, which I like even though I don’t really like John Legend or Christmas music. There’s Chuck Berry. There’s Fiona Apple singing Frosty the Snowman. There is no Elvis, no Phil Spector, no Johnny Cash.
Alas, the playlist doesn’t include Duke Ellington’s Nutcracker Suite, which is my favorite Christmas album. It has disappeared from Google Play Music, but can be found on YouTube. Sugar Rum Cherry, in particular, is amazing — Duke’s sexy, slinky take on the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Anyway, here’s my little gift to those who have a Google Play Music subscription. Enjoy!
I’m writing at a difficult moment. Today I woke up to the news that eleven Jews were murdered in Pittsburgh. I want to share this nice, happy thing in my life here in Korea because there is beauty and life in the world and I am committed to enjoying it. My first visit to Korea came less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, and many people asked me whether I still planned to come here and teach English for a year. My answer now was my answer then: as much as possible, I don’t ever want to let terrorists decide for me what to do or how to live.
Busloads of apples
Apple farmers selling their wares at the Yeongju Apple Festival.
Apple farmers line the streets, old ladies with paring knives handing out samples, crates of their wares spread out for sale. Young men with batons direct traffic into special designated parking areas, while bus after bus rumbles in, belching out Korean tour groups led by tinny amplified voices. There’s a stage set up and rows of white plastic chairs, but at noon the Yeongju Apple Festival is still not quite underway.
There are a lot of ways to know you love a person, but one way is when she looks at the Apple Festival, looks at you, and suggests you get out quickly and go somewhere else.
Autumn leaves
We’d come to Yeongju and Buseoksa Temple for the autumn leaves. We drove down on a Friday afternoon of spattering rain and dropping temperatures, crossing the Sobaeksan range in deep fog, but when we arrived at Road to Buseoksa Pension, the stars had come out. We were the only customers at a nearby restaurant, eating a dinner of fish and tofu while the owners and their friends grilled off-the-menu samgyeopsal in the other room.
In the morning we headed up to the temple, which boasts Shilla stone monuments and statuary, a Goryeo wooden building that’s among the oldest still standing in Korea, and spectacular views. It was interesting to see the unusual architecture of the Goryeo main temple hall, which has support structures that are related to, but different from, the typical Joseon Dynasty style you see nearly everywhere in Korea. Because there was so much destruction during the Imjin War in the late 16th century, examples of earlier architecture are rare.
Autumn view from Buseoksa Temple.The main temple hall, which dates back to the Goryeo Dynasty.
Here you can see the unusual support structure, quite different from the usual Joseon style found in most Korean temples.
The main columns have a “belly” shape, widening in the midsection and tapering again at the base.
Shilla stone Buddhas.More lovely fall colors from the temple.
We were lucky to get to the temple early. By the time we were leaving, around lunchtime, the busloads of tourists had turned this quiet autumnal refuge into a circus, or really just a low-grade Korean amusement park without any rides. It was time to get away.
Mountain mushrooms
Not far away, near Punggi, across from the Sosu Seoweon (Confucian academy), we saw a sign for a restaurant and decided to pull in. It was styled like an old hanok, and we were shown to a private room.
As we were entering, I saw — and smelled — a bubbling dish being brought to the next room over, a heady, rich brew of earthy mushrooms. “Whatever that is,” I said, “we’re ordering that.”
Wild mushroom jangol.
We had lucked into the last available seating at Dageum (다금), an apparently famous restaurant about which I can find nothing online. Not long after we arrived, two buses showed up, but with our private room, we hardly noticed the crowds. Each dish is handmade, and the man who runs the place goes out into the mountains to gather the wild ingredients. In the jangol, you could taste and savor each different type of mushroom: this one purple and astringent, that one almost like kelp, another woody and chewy. We had the jangol plus a wild mushroom pancake, plus a bunch of side dishes, all for 40,000 won.
Wild mushrooms gathered from the mountains.
We rounded out the day with a visit to Sosu Seowon, Korea’s oldest Confucian academy. Unlike Buddhism, Confucianism is no longer an active faith, and these places, which were always austere, are now a bit sad too. But the autumn leaves were just as beautiful there, and you could feel some sense of what it must have been like for the scholars to observe the passing of the seasons in this beautiful place dedicated to learning and practicing the virtuous life.
And then we drove home, back to Seoul, through the traffic and the city lights and up into an apartment tower, where we ordered in Chinese food.
I woke up this morning, far away in Korea, to horrifying news of anti-Semitic terrorism back home.
I haven’t yet got much to say about what happened, but I felt the need to respond to hate with tzedakah (charity). There’s little else I can do right now. In multiples of chai, I donated to these organizations:
HIAS “Welcome the stranger. Protect the refugee.” This is the organization whose mission of kindness drove the murderer to his vicious act. Anyone who knows our history as a people understands that we have been refugees, time and again. As the Torah says:
And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.
ADL The Anti-Defamation League continues to fight anti-Semitism in America and around the world.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee The president has openly encouraged political violence, and his party has done nothing to stop him. The murders in Pittsburgh and the mailing of bombs to prominent democrats, including one to George Soros, a favorite target of anti-Semitic conspiracists, are of a piece. America’s anti-racist majority needs the political power the vulnerable instead of inciting violence against them.
Edit (October 29, 2018)
As we learn more, I found out there were two other congregations praying at the synagogue at the time of the attack. I’ve donated to both.
Once a year, Orthodox Jews take the Torahs out of the case and dance around with them drunkenly. It’s the raucous, joyous holiday of Simchas Torah, which celebrates the end and beginning of the annual cycle of reading the Five Books of Moses. You finish, you start over again. Yay!
This isn’t our typical way of learning in Western culture. We tend to learn sequentially, hierarchically: grade by grade, level by level. Working biologists aren’t expected to go back through their high school bio textbooks, and few of us reread the novels we read then, even though they were written for adults and not for the children we were at the time. (The Old Man and the Sea doesn’t hold up that well, but The Great Gatsby makes a lot more sense, and Holden Caufield’s prep school whinging is easier to take when you’re not reading it in a shitty public school.)
In language learning too, there are levels and hierarchies. By rights, my Korean is advanced intermediate or thereabouts. I’m certainly well past the beginner level, able to have real conversations with complicated grammar and vocabulary.
And yet.
Jews read and reread the Torah not because it’s new, or because they forgot what happens. (Spoiler alert: The Jews win and Moses dies.) We study because each time we can go deeper, or find something new that we’d overlooked the last time.
Language study is like that too. Have you ever gone back through an old chapter of one of your language textbooks, something you’re now way past? You’ll find that once knotty and intractable passages are now easy to understand. And you’ll also find vocabulary and grammar you’d forgotten, or that you couldn’t get then but can now.
With that in mind, I’m rereading my Korean language textbooks from the beginning. It’s not that I’ll finally learn how to say hello or what’s for breakfast. But already, even in the first chapter, I’m bumped into a few words I’d long forgotten, a few concepts that had slipped my mind.
Learning isn’t always about moving forward. Sometimes you get more by going back over the same ground and seeing what you missed the first time.
It feels good to engage with new music. Last week I saw the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma perform here in Seoul, and I was especially moved by Kojiro Umezaki’s …seasons continue as if none of this had ever happened… and by Wu Tong’s merging of a Chinese folk song, sung and played on the sheng, with Yo-Yo Ma’s rendition of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude. Each piece combines the old and traditional with the modern, but in completely different ways: Umezaki through an ingenious and heartbreaking electronic deconstruction of the sound of the shakuhachi, and Ma and Wu through the juxtaposition of two older pieces, performed in fairly mainstream ways, to create a postmodern overlap.
As the weather turns cooler, it’s nice to know I’ve got a body of listening ahead of me, something to enjoy during the winter months when holing up at home is more appealing than venturing out.
So what gives? After more than a year at Samsung, I see two main causes of Korea’s low worker productivity. The first, most obvious cause is long hours. Many Koreans (though, thankfully, not those in my division) feel like they have to get to work before their bosses and leave after, regardless of whether they have anything important to do. They put on a show of being at work for very long hours, but exhausted workers don’t actually produce very much. They’d be more effective if they just went home and slept.
This culture, thankfully, is changing. The president is pushing policies to limit excessively long hours, and companies like Samsung are making changes. In my division at Samsung, it’s now against the rules to work more than 52 hours in a week — still a lot of hours, but it means you can’t put in 12-hour days and then come in on the weekend without a notice getting sent to HR and the CEO. There are twice-a-month events called Smile Day, when you’re encouraged to go home early, and Wednesdays are Family Day, so people are also pushed out the door a little bit. And vacation days are mandatory: if you don’t take them by the end of the year, you’re actually not allowed to come in to work until they’re all gone. None of these reforms is a magic fix, but they’re helping to push the culture away from overwork and toward more efficient time management.
The second cause of low productivity is perhaps harder to pinpoint, and harder to reform, but I think it has much to do with the top-down, authoritarian culture that still rules many companies. Workers put in a lot of effort do get something done, only to be told to do it all again differently. I’ve worked on projects that carried on for months in a state of constant crisis, everything needing to be done immediately even though the release date was still far in the future. Instead of “measure twice, cut once,” it was more like “chop everything to pieces and glue it all back together,” and we did it over and over again. The final result was the sloppy hodge-podge you would expect.
This too is changing, though maybe not as visibly or as quickly. The leader of that project was edged out, and there’s a notable lack of panicked frenzy these days in my division. When workers are given the time and space to think and to do things right, they produce greater value. Just think what we could do if we added that latent worker productivity to the many factors already standing in Korea’s favor!
Last year, after a tedious New Year’s Eve party, I nearly ended up in a fistfight over a taxi.
The year before that, I stood on a cold, rainy beach in Da Nang, enduring hours of Vietpop for what turned out to be one small firework. The highlight of the evening was hearing my Vietnamese girlfriend declare that “Vietnam has the most beautiful bitches in the world,” by which she meant beaches.
In past years, I’ve been to countless forgettable parties, paid too much for mediocre dinners, wasted a grim evening at Menahata Bulgarian Bar that was not at all like the video for Start Wearing Purple. I welcomed the millennium at my cousin’s house in Washington, DC, where she had forgotten to throw the party she’d invited me to because she’d just had a baby. About the only really fun thing I can ever remember doing for New Year’s Eve is going to concerts for bands I would’ve loved seeing any night of the year. Mostly Primus. Although it was after one of those concerts that my car caught on fire.
Refugees
Because New Year’s Eve is so artificial and forced, it’s pretty much the opposite of spontaneous or interesting fun. It’s fitting that the most famous New Year’s Eve celebration involves plastic celebrities in a fake place full of revelers who endure hours of frozen huddling without access to toilets. It’s like a North Korean performance of fun. If the Times Square revelers were refugees, Amnesty would complain about the conditions. And then Jenny McCarthy would try to stop Doctors Without Borders from vaccinating the children.
Because New Year’s Eve is so overhyped, everyone tries way too hard. Because so many people are trying so hard, there are too many events and parties, and the energy gets diffused. You end up at a bar or a party where the hosts are freaking out all night that not enough people have shown up, and everyone attending is worried that something way better is happening somewhere else without them, and the people working hate that they’re working on New Year’s Eve. If you’re with a date, there’s way too much pressure, and the people without dates are all setting the bar way too high. Then it’s midnight and nobody knows what to do, and then the party is over.
No uniformed personnel
My family has had some terrible luck with New Year’s Eve. My grandfather had more than one New Year’s Eve heart attack that landed him in the emergency room. Once my mom got a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop, and the paramedic apologetically asked her if she’d been putting anything interesting up there (she hadn’t).
One year my brother got his car stuck in the mud. A cop saw the car and called my parents. When my parents asked if anyone was in the car, the cop said he didn’t know because he didn’t want to get his boots muddy checking the car. Turns out my brother was fine and had just decided to sleep there until morning, but since then my parents have considered it a good New Year’s Eve if they’ve avoided speaking with any uniformed personnel.
A quiet new year
This year — during my year of no particular ambition — I spent New Year’s Eve at home, by myself. I ordered in. I binge-watched Parks & Rec. I took a nap, and later I took another nap. I had a bath, listened to some jazz, and then I watched the ringing of the Bosingak bell on Korean TV. For a while at midnight I could see some fireworks in the distance from my balcony. My New Year’s Eve was quiet and relaxing, cost very little, and exceeded my expectations.
This morning I woke up, made myself a cup of coffee, and watched the first sunrise of 2018.
Go see this fun, gloriously dopey little indie band while they’re still fun and indie. Go see them while they’re still playing in no-cover Hongdae basements and about half the crowd is their moms and the other bands on the bill and their songs are still about being rock stars and how nice their grandmothers are (really).
I went to see Beautiful Bombs for the second time last night, where they were the opening act at their own single release party, inside a club smaller than the old Berkeley Square, for those who remember such things. Korea has what must be the politest punk scene in the world, so there was none of the skeeviness that hung around the old clubs I used to go to in my Bay Area youth — the Stone, the Omni — and of course clubs these days are smoke-free and have good digital sound systems and I’m not stoned, so everything’s a lot less blurry than it was back then. But Beautiful Bombs brings some of that energy. They’ve got the tight bounce of a band that really, really likes playing together, and their lead guitarist is pretty amazing. He reminds me of Slash, which is an idiotic thing to say, but I’m saying it because I’m totally fanboy crushing over an indie club band. If I were 17 and in high school, I would put a Beautiful Bombs logo sticker on my binder, and if you mentioned it because you knew who they were, we would be friends.
There were other bands too. 아디오스오디오 (Adios Audio) is a guitar-keys-drums trio whose lead singer has a Busan twang, and they play what she called “emo-core,” which is less bad than it sounds. She has a clear, powerful voice and writes lovely melodies, and you can hear the Jaurim influence, which isn’t a bad thing. 레드닷 (Reddotts) was the rare Korean band that brought a little bit of rock-and-roll menace to the proceedings. They’ve got a dirty groove and a tiny little tatted-up bass player who’s only about as tall as her instrument, and they’re also pretty worth seeing. And ABTB, the most professional of the bunch, reminded me a lot of those late-nineties bands I never got into, like Filter and Tool and whatnot, and they were very loud, and we left after their first or second song.
But I’m all about Beautiful Bombs. Go see them while they’re still fresh and happy and playing music because they love it. Go see them before the guitarist gets poached by some older, richer, boringer band that pays better, or the singer faces reality and joins his dad’s company, or some Korean record exec convinces them to make one of those terrible OST ballads with the video that starts with a bunch of text to let you know it’ll be a terrible OST ballad. Go see them while their following is still so small that they’ll recognize you if you show up a couple times.
You’ll have fun. They’ll have fun. And what else is there, really?
