Category: Personal

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.

As we all know by now, the ferocious tsunami that struck Asia and Africa on 26 December is one of the most devastating natural disasters in history. The United Nations, of course, is playing a major role in coordinating the relief efforts.

The disaster struck a number of places Jenny and I traveled in India, including Chennai (Madras), Mahabalipuram, and the former French colony of Pondicherry. (On our living room wall is a Pondy silk scarf, and in our cabinet of curiosities is a statue of the goddess Laxmi from Mahabalipuram.) This brings home the tragedy to me personally, both because I’ve met and interacted with the locals and seen the places that are now devastated, and because the tourists who were hurt and killed were people just like me and the people I socialized with.

Austin’s Blog has a collection of videos of the tsunami, which are not for the faint of heart.

And finally, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece a couple of days ago discussing previous tsunamis and similar natural disasters, and warning that the island of La Palma, in the Canaries, will one of these days collapse into the sea, launching a tsunami that will hit the east coast of the United States with a wall of water taller than any skyscraper. We would have eight hours or so to evacuate, and we’d need to get pretty far inland to be safe.

I suppose this is all a reminder that nature is very big, we are very small, our lives are very short, and the only thing we can be sure of is that we will eventually die. So enjoy the present moment, because it’s all there is.

Happy new year.

If you’re feeling as awful about the big tsunami as everyone else, you might want to donate to the Red Cross, which is coordinating disaster relief. The website is running slowly — hopefully because it’s swamped with people making donations — but if you wait, it should load.

It being Christmas Eve Eve (and the last workday before Christmas), I decided to take my stash of leftover Pepero and Choco-Pies to work and hand them around to the admins. The non-Koreans were a little confused, but pleased enough. Cheryl, who works in the glass reception booth downstairs, said, “You must have heard my stomach growling,” and Bing, after insisting that she didn’t need any gifts, immediately gave in at the sight of a Choco-Pie.

But the Koreans were thrilled, giving guilty giggles at the thrill of eating what are obviously kid foods, on a par with Fruit Rollups or Twinkies. Ambassador Shin caught me handing them out and asked, “How do you know Pepero?”

“I lived in Korea,” I explained. “I remember Pepero Day.” He grinned and walked away.

Merry Christmas!

Check out this fascinating front-page article in the Times about the Japanese fever for “Yon-sama,” a Korean actor in a Korean soap opera called Winter Sonata, and the enormous cultural impact that it’s having.