Books, blog and other blather

Author: Mark (Page 20 of 90)

Early Korean Recordings in the United States

The Korea Herald has an interesting (if factually challenged) story about older Korean music in this recent article about the 1950s singer Moon Kim. I just wish they did a bit more research before going to print.

The KH story claims that a local professor “discovered” Moon Kim’s 1956 record “East of Make Believe,” making the first known recording of a Korean artist in the West earlier than previously known. Worst, the article calls this “hallyu”, which is just silly.

A quick bit of Googling shows that people have known about this record for some time (and it is a record, not an album). Here is an eBay auction of “East of Make Believe” from a couple of months ago, and there are several others out there.

Still, her story is pretty fascinating. Moon Kim was the performance name of Ok Doo-ok, a singer who got her start in the 1940s in Korea. In the late 1940s, she emigrated to America, where she either studied music at Juilliard or journalism (or both … I’ve seen different reports). She released some songs for RCA in 1956 and 1957, but not much came of it and RCA dropped her after a couple of years. Then she worked for Voice of America for a bit, before starting several restaurants around the United States in the 1960s, creating a line of skin creams in the 1980s, and working with Korean orphans. She passed away in 2008.

Here’s a video of Ok/Kim singing on Korean TV in 1990:

And here is a video of her 1957 song “Oriental Hop”:

A More Complete (But Still Very Incomplete) List of Differences Between Korea and Spain

Difference Who’s Better
Movie theaters Korea – cheaper, bigger, nicer
Shopping Korea – most things open Sunday, convenience stores open 24 hours/day
Customer service Korea – much much faster and more helpful
Korean food Korea (duh)
Spanish food Spain (also duh)
Wine Spain – cheaper, nicer
Beer tie – both terrible
Weather Spain – sunnier, less hot, less humid
Traffic Spain – also bad, just Seoul has much more of it
Subways Korea – can use phone, cleaner, fewer pickpockets
Buses Spain – smoother
Fast food blerg. Hoping not to have an opinion for some time
Television tie – both terrible
Beaches Spain (duh)
English ability Who cares? Study the local language more, you uncouth foreigner
But what about tourists and people without the time to learn the local language? Fine … Tie, I guess.
Geopolitical danger Tie – Barcelona is apparently a big al-Qaeda hub. South Korea has the North. But neither worry me much.
Geopolitical danger Tie – Barcelona is apparently a big al-Qaeda hub. South Korea has the North. But neither worry me much.
Access to North Korean websites Spain – all things NK remain blocked in South Korea, even North Korean news’s handy new Facebook page. It was nice being able to read anything I wanted about the North without going through the hassle of elaborate workarounds (and someone I was able to read it all without turning communist)

There’s plenty more to talk/whine about, I’m sure, but that’s a list of what has occurred to me after being back four days.

Korea Changes, and Changes You

Well, I’m back in Korea again. Living here for the first time in four years (although I did visit a couple of times while I was in Europe). It is good to be back, trying to find my bearings again. Trying not to stick Spanish words randomly into my sentences. Trying not to gag when I see the price of a glass of wine or an espresso (although smiling happily when I see the price of Korean food and soju).

At the same time, Simon and Martina over at Eat Your Kimchi have just celebrated their fifth anniversary in Korea, with a post about how Korea has changed them. It is a good post, but what I find really fascinating are the comments below (I have them organized by most popular). It is full of people who have written little testimonials about why they are into K-pop and Korean culture, despite living far from Korea and having few direct connections to the country. There is a 25-year-old Kindergarten teacher (in Sweden, I think), a 48-year-old mother in Utah, some guy living in Poland, a 17-year-old in the Caribbean who wants to study in Japan.

Of course, Eat Your Kimchi is about a lot more than K-pop. But I think their audience speaks a lot to the international audience for K-pop. It’s not that K-pop or Korean culture is “taking over” the world. But world culture is fragmenting more and more, offering people ever more options of what they can listen to and how they can define themselves.

Back in the 1980s, each year there would be a “biggest music group in the world”, a group (or two) that would dominate radio, that everyone wanted to see in a huge stadium concert, that would be on MTV (or Much) 24-hours/day. That kind of singular domination doesn’t really exist anymore. Most of the stadium touring groups are oldie acts, that old people will go see, even if mostly out of habit. The biggest concerts now are the huge summer festivals, with dozens of acts on the bill, usually in a wide range of genres.

K-pop and Korean culture has become one more option in the buffet of world culture. And for now, it is a very popular part of the buffet — which is good because that means the restaurant keeps replacing it quickly, keeping it fresher than the boring food no one likes and that simmers for hours growing stale. (Er, I think I’ve overextended that metaphor).

Anyhow, Korean things are doing very well now, and I think they are going to continue for some time to come. But as you can see from Simon and Martina and most of their followers, these fans are not usually singular obsessives, caring only about Korea. Korea is one part of a nutritious, cultural breakfast. And, imho, that’s pretty cool.

As for how Korea has changed me. Well, I’ve been in Korea, off and on, since I was 25. Somehow I have fallen into a career that largely involves Korea things — writing about Korea in one form or another. So of course Korea is a big part of my life. I know some people out there have read my book on Korean culture, which makes me feel very lucky.

Seriously, just the thought that people paid money to read my thoughts on a subject is pretty overwhelming. When you are in a newspaper or magazine, you know they are paying for the whole package, and your article is one small part. But a book? That’s all on you, and if they hate it, you just wasted their time and their money. So, anyone out there who read the book, thanks so much.

And, as I have hinted before, there are more books on the way. I think there will be two coming out later this year … I just hope you will continue to find them interesting and useful.

How about you all? Has Korea changed you? Or have you seen Korea change?

Feast, Famine, and Korean Music

Econ 101: in a perfectly competitive environment, profits go to zero.

Case in point: Korean music.

After years of people saying Korea could not support summer music festivals, the country now has five major music festivals in a three-week span:

  • Ansan Valley Rock – July 26-28 – Ansan, Gyeonggi Province – 260,000 won (The Cure, Skrillex, NIN)
  • Pentaport – Aug. 2-4 – Songdo,  Incheon – 165,000 won (Fall Out Boy, Suede, Testament)
  • Jisan World Rock – Aug. 2-4 – Jisan – 250,000 (Weezer, Jamiroquai, Nas)
  • Supersonic – Aug 14-15 – Olympic Park, Seoul – 176,000 won (Pet Shop Boys)
  • City Break, Jamsil, Seoul, Aug. 17-18 – W250,000 (Muse, Metallica)

And those are in addition to these July festivals:

  • Asia Metal Festival – July 1-2 – Seoul – 73,000 won/day
  • Rainbow Island – July 7-9 – Nami Island, Gangwon Province – 99,000 won
  • Ultra Korea – July 14-15 – Olympic Stadium, Seoul – 160,000 won (DJs and EDM, but also Japan’s Perfume)

It’s the sort of pattern one sees over and over again in Korea, where everyone tells you something can’t be done, until someone does it, then everyone does the same thing, too, and floods the market, be it microbrew beer, mixed martial arts, or whathaveyou.

But I guess too much music is a problem you want to have. It’s great to see how far the scene has come since the first aborted attempt that was Triport in 1999.

Beauty Myths and Korean Beauty Myth Myths

Zara Stone over in the the Atlantic takes a look at Korea’s plastic surgery “obsession” (HT: Marmot’s Hole), in an article that is at once fascinating and infuriating. Fascinating because Stone has done a fair amount of serious reportage, digging up some really interesting history and details. Infuriating because it is so full of moralism, stereotypes, and poorly thought-out ideas.

Some points on Stone’s article, in no particular order:

1) “Plastic surgery” is presented like a blanket term, with little distinguishing between eyelid surgery and more invasive techniques (although Stone notes that Koreans often make such a distinction). No mention is made of, say, orthodontics, which in America is incredibly common, far beyond any medical need. Are braces and retainers examples of “body objectification”? How about Lasik surgeries? Tanning beds?

It’s also worth noting that Korea’s obesity rates are so much lower than America’s. So, while too many women in Korea have an unhealthy fascination with thinness, the problems with weight are a much smaller part of Korea’s body image problems.

The point being, if you broaden your definitions of body image beyond “plastic surgery,” suddenly Korea looks a lot less of an outlier.

(All that said, the V-line jaw surgery is pretty terrible stuff … although Stone gives us no sense of how common or uncommon the procedure is.)

2) The K-pop link. Like a lot of writers on this subject, Stone looks at K-pop’s beauty standards (although, thankfully, she notes that this is an issue that pre-dates K-pop). And like others, she blames K-pop for much of Korean women’s beauty myth problems (and the article focuses 99% on women). Which is pretty daft, in my opinion. There are huge amounts of plastic surgery in Hollywood and Western pop music, but people usually are more cautious about linking them to mainstream plastic surgery culture/trends. What makes K-pop so much more influential and problematic than Western pop culture? If there is a difference, Stone doesn’t describe it.

It’s also worth nothing that K-pop fans tend to be more interested in the male idols than the female, but once again the author glosses over male images in her analysis.

Oh, and then there are those K-pop talent shows on TV, which has produced acts like Busker Busker, Lee Hi, and Akdong Musicians — all pretty different faces and bodies than typical K-pop. If this was all about prefab appearances being pushed by the music companies, why does the Korean public vote for all sorts of different looks?

(Btw, I quite like this brief interview with Park Ji-min, winner of the “K-Pop Star” program, talking about why she likes working at JYP Entertainment).

3) Work and beauty. Stone talks a lot about how beauty is a part of work-related competition, trotting out the canard that the economic crisis of the late 1990s somehow pushed people toward more procedures. She also points out how Korea job applications include head shots — although I would point out that plenty other parts of the world tend to require photos, too, and Korea was requiring photos long before women were participating much in the workforce.

Do beautiful people have an unfair advantage when it comes to getting hired in Korea? Sure … just like everywhere. But is it significantly different in Korea? Not from the many, many offices I have been to in Korea over the years. Ninety-eight percent of the time, the university name and record matters far more than appearance (plus most of the high-prestige jobs in Korea require an application test, which double-fold eyelids don’t help you with at all).

* * *

Anyhow, I’m no fan of most cosmetic surgery, and like many people harbor an instinctive dislike for it. My wife has never had any work done and I’m quite happy with her (quite Korean) appearance. But making sweeping generalizations about a country based on my personal tastes (and a country that the author doesn’t particularly know)? That I’m much less confident about.

Certainly women in Korea, like women everywhere, are under way too much pressure to look certain ways. And the deep types of anti-women prejudice still lingering in Korea make it worse. As Sharon Heijin Lee (not “Hejiin”) says in the article:

There’s a real problem when you make generalizations about a whole country full of women, that they’re all culturally duped. There are certain economic situations happening in Korea and America that might impel different choices. We — Americans — might not see plastic surgery on the same level here that we see in Korea.

And:

When we think of it as just the desire to look white, we’re not really giving credit to the surgery industry that flourishes by reprinting people’s features.

Body image and the pressures women are under to look a certain way are important subjects worth exploring. But blaming Korea’s version of these subjects on K-pop and economics is dubious to the extreme. If only Stone had listened more to her own expert.

Adios and Annyeong

Hard to believe it, but my time in Spain has nearly come to an end. Somehow our quick jaunt turned into nearly four years. But it has been a (mostly) fun four years, so no regrets. Living so close to all those Spanish beaches was good fun. Making new friends was quite nice. Working on another language was interesting.

Best of all, it was great to return to writing, after stopping for a couple of years to try out documentaries. In addition to the journalism and think tank writing, I should have a couple of books coming out later this year — two very different projects that I hope to talk about very soon.

But living here has also made it clear to me that I’m more of an Asia person than a European. It should be fun returning to a part of the world that I’m more accustomed to. Not to mention returning to the foods I like. It’s only been four years, and I have visited Korea a couple of times, but I’m still curious about what has changed. Korea is always changing, and I think that last few years were no different.

Spain’s Economy: Two Malos Don’t Make a Bueno (and 3 is right out)

Another weekend, another round of protests here in Spain by the indignados, or “the outraged”, demanding an end to cuts and other austerity measures. I was taking a walk along the Gran Via yesterday when one troupe of demonstrators from Badalona came marching down the road, blocking traffic and shouting their uncoordinated, mismatched chants (for someone used to Korean demonstrations, Spanish protests are rather underwhelming).

But protest quality aside, what is most irksome is seeing how profoundly all involved in Spain — the pro-austerity crowd and the indignados — continue to miss the point.

On the one hand, cutting and slashing budgets in Spain (and much of Europe) are terribly bad macroeconomics. This budget was in surplus with a very small debt when the economic crisis happened, and austerity now in such a miserable economy only creates more problems than it is supposed to cure.

On the other hand, so much of Spain is still so horribly inefficient. Businesses have 20 people doing the work of four or five in, say, New York. One cultural organization I know here in Barcelona has 18 people employed in its tourism division — despite not offering any tours of its facilities or doing anything tourism-related. It’s crazy. The good years of 1996-2006 or so  led to massive bureaucratic expansion, much of which is still in place.

So what solutions are politicians talking about? Instead of trying to figure out how to make the reforms that are needed to make Spain more efficient while creating projects that will help Spain in the long-term, we get arguments about Catalan independence. Instead of cutting the fat and adding to the efficient, we have institutions cutting the meat and protecting the fat.

People aren’t dumb, and as the Spanish political system proves itself to be thoroughly useless in solving the country’s problems, Spaniards are rapidly losing faith in the political system:

So we will very soon be in a situation in which the four main parties in Spain—the ones represented in the Metroscopia survey—all have around or less than 20% support, within a political and constitutional system that is rotting away all by itself due to so much corruption, incapable of bringing about the institutional changes necessary to adapt Spain to a new century, and in which there is no realistic alternative anywhere on the horizon capable of governing the country.

Of course, with the European economy as a whole shrinking for six quarters in a row — worse than the initial crisis of 2008/9 — it’s not like the rest of the continent is doing much better. It’s a beautiful place, but I’m happy I’ll be moving on soon.

Tides of Change

Google’s fun Earth Engine lets you look at maps of the world going back nearly 30 years, so you can see how an area has changed over time. Usually, the resolution isn’t good enough to turn up much of anything, but one area it works pretty well is with reclaimed land along coastlines. And between Songdo in Incheon and Saemangeum in Jeolla Province, Korea has a couple of big reclamation projects going on. So I checked them out on the Earth Engine to see how they looked.

Here is Songdo, the new “international business city” being built southwest of Seoul, close to the Incheon airport:

If you want to see some good pics on the ground of what Songdo looks like today, you should check out the photography of Robert Koehler (like this one):

Saemangeum is even bigger, with around 400 square kilometers eventually to be reclaimed from the sea (or so I read). I don’t know how much they’ve done so far, but it is fascinating to watch, along with the building of that huge sea wall:

 

Can’t Win for Losing — Econ Edition

Paul Krugman’s latest column, “The 1 Percent Solution,” is a very good one, as usual, but it also gets at a deeper issue that has been bothering me for some time — why is it that austerity ideas are so deeply rooted in the elites, despite such a lack of evidence for their effectiveness? Krugman gets into the class aspects of the divide, arguing that the 1% are simply arguing for policies that are good for the 1%. Not terribly surprising, I guess.

But it is an argument that brings up a couple of related points, imho. The first is demographic. While there is a big divide between haves and have-nots, it is a line that changes with age — as people get older, they tend to get richer, and they tend to become net creditors instead of debtors. The 1% beliefs are not just about entitlements and austerity, they also are very creditor-friendly, preferring deflation over inflation, for example. Which in part explains the difference in how age groups support different policies.

The other bigger issue that I’ve heard economists bring up is the Cold War. Basically, the argument is, back in the days of the Cold War, when there was this big, left-wing enemy out there, the monied elites in the West saw it was in their interest not to let inequality grow too much. The peasants had alternatives, so you couldn’t let them get fired up and storm the Bastille. A stable, happy system was good for all.

But today, now that communism is over as a viable danger, the 1% (or 0.1% or so) are free to push for their own interests without fear of blowback. And so they have pushed, quite successfully. Is it a coincidence that the rise of the financial industry and inequality matches with the downfall of communism? Maybe economic systems need common enemies to keep them in balance.

With the continued problems gripping Europe, you can see people growing more desperate for a solution. Most people are pretty centrist politically, but when the center refuses to provide answers, people will look for alternatives. Certainly Spain is exhibit A for a political system that is completely unable to reform itself or provide answers for its citizens. Without things in Europe getting better, I worry who might try filling that void in the future.

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