Mark James Russell

Books, blog and other blather

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Outrage, bias and growing older

January 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

I was taking a look at traffic to this little blog (bloguita?) a little while ago, and noticed a few hits coming from the forum attached to a popular Korean pop culture website. There, on a thread all about the actor Bae Yong-joon, one commenter had linked to my website, saying some nice things about Pop Goes Korea, but also making some strange claims about my “bias” against Bae Yong-joon, apparently instead favoring Lee Byung-hun.

Which I thought was more than a little odd. I mean, there’s a lot in the book about Lee because, well, there’s a whole chapter that profiles him. But in that chapter, when I talk about the rise of the Korean Wave, I clearly indicated the prime importance of Winter Sonata, the drama that made Bae so internationally famous. I may have tweaked Bae’s obsessive fandom once or twice in the past, but I think I’ve always given him his due.

wintersonata

So if I talked a lot about Lee Byung-hun, it was because he was the subject of the chapter, and because he was generous enough to give me plenty of time for interviews, responding to my many questions. Bae would have been a great choice for a TV chapter, but at the time, he just wasn’t interested in participating in the book (and I had some contacts with his company and manager at the time, so wasn’t just cold-calling from out of nowhere).

But, being the Internet, people like to speculate, which led to some really odd comments, like maybe I preferred Lee Byung-hun because his personal scandals appealed to my male sensibilities. Very, very odd. If anyone wanted to take a moment to research a little, they would have found plenty of stories about the importance of Winter Sonata  and Bae in Hallyu history.

Anyhow, it definitely was not a big deal. I only mention it because of some other online fusses I’ve seen lately. There’s apparently a squadron of people who loathe the very nice folks at Eat Your Kimchi, so when EYK was announced as a guest on some Arirang TV show, a mini-mob arose, accusing EYK of all sorts of ridiculous stuff (like fat-shaming, which would be, like, the exact opposite point of their videos on the topic). The mind boggles.

Fans of K-pop groups are always quick to switch to outrage mode, whenever someone is perceived to have slighted their favorites. Some of those fans are famous for being totally unhinged.

But it isn’t just Korean pop culture fans, of course. It seems like any field where people are the least bit passionate, that passion turns so quickly and easily into a wild, mob mentality. Left hate right. Right hates left. The fantasy and science fiction communities, also love a good flame war (“So-and-so famous writer from the past was racist!” being a popular starting point).

All of which makes me so happy to be middle-aged. I have my loves and dislikes, but aside from my family, all my music favs, art, movies or whatever have a much more moderate place in my psyche. “I hate X.” “Oh, okay. I quite like X, but that’s all right.” Life is so much more pleasant this way.

* * *

Then again, no shortage of the big Twitter flame wars involve adults, so I guess age doesn’t mellow everyone.

Korean box office — another year, another record

December 30, 2014 / / 0 Comments

And so it was, on Dec. 30, with just one day left in the year, Korean movie theaters once again set a new attendance record. At least, that’s how it looks on KOBIS, where yesterday finished at 213.1 million admissions, just shy of last year’s 213.3 million.

Of course, when it comes to actual revenue, 2014 set a new record a few weeks ago — 1.65 trillion won ($1.5 billion), versus 1.55 trillion won last year.

Roaring Currents

As for Korean movies, as a percentage it was a bit of a down year, and thanks to a late surge does it look like they’ll finish the year right at 50 percent of ticket sales. That’s down from last year’s amazing 59.7 percent, but still pretty frickin’ good.  They made about 811 billion won, which is the third-best ever.

The Hollywood studios, on the other hand, must be ecstatic, setting huge records across the board. 106 million admissions is 23 percent higher than their previous record, and 839 billion won is also a huge record.

Anything else worth mentioning? ADMIRAL: ROARING CURRENTS was crazy popular, of course, making 135 billion won. But 12 Korean movies made more than 20 billion won, and 22 made more than 10 billion won, so from where I sit, the industry looks pretty healthy.

I do find it pretty cool that in all my years in Korea, the movie biz has set new attendance records almost every single year (save three or four, I think).

Be steelpan my beating heart

December 29, 2014 / / 0 Comments

So, it’s winter. It’s dark and cold. China keeps farting out its pollution onto us in Korea. How to chase the blues away? Steelpan drums!

Okay, maybe not to everyone’s taste. But here are two songs that I have been finding irrepressibly cheery lately. First, Duke Dumont’s dance song “I Got U”:

And here’s “Flying White Pillow” by Korean indie band Telepathy (the version of the song they recorded for Fred Perry Subculture, which is much more interesting than the original, thanks in part to the steelpan sound):

That’s all. Nothing about The Interview, Nut Rage, or politics or any of that annoying stuff. I just like these songs and have been listening to them together a lot.

Why Korea is up my alley

December 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Close to my home, there is this small, nondescript alley. Or, rather, there was. Just one year ago, the alley had nothing but a super-cheap lunch place and a lot of residences (and stacks of garbage). Here is an image of it taken from Naver from just over a year ago.

Hongdae Alley 2013

Now, however, that alley has been turned almost completely commercial. There’s a “Mongolian” lamb grill, an Izakaya, a croissant shop, a grilled seafood place, a fancy dessert shop, and a pretty good Chinese restaurant.

Hongdae Alley new

Not to mention a Japanese bakery, Aoitori, which is bizarrely one of the trendiest joints in the area for drinks later in the day (it turns into a quasi-pub, with cocktails and wine, in the evening).

Aoitori

And that’s just on this 50 meter stretch. When you go to the end, the cross alley now has a Mexican-Japanese fusion pub, a huge chicken place, a hair shop, plus three of the buildings are now being renovated or completely rebuilt.

Hongdae alley

In short, there’s a real dynamism here, a sense that everything is constantly in flux. And I really like that. Of course, all change also implies a sense of loss and someone inevitably gets hurt, but I like living in a country that is still moving forward.

Imagine this happened in alley after alley, block after block, and you might get a sense of how much energy there is in Hongdae these days. Every time I think this neighborhood has hit a saturation point (for bars, coffee shops, galleries or whatever), it just keeps on growing.

Cold Day

December 24, 2014 / / 2 Comments

A couple of days ago, temperatures in Seoul plunged to around minus-14 or so at night. Not fun. But, on the flipside, that means the streets are much less crowded than usual. And unlike other years, the pollution out of China has not been very bad.

Here are a couple of pictures from the Cheonggyecheon, during my lunchtime walk.

Cheonggye cold

Cheonggye - cold morning

And the DDP looks rather mysterious with a little layer of snow on it.

DDP-cold

And another view of the DDP, from a couple of days earlier.

DDP-1215

The sad shambles of K-pop contracts

December 4, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The nice folks at Eat You Kimchi have bravely waded into the muddy waters that are K-pop contracts. And their answers are more than a little depressing — a large “break even point” for training costs that artists must repay, while getting 40 percent or less of their revenues, all the while more expenses pile up, and there’s little transparency.

It’s a good overview, but I will add a couple more points:

  • Bad K-pop contracts have been in the news since long before 2009 (even if the JYJ/TVXQ problem took it up a level). In fact, Time magazine did a big takedown on the K-pop industry in 2002 — here (about payoffs and corruption, free) and here (about contracts and salary, but you need to sign in)
  • While the K-pop artist contracts are pretty sketchy, it is worth remembering that a lot of these companies have many trainees they are working on at any given time, which can be quite a cash-eater.
  • K-pop “stars” aren’t really stars the way we think of them (at least in accounting terms), but are more like employees. And pretty much everyone in the Korean entertainment industry works crazy long hours for terrible pay.

So, I guess to me the problems with K-pop are not because working conditions are so atypical for Korea; but for too many people, they are all too typical. Or typical of a kind of Korea that much of the country has outgrown — and it’s way past time for K-pop to catch up.

With more artists fleeing their production companies than ever, certainly the time is right for a big shift in the industry. In the past, though, when artists became moguls, they usually just repeated the same terrible business structure. But I’d like to think that sooner or later, some visionary will see the many, obvious weaknesses and try setting up a label that works for the artists.

Joining Colin Marshall’s Notebook

November 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The charming and insightful Colin Marshall, host of the website Notebook on Cities and Culture, recently traveled to Korea to turn his analytical eye here.  He wrote several articles about Korea for The Guardian, and he also conducted a whole bunch of interviews with artists, thinkers, trendsetters, and, well, me.

You can listen to me here, going on about a whole bunch of Korea-related things, like pop culture, art, win and Pringles.

Many thanks to Colin for the fun afternoon. Sorry the audio wasn’t clearer, but we were talking at Mudaeruk — a great cafe, but it can be noisy.

Play that Funkafric music

November 17, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Friday night I checked out a concert by one of my favorite Korean groups, the Jimmy McGriff-like organ funk of Funkafric. The show was held in the Hongdae club Strange Fruit, a small venue that has a surprising good sound system. For whatever reason, the turnout was pretty light.

Funkafric-2014Nov

Here are a couple of closeups, of the main man behind Funkafric, Lim Ji-hoon, as well as his current drummer Heo Curly (sorry about the poor quality of the pics).

Lim Ji-hoon

Curly-Nov2014

Sadly, I don’t have any good photos of the violinist playing that evening, Echae Kang. But she was very good, too. She and guitarist Ranhee Sun were particularly fun singing backup on their reggae-tinged cover of “La-La Means I Love You”.

This was one of those Funkafric shows where they teamed up with a pansori singer (sadly, I did not catch her name) — I gather they do that sort of thing from time to time. Usually I’m not a big fan of “fusion” music, but this mix actually worked out surprisingly well.

Funkafric-pansori-Nov2014

Honestly, there were a few people there. Not sure why all my photos are making places look so empty.

To get a sense of Funkafric’s sound, here’s a video of them playing on EBS last year.

Anyhow, I do believe Funkafric will be playing at Mudaeruk on Dec. 20, with My Way Killing and some other excellent groups. You should check it out if you are in town.

 

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