Mark James Russell

Books, blog and other blather

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Back in the R-O-K

May 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

It is good to be back in Korea for the first time in a couple of years. Having lived here for so long, I was often too immersed in the culture to notice the changes going on, but after being gone for a couple of years, it is much easier to see them.

My first thought, upon arriving at the airport and taking the new(ish) train into Seoul was: Wow, is Spain a dump. I mean, there is a lot I love about Spain, but to see the clean, cool trains, with wifi everywhere, the difference was rather jarring. Great, though, to be able to take a train into Seoul, especially during rush hour when the bus would have been a nightmare.

Here in Seoul, the bizarro City Hall building is nearly finished now. A lot of people like it (“It looks like a tsunami rushing over the colonial era City Hall,” said one friend), but I’m not one of them. The new Gwanghwamun plaza is rather nice, and I think makes better use of the space than the old plaza. Looking forward to checking out an Imax movie or two while I am here, plus seeing all the other changes.

BoA, Strange Voices, and Messing Around on Soundcloud

April 18, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Apparently I am procrastinating. But in doing so, I swung by Soundcloud and started link hopping and came across some interesting music.

First fun discovery was Mimyo, who has apparently continued with his BoA obsession. Last year, he and Byul.org inspired a whole bunch of indie musicians to record a bunch of BoA covers and put them up on Soundcloud, calling the whole project Model B. I guess that was not enough for Mimyo, though, because he also recorded a shoegazer version of BoA’s “Game”–and quite a good version, imho.

Plenty more Mimyo here on Soundcloud.

That led me (eventually) to the singer/group Hoegidong Danpyunsun (회기동 단편선, aka Park Jong-yoon).

You can read an interview with Danpyunsun here:

Oh, and just for fun, here is Byul.org’s “Idiots”.

And a Jambinai dance remix? Really? How did I miss that? Not sure if I like it, but I certainly like knowing it exists.

UPDATE: Nearly forgot to mention Foundation Records is up to Vol. 20 now on its F.ound Tracks series.

Spain Economy Meltdown (Just the Previews for Now)

April 17, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Always great to see Paul Krugman turning his eye to Spain, even if it is because the Euro crisis is spreading its way over here. As he succinctly says, Spain is no case of meltdown by excess spending: it was running a surplus in 2007 and its debt level was very low. What Spain did have, however, was a housing bubble–created in no small part by way too much cheap money from Germany.

I’m still amazed at how the PIGS countries are putting up with German-led nonsense about how to solve this crisis. Foolish Northern lending was as responsible for Europe’s current woes as anything, so it is not unreasonable to ask those responsible to bear a share of the pain of fixing the problem.

There is that old saying: If you owe the bank $1,000, the bank owns you; but if you owe the bank $1 million,  you own the bank. If I were Spain–and Portugal, and perhaps Italy (but not Greece: they really are messed up with excessive spending–I would be pushing back. Sure, Spain pulling out of the euro would create havoc here, but it was be just as bad for the rest of Europe. The threat would go a long way to righting the balance between Europe’s north and south.

For more information about the Spanish economy, there is always the wonderful Edward Hugh. He has a new interview up here. I wonder what Mr. Hugh would make of Krugman’s suggestion that Germany should raise its inflation rate up to 4% or so, while the PIGS are kept at 1%-ish, to help re-balance the north and south of Europe.

Brother Louis, Sister Choo-ja

April 12, 2012 / / 1 Comment

I just found out that Kim Choo-ja recorded a version of “Brother Louie” on her 1974 album 가는 길 (Going Road). So much fun. If only Louis CK would open his TV show with it … just once!

(Sadly, this is the only version I could find on the Internet. The album version was much better, imho).

I should probably mention that Kim Choo-ja’s version is called “청개구리 사랑” — or “Green Frog Love.” I assume it is a reference to the famous Korean folktale about the frogs who don’t listen to their mother, except for one time after she dies, to terrible results (“Gaegu! Gaegu!”).

Big Changes in Barcelona

April 7, 2012 / / 0 Comments

La Vanguardia had a really interesting article a couple of days ago about immigration in Barcelona since 2000 (sorry, only in Spanish, as far as I know). Considering how international Barcelona feels today, it is kind of amazing to realize how recent a development that is. Today, there are about 282,000 foreigners living in Barcelona, or about 17.4% of the total population, way up from less than 4% in 2000.

That’s actually down a bit since the peak in 2010, when there were 294,000 foreigners here. But it is way, way up from 2000 when there were just about 50,000 foreigners. From 2000 on, the growth was incredible, doubling every couple of years for five years, then slowing down but still growing until 2010. Not surprisingly, Central and South Americans made up a fair bit of that growth — from about 35,000 to 115,000. Africans are up a bit. But Pakistanis and Chinese have been the biggest sources of growth.

I cannot begin to imagine how different this city must have been back then (well, I can imagine a little, thanks for some good books like these). I have some American friends who have lived here since the late 1980s, and one Korean friend who came here in 1980, and the stories they tell make it sound like a much more difficult and xenophobic city back then. For sure, Barcelona has become a far more interesting city thanks to these changes. And, judging by the shops I go to, much more prosperous, too.

Smells Like Freedom … Wait, No, That’s Burning Trash

March 29, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Today was the big general strike in Barcelona and across Spain. I swung by Passeig de Gracia in the heart of the city just after noon, when a few thousand people had gathered–enough to shut down the big road, but things were pretty sedate at the time. Mostly tourists taking pictures and protesters eating sandwiches, while the police nervously kept an eye on things.

(This boring pic is mine).

A bunch of protesters marched down Calle Balmes on the way to the main protest, setting off (large) firecrackers and trying to bully local businesses to shut down in solidarity of the strike. Some store owners argued, while others shut their gate until the protesters passed, then opened right up again. Stores owned and operated by immigrants all seemed to stay open–locals protesting for their privileges and entitlements, while new citizens work hard. Typical.

I guess things picked up later, because as I swung by a local market, I noticed a big cloud of something nasty drifting down Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. Turns out protesters set a bunch of garbage bins on fire, in between spray painting bank walls and picking in windows. In my neighborhood, they just overturned a bunch of garbage cans, but nothing was lit on fire … but it was all still very charming.

 

(Those great pics are not mine. Taken from AP).

Not that I am a mindless austerity drone. Clearly cut-cut-cutting is not going to revive the Spanish economy, and can be pretty counter-productive. But leftists protesting for “democracy”, just months after losing an election to a right-wing government that is doing just what it said it would do? Ugh.

If only Portugal started working on nuclear weapons and saber rattling, it would feel like home.

General Strike, Generally Annoying

March 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Lucky us, here is Spain, we have a big general strike called for Thursday. I’m just happy I shouldn’t need public transport or any services that day, and I’m sure all the shops in my neighborhood will be open.

There is something inherently depressing about how economic ideas get warped whenever anyone tries applying any of them in politics. Not living beyond your means? Good idea. The fresh-water economics austerity drive in the face of the economic problems of the last four or five years? Bloody stupid.

But now that people are generally realizing the fresh-water school was full of nonsense, the left is re-exerting its own brand of nonsense on the debate. Yes, cutting mindlessly in a demand-driven recession is stupid. But there’s no arguing that Spain still has way, way too many bureaucrats and administrators, most of whom do little work. I’ve only been here a couple of years and am certainly no expert, but what I’ve seen looking incredibly wasteful and inefficient.

But of course we cannot begin to have a rational talk about this sort of thing without people from the left or the right hijacking the discussion and warping it into something else.

At least the demonstrations I have seen so far in Spain have all been well mannered and relaxed (with the smell of a lot of pot smoke everywhere).

PS: Funny comment from a friend of mine who grew up in Spain years ago:

I think things were better under Franco and I hated living under Fascism.

Science of the Pop Business
or the Business of Pop Science?

March 23, 2012 / / 0 Comments

There’s a great look at how American pop hits are made these days in the New Yorker article “The Song Machine.” Of course, this sort of behind-the-scenes look at the sausage factory of pop music has been done before. But at the same time, pop music has never quite been how it is now. With hip hop having been transformed from into mainstream party anthems, the rise of “smart” pop (a la Phoenix, Peter, Bjorn & John, or Robyn), and rock mostly changing into party-rock, dance-pop has basically grown blob-like to absorb all of its former foes. Screw Goldman Sachs, today’s pop music is the true vampire squid.

Not that that’s a bad thing. Seriously, I think a lot of really good pop music is being made these days. It may not be Cole Porter, but it’s got a good beat and I can dance to it.

Great graph here:

Rihanna is often described as a “manufactured” pop star, because she doesn’t write her songs, but neither did Sinatra or Elvis. She embodies a song in the way an actor inhabits a role—and no one expects the actor to write the script. In the rock era, when the album was the standard unit of recorded music, listeners had ten or eleven songs to get to know the artist, but in the singles-oriented business of today the artist has only three or four minutes to put her personality across. The song must drip with attitude and swagger, or “swag,” and nobody delivers that better than Rihanna, even if a good deal of the swag originates with Ester Dean.

What a paradox, though, that in the most diverse musical age humanity has ever had, that one form should rise to rule them all.

No wonder K-pop is doing so well. Pop in the West is more uniform than ever, so how else can one exert one’s independence and rise above the crowd (and still be dance-friendly)? K-pop is like salsa for the next generation — catchy, danceable, and different.

But what do I know? I was at a Catalan bluegrass concert last night…

Globalizating TV

March 22, 2012 / / 1 Comment

There is an interesting and insightful article about Fox Networks’ new show TOUCH, which stars Kiefer Sutherland (and reportedly features a surprising lack of torture). TOUCH is going to roll out in 100 countries at pretty much the same time, the kind of international push that is common for blockbuster movies, but less common for television.

From the article:

To Tim Kring, the show’s creator, the shift is stark. In spring 2007, six months after his show “Heroes” started in the United States, he watched hundreds of “Heroes” fans line up for an event in Paris, even though the show had yet to be seen on television in France.

“Every single person there had seen every episode. They had all gotten it illegally off the Internet,” he said in an interview. It was then, he said, that he realized, “Audiences will find these shows no matter where they are.”

The article points out that the king of simultaneous roll-outs of WALKING DEAD, which airs in 120 countries around the same time.

Now, I have little doubt that TV execs are mostly doing this because they have to, trying to make a virtue out of a necessity. But that is how and why a lot of big changes happen. And frankly the change was way overdue. Shows like LOST and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, with their rabid fan bases, would not only get uploaded immediately to the Internet, they would also get translated within hours. It was pretty mind-blowing (and funny, as the instant translations often were error-filled, along with the occasional apology by the translator for not understanding sections).

One of the first big examples of this change in TV releasing that I can recall was THE TUDORS. It was quite popular in Korea at first, but the distributor was getting screwed by piracy. So for the show’s second season, Sony set up a secure server where the Korean translator could watch the show and do her work a couple of weeks ahead of time, ensuring the show was ready to go with Korean subtitles almost immediately.

It’s a big change from when I first arrived in Asia, when terrible, long-since-canceled US television series rules the airwaves. It was incredible how much MR. BELVEDERE and ALF you could find, even in the late 1990s.

Of course, the Internet and globalization have not only forced Hollywood to give more respect to local audience around the world; they are the same forces that are allowing local cultures to get out of their home countries and find audiences elsewhere. Korean TV and music being the examples I am most familiar with. Some people complain that the world’s cultures are being homogenized; sorry, but from where I sit, I see people getting access to more choices from more places, and that’s a good thing.

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