Books, blog and other blather

Category: Pop Goes Korea (Page 2 of 3)

Pop Wars Returns at Last

Not sure why this took me so long, but at last I have imported all of Korea Pop Wars, my first blog, into this current site. I guess that does not help much with old incoming links to KPW, but at least it makes all that information more easily available for people who read my little website.

It is kind of fun looking at those old posts. After all, I started the last blog in 2006, during perhaps Korea’s best movie year ever. So you had posts like this box office update, when there were zero Hollywood films in the top 10 — seriously, there were eight Korean films, one Japanese movie, and a Spanish film. And here is a post about the Korean country singer (and friend) Jimmy Lee Jones. Last I checked, Jimmy is still going strong, with his bar down in Daejeon.

Anyhow, if you were looking for my old posts about movies or music or whatever, hopefully they will be easier to find now.

Asian Indie – It’s a Big Place

As much as I love Korea’s indie music scene, it is always good to be reminded just how much other great music is being made all over Asia. And I don’t just mean Japan and China. Southeast Asia seems to be flourishing culturally these days, thanks in part to its continued economic growth.

If you are interested in Southeast Asia’s rock music, there is a great blog called Sea Indie (SEA Indie?), which features music from Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, etc. Along with news and reviews, Sea Indie puts out Soundcloud compilations, year-end best-ofs and other good packages for finding the best music of the region. For example, here is their article about the best songs of 2011. Did you know Indonesia had a great folk-rock band called Bangkutaman? Well they do, and the band is quite good.

Here is Sea Indie’s first compilation, featuring rock from Indonesia:

You can download their Filipino collection here and their Malaysian compilation here. But I quite like this regional collection.

The website kind of gets at one of my points in POP GOES KOREA — that Korea’s great musical accomplishments aren’t just because Korea is so special, but they are in part a sign of how the world is changing thanks to the continued effects of globalization. Korea did it first in Asia, but young people around the region are traveling more and growing more wealthy, and as they do, they want to participate in modern pop culture. Sometimes that will be very mainstream culture, but other times it will be more indie and ground-up. And that is a very good thing.

Oh, it is worth noting that this is not just a new thing either. Here is a fun blog post at Tofu Magazine with plenty of music links featuring some great Hong Kong and Singapore rock-pop from the 1960s. I quite liked this album by Teddy Robin & the Playboys:

Here is their version of “A Little Bit of Me, A Little Bit of You“.

Pop Goes Korea Comes to E-Book

Fun news — Pop Goes Korea is at last available as an e-book. You don’t have to track down a physical copy, wait for an order, or kill any trees anymore.

You can get Pop Goes Korea for your Kindle here, or your Nook here.

Best of all, my publisher allowed me to make one small but important change to the e-book edition. At last we have the dollar-won exchange rate specified in the text. When I wrote the book, it was at the unusually strong 800 won/dollar level, which made some of the numbers seem a bit odd (soon after, it fell to 1,200 won/dollar, and today is still less than 1,100 won/dollar).

Big thanks to everyone who has already bought a copy. And thanks to all who read my articles and blogs — I really appreciate the support and I hope to keep you interested.

Citations and Celebrations

It’s been a good couple of days for people who like to read my ramblings about Korea (admittedly a rather small sub-section of humanity). First, I was quoted a fair bit in an article in the Scotland Sunday Herald about K-pop. And now the latest New Yorker, as John Seabrook’s feature article about K-pop, “Factory Girls,” references Pop Goes Korea a whole bunch — sadly, though, Seabrook’s story is behind a pay wall. (UPDATE: I nearly forgot, I also was quoted in an Ad Age article about the marketability of Psy and “Gangnam Style”*).

“Factory Girls” was interesting, as I got to experience the famed New Yorker fact-checking regime. Plenty of calls and emails asking about all sorts of K-pop details, sometimes basic facts, but other times more interpretive. They were nice enough to have uncovered a couple of errors from my chapter on Lee Sooman … in part because there is so much more information from the 1980s and 1990s online now than when I wrote the book. Luckily, none of the errors were crucial to my book — mostly they were details (like the number of times one K-pop star was arrested for drug use), the kind of things I hope to clean up should the book ever get another edition.

Anyhow, if you are interested the New Yorker’s fact checking culture, John McPhee’s article “Checkpoints” is also paywalled, but you can read it for free here.

* (How scary is it that when Anita Chang Beattie filed her story late last week, “Gangnam Style” had 283 million Youtube hits, and already it is at 335 million?)

* * *

In other news, Park Jihyun and Gord Sellar’s short film, “The Music of Jo Hyeja,” just won the Audience Pick Award at the HP Lovecraft Film Festival in Los Angeles. “The Music of Jo Hyeja” is a spooky, atmospheric short film that re-tells Lovecraft’s story “The Music of Erich Zann.” It looks great and features music by Jambinai, so how can you go wrong? Hopefully it will come to a film festival near you before too long.

 

Money, Big Ideas, and Civilization: A Reading List

It looks like I am going to be horribly slow in finishing my review of Doomsday Book. Sorry about that. But at the moment I am putting much of my free time into plowing through a rather large reading list for a seminar I will be attending in a couple of weeks (in the Italian countryside … nice!). The event is being organized by the Legatum Institute, a public policy institute that is perhaps best-known for its Prosperity Index. It also co-sponsored the Democracy Lab with Foreign Policy magazine.

The theme of this event is “Why Do Civilizations Flourish and Fail?”, and I’m sure we’ll have no problem coming up with a definitive answer by the end of the week. -..-

Anyhow, the reading list is a pretty good overview of the latest books on the subject, as well as some pretty tangentially related other books on naval history, neural theories, and more. I thought I would talk a bit about the books, if only to help me work out my own thoughts.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty 
-Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

This book has gotten a lot of press over the last few months, and I suppose it is easy to understand — they have a very clear thesis (“inclusive” political institutions make societies grow, “extractive” ones make them die). I’m kind of surprised that Acemoglu and Robinson are university professors because at many times the book reads a lot like something by a journalist, with random anecdotes and man-on-the-street quotes that are supposed to illustrate a point, but are usually too idiosyncratic to be useful.

While the contrast between inclusive and extractive political institutions is a very interesting and useful point, Acemoglu and Robinson definitely over-rely on it, constantly reducing complex issues and historical changes to a simple inclusive/extractive binary. It’s kind of like the old saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail.” And the authors do like to bash away. Jared Diamond has written an excellent analysis of their book over at the New York Review of Books, especially challenging their challenges to his own theories from Guns, Germs, and Steel. He brings far more insight into the longue durée and prehistory arguments than I can, so please check out his review.

But they do have one chapter that revolves around the difference between North and South Korea, which is something I think I know a bit more about. The authors use the Koreas as an example of how different political institutions can radically affect development.But clearly they don’t know a whole lot about Korea, aside from the usual talking points one gets from newspaper stories and introductory books. For example, they talk about South Korea’s property rights, even though, while much stronger than the North, Park Chung Hee did not have a problem walking all over property rights of individuals or corporations when it suited his interests. Nor do they have any concept of how both Koreas’ long history of state administration affects legitimacy or government efficacy. They also talk as if North Korea immediately started to fall apart because of its extractive institutions, overlooking how long North Korea seemed to be doing okay after the division of the Peninsula. North Korea was probably ahead of the South until the mid-late 1970s, and it wasn’t too terribly far behind in the 1980s — granted, that was mostly because it was being propped up by the Soviets, but, still, it was far from the mess that it is today.

Besides, anything involving North Korea really is a bit of a gimme. It’s just too much of a basketcase to be very useful for much practical analysis. You could point to any difference between the countries (professional management, say) and credit/blame it for the differences.

Another huge problem with the book is, even though it a huge emphasis into analyzing why the modern state grew out of England in the 18th century, it barely considers the Scientific Revolution. Lots of talk about the English Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, but science gets a pass. That sort of oversight drives me nuts. Plenty of countries have political revolutions (sometimes widening political power, sometimes centralizing) and several countries have had economic progress, there’s only been one Scientific Revolution. One of the most important results of modern science is the mechanistic, atomistic mindset it created, the ability to think of the world as spiritless, material matter — surely a key stage in creating modern political and economic institutions.

 

Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius 
-Sylvia Nasar

Nasar is most famously  for her book on mathematician John Nash that led to the movie A Beautiful Mind. Grand Pursuit is mostly a series of small biographies of some of the most important economists of the last two centuries, including Charles Dickens, Marx and Engels, Alfred Marshall, Joseph Schumpeter, Keynes, Hayek, and Samuelson. Not a lot of bit theorizing going on here (and when Nasar does venture into big ideas, it can come across as a bit clunky and forced), but the biographies are compelling and well written.

In a way, it is a bit like my own book, focusing on individuals to look at larger trends and ideas, but of course it is much stronger and broader than Pop Goes Korea. Nasar also fills her stories with the kind of personal details that, while engaging, really make me nervous as a journalist. Things like: “So-and-so looked out the window, more nervous than he had ever felt” (not an exact example, but it gives you a sense) — Do we really know so-and-so was looking out the window then? Do we really know how nervous he was? Maybe Nasar was able to dig up sources that really were that detailed, but for people that long deceased, the style makes me nervous.

Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World
-Vali Nasr

This has probably been my favorite book so far — well written and full of new information and smart insights. It helps that Nasr is from Iran and has a wide network of family, friends, and personal memories to draw from. He’s not just some academic studying a region, but he has a personal stake in the issues and an authentic, street-level view of what is going on.

Not surprisingly, he concentrates heavily on Iran (maybe about half?), and then Pakistan and Turkey get some decent coverage. The rest of the Arab world is discussed, but less in-depth.

If you have watched any Iranian cinema, read Persepolis (the comic book) or other books,  or had any dealings with Iranians, you should already know that much of the country is very different than how it is typically portrayed in the media or thought of by most people. It is far more modern and capitalist than most people in the West realize.

At its heart Nasr’s book is the anti-Why Nations Fail. Whereas Nations‘ authors believe that political institutions come first and all else follows, Nasr believes that economics come first, and political institutions tend to react to the material status of a country. He certainly does not consider Islam to be inherently conservative or medieval. Instead, he thinks that people there are not that much different than God-fearing Americans, only their history has forced them into very different circumstances. He mostly blames a century or so of colonialism and then the oppressive Kemalist governments that ruled much of the region (secular, militarist, and authoritarian) for destroying the middle class, ruining basic governing structures, and giving rise to Islamism.

 

The Ascent of Money  
-Niall Ferguson

I’m not finished it yet, but, on the whole, Fergunson’s book is a lot stronger than I thought it would be — much less political, like his often blustery newspaper editorials, and more solid, fact-based history. Of course Ferguson is arguing a particular point of economic view, but it does not overwhelm the subject matter.

Unsurprisingly, Ferguson’s chapter on the Rothchilds is one of the strongest (as his history of the family is considered one of the best out there). But rather than concentrate too much on personalities, Ferguson looks more at the institutions and larger aspects of money: money as credit, money as bonds, insurance, etc. His look at the financial background of World War I — how the markets did not see war coming and, only at last moments before the scope of the coming conflict was clear, completely freaked out, with all the major stock exchanges in the world shutting down within a few days — is particularly fascinating.

But when we move from history and closer to contemporary issues (and therefore contemporary politics), Ferguson’s book weakens. He is entirely too credulous about the rise of China, for example. And blaming (crediting?) China for the hedge fund and derivative explosion of the last 15 years is just bizarre — kind of like blaming TNT for an explosion, rather than the person who set and detonated the bomb. It reminds of me that Simpsons episode, “Kamp Krusty,” when Bart asks Krusty how he could lend his name to such a lousy product. Krusty answers:

“They drove a dump truck full of money up to my house! I’m not made of stone!”

You can see the episode with that quote here (around 3:50).

Ferguson’s big conclusion, about how banking and finance need more evolutionary pressure and creative destruction is a bit dubious, too. After all, even Alan Greenspan had admitted that the banks’ instincts for self-preservation are not nearly as good as he once believed.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years  
-David Graeber
Not really on the reading list, but it seemed like a good addition. Sadly, this is not the book I was hoping for, which would have been a history of debt. Instead, it is more of a grand re-theorizing of all of modern economics from an anthropological point of view — and a very political, academic-left kind of post-modern anthropology at that (i.e.: not the good kind of anthro). Apparently Graeber is some kind of famous anarchist activist, so I guess it was my fault for thinking this book might be something different than what it is.

That said, it is definitely a book with merits. Sure, it may drive you crazy two or three times a page, but Graeber also will intrigue and stimulate three or four times on that same page, so generally you come out ahead. However, unless you are inclined to believe that the last 5,000 years are all an unnecessary social construct built upon cruelty and domination, and we could transform our world into a truly free, open place by getting rid of money, then this book is probably not for you.

 

Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy
and the Birth of Democracy

-John Hale

Hale’s book is another total winner. Fun and endlessly insightful. He ties the cultural/political flowering of Athens into its rise as a naval power in the eastern Mediterranean. In the face of conflicts with the Spartans and the Persians, Themistocles convinces Athens to build a powerful navy of trireme vessels — oar-powered ships that could ram their way through other boats. But oars require people to power them, and the sheer number of ships in the Athenian fleet meant that pretty much all of Athens’ citizens had to spend some time at sea; and because everyone is equal when rowing and everyone rowed, Hale argues that the triremes played an important part in developing the city’s democratic, participatory character.

 

The World America Made
-Robert Kagan

I basically agree with Ian Buruma on this book — the US global military presence is general does more harm than good. Not because the United States is evil (generally its foreign policy seems well-intentioned), but because the US’s protection encourages many countries not to develop their own defense forces adequately. And when countries do not take responsibility for their own defense, that turns them into irresponsible children.

I did, however, like the reminder that the United States never really was that dominant internationally, even after World War II, and enemies and allies alike constantly jostled for power and influence around the world.

* * *

Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is also on the reading list (and I downloaded it to my Kindle), but at this point I am more familiar with McGilchrist’s TED talk than his book. I hope to fix that situation soon, though. As a big Julian Jaynes nerd, it does look like McGilchrist’s work is in a similar vein.

 

There have also been some classics on the reading list, so it has been fun revisiting Macchiavelli’s The Prince, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds (not on the reading list, but Nasr’s book on Iran put me into a Persian sort of mood)

New Review for Pop Goes Korea

You do not hear a lot about a book you published two years ago, so I was pleasantly surprised to find POP GOES KOREA reviewed in the most recent issue of PACIFIC AFFAIRS.

PACIFIC AFFAIRS is a pretty serious and respectable academic journal, having been published since 1928. The reviewer, Dr. Jung Eun-Young, an assistant professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, did a pretty good write-up — in general positive, with some solid insights and fair criticisms. The highlights:

The most interesting part of this book for cultural scholars is the conclusion, where Russell turns to the international dimension, boldly stating that “there never was a Korean Wave” (215) and pointing out its negative connotations. He argues, “the trouble with talking about a ‘Korean Wave’ is that it does not really explain anything… Can we really say there is anything specifically ‘Korean’ [in Korea’s pop culture]?” (212).

And:

Russell’s book certainly deserves credit for providing new and detailed insights into Korea’s pop culture industry. It is especially useful for readers unfamiliar with Korean pop culture; the many sidebars as well as the main text are informative and accurate. Given that Russell refers to this book as a first installment, we can expect to see more stories of Korean pop culture, revealing other dimensions through his insightful analysis.

So, there you go. I am not sure how long that link is going to work, but hopefully I will be able to update it when the current issue moves to the archives.

POP Goes the Herald

There is a nice little profile of POP GOES KOREA (and me) over in the online newspaper the Herald de Paris. Along with a goofy picture of me looking all faux-pensive.

As the writer, Marine Vidal says by way of introduction:

Back to school! Vacation time is over, but no need to depress; we can still travel the world through a good book. What better estrangement than to read about South Korea? A recommended pick isPop Goes Korea, by longtime Canadian expat journalist Mark Russell.

I think that article is the closest thing I have ever had to an actual profile. It is kind of an odd feeling, and I sympathize for all the people who have suffered through the same experience for one of my articles. But the reporter was very nice, the experience was mostly painless, and the story was quite complimentary, which is about all you can ask for.

Requiem for a Cinema

One of Korea’s more famous, older cinemas, the Joongang, apparently closed on Monday (thanks to Darcy for pointing that out). Not a big surprise, I guess — its facilities were not the best, and the land under it, at the eastern edge of Myeongdong in downtown Seoul, is way too valuable. But there are not many theaters left in Seoul with any history anymore, so the end of the Joongang is something of a sad thing.

Joongang cinema

The Joongang was built in 1966 by the Byucksan Group. For most of its history, it was a second-string theater, showing movies after they had already played at the nicer cinemas in town. But in 1998 it was renovated, and turned into a multiplex, giving a new lease on life.

Like a lot of older, less popular cinemas in Seoul, the Joongang became a popular place for press screenings, so I used to go there a lot. I can remember seeing THE TWO TOWERS there, as well as OSEAM, GANGS OF NEW YORK, and many other films before the rest of the world got to see them. I think the last preview I saw there was a special screening of Hong Sangsoo’s NIGHT AND DAY (which was followed by typically Hong levels of drinking afterward).

(Note: To read about the closing of the last single-screen, old-style theater in Seoul, the Dream Cinema, you can click here).

I talked a bit about the Joongang in POP GOES KOREA. It is a story I told to illustrate the dysfunctional way movie distribution used to work in Korea, about the famous Korean producer Shin Chul, and the fight he had with the Joongang back in 1994 over his movie THE 101ST PROPOSITION and JURASSIC PARK. In honor of the theater’s memory, I will reprint that story here:

Back in 1994, one of downtown Seoul’s most important theaters, the Joongang Cinema, signed a deal with ShinCine Communications to distribute their film The 101st Proposition. The deal called for the Joongang to play the film a minimum number of weeks, with the exception that, should attendance drop below 1,500 people per day, the cinema could put in something else.
That same year, the film everybody wanted to see was Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. The Joongang owner, like all other theater owners in Korea, was eager to get such an obvious blockbuster onto its screen. The 101st Proposition, however, was still under contract, and its attendance was not dropping below the lower limit of 1,500 people. At the time, even the biggest movies rolled out on few screens, usually just fifteen to twenty in the entire nation. In Seoul, a movie would show in only one or two theaters, so it took a long time for everyone who wanted to see a film to get in. With this much business at stake, getting the blockbuster of the year was a financial bonanza.
So the management at the Joongang took action. First they pulled their ads and promotions for The 101st Proposition, and attendance dropped a little. Next, the theater hired some thick-necked goons to stand out front to intimidate customers and prevent them from buying tickets. It did not take long for the film’s production company ShinCine to find out about this, but what could they do?
Luckily, ShinCine had good ties with many young progressives willing to stand up for Korean movies. Even in the 1990s, progressives in Korea were used to taking their lumps from the people in charge (be they government or private industry). Plenty of producer Shin Chul’s friends had recently gotten work as schoolteachers around the city, so a friend called up the teachers and invited them to bring their students to see the movie.
To further vex the Joongang, one person went to the bank and changed his regular won to thousands and thousands of one-won coins—each worth about one-tenth of a cent, still legal tender, although not in general circulation. With movie tickets costing about 4,000 won each, that added up to a lot of coins.
The students came to see the movie, carrying great bags of one-won coins, much to the consternation of the thick-necked gentlemen and their employer. By this point, the whole mess had turned into an event. The goons tried intimidating the schoolkids, which led to plenty of shrieking and mayhem. Other progressive friends of ShinCine came down to support the drive, such as the well-known and always politically inclined actor Moon Sung-keun (who also starred in the film). Moon stood on a chair, shouting out the importance of Korean culture and Korean movies, the need for the screen quota, and similar credos. The Joongang management called the protestors communists. It was chaos.
In the end, the Joongang got its Jurassic Park. Worried that the situation was escalating and that someone could get hurt, ShinCine’s owner/producer Shin Chul asked producer Lee Tae-won (then the top producer in Korea) to intervene. Lee negotiated with the Joongang Cinema, and they decided that the dinosaurs would get to play. In exchange, Shin was promised a prime slot for one of his movies the following summer.

Pop Goes Korea — Kind Words From Malaysia

Okay, this is a little late, but I just found out that POP GOES KOREA received a very nice review last October in Malaysia’s NEW STRAITS TIMES. (Sadly, I cannot find the link on the newspaper’s website anymore, so must link to the Findarticle version).

Actually, it is more of a summary than a full review, but the author, Johan Jaaffar, calls POP GOES KOREA “incredibly informative” and is generally positive of my book, so one is appreciative of kind words and publicity whenever and wherever they can be found. Thank you very much, Mr. Jaaffar.

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