Korea Society Podcast: MOOOOOOO!

The Korea Society has an excellent podcast available for download: Lee Myung-bak's First 100 Days in Office: The Roots of a Summer of Discontent?
Lots and lots of thoughtful, interesting commentary from real scholars and experts. Check it out!

Protest Culture in Korea

I'm working on a much longer post about the recent protests (please keep the groaning to a minimum) in response to a) everybody having cooled down, and b) more interesting conversations with the other researchers in my office about the issue. In the meantime though, please enjoy Gabi Hadl's wonderful article from the Kyoto Journal. It beautifully breaks down and categories the different protest strategies used here.

Gomushin Girl Wuz There!

Proving that I grok all trends about twenty years after they first emerge, check out the fms coverage of DMC's first concert here in Seoul. Yes, I was there! When you're done basking in my reflected radiance (won't take too long . . .) go bask in Expat Jane's.
I'm quite the musical omnivore, but I seldom go to concerts. When I do, they tend to be of the bluestocking variety, so this was a good change.

축하해, George Takei!

According to CNN, Sulu is going to tie the knot with his partner of 21 years. Congrats!

Once in LA I went out to cover a photo exhibit about Manzanar for an arts magazine, and ended up seeing them together at the show. Cute couple.


thanks AP!

어떻게 왔어? or, Wine and Sympathy

Last night while I was out running an errand, I ran (almost literally) into an exchange student from the States. As we were crossing the street, this unknown girl suddenly stopped, waved, and called out to me. "Hey," she asked, "Would you like a bottle of wine?"
Silly question! If nothing else, it will fuel another episode of Bomb English!
Turns out she was a music student doing an exchange at a local university, and it was her last night before heading home. Her Korean friends came to check out what was taking her so long, and we all got to talking. That inevitably led to The Question:
How did I end up in Korea?
By and large, unless you're a hyphenated Korean-Japanese/Chinese/American/Russian/Gambian/whathaveyou, people wonder how you got here. Especially if you're a guy, people wonder if you're here because of your significant other's ethnicity or background. If you're a girl, they're just confused. Certainly even back home I was in the minority as a non-ethnically Korean person studying Korea. It seems to be a country where foreigners end up almost by accident.
My arrival was nearly accidental as well. Way, way, way back in high school I'd been on a summer exchange program to our sister school. I had a wonderful time, and the school I studied at suggested that I come back and study there for a full year after I graduated from my school in the US. I came home and proceeded to beg, plead, cry, and sob miserably in an effort to persuade my parents this was a good idea. But I had already started accumulating college credits (through the Running Start program), and my dad especially didn't want to see me waste the time I was putting in at the local college just to go back and do more high school. Instead, he made a deal with me: If I would wait, they would let me do an exchange as a college student. Deal!
I'd planned on going back to Japan, but my Asian History prof. suggested that I go on a new program to Korea. Korea . . .? I hadn't the foggiest notion of what Korea was like, but my professor persuaded me that that was a point in favor of going. I should experience something new while learning about a country that wasn't being studied as much as surrounding nations.
Well, the fact that the program was free didn't hurt either.
So I and a few friends applied that very day, and voila! we found ourselves Korea bound that summer. It was fabulous! It was a one month introductory Korean cultural program, and by the time I went home my research aims within anthropology had shifted west by a few hundred kilometers.
I was very lucky to be encouraged by a number of people both in and outside the field when I returned to the states. My adviser, an economic anthropologist who did all her fieldwork in Mexico, was wonderful and open even though I was the only person in the department interested in Asia. The only Asian history prof. at our school really took me under her wing, and deserves special thanks for being the one who initially proposed Korea as a place of study. Finally, huge thanks goes to the then-president of my college, who was born in Korea and took special pains not only to help me advance in my studies and give me opportunities to come here, but also consulted with me when I got back in how to best advance Asian studies at our own small school (the idea was that even though there was no formal major or minor in EAS, I had done a darned good job of getting so many Asia-related classes at my belt that there might be hope of having one in the near future at our school.)
To my booze-bestowing new almost-friend: Good luck, and I hope you make it back here. When you get home, be sure and thank the prof who sent you here for helping you find something a little more off the beaten path.

Heresy

Well, this is obviously going to cost me the recommendation of the Met . . .
My mp3 player, a 1GB Samsung Yepp, had been acting up a bit lately. After more than a year of very hard use, the metal inside where the headphones connect seems to have become slightly corroded in spots. It's still perfectly usable, but you have to be careful not to bounce it around to much or the sound isn't very good. My original thought was to see if a good cleaning would fix it, or if that failed see if they could replace the receptor.
A few words about my Yepp: I bought it to replace a Creative Zen, my very first mp3 player. I liked the Zen well enough, but it didn't rock my world and I shopped around before I decided on the Yepp. I feel motion-sickness easily, and I primarily used my mp3 player on my commute, so for obvious reasons I didn't have much interest in upgrading to a player with video. Watching anything on a 1" screen seemed like a recipe for ill. Originally I wanted another player that like the Zen would take AAA batteries. I travel a lot, and finding a place to connect and charge a specialized battery in whatever podunk town I am in didn't seem as attractive as being able to just buy a new battery. The Yepp had a rechargeable battery, but the clerk at the store said that one charge should keep me good for about 15 hours. I was skeptical, but in subsequent use I've actually gotten better than that. The USB connector you need to charge and connect is also built in, so there was no need to carry a cord with me. There was no need to download anything, either, so I could just plug that puppy in, drag the songs I wanted on, and go. Being about the size and weight of a small pack of gum, it was pretty easy, too. My little bright green friend (it's available in a range of colors, and you can also buy cute stickers and whatnot now to accessorize) cost me about 80,000 won, if memory serves me correctly.
So, a checklist:
tiny
easy to use
inexpensive
convenient
Yeah, the Yepp is basic, but it works and has kept me happy during many a long commute. I would recommend them strongly to anybody looking for an mp3 player that just plain works and won't give you a hassle.
But I'd used that puppy hard. While it still works, that one bit was getting annoying and I knew I'd have to replace it eventually . . .. Ah, and there was the Met and all my friends, whispering honeyed words in my ear about the iPod and all it's glories. "Ah, Gomushin Girl,' they said, "Join us, and together we will rule the galaxy! Buy an apple gadget, and you'll never go back. Discover the joy of iTunes, download all your favorite podcasts, and see the ease with which all your life will now fall into place." Undoubtedly they all went back and had a toast together, and speculated gleefully about how I'll be buying a Macbook Air next.
So I did it. It was a impulse buy, but I went ahead and got the basic Nano.
I hate the damn thing already.
Oh, I'll admit, it's a beautiful design. Isn't it pretty? But I'm going to slug the next Mac fan who tells me how Apple crap is easy to use. Intuitive, my ass.
First of all, it was NOT just stick the damn thing in place and watch my computer and iPod start doing a mystical dance of love. Remember my Yepp? That was was true ease. I stuck the USB in the port, opened my music file, and dragged stuff on. This time, I was running around downloading iTunes. The same iTunes that is taking hours and hours and hours to convert my files. At the rate things are going, I'll actually be able to listen to my music sometime in, say, the next millennium. My computer is a reasonably fast machine, so this is unreasonably pissing me off. There was a file from a friend with an iPod, so I went ahead and loaded that to take a listen. Almost the first thing I did was destroy my hearing. Apple has made the default adjustment vito volume. Scroll while a song is playing, and prepare for eardrum assault. As a nearly pathologically song skipper, what I really wanted to do was easily skip through part of a song. It took me the better part of five minutes to figure out how to do this, and even now it's a damn annoying process that involved clicking several times and then scrolling and then clicking. If you screw up at all, you'll end up fiddling with the volume again. Also, it isn't anywhere near as precise as the same process on either of my old players. A minor issue to some, but a major annoyance to me.
For all the talk about how good Apple design is, and how intuitive it all is supposed to be, I'm left feeling remarkably frustrated. I still have a hard time navigating through iTunes, and I'm down to slogging through the Korean instruction manual to figure out the nitty-gritty of how my machine works. Yes, my Nano has way more bells and whistles than my Yepp, but for sheer ease and practicality? Meh. It has video and whatnot, and it's very pretty, but it's also larger, has less battery life, and is overall less convenient. I'm torn on the price . . . I still agree that the price is really quite fair for what it is. There's 3 more gigabytes on the Nano than on my Yepp (there is a 2GB model, too) and it does more stuff . . .but . . .still, it was double the price.
Normally, fascination and the fun of playing with a new toy take over, and I end up singing the praises of the newer, better machine pretty quickly. But in this case, I'm pretty underwhelmed. My Yepp was a really good purchase that I would recommend still. I'll probably adjust and start using the Nano as my principal machine eventually, but somehow I don't think it's going to actually replace the Yepp in many aspects. I love my Yepp, and when push comes to shove I'll probably still try and get my current one fixed. If it can't be fixed, I may just buy another.
Ouch.
In the meantime, when I step out the door today, the Yepp will be what's in my bag.

P.S. Hey Met! You know what else? Next time I buy a camera, I'm gonna get a Nikon! SNAP!

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

It was a dark and stormy night . . .
Baron Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873.) A man as long winded as his name would imply. This, my friends, is the face that launched a thousand bad first-sentences, and inspired such luminaries as Snoopy the Dog.
As a prolific Victorian writer (is there another kind?) he wrote some of the worst prose you can imagine. He wrote things that would have sent even Dickens screaming from the room, calling for edits. He also coined those wonderful clichés: "The pen is mightier than the sword," and "the great unwashed".
Expect practice entries to next year's Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest to appear here regularly. Help me decide on the best of the worst.
wikipedia is the best place to find your photo fix