Sing, O Muse, of the Rage of Thomas’ son, Gregory . . .

Korea has yet again made me feel very unwelcome. A correspondent on-loan to ABC from a Korean news program managed to get this pile of clever, vile, journalistically-irresponsible selective and creative half-truths printed:

English Teachers Bring Drugs To Korea

I would go through all the near-lies, distortions, and damned lies in it, but fortunately, the comments following the article do an excellent job for me. My personal favorite is the quoted “$2,200 dollars a month.” That was true for roughly one month in recent memory – November 2007. She is using a figure (One thousand Won equals One dollar) that is off by around 33%.

A foreign teacher making 2.2 Million Won a month (a very common salary, but more than any public school pays teachers without a master’s degree) is earning $1,583 a month – that’s $18,000 a year. Would you be clawing for an 18k a year babysitting job where you need to leave the country once a year just to start another job, or if your boss fires you, and the government is almost definitely going to take his side unless you shell out 400 bucks and 30% of the winnings for a lawyer?

I am going to stop before I get going on Korean mafia involvement in the drug trade and human trafficking, particularly on the US west coast, much less their complete monopoly on all but a statistically insignificant portion of it in Korea (if we’re making so much money, why the hell would we risk selling drugs?), nevermind the comically predatory practices in my profession (ESL), and besides all that, the flat-out eugenics that college-educated Koreans accept as fact to support their superiority, and look, I didn’t stop, and I’ve about talked myself into moving.

The further disgusting part is when you look at her profile on KBS Global’s website.

Westerners have as strong a prejudice against Asia as their aspirations for the region. Worse yet, the provocative nature of foreign media tends to further inflate existing prejudice against Asia. Korea has many characteristics which draw keen media attention, because what most people recall about the country is that it is still a Cold War frontier and remains divided, with an unstable security situation. Having knowledge of only the Korean War and intense political confrontation, the Western audience doesn’t try to see and analyze the overall situation in the nation.

Yes, the West wants to overthrow your miniscule peninsula, thinks you are inferior, and is completely unaware of you, besides that you make electronics that are better than China and Taiwan’s, but not better than Japan. You’re on to us. (Dear Korean readers: THAT WAS SARCASM)

So please, next time you hear a Western English teacher bitch about Korea, try to show a little bit of sympathy. And for my Korean readers, I can only ask that you try to understand my bitterness and frustration. I’d love to have a beer or two with you, but Jesus Christ, could you just admit that somebody who isn’t Korean even could do something right sometimes?

Reading Salon.com – shut up.

*Note – This article deals with a very limited set of people. I am not discussing those below the poverty line, or even really outside of Western Europe and North America. I am not interested in convincing anyone’s Limbaugh/O’Reilly-obsessed dad that women have it rough, and I regard the workplace as an unpleasant place, by design, for all humans. *

I have started reading contemporary articles on romance, dating, sexuality, and so on, and it’s humbling how average I appear to be. Salon.com is an entertaining read. It is the antithesis to my preferred news sources – The Christian Science Monitor, BBC, Al-Jazeera, and (just because they are representative of the shit Americans get fed as news) CNN. The timeliness of some salon.com’s editorial writing leads me to frightening realizations about where I fit in the population of North Americans. I’m young, bright, gainfully employed, well-educated, and so on. There’s money to be had writing news to people like me, but I’m too young and not quite wealthy enough to feel like the New York Times is written to me. So, I have Salon instead. Worst of all, the money to be made writing news to people like me, or people like the New York Times’ readership is what keeps everybody else from getting the kind of news they should be getting.

I have relatively recently stumbled over two articles that address ideas that I’m being forced to think about, given my current relationship with a 3rd wave feminist and my lingering classical notions of “purpose.” These ideas and the articles overlap in their treatment of these topics.

Attack of the Listless Lads

In Defense of Casual Sex

These articles discuss (sometimes indirectly) increasing female empowerment (especially in dating and sexual contexts), its role in male identity, and the increasingly common view of men as exceptionally flawed by contrast with our female counterparts. For me, the latter is the major issue here. As a male, I’m noticing that my quirks seem less-permissible than presumably similar flaws were for my father, uncles, (figurative) older brothers, and so on. The former article declares this a controversial opinion, apparently by the traditional view of the man as the breadwinner, decision-maker – the images you get in black and white short-form videos produced in the fifties. (”Hi, honey. Here’s your pipe and a whiskey with two ice cubes just like you like. Dinner will be ready in 30 minutes, and the kids are upstairs studying. Can I make you a little more comfortable?”) That’s been dead since at least the late seventies, and probably was always a myth. This is not where I want to spend most of my time. This ideal was bound to get destroyed by capitalism. I mean, seriously, someone sitting around the house all day serving another person with no money involved directly? Feminism cannot take credit for the widespread acceptance of women outside of the home, if it even wants it. The empowerment that women are now seeing is largely the result of it being profitable to make women “empowered.”

I don’t find this particularly interesting. It’s socialism, and relatively mainstream socialist thought, as I understand it. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

But the above writers (one a woman, one an older man interviewed by a woman) view contemporary young men as “unworthy” of their female counterparts in the first case, and “scared shitless” of commitment in the second.

This interests me, because I can imagine someone perceiving my behavior as me experiencing the feelings ascribed to men in these articles.

(According to this mindset) Women are overqualified for men in general and awestruck, in the good way, by the wealth of opportunity they now enjoy. Men, by contrast, are now assigned an incapacity to make decisions in general, from what to have for dinner, to what sort of jobs to apply for, to which girls we date are worth taking past those first couple nights out.

I can’t say a lot about female empowerment. I’m a man, I’ve dated women (almost exclusively) from the generation currently under the microscope, and I only have indirect experience of the inner workings of American men who I believe were transitional from “the old way” to the current batch of twentysomethings – the baby boomers – for a comparison. In my world, Baby boomer women were essentially sexless housewives or bed-tanned second wives with expensive tastes. Neither talked a whole lot about sex. Catholic education also provided a lot of adults who didn’t talk about sex outside of abstinence.

The baby boomer men I know don’t sound like they had much more of a clue, really. I’m more emotionally healthy and have a better job at twenty-six than any of them I know well enough to talk about had at 30. I think most of them were married (or close to it) by my age. They aspired to financial security and pursued it in pretty conventional ways. My dad was my age in 1975. I think he was on his first marriage by then. I was six years away from being born. There was apparently an expectation to get married that I don’t feel.

The expectation of marriage by your mid-to-late thirties might be the difference, and might be what’s making men like me all fucked up. Let me explain.

Women get told to have all these experiences now that they are (theoretically) liberated. Go out and have fun before you settle down and start making babies, or (gasp!) don’t make babies at all. That’s great. I’m seriously happy that this is happening. Women at 35 are still enjoying dating. Great.

But what about the guys? What are we supposed to do while women are having all that fun? We have that fun, but it isn’t endorsed by the public the way it is being endorsed for women. There’s something attractive and positive about a 35 year old woman seeing a few guys at the same time that I don’t immediately feel about a man the same age. He’s past his prime and ought to be settling down a bit, right?

At least in mixed company, women get winks and giggles for being size queens with sugar daddies, but guys who openly attest to preferring girls dramatically younger than them with disproportionate breasts aren’t even worth commenting on.

I do it, too. I am not blaming anyone.

I am still formulating this. Either men are continuing to act the way they were in the past, or are having even more fun in general before getting married, while women are increasing their premarital jollies. At any rate, there is still a sense that what men in general are doing is not permissible while what women in general are doing is either commendable or out of their hands. There’s a lot to be had here, and I’ve been writing this off and on all day. I give up.

“Has it been 2 months already?”

Here is a brief post to hold you over while I start developing a couple more complete entries.

-There is now a small earring in the earlobe that says I’m not gay. I’ve already lost the back to two earrings.

-I’ve been to 2 small islands with my girlfriend

-The hard drive on my macbook decided to stop working, erasing tens of gigs of music, the working copy of my resume, 3 huge multitrack audio files of the only songs I’ve ever written and recorded, a few pictures, and who knows what else. I replaced it for very little with a new hard drive 3x the previous one’s size.

-I bicker at regular intervals about the same things every teacher in Korea bickers about with his employer.

-I’m in love.

-I’m not bad at getting around Seoul on a skateboard now.

“What Do A Billion Muslims Think?”

Since Iran became a caliphate (Probably. I was (-2) years old at the time.), people have speculated about what Muslims think. As is typical, nobody seems to have done the obvious. Just ask them already.

Well, Gallup just finished doing just that. It’s hilarious the bullshit that Americans have been fed about “cultural differences” between the “Islamic World” and “The West.”

What Do A Billion Muslims Think?

(c/o The Christian Science Monitor)

There it is. I honestly don’t even know how to comment on this, being so flabbergasted. A comfortable (58%) majority of men in Saudi Arabia think women should have voting rights, for crying out loud.

I’m also very bemused by the absence of any mention of this on any other news site. New York Times, CNN, BBC . . . Al-Jazeera hasn’t mentioned it, for crying out loud.

The majority of muslims are every bit as moderate as westerners. Pundits, please shut the hell up now.

Do you know what sucks worse than biting your tongue?

Absolutely, positively nothing . . .

Except biting your tongue very, very hard, and then being an English teacher, so you need to speak for 6+ hours a day just to teach, nevermind administrative odds and ends, personal life, sorting out taxation and pension hijinks, and then living in a country where there is at least a little bit of red pepper in every remotely common food.

I would share more, but sorting laundry was intellectually taxing.

I can’t even eat the delicious, wonderful candy that just arrived from the US, care of Ma and Pa Schroeder because of this shit.

Hate the police.

Apparently, there has been a recent crackdown in drug use and trafficking in Korea recently. Since I don’t go to clubs, work at a public school, or even really party in any sense, I missed it. Hell, I don’t hang out with many foreigners at all. Anyway, I met some foreign teachers last night in my neighborhood and we had some donuts and coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, and I got into an argument.

Short anecdotes seem to work best lately.

This past weekend I had a moment.

I bitch about Korea all the time. There’s plenty to bitch about. The culture is infuriatingly and blatantly hierarchical, repressive, sexist, xenophobic,  and arguably just plain-old backward.

Imagine a place so repressive toward women that one smiles a little on the inside seeing a lady smoking a cigarette on the street, just because to do so is a remarkably bold, rebellious step. A Korean woman who smokes in public may, depending on the neighborhood, draw stares, whispers about promiscuity, and in some circumstances, a loud, abusive dressing-down from elderly strangers.

But then, there was a moment Saturday night that reminded me that this place isn’t all bad.

I was hanging out in front of the convenience store, on one of the chairs provided for just this purpose, drinking the metric equivalent of a double-deuce, with a skateboard at my feet. I see flashing red and blue lights.

The car with the flashing lights comes closer, and then turns left in front of me. I flinch for a minute. I don’t even have a brown paper bag. Regardless, I take another gulp, and put the can down on the table in front of me, also provided for this specific activity.

The cop in the passenger seat smiles, waves, and pulls away

I have 2-3 posts brewing, but . . .

They require a lot more thought before they’re ready. So I’m going to go in a totally different direction.

This post will be a discussion of slightly-to-very embarrassing bands I love. It’s come to my attention that I might have exceptional taste in popular media. If I don’t, well you can go get fucked. This is my blog &c.

Let’s talk music. I have some terribly embarrassing and terribly acceptable taste in music. Let’s start with the acceptable.

MC5, The Stooges, Velvets, Etc.

Okay, they’re great. It’s not all that much fun or all that revealing of me to say so. They stayed consistently hard as shit throughout their recording careers. My dad had a copy of “Kick Out the Jams” that was the 2nd most important record I got from him, immediately behind the second Led Zeppelin album. Well, third behind the copy of Foreigner’s “We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)”.

Flipper.

I would like to thank my college friend, Jacob, for introducing me to this band. I can’t begin to do justice to how amazing this band really is. Me, Kurt Cobain, and someone who actually liked UK Two-step Garage for awhile, agree on a “post-punk” band. Their only real album is also out-of-print, which is frequently (though not always) a very good clue that a band rocks really hard.

Bad Brains.

I seriously think Rock For Light is what you hear by default when you get your ass kicked. It’s like Michael the Archangel cues up the tape or something. Plus they’re black, which makes them cooler. Surprise surprise, they were cooler before they got old and moved to New York where they made some particularly-famous-now Jewish assholes want to make hardcore.

Black Flag.

They rock pretty fucking hard. Not as hard as Bad Brains, but that’s sort of like “This guy I know is a badass, but I bet he couldn’t kick Charles Bronson’s ass.” “Damaged” is the only album post Dez Cadena singing that’s worth owning. Like, ever. Greg Ginn wrote all the words worth hearing. Please remember that before you all rush out to pay Hank Rollins for his friendship with Ian MacKaye.

Minor Threat.

More embarrassing than Black Flag just because they are affiliated with Straight Edge Hardcore. By “affiliated,” I mean “some stupid kids decided to take something way too literally.” Ian MacKaye is probably not as interesting a songwriter as Greg Ginn.

All that said, I don’t want to discourage stupid kids. Most pretty awesome things are the result of stupid kids taking something way too far. But seriously. The vegan assholes who worship at this altar conveniently missed the videos upon videos of MacKaye and company slugging 2 liters of everyone’s favorite cocoa derivative to get ampd up for shows, and so on and so forth. This music also sounds like beating people up.

Jawbreaker.

As far as I can tell, this is where that awful “Screamo,” “Post-hardcore” or whatever they’re calling bad punk with expensive haircuts and poorly pitch-corrected vocals now. Which is not to saw Jawbreaker sucks. They rock really fucking hard. Imagine if those awful “Rain . . . / . . . Pain” rhymes really did make you ache deep down thinking about the girl you took to your Junior prom, or the girl you dropped out and lost through the warping butt-end of a 40, and so on. They toured a lot, and inspired a lot of really bad music. Please don’t judge them for it. While we’re talking about bands that don’t deserve your loathing despite influencing awful music . . .

Nirvana.

This band is scary because they totally were the kids up the street who always smelled like either really cheap pot or burning garbage. They showed me Rambo II once when I was like 10. At any rate, the Nirvana home videos show us a frighteningly normal set of three guys who just happened to be in a really good band with a fucking hot lead singer. This is, again, embarrassing because they are associated with a lot of bad music. Sonic Youth, for example,  sucks in a big way. I always feel like I’m on the outside of an elaborate joke when people talk about liking them. They also paved the way for bands like Weezer and “The Grunge REO Speedwagon,” Smashing Pumpkins.

Led Zeppelin.

I would not listen to guitar-based rock without the second Led Zeppelin album, and I suspect many “grunge” kids/musicians feel the same. Before my father introduced me to them, I was listening to frighteningly embarrassing music. Really embarrassing. My dad listened to them a lot, but he always had awful taste in Zeppelin. I obviously didn’t have a name for it at the time, but I could hear what I now know was overproduction on what I now know is “Physical Graffiti” (”Kashmir,” in particular) when I was in sixth grade. I shit you not. There was something visceral in “Communications Breakdown” and “Whole Lotta Love” that just felt right, and faded as the tapes progressed chronologically. I know someone who paid a stripper with falsies to dance to “Whole Lotta Love,” mostly because he/his friends didn’t think she could.

Sebadoh.

It’s neutered early Sub Pop. I’ll be presumptuous and assume you’ve heard Mudhoney’s “Superfuzz Big Muff.” If you haven’t, go do that now. Again, out-of-print last I heard. Sorry.

Sebadoh is like that, except it’s crying because all the requests/demands to have sex with you because you’re in a rock band from the aforementioned Mudhoney album didn’t work. This band makes you grow a vulva.

Beat Happening.

More Sub Pop-type stuff, although technically affiliated with the infinitely-cooler K Records. It’s all semi-incompetent crap that periodically turns out a gem, largely as a result of keeping a Tascam Portastudio running while a bunch of burnouts smoke pot and play guitar/bang on things. Somehow, this turns out a fair bit of listenable, and even good, music. I can’t figure it out, either.

Every Band Steve Albini Has Ever Been in.

Steve Albini, by definition, plays and records the kind of music my mom wouldn’t let me listen to. It’s everything gorgeous about punk rock combined with everything awesome about metal. I’ll confess to borderline fanboy status, although I’m trying to develop digital snobbery in response to his, among others’, analog snobbery.

Casiotone For The Painfully Alone.

It’s pussy-ass music over slow, slow breaks. Frequently, the said breaks are the preset beats from old Casio keyboards. It is occasionally gorgeous, but frequently mediocre.

The Mountain Goats.

It’s a guy with a guitar who used to record into the mic in on a boombox, and shouldn’t have stopped doing that. Now, he makes quirky, comfortable pop music with real production values, sort of like what happened when Pavement stopped making “indie” albums. He started really recording and working with other musicians, and the immediacy, or perhaps the lack of pretension, or something, vanished. It feels premeditated, belabored, and nowhere near as ephemeral. I’m probably talking about overproduction again. But when I hear “overproduced,” I hear Jimmy Page ca. The Song Remains The Same or Axl Rose ca. Chinese Democracy’s excesses. By contrast, The Mountain Goats aren’t so bad, or are even tasteful. Then I remember that George Jones doesn’t make your grandfather less a drunk.

Italo-Disco, as a genre.

There was no “disco sucks” backlash in Western Europe, and the US dollar was trading particularly well against several Western European currencies in the early eighties. So, what is the correct response to a surge in interest (and price) in Disco in Western Europe? You make your own, of course. Italo-Disco is the result. How does it sound? While it’s terribly predictable, that’s exactly the point. It sounds like something a gay Italian man would want to get all coked up and dance with another all coked up gay Italian man while listening to. It is also entirely synthesized, which is probably what it will be remembered for. No bass guitars, no pianos, all synthesizers, cheesy drum machines, and Gay As All Hell. This is the direct precursor to what people call House Music nowadays.

To paraphrase The KLF’s Manual, there are no emotions you can’t experience on a dancefloor. The words are complete gibberish, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the dull “thud” of the analog drum and the “snap” of the synthesized handclap with the squishy, squirmy sounds that were just a few years from being called “acid house” and providing a soundtrack to, uh, gay black men getting all coked up and dancing together in Chicago.

I know this stuff is cool to like now what with “electroclash” going out and people desperately needing a new ‘retro’ fad to latch onto, but this stuff seriously makes me want to dance and drink 6 dollar cocktails.

In The Navy! 

Joy Division.

Yeah, I said it. “Unknown Pleasures” is all that’s worth your time. They suck, and this album was made by the production, which makes it even further hilarious than it already is. New Order is in here, too.

Honorable Mentions.

Defiance, Ohio, The Ghost Mice, This Bike is a Pipe Bomb, etc. The anarchist-leftist vagaries of this crap hit too close to home for me to completely ignore it, so I need to listen to it from time to time. Then, I listen a little closer, realize it sucks, then realize I sort of like it.

I would like to remind you; This is a list of embarrassing music I LIKE. Bad music, or music other people like en masse that I hate, would take a really long time to list.

Scene 2: At the language academy

George: Tee-chuh, baf-room!

Greg Teacher: George, do you mean “May I use the bathroom?”

George: Yes.

(Exeunt George, visibly flustered, stage left)

(CLASS laughs uproariously.)

Further evidence of my increasing maturity.

Today my adult class acquired a new student. Eddie wasn’t there, so I had one new student and Rachel. The new student seems like a pretty standard square Korean guy. He has 2 kids, and apparently owns a semiconductor business.

We were supposed to talk about an article about The New York Philharmonic visiting Pyongyang, but this got derailed by introductions and finding out about American life. Which further derailed into why I wanted to write this blog entry.

I miss eating beef all the time. A lot. I’ve been in Korea for over a year now. When I go out with friends or my girlfriend, and they ask me what I want to eat, I only ask that it be Western, and filling. I told my class this, and this turned to the safety of North American beef.

I explained how rare Mad Cow really is -10 animals have been detected in Canada, total. This baffled them.

Next, I asked them why they were worried about it. Here comes the shocker.

Apparently Korean news reports that American beef has ground up bones ADDED TO IT DIRECTLY. Imagine trying to explain the concept of “bone meal” to someone, in their second language, in contradiction to something they heard on the news. I did it, and apparently didn’t step on any toes.

Next, I managed to successfully determine that 2 people in my class, as adults, believe that you can die from sleeping in a room with a fan on. This is a relatively common belief in Korea. One of these people is a retired nurse, just to remind you.

I elected to teach them the term “Agree to disagree,” and moved on.

Now, those of you who knew me around age 12 or 13. Think about that. I am okay with lots of someones believing a fan can kill you in your sleep.