“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.

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.

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.

Why I was born to teach, and I hate it.

The title of this post might be the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever typed.

However, I had an amazing, artist-chasing-muse moment teaching my adult class on Wednesday night, and I wanted to share.

The buildup was the kind of thing that just happens with me sometimes. One of my adult students, Rachel, mentioned she’d like to work on her reading comprehension, and discuss articles in class. She apparently wanted celebrity gossip, I found out later, and Eddie, the other student, really wanted no part of it. He seems to think that studying vocabulary lists is the best way to learn a language.

Anyway, after trying several different sources, I finally find that scholastic.com’s articles are about the only news that these two adults are going to understand at all. So, I sent them this, without the dressing that gives away the intended audience: US Embassy Attacked. I hoped against all hope that I could get two uncomfortably-like-my-parents people to follow my lead in a discussion that was bound to end up in nationalism.

Eddie and Rachel came in, both slightly late, but class could begin in earnest earlier because Eddie is usually very late, and this time he was not. At any rate, they began griping about vocabulary. I had gone over a fair bit of the vocabulary at the beginning of the previous class, repeating that I wanted them to ask every last question they could find re: vocabulary right now, and giving them a light primer on 20th century Eastern European history. In their second language.

So what happened? On the whole, I was disappointed. “Nationalism” translates to Korean with a very positively-connotated word, and Eddie loudly declared that Kosovo should be its own country if they are their own ethnic group. I explained to him that this was literally nationalist, and then explained to him that the word nationalism had some negative baggage in English. (For example, the contraction of “Nationalist Socialist”) Rachel mostly listened, and asked for clarifications on the details of the article.

We talked for awhile, and Eddie expounded on people needing their own homelands. It was clear that Kosovo needed to be its own country, because there were people who were not Serbs living in Serbia.

I inquired about his knowledge of America’s ethnic makeup. With some light prodding, he conceded that there was a mix of ethnic groups in the United States, getting along relatively well, and that he’d rather live in United States than an independent Kosovo. I asked if he had any ideas about why this might be. He said he didn’t know, and then looked expectantly to me for an answer.

I don’t have one.

I then re-iterated 2 statistics from the article. 60% of Serbians are unemployed. The average monthly income is roughly $250. A region of this country that is legendarily worse off than those statistics, and cites that as a reason for withdrawing from the country, has just declared independence. I asked Rachel and Eddie what generally happens to a country during a civil war. This drew blank stares. I then took a minor risk, asking if their parents ever spoke with them about what it was like to live in Korea in the thirties and forties . (For those of you unaware, Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to the end of World War II, with your standard “You would have gotten thousands of coffee table books if this happened to white or sort of white people” atrocities, and then there was this war.)

They didn’t seem to catch on that civil wars are bad for people. I finally went for broke. “Eddie, let’s say you live in Korea, and you make 250,000 Won (korean currency = $250) a month, and your extended family is generally unemployed, so you need to help them out with that as well. You have an option to live in Tokyo, and make around 3,000,000 Won (about 3,000 bucks) a month. You will be away from your people, but you will be able to feed your family. Is that more important than being under Korean rule?”

He finally acknowledged that yes, maybe feeding his family was more important than living under Korean rule.

I asked why Russia and China don’t like the idea of a new country, and America does like it. This, frighteningly, led to blaming communist solidarity. I explained that Russia is no longer a Communist country.

I gave in, and went briefly through the discussion of why China and Russia don’t want Kosovo to be recognized as its own country. I wrote the words “Taiwan” and “Tibet” next to China, and “Chechnya” next to Russia. Eddie gave me the gorgeous “Ah-ha,” which baffled me, considering his apparent unfamiliarity with the fall of Soviet Communism.

This isn’t even the good part.

10 minutes left in class, Eddie says “Hey Greg? I have a question.”

“What’s that, Eddie?”
In perfect English, the best I’d heard all night:

“What is the difference between a mob, a rioter, and a protester?”

Ecstasy, orgiastic joy, my face reddens. After 45 minutes of bluster, Eddie has asked, in perfect English, a question I would be thrilled to hear an adult ask me in his native language.

I would like to kiss him. I elect to shake his hand, which leads to some confusion.

“Uh, What?”

“You just asked an excellent question, Eddie.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

I quietly loathe myself for axiomatically equating high household income with a healthy country, but I am not comfortable taking my real positions with them just yet. Or my broader ones, anyway. I am not looking to convert people. I’m simply really fucking tired of reading out of a textbook with people who I know must care about something besides advancing their career and watching Sex and the City without subtitles, respectively. That is all.

I would like to apologize in advance to my girlfriend for her friend/roommate’s image making it into my blog before her image. Take a cute picture of us together. Get it to me.

If you were wondering, yes I am starting to listen to twee pop, and the bad cardigan grows in 4 weeks after you decide that Beat Happening doesn’t suck.

A half-baked thought on education.

Tonight my adult class uncovered something I was probably better off not knowing.

Okay, the lesson was on describing abilities.

The sentences structures in the book were “Are you able to . . .,” “Can you . . .,” and “Do you know how to . . .” I pushed “Can you . . .” hard, and they were curious why. They thought that being so direct in English was rude.

I told them it was not.

This then led me into a conversation that I thought someone with a relatively high level of fluency and reading comprehension would know about English by now.

I need to write, let’s see if I say anything worth hearing.

At 26, I’m doing all the things you’re supposed to do before you’re thirty, in the wild, youthful sense.

I am living such a comical bachelor existence that I really didn’t know people lived like this. (I dare you to guess the last time I made myself a real meal. I’m not proud of it, but it just works.) When I don’t feel like going to work, I wait to the last minute and spring an extra buck or two for a long-distance bus, or even a cab. I sleep pretty much when I want to, as long as it’s not between 2 pm and 9:30 pm or so. I have a trip to Japan on tap that is such a potential nightmare that I’m embarrassed to give the interweb all the details. I’ll wait until after the fact. I have no doubts I will have a blast, but I’m sure that someone slightly older and “wiser” might second-guess me.

Otherwise, work is becoming not-insane. I have no reason to believe anyone is dissatisfied with my performance as a teacher at the moment. I will now go into why things may get better at work shortly.

Currently, my employer uses North American elementary school reading books in ESL classes. I suspect that mothers push for this on some sort of hype they’ve been fed. However, the needs of someone learning to read English who already speaks English are dramatically different than those of someone who barely knows the Latin alphabet and needs strict reinforcement in speaking of Subject Verb Object sentence order. But, Korean mothers need to feel that their kids are in “advanced” or something classes, so we continue with the books, slowly but surely. I effectively develop my own “curriculum” since there really is nothing existing to teach. I need to create my own circumstances to get kids to talk. My approach entails adapting the story material to the interests of my students, with slightly-varying (mostly negative) results. About the most success I’ve had is arguing the merits of different First-Person Shooter computer games with the class full of Christmas-themed names. A high school kid once told me where to find find the cheapest “pc room” (hourly computer facility) in my neighborhood, and otherwise simply confirms or denies that he understands the material in various ways, when directly addressed.

I’ve tried just about everything with every class. It’s as if once they are no longer naive and excited enough to just get a kick out of things that sound funny or whatnot, they just don’t give a damn about anything. This is all obviously much better than the sandwich-making before I got here, but it’s not remotely inspiring or terribly fulfilling.

I’m mentally exhausted and really don’t care that much about anything I want to blog about. I’m going to go read. There are patchouli smells and “Eh?”s that perk me up, and otherwise my uncooperative washing machine and hot water occupy most of my idle thoughts.

I had Cincinnati chili this weekend – one coney, one four-way. It was comforting like you would not believe.

New Years Resolutions 2008

I am pretty sure I’ve never made a New Year’s Resolution. Here goes nothing:

1. I will only drink once per week.

2. I will not rush into a new monogamous romantic relationship. (Anyone have ideas on how to make this more concrete?)

3. I will make a concerted effort to learn enough Korean to have some dignity as a teacher of a foreign language.

4. I will clean my apartment at least once a week.

5. I will cook at least 7 meals per week. Cereal and ramen don’t count.

i. I will make a major grocery shopping trip every week.

ii. I will grocery shop from a list.

iii. I will haul my butt to E-Mart rather than the tiny little mom and pop place for this.

6. I will either start going to a gym or piano lessons, or both.

7. I will send at least 1 piece of snail mail to the United States per month.

8. I will make at least 1 outgoing phone call to the United States per month.

9. I will log my time spent online, develop, and implement a plan to reduce my idle surfing time. *

I think that’s it. Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

*Late addition (11:00 01/01/08)

An anecdote from the old hagwon.

I used to work for a company that taught Kindergarten during the day, in addition to classes in the evenings. I now only teach evenings. This means I don’t do as many Real Teacher ™ things. For example, Field Day.

Quick rant.

If I hear one more person question the quality of the King James Bible as literature, (NOT a source of revelation, mind you, a piece of fucking LITERATURE) I am going to find a way to end my life that is elaborate enough to be that one quirky story on the news.

This will drift a bit, as I am not very centered presently.

Things have been quiet at the hagwon lately. Except, of course, the director going on his periodic rages with vague reasons. He was happy for awhile because we had gotten an explosive increase in enrollment. Something pissed him off, though. He doesn’t like talking with the mere songsangnims (“teachers”), so I don’t have a  clue what it is.

In other news, I’m cutting back on expenses because I need to finally start sending home money on my lovely school loans. Dandy. I did the math, and my current pace puts me at done in around seven years.  Not bad, I guess.

I dance around this a lot, but I do have a girlfriend. Why am I dancing around it? I told myself I wasn’t going to have a girlfriend here. It happened anyway. She’s great. I would have a significantly more difficult go of it in Korea without her. And she’s cuddly.

The Korean government keeps tabs on foreign teachers because there was some fraud awhile back. There have been violent felons and people with fake degrees teaching kindergarten. So, I had to get information on my graduation from college. Namely, the exact date I matriculated.

This shouldn’t be too hard. However, the only place this is written is on my diploma. However, THAT’S IN FUCKING LATIN, the classical language MOST people learn, but not me, OOOH no, Latin scholarship is too derivative for my undergraduate degree. So now I am likely to get audited by immigration because I don’t know if “quarto decimo” means “the fourtheenth” or “falling on the fourth.” And don’t tell me. At this point, it’s best I don’t know.

Anyway, what finally got me to write here (and the conclusion to the buildup above) was looking on my college’s website for my graduation date. The diversity program caught me in a very direct way immediately beginning my search. Yes, all colleges have them. Yes, I think they’re stupid unless they are at an institution that makes educating group x a stated goal (i.e. “not a really fucking old college and expensive college, whose theoretical underpinning predates female enrollment, much less belief that non-whites are fully human”), and frequently contrary to the goals of the institution, and usually those who defend them have no real reason to do so outside of social justice claims that ultimately declare that, for example, black people are always poor, and even when they’re not, they don’t read books. But they love sports. They even hired one of those rich uncle tom weenies with a CV full of “urban outreach” bullshit to push this. She sat in her office talking with people who self-identified as a minority in registration, and otherwise had nothing to do with the school. Otherwise, she went out to college fairs, handed out her card, and told black kids who stopped near the booth that St. Johns, a school she knows jack shit about, is an awesome place for black people. Which it isn’t.

Anyway, the front page is an obvious-to-anyone-who-attended-the-school-in-the-last-two-years fake. Minorities were obviously placed in a rather elaborate faked class, and photographed. The two students are 2 years apart.  Two links away, on the page with a message from the president, we get a quote from someone that is a regular source of disagreement on the program. I don’t doubt the value of Booker T. Washington’s writing. However, his works are very rarely a favorite, much less more than an afterthought on the program. Fine, it made a difference to someone. This quote is placed below the previously-mentioned “minorities who read” picture, next to the President’s message. I would hope that quotations on the website are not just pretty things, but something intended to be representative of the school.

Booker T. Washington is one of the 4 or 5 authors regularly up for debate to be stricken from “the program.” I’ve read him.  He really just isn’t that good. Well, compared to Aristotle or Marx, anyway.

Now, speaking as someone who saw a very attractive romantic interest lionized because, well, she is an Oprah special waiting to happen, this annoys the fuck out of me. Partly because I still have animosity toward her (there, I said it) and I’m tired of being black being cooler than being lower-middle-class-and-falling white. I was at least as unequipped to deal with a frou-frou East Coast Liberal Arts College as your average poor black, and didn’t even have the novelty of <i>that</i> to help me. I was just another white borderline sociopath who couldn’t dress himself, but also didn’t go to my summer home in Ambergis Caye or visit my father in Japan over the summer, and as a result I decided to Al Jolson it up with my lack of refined tastes, with predictably sad results. Rather than continue the quiet nerdiness I fell into quietly in high school, I discovered that I really wasn’t bright enough to be that kid at St. Johns. So, I decided to be mostly bacchanalian and rude.

Just go read Jim Goad. He’s better at this than I am.

I need to go buy yarn so I can make rabbit headband/masks tomorrow afternoon. Seriously.

My apartment is a mess, I love rice, I love spam (a delicacy in Korea. I shit you not. Gift sets are widely available.), and I am really tired of extra vowels. Seriously. Who the fuck goes to Muck-dawn-nuhlds-uh? And yes, that is a phonetic spelling of what it says on the sign outside my window.

What to do from here continues to smack me in the face, as I reach the 6 months in Korea mark. Considering I still have no idea what I enjoy (there is no way in holy hell I could teach kindergarten for the rest of my life), I’d likely have the same trouble I had before Korea. Namely, being so removed from goals that I could not even start finding them. I mean, it’s only about 8 months since I convinced myself that being happy is necessarily a good thing. And at the time, I really despised my life – hence Korea. My only consistent goal now is getting out of debt. I’d like to not have a job. I’d live most places to do that. That’s a recent enough discovery that I have to doubt it’s permanence.

So there. As promised, standard bad blogging.