marketing a placebo

Birell, the non- alchoholic egyptian beer, is marketed in the same way that american beers are.



Babe:
Hi Morsey.
Guy:
In my opinion, that girl has a beautiful personality
Announcer:
A girl's personality is the last thing that you notice about her.
Be a man and drink Birell, It's a pure feeling that only a man would feel.

Yes, there slogan is "Be a Man."

Because only real men drink non-alcholic beer so they can pretend to feel a religiously prohibited form of inebriation.

i don't even know what else to say, really.

japanese design and aesthetics blah blah blah

whatever. Tokyo is making me feel disgustingly inadequate and unoriginal. I went to an after show party for this guy last night, and i felt uncomfortable, self-righteous, and very small. (psychologically speaking - physically i felt enormous, because Japanese people are TINY, and all the foreigners do their best to emulate this via eating disorders.)
But I will say that Japan does have an amazing, hypnotic design sense, almost as if it taps into this primal need for control and order, so that even buying this toy made me feel like maybe my life will be a little bit more in control.


(and yes, it comes with replaceable arms and head, so she can eat ice cream or carry a gun, depending on your mood.)
Where does this attraction to simplistic perfection come from? Is it really primal, or is it a subconscious backlash against modernity? And how come the Japanese are so fucking good at it?
While the aesthetics of food and architecture are amazing, its the toys that i can't get over.... its not just that they're 'cool'... but that they're a form of salvation. Live a life of insecurities and failed expectations, go to work at a job you have no control over - and then come home to tangible, compartmentalized perfection.
What separates toys from food, electronics, or architecture is that from an adult perspective, they are 'function-less.' Or rather, their functionality is limited completely to symbols of order and perfection: you don't play with them, you don't use them in any way at all. They sit their and emit cosmic simplicity, universal order.

the toilette as philosophical muse (zizek shall go unmentioned)

Post #1
Its pretty common to see ashtrays in bathroom stalls outside the US, but Korea is the only place i've been with ubiquitous urinal ashtrays. What's more, they often have lighters in them, suggesting a need to light up directly after (before) taking a piss.


Post #2
I'd like to see a cross-cultural study on the average number of post-urinary 'shakes' among adult males. I'd anecdotally peg it at 1-2 for Americans, 6-8 for Koreans.

Post #3
From Japan, this is truly brilliant...

It directs the fresh toilette water through a faucet atop the tank, so when you flush you can use the clean water to wash your hands before it drains into the reserve tank. Saves water and 2 knob turns.

japan day 1

After all my talk about the failure of Korea's restoration/preservation projects, i've been a bit nervous about Japan... I mean, Japan holds such a large place in our mythification of Asia that I'm not sure if one can truly remove themselves from the experienced knowledge that they're seeing JAPAN. Will i be able to "objectively judge" (i.e. judge from my subjective aesthetic values) what i see? Or will i be so psyched about how cool Japan is that i'll just fawn away, much like a reporter covering the Obama campaign? (i try hard to keep my material fresh and topical, fyi.)

SO, with that out of the way, i will say that Dazaifu certainly felt a lot more authentic than almost anything in Korea.



Maybe it was the plum blossoms? Or is it a stone vs wood thing? Or maybe its just a "this ain't Korea so Hell Yeah" sort of thing.

One clear difference is the quality/style of things you can buy around the shrines. In Korea the stalls around historical sights were limited to street food and children's toys like battle axes and squeaky hammers. Random.
But in Dazaifu there were stores with enormous beautiful 3000 dollar hand carved wooden sculptures. There were hand made tea pots and intricate tiny cloth dioramas depicting traditional Japanese life. And these weren't kitsch or tchotchke or anything... at least i can't imagine a handcrafted doll the size of my thumb, meant for a home shrine and costing 45 dollars, being considered 'kitsch.'
In Korea, I found the lack of anything worth buying with a 'cultural personality' strange, but i didn't really hold it against the place. I'm ready to do that now.

Also, Japan has this:


btw, that giant Luke Skywalker riding the Tauntaun is only $29... ebay anyone?

Travel as a study of The Trajectory of Pop Music in a Globalized World

Once I sat in a Pizza Hut in Nizwa and they were playing White Town's "Never Be Your Woman."
40 years ago Nizwa was a rebel Omani city without paved roads or electricity. Now... White Town (...and pizza.)

Last week i heard Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping" on a public bus into Pusan.

I don't know how many times i had to defend my distaste for Michael Bolton/Phil Collins/George Michael while living in Egypt.

(linguistic) insecurities

The first time a student in Egypt explained to me that Arabic contained every phonic sound from every language on earth, i was a little taken aback.
After all, Arabic contains no V, P, or CH sound, nor a grouping of 3 or more consecutive consonants (like in spring).
And this is only the English sounds that Arabic lacks.

But in the Middle East, Arabic is more than just a language. It is first a signifier of purity - the Koran was revealed in poetic Arabic, and unlike the Old or New Testament, it cannot be sacredly translated.
It is also a symbol of unity.
Though the Egyptian and Moroccan dialects are as different as Spanish and French, their definitional sameness acts to represent (maintain/produce?) an analogous unity among Arab countries. When you speak the same language, you implicitly share values and responsibility - and as differences in culture, politics, and economy have decimated any notion of pan-Arabism, Language has remained the one true bond. The exclusion of Shi'a Islam in Iran and 'secular' Islam in Turkey from the broader Middle Eastern concern is no coincidence - they speak a different language.

While living in Egypt, I saw this linguistic myth as nothing more than the language component to a host of myths meant to reify Arabic/Islamic superiority through 'empirical' examples.

And then I came to Korea.

And sure enough, identical story. Only here the claim is expanded to include Hangul, the writing system, which can supposedly reproduce any 'foreign' sound.

While no language can make the claim to umbrella all others, at least Arabic was sort of close. I mean, Egyptians are shockingly fast language learners, and they actually don't have strong accents.

But Korea? Aside from lacking phonemically differentiated L/R, B/P or G/K, there is no F, Z, V, or voiced dental fricative TH (as in 'the'), nor many short vowels. Also, any consonant sound must be followed by a vowel, even if it at the end of the word. (thus max becomes maxuh.) Koreans are shockingly bad language reproducers.

But the 'fact' of Korean lingual superiority is so ingrained (mythified) that it goes completely unchallenged. The adult students i have confronted about this obvious untruth have either laughed in realization, or frozen up, like being told God didn't exist.

But their is more to this bizarre convergence of mythified Linguistic Exceptionalism.
The direction towards which this myth is used varies greatly between the two countries. In Egypt the linguistic superiority myth served to unify a diversified Arabic culture and reify Islamic superiority. Although it was to an extent used as an in-group creating example, (demonstrating superiority over the European out-group) this "in-group" included many countries, and in a sense expanded and defined the group beyond an equally plausible "Egyptian exceptionalism."
But in Korea, the Linguistic Superiority Myth serves an almost opposite purpose. Korea doesn't share its language with a broader region, and so the bolstering effect of the myth does not expand the group. Rather it exclusively serves Korean Nationalism, which unapologetically accepts Korea as the Best Country on Earth.

Of course, there are a billion examples of how this myth is hypocritical. Just as Koreans claim their language is superior, they also rely on English catch phrases as an economy of 'cool' more than anywhere else I've ever been. Korean advertisements regularly use nonsensical English phrases to bolster their images.

(the usage of 'story' in store names will be the subject of another post)

Furthermore, a large portion of the Namdaemun disaster coverage here has focused on Foreign coverage of the incident, to the point where it feels like The Korean Media is over-emphasizing foreign concern as a way to demonstrate the true importance of the disaster. Like the news is saying - "If the New York Times and CNN are covering this, than you know it is important."

As always, i'm not sure what the point of these observations are. In English, I feel like we're more proud of the words we absorb than anything else - knowing the definition of schadenfreude, or that the word for 'tariff' is of Arabic origin, is a sign of sophistication, and any notion of linguistic 'purity' only comes up when confronted with the idea of Ebonics as a legitimate linguistic whole.

But if we weren't so confident about our economic/political/moral superiority, would things like linguistic nationalism start becoming more important?

technomythonoia update

a genuine cause for concern.

(original post here.)

gift sets i have seen.

With Seollal just around the corner, it seems a good time to comment on Korea's unusual knack for gift sets.


It's funny to me not so much because they're popular here, but because for some reason they're not popular back home. I mean, a well wrapped set of toiletries or coffees is actually a pretty nice gift.



Of course, this being a blog about differences, i'm going to focus on the ones that might not go over so well back home...

A whole case of generic brand Spam!


Nothing says "happy new year" quite like 12 cans of tuna!


Dried sardines are always a safe bet.

meh dong!

Korea gets 5 points this week because sticking your tongue out is a vocalized onomatopoeia.
And they do it a lot.

a very belated new years post (of sorts)

On new years i was supposed to join the supposed 600,000 citizens who crowded Haeundae Beach in Pusan to watch the sunrise. But it was freezing, so i stayed in bed. Apparently, i was not alone.
Because this is a Korean tradition, I wasn't surprised that when i asked my kids on Tuesday how many of them had seen the sunrise, most raised their hand. What did surprise me was that most of them had "seen" the sunrise in a rather insincere manner; by watching it on TV or looking at slide shows on their computer.

huh?

There is a language barrier, and so the most pressing question was to decide whether

A) the kids were watching the sunrise later in the day to avoid waking up at 6am.

B) The kids were watching it on TV because they were too cold/lazy to go outside.

(Un)surprisingly, the answer was evenly split.

I understand people watching the Times Square ball dropping live via television. That is a site-specific event. But the sunrise? Furthermore, i can't really image someone watching a taped 'ball-dropping' the next day because they were too tuckered out the night before.

I have a very hopeful image of my children watching the sunrise on their Samsungs while the actual sun rises, um, like directly outside their house. For added irony, one of the children gets up and pulls down the blinds to keep the glare off the TV.

A boy can dream, can't he?

technomythonoia!

Koreans don't flush their toilet paper.
And yes, I know this is not an entirely unique practice. In Costa Rica it was the same, as in most parts of Egypt. But that was because these countries have an aging infrastructure that was built on a third world budget.
In Korea, they have plasma TV's in their elevators, and I'm pretty sure nothing is more than 5 years old.

I'm not even kidding. This is the wikimapia view of my house. The satellite image must be a little outdated, because its just a giant field. Which means there is no way that the pipes can't support my toilet paper. And yet, my boss and landlady both warned me that if i flushed, i would absolutely clog the pipes. (my landlady warned me by punching me multiple times in the arm, but I'll save the violent vibrancy of aged Korean women for another post.)

So why won't Koreans flush their toilet paper?
Although i can't come up with an accurate name for the phenomena, (technomythonoia?) I'm willing to bet it's somehow related to fan death.
(fan death, of course, is when "an electric fan creates a vortex, which sucks the oxygen from the enclosed and sealed room and creates a partial vacuum inside.")

This isn't to say American's don't' suffer from some form of the same ailment - i would literally run out of the room after turning on the microwave before i went to college. But I am struggling to find an American equivalent at the same level of absurdity as fan death.

And i am similarly struggling to figure out why the multitude of warning signs needed by a technologically paranoid society have to be animated.
(I am using animated here in both senses of the word. Yes, we use 'illustrations' in our warnings, but they are almost always passive. If you look closely, you can see little cartoon tears (sweat drops?) flying off the people in the second and third panel of the earthquake warning.)




Life's mysteries know no limit...

No outside drinks or squids.

gaming

It is 40 degrees in Gimhae right now. And yes, these kids are playing street fighter outside of a convenience store.

They should really be at home watching one of Korea's TWO tv channels devoted to starcraft:

Korean elections - can i take your order?

I am woefully (willfully?) ignorant about Korean politics...

However, it's got to say something about a country's faith in their electorate when they start assigning numbers to the candidates.


Sure, I guess its a sign of robustness when you have 12 candidates running instead of 2, and for all i know other parliamentary democracies do the same thing...
but, still,
When a conversation about the political leadership of your country can begin with the question,
"i went with number 6, how bout you?" - something is wrong.

And seriously, you've got to feel bad for whoever gets assigned the number four.

the dark side of K-pop

What drives a culture to develop a sub-genre of music videos devoted to making 13 year old girls cry?

Is it the strange paradox of living in an absurdly safe country that has the specter of a nuclear neighbor hanging over it's head?

I'd post more, but that video's long enough... and prototypical.

small differences (linguistic - neurological edition)

I'm very interested in how the brain "translates" accent into understandable speech. Are Engilsh speakers, with its infinite accents, better at this? Furthermore, is the way we learn our first language reflective of our general way of thinking?

In Egypt, people were often baffled by the slightest mistake in accent. I lived near a street called tram street, which in Egyptian Arabic should be pronounced ahhh- taahh-rehhm. There is a very slight rolling of the R in there. Although my general arabic accent is quite good, this one word was impossible for me.

One time, I sat in a taxi and tried to explain to the driver what street I wanted. We agreed that there are three main streets that run across Alexandria. We agreed that we were at the moment on one of them, and it was not the one that i wanted. We agreed that I didn't want to be on the sea. In my mind, this alone should have been enough, but he began to rattle off all of the smaller streets, until finally i was able to pronounce tram street correctly.

Another time i was in McDonald's, and said i wanted my meal a cahm - bow. (As in Combo. With fries and a drink. I actually forget what they call it in America now, but in Korea its called a "set.") I was met with a blank stare. What i meant to say was cum-bow. There was no mental training to search for similar words, to do internal interpretations of meaning. The language was an all or nothing deal, where you either hit a bullseye of meaning, or grazed the target as gibberish. The fact that there was literally no other similar word i could have been trying to say in that situation was entirely besides the point.

While I was in Egypt and bitter and angry, I interpreted this as a clear sign that Egyptians were retarded. Now I'm beginning to realize that it has a whole lot more to do with how we are taught to learn language.

So now in Korea...

i sort of lost it yesterday. I was teaching little Bennie and Angie phonics stuff out of there phonics book, and there's a page that has

P + ark = Park.

That's it though. The book doesn't follow through with the whole Electric Company thing, it just moves on.
However, i have about 20 minutes of material that i have to stretch to fit a 45 minute class, so i thought i'd build on it.

wasn't going to happen.

They could read "ark"
and they could read "park", because they already knew it. But when i switched to an "M", i met blank stares. It's not that the kids didn't know what sound an M makes. (And furthermore, its not like there written language isn't phonetic either.) It's just that they're trained to memorize, not to problem solve.

I wrote "ark" "Mark" "Park" and "Hark" on the board, and had them repeat the pronunciations of each.

Then i added "Gark." (again, meaning isn't important here, this is a phonics class.)

One of the girls said "gorilla."

She knew the letter g, but the way her brain was wired to learn, she had to say a word that she already knew.

I was ready to cry.

small differences (korean edition)

Koreans squat like this:
(not my picture)

heels flat on the ground.
Not as easy as you might think.

Koreans don't do 'pull my finger.' Instead its a maneuver like setting off an old fashion detonator wherein the hand goes from 'thumbs up' to 'closed fist.' This can also be reversed à la opening a can of soda.

The mother of all differences is dong chim.
(not my picture again... unfortunately.)

It is translated as "poop needle," although kids are more than happy to perform a frontal version of said act. A wikipedia search redirects you to a sight on the Japanese equivalent called kancho, although the URL betrays its true origins. I'll put up my own pictures of this soon, but for now, you can experience a simulation here.

Also, yesterday was pepero day. You know, because 11/11 looks like 4 sticks of pepero.

But oh man, I can't wait for Black Day so i can "commiserate [my] singledom."

war as comedy

I visited a giant POW memorial in Geoje a few weekends ago, and it was...

...interesting.

I just can't imagine what purpose is served by portraying war in this way.
My understanding was that these things (btw, what the hell are they called?) are more appropriate for, say:

...corn.

I suppose there's a lot to be said about the general disinterest in war memorials in America. When people do talk about war memorials in America, they usually think of the Vietnam one, and even then its most likely discussed as a work of art.

But war memorials are huge in Egypt and Korea. And aside from singlehandedly supporting the diorama industry, they probably say something about the countries. (maybe.)

In Egypt the war memorials/museums were intense, sprawling places with poorly made figurines and large plaques with phrases like "the defeat of the invincible army." (I still can't decide whether the 'invincible army' is the Egyptian or the Israeli.)



But in Korea they're like bizarre theme parks.

How travel made me less liberal.

I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but haven't really found the right way to approach it...
This pretty much sums it up I guess.
But yeah, before I lived in Egypt I was perfectly happy to give it not just the Benefit of the Doubt, but really much more; I wrote my thesis on Islam as an "alternative and cohesive telos and worldview."
And yet... after 7 months in Egypt I couldn't believe how disillusioned I felt. I've touched on it before... how everyone middle class just wanted to get the hell out of there. How it felt like the clash between "Islam and the West" was based on the fact that they desired literally everything Western, which led to a natural problem with the "Islam" part. (not the religion per se, but the economic, political, and cultural stagnation that because of the holistic nature of Islam, is hard to attribute to anything other than Islam, or it's deterioration due to Western influences.)

I went to Egypt open-minded, and I left with the same opinion that a lot of egyptians have:
(to quote an Egyptian i was particularly fond of )
"Egypt is fucked"

So how does one deal with the fact that liberalism is better served by theorizing than by experience? Would i have been a better "scholar" if I'd stayed at home?

Speaking to people who study the Middle East from afar, i literally feel tainted by experience.

culture is easier to talk about via music videos

This video is popular here.
(Although its a different sort of popular than in egypt, because i've never seen it on TV, only on phones and mp3 video players etc.)

First, "she was pretty."
I'm assuming this is a korean translating thing, because it happens all the time. For example,
Question: "How are you?"
Answer: "I was fine."
I don't know whether this a confusion about how to use the "be" verb, or whether they only describe people in past tense.

Second, the flasher. Apparently this is fairly common in Korea. I know this is anecdotal, but it's at least common enough that an 11 girl in my class was "so - so" after a flasher had been prowling her building all weekend. She was trying to explain to me what a flasher was when my boss walked in and started giggling and then faux flashed me with her coat. Everyone laughed.

Finally, i think it's pretty great that hot asian school girls are apparently not an 'exotic fetish,'
since this video was made for purely domestic consumption. (Unless of course they've internalized the exoticism that the West created, in which case its FUCKED UP)

On a related note, god bless youtube.




(did you know they use the english words for gay and lesbian here?)