Dec 30
By DoAn Forest
This video concept was born when I bought a 6-DVD of Korean pop music videos. In almost all these videos, it seems that someone meets a tragic end — it could be a disease, a crash, a suicide, a gunshot wound, or just of heartbreak. Living in Korea for a long time, I find this tragic appetite of their pop culture to be almost tragicomic.
The video was cut to a song which was a collaborate between Jet Echo (myspace.com/jetecho) and MakBak (myspace.com/makbak) … two bands who lived in Seoul in the mid 2000s.
Dec 28
By Mizaru
AT 6:15 p.m. on Christmas night my recruiter/fixer calls then leaves a message in the voice box: “Where are You?!”
Moments later an e-mail arrives: “Can I interview you tomorrow (December 26)? You never answer my phone call on time.”
I quickly reply that I am continuing this story and want to go back to the Yoido Full Gospel Church on the Sunday after Christmas. But the fixer calls me again and says, “No, no don’t go.”
He instead wants to meet in Anyang (a city in southern greater Seoul). His motives are obvious to any foreigner who lives here. If I go to Yoido and by chance connect directly with the team that is looking for a foreigner to read the Bible to them, then, I’ll do it for a low “Friendship” fee and he will lose his substantially larger middleman recruiter’s fee.
Dec 26
By Jesse Coy Nelson
For the first two songs, the impression that I got was a drunken karaoke session. Dylan had some disjointed crust on his voice that he had to break loose. By the third song, he was sounding better, like a grizzled Tom Waits (and yes, I know he predates Tom). I didn’t recognize the third or fourth songs, but I have them now… “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile.” By the fifth song, “Levee’s Gonna Break,” Bob was definitely in full form. Being somewhat removed as I was, and with the simple, no-nonsense setup of the stage, Bob was transformed. He became for me a floating tan hat, sometimes hovering over the organ keyboard, or sometimes emitting the sound of a harmonica… Bob the Hat.
Dec 23
By Paul Auster
I heard this story from Auggie Wren. Since Auggie doesn’t come off too well in it, at least not as well as he’d like to, he’s asked me not to use his real name. Other than that, the whole business about the lost wallet and the blind woman and the Christmas dinner is just as he told it to me.
Auggie and I have known each other for close to eleven years now. He works behind the counter of a cigar store on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, and since it’s the only store that carries the little Dutch cigars I like to smoke, I go in there fairly often. For a long time, I didn’t give much thought to Auggie Wren. He was the strange little man who wore a hooded blue sweatshirt and sold me cigars and magazines, the impish, wisecracking character who always had something funny to say about the weather, the Mets or the politicians in Washington, and that was the extent of it.
But then one day several years ago he happened to be looking through a magazine in the store, and he stumbled across a review of one of my books. He knew it was me because a photograph accompanied the review, and after that things changed between us. I was no longer just another customer to Auggie, I had become a distinguished person.
Dec 23
By Sam Sheppard
It suddenly dawned on me this week just how close we are to Christmas. Living in a non-Christian country, and surrounding myself with predominantly secular friends, means that it sneaks up somewhat. Not that I’m a particularly avid fan back home, but this week would normally have heralded the time when I returned to the family nest for a week or so, becoming once again inundated with mince pies and marzipan after a 12 month absence. It’s fair to say I’ve given it little thought this year, bar a brief stroll along Fashion Street in Nampodong, which seems to be crammed with as many decorations as Regent Street and Covent Garden combined.
On that occasion, surrounded by young couples giggling beneath the lights and even younger families clambering across the nativity scenes, events felt no different to those unfolding on the other side of Eurasia. I squinted against the lights and stepped as nimbly as possible around swarms of children in exactly the same way as I’ve become accustomed to doing on any given December in the UK.
Dec 21
Editor’s Note: This begins a loose-leaf series on different types of Religion and Spirituality practiced in Korea. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Shamanism will be reported on from an eye-level perspective. 3wm editor Mizaru begins the series with a visit to The Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul.
I’ve been going to church all of my life. Maybe not as consistently as I avoid birthdays and enjoy Halloween, but I go and will continue to go. My church going consistency is marked by one inevitable thing, and that is I am always late to the service.
Dec 20
Three ex-Dahn members and the editors of 3wm contributed to this story.
![Optimized-DSC_0022[1]](http://thethreewisemonkeys.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Optimized-DSC_00221.JPG "Optimized-DSC_0022[1]")
Editor’s notes: This is part 2 of an ongoing story. Part 1 can be read here. There have been a few private and anonymous contacts made to us from ex-members of Dahn who briefly shared their experience.
I.
Recently, I was asked as one who was once part of Dahn Yoga for my thoughts on it. Had the opinion of it being a cult changed? Were there any changes seen in this business/religion/philosophy over the intervening years? No, my view of Dahn Yoga as a cult has only been strengthened by the recent spotlight the international media has cast upon it and Dahn’s founder, Seung Heun Lee. The only difference from my time in Dahn till now is, the addition of new company names like WHO, World Hongik Organization.
Dec 20
By J. Lee
A week after the North Korean shelling of the Yeonpyeong Island, I e-mailed Sung-yoon 
Lee of the prestigious Fletcher School, Tufts University, outlining my thoughts on the recent provocation. Like many people, I, too, had been shocked by North Korea’s gratuitous attacks on innocent civilians. Nonetheless, I felt that one had to adopt carefully measured strategies to stave off a further crisis—what I described in my e-mail as a potential “Doomsday.” In it, I wrote that “now is perhaps the most opportune time for Lee Myung-bak and his retinue of sycophants to resume talks with North Korea…” for “[s]hould another Korean War occur, there will be no victors, but victims only.”
Dec 20
Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool is the first major New York exhibition of the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara (born 1959), and features more than one hundred works ranging from his early career in the 1980s to his most recent paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, and large-scale installations. As one of the leading artists of Japan’s influential Neo Pop art since the 1990s, Nara is well known for his depictions of children and animals.
Dec 13
By Flora Lee
Just to briefly describe the life of an average gosam: he/she gets to school by 7 to 8 a.m., and does practically nothing other than study, study, study until midnight or more—at school, at home or at private study rooms that cost quite a lot. In reality this brutal slog begins as soon as final exams end in one’s junior year if not as soon as the exam is taken by seniors (many students set a “D-Day” countdown application on cell phones or computers at 365 days and follow the countdown by days, hours, minutes and seconds and the rest can’t escape constant reminders from friends, teachers and parents). For students who wish to enter a prestigious university—called SKY here indicating Seoul National University (Korea’s Harvard), Korea University (Yale perhaps) and Yonsei University (maybe Oxford)—the competition gets fiercer, the strongest enemy being yourself. Imagine all that effort being judged on one single day. One mistake, and you could be stuck not in a university dormitory but in Gangnam-Daesung or Jongro Yongin Campus two famous academies for jaesusaeng—to all gosams, being put on the jaesusaeng list and spending another year in hell is a terrifying punishment (sadly 150 thousand students ended up victims of it last year alone).
Dec 13
By R.M. Adamson
It’s a late afternoon weekday, the sky clouded and offering possibilities of rain but holding back on it so far and the temperature is just warm enough to make the beer taste a little bit better. We’re near the main entrance of one of the more decrepit open-air marketplaces in Seoul, this one called Ahyeon Shijang.
I recall my first visit to one of these open-air markets in South America, back when I lived in Paraguay for a short time as an exchange student in high school. It was a place of tiny stalls and discordant and unexpected sounds, not unlike this place I’m at now except bigger, everyone shouting and running and calling, where the illiterate and poverty-stricken among the residents of Asuncion were busy selling just about anything and everything they could sell. Things I’d never seen before. Things that looked like food but might not be. Mechanical and household appliances I’d have to guess at the uses for and likely be wrong. A busy place, full of busy business and constant movement, concrete below, half-constructed walls with exposed wiring. Stuff everywhere, and all of it for sale.
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