Feb 27
By Donald Kirk
The Chinese by now must be getting the message. How long can they pretend not to hear the shouting and singing from all those people on the steps of the church across the street from their embassy around the corner from the Blue House and the Gyeongbuk Palace in central Seoul. Don’t tell me that row of police buses lining the street in front is blocking all the sound waves.
Ok, granted I didn’t see any windows opening in the beautiful modern building to which the Chinese moved their embassy from the historic Myeongdong site, now under construction as a much bigger, more modern establishment. Nor did I see any sign of movement in front of the embassy or inside the glass windows.
Still I’ve got to believe the Chinese are quite aware by now that sending poor bedraggled North Koreans, who’ve swum or walked or paddled across the Tumen or Yalu Rivers into China, back to North Korea is really a bad idea. It’s not just that the Chinese look like cruel collaborators with an oppressive regime. The problem is they look so dumb, so unhearing and downright inhuman.
Feb 27
By John M. Rodgers
On Tuesday, March 13 at 10:40 a.m., travel agent and serial scammer, Kang Wan Koo (aka Wystan Kang, aka Joseph Kim), will stand trial for fraud and embezzlement at the Seoul Eastern District Court. It has been a long time coming with scores of victims bamboozled out of more than a 170 million won ($150,000) over the period of at least a year according to the Prosecutors’ Office who finally arrested and detained Kang on February 13.
Prosecutors have since questioned him to build their case which is already thick due to the many victims–from places such as Pakistan, the U.S., Israel and France–who have come forward and evidence gathered by Kim Hyun-joo of the Korea Tourism Organization’s Tourism Complaint Center with 3WM and attorney Tae jin Jo of the Korea Legal Aid Company who is representing victims in a civil case. Mr. Jo expressed optimism about Kang finally facing charges and the effect it could have on the civil case: “If his crime turns out to be guilty in criminal court, we could win our civil trial easily without additional evidences. So, it could shorten the civil trial schedule.”
Yet, as before, Jo is rightly concerned about collecting the losses of the victims. “But, unfortunately, it doesn’t mean our clients could receive their money from him or his company without any difficulty,” he said. The prosecutors’ statement that Kang “has no money” certainly doesn’t assuage the concerns of those scammed. When news came that Kang had been detained, some victims weren’t so pleased: “Him being detained means none of us will ever see our money,” posted one. A few days later another commented, “Someone please make me feel better by telling me that this is actually going to help us get money back!”
Feb 27
By Lee Scott and Iwazaru
The first rule of doing damage control on an Internet meltdown is to protect your Twitter page. That’s what I found when I got around to checking out Jenny Hyun’s page a full five days after her rocketing to the top of my “Korean Americans I had never heard of till now” list. Jeremy Lin I had heard of (who hasn’t by now?). Floyd Mayweather, too.
Interestingly (to me), it was about five days after Floyd Mayweather made his (at best racially insensitive and at worst racist) remarks about New York Knicks player, Jeremy Lin, that Hyun went off the deep end. Mayweather tweeted on February 13, 2012:
“Jeremy Lin is a good player but all the hype is because he’s Asian. Black players do what he does every night and don’t get the same praise.”
Mayweather’s comments sparked not only Hyun’s tweet-tirade (more on that in just a moment), but also prompted Ultimate Fighting Championship president, Dana White to call him a racist .
Feb 27
By Scott Freeman
Many years ago I vaguely remember walking into a record store and purchasing an album titled “More Power To Ya” from Charly Records (see photo), a UK record company that specializes in reissuing soul, rhythm and blues, and jazz. I bought it on a whim—it must have been cheap—because I had never heard any of the tracks before. So I listened to this record a few times and then filed it in my collection. At the time, I wasn’t even interested in collecting soul and funk 45s like I am now. But one of the tracks off that album, Don Varner’s “More Power To Ya,” had a resonating effect on me and I never forgot it.
A few years later, when I became more interested in collecting 45s, I found a copy of this 45 on Ebay and had to have it. While the 45 was issued on the Diamond label out of New York City, the song itself comes out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
You wouldn’t think it, but Muscle Shoals has had a rich tradition in music and recording studios that started back in the 1960s and continues into the present age. Just about everybody who is anybody from the music business has recorded there at one time or another, from Wilson Pickett to Aretha Franklin, from The Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan. All of this musical significance is pretty amazing for a city that boasts a present-day population just short of 13,000.
Feb 27
An International Artists Community group exhibition
March 3rd-14th 2012
…
Gallery Golmok
In art, the unclothed human form has been a common subject for ages. We work from the nude figure because of its natural beauty, which the human mind has been programed through evolution by natural selection to find appealing.
We work from the nude figure because it is (in our opinion) possibly the most complex object to study from. It is constantly in a state of motion and it can provide a nearly infinite number of possible images as the model and/or artist move in relation to each other.
We work from the nude figure because it is possibly the greatest scale with which to measure and challenge our technical skills.
This collection of images by artists from over ten countries demonstrates the great variety of ways in which this most natural of forms can be depicted.
Feb 20
By John M. Rodgers
When 28-year-old Korean-American Robert Park crossed the frozen Tumen River that divides China and North Korea on Christmas Day 2009 somewhere near the northeastern North Korean city of Hoeryong, he carried a Bible and a few letters demanding that then-leader Kim Jong-il close all prison camps, release all prisoners and step down.
Just days earlier, Park told Reuters in an interview he requested be run after he’d entered the North, “My demand is that I do not want to be released. I don’t want President Obama to come and pay to get me out. But I want the North Korean people to be free. Until the concentration camps are liberated, I do not want to come out. If I have to die with them, I will…. And if he (Kim Jong-il) kills me, in a sense, I realize this is better. Then the governments of the world will become more prone to say something, and more embarrassed and more forced to make a statement.” Die he did not—he was released 43 days later on February 6—but what happened to him may have been a worse evil than death.
Feb 20
By Lee Scott
When we arrived at the police station, the minivan’s owner had gone out to have dinner. They called him and asked him to come back as soon as he could. When he came in, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t recognize him. He was the owner of the vehicle but not the driver. The minivan was used for his business (Chinese imports). When I found out he could speak Mandarin, he and I were able to converse much more freely (I speak Mandarin much better than Korean). He was telling me a little about his business and kept apologizing over and over for the situation. I told him that of course he needn’t apologize since he hadn’t been driving, nor had he even known that his employees were mis-using his vehicle. One of the other police sergeants in the office scolded him about the siren and PA system. Apparently he had the appropriate permits for both, but the two young men who were the culprits had been mis-using them as well. “Make sure it doesn’t happen again,” the cop told the man.
Feb 20
By Achilles
“I don’t like teaching English!” said “Sally” to the class. “Matt” said the same. And then “Lisa.” And so it continued for an entire week.
Korean middle and high school English teachers from the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE) might be the most miserable people on the peninsula.
The big news for expats recently is the forthcoming move to cut hundreds of native English teachers from secondary schools here in Seoul. SMOE officials have cited budgetary issues coupled with “research” “showing” that having a native English teacher does little to improve English language skills in secondary students, as reasons for the shift in policy.
Feb 20
By The Expat
This morning’s early stroll around Itaewon started out peacefully. I parked my car and walked up what for lack of a better name is commonly referred to as ‘Homo-Hill’, past the “Why Not?” bar and “SoHo”. Some local heavies were cleaning out a small restaurant at the top of the hill that recently went out of business (or was ‘forced’ to close). As they finished up, the only things remaining in the empty space were a few posters on the wall.
I rounded the bend, approached the top of ‘Hooker Hill’ and began the climb downwards. A local working girl was standing near the front door of her bar, smoking a cigarette. Two large Nigerian men were walking up the hill, approaching the girl’s shop and calling out to her. She quickly ran inside and closed the door.
Feb 13
By Mizaru
In the basement of the apartment building I lived in is the Police Bar. My room was above it out of earshot; a 5th floor walk up to a small room of cubist angles and a skylight. TV and cable were provided and a shared public bathroom cleaned for real every morning by a Chinese woman from Szechwan who for whatever reason didn’t mind fishing used condoms out of the toilet. At three-hundred bucks a month and an around the clock bowl of rice available how could it be better?
The first few nights and for some months to come Sinchon had a helter-skelter pace to run in and the neon dreamscape of a modern Kubla Kahn to be seen in.
I’m back in again and the only thing that seems new to the neighborhood now is a quirky comic bookstore off the main road that has transfigured itself into a “Purple hair redux” boutique. And contrary to a rumor, the Police Bar has not closed. The Japanese students that I used to cohabit the building with still drop down to it at around 12 a.m. and then the Police Bar has to stay open till the sun comes up. This is still part of that Sinchon de-rigor—as long as there are customers keep the place open, almost every place open, and let them revel on the streets in the smells of the crackling pork and bubbles of far-reaching perfume.
Feb 13
By David Wills
During my three years in South Korea, there wasn’t much the locals would say to me about China that wasn’t overwhelmingly negative, bordering on the outright racist. Even the very youngest students would tell me about the “dirty” Chinese, who sit around watching each other defecate, stopping only to eat babies or steal something from Korea. Of course, Korea isn’t exactly a land of open-mindedness and enthusiasm for its neighbours. Even by the standards of Asia – where animosity between nations is commonplace – Korea is notable for its xenophobia, its paranoia, and its sheer contempt for people that look, act, or speak differently to those of the one true bloodline.
Yet it surprised me when I arrived in China and found that the opinion of Chinese people towards Korea and Koreans (and I’ll state now that I’m definitely referring to South Korea, rather than China’s ally up North) was unanimously positive. Now, I can’t pretend to have taken a sampling of the population as a whole, but I have taught in China for a year and a half, and could count more than five hundred people having told me about their fondness for all things Korean.
Feb 13
By Lee Scott
It was a little after midnight when we heard a loud police siren coming. A black minivan came tearing down the street, headed to where we were standing near the kebab truck. The driver was veering toward crowds of people in the pedestrian street and blasting the van’s police siren. We couldn’t understand why the van had a siren or what they were doing. The driver slammed on the brakes right in front of a crowd of young men and women who scattered in a panic. All the while the guy in the passenger seat of the minivan was laughing and shouting imprecations at the pedestrians over a P.A. built into the siren system.
Feb 13
By Matthew Lamers with photos by Dylan Goldby
“The broader term is New Journalism — think Wolfe, Capote, Talese and, yes, on the fringes, Thompson with the lizards in the shadows and a bottle of Wild Turkey within reach,” said Rodgers. “3WM does often subscribe to Thompson’s theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. There are times when a certain submersion in the subject is necessary which brings you beyond the facts and closer to the truth. In the end, the goal remains to provide our readership with a deeper sense of the story that may entail a certain level of subjectivity brought on by the proximity to the subject.”
Said Soper: “We are a weekly updated blogazine with inside-out reportage, interviews, images, videos and everything else we can frame into it that is provocative, smart, entertaining and takes on life here from the Korean Peninsula.”
Feb 09
By Earnest Lee
Have you ever thought about how weird life can get? Hoping from one culture to another as we have you get a chance to see what useful fictions people live by. At the forefront of sexual politics many have called dogma surrounding marriage and monogamy the biggest illusion and our most cherished useful fiction. What people do at all costs to keep a failing marriage together is really beyond me but sometimes, every once in a while we get a glimpse. Coming to grace us here in Seoul is White Box Theater’s production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”. This amazing modern classic broke ground in 1962 artistically ushering the death of the bubble gum 50’s and the cursing honesty of modern theater and cinema. It won its author Edward Albee the Tony and the New York Drama Critics Award for best play and to top it off, it basically won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama–but due to objections to the play’s use of profanity and sexual themes, the board decided not to give out a Pulitzer in Drama that year. That’s how powerful an impact this work had and has today. I got a chance to see a preview run of the show and talk to director Quinn Olbrich about the production.
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