art and subjectivity

I finally went back to Insa-dong Monday evening and met with Mr. Shin, the friendly, bearded, septuagenarian artist who does the great calligraphy. As I promised him, I brought along my collection of artwork for him to appraise and critique. A surprise was in store for me, though: his chair was occupied by a "guest artist" while Mr. Shin stood to the side. The guy turned out to be an expert in Dalma-daesa paintings, and he and Mr. Shin were both eager to look at what I'd done.

I have to laugh: neither guy-- and both are pretty old and Old School-- was all that impressed with the abstract calligraphy. This was glanced at and then resolutely ignored for the rest of my time with them. Not a single remark was made about it. I was reminded of a passage in Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk, in which he visits an exhibition of Chinese calligraphy by an "innovative" Western artist. Along with him is a traditional Chinese calligrapher (NB: Salzman's narrative takes place in China-- I recommend the book, and the semi-fictionalized movie based on it, in which both Salzman and his wushu master, Pan Qingfu, play themselves). The calligrapher grimaces at the Westerner's very nontraditional calligraphy, shakes his head, and says, "This is so-called freedom."

There are reasons to smile and reasons to take this seriously, because we're talking about values. The old guys looking at my artwork are veterans and teachers, with years of experience behind them. They're also traditional Asians who feel you stand before you fly. Abstraction (abstract art is ch'usang yaesul in Korean), to their way of thinking, happens only after you've mastered the basics, which I obviously haven't: I began this whole enterprise around my birthday at the end of August, and have been learning as I go, without any formal training.

It was when I unrolled my "large" artwork, the Dalma-daesa pics and the Bul Shim/Buddha Mind calligraphy, that the old guys became more animated.

And the critiques rolled in.

"His expression's too scary looking! He looks like he's ready to kill somebody!"

[NB: He is the legendary inventor of kung fu, and his intense stare was supposed to be able to burn through walls. Plus, I've seen plenty of ferocious Bodhidharmas, including the one right there on Insa-dong's main street who's screaming.]

"His earlobe's not long enough!"

"His eyebrows should droop, not flare upward!"

"You're not writing the bul shim right!"

"Your strokes are too bold-- they need to be lighter!"

"Less black-- put in some gray! Subtle and smooth!"

[NB: You'll recall I made a deliberate decision to follow the bold-style school of thought on this, avoiding wispiness and subtlety. The best examples of this style can be found at a shop very close to Chogye-sa that features a particular artist who specializes in a very strongly-drawn, wisp-free Dalma-daesa.]

In the end, I think I got a "B." Despite their many and valuable critiques, they liked my work overall and praised it. They made three pieces for me to take home and study-- it was like getting $60 worth of artwork for free, an enormous privilege. One piece was a Dalma-daesa done by the guest artist (whose name I never learned). The next was "Bul Shim" by Mr. Shin. And the final piece was a gorgeous rainbow-style "Bul Shim" which I'll be putting on my wall to admire, but probably won't be learning from. The rainbow-style artwork is a few orders of magnitude beyond my current abilities, but I'd love to learn how to do it. Mr. Shim says, "If you learn this style, you can earn tons in America." At one point, he says he was earning $800 a day in Hawaii.

I can't say I was too hurt by their critiques. I have a decent idea of what I'm doing, and will probably continue to make Dalma-daesa pieces my way, but will also be making pieces in the style they suggest. One point I concede entirely is in how to write the shim (mind) character-- I'll be making an effort to write it the way they suggest, even on Kevin-style artwork, because my own intuition was that something was missing in the "oomph" of that character. When Mr. Shin showed me his way of doing it, something clicked. Both artists took great pains to explain the significance of writing shim correctly, and their tag-team earnestness was convincing.

On the other hand, I'm not inclined to listen to their advice about the bul (Buddha) character, because, as I showed you all before, other artists write it the way I do. The "radical" (root) on the left side of the bul character is in, the character for "person." Mr. Shin and Friend insist that it should be written more like the "print" version, in which the second stroke of in is absolutely vertical. Partly, this is because they feel I need to master the "basic" way of writing it, but I think they're also revealing an artistic bias. I suppose that, for them, bul looks "right" only when written a certain way. I certainly don't begrudge them that point of view.

Let's move the discussion a little bit deeper and talk a bit more explicitly about values in this kind of situation. A student with more than one teacher in the same subject is usually forced to make a certain type of choice, and it's not always pleasant: do I follow one teacher's advice over another's? Do I meld the two? How much of myself do I inject into this process?

My brother Sean knows this well. Sean's a cello player, and he's had many, many cello teachers-- often at the same time-- all of whom have different attitudes, teaching styles, and philosophies of performance. Sean knows that, as you learn, you inevitably receive contradictory advice, so it's incumbent on you to figure your own way through it. What results is a style that's a reflection of those who taught you, but simultaneously something that's all yours.

Zen literature has stories about students who study for years under one master, then move to another temple where the new master tells them flatly that everything they learned was garbage-- learn again! Once a student is aware that this is how things work, however, he's one step closer to realizing that, in the game of life, apparently contradictory statements aren't always as contradictory as they appear. In Sean's case, there was a period in which, after years of tutelage by an Armenian instructor, Sean was tutored by an American cellist who plays for the National Symphony in DC. The American's style and attitude were completely opposed to the Armenian teacher's; Sean went through some frustrating periods, and he also had moments when he favored one teacher's method over the other. When Sean played in front of his Armenian teacher after a year at the Cleveland Institute of Music (where his mentor was also an American), his teacher was disappointed. It seemed as if Sean had ignored everything he'd tried to teach (Sean, if you're reading this, I'm trying to squeeze years of maturation into a time-lapse chronology, so apologies for oversimplifying). But by the time Sean finished his undergrad career, his old tutor's comments had become quite positive. Artistic maturation isn't easily described by phrasal verbs like "growing apart," "growing away from," or "moving beyond." Whatever's happening, it's something else, and I don't think "away" and "beyond" quite fit as descriptors of this kind of progress.

I can borrow from Sean's learning experience and steal from my own academic knowledge of Zen to anticipate how it's going to go for me and my budding career as a brush artist (if I may be so pretentious as to call myself that). Through it all, it helps to have some backbone, some self-confidence, a sense of what works and what doesn't. You won't always please your teachers, but if your practice is earnest, that sincerity will be perceptible to those with eyes to see and hears to hear.

So now it's time to go home and stick these great gifts on my wall, along with my two previous acquisitions (the Dalma-daesa pieces I've talked about before), to be attentive to external reality-- very important if you're trying to be mindful-- but also to attend to internal reality, the workings of the heart.

The character for "mindfulness," pronounced nyeom or yeom in Korean (rhyming with "yum"), is composed of two simpler characters stacked one atop the other. The top character is geum, which means "now," and is a bound particle in the Sino-Korean word jigeum, meaning "now." The bottom character is none other than shim, "mind." So we're talking about now-mind. Or, since shim can also mean "heart," perhaps what an artist-- or anyone else-- needs to live deeply is heartfulness.
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I almost did it

I've been toying with the idea of adding the dreaded "comments" feature to my blog, something even more direct than Vile Vituperation or email. I installed the HTML, looked at the WYSIWYG preview, and thought: "....Nah."

Then I hit "cancel." Sorry, folks.
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testes: a remembrance

I still remember with fondness my former middle-school student from the mid-90s, Nara Kim, to whom I'd given the assignment of writing a list of questions to a hypothetical American student. One of the questions she wrote was (I think) supposed to be about cafeteria food. It should have read, "Does the food taste good?", but instead she wrote:

"Does the food have good testes?"

I started cackling and she demanded to know why. I pointed at "testes" and she asked what testes were. I said I couldn't tell her. Undeterred, she pulled out her electronic English-Korean/Korean-English dictionary and looked "testes" up. She saw the Korean definition and frowned.

"What's that?" she asked.
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le parcours

More evidence of the hard-wired nature of sexuality.

One reason why I sympathize with Blair: the poor guy's taken principled stands under a lot of pressure, and it's affecting his health.

Also in London: magician David Blaine thinks outside of the box.

Dan Darling of Regnum Crucis has some great analysis of Osama Bin Laden's rants to the American people and to the Muslim world, here and here.

Merde in France pisses warmly (if briefly) on Europe's economic fortunes.

Andrew Sullivan (I): Great article about "dream tickets" in the presidential race.

Andrew Sullivan (II): His personal crisis of faith, which is in my opinion a microcosm of a much larger thing happening between the Roman Church and American culture.

Satan's Anus hisses about media coverage in Iraq.

I noted this in the comments section of one of the Marmot's blogposts, but Anticipatory Retaliation lays it out nicely:

...creating linkage between North Korea non-aggression and Iraq peacekeeping, in light of the recent UN resolution, does create the awkward situation where the US is supporting a UN-backed peacekeeping force in South Korea while the South Koreans refuse to assist in a UN-backed peacekeeping operation in Iraq.

I think this is going to be very weird, and don't expect good results. Scroll one post down, and AR provides a very scatological post. Well, not as graphic as Hominid-style shittin' it old-school, but still pleasingly pungent.

Gweilo Diaries finally provides a girlie pic I truly enjoy.

Weblog@Oranckay has been following the Noh Mu Hyon flap and commenting on Noh's rocky relationship with the conservative Korean press. A recent post says:

I truly believe that the reason Roh's ratings have been so low is because those who have always hated him always have and always will (did I mention that Roh won a defamation case against the Chosun in 1991?), and those who have always supported him are angry that he's not handing them the whole country to do with it as they please. That includes the more spoiled of unions, the ones working for big concerns that exploit smaller interests with smaller unions, and others.

So, his ratings are not low because he has failed to show leadership, but because he has demonstrated leadership in making highly unpopular choices.

I don't see things this way, however. When I look at Noh, I see an idealistic president who's in over his head, who's spinelessly backtracked on stupid campaign promises (parity with the US, anyone?) in the face of realities he should have known existed, and who's going to whine "I feel my pain" any moment now. While I've drawn parallels between Noh and Clinton before, laurels go to Clinton for being far more adept at triangulation, and in that sense, a far superior politician to Noh. A call for a referendum/confidence vote smacks more of desperation than anything else. Noh is more reactive than proactive, all things considered.

I do, however, think that if a "recall" process were started here, it would be a mistake.

Chinabloggers are all over the issue of Chinese selfishness. Try here and here and here.

Old news at this point, but let's note that Mother Teresa has been beatified. Doesn't make her corpse any tastier when I chew on her humerus, but hey-- there are treasures stored up for her in heaven. You go, girl!

Glenn makes me envious.

Cobb on the Catholic problem.

Annika's familial spat may have ruined her mother's birthday. As commenters to her post said: I've been there & know the feeling. It'll pass. Just remember to keep communicating. Love conquers all, at least temporarily.

You've probably seen it elsewhere, but e-folks are commenting about Jessica's Well, wherein the discovery is made of a 1946 Life Magazine piece that shortsightedly bemoans the immediate results of World War 2. I link you to Den Beste on this one.

In a more recent post, Den Beste argues that certain anti-American rabble rousers in Iraq are not being hunted down and repressed because, well, we want Iraqis to have a taste of what free speech actually means. As he puts it:

Tolerating extremists like Al-Sadr is part of our long game of proving our commitment to free speech for Iraqis. We said we wanted Iraqis to be free, and part of that is toleration of dissent. When we ignore even extremists such as Al-Sadr, it's part of the process of proving that our word is good.

Al-Sadr and others like him are the canary in the free speech coal mine. As long as someone like Al-Sadr is tolerated, and permitted to spout his poison unmolested, others will feel secure.

Part of why we encourage public dissent is to encourage public support. Under Saddam, anyone could proclaim their support, but no one else would believe them even if it was true. When dissent is suppressed, support has no credibility. It is only when dissent is tolerated that one can publicly support the government and be believed.

The Iraqi people were not able to free themselves without outside help. Revolution was impossible, as they proved in 1991. It took outside force remove Saddam, which we just supplied. Too late, perhaps; I am ashamed that we did not actively support the 1991 revolution. But it's better late than never.

We have given the people of Iraq the opportunity to be free, but they must seize it and they must hold onto it. We are giving them a chance for freedom, but only they can keep their freedom.

And for my money, this is the most important point:

Instead of asking why the Americans don't do something about Al-Sadr, we need Iraqis to start thinking, "What are WE going to do about him?" But they also need to learn what kinds of things they should do, for if they deal with him and others like him the wrong way, it will destroy their liberty just as surely as he wants to destroy it.

Whenever Den Beste offers up the "real" reasons why our current government does what it does in Iraq, I usually leave with a funny suspicion that he's thought the matter through more deeply than the Bush Administration itself has. I find Den Beste's explanations plausible, but it's telling that Den Beste rarely, if ever, links directly to Admin sources to support how he derived his rationale. I get this same feeling from Andrew Sullivan on occasion. One of the major strategic aspects that still don't add up in my mind is how to reconcile nation-building with a flypaper strategy. As I've remarked before, I fail to see how it's possible to build while inviting hostile elements to tear down what's being built. What's the rationale behind the rationales?

In a disappointing move, the Bush Administration says it would consider a written guarantee to NK if NK made certain concessions. More reassuringly, however:

Bush said he would sign a security declaration if it were a joint agreement with the four other countries participating in the talks with North Korea -- China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. A senior administration official said Bush had ruled out a bilateral agreement on the principle that if North Korea violated a multiparty pact, "they would not only be dismissive of the United States, but they would also be dismissive of the other parties that participated in the assurance."

Verifiability is the watchword. In a sense, Bush's acceptance of the possibility of a written guarantee isn't the acceptance of anything. The conditions on which such a guarantee are predicated are-- as we all know because NK shouts it all the damn time-- unacceptable to the Dear Beaver. Knowing this, Bush can make "written guarantee" rhetoric with a smirk. So just as it's not a good idea to place too much weight on Pyongyang's bluster, Pyongyang needs to realize that it's probably not a good idea to place too much weight on Bush's rhetoric. Good. Good for Bush.

Some pundits feel that the US should be dealing with NK bilaterally, as a way to have more control over the terms of the discussions and to avoid treaties (or other documents) that are the inevitable watered-down result of design-by-committee. That's a good point. I think, though, that these pundits are forgetting the primary reason we're insisting on a multilateral approach here: the diffusion of responsibility also means diffusion of blame when things go wrong. Both China and North Korea, for their own reasons, are acutely aware of this. It's why NK has been relentlessly focused on the US in its propaganda and diplomacy, and it's why China is visibly uncomfortable about its current important role in the nuke problem.

Here's something disturbing:

With little notice or meaningful oversight, the Internet has become a pipeline for narcotics and other deadly drugs. Customers can pick from a vast array of painkillers, antidepressants, stimulants and steroids with few controls and virtually no medical monitoring.

And:

The online merchants now feed a sprawling shadow market for prescription drugs, frustrating medical leaders alarmed by the threat to public health and investigators hard-pressed to keep up with nimble Web sites that can open and close at a moment's notice.

"It's like rabbits," said Wayne A. Michaels, a senior investigator for the Drug Enforcement Administration. "Every day, there are more of them. They're up, they're down, they're foreign, they're domestic."

The agency recently created a six-person task force solely to track the online trade in narcotics. But officials acknowledged the effort is a form of "triage" amid an escalating crisis. "We're afraid it's going to overwhelm us, once we've identified all these sites," said Elizabeth A. Willis, chief of the DEA's drug operations section.

The multimillion-dollar industry has appeared overnight, pumping millions of pills into some of America's smallest and most economically distressed communities.

Time to rethink the war on drugs?

Sigh... North Korea once again farts. Wank, wank, wank... CNN reports it this way:

Monday's test over the Sea of Japan is seen as part of North Korea's annual military exercises, a spokesman for South Korea's Joint Chief of Staff told news agencies.

While many Koreans are against sending troops to Iraq, some folks here are sporting hard-ons.

Korea Herald on troop dispatch, here.

Dong-A Ilbo comments that troop dispatch size would be around 6,000 to 10,000.

Something for all Koreans to be proud of.

A JoongAng Ilbo editorial that explores the power of Hollywood and concludes with a muddled mixture of awe and fear and resentment:

The power of the American movie as symbolized by Hollywood is perhaps the natural result of the cultural diversity of the United States as a nation of immigrants and its openness.

Its ideology is spread through the world by Hollywood movies, although moviegoers may scarcely realize the underlying tone.

There may be no more effective tool for ruling when those being ruled do not awake to the reality.

I suspect the author's a fan of American Marxist academe. America is, among other things, an "empire of the mind," as Bill Whittle argued.

In praise of game geekery. Why? Because it's news when a female gamer isolates herself from her friends for six months in order to become the best goddamn Starcraft player in cyberspace. If this article doesn't strike you as a little whacked, let me whack you.

Damn. NK seems to be researching how the Vietnamese economy works. I hope they factor Western investment and the gradual opening of markets into the equation if they plan on adopting the Vietnamese model.

QUESTION TO KOREABLOGGERS: Yesterday (19 Oct), I saw an interview on the online Chosun Ilbo titled "Iraq is No Vietnam, Retired Commander Says." Today, I searched the archives because I wanted to link to the article. I found the link, but it's either bad or stale-- it leads to a totally different article. Even stranger: when I use the Chosun Ilbo search engine to search the archives through keywords like "Vietnam" and "Iraq" and "colonel" (the interviewee is a retired colonel who advocates sending a large number of troops to Iraq), the article doesn't appear at all. Am I searching incorrectly? Was the article perhaps removed for some odd reason (cue sinister music)? What's up? And if you're a Korean-literate Koreablogger, do you see a link to the interview on the Korean-language site? If you do, please pass that link to me and I'll struggle through the article as best I can. I read parts of it in English yesterday and deemed it link-worthy, but didn't get around to linking until this evening.

So we end on a "Hmmm" this evening.
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public kimchi fart

I'm stealing this from myself. It's something I wrote to my brother David about a recent incident.

I was over at Yongpoong Bookstore the other day, standing in the Religion section,
reading a recently-published book by Thich Nhat Hanh when I heard a loud, LONG
fart. I looked up, and some guy standing about ten feet away was browsing some
books, and it was obvious he was the one who'd farted. What made this strange is
that he basically did it out in the open, by the main aisle where all the pedestrian
traffic is. I was off to the side, hidden by bookshelves. My location would have
been better for any potential farts, so I had to admire the guy's brazenness. He
was about twenty feet away from one of the main cash registers. I can only wonder
what the girls working there thought.
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Huimang Shijang: Lessons Learned

Before plunging into the thick of things, some quick side notes:

Know this: I AM A PROPHET.

Back in high school, I wrote a poem (which has since been included in Scary Spasms in Hairy Chasms) about "my purple frog." Well... here he is.

Fear me and my prestidigitational acumen!

A North Korea note: Bush rules out a formal nonaggression treaty with NK. Other, less formal, statements may be possible, but the legally binding treaty NK has been demanding is not an option. I don't think this really comes as a surprise to anyone; I think the Bush administration, despite some internal discord, has been leaning heavily in this direction the whole time, something epitomized by Bush's long-ago profession of loathing for the Dear Wiener.

Personally, I'm against any sort of concession or written reassurance to NK. I don't see what purpose it would serve when NK has repeatedly shown its disdain for promises and pacts, written or otherwise. I also admit to a certain amount of glee in imagining NK's discomfiture in dealing with a possibly-irrational, possibly-homicidal, possibly-stupid US president, and I chuckle when I think about their fear of four more years of this guy. Bloggers like Andrew Sullivan drew the Reagan parallel long ago: the Soviets weren't sure what to make of the old nutcase in the Oval Office, and one major side effect was the overspending that sent the Soviet economy over the edge and secured Reagan a more or less positive place in the history books. NK finds itself in a similar position with Bush, and it's moot as to whether Bush actually is stupid or crazy or murderous. Pray for a disastrous NK overreaction sometime in the near future (I mean something leading to internal collapse, not to a sudden push across the DMZ, obviously).

[NB: I'm aware that other Reagan-Dubya parallels are faulty. I'm restricting my comments to this particular parallel, which I think contains some substance.]

HUIMANG SHIJANG

My friend Solie Choi has moved way outside the city, so it was kind of a pain for her to come today. She did so without a single grumble, despite having had to visit the hospital yesterday to treat some mysterious complaint. The poor girl is quite thin, didn't bring along a jacket, and was freezing by evening. And while we did manage to sell a couple items, I felt awfully guilty about what she went through. To top it off, she refused to accept any commission for her great help today, and then she treated me to dinner before we went our separate ways.

Our earnings totalled less than $20, but that's more than the ZILCH I earned last week. And I was lucky: you normally pay a W10,000 fee each time you set up shop at the market, but they waived my fee because we were rained out last week. Not willing to look a gift horse in the mouth, I didn't ask whether others also had their fee waived.

Solie's friend (I don't know her name) came by with her husband early in the afternoon. They bought some of my abstract calligraphy. Charles (cf. previous post) came by and bought a mid-sized Bodhidharma for a friend. And a guy who called himself "Mr. Song" came by and asked for two copies of a caricatured self-portrait I'd done in a moment of randomness (and with no real intention of selling).

Lessons learned:

1. The Huimang Shijang (Hope Market), on a good day, is crowded with young people. They're mostly young women, and mostly interested in hats, scarves, and other frills you put on your body, including jewelry. Practical items, like wallets and tee shirts, also seem to sell well. Guess what this means for folks like me, who are trying to keep some aspect of traditional Korean culture alive!

2. Having a friend along is indeed a good idea. The time passes more quickly, and if your friend is Korean, it certainly makes interaction with the customers easier. In contrast with last week, people actually stopped to talk at length. They'd start with Solie, then I'd break into the conversation (partly to indicate I understood what they were saying; partly because I don't want to be ignored at my own stall). Unfortunately, this didn't result in many sales, but it did provide some amusing moments: one woman came by with her two tiny daughters, neither of whom could have been older than five, and I let the older daughter write her own name with one of my brushes.

3. Calligraphic ink dries faster in the open air. This is great news for freshly done artwork, but it sucks major ass for your brushes, which stiffen up too quickly and often. My brushes were positively chunky by 6:30PM.

4. Diversify, diversify, diversify. As Solie herself predicted a few days before we met at the Shijang, people don't necessarily want to buy the expensive stuff, and little things sell better. Everything sold today was small-scale. I'd made it all over the past week, so I'd have small items to display along with the larger artwork. One couple said they would "think about" buying a larger piece. Maybe I'll see them next week. Mr. Song, the guy who bought two of my caricatured self-portraits (one of which he asked me to draw directly into his journal), said in a serious tone, "You better change your business model." Yes: I get the distinct feeling that young folks shopping at the Huimang Shijang don't really relate to old time Zen art, and they probably don't want to have their own culture sold back to them, even if it does represent a foreigner's reimagining of it. The youth probably want to see foreign art from a foreign artist. It was telling that the more traditional artwork was bought by (1) Solie's friends-- probably as a favor-- and (2) an American. I heard a lot of Koreans walk by my stall and say, "Oh, that's Dalma!" ("Dalma nae!") This led to precisely zero purchases. So next week I'll arrive with an armful of stuff the foreigners'll probably hate, but the Koreans might be motivated to buy. This may mean putting aside the brushes and going back to what I do best: cartooning. I'm thinking that scenes from my upcoming book, The Sanshin's Tiger, are in order.

5. You should do your artwork early in the week so that the red ink of your dojang has a chance to dry. I was up until 5:30AM doing calligraphy and making pics, then I slept until 8:30AM and packed like a madman. A constant worry was smudging: when you pack not-quite-dried artwork into the tight space of a suitcase, there's a nasty potential for ruined artwork.

6. Have a method. Today was my first "real" day at the market, and if it hadn't been for Solie's help and suggestions, I'd have wasted most of my time. She filled in for the half of my brain that was missing. I think I'll have a better act next week. Meantime, I'm taking an American friend's suggestion and snooping around Insa-dong on Monday to see about selling the brush art and calligraphy. Insa-dong sees a lot of foreigners, and shops are brimming with the kind of art I've been doing. If I can finagle a spot next to the multitalented septuagenarian Mr. Shin during the week, that might be shweet. I'd probably have to reduce prices on some items, though. Mr. Shin can churn out major art in less than two minutes, and he doesn't charge much for it. I'd look pretty arrogant charging more for rougher work while sitting next to him.

Quite a few Koreans, in talking with Solie and assuming I didn't understand them, asked her rather bluntly what the heck a foreigner was doing practicing calligraphy, learning hanja, and drawing Dalma-daesa. The frequency with which this question arose was a bit annoying, but not surprising. A blinkered cultural perspective is de rigueur in Korea. On a more positive note, none of my possessions got shat on by birds this time. I mentioned this to Solie. She replied that she and a friend of hers got massively shat on by a flock of seagulls in Australia. A passing Aussie joked that they'd been blessed-- just as we'd joke in America. Solie hinted that two Korean women covered in birdshit just don't see matters the same way.

The evening ended with a lot of shivering. Neither of us had brought sweaters or jackets, but I at least had my warm layer of blubber to keep my core temperature from dropping. The fat wasn't any help with my fingers; I suppose this means I'll have to gain another couple hundred pounds to ensure my hands stay nice and warm in low temps. Charles, who bought the mid-size Dalma-daesa, hails from Wisconsin, so if he's reading this he probably thinks I'm a big wuss from the warmer mid-Atlantic, which would be correct.

Just before we left, some idiots decided to light a slew of bottle rockets and other wild sparklers. These have recently become rather popular; I hear them going off more and more often in my neighborhood at night. Two rockets flew right at Solie but flared out before they did anything major. Yeesh.

But an interesting time was had by all, and I ended up with a little extra cash. We'll see how the Insa-dong errand goes tomorrow, and I'll give the Huimang Shijang another try next week, weather permitting.

In the name of Allah, the compassionate and merciful (lest we forget the two most ignored qualities of Allah).
_

...and then: informational windfall

This comes from Charles, a.k.a "The KimcheeGI" (whom I met today at the Huimang Shijang, so a shout-out to C is in order, as well as sincere thanks for his purchase of my humble wares). The Marmot will be interested to know that Charles is thinking of doing grad work at GU SFS. You bastards snatched another one who'd've done just fine in LingLang. Sorry, but Hoya solidarity ends at the admissions desk when you goddamn SFSers steal another soul from the pool of potential LingLangers.

Charlie's email contains NK-related info. The email says in part:

I read with interest your posts on North Korea's famine, and have a few more links if you'd like to check them out:

Testimony of Andrew S. Natsios, Administrator, USAID Before the Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs Committee on Foreign Relations U.S. Senate
June 5, 2003: http://www.usaid.gov/press/speeches/2003/ty030605.html

He's author of the book The Great North Korean Famine:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1929223331/ref=ase_booksiloved99-20/002-0844716-1358421?v=glance&s=books

I read Natsios for a class on North Korean Socialist Development, and he is pretty fair considering the possibility of becoming emotionally attached to this issue. Currently administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Natsios has studied famines for more than a decade. He is neither an American Policy apologist nor a North Korean apologist.

Also, UNICEF opened a North Korean website http://www.unicef.org/dprk/ ...it has some spiffy Powerpoint presentations in the Situation webpage about nutrition assessment in the north, and comes to an amazing conclusion: North Korean kids are malnourished...

Accepted with thanks. Hope your friend enjoys the gift. If you need to know where to go to get that made into a scroll for cheap, I know a place in Insa-dong: call 733-5568. You'll have to deal with them in Korean, but since I now know you already speak super Korean, this won't be an issue.

Another email from Guyjean:

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/03spring/hodge.pdf

The KPA of 2003 is an imposing and formidable force of 1.17 million active
personnel with a reserve force of over 5 million, making it the fifth largest
military force in the world.24 The ground forces are organized into eight infantry
corps, four mechanized corps, an armor corps, and two artillery corps. The KPA
air force consists of 92,000 personnel, and is equipped with some 730 mostly
older combat aircraft and 300 helicopters. The 46,000-man KPA navy is primarily
a coastal force.25 Additionally, the KPA maintains the largest special operations
force (SOF) in the world, consisting of approximately 100,000 highly trained, totally
dedicated soldiers.26 A long history of bloody incursions into South Korea underscores
the offensive mission of this force.


http://www.1upinfo.com/country-guide-study/north-korea/north-korea151.html
page down to see the important Table of Contents

NORK cyberhackers?
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,59043,00.html

The Library of Congress study on NK
http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/kptoc.html

Treat as highly suspect
http://www.rense.com/general37/nkorr.htm
"In addition, the US has 70 KH-11 spy satellites hovering over North Korea."
We most certainly do not have 70 KH-11's hovering over NK.

A fun interview
http://www.rense.com/general39/nkkk.htm

2 years old but kinda interesting
http://www.checkpoint-online.ch/CheckPoint/J2/J2-0001-NorthKoreaDeadlier.html

I just luv this photo
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark.htm

:-))
http://www.theonion.com/onion3905/north_korea.html

some fairly recent info on food aid
http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf/0/a28cf19153975fe349256ccc0017d604?OpenDocument

self-explanatory
http://www.kimsoft.com/dprk.htm

some very interesting stats
http://www.countries.com/countries/north_korea/


http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rn/2002-03/03rn29.pdf

interesting list of articles
http://www.crisispapers.org/topics/north-korea.htm

good stuff
http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f2d1.html

worth a quick read-- from the CBC
http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/correspondents/stpierre_nkorea.html

PBS
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/northkorea/facts.html

[from a different email]

some good links here on food aid.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=north+korea+food+aid
Guyjean

Damn.

It's going to take a while, Charles and Guyjean, for me to sift through all this, but it's a treasure and I thank you both.
_

Hongik University Hope Market (Huimang Shijang): Come Join the Madness

WHITE FOLKS, OTHER YANG-NOM AND ASSORTED WAEGUK-IN:

If you happen to be in Seoul and want to drop by my humble stall, my fat, off-white ass will be parked at the Hope Market (Huimang Shijang) near Hongik University this Sunday, from noon to about 6PM, weather permitting. And while you're there, buy something. From me. There'll be abstract calligraphy, normal calligraphy, and enough Bodhidharma pics to make you wonder whether I'm obsessing.

The market shouldn't be too hard to find if you ask around. Take the subway to Hongdae Ipgu Station, and go out exit number 6. Walk to the big intersection (the one with traffic lights and a big-ass sign with an arrow pointing in the direction of Hongdae), and turn left. The street will start to go uphill. A little before you reach the end, you'll see a side street that splits diagonally off the street you're on. Walk up that and you'll see the Hope Market on your left. Be sure to ask as you walk, just to be sure you're on the right track.

By the way, I drew a naked picture of a woman I knew-- my lovely half-Turkish drama class partner from 2000. No, I never actually saw her naked, but one time she was wearing a white summer dress with light flower prints and she stood in front of a sun-filled window. For one glorious backlit moment I had a glimpse of Shangri-la. The dress disappeared and all that remained was a breathtaking rhapsody of firm, delicious curves. The sketch doesn't do her justice, but with Conrad over at Gweilo Diaries posting his favorite breast-enhanced chicks, and now Mike at Seeing Eye Blog doing his Half-Korean of the Day, I felt this blog needed a shot of estrogen. Picture forthcoming. I'll have to persuade my buddy Tom to scan it, because I'll be damned if I'm scanning this at a PC-bahng.

In the meantime... perhaps I'll see you at the market. Peef, yo.

UPDATE: A note of thanks to the Minister of Agriculture for his support re: my Sermon on the Mount (cf. Vomit Vile Vituperation, sidebar link). I'm glad the first reaction to that post wasn't hate mail, but I expect some dim asswipe will be along directly to try and teach me the error of my ways.
_

a Sermon on the Mount for hateful Christians and other stupid dogmatists

With thanks to the Air Marshal, who linked me to a recent article about Matthew Shepard, the boy who was brutally murdered in 1998 for being gay. From the article:

(Casper, Wyoming) Anti-gay preacher Fred Phelps has announced intentions to erect a monument to Matthew Shepard the gay college student brutally murdered five years ago near Laramie.

But, the monument will be no memorial. Phelps says the monument would be 5 to 6 feet tall and made of marble or granite. It would bear a bronze plaque bearing the image of Shepard and have an inscription reading "MATTHEW SHEPARD, Entered Hell October 12, 1998, in Defiance of God's Warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22."

The monument would be erected in downtown Casper, Shepard's home town.

Phelps has sent details of the monument to the city of Casper city council and there may be nothing the city can do to prevent it.

Phelps said he intends to put up the monument in City Park, already the location of a controversial statue of the Ten Commandments.

How did Phelps' congregation behave during Shepard's funeral? A little recap:

During Shepard's funeral members of Phelps' Westoboro Baptist Church demonstrated in front of the chapel.

And maybe it's a good idea to remember how Matthew died:

Matthew had been lured from a campus bar shortly after midnight on October 7 by two men who told him they were gay. He was driven to a remote area near the Sherman Hills neighbourhood east of Laramie, tied to a split-rail fence, tortured, beaten and pistol-whipped by his attackers, while he begged for his life; he was then left for dead in near freezing temperatures. A cyclist who found him on Snowy Mountain View Road at 6:22 pm, some 18 hours after the attack, at first mistook him for a scarecrow. He was unconscious and suffering from hypothermia. His face was caked with blood, except where it had been partially washed clean by tears.

Matthew died at 12:53 am on Monday 12th October 1998, at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his family at his bedside. Hospital officials said Matthew had a fracture from behind his head to just in front of his right ear and a massive brain stem injury which affected his vital signs, including his heart beat, body temperature and other involuntary functions. There were also approximately a dozen small lacerations around his head, face and neck. He was so badly injured in the attack that doctors were unable to operate. He never regained consciousness after being found, and remained on full life support.

While Matthew lay dying in hospital, just a few miles away, a group of students from Colorado State University thought it would be funny to ride atop a homecoming float that featured a scarecrow figure designed to resemble Matthew's battered body. The figure was wearing a sign that said "I'm gay." An obscene message was painted across the back of the scarecrow's shirt. The students didn't mean to be insensitive. It was supposed to be a joke. They were just ordinary, average guys, having a bit of fun.

We're a wonderful species sometimes, aren't we.

So now Pastor Phelps wants to build a monument. There's already a Phelps-friendly website preaching the gospel as Phelps and his crew perceive it, right here. It's called GodHatesFags.com, and like most such hate sites, it's chock-full of scripture.

I've already made clear that I'm not impressed by scriptural arguments, because as Shakespeare noted, even the Devil can quote scripture to his purpose. Scripture is a tool; it can be used well or poorly, for good or ill. Scripture, in and of itself, proves nothing, adds nothing, is nothing, and people who make themselves slaves to scripture are some of the blindest, most pathetic, morally stunted souls out there. When we forget that scripture is the finger pointing to the moon but not the moon itself, we start down the wrong path. Always.

Pastor Phelps is trying to pull off something that needs to be fought-- hard-- by the good people of Casper who can see his efforts for what they are. I hope they stop him from creating this monument to hatred.

But what I really hope is for a chance to spend twenty minutes alone in a room with Pastor Phelps so I can beat some fucking sense into him. Nothing like receiving the dharma through knuckles and feet. And maybe a baseball bat.

To all those idiot fuckwads like Phelps, who dig through scripture to justify their hatred or go cruisin' for a bruisin':

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

"Fucked are the closed of mind and heart, for their nose is always in the goddamn Bible, which I didn't fucking write. Fucked are the blind haters, because they know nothing of true love. Fucked are the gay-bashers, because they're probably closet gays themselves, and don't realize how laughable their self-hatred is. Fucked are those who hunger and thirst for violence, and here's hoping they get what they wish for a hundredfold. Fucked are the merciless, for they will receive no mercy from my pissed-off Jewish ass. Fucked are the evil of heart, for they will see God's middle finger right before it impales them through the crotch. Fucked are the doctrinaire troublemakers, for they will be the aborted children of God. Fuck all you unrighteous motherfuckers who cast aside humility, openness, tolerance, and love the moment you feel the least bit threatened by someone who's different from you! Fuck all you people who didn't get the point I was trying to make about how we should treat the weak, the meek and the powerless! Fuck all you stupid, blind, deaf asswipes who didn't get that my career was a constant mantra-- what matters is not scripture on a scroll but the heart, YOUR HEART, which is the living scripture!"

And Jesus, in a deep fury, lost control. He picked out and levitated all the murderous gay-haters and self-righteous scripture-quoters from the crowd of listeners, flung them into a huge pit off to one side, and called down a ton of molten iron, which poured from the sky and onto the frightened evildoers, separating meat from bone with a great and horrible sizzle.

And there was screaming.

When the final blood vessels had burst, when the final cranium had been reduced to ash, when the final sinner's grotesque throes had ceased, and all that was left were blackened femurs, smoking ribcages, and twisted souls already flying hellward, Jesus surveyed the destruction, fell to his knees, hugged himself, and wept. "Assholes," he choked. "It didn't have to be this way, Father, but what better price for deliberate obtuseness?"

Then he stood. He took a deep breath, blinked away bitter tears, turned to the people who were left, and said:

"Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

And he stepped quietly down from the mountain and passed through the crowd, disappearing before anyone could stop him.

POST SCRIPTUM: It's amazing how fundamentalist scripture-quoters routinely ignore the passages about the literalist Pharisees who dogged Jesus. I don't claim any enlightenment when it comes to my intolerance of people like Pastor Phelps. Of course it doesn't help to fight hate with greater hate, but I'm only human, and I have feelings. Right now I'm pissed. I don't believe in a hell, but if there is one, I'm sure it's reserved for creatures like him. In the meantime, I relish the thought of Phelps meeting a lonely fate on an open road, tied to a fence like a scarecrow with no one to hear his cries. And I hope an angel visits him at his darkest, most despairing moment, and takes a loving, compassionate shit on him.
_

Happy Birthday

I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin in 7th grade, and I remember going to Kevins house around that time for a party. I don't remember the occasion, though I would assume it was a birthday party, so we're probably talking the summer of '82 here. Sean would have been about 3 I guess, but I still remember Sean running around at Kevin's party.

I also remember Sean and his group playing at Maximum Leader's wedding reception. If I recall correctly, there was a tremendous version of (hope I spell it correctly) Adagio for Strings by Dvorak.

Happy 24th Birthday! At 25 you can finally rent cars, and then it's downhill from there.

Sean is 24!!

On October 15, my brother Sean turned 24 years old.

Sean majored in cello performance at the prestigious Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) in the not-so-prestigious city that houses the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (where I got to see the sullied canvas sack that contained John Lennon's bloodied clothes and glasses after he'd been shot).

Sean went on to a Master's program at the also-famous New England Conservatory in Boston. Just as I'm more or less self-taught with Chinese calligraphy, Sean's taught himself to play the piano. He feels he's better at improv on the piano than on the cello; I've asked him to try that with the cello but he always refuses. Bastard.

Sean's flirted with vegetarianism, having been a vegan for-- what-- a year or so? This was a while back. He finally saw the light and went back to meat, but then he got religion again and started the Atkins Diet. The Atkins Diet strikes me as very unsafe, but I can't deny that Sean's become very svelte since he began it. He and I used to look like twins; nowadays, however, I look like Evil Bloated Sean from Alternate Timeline Theta-2. I don't think people have trouble distinguishing us now.

Sean also composes music, as you'd expect from someone who majored in music. One of his pieces, written for a trio to play, was performed by Sean's chamber group, the Babadjanian Trio, at the Kennedy Center's Millennium Theater in Washington, DC. That piece was, in fact, Sean's Opus 1.

It's mainly thanks to Sean that I have some appreciation for classical music, though I also think I grew fond of the music's relaxing properties while I was a French teacher at Bishop O'Connell High School in Arlington, Virginia.

Sean also drives kind of fast, but it's better for him to drive in New York City than for me to do it. I'd go to pieces. Sean's fast driving is balanced by a keen sense of direction-- another faculty I lack. Luckily, in Seoul, all I have to do is familiarize myself with the subway system to get around. Or I can catch a cab, mention the destination, and let the cabbie figure it out (though occasionally you have to watch for the unscrupulous cabbies who deliberately take the long routes to cadge a bigger fare).

Sean's a radical extrovert. Like a lot of lastborns, he also tends to lose stuff. Not that I can criticize, after my recent cell phone scare.

Along with classical, Sean loves Bjork and rap.

Sean was born ten years, one month, and 15 days after yours truly. Mom blames the large age margin between me and my brothers (David is seven years younger than I am) on the pain she experienced in giving birth to me. Heh. A Korean mother's gentle sentiments.

"When you were coming out, Kevin, I screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeamed."

I don't think Mom screamed that much when Sean popped out.

Happy birthday, Mr. McVicker. (He calls me Dr. Bigglesworth.)
_

NK starvation: what the think tanks say (Volume 2)

And so we continue with our exploration of NK issues.

To recap: the two major issues I originally wanted to explore were and are:

1. The NK military is currently starving.

2. "It's all bluster."

The first issue is a subset of the second, so I've been dealing with the starvation issue in a few posts because, well, a soldier who can't eat is a soldier who probably can't fight that well. I decided to parse the issues further, which gave rise to two sets of questions:

SET 1, re: starvation

1. What are the latest figures/expert guesses on NK starvation, in terms of rate and brute numbers? What's the general history of the starvation problem, and what projections, if any, are there about future starvation?

2. Who's currently giving food aid to NK? What percentage of NK's food supply is being domestically produced?

3. Can an overall picture of NK food production, delivery, and consumption be painted? How accurate will this picture be?

4. What measures, if any, are in place to verify where food goes (this question is crucial; if we can't answer it satisfactorily, we can't answer the "are the troops starving?" question satisfactorily, either)? Are military defectors from NK in a position to speak about diverted food?

5. If we get past question #4 and have at least some idea where food is going, how much is being routed to the military? How are the lower-echelon people in NK's government doing?

SET 2, re: "It's all bluster."

1. What would constitute a "clean" or "pyrrhic" victory? [ensuing discussion omitted]

2. What do the experts, military and otherwise, have to say about how a war on the peninsula would go? If you, as a blogger/talking head, think you have an angle the experts don't have (you lone voice in the wilderness, you), what's your angle?

3. What kind of military equipment does NK have in terms of weaponry, transports, etc.? What's the best-guess rundown on the military's strength, overall? How are experts evaluating "strength"?

4. What is the current state of NK troop training? (Many contend it's poor.) How will this be relevant in war?

5. Where are the NK troops positioned?

6. Would China get militarily involved? I found it interesting that some Chinabloggers think China would indeed get involved. I'd love for them to weigh in on this.

7. When all is said and done, what do experts feel would be the effect of a peninsular war on the South Korean population (i.e., numbers killed & in what space of time), infrastructure, economy, political future, etc.? This question is directly relevant to the larger issue of whether SK citizens are justified in fearing a war, and it's also relevant to our judgement that a victory will be clean or pyrrhic. What frustrates me about the SK position is the insistence on the "one people" rhetoric, which on its face is contradicted by fear of NK attack. So perhaps an interesting side issue is: what's going on in the "average" SK citizen's psyche that allows them to reconcile these two apparently contradictory convictions?

We've got a while to go before we're ready to deal with the SET 2 questions.

I began last time with a snippet from a presentation text I found at the American Enterprise Institute's website. The presentation was Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony given by James R. Lilley on March 12 of this year. What I didn't have time to note last time was that Lilley's testimony hints that, yes, the hunger problem is indeed creeping upward in NK society:

Ungrateful as North Korea has been for past aid, this time it is complicated by a starving population, even including cadres.

It's capillary action, like when you dip the corner of a napkin into a glass of water and hold it there: the water spreads slowly upward. Starvation in NK may be doing something like this, too, though I'm pretty sure it'll never reach the topmost levels of government.

Let's move on to Harvard's Asia Pacific Policy Program and see what they have to say, if anything, about NK and starvation and troops.

Sigh... a bunch of links. One of those links, luckily, is to the CIA World Factbook, 2003 version. Here's some interesting info:

North Korea, one of the world's most centrally planned and isolated economies, faces desperate economic conditions. Industrial capital stock is nearly beyond repair as a result of years of underinvestment and spare parts shortages. Industrial and power output have declined in parallel. Despite a good harvest in 2001, the nation faces its ninth year of food shortages because of a lack of arable land; collective farming; weather-related problems, including major drought in 2000; and chronic shortages of fertilizer and fuel. Massive international food aid deliveries have allowed the regime to escape mass starvation since 1995-96, but the population remains vulnerable to prolonged malnutrition and deteriorating living conditions.

A timeline on starvation, then (bear with me; I'm slow on the uptake, and I know most folks are aware of this already, but some aren't, so we're learning together), would begin at about the time of Kim Il Sung's death in 1994 and the "peaceful" transfer of power that followed the Great Leader's entry into the Celestial Sphincter (and probable descent into the Abode of Polyps, where all evildoers go... good North Koreans get pumped by reverse cosmological peristalsis along the Small Intestine of Travail, through the Duodenum of Glory, and into the Stomach of Immaculate Destiny, where they will be digested over a thousand years. No, wait-- that's the Sarlaac from "Return of the Jedi.").

Large-scale military spending eats up resources needed for investment and civilian consumption. Recently, the regime has placed emphasis on earning hard currency, developing information technology, addressing power shortages, and attracting foreign aid, but in no way at the expense of relinquishing central control over key national assets or undergoing widespread market-oriented reforms. In 2002, heightened political tensions with key donor countries and general donor fatigue have held down the flow of desperately needed food aid and threaten fuel aid as well.

The first sentence may be a reference to Kim Jong Il's "army first" policy. Further down, the Factbook entry says NK is currently spending about $5.2 billion on its military yearly, which comes to about 34% of its GDP.

Compare the above to the US's $276 billion expenditure, which accounts for only 3.2% of the US GDP.

Like the fish said in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life": "Kinda' makes ya' think, doesn't it?"

When you follow the Harvard links, you also reach KoreaWeb, which in turn offers a link to Tim Beal's site on North Korea, which has a link titled "Food Supply and Aid." We click it now.

A UN brief from earlier in the year says the following:

United Nations: Child malnutrition falls considerably but gains threatened by lack of support
PYONGYANG / GENEVA, 20 February 2003 - Malnutrition rates among children in the (DPRK) have improved considerably over the past four years, according to a new survey, but the UN agencies that announced the findings today said the gains could be lost if international support for humanitarian assistance to the country continues to slacken.
:
The proportion of children underweight (weight-for-age) has fallen from 61 percent in 1998 to 21 percent in 2002
Wasting, or acute malnutrition (weight-for-height), has fallen from 16 percent to 9 percent
Stunting, or chronic malnutrition (height-for-age), has dropped from 62 percent to 42 percent.
The Government of DPRK attributed the improvement in part to the substantial humanitarian assistance provided by the international community in recent years. The exceptionally high levels of malnutrition recorded in 1998 also reflected the famine conditions that prevailed in the DPRK in the mid 1990s.

I'm not sure why I noted that, except that it was about the children. Makes you want to weep. Yet I'm beginning to think that the least bloody way out of this predicament is the cutting off of all aid, and perhaps the enlisting of other countries and organizations in this freeze-out. I doubt it's feasible, though; there are other aid groups than just the UN. Christians in South Korea, for example, donate millions of dollars in supplies to the North as part of their moral duty. My feelings on this are mixed: how can you seriously ask such groups to stand aside while people starve? Yet I can't help thinking that their efforts need to be stymied where possible, even as the stats about how starvation affects the children depress me.


THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

An October 10, 2003 article by Charles "Jack" Pritchard published in the Financial Times says the following:

In a cash-strapped country that devotes, by some estimates, 34 per cent of its gross domestic product to its military, there is little left for economic development. Yet Mr Kim cannot change course overnight. He needs to be able to convince his power base-- the military-- that the US is no longer a threat that warrants a nuclear programme or such a large expenditure on conventional forces. Make no mistake, Mr Kim is not motivated by a desire to improve his people's standard of living. He simply wants his regime to survive. But whatever the motivation, the US should be encouraging any change that moves North Korea away from military belligerence and towards enhancing citizens' economic well-being.

So we again see the 34% figure. Evidence of an "army first" policy indeed. Can we assume this has implications on where and how food is distributed in NK? I think it's safe to say yes.

I'm out of time for the evening, but let me skip over to Google and do a search on "Kim Jong Il's army first" and "military first" policy.

Here's a NK propaganda website in English that details many of the Dear Leader's recent achievements. It lists the army-first policy very early on. So Kevin learns that, yes, this is indeed a policy.

A Korean website offers this English-language summary of the Songun Jongchi (Military First Politics):

The subject of this article is analysing Sonkun Jongchi {Military-first Politics} in North Korea, in order to find out the features of the party-military relations under Kim Jong Il regime. The Military-first Politics, introduced during the crisis in 1990s, means that the Korean People's Army (KPA), instead of workers and farmers, comes to be a main force of the revolution, and, accordingly, responsible for the development of the country, as well as for the national security. In other words, the KPA holds a higher position than workers and farmers under the Military-first Politics.

And the mysteriously worded final paragraph of that summary:

It would be too much to conclude that the Military-first Politics has brought on a fundamental change in the North Korean political system and the party-military relations, because the new politics encompasses both "change" and "continuity." However, it should not be overlooked that the Military-first Politics, indeed, is now bringing on a significant change in the North Korean political system and the party-military relations, and, moreover, seems to become a powerful driving force for a substantial change sooner or later.

"Driving force for substantial change"? Fascinating, Captain.

I'd like to end by publishing an email I received that offers some links and insights.

Hi,
If you're not familiar with these sites, see:

http://cns.miis.edu/research/korea/index.htm
nothing on food here but some superb articles and some damn good sat photos and maps of where (we think) things are.

worth reading
http://cns.miis.edu/research/korea/450079.pdf

this paper has excellent coverage of NORK
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea.html

this guy really has his finger on the pulse of what's going on over there.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/others/pongyang.html
[Hominid note: This link contains a misspelling, but the link WORKS with the misspelling in place. DO NOT CORRECT.]

FAS is always an interesting read.
http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/dprk/

some notes i took a few months ago...

North Korea

- have announced they intend to test a nuclear weapon. This strongly implies they have more than one. They also said they have the means to deliver them which we interpret as meaning that they have reduced them in size enough to place on ballistic missiles which can hit Japan. They have also stated they may choose to sell nuclear bombs to whomever they wish. We know they have been providing massive nuclear aid to Iran and Pakistan.
- We know where their main nuclear processing plant is but we don't know where the others are. We have evidence that there is at least one other one not located close to the one we know about. The point being - we can't take out their nuclear facilities in one fell swoop.
- NK wants: food aid, monetary aid (billions), two nuclear power plants that we build (so that they can't be used for nuke bombs), and a non-aggression pact that we won't attack them all while they continue to build new nukes.
- NK is a regime that deserves to be changed - and changed by force if need be. They have sold nuclear and ballistic missile technology, they have sold vast quantities of drugs and are massive counterfeiters of US dollars.
- Japan has told the US that if we give the NKs a non aggression pact, Japan will go nuclear. If Japan goes nuclear, so will SK and Taiwan. This will make China verrrrry nervous.
- Increasing the number of countries that have nukes is really REALLY bad.
- We have 37,000 US troops in SK most near the border hence vulnerable to NK artillery.
- Seoul - 10 million people - within artillery range. [Hominid's remark: getting closer to 12 million these days]
- Seoul uses piped natural gas for heating and cooling. A few thousand artillery shells would set the entire city ablaze.
- SK has 18 nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants and artillery shells do not play together well. Massive radiation leaks. Prevailing winds are east so the radiation would fall over Japan.
- We estimate that about 30% of NKs artillery has chemical warheads.
- NK has said it would "never" use nukes on its dear brothers to the south. It doesn't have to as it can 'kill' Seoul with artillery. NK would use a nuke or two against Japan. Japan would then blame the US for the second nuclear attack on its territory.
- In 1994 a US military commander in SK estimated that a war with the North would result in one million deaths (including tens of thousands of Americans) and cost at least $100 billion.

these ought to keep you and your readers busy for a few minutes!
Guyjean

Gaijin?

If anyone else wants to write in with comments or info, feel free. That's it for the evening. I think I'm going to explore Guyjean's/Gaijin's links more thoroughly in the next post before continuing down my list of think tanks. An initial perusal of the links seemed more than promising. Many thanks.
_

North Korea claims that, yes, it has a penis

And it's going to show it to us. To wit:

SEOUL, South Korea Oct. 16 — North Korea said Thursday it would "physically display its nuclear deterrent force," South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.

The remark by an unnamed spokesman of North Korea's Foreign Ministry could be an indication that the communist regime intends to test a nuclear bomb.

"When the time comes, the DPRK will take steps to physically display its nuclear deterrent force," the North Korean spokesman told Pyongyang's state-run news agency KCNA, which was monitored by the South Korean agency.

As I type this, I'm listening to Rage Against the Machine's "Calm Like a Bomb." Interesting way to feel the moment.

"When the time comes"? When's that, fuckers?

For more on the latest ball-waving, go here.

And here.

And here.
_

we interrupt this interruption to bring you TUMORS

I've got new items up at Only the Chewiest Tumors, and they're looking for a home. What's new? you ask.

How about abstract Chinese calligraphy?

Yes, I may be pushing it, getting a little overambitious, especially since I'm still learning the characters. But I thought to myself... why not? The purists won't appreciate what I've done, but if they can get beyond their own classicism, they might actually like what they see.

This time around I scanned the puppies myself. The resolution wasn't that great so I ended up using the Photoshop "blur" and "sharpen" functions at the PC-bahng to tweak the images, which are still a bit blurred.

This first image is a smaller version of the Bodhidharma brush art I've been doing.

Something to note: I've been trying to incorporate some symbolism in the Dalma Daesa art (only recently; not all the artwork is this way). The number of strokes in Bodhidharma's beard is 16, referring to the 16 Nahan (they're the 18 Lohan in China, I think), some of the Buddha's original followers. Dalma's mustache is done in six strokes to symbolize the six years of the Buddha's go haeng sang, that period of his life when he practiced deep austerity. The Buddha claimed he became so emaciated that he was able to place his hand on his stomach and feel his spine.

I'll never know that feeling, thank God.

Dalma's nose is made by four strokes-- the Four Noble Truths. If you add the strokes and dots making up Dalma's eyes and the wrinkle between them, you get eight-- the Eightfold Path (P'al Jeong Do, or "Eight Correct Ways" in Sino-Korean). Dalma's eyebrows total six strokes, representing the Six Perfections (paramitas, the yuk baramil in Sino-Korean).

And the biggest symbol is perhaps too abstract to even notice: Dalma's robe is suggested by two serpentine strokes, and he's got a halo. If you count those as three strokes, and add Dalma's face to get four-- and then LOOK CAREFULLY, you may notice that the gestalt is the character shim, or mind. I admit it's a stretch, but I did do it deliberately.

The next picture is an example of abstract calligraphy. My friend Solie Choi suggested I should make some smaller pieces to complement the bigger ones, so I decided to see what would happen if I played with the characters a bit. I think you experts will have noted that I didn't simply play with them randomly-- there is indeed some method to the madness. Here is "Mu A," or "no self":





If you're a purist, you'll hate it. If you're not, bless you. The next one is "Seong Do," which means "enlightenment" or "attaining the Tao."





Finally, I'm also offering this little statement on nondualism, "Eum Yang Bul I," or "yin and yang are not-two." When you step back from the Great Ultimate symbol, the T'aegeuk, the two swirling elements collapse into one. But that one is a symbol for capital-O "One," also known in religious circles as "one without a second." The nondualistic One.





Please smack me if I sound like I'm a tour guide in an art gallery.

In any case, go give the Tumors a visit. If you feel so inclined, purchase something. I'll get it out to you as quickly as I can, and remember: every work is unique. No prints when it comes to the brush art. I don't skimp.

Oh, by the way, I should note something: there's a good reason to buy a scroll instead of just the artwork. When they make scrolls in Insa-dong (an art district in Seoul, for you newbies), they use a press. I asked. This is important because calligraphy tends to leave the paper (hwa seon ji) somewhat wrinkled as the ink merges with it. This is only natural, but caveat emptor: when you buy "artwork-only" from me, you're getting the art in its most natural, uncivilized state, and that means it'll be slightly wrinkled. Drop some water on a piece of stationery and watch it dry; you'll see what I mean. So unless you can find expert framers and scroll-makers near you who know how to deal with this kind of product, I strongly suggest opting for the completed scroll. (In case you're wondering, I'm not making any money off the extra cost for scrollwork.) The end product will be smooth and flat, like many Korean women's thoracic and gluteal regions.
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emetic interlude, with fighters

Before continuing with the NK posting, I need to highlight something the Air Marshal forwarded my way:

hURL

Enjoy. Don't blame me if you click the link.

I should also note that, around 2:00-2:15PM today, traffic simply stopped. At the beginning of this stopping period, I heard what sounded like air raid sirens and then the noise of fighter jets overhead. Quite cool. I guess this was some huge fire-- uh, defense drill. More on this later as I confirm.
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NK starvation: what the think tanks say (Volume 1)

I write "Volume 1" above because funds are limited, which means my time in the PC-bahng is also limited. So expect more on this soon.

A quick recap of the questions I'm working on re: the starvation issue and how it relates to the NK military:

1. What are the latest figures/expert guesses on NK starvation, in terms of rate and brute numbers? What's the general history of the starvation problem, and what projections, if any, are there about future starvation?

2. Who's currently giving food aid to NK? What percentage of NK's food supply is being domestically produced?

3. Can an overall picture of NK food production, delivery, and consumption be painted? How accurate will this picture be?

4. What measures, if any, are in place to verify where food goes (this question is crucial; if we can't answer it satisfactorily, we can't answer the "are the troops starving?" question satisfactorily, either)? Are military defectors from NK in a position to speak about diverted food?

5. If we get past question #4 and have at least some idea where food is going, how much is being routed to the military? How are the lower-echelon people in NK's government doing?

You may recall a previous post in which I explored this question primarily through the source material I found at the Free North Korea! site (a site I highly recommend). Can we, at this point, answer some of the above questions? Let's give it a shot, based on what little we now know or think we know.

1. What are the latest figures/expert guesses on NK starvation, in terms of rate and brute numbers? What's the general history of the starvation problem, and what projections, if any, are there about future starvation?

No answers yet from my own research. Maybe some tonight and in evenings to come.

2. Who's currently giving food aid to NK? What percentage of NK's food supply is being domestically produced?

Based on what we've found out, it sounds like 4.6 million out of NK's 22 million people are depending on outside food aid, which is ostensibly being directed to those regions that need it most. As a percentage, then, about 21% of the population has been receiving food aid. We think.

3. Can an overall picture of NK food production, delivery, and consumption be painted? How accurate will this picture be?

I phrased this as a yes-no question, so my answer at this point is no. I don't believe an overall picture can be painted based on what I discovered through my limited research. I think a more detailed picture might be available to us through think tank research, and perhaps through whatever UN-related online sources there are. How accurate a picture do I think this will be? Not very accurate-- partly because I'm only an amateur, only a blogger; partly because NK is deliberately obscuring the specifics; partly because wire service reports and defector testimonies are patchy and anecdotal. I don't have much confidence that the think tanks will ultimately provide us a very clear picture, especially as their findings are compared against each other.

4. What measures, if any, are in place to verify where food goes (this question is crucial; if we can't answer it satisfactorily, we can't answer the "are the troops starving?" question satisfactorily, either)? Are military defectors from NK in a position to speak about diverted food?

What measures are in place? At this point, I'd have to say I don't know. With most of the reports emphasizing deep frustration with the food aid workers' inability to verify where the food goes, it may be wise to ask whether there even are any measures. Perhaps the UN and NGOs do have some verification methods established on paper; whether they occur in practice is almost a completely separate issue.

As to the military defectors... I may delve back into Free North Korea! and root around the defectors' testimony there.

5. If we get past question #4 and have at least some idea where food is going, how much is being routed to the military? How are the lower-echelon people in NK's government doing?

I have no answers to this question right now.

So: think tanks.

THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

James R. Lilley's March 12, 2003 Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony deserves to be quoted at length:

Kim Jong-il has a failed economic system. He is on life support from the outside in terms of oil and food. Ungrateful as North Korea has been for past aid, this time it is complicated by a starving population, even including cadres. Kim's moves so far on economic reform in July 2002 have failed badly, his attempt to get the Japanese reparations package, for which he lusts, backfired in the Abduction Cases issue. His economic zone in Sinuiju started out as a fiasco and certainly irritated the Chinese. Kim still has the generous hand of South Korea reaching out-- but now hopefully in a more measured and balanced way. Huge bribes and grotesque one-sided tourism deals to Kum Gang-san lost large amounts of money for Hyundai, and the ROKG. Hyundai is reported to have funneled $1.7 billion direct to Pyongyang. South Korea's Sunshine Policy is viewed by the North's leadership as a dangerous subversion, according to the highest level defector Hwang Jong yup, who is the most complete source on Kim Jong-il. A takeover of the North by the South, Kim Jong-il believes, should be resisted at all costs, even if it means less aid.

Perhaps the most disconcerting development for Kim Jong-il is the possible coming together of surrounding states-- ROK, China, Japan, Russia, and the U.S.-- in a loose coalition. This group of states has already agreed in principle that the Korean Peninsula should be free of nuclear weapons and should have economic reform. The potential use of economic leverage on his WMD programs is a frightening prospect for Kim and is one of the greatest dangers that North Korea has faced in the past 50 years.

According to Hwang Jong Yup, after the disastrous starvations of 1995 and 1996, Kim Jong-il was desperate and talked of strike on the South, which he had persuaded himself could work. He did not do it then. He fired off a three stage missile instead which then lost him his Japanese contacts and hopes for immediate reparations worth by some estimates to be over $10 billion.

A recent internal KWP document that has surfaced in the Japanese press describing KWP concerns about internal corruption and dissatisfaction among the population. The flight of hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees to China has dramatized public desperation in the face of continuing economic hardships. The combination of factors could move Kim in the direction of more desperate external moves and to divert attention from domestic failure. In this, he will get the support of his military.

As was the case in 1968, Kim Jong-il lacks support from Russia and China-- who had backed his father in 1950 and for years after. This undercuts his strength and his maneuverability.

So will he raise the ante with provocations? Most probably, he will. Will he focus on the U.S. and not on the ROK? Most likely, he will. Will he risk a major confrontation with the U.S. by striking out at U.S. installations, military, air, ground and naval hardware? He will try but will probably stop short of a casus belli. He recognizes his main vulnerability is his economic weakness and dependency. Again, Hwang emphasizes that this is where Kim Jong-il can be undone. He has to keep economic aid under continuing tight control, and he must arrange to get credit for it. But it remains his Achilles heel. And it is the most likely instrument of regime change.

[to be continued... I'm out of time this evening.]
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with apologies for absence...

Yesterday's NK blog didn't appear because my colon had other plans for me, and informed me rather suddenly of them while I was in mid-type. Luckily, I live only 200 yards away from this PC-bahng, so I was able to waddle home without shotgun-blasting anything along the way. When I was about 50 yards from my front gate, however, I had a strange feeling I was being watched. I stopped and whipped around, and sure enough, a tiny dog was staring at me from a dark corner. It was a hilarious moment. The dog looked no bigger than a chihuahua (its ears were much smaller), but it was fixing me with the most serious, beady-eyed gaze I'd ever seen on a Korean dog. With its bulgy eyes, it reminded me a bit of the mythical haetae, the Korean dog-unicorn-lion beast (known as a fu dog in the Chinese-American community, yes?) seen as stone sculptures all over the place.

Managed to get inside the domicile, situate myself on the pot, and have a wonderfully explosive release that shook the heaven-realms, ruptured the hell-realms, and made Keanu go, "Whoa." Too bad I don't have a digital camera with me. I could have shown you a Rorschach pattern to end all Rorschach patterns.

A: "Holy shit-- it's an eagle! An eagle run over by a truck!"

B: "No, you fool. That's clearly Hillary Clinton. Look, it's even got the death's-head grin. Track down a bit and you see the fat ass."

C: "I was thinking something more along the lines of a brown and runny Georgia O'Keefe."

B: "You mean he shat a flower-vagina?"

C: "More like a vagina-flower, I'd say."

A: "Oh, for a dump of fire..."
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God cuts the fun short

The Hongik University Hope Market (Hongdae Huimang Shijang) runs on Sundays. As it turns out, it usually goes from noon to about six. I wasn't sure exactly when the market started up, so I arrived early, around 10:30AM, convinced I'd be part of a huge crowd waiting to stampede onto the grounds (it's a little park, more brick than brush). But I was the first one there.

First-timers to the market have to register, and there's a W10,000 fee (you pay the fee each time you set up shop). You're given a tag to wear on your chest, and you can set up pretty much anywhere you want (though you have to be careful of the regulars, from what I heard).

Things were slow today. At 10:30AM, when I arrived, the park was a mess from the Free Market that took place yesterday. Beer and soju bottles, junk food wrappers, and that old Korean standby-- vomit-- were in evidence everywhere, along with posters advertising the latest rap and hip-hop groups, taped onto the ground in sets of 10 or even 20.

Around 11:30AM, people started to show up. Some of these folks wore tags indicating they were the Hope Market "managers," while others were simply merchants hoping to start setting up. Everyone, including myself, pitched in to clean the area up. Brooms, brushes, and dustpans were passed around. I ripped up the posters that were on the ground. Trash pickup doesn't happen on Sunday, so the best we could do was jam everything into plastic bags and pile it all together. Not much could be done about dried puke and birdshit (my bag got shat on, dammit), but the place looked a lot cleaner by noon, and everyone began to set up shop. Curious passersby started wandering into the market around 12:30.

I had a blanket and one of my pillows with me (for my ass, not my head). I spread the blanket out, unrolled some brown packing paper, and spread out my wares-- the ones you see over at Chewiest Tumors. People stopped by; many were curious, and one kid begged his mother to buy him a Bodhidharma (Mom said no). Alas, no takers, but we were only 90 minutes into the game when the Good Lord decided to drain the dragon on us.

Lessons learned today:

1. I planned well when it came to presentation: the blanket and brown paper were good ideas. The artwork definitely caught people's eye. Quite a few people asked, "You did this?" I smiled and bowed and said yes. But presentation isn't enough: I got a few critiques from the people running the market. "You should do your art on the spot," they suggested. True-- other artists had brought their entire kit. Next time, that's what I'll do, but I'm still shaky about how I hold my brush, and I still run through quite a few drafts before producing something I like-- a dead giveaway that I'm not a seasoned pro. So the product is good, but the process is still too ugly to show the public. Maybe this week I can clean it up a bit, concentrate more, and waste less effort on drafts. Buddha-mind. Buddha-mind.

2. I need a better system for wrapping up the artwork. I didn't have to use them today, but I'd brought cut-up cardboard tubes. As I discovered during a test run, they're a bit too skinny for my purposes, and it's hard to roll the paper into thin enough cylinders that will fit inside the cardboard tubes. Something to ponder this week.

3. It was interesting to see that a lot of kids seemed taken with the artwork. Tagging along with their parents and showing no real interest in the various wallets and purses and bangles, the kids were attracted to anything remotely visual arts-oriented. A lady on my left was selling tee shirts she'd designed herself. They were gorgeous. A young 20-something guy several stalls down was making stone dojang on the spot. I asked him how much his biggest ones cost; he said W20,000, which is awfully cheap. I told him so, and joked that I should have come to him for my dojang. He said, "Oh, that's nothing. Some people charge W50,000 or even W100,000 per." I didn't feel so bad that I'd paid W50,000 per stamp for my own set of three. The upshot of all this is that I need to think about offering some more cartoonish artwork for kids. The tiger vs. monk staring contest might be just the thing, and I think I finally found some Chinese characters that'll work with the image.

4. Weatherproofing! The rain came early on, and that wasn't just a problem for me; many-- if not most-- of the other merchants ended up striking camp after having sold little to nothing. A few intrepid souls were well-prepared, however; I imagine they stayed on despite the rain. I think I need either a big plastic sheet to cover the artwork while it's displayed on the ground, or else I need a more condom-like approach in which each piece is individually wrapped in its own sheath. I might also want to hang the artwork vertically somehow-- maybe off a makeshift tripod.

5. Completed scrolls. Along with "raw" product (such as what I'm selling at Chewiest Tumors), I need to showcase some actual scrolls so people get an idea of what their purchase will look like. I was told I could probably sell completed scrolls for 2 to 3 times the price of the artwork alone.

A lady friend of mine who majored in art and design at Sookmyung University took a look at my brush art and thinks I might also try the gallery route, even though they take a commission. Hmmm. Something else to think about.

OK... tomorrow, as promised, more on North Korea and the starvation issue, this time through the eyes of the think tanks. In the meantime, I direct your attention to the Marmot, who quotes from a current issue of Policy Review. The Infidel also has some interesting things to say here. And on the Tacitus site, Bird Dog asks what you would do about NK if you were president. Expect a ponderous comment thread as usual.

There, that ought to keep you busy for a while. Heavy-duty blogging for my hairy self tomorrow (Monday, Korea time).

Oh, yeah-- forgot to mention: it was actually sort of cool to be the only foreigner selling stuff today. Some people couldn't decide whether to speak directly with me or not, which forced me out of my introverted shell and made me greet them in Korean first. One American shopper came by with his (who else) Korean girlfriend. He spoke shitty Korean, so I was pleased in a petty way. I also learned that the lady to the right of me was not only a Buddhist, but also left-handed. Her brand name (she was selling diaries with embroidered covers) is "LeftRoad."

LeftRoad, meet Chua Su Bul.
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