Yeah, sometimes I actually do feel like getting one of those shirts from Baboshirts (they advertise on Facebook, aggressively) that asks, in Korean, “Do you know what your shirt says?”

And when you see stuff like that on kids’ shirts, you have to wonder who the hell “designed” it. It can be moderately amusing to see someone wearing a more low-cut shirt with some fitting English on it, for example, but when it’s on a little kid’s shirt… either the person who designed it REALLY speaks no English, or else REALLY has issues.

No analysis, just one of the funnier things that happened while I was away. From the other two (male) teachers walking in to the break room after class asking “Did you get a load of that SHIRT” to the reference to interracial sex where the kids call the tan one “black skin” to mock him, to the idea of a freaked out 14 year old desperately trying to find the translation of “Irginity” on Naver to find out why the male teachers in class looked at her like she was the girl from The Ring… Good times.

I didn’t notice the comment in the spam box till now! Ironically, I was reading the very post you linked earlier today, and am still thinking of how to phrase my response. :) Hmm. I’ll post my comment there too, so you know I’ve seen this!

I quoted and linked you over at my blog while posting on a slightly different topic (Hallyu and KimCheerleading), here:

http://tiny.cc/Yrszk

Thanks for the food for thought.

I was pleased to learn, when I asked the class if anyone was watching the show, that it has two fans in my class already! (And I haven’t shown even an episode of it.)

As for Technorati… don’t let it bug you. Do your thing. Modify your thing. Worrying about ratings is… I dunno. You have a day job. :)

I should credit you with keeping me up on North American pop culture, by the way. You know how it is. I never heard of Weeds or Crank except from you…

(Because I think authenticity is like confidence — once you’re worried about how to exude it, you’re incapable.)

Long list of people, most whom weren’t on my radar, but Buckley, at least, now is. (Though I’ll be ages before I get around to him.)

As long as John Currin, Takashi Murakami, P.J. O’Rourke, Neveldine & Taylor, and Christopher Buckley are putting out the best possible work they are capable of doing, I don’t really care if it stacks up against that of their predecessors.

Yeah, essentially, I’m saying something similar. (Though to me, an appreciation of the old stuff led to a decrease in appreciation of the newer stuff, since, while it’s all inauthentic to some degree, the new stuff seems much more inauthentic to me.)

As for cultural decline, I’ve been saying for years that Western civilization is in the process of jettisoning Western culture in order to make the consumer machine flow more smoothly. We have done very little artistically in the mid-to-late 20th century that holds a candle to Bach, or Chartres Cathedral, or the paintings of countless dead Europeans. Warhol? The Beatles? Fooey. Ironic, since we have so much technique now, and so much tech at our disposal… but nothing to say, I guess. And nobody to say it to.

(I make exceptions for narratives, which seem to be cruising along; mainstream fic, not so much — the decadence of self-indulgence is downright stinking — but in various genre fictions, in a few outstanding TV shows and films, and so on. But then, humans are to narrative like fish are to water; it doesn’t mean we still have a functioning Culture, in the big-C culture sense.)

Which brings me back to Korea — my sense is the jettisoning is well under way here too, and have thought so since an ex-girlfriend (Korean) commented that she found traditional Korean kayagum music to sound “exotic”, “unfamiliar”, and “oriental.” Unfamiliar, okay, but “exotic”? “Oriental”? WTF!

Re: Pop ephemera and disposability, The Beatles and music were just variables, and you could pretty much fill in the blank (Gilligans Island and television) with whatever you want. As a Lit major, I’d read something like Vanity Fair in my spare time, and while I loved it, it can be interesting to see how someone like Tom Wolfe updates the themes, concerns etc and puts a contemporary North American spin in on it in a novel like Bonfire of the Vanities. If people are still interested in producing and consuming new stuff, it’s a sign of cultural health. Too much time spent mining the back catalog by consumers, and well, it’s definitely a sign of cultural decline.

As for music, maybe it’s because I intensively trained in it, but for me, what matters most is what is “greater” — partly because so little popular music has nostalgic value for me. (Jazz, avant garde, twentieth century orchestral or chamber music, these are what I got into in my late teens and early 20s, and music was of little or no interest to me before that except as staking out lifestyle/identity territory. (I had a G’n'R jacket, and I listened to them, but mostly as a way of constructing a shield around myself to protect myself from, well, Prince Albert Saskatchewan. You know what I mean. But before I heard Miles Davis for the Nth time, music never really got me in and of itself.) I suspect though, that this makes me the oddball around here.

I also suspect that however disposable any individual instantiation of “popular music” is, there will always be some contemporary version of it around… as long as we have tongues in our heads to sing our joys and frustrations and people of the opposite sex to try charm. :)

X-Files, the various incarnations of Star Trek (DS 9 and Enterprise had some great arcs), Buffy, Band of Brothers, Rome, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Lost, Weeds, and Big Love, off the top of my head are some of my favorite serials, though given enough time I could think of some more. It’s amazing how much the overall quality of television of programming has improved since the debut of The Simpsons and the X-Files way back in the nineties.

Which shows specifically? This is also something someone I know argued about Babylon 5 — it was one of the first TV shows to have a long, long arc, and not just a reset button at the end of each episode. (And thus made poossible shows like the contemporaneous (but early on, only very weakly arcing, and heavily resetting) show The X-Files and Millennium, and later The Sopranos, Weeds, etc.) I haven’t thought it over too much, but there might be something to it.

Indeed pop culture is ephemeral. — its ephemerality is quite fascinating, though it’s also the flipside of its mutability, a major feature of what’s largely an oral tradition, and the mutability also ensures its survival, ironically. Seriously, the more I look at late 19th and early-20th century icons of music and performance, the more I see echoes or even the origins of the personae that our entertainers today present… and the lyrics? Well, there’s a wellspring from which it all seems to pour forth. Hmmm. I think I’m on a different tangent than you, though. But it does remind me of my mother’s claim to have learned a song on the playground in Quebec, and then, in shock, recognize it when she ran across an 800-year old version of the same song in a book on the troubadours.

Hell, culture in general’s ephemeral, too, isn’t it? That’s something that keeps hitting me as my students (in the reaction write-ups for a panel discussion a week and a half ago, which I’m grading now) keep saying that this or that thing is “purely Korean”, something I challenged class members to think of after the discussion touched on cultural hybridity and cross-cultural influence.

The most common and iconic one is the most wrong… kimchi? Hot peppers are not native flora in Korea., and haven’t been here all that long at all! Apparent solidity gives way, with just a little history in hand!

Bah, who needs brevity?

Hmmm. I see your point, but in a sense, the book I’m reading right now argues what my response would be: indirect influence. (The book, by the way, is Nick Tosches Where Dead Voices Gather. I’ll post about it sometime after I finish it.)

Whedon’s audiences may have been (relatively) small — though not too shabby for genre TV — but the impact seems to have been much wider. (That is, if you believe wikipedia, but it does present some evidence.) Sometimes, a small audience that includes some well-placed people means more influence than fame and fortune. And there are countless writers and musicians like that — barely read or listened-to in their time or later, but sought out by the small elite that is writing or playing music, and influential upon them.

Anyway, back to cash — you have a strong point for American society, where copyright law is actually enforced (and where I think more people actually feel like they should buy CDs or pay to download them), but in Korea, where it isn’t, brand new work is equally easy to get as older stuff. Actually, more so — you can just push a few keys on your PC. No need to even go to the museum or library or whatever.

It’s different with books, mind, but only for the present, I suspect — since there are already a few rampant etext collectors out there. It’s only a matter of time till it happens with books too.

(And in a sense, in Korea, it already has, but the lo-tech way: classes of students just pitch in and visit the photocopy shop to get a few dozen copies of a textbook done up. Despite occasional “crackdowns” this business is thriving, enough so that there are about six or seven major copy shops within a two-block radius of the front gate of the university where I work! But it hasn’t quite happened with novels here — often, you can buy the novel for only a little more than a single copy would cost, after all.)

I do think there is something to the long tail argument, but cash can still be the best indicator of passion. I mean, I knew I loved P.J. O’Rourke even when I couldn’t afford to buy his hardcovers when they were new, I’d just pay attention to the book reviews and his byline and slap a hold on the title as soon as it popped up in the libraries database. However, I knew I really, really, loved O’Rourke’s work when I was in Japan – when I discovered he had a new release coming out I ordered a copy on Amazon.com as soon as I found out. I had very little Japanese, but I figured out how to navigate the Amazon.co.jp site pretty quickly.

Cash is still a very useful yardstick (though it does have it’s limits, I think it’s more useful as a measure for contemporary work as opposed to older stuff more easily obtained, performed, or seen in a library, concert hall, gallery, or museum) as a measure of just how much a person really enjoys a particular artist.