As I live in Korea, this may amuse me more than those in North America. Or not. On what I think is the Carla Bley Band site, which is built on the theme of a musical prison — don’t ask what the heck that is all about — there’s a piece about how a deal was worked out, with Carla Bley scoring a musical residency in in Germany, and the WXW prison in America getting — you got it — a Korean prison chef. I told you it was weird. The rest of the site is bizarre, too. One more …
Month: January 2006
Though it’s probably the basis of pragmatic socialism, really, and therefore nothing new…
… it just struck me in a fundamental, pragmatic way that the idea of “surplus labour” kind of depends on the people who are “surplus” allowing such a fundamentally oppressive system to exist. And while the utopian vision of a society in which a concerted uprising puts a stop to such a system was (supposedly) trampled in 1989, there’s another version of the uprising–one that depends on an unconcerted attack on the system, a continuous, distributed, disorganized form of resistance that, instead of collapsing the oppressor system, transforms the system into something more universally oppressive. The name of this distributed, …
Cab Thieves
NOTE: I posted this a while back, but it wasn’t published until a few days ago. The “today” mentioned is at least several weeks back. Lime and I were waiting for a cab today, and this twerp came after us, looked at us, and then positioned himself to catch anything that would be coming our way. When a cab pulled up, Lime hollered “Yaaa!” (Hey!) to him, to remind him we’d been waiting first. The word’s not the most polite thing, but on the scale of impoliteness it’s not anywhere near as bad as nabbing someone else’s cab. The bastard …
Too Harsh?
Is this too harsh to email to this guy? I was forced to pass him today, and he had the gall to send a thank-you email to me. Not that the twit would read it, but maybe I could get it translated. He deserves some kind of harsh response, considering the crap he pulled to get a pass in the class — rather disgusting as I’m sure you’ll agree — but I’m not sure whether what I’ve written below crosses the line. NAME, Don’t thank me. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t deserve the grade you got. NOBODY thinks …
Subterranean Doctrine? Part 1
Jodi over at The Asia Pages recently (a few months ago) wrote about the complexities of dating someone from another culture while living in that other person’s culture. Actually, she writes about it fairly often, and I can see why, because it’s a really big thing in your life, in a relationship. Occasionally my criticisms of things Korean — cultural, governmental, traditional, or what have you — have led to some pretty hard arguments with my (Korean) girlfriend. It wasn’t because I wasn’t sensitive enough, it wasn’t because I wasn’t funny enough or even because of any basic disagreement; some …