Kim Jong-Il: Lovable Troll?

Kim Jong-Il recently endeavored to make his successor a collective leadership rather than the hereditary passing on of the reins of North Korea.

Japan has recently launched a 4th spy satellite to keep an eye on North Korea.

North Korea has agreed to suspend its operations to develop nuclear arms, and South Korea has undertook to offer them aid.

South Korea is due to take over wartime operations control of its armed forces by March 15, 2012. Since the 1950's this control was under the United States Armed Forces' jurisdiction.

Documentaries have reported the stringent restrictions on interactions with foreigners in North Korea: that it is actually illegal to speak with foreigners. Such documentaries show hordes of people in the subway of Pyongyang passing the camera without looking up. How is this different from any other city in the world though? They then show people scrounging around in a field and comment on the widespread starvation in the country to spread the image of communism as impoverished. Yet these shots might just be of people gardening. Apparently, North Korea has a specially trained "elect few" who communicate with the outside world. If outsiders are only allowed to speak to the "elect few" who only speak in propaganda (of course), how does the rest of the world know about the quality of life for the average North Korean? It is also illegal in certain states in America to have oral sex, and in South Korea it is illegal to have an affair. Laws and their enforcement do not occupy a map with a scale of 1:1. How genuine is this portrayal of the country as a hermetically sealed dictatorship?

Is Korean unification on the horizon? Despite the suspicion with which the North is regarded, reports and surveys have revealed the general level of happiness in that country as higher than that in America. And while the cult of personality might mandate the idolization of Kim Jong Il, I have no doubt that many, many Koreans genuinely love and admire him. Can the Americans say the same of George Bush? I've never met an American who loved George Bush. This certainly does not mean they are not out there. But what does the difference between how these two leaders are regarded by their people say about the world? Perhaps hatred is cool. Perhaps loving your leaders is unfashionable. Perhaps the hegemony the United States wields derives its power more from hatred than Christian love. Many critics of Kim Jong Il say little of his actual actions and dwell more on his "troll"-like appearance. Who cares about what people do anymore, as long as they look cool, powerful, and strong doing it, right? HMMMMMMMMM!

Testing, Testing 1,2

Time sits still
Waits




For rhythm

to set in, cut off, tables
shrinking in measurements minuscule
motes flurry like seconds in
sitting composure on plates, ready
to be eaten.
The wait staff jostle each other and laugh.
This room where
while meets forever, or until wines and dines
during, this
restaurant where
the busboy’s name is then.
No rush orders here, where
the hunter parts reeds
to shoot ducks,
but hits deer instead. Venison in vein,
gristle, and marrow.
Tomorrow need not fear that it
never knows; sorrow; it has yesterday’s
20/20 foresight.
Time sits still
Waits




For rhythm

to set in, cut off, tables shrinking in measurements minuscule motes flurry like seconds in sitting composure on plates, ready to be eaten. The wait staff jostle each other and laugh. This room where while meets forever, or until wines and dines during, this restaurant where the busboy’s name is then. No rush orders here, where the hunter parts reeds to shoot ducks, but hits deer instead. Venison in vein, gristle, and marrow. Tomorrow need not fear that it never knows; it has yesterday’s 20/20 foresight.

There are four main erections.

My kindergarten students are memorizing a short speech for their graduation ceremony. I'm having them all be numbers and explain what things characteristically come in that number. For example, the kid who is "being" number four says "My name is four. There are four wheels on a car. There are four walls in a room. There are four main directions." Well, I'll be damned if today he didn't say "There are four main erections." I had to stop myself from laughing.

I've got my I's on you.

This photograph was inspired by one of my students. I gave them a recent assignment to draw their favourite room of the house, and he drew the "eyebathroom." This drawing, while poorly executed, was conceptually bold. He drew a bathtub full of eyeballs, eyeballs coming out of the faucet in the sink, and eyes around the toilet seat. While I could draw lots of Freudian innuendoes out of this, I think it's just surreally funny. Sure, he might have reverse primal scene anxieties, and he could be stuck in the anal stage of development. Or he could be the reincarnation of Victor Brauner. Or he could be a kid with a overactive imagination and a sense of the dramatic and shocking.

I love kids...

Revenge of the flatulence.

I have a student in one of my classes who always makes fun of the other students or me when any of us fart. She seems to have radar-reinforced olfactory nerves or something, because she knows who farts when. I myself can never tell who it is when it's not me. Well, today she let loose a couple stinkers of the silent, but violent variety in the classroom. The poor girl was mortified. She buried her head in her arms on top of her desk, and she actually started crying. GEEZ. No one made fun of her though... except one other student who commented on the ordeal to me in a whisper and a giggle.

On another issue entirely, I heard Bush ordered another 21 000 some odd troops for the war in Iraq. That's old news already, but the video games that simulate war in the middle east the military designed and then deployed into the public to recruit people who might have got an inkling that real war might be like a video game, seem to be working. There's still enough people that either think that the war is justified or that war would just be cool to participate in to keep the war going. I'm reminded of newsreels of Iraq War #1 with Bush Sr where the public witnessed the reverse effect of a real war becoming like a video game, pixellated in our living rooms as smart bombs that err as much as the humans that make them blew up military targets (and some civilian ones they neglected to show).

When are they going to make smart fart bombs? I know. That's course and callous of me to make a joke like that, but in a world where torture is justified by invoking paranoia about national security, sometimes laughter is therapeutic.

A Conservative Jewish Organization accepts homosexuality.

I was chatting to a friend online today, and he told me that the Conservative Jews accepted gay relationships as an alternate life choice. The reform Jewish movement accepted gay relationships years ago. He also told me that Canada voted down the recent proposal to revoke the legalization of gay marriages. I think that this move was good both from a human rights perspective and from an economic perspective.

There are only a handful of countries where gay marriage is legal. Such countries I would expect to attract gay immigrants. I would also expect that many of these gay immigrants would have a higher average standard of living than their heterosexual counterparts. Rich people often wield the privilege of deviating from behavioral norms (such as not marrying) because they can do so while being considered "eccentric." Poor people who deviate from behavioural norms are usually just considered "crazy." None of this is based on fact; they are merely my perceptions.

Attracting a group of people who might be variously excluded from legitimate institutions (such as marriage) in their home countries who enjoy a higher than average income (again, this is a vague suspicion unsupported by evidence) level increases their buying power and stimulates the economy in general.

Just some idle speculation...
Is idleness the mother of invention (oh yeah, it's necessity), or is it really the father of evil?

Happy New Year.

I figured I would do my Happy Holidays here in a New Years post. To start the new year right, I thought I would give some free promotion to a very worth website, dedicated to addressing the problem of hunger. Really, the worthwhile things in life would never come about if we spent all our time worrying about where our next meal was coming from. For all those Da Vinci's, Einsteins, Jordans, Gilroys, Duchamps, Rushdies who will never see the light of day because they struggle to meet the bare necessities of life: food, clothing, and shelter, this post goes out to you.

Please click on this link to make money for the hungry. If you don't know how it works, there's more information on the site. For every click they get, they make an amount of money which goes towards feeding the hungry. If you think this is a scam, feel free to look it up on Snopes.

www.thehungersite.com

This is my friend Jae-Yung. I went to visit him in Jinju on the weekend, and he took me to see Jinju Castle. Apparently during one of the many Japanese incursions into the Korean Peninsula, a woman martyred herself by dancing for one of the Japanese generals, and then embracing him with interlocking rings on all her fingers. Once she had trapped him, she jumped off the cliff into the Nam river and killed both of them. Jinju castle was a resort for Korean generals and the aristocracy. There they enjoyed feasts and entertainment. The second picture is a picture of Jinju castle after the sun went down. After going to the castle and shopping, he took me out for baked eel, the specialty food in Jinju. I even tried eel bile, mixed with soju, the sweet potato liquor that is so popular here. It's supposed to be very good for your health. The eel was delicious, but I was a little indifferent to the bile.

If you're reading this, Jae-yung: thank you for a wonderful time. You are always welcome at my house.

The Ran-domicile

Well, this photo is a little off-season. It was taken in September. I decided it would be a good idea to go to the DMZ, the border between North and South Korea on my upcoming vacation. Should be eye-opening like Le Chien Andalou.

The Kyoto Protocol

I had to walklimb a mountain
to right this poem. here in beautiful
hangook, smog settles in valleys
where the suicidal species congregates
and lives in high-rises and billboards;
so here I am, trying to find some clean
air, a piece of mind
above
the love/hate relationship I harbour
for my own caucasian male ego. The people
here speak to me and I can understand
little of what they say. Their faces
say more -- kind and generous, have what I have.
Busan stretches its limbs below, encircling
its own heights that reach
for the sky
like a woman's breasts when she's on
her back, and there's nothing
sexual about that right now; I'm gay
for chrissake! For Christ's (and other's)
sakes I crossed the burden
of my being in a ferry named atomic.
For strictly exercising her lungs,
a woman cries out and magpies call back,
looking
for leftovers flung over the shoulder
of a kind and generous "have what I have"
face that quenched my thirst
with a persimmon.

What is it about heights that makes
people delight
in shouting, overlooking the harbour
where thousands board high-speed trains
with hand-bills and church congregations
sing suicidal hymns next
door to buddhist monks sneaking
into a tavern to quaff a drink, dripping
with the memory of incense.

Speak to me,
people hear!
of what they say I can understand
little.
And redundant,
recursive
limbs
stretch back behind the sky,
reaching for the atomic ferry.
Tinker bell,
a mountain named desire
maintained as a molehill,

echoing.