Those Penny-pinching Admen

I've noticed a new trend in television commercials. Take the Cadillac commercials. Initially they featured Kate Walsh and the awesome guitar part from Hum's classic song 'Stars'.
Now they feature Lance Reddick from the Wire and that one really awesome episode of the X-Files--and a clip with the same effect, the same atmosphere and general Hummishness, but a sound-alike clip nonetheless, that likely costs Cadillac none of the royalties they had to pay for the HUm clip.
Likewise a Walmart commercial features an instrumental from Badly Drawn Boy's great About A Boy soundtrack, and later broadcasts of the commercial run with a sound-alike, with the same twinkling glockenspiel as the original without any of the residuals to Badly Drawn Boy.
Way to thrift it up, Madison Avenue!

Newest American trend to hit Korea: calling dudes gay

This blows my mind. Effeminate Korean singer Brian from duo Fly to the Sky

goes on Gag Concert, only to be ragged on by has-been singer Lee Sang-won

for being gay. My translations are based on this article from Sports Chosun.

Lee: Where did all the talk of you cross-dressing and dating [Fly to the
Sky bandmate Eru] come from?
Brian: It's a misunderstanding due to the fact that we're so close. And sometimes I go to hang out at Eru's house and
sleep over.
Lee: [Older entertainer] Tae Jin-a always says you're so pretty . . .
Brian: Of course. I think of myself as his son.
Lee: Do you think of yourself as his son or daughter-in-law?

Lee then ordered Brian to do push-ups to prove his manhood.



Now what I want to know is where Lee Sang-won got this homophobic gay-bashing attitude from. It's one of America's most unsavory distinguishing characteristics and I've long cited its absence from Korea as a definite point in its favor (Not that it means Korea's any more enlightened about homosexuality than the U.S.)

I suspect that the audience watching Gag Concert that night was very perplexed by the attack. I mean, Korea is the land of the pink shirt, and whether or not Korean men are more in touch with their feminine side because they don't believe in the existence of Korean homosexuals, it remains true that Korean men can act in a manner that would get them brutally teased in the U.S. without fear of recrimination.

I don't know whether Lee Sang-won learned to be made insecure by other men during years of has-been exile in America or what, but I sincerely hope that his nasty sniping doesn't rub off on any impressionable Korean kids.

Goodwill Ambassador of the Week

This week's Goodwill Ambassador of the Week is none other than Beauty's Chatterbox star panelist Bronwyn!
We here at the Paint Roller Blog would like to thank Bronwyn for her contribution to international understanding. On the August 27th episode of Beauty's Chatterbox, or 미녀들의 수다, or 미수다, or Misuda, or whatever you call it, Bronwyn helped bridge the gap separating Koreans from foreigners by explaining that she never goes to Hongdae because of the smell. The foreign men there, explained Bronwyn, drink too much and throw up so much that you literally have to gingerly tiptoe down the street to avoid the nearly blanket coverage of vomit. To drive home the point, the outgoing South African then stood up and demonstrated what it is like to walk down the streets in front of Hongik University. Way to go, Bronwyn!
This show, for those of you who don't know, is a panel show in which pretty foreign girls who speak Korean discuss Korea and talk about how it is different from their own country, what surprises them, what they like and dislike etc. When the show began the women on the panel were mostly old hands, Korea-wise, in particular American Leslie Benson Bensfield, who's spent 11 years in Korea and speaks fluent Korean. The show was mostly people who know Korea well telling Koreans about their own country, gently pointing out some of Korea's less proud aspects, in particular, its sexism.
There was also plenty of laughs for all. Common topics of the show included:

1. Those tough ajummas.


2. Eating dog, fermented skate (홍어), and spicy food.


3. Booking (nearly delved into every episode)


4. Dating Korean guys.


5. Korean drinking culture

Well after plodding these well-worn boards for a long time, these topics have ceased to be interesting. Anybody out there who watches this program will notice that in an effort to maintain the interest of basically talking about in-your-face old ladies, drinking soju and eating dog meat, they have changed the format from 'knowledgeable foreigners discuss their experiences in Korea thoughtfully' to 'buckwild foreign chicks who don't know anything about Korea and can barely speak Korean say shocking, uninformed things in barely understandable Korean'
And somebody please tell me what's up with this?

I imagine that the next step when this concep' has run out of steam will be to have some models and sorority girls come to Korea for the first time, take them out for a night of drinking, booking, and dog meat and then ask them about it the next day while they model Andre Kim teddies. I propose a title change to 미녀들이 서툴다.

Seoul Drama Awards, desperate self promotion

Desperate self promotion for desperate self promoters. I am in the middle of watching the 2007 Seoul Drama Awards, and boy are they a piece of work.

First of all, the logo for the awards ceremony is an abstract three legged bird/samjogo/삼족오, which happens to look like the logo for Jumong, one of the Korean dramas in competition.

Oh wait, the logo in the video from their website is exactly the same.

Second, the use of English is comically spotty. The Japanese winners all give at least part of their speech in English, but not a single Korean has uttered a word of English, except one of the hosts, who told an Australian winner who had his acceptance speech in his hands "We would like you to say a few words, please."
Third, the hosts (The guy from the Capentech commercials and the hostess of one of Korea's many exploitative news magazine shows) take time out between every award to point out that Korean dramas are now in international competition with dramas from all the top countries. A Korean miniseries beat out a British miniseries with Helen Mirren in it, and this fact was explicitly pointed out.
One of my favorite parts is when Lee Hyori and some dude present the nominees for some award, one of which is The Tudors, and Hyori just went off on how she totally loved the Tudors, but as for the rest of the nominees . . . dunno. The camera went to a Japanese "Hallyu star" in the audience in what appeared to be the Japanese section, and both he and the woman behind him had a sort of shocked, 'we are not amused' look on their faces.
Also, when they introduced 'foreign dramas' and 'Korean dramas' and every single example of a foreign drama they showed during that montage (Lost, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break) was an American show, and yet I don't think any none of those shows were even up for any awards.
To be fair, when the award show started I was convinced that every single award would be won by the Korean nominee, and they haven't gone that far. Way to show restraint. I guess its enough that now Jumong, Hwangjini, and all the other big dramas this year can honestly say that they've won awards in international competition.

When will the hurting stop?

I have a bit of a theory about Korean culture that I would like to elaborate on. I doubt that I am the first person to come up with this concept, but I am beginning to find it an inescapable conclusion, which means that I am perhaps becoming too biased to judge whether my own idea actually makes sense. So let me know if you think it's all wrong.

The concept came to me when I was reading about gang initiations. Many gangs initiate their new members by making them commit a crime. The initiate subsequently feels a bond of shared guilt with his fellow gang members, who have commited the same crime. This shared guilt bonds gang members together tightly.

Now what I'm saying is that Korean society acts in a similar fashion, but instead of a bond of shared guilt, I believe that Koreans are brought together by a bond of shared discomfort.

Where did this theory come from? I noticed that, while people in Korea do a lot of things that are pleasurable, there is usually some extra something thrown into the mix that is unpleasant. Communally unpleasant. When you eat Korean food, the first thing that you are struck by is the spiciness. You ask yourself "Why must everything we eat be spicy?" and even if, like many non-Koreans, you like spicy food, you are confronted with the basket on the table containing carrots, cucumbers and green peppers. You eat the carrots, eat the cucumbers, and then someone tastes the pepper, gingerly at first but then quicker. "It's ok, they're not spicy!" that person reassures you, so you grab the other pepper and bite into it. It must be from a different batch, because it is burning the enamel off your teeth. It's like Russian roulette with food.

Or you can go in for the guaranteed torture that is buldak (fire chicken).

Buldak is another shared adventure in masochism. You and your friends go to the buldak restaurant to suffer through a painful chemical burn together, with the added bonus of a vaguely charcoal-y scent and a chicken-y chew. There is nothing to recommend buldak except the oft-repeated claim that 'spicy food is addictive.'

Do you know what happens if you blow your ear drums out listening to your headphones? Or if you develop a dependency on a drug? You require an increasing amount of these inputs to feel satisfied, because you've dulled your senses. Imagine how much a lifetime of eating spicy food dulls your senses.

It is a well known fact that Korean workers go home only when their bosses go home. If the boss stays till 9pm, that pretty much means that everybody is staying till 9:01. I usually hear people explain this in terms of the boss. "Oh, you mustn't leave before your boss." I disagree. I believe the true point of everybody waiting for the boss is everybody waiting together. Everybody missing dinner with their families and knowing that that's what everybody in every office in Korea is doing has a real effect on the national psychology. How can you help but think 'We are a hardcore nation.'

Drinking alcohol is commonly agreed upon in most cultures to be an agreeable recreational experience. Those who drink alcohol typically do it to loosen up and relax, to let their guards down, and to facilitate socialization.

Koreans are no different, in intent, however it is the degree to which the drinking takes place that makes it, for many, a painful experience. Most of the participants in drinking sessions are not in control of the amount that they wind up drinking. That is decided by whoever is running the party, usually a boss or the oldest person at the table. Blacking out and vomiting are common experiences for some. What should be a fun activity becomes a brutal slog mandated from above. Everyone in the drinking party is bound by the will of the senior member to drink, sing and be merry or else face ostracism.

Some office girls, chugging as though their jobs depended on it

Again, we see singing, at times a pleasurable experience, turned into a painful social tool, like a hammer. Public singing becomes another bond, this time one of shared humiliation. Bear your soul or else. Again, this is not always the case, but it takes on this unpleasant dimension in the context of forced socializing.

What's next? Why it's on to stage 3, for some real bonding through shared guilt. This time the guilt of adultery. What could create more convivial feelings than sullying your marriage vows with some guys from work? Some whiskey, women and song will guarantee that you and Team Leader Choi will remain close business contacts forever!

Finally, what form do the most popular Korean television shows take? Celebrity humiliation, in which Korea's most famous TV personalities have to suffer hilarious indignities. In the show shown below, celebrities have to memorize a song and sing it perfectly, at the risk of having a pan dropped on their head (HT to James at The Grand Narrative for finding the Youtube clip).

Although the most popular current incarnation of bonding through shared suffering theater is Old Time TV (옛날TV), in which entertainers must perform such feats as pulling the tablecloth out from under a stack of bowls at the risk of having 100 liters of water dropped on them and having to memorize and sing a song while trapped inside a sauna, being allowed out only if they can sing the song perfectly.

The exquisite pain of Korean victimhood

Here is a short list of ways in which Korea's obsession with victimhood manifests itself

• In daytime dramas which center around a woman with a dopey victim-y hairstyle being cruelly mistreated and suffering through it passively (문희, 금순이).
• In historical films in which the main characters are helpless victims of historical circumstances passively tossed about by the viscissitudes of the time.
• In hysterical news reports about foreign English teachers come to Korea to have sex with Korean women.
• In hysterical news reports about foreign investors carting off steamer trunks full of money while leaving nothing behind for the Koreans.
• In Korean American antisemitism.
• In hysterical news reports about foreign companies (Mercedes, Starbucks) selling their products at high prices in Korea.

Feel free to add your own.

TV, loneliness and suicide

Yes, this post is about the three sisters of modern life. I was just watching the ultra-broad Korean sketch show Hey Hey Hey, in which one of the regular cast busts into a normal-seeming situation dressed in insane costumes, usually with one or more teeth blacked out wildly dancing and/or screaming. After writing that last sentence I went to youtube to find a good example of the above and immediately hit the jackpot. Watch the first 10 seconds of this clip.


Now one thing you're gonna notice in this clip is the sound of people 'reacting' to the hilariousness that you are seeing. Most Korean sketch comedy shows are set up this way, where the sketches are produced and then shown to a studio audience and a panel of celebrity reactors, who say dumb things and point out how ridiculous/'funny' the sketches are.
So I was watching this horrifyingly dumb show when I suddenly recalled Mildred, Guy Montag's wife from Fahrenheit 451. Her sole pleasure in life was watching the family TV show, which was basically an interactive soap opera projected on the walls of the house. And yet she still frequently attempted suicide. And her futuristic society had fast acting response teams set up to deal with what is implied to be a steady epidemic of suicide attempts.
South Korea's suicide rate, incidentally, has gone in the last twenty years from about 9 per 100,000 people to 23. While many cite economic pressure as the cause of the rise, I suspect loneliness may be a significant contributing factor. I'm not going to reference anything to back up that assertion, but to compensate I am calling myself out for my own logical leap, so there you go. Granted, Koreans are to my eye more social than the Americans I grew up around. Still, the fact that even a laugh track isn't enough for people and they have to pipe in actual reactions from 'real' seeming celebrities tells me that people who are watching these terribly unfunny programs are doing so for reasons other than their love of comedy.
Whatever the reason, I consider this more proof of my pet theory that Korean comedy is not funny because it's created for social purposes and not for laughing.

Korean TV makers hate their viewers

Or think they are morons, or have terrible taste. And perhaps at times they are right. I a talking in particular about the excremental program entitled Zoozoo Club (주주클럽), in which animals are put in ridiculous staged situations with little regard for their welfare or that of the humans appearing on the show.

The other thing that I hate about this show is that it features Boom, Korea's most depressing TV personality. He is doubly blessed with the soju-addled puffy face of a middle-aged man and the asinine, childish haircut of an exceptionally impressionable teenager.

Having finished my new song and video, Living in Korea, I decided to spend some time away from the computer/mandolin/video camera axis of evil and spend some time with my wife. I sat down to watch the story of a borzoi who had given birth to puppies (you can see two of the puppies by following the link above). Then the owner's four year old daughter is 'alone' with the dogs (and the cameraman, and the producer . . .) and she starts carrying around the puppies by their necks and front limbs and basically freaking out the mother dog, who diplomatically jumps the girl to free her choking pup. This is played repeatedly in 'horror movie' slow motion and color correction.
Then the little girl is depicted 'saving' one of the puppies in a rain storm, which is clearly made by a garden hose pointed in an arc at the little girl and dog. There are copious images of the little girl really crying while being pelted by hurricane-force artificial rain.
Finally and most ridiculously, the mother and daughter are given potatoes by the producer, which they steam and then three-bearsishly go away while they cool. Naturally the mother borzoi is pushed in the house through a window and guided by the detached, noninterfering superpro cameraman to the potatoes, which she eats. She runs away and another little non-borzoi dog comes on the scene to find scraps of potato, at which point we see freeze-frame reaction shots of the mother and daughter angry at the little dog. Then they brutally corporal punish the little dog, even though they know full well what the deal is.
This would make sense if there were any pretense to fiction, but these events are portrayed as real, apparently under the impression that Koreans are still under the same sway of the magic of TV that they were when they first got a glimpse of it, fresh off the farm as they were at that point. Lazy lazy lazy.