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From my interview archive: audio dramatist and ZBS Foundation president Thomas Lopez

Friday, August 30, 2019

I’m listening again to selections from the archive of long-form interviews I conducted on the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture between 2007 and 2015.

I still remember the moment I first glimpsed the cover of Dreams of the Amazon in the CD section at my local library. I must’ve been nine or ten years old, still a few years shy of getting into music, so I don’t know what impulse other than pure curiosity could have brought there. But something about the giant skull, the stone temple, the waterfall, and the crystal city above, all rendered in a vividly colored, Art Deco-esque style, convinced me that I had to hear it. (Looking back, the resonances with other things I was enjoying at the time are clearer: Tintin, 70s Choose Your Own Adventure books like Mystery of the Maya, the PC adventure game Amazon: Guardians of Eden.)

Dreams of the Amazon turned out to be a radio drama, though at the time I didn’t know what a radio drama was. For a while I just called them “ZBS productions,” since ZBS was the name of the company that made Dreams of the Amazon. I didn’t know at the time that ZBS stood for “Zero Bull Shit,” or at least it did when the organization was first founded as a commune on a farm in upstate New York back in — you guessed it — 1970. ZBS’ original mandate laid out a mission of using full-cast radio dramas to “raise consciousness,” as was the style of the time. (A childhood spent listening to my dad’s Firesign Theatre records had already accustomed me to both this form and this sensibility, not that I could have articulated what either group was going for.)

By the early 1990s, the time of Dreams of the Amazon, ZBS productions had grown much slicker-sounding (and featured fewer words of wisdom from the likes of Ram Dass), but they weren’t much less trippy: in its opening scene, protagonist Jack Flanders is approached by a Brazilian-sounding woman who seats herself at his table and proceeds to remove her hair, face, and skin (sonically accomplished, so I’ve heard, with vegetables and rubber gloves), revealing the crystal skull of the cover beneath.

Flanders bumbled into all kinds of mystical and metaphysical trouble around the world (with sound effects invariably recorded on location) from 1972 to 2016, the year his voice actor Robert Lorick died. Incidentally, the actor who initially brought Lorick into ZBS fold happened to teach the acting classes I was taking around the same time I first picked up Dreams of the Amazon. This looks like a striking coincidence now, but at that age you just sort of take things as given (much as I did with the fact of Seattle’s being the center of alternative comics at the time).

Today I would have all kinds of questions for my teacher (who also died in 2016) about the experience of making radio dramas among relatively hard-working hippies building on the conventions of pre-World War II American popular culture. But I did eventually get talk to ZBS Foundation president Thomas Lopez, nom de guerre “Meatball Fulton,” after launching The Marketplace of Ideas. He told me of his then-recent realization that the Jack Flanders series is ultimately about “loving kindness,” which on one hand may be exactly what you might expect someone who emerged from this particular cultural milieu to say, but on the other — upon reflection on my own 25 years of listening to his work — makes perfect sense.

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Korea Blog: A Liberation Day Protest Raises the Question, How Anti-Japanese Is Korea, Really?

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Koreans hate Japan. Even those who know precious little else about Korea — that place with the spicy food, all that pop music, and the troublesome neighbor? — know that. But in recent years public expressions of anti-Japanese sentiment have been hard to come by here, at least from the under-80 set. Any outside observer might rightfully have asked, do Koreans really hate Japan? When the last generation to remember suffering under Japanese colonial rule passes on, won’t the bad blood dry up entirely? But the past few weeks have breathed new life into Korean resentment against Japan, a feeling that culminated in a protest march through downtown Seoul last Thursday — very much not coincidentally National Liberation Day, when Koreans, both South and North, celebrate Japan’s defeat in the Second World War.

I say “the past few weeks” because I’ve only been in Korea that long, having spent the month and a half before that in the West. Even when I’m out of Korea I make sure to keep up with Korean news, and from it I got the sense that a rumored “trade war” with Japan had grown into a fairly serious matter. Few other stories got much airtime on the television screens on the train back into Seoul from Incheon Airport — a train whose walls were also lined with advertisements for a newly launched Korean budget airline and its many Japanese destination cities. When I got back to my neighborhood, I saw anti-Japan posters here and there along the streets, and even a group of identically dressed college students doing dance routines in favor of boycotts against the country. But it can only have made actual Japanese people in Seoul so uncomfortable, since quite a few of the voices I heard as I made my way home were speaking Japanese.

My first serious thought about all this was a thought shared by many an apolitical Korean: I should see if there’s a sale on at Uniqlo. The Japanese clothing chain has become one of the most visible businesses at which Japan-boycotting Korean consumers have refused to spend money. So have the high-design household-goods retailer Muji, the discount shop Daiso, and even 7-Eleven, whose prevalence in Japan has caused some to mistake it for a Japanese brand. Japan has also seen a drop in tourism from Korea, on top of the loss caused by the belief (uncommon in the rest of the developed world) that the whole country has been dangerously radioactive since the Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster of 2011. Pictures of signs denying Japanese customers entry to Korean businesses have circulated on social media. And a middle-aged man went viral by smashing up his own Lexus on video, shouting about his embarrassment at owning a Japanese car.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Korea Blog: The Suicides in South Korea, and the Suicide of South Korea

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Every journalist covering South Korea must, at one point or another, write about suicide. Not only do a greater percentage of people kill themselves here each year than anywhere else (though Lithuania comes close), the very act of killing oneself can plausibly be tied to other widely lamented conditions in Korean society. A CEO’s suicide might result from the pressures of a “hypercompetitive” economy (as might that of a long-unemployed father), a student’s suicide might result from a low score on the all-important college entrance exam, a young woman’s suicide might result from being attacked by her social-media followers (or even from the failure of a cosmetic surgery procedure to deliver the expected results). But trends more recently identified by global media may produce a subject as reliable as the suicides that happen in South Korea: the suicide of South Korea itself.

The quantitative view of this national suicide involves a figure of which reporters have already made much: Korea’s startlingly low birthrate. “In 1960, South Korea had a total fertility rate of more than six children per woman, high enough to cause a population explosion,” writes Bloomberg’s Noah Smith. “A country needs a fertility rate of about 2.1 — a little more than one child per parent — to maintain long-term population stability. South Korea’s fertility is now about half that number. And it’s still falling.” The country’s record-low birthrate of 0.98 puts it below even the famously fertility-challenged Japan, which still manages more than 1.4. As soon as Korea’s figure was reported last year, doomsayers began projecting the trend toward predictions of what year, exactly, the very last South Koreans would die off.

Good riddance, more than a few Koreans in their twenties and thirties might have thought, as long as they take this society with them. The refusal to reproduce as a kind of protest against the expectations of modern Korea has proven an appealing media angle, and this summer has seen a good deal of coverage of the so-called “no marriage” movement among these younger Koreans. The impact of its name in Korean turns on a difficult-to-translate linguistic distinction: while calling someone “unmarried” in English has no strong connotations, the word’s standard Korean equivalent, mihon (미혼), implies that its object may not have married yet but one day will. An alternative term has thus gained traction in recent years: bihon (비혼), which suggests a deliberate choice not to marry, and thus not to engage in anything that comes along with marriage.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Open Culture posts on Jorge Luis Borges

Thursday, July 25, 2019

Since 2012 I’ve written about all manner of topics at Open Culture, and you can find a selection of some of my favorite posts over the years in the Open Culture section of my essays page. I often write there about writers, and few writers as often as Jorge Luis Borges. Here are all my posts on the author of “The Aleph,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and many other mind-expanding ficciones besides:

You can also find more on Borges by other writers in the Open Culture archive.

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Korea Blog: 43 Reasons Everything in Seoul Is Good and Nothing Is Bad (or Something Like That)

Sunday, July 21, 2019

Waiting to step off a bus here in Seoul not long ago, I got an idea for not just a tweet but a whole Twitter thread. As usual, I had just tapped the exit-door reader with my transit card — but strictly speaking, it isn’t a transit card of the kind used in Los Angeles or New York, one you have to keep topped up with periodic money refills at a machine. It’s just my regular bank-issued debit card, the one I use to buy everything. It also works not only on all the buses and in all the train stations in Seoul, but on all the buses and in all the train stations everywhere in South Korea. Having by now grown used to that convenience and other, even more convenient conveniences besides, I got to wondering whether they’ve collectively made it impossible for me to live outside Seoul, let alone in any of the comparatively ramshackle cities of the West, ever again.

Right there at my bus stop, I began a thread of “things Seoul has that give me serious reservations about ever living in any other city” as follows:

  1. The card I pay for transit with is just my regular debit card (so no need to “fill it up”) and it works in every city in the entire country
  2. Every subway station has bathrooms, without exception, and not the kind you would only use under great duress
  3. Almost every subway station has coin lockers (just a name, since I pay with the aforementioned debt card), so you seldom have to worry about dragging bags, etc. around all day
  4. You save your table at a coffee shop by putting your most expensive personal item down on it. You don’t ask a nearby random to guard your stuff if you have to go to the bathroom
  5. A Starbucks can move into a neighborhood — or more than one Starbucks — without “driving out” the smaller chains and indies, which just seem to multiply as a result
  6. Literally everything I would ever need in life, up to and including higher education and hospitals, lies within a ten minute walk of home. (This is in no way an exaggeration)

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Korea Blog: The Making of a Dictator in Anna Fifield’s “The Great Successor”

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

I first learned of Kim Jong Il at the same time I learned of the country he ruled, and for years thereafter had no image to associate with North Korea but that of the high-living, Hollywood-obsessed Dear Leader with permed hair and platform shoes. This was back in my high school days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when it came as a surprise that eccentric third-world dictators still existed at all. In subsequent years Kim would become more and more an international figure of fun, a process that culminated in his appearance as a grotesque marionette in South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s film Team America: World Police. By the time Kim died in 2011 I had learned much more about both Koreas, North and South, but the only thing that struck me as notable about his son and successor Kim Jong-un was his having been born the same year as I was.

Though less of an oddity than his father, Kim Jong Un has proven to be the more compelling figure, especially to consumers of news in the West. That goes even more so for producers of news like Washington Post Beijing bureau chief Anna Fifield, who began her career in Asia in 2004 when the Financial Times sent her to Seoul. She eventually developed a desire to “find out everything there was to know” about the current ruler of North Korea, and its fruit is the new book The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un. Applied by Fifield herself or not, that subtitle reflects the tone of the book, many of whose chapters open with epigraphs quoting the characteristically bombastic, tortured English in which North Korean propaganda pronounces on such subjects as the “monumental edifices of eternal value” built across that “socialist land of bliss,” the “thrice-cursed acts of treachery” committed a disgraced party member (Kim’s uncle Jang Song Thaek, whose subsequent execution was ordered by Kim himself), and the “icon of cultural efflorescence” that is the city of Pyongyang.

Few observers can resist the chance to poke fun at North Korea’s rhetoric, or indeed any other aspect of how the impoverished, belligerent “Hermit Kingdom” presents itself to the world. At the same time, the country also offers its observers an almost unparalleled opportunity to fire off high-handed pronouncements of their own, usually moral in character, on everything from the gulag-like system of prison camps made for dissenters to the enforced drabness of the clothing and hairstyles seen on the streets of the capital. “May you soon be free to follow your dreams,” Fifield writes to the people ruled over by the Kim dynasty in her book’s dedication, a statement neither particularly patronizing nor self-serving, which makes it quite refreshing by the standards of writing and speaking on North Korea — standards against which The Great Successor measures in every way as a superior work.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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일기: 데이비드 호크니 회고전

Sunday, June 23, 2019

데이비드 호크니는 영국 화가이지만 그의 제일 유명한 그림은 로스앤젤레스 풍경을 묘사한다. 1967년에 그렸던 <더 큰 첨벙>이라는 그 그림은 가장 인상적인 로스앤젤레스를 보여 주는 예술 작품들 중 하나인 것을 부인할 수 없다. 한국에 이사오기 전에 로스앤젤레스에 살았던 나는 <더 큰 첨벙>을 사진이나 동영상에서 본 적이 많지만 그 그림을 직접적으로 볼 수 있게 된 곳은 바로 서울시립미술관이다. 지금 거기에서 열리는 데이비드 호크니 회고전은 50년대부터 현재까지 그려졌던 다양한 형태를 가진 테마로 여러 작품들을 전시하고 있지만 내가 꼭 가려고 했던 이유는 오랫동안 실물이 아닌 매체로만 봤던 <더 큰 첨벙>이 있기 때문이다.

푸른 수영장과 키가 큰 야자수들이 있는 현대건축의 단독주택을 담고 있는 <더 큰 첨벙>은 로스앤젤레스의 이상형을 그리고 있다. 그러나 영국 지방 출신인 1937년생 데이비드 호크니의 눈에는 그러한 장면이 실제보다 그가 느꼈던 로스앤젤레스 실제 그 자체인지도 모른다. 20세기 중반에는 데이비드 호크니 뿐만 아니라 소설가 크리스토퍼 이셔우드와 건축 평론가 레이너 반함과 같은 많은 영국인들은 오래되었고 전통적인 유럽 도시보다 빠르고 자유럽게 팽창하고 있는 로스앤젤레스로 가서 사랑에 빠졌다. 크리스토퍼 이셔우드와 레이너 반함이 썼던 책들은 내가 매우 좋아하는 로스앤젤레스에 대한 책들 중에 하나이다. 그 책들은 크리스토퍼 이셔우드의 소설 <싱글 맨>과 레이너 반함의 <더 큰 첨벙>이 실린 표지가 있는 비소설 <로스앤젤레스: 네 가지 에콜로지의 건축>이다.

21 세기의 로스앤젤레스는 나를 여전히 매혹시키지만 60년대에 처음으로 갔던 데이비드 호크니 같은 영국 사람의 입장에서 본 로스앤젤레스는 매력적인 도시일 뿐만 아니라 신세계처럼 보였을 것이다. 세대와 국적이 다른 데이비드 호크니와 나는 공통점이 많이 없지만 우리 둘 다는 자기만의 방식으로 로스앤젤레스의 매력을 즐긴다. 게다가 로스앤젤레스에 살고 있는 영국인인 데이비드 호크니와 서울에 살고 있는 미국인인 나는 모국이 아닌 나라에 거주하고 있으면서 그 나라를 관찰한다. 그러나 그림을 그린지 60년이 넘은 데이비드 호크니는 나보다 관찰력이 훨씬 더 뛰어난다. 그가 예전에 한 인터뷰에 따르면 그는 보는 방식에 관심이 많다고 했고 나는 서울시립미술관의 회고전에서 그 말을 증명하는 증거인 작품을 많이 찾을 수 있었다.

회고전을 보고나서 <더 큰 첨벙>이라는 그림 뿐만 아니라 1974년에 나온 영화도 찾아서 봤고 그 것은 내가 즐기는 다른 많은 영화들처럼 여러 장르들과 형태들을 한 작품 속에 섞었다. 얼핏 보면 <더 큰 첨벙>은 데이비드 호크니에 대한 다큐멘터리처럼 보이지만 허구인 장면들도 포함한다. 그 색다른 형태의 영화 줄거리는 데이비드 호크니가 전 애인이 등장하는 <예술가의 초상>이라는 그림을 그리는 과정을 다룬다. <예술가의 초상>은 작년에 9천만 불에 팔렬지만 내가 데이비드 호크니를 부러워하는 것은 성공도 부도 아닐 뿐만 아니라 관찰력도 아니다. 무엇보다도 부러운 것은 바로 영화인 <더 큰 첨벙> 속에서 볼 수 있는 그의 집중력이다. 영화 속 데이비드 호크니가 그림을 그리는 장면을 보면 그가 일하면서 작품 외에 다른 아무 것도 인식하지 않는 고도의 몰입감이다. 그러한 몰입감이 없었다면 <더 큰 첨벙> 같은 그림을 그리는 데에 필요한 로스앤젤레스를 보는 방식을 찾을 수 없었을지도 모른다.

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Korea Blog: A Harrowing Journey to an Island of Women, and Into Korea’s Psychological Recesses: Kim Ki-young’s “Iodo” (1977)

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Every Westerner with an interest in Korea remembers when they first realized just how different Korea is from the rest of Asia. The contrast with Japan and China is especially notable, given that many Westerners at first see those countries as culturally indistinguishable from Korea. But it doesn’t take much observation before distinctive elements start to emerge: the popularity of Christianity, to name one highly visible example, at least if all the neon crosses glowing red on Seoul skyline’s are any indication. But despite the surprising influence that particular faith now commands in Korea — mainly in the form of Protestantism, though Korean Catholicism can hardly be ignored — it hasn’t entirely overwritten more deeply rooted belief systems like mugyo, a form of shamanism practiced mainly by women.

That folk religion may date back to prehistory, but its traces still appear in countless forms throughout modern Korean society. “One suspects something wrong happened on the way to modern nationhood in Korea,” wrote Ian Buruma after coming to this country during the 1988 Olympics. “An unfortunate synthesis must have occurred between West and East. The West, usually via Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, gave Korea half-baked German notions of Blood and Soil; it also exported, mostly from America, the equally half-baked notions of vulgar evangelism. Korea contributed an emotional legacy of historical bitterness and a propensity for shamanistic rites.” This mixture, in varying proportions, had also long been appearing in Korean cinema. About a decade before Buruma’s visit, one film used those shamanistic in service of a haunting story that plunges deep into the country’s psychological recesses: Kim Ki-young’s Iodo (이어도).

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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일기: 배수아, <올빼미의 없음>

Sunday, June 16, 2019

나는 미국에 살았을 때보다 한국에 살면서 독서 모임들에 훨씬 더 자주 참여한다. 고정관념일 수도 있겠지만 미국에서 열리는 독서 모임의 참여자들은 대부분 다른 할 일이 없는 아줌마일 경우가 많다. 그러나 내 경험에 의하면 한국 독서 모임 참여자들의 대부분은 20대나 30대 여자이지만 남녀노소들도 오는 경향이 있다. 나는 한국어 읽기와 말히기를 연습하려고 나를 빼고 한국인 밖에 없는 한국말로 진행되는 독서 모임에 가긴 하지만 서울에서 열렸던 영어 독서 모임에도 들른 적이 몇 번 있다. 지난 영어 독서 모임 시간에는 우리가 배수아의 단편 소설집 <올빼미의 없음>의 영어 번역본을 읽고 토론했다.

하지만 영어 번역본을 도서관에서 못 찾은 나는 그냥 한국어 원작을 읽고 영어 독서 모임에 참석했다. 나는 배수아의 작품들을 매우 좋아하고 모두 한국어로 읽을 목표가 있어서 영어로 읽지 않아도 될 거라고 생각했다. 알고 보니 독서 모임에 참여한 사람들은 책을 통해 나와는 굉장히 다른 경험을 했다. 책을 읽은 대부분의 독자들은 책에 나와 있는 소설들 중 이해할 수 있었던 것이 하나도 없다고 불평했다. 그들은 너무 긴 문장들과 애매모호한 줄거리를 따라가기 힘들다고 했다. 내가 말할 차례가 왔을 때 나 역시 배수아 같은 작가의 소설을 즐기는 법을 모국어인 영어로도 설명하기 어려웠다. 모든 가장 독특한 작가들의 경우에는 원래 그 책에 맞는 독자도 있고 맞지 않은 독자도 있을지도 모른다.

그러나 결국에는 내가 독서 모임의 다른 참여자들에게 배수아 같은 작가의 작품들이 왜 나를 매혹시키는가에 대해서 조금이라도 알려 주기도 했다. 내가 특별히 깊은 인상을 받은 <올빼미의 없음>에 있는 독일 프랑푸르트를 배경으로 한 <무종>이라는 단편소설을 예로 들고 배수아가 외국 도시에서 도시로 이동하는 색다른 느낌을 어떻게 글로 전달하는가를 설명해 봤다. <무종>은 책의 다른 소설들에 비해서 길지 않지만 프랑푸르트 뿐만 아니라 여러 다른 배경들도 포함한다. 한국에 살고 유럽에 자주 가는 작가인 배수아와 비슷한 화자는 다른 유럽 도시들에서 몇 달씩 머물렀던 방들을 떠올리고 그 여행 경험을 자유롭게 묘사한다. 소설의 시작에서는 저자가 모형 비행기 수집가라는 인물과 함께 길을 못 찾는 기사가 운전하는 택시를 타고 있지만 끝은 그 모형 비행기 수집가가 등장하는 꿈의 장면이다.

여러 다른 장소들과 시간 사이로 이동하는 <무종>을 포함해서 배수아가 쓰는 글은 에세이를 자주 읽을 뿐만 아니라 쓰기도 하는 내가 보기에 소설과 에세이의 사이에 존재한다. 나는 소설을 두 번째로 읽은 후에야 배수아가 그 연결을 어떻게 만들었는지를 볼 수 있게 되었다. 내가 생각하기에 글을 구성하는 구조는 잇따라 일어나고 있는 사건들이 아니라 생각의 논리나 흐름으로 구성된다. 문장들이 엄청나게 길고 가끔 복잡하기도 한 이유는 현실에서 우리의 생각도 그렇게 느껴지기 때문이지 않을까? 한국어를 공부하는 나 같은 독자에게 재미있는 도전을 주는 <무종> 같은 작품에서 중요한 것은 줄거리보다 연결이고 배수아가 하는 일은 추억과 경험이나 상상과 꿈 같은 여러 소재들을 자연스럽게 연결하는 것이다.

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Korea Blog: With “Parasite,” Bong Joon-ho Comes Back to Attack His Homeland — and Wins it a Palme d’Or

Sunday, June 2, 2019

When a Korean wins a major international award, that award tends to be seen here in Korea as having been won for, or even by, the nation itself. Olympic gold medals, if not silver or bronze, have long mattered a great deal. Anticipation for another Nobel has run high since former president Kim Dae-jung’s Peace Price in 2000. The 2016 Man Booker International Prize went to novelist Han Kang and her English translator Deborah Smith for The Vegetarian, but in the eyes of much of the press here, the validating honor also went to Korean literature itself.  Over the past decade or two, Korean film has enjoyed a higher global profile than many other products of Korean culture, but no Korean filmmaker had ever come back from Cannes with a Palme d’Or. Or rather, none ever had until last week, when Korea — or rather, Bong Joon-ho — won it with Parasite (기생충).

Cinephiles may wonder what took the Cannes jury so long to bestow the Palme d’Or upon a Korean film, given the astuteness the festival has shown in regard to Asian cinema in general: they gave one to Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives in 2010 and have given five to Japanese pictures over the past 65 years, most recently Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Shoplifters in 2018. That film, about a poor but cheerful quasi-family clinging to the margins of modern Japanese society through a life of small-time crime, has more than a little in common with Parasite, which tells the story of a father, mother, son, and daughter living by their wits in the closest thing to a Seoul slum a mainstream movie has dared portray. Earning a meager income by folding cardboard pizza boxes, the Kim family may not have to shoplift — not regularly, at least — but they do have to live by their wits, seizing upon any and all minor opportunities that present themselves just as they do the unprotected wi-fi signals that reach the corners of their run-down basement apartment.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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