{"id":1312,"date":"2013-02-04T12:59:28","date_gmt":"2013-02-04T20:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1312"},"modified":"2013-02-04T12:59:28","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T20:59:28","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s3e8-pyongyang-style-with-rob-montz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1312","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E8: Pyongyang Style with Rob Montz"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles’ Koreatown with filmmaker Rob Montz, director of Juche Strong<\/a><\/em>, a short documentary about North Korea and its propaganda. They discuss reaching the same age as Kim Jong-un without a hermit kingdom to rule; the question of why North Koreans continue to believe in their state, despite having good reason not to; his early fascination with North Korea’s World Cup showing, and how pursuing that fascination led him from standard opinions on the country to newer, more interesting ones; his realization that North Korean ideology comes built upon the same basic structures of psychological truth that any of us have; his interviewing of experts on North Korea, and their disagreements about the nature of the Juche idea; his trip to Pyongyang, and how it didn’t require him to hide underwater from North Korean commandos, breathing through a reed; the state’s aspirations to totalitarian watchfulness, and how incompetence shatters that image right at the airport; the boredom a visitor to North Korea endures, and how that boredom differs from the boredom we experience in the developed world, where we’ve mostly cured it; the nihilism that sets upon a mind deprived of the ability to autonomously create meaning and provide purpose; how life in the constant American stimulation stream may render you more vulnerable to boredom when you momentarily step out of it; how many pleasures a people will willingly forego if they’re given a larger sense of purpose and community, and how we know the North Korean government knows this; what North and South Korea still have ideologically in common, though the South chose the means of ideological expression that let its people get fed; Confucian values on both sides of the DMZ, and how they even manifest in the strange filial piety of East Asian friends; his extension of the examination of North Korean-style propaganda to United States politics, and especially the ceaseless repetition of the phrase “God bless America” therein; of Washington, D.C., where homosexual atheist political operatives instruct Republican politicians to insist \u00a0upon the divine ordainment of American exceptionalism an inveigh against the “gay menace”; and how you can help fund the completion of <\/a>Juche Strong<\/a><\/em>\u00a0on Indie Go Go<\/a>\u00a0(not to mention the clam-roasting footage you can get for doing so).<\/p>\n

Download the interview from\u00a0Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em>\u2019s feed<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Colin Marshall sits down in Los Angeles’ Koreatown with filmmaker Rob Montz, director of Juche Strong, a short documentary about North Korea and its propaganda. They discuss reaching the same age as Kim Jong-un without a hermit kingdom to rule; the question of why North Koreans continue to believe in their state, despite having good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-north-korea","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1312"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1315,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions\/1315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}