{"id":2509,"date":"2014-11-22T17:23:54","date_gmt":"2014-11-23T01:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2509"},"modified":"2015-04-06T09:22:13","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T16:22:13","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-cultures-korea-tour-de-terriblization-with-mark-russell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2509","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture’s Korea Tour: De-Terriblization with Mark Russell"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"markrussell\"Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and <\/em>The Polar Intertia Journal<\/a>, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition.<\/em><\/p>\n

In\u00a0Seoul’s Hongdae district, Colin Marshall talks with Mark Russell<\/a>, author of the books\u00a0Pop Goes Korea<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0K-Pop Now!<\/em><\/a>, and the coming\u00a0novel\u00a0Young-hee and the Pullocho<\/em><\/a>. They discuss what unites Korean pop culture other than having made by Korean people; the tendency toward mixture that characterizes so much of the country\u00a0culture; his early experience with Korean culture practicing tae kwon do in high school; where the “if this doesn’t work, I can go teach English in Korea” took him, how he envisioned that prospect, and how he found himself on a plane to Korea the same week he brought up the idea; the “completely different” Seoul of today from the “bare” one he found in the nineties, where Pringles could excite him; what in Korea doesn’t change, amid all the change that has gone on; the European look backward, and the Korean look forward; how Korea makes the impossible possible, but sometimes takes the possible and screws it up; the bygone days when every foreigner was assumed to be an American; whether K-pop saturates Korea more than American pop saturates American; what, exactly, makes pop music uncool; the consequences of the fact that “most people don’t live at the PhD level; what makes Korean blockbusters more interesting than American ones, including not having quite cracked the “scientific blockbuster code”; the Korean popular culture his first discovered; what happens when you go drinking with a favorite director; what happens when you look too closely into the “sausage factory” of art production; the pop golden age people remember from three years ago; when he realized his own life in Korea had taken shape; his plunge into the Seoul alternative music scene; when Busan, not Seoul, had the best music in Korea; the role Hongdae has played in Korean music, having become the Korean music scene itself; why groups have trouble touring the country; Korea’s lack of unconventional “slots” in which to live, especially outside Seoul; when he began writing fiction, and how he wrote a novel set in Korea while in Spain; the all-important “de-terriblization” process in art; how much insight traditional Korean folktales give him into the culture today; the foreigner’s freedom to “get things wrong in your own way”; his years in Spain, and the difference drinking wine there versus drinking wine in Korea; what he began to miss about Seoul while away; his impressions of the Spanish economic crisis; his sense of Korea getting better and better, economically as well as culturally, despite the fact that he “wants to be as cynical as everyone else.”<\/p>\n

Download the interview\u00a0<\/span>here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<\/span>iTunes<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition. In\u00a0Seoul’s Hongdae district, Colin Marshall talks with Mark Russell, author of the books\u00a0Pop Goes Korea,\u00a0K-Pop Now!, and the coming\u00a0novel\u00a0Young-hee and the Pullocho. They discuss […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,33,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture","category-seoul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509","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=2509"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2895,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509\/revisions\/2895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}