Gay N Gay: korea

Showing posts with label korea. Show all posts

How the Mighty Have Fallen

According to an editorial in the Hankyoreh, when South Korean President Lee Myoung-bak visited the US last month, he "relied heavily on a U.S. speechwriting firm for the text of his major speeches and statements ... The Korean Embassy in the United States reportedly paid $46,500 (around 51 million won) to the Washington-based company West Wing Writers, primarily for draft writing and revisions

How the Mighty Have Fallen

The Other 99 Percent

From today's Hankyoreh:Independent opposition candidate Park Won-soon won the Seoul mayoral election on October 26 handily, and he's already on the job -- he even took the subway to the office.This was an off-year election, with the big one coming up next year, and there's good reason to expect that the ruling Grand National Party will take a beating then. President Lee Myung-bak has been

The Other 99 Percent

More and Better Opposition Candidates!

From the Hankyoreh:Merchants of a traditional market in Busan’s Saha District carry out a campaign to urge voting, Oct. 24, two days before the by-elections. They hold signboards reading, “You casting a vote is beautiful!!” “Make sure you urge others to vote!!” and “State your opinion through voting.”An editorial from the Hankyoreh:According to an analysis of social indicators released this

More and Better Opposition Candidates!

Who's a Pretty Boy Then?

I said the other day that the pretty boy is a traditional type in Korean art and entertainment, and indicated that his appeal extends beyond the young girls who are the target audience for boy groups and the like. I began to think that I should offer some support for that statement.The most famous example of youthful male beauty as an ideal in Korean culture is the Hwarang, the flower boys of

Who's a Pretty Boy Then?

Look to the Future, Don't Dwell on the Past

This morning, while I was getting ready to leave for Gumi, my host's TV set was on, tuned to the news. Although my Korean is rudimentary to the point of nonexistence, I could tell just by the sound that something was up, so I looked at the screen. It was President Lee Myung-bak, solemnly intoning something or other. For a while I was nervous that he might be announcing a declaration of war

Look to the Future, Don't Dwell on the Past

Come Over and Help Us

I imagine there must be one or two people out there wondering why I haven't been posting about Korean politics this time around, especially with the growing tensions over the sinking of a South Korean ship, blamed by South Korea and the US on North Korea. I haven't been following events closely enough, to tell you the truth.I have seen a lot of clips of Secretary of State Clinton grandstanding on

Come Over and Help Us

The Rule 3 - The Naked Kitchen

I've been working on a review of Hong Ji-Yeong's 2009 release The Naked Kitchen, which seems not to have received much attention despite its quite bankable cast. (The Naked Kitchen is a misleading tease of a title; the Korean title is simply the English word Kitchen, transliterated into Korean. From here I'm just going to call it Kitchen.) Darcy didn't even list it in upcoming releases at Koreanfilm.org as far as I can tell, and he's usually quite thorough. One thing that struck me when I watched it was how well it conformed to the Alison Bechdel / Liz Wallace Rule for movies, which requires that they have at least 1) two women characters, who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man.

Kitchen meets the requirement with ease, perhaps because writer-director Hong is a woman. Ahn Mo-rae (played by Shin Min-a, left in the photo above) lives happily with her financier husband Sang-in (played by Kim Tae-woo, right), and has her own shop which sells parasols decorated with her own painted designs. Her friend Kim Sun-woo is a photographer, still unmarried, and they talk to each other a great deal during the movie, not just about men (Sun-woo thinks Mo-rae married too young and needs more experience) but about their work. Early in the movie, for example, Sun-woo drafts Mo-rae to help her photograph a wedding, so they talk about the work they're doing and about Mo-rae's pay for the gig. Sun-woo is a familiar type, the slightly older, tough, brassy working female buddy, but she has a good-sized role in the story, and I find her very sympathetic. (I couldn't, however, find any photos online of the two women together.)

Other than that, Kitchen is pretty conventional. Sang-in quits his job to pursue his lifelong dream of being the chef in his own restaurant, and brings from France a young cooking prodigy, Park Du-re (played by Joo Ji-hoon, center in the top photo), to coach him and help work out the menu. Du-re and Mo-rae start an affair (Sun-woo was right, Mo-rae needed more experience) and things get complicated. Kitchen flirts, ever so delicately, with male homoeroticism -- there seems to be a hint that Sang-in and Du-re also had an affair when they met in France, which Du-re would like to rekindle in Korea; but the flirtation seems more fashionable than sincere. The 2006 hit The King and the Clown proved young Korean women to be as susceptible as young women elsewhere to the fantasy of pretty young men smooching each other, but Kitchen doesn't pursue the theme beyond the aforementioned hint. Too bad -- it might have improved the box-office.

The Rule 3 - The Naked Kitchen

I've been working on a review of Hong Ji-Yeong's 2009 release The Naked Kitchen, which seems not to have received much attention despite its quite bankable cast. (The Naked Kitchen is a misleading tease of a title; the Korean title is simply the English word Kitchen, transliterated into Korean. From here I'm just going to call it Kitchen.) Darcy didn't even list it in upcoming releases at

The Rule 3 - The Naked Kitchen

By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea

I played tourist this weekend, and that combined with general discombobulation is why things have been quiet around here. They probably will continue so for a few days more, since I'm planning to travel outside Seoul again tomorrow. When I get back, I hope to be more productive.

Yesterday a friend took me with him to Jebu Island, just off the western coast of South Korea. (Not to be confused with Jeju [also spelled Cheju] Island, to the south.) He was meeting some friends he'd known since elementary school there. They're all in their mid-40s now. One of them has run a hotel on Jebu for about ten years, and the friends gather there three times a year. This impresses me, because I'm not in touch with anyone from my elementary school years.

I'd been to Jebu once before, about five years ago. It's an island you don't need a ferry ride to visit: instead there's a raised, winding road that takes you through the tidal flats that surround the island, a road that is covered when the tide is high. (Photo of the submerged road here.) You have to check the times when the road is above water. It's not the most picturesque scenery, with hundreds of yards of mud on either side. We passed other tourists as we neared the island itself, wearing boots as they dug in the mud for shellfish, squids, and whatever else they could find. Since it was a long holiday weekend, we found a line of cars ahead of us when we turned onto the approach to the island, and progress was slow.

It wasn't a big reunion, just eight or nine of my friend's classmates and their wives and children, but (or maybe because of that) it was fun: lots of food, lots of soju (Korean rice vodka), lots of conversation, lots of karaoke. (The soju commercial below has been inescapable while I've been here; featuring the pop singer Lee Hyori.) Several people spoke at least some English, and the others were patient and encouraging about my fumbling, inadequate Korean.

After breakfast this morning, under gray skies and occasional drizzle, a bunch of hotel guests rode out to the edge of the tidal flats to see what were in the hotelier's nets there. We put on borrowed / rented boots and disposable plastic raincoats and climbed onto the back of three vehicles like the one below:

Driven by the hotelier and two of his workers, they took us out to check the nets. We collected an octopus, some clams and crabs, and some small fish. (Or rather, the other folks did. I just wandered around a bit, distracted by a very hot fisherman I found it hard not to keep looking at, and who does not appear in these photos.*)

The fish were cleaned and eaten fresh and raw, with soju, where we were.

After which we rode back to the hotel, the tide slowly rising behind us, for a hot lunch.

One of my host's friends is a Harley-Davidson enthusiast, and as we were finishing our meal a bunch of people he knew rode up.

Very nice, friendly people. The first bikers I've encountered in Korea, some of them smoking the first cigars I've seen being smoked here. They all sat down to lunch too. Shortly afterward my host and I returned to Seoul.

*It may be worth mentioning, considering questions I've occasionally been asked and a complaint I've received, that despite the title of this blog, not everything or everyone it discusses is gay. The fact that I was drooling over this fisherman, for example, doesn't mean he drooled back. (Even if he were gay, he probably wouldn't.) This is a misapprehension of which I've often run afoul in the 30-odd years since I came out: straights and gays alike tend to assume that everyone I know must be gay (and that I'm having sex with all the gay ones), even though both groups should know better. The straights who know me, after all, have themselves as evidence that not everyone I know is gay, and the gays (who aren't sleeping with me) have straight friends themselves. Being openly gay has meant that I've blended the two populations together most of the time without much thought. Often it's the very people who gripe about queers ghettoizing ourselves who assume that the wall of separation is high and unbreachable. So, verb. sap.

By the Sea, By the Sea, By the Beautiful Sea

Memorial Day

I was just walking out of Incheon Airport last night, following my hosts to their car, when one of them asked me if I'd heard the big news story. "Noh Mu-hyeon committed suicide today," he told me.

Things had unfolded in an amazingly short time. Early Saturday morning, the former president of South Korea had gone hiking near his home -- climbing up mountains is a popular pastime of the elderly here -- and then thrown himself off a cliff. He must have done it virtually in front of the bodyguard who was with him. At 9:30 a.m. he was pronounced dead at the hospital, and within a few hours the country was in mourning. It was reported that he'd left what amounted to a suicide note on his computer at home. In the early evening his coffin was brought back home and carried to the Town Hall by aides and family members. (Photo above from the Hankyoreh.)

Rather than quote the obituaries I've seen online, let me quote this article by the historian Bruce Cumings, which appeared in The Nation in 2003:

In December [2002] the South Korean people broke decisively with the existing political system, and the elites within it who date back to the Korean War, by electing Roh Moo Hyun. Roh is a lawyer who came up the hard way: Born into a dirt-poor family that could not afford college, he schooled himself in the law and passed Korea's notoriously difficult bar exam on his first try. In the 1980s, during the Reagan-supported dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, Roh defended many human rights and labor activists at the risk of his own career and life. Amazingly, for presumably anti-Communist South Korea, his wife comes from a family that was blacklisted for decades: Her father was a member of the South Korean Labor Party in the late 1940s, a Communist party outlawed by the US Military Government that ruled the South then; he was arrested for allegedly collaborating with the North during the Korean War, and died in jail. Roh's sharpest break with the past, though, is his constituency. His election was boosted mightily by a burgeoning movement among younger Koreans against the seemingly endless American military presence in the South, conducted in successive, truly massive and dignified candlelight processions along the grand boulevard in front of the US Embassy in Seoul. Routinely labeled "anti-American" by the media, these demonstrations were in fact anti-Bush--like so many others.

After he left office in 2007 charges of corruption were leveled against Noh, primarily involving large sums of money allegedly given to family members and to Noh himself. This prosecution was what evidently led to his suicide. It's hard to sort it out: I'm inclined to suspect a political element in the investigation, as are many Koreans, since the Korean Right like its American counterpart is big on getting back at political opponents. It doesn't diminish my suspicions to learn that the prosecution will be dropped in the wake of his death. I have the impression that despite the accusations of arrogance and self-righteousness that have been thrown at him, Noh quickly realized that he wasn't a very good president. His only real political experience was a brief term as Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries under his predecessor Kim Dae-jung. According to a rather blatantly biased Wikipedia article on Noh, his biggest success in office was a "free trade agreement" with the US, a move that wasn't going to meet with much opposition from either the local Right or the US itself -- his main political antagonists -- and was almost calculated to offend his core constituency, since South Korea has had hard experience with "free trade" in the past dozen years.

Now it looks as though his death may galvanize opposition to Lee Myeong-bak's administration, despite the predictable calls for reconciliation. Lee has been trying to stifle dissent of any kind at least since last summer's candlelight vigils, which nearly brought down his government. It hasn't been as easy as he must have hoped -- the courts just threw out arrest warrant requests for some labor leaders he wanted put away, for example -- but while his opponents have the numbers, Lee has the guns. (And like our own President Obama, Lee wants to focus on the future, not on the dead past.)

Last night in Seoul, "mourners clashed with police who seized their makeshift tents and cordoned off the memorial altar with buses to prevent them from holding rallies," as the Korea Herald reported it. (Photo above is from the Hankyoreh.) Of course any assembly of people the government doesn't like is now illegal, but it's hard to suppress public mourning for a dead recent president. Lee, and Korea, may face a long, sad, painful summer.

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