Tag: South Korea

A petrified pup, a brilliant book, a nip of neurosis

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

The dog keeps staring at me. 

Outside, gusty winds render trees, shrubs and bushes lashing percussion fit for a Nine Inch Nails concert. If Trent Reznor showed up, we’d be golden. Instead, I’m gazing into the helpless eyes of a small Schnauzer-terrier that’s terrified of the thrashing flora this warm spring day has unleashed.

Cubby the Super Hound — he should have a cape and rubber suit with nipples on it — has his kryptonites, and one of them is blustery winds that rattle objects into outdoor cacophonies. There goes a recycling bin and all its clattering innards. Whoosh-bang, a gate door swings open and shut, on repeat. And those whipping, whistling trees are declamations of the devil. For him, it must be like dwelling in a haunted house, terrorized by loud, chilling sounds of unseen provenance.

As long as the wind blows, he follows closely wherever I go, as if my pockets are stuffed with treats (they are not). At rest, he cautiously climbs on my lap and quakes like a 25-cent motel bed. 

He looks up at me, pleadingly. I look back at him, pitifully. It’s a staring contest between man and beast. Alas, the poor pup wins every time.

I’m re-reading a deep, delightful little novel titled “The Friend,” which is about writers and writing, friendship, dogs and suicide — a perfect brew of the contemplative, canine and emotionally punchy. It stars a nameless narrator, a middle-aged writer, who’s in a ghostly, one-sided conversation with her close friend, also a writer, who killed himself. It also stars a depressed Great Dane the size of a zebra. The 2018 book won the National Book Award and the author, Sigrid Nunez, has a wry, gently profound way with words and ideas. She has a lot to say about creativity, loss and bonding and does so with chiseled economy washed in a beauty that’s unshowy but electric. “The Friend” runs a mere 212 pages — a wisp, a wonder — but contains worlds of hilarious, heartbreaking humanity. It was made into a movie starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts, but I won’t watch it. I don’t want to upset the novel’s unruffled perfection.

The South Korea trip — that again — is creeping closer and the old pre-trip jitters are manifesting. Things like: Will I get through customs with Xanax in my luggage? The anti-anxiety meds are a controlled substance and bringing them into Korea requires reams of draconian paperwork, including an absurd handwritten note from your doctor. I’m going to chance it; they don’t always ask. If they do stop me and confiscate it, well, I hope they enjoy. It’s a blast!

I’m also getting flustered, a churning storm in my gut, about possible TSA lines that run longer than a Frederick Wiseman documentary. I can’t stand long lines, and for some reason airport security lines make me irrationally nervous. I find them stressful, mania-inducing, like I did something wrong and I’m about to get busted by some granite-faced goon. I’ve purchased TSA PreCheck, which allows small security short cuts (e.g., you don’t have to take off your Nikes) and theoretically provides shorter waits. We’ll see about that during this latest Congressional crisis. Where’s the Xanax?

How I spent last Saturday, all cheers, jeers and blaring car horns. The signage — priceless:

It was cathartic.

I stabbed my face, and other fun things 

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Before I visit a country for the first time, I like to bathe in the local culture, mainly through books and movies. (I save the food part until I get there and do it right, with bite.) As mentioned in my last post, I head to Seoul, South Korea, in a few weeks, so I’ve been hungrily reading novels and watching films by Korean artists. Christ, they’re grim. How I love it.

Take “Memories of Murder,” by Bong Joon-ho, who made the stinging class-warfare satire and Oscar-winner “Parasite,” itself fairly bleak. This excellent serial-killer detective saga throbs with death and dark humor, winding down to a gut-punch ending that will leave your jaw somewhere around your big toes. Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” is another serial-killer drama, a fiendishly clever spin on the revenge thriller splattered with brutally sadistic punishments that I cannot speak of here, lest the authorities bust in.

Something lighter? Try the smash Netflix series “Squid Game,” in which financially strapped citizens try to win millions playing grueling games with the simple rule: you lose, you die. I haven’t seen so many blood geysers since “The Wild Bunch.”

Twisted, yes. But then you don’t know Park Chan-wook’s 2003 masterpiece “Oldboy.” Yet another revenge rampage, Park peppers his gorgeously gory film with creative curlicues not easily forgotten — like the antihero devouring a whole, live, squirming octopus in one take and, later, fending off dozens of assassins armed with only a hammer, a tour de force of cinematic choreography.

It’s not much sunnier on the book side. I just finished the slim novel about suicide “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” by Young-Ha Kim. It’s gloomy, but also not great. It’s infatuated with its own misery. 

More famous is “The Vegetarian” by Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang. The heroine of this celebrated novel renounces meat, triggering a plague of psychological and bodily repercussions. (Put. Down. The. Cheeseburger.) And I’ve just started “Lemon” by Kwon Yeo-sun, about the unsolved murder of a high school student. More death — party time!

Is Korea so cracked? Apparently I’ve tapped into a thick cultural vein of crime, vengeance, class disparity, the sordid and surreal, the darkly existential and the exceptionally, even giddily, violent. That vein is a bloody gusher.

Speaking of unchecked violence, the other day I bayonetted my cheek with a thumbtack. I was lancing a pimple, not too giant, but big enough to evoke the Elephant Man. A hard, stubborn whitehead that was impervious to onslaughts by furious fingernails. So I said F-it, I’m getting a tack and uprooting this beast. First, I sterilized the tack’s point in the dancing blaze of a Bic lighter. Then I rinsed it in hot water. Then I took the business end of said tack and dug out the pimple’s white core from my cheek. Blood happened, but I extracted the thing in 30 seconds flat. My threshold for pain and gore is impressively high. The tattered flesh around the deceased pimple healed in a few days. I am an absolute master. Dermatologists, take note. And fellow zitheads: Shelve the Stridex. You might find more relief at Staples than CVS.

Like its kaleidoscopic neighbor Japan, South Korea is a Day-Glo bouncy house of the whack, weird and wonderful. While there, I will have ample offbeat options: Should I visit the Toilet Park and Museum, aka Mr. Toilet House, a festival of fecality? Or the Penis Park and Museum, studded with upright totems of erotic arousal (stop it!)? Or the Meerkat Friends Cafe, where twelve meerkats — so smooshily cute, like living anime creatures — a random raccoon and a floofy white Arctic fox scamper and play with you as you sip, and conceivably spill, coffee? I’ll be at all of them, of course. Oh, I almost forgot the popular Poop Cafe, whose theme is all things playfully bowel-adjacent (think chocolate soft serve, etc.). Consider it checked.

From the South to South Korea: a drastic change in plans 

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

I’m supposed to be in Nashville right now. But I’m not, and I’m glad. 

A trip down South was planned as a post-France jaunt, 3.5 days, fast, domestic, easy and fun. I’d do it in early March while the weather’s still mild, my final trip till the annual fall journey in October or November, wherever that may be.

I booked a Nashville hotel, some tours and great restaurants, and of course a flight. But very late in the game it struck me that the math wasn’t computing. The damn thing, for hardly four days in a city of modest attractions, was costing just shy what a longer trip abroad would cost. I blanched, then I panicked. What was I doing, numbskull?

This was two weeks ago, this brilliant epiphany I should have seen months ago. Text my brother, I thought and I did. He began firing off trip ideas — Granada and Valencia, Spain, for starters — then, boom, he sent me a swanky hotel bargain in … Seoul, South Korea. My immediate text response: “Oooooo.” A fire was lit.

Despite having in the past mulled Seoul as a destination, it never quite captured my imagination, even though it looks like the sister city — high rises, high tech, sleek and seductive, old and new — of Tokyo, one of my favorite places. 

Quick like, I was on the web, from Chat GPT and Lonely Planet, to TripAdvisor and YouTube, researching and rummaging. And, hell, if Seoul wasn’t completely captivating. Pagodas meet K-Pop, kimchi mingles with Korean BBQ, and temples to godlike emperors and gaudy consumerism abound. I checked mid-April weather (cool to warmish) and saw that it’s also peak cherry blossom season. What!

I’m a capricious creature, incurably impulsive, too often following my gut before my head (see: Nashville). But while this reversal — I booked the Seoul hotel and swapped my Nashville flight credits for Korea credits — is dramatic and sudden, it is not rash.  

Rash implies foolish and reckless. This time I’ve thought it out, lured to a place I’ve never been, based on hours of homework. Frankly, my heart was never fully in Nashville. It was whimsical, poorly reasoned. They may serve soul food there, but they don’t serve Seoul food. Tours are booked — I might be most excited about the “Anthony Bourdain Ultimate Korean BBQ Experience,” and why not? — hotel secured, etc. The flights are a time-sucking monstrosity — 20-some hours — but you gotta roll with it if you’re committed.  

I am at peace. I’m also madly excited.

Don’t eat dogs. Just don’t.

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

I would never eat a dog. This goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway to broadcast loudly that I would never eat a dog. Or a cat for that matter. But this is about dogs, a bit broached by a new law in South Korea banning the consumption of dogs.

In a brief from today’s newspaper: “Breeding, killing and selling dogs for their meat will be banned in a country where it has fallen out of favor. Hundreds of thousands of the animals were still being bred for human consumption.”

The first sentence fills me with joy, relief and pathos.

The second sentence renders me a clenched fist of disgust, outrage and sorrow.

The story goes on: “A person who butchers dogs for human consumption could face three years in prison or a fine of 30 million South Korean won, or about $23,000 … The breeding and selling of the animals would be punishable by two years in prison or a fine of 20 million won.”

Not nearly as draconian as it should be, but a start. 

While South Korea joins Hong Kong, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan as places prohibiting the trading of dog meat, millions of dogs are still slaughtered for their meat in Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam and other barbaric regions.

I know first-hand about the trade in Vietnam. Some years ago, riding on the back of a ramshackle moto-bike in Hanoi, my makeshift guide decided to swing by an open-air market where cooked dog remains — whole torsos, heads and tails — were displayed. 

He then took me to a “dog restaurant,” where a trio of giggly, visibly drunk male diners beseeched me to join them for some bubbling dog stew (I waved them off). It was nauseating. (Of course later, the guide and I feasted on a cobra that was slaughtered in front of us. This was not a banner day for animal welfare.)

Thank god I saw none of this sort of atrocity, dogs caged like chickens:

The newspaper story has a link to Four Paws, an animal welfare group out of Australia, to which I just recently and coincidentally donated $100 and plan to drop more. I implore all animals lovers to do the same. Look at the site. It will break your heart, hopefully not your bank.