well hell. it's been awhile. no major events i feel like revealing, so i'll share some minutiae.
the other day as i was waiting for the subway, sweating my balls off, some old man came up to me with a rag and starting wiping my back with a towel. and then he ever-so-gently stroked my damp, tattooed skin saying "pretty" in korean. and somehow that didn't cross the oh so fine line between tender and pervy.
i guess that's all. i get to see jules and roar in less than one month. i'm fucking stoked! it's been almost a year since i've seen those assholes. we will conquer china, or at least the shandong province, one disgusting bottle of mao tai at a time. i should [fingers crossed] get a bitchin' case of alcohol poisoning while i'm over there. it's still a month away, so expect many more random outbursts like this leading up to my departure.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
bungee disappointment
so i didn't go bungee jumping. that's why i'm still alive enough to type this, i guess.
the night before i went, met up with fike, my suncheon chingu, in itaewon. yeah, yeah, i know, itaewon sucks. but whatever. getting drunk is getting drunk. we came up with the brilliant plan to just not go to sleep and stay up until we had to catch our bus at 7:30 in the am to go rafting and bungee-ing.
so we drank. and drank. and drank. at one point we were at a bar called gecko's. there was some crazy slamhound looking chick who appeared to be talking to herself, sitting alone at her table. these other slamhound/pussycat dolls rejects were sitting at the bar. anyhoo, me and fike started talking shit about the slamhound sitting by herself. yeah, whatever, that's what we judgemental humans do. so we're dicks. eventually she realized we were making fun of her, so she got up and left. then the pussycat dolls (who claimed to be her friends), came up to us and said we were assholes because we said their friend was fat, or some shit like that. i don't even remember. no, we didn't say she was fat, she just looks like a stupid, crazy whore. but a SKINNY stupid, crazy whore. is that better? anyhoo, the leader of the gaggle says "you ruined our friend's night, so now we're gonna ruin yours." um, ok. how? it was never revealed just how they would ruin our night, although the talk of the intent to ruin our night went on for way too long. instead, they gave fike and i a new inside joke. assah! i sure do loves me some girls who are fucking idiots. moving on...
we drank for a long time. around 4:30 or 5 we started to get a little sleepy. hey, it's natural. so we decided to sleep in the itaewon subway station on the ground until it opened. i woke up to some random korean man sort of nudging my shin to tell me to wake up. okay. get on the subway, go to our destination, and then we still had an hour and a half until the bus came. so we slept on two benches out in the open. woke up at 7:15 and there was the bus, a mere 20 feet away. assah!
got on the bus, expecting to sleep, but it was someone's bright idea to show the film masterpiece cliffhanger at full volume on the bus. fuck, dude. showed up at the rafting place 2 or so hours later. not in chuncheon, like i thought. some other korean city that starts with a ch and ends with an eon. did the rafting thing. that was pretty cool. it was nice to be in water in the summertime (aside from being caught in the rain, which is the only happy fun summertime water exposure i had had prior to the rafting trip). the scenery was beautiful. and i wasn't even crazily tired yet. the rapids were nowhere near life-threatening. i guess i'm just too extreme for my own good. there's a stupid no fear hat somewhere that says "if you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space." true dat, mr. no fear logo thinker upper.
after rafting, ate some grub and moved to the bungee place. this giant orange bridge was so cool. and as we drove up, i wasn't even really too freaked out about hurling myself off of it. at this point, i was pretty f-ing tired, and looking forward to getting home at a relatively early hour. the bus was sposed to leave around 5, according to the itinerary. nevermind the fact that 30 people wanted to bungee jump and there was a rain delay. so yeah, turned into almost 5 hours of waiting. ultimately, a group of people decided not to do it, hoping that enough of us backing out would get us back to seoul in time to get home. that was sort of my rationale. or maybe i just pussed out. i don't know. i can be a pretty impatient b-yotch when it comes down to it. but fike jumped. so that's cool. got the whole thing on video.
we left there at almost 8 pm, and didn't get back to seoul's express bus terminal until after 10 pm. keep in mind, i'm still going on what little sleep i got from the itaewon subway floor and random park bench in hongdae. so still on the bus, and i get dropped off at hongdae again. at this point it was nearly 11, so i said fuck it and took a taxi back to ilsan. an expensive taxi, but i was so damn tired.
so that's it. that's my underwhelming bungee jump that never was story. oh yeah, there were lots of families and very small children who were bungee jumping there. also, sometimes the guide person at the top (the one who straps you in) would push people off if they were being pussies about it (including one terrified 10 year old girl). i'm thinking maybe that's different than how they do it back en los estados unidos.
the night before i went, met up with fike, my suncheon chingu, in itaewon. yeah, yeah, i know, itaewon sucks. but whatever. getting drunk is getting drunk. we came up with the brilliant plan to just not go to sleep and stay up until we had to catch our bus at 7:30 in the am to go rafting and bungee-ing.
so we drank. and drank. and drank. at one point we were at a bar called gecko's. there was some crazy slamhound looking chick who appeared to be talking to herself, sitting alone at her table. these other slamhound/pussycat dolls rejects were sitting at the bar. anyhoo, me and fike started talking shit about the slamhound sitting by herself. yeah, whatever, that's what we judgemental humans do. so we're dicks. eventually she realized we were making fun of her, so she got up and left. then the pussycat dolls (who claimed to be her friends), came up to us and said we were assholes because we said their friend was fat, or some shit like that. i don't even remember. no, we didn't say she was fat, she just looks like a stupid, crazy whore. but a SKINNY stupid, crazy whore. is that better? anyhoo, the leader of the gaggle says "you ruined our friend's night, so now we're gonna ruin yours." um, ok. how? it was never revealed just how they would ruin our night, although the talk of the intent to ruin our night went on for way too long. instead, they gave fike and i a new inside joke. assah! i sure do loves me some girls who are fucking idiots. moving on...
we drank for a long time. around 4:30 or 5 we started to get a little sleepy. hey, it's natural. so we decided to sleep in the itaewon subway station on the ground until it opened. i woke up to some random korean man sort of nudging my shin to tell me to wake up. okay. get on the subway, go to our destination, and then we still had an hour and a half until the bus came. so we slept on two benches out in the open. woke up at 7:15 and there was the bus, a mere 20 feet away. assah!
got on the bus, expecting to sleep, but it was someone's bright idea to show the film masterpiece cliffhanger at full volume on the bus. fuck, dude. showed up at the rafting place 2 or so hours later. not in chuncheon, like i thought. some other korean city that starts with a ch and ends with an eon. did the rafting thing. that was pretty cool. it was nice to be in water in the summertime (aside from being caught in the rain, which is the only happy fun summertime water exposure i had had prior to the rafting trip). the scenery was beautiful. and i wasn't even crazily tired yet. the rapids were nowhere near life-threatening. i guess i'm just too extreme for my own good. there's a stupid no fear hat somewhere that says "if you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space." true dat, mr. no fear logo thinker upper.
after rafting, ate some grub and moved to the bungee place. this giant orange bridge was so cool. and as we drove up, i wasn't even really too freaked out about hurling myself off of it. at this point, i was pretty f-ing tired, and looking forward to getting home at a relatively early hour. the bus was sposed to leave around 5, according to the itinerary. nevermind the fact that 30 people wanted to bungee jump and there was a rain delay. so yeah, turned into almost 5 hours of waiting. ultimately, a group of people decided not to do it, hoping that enough of us backing out would get us back to seoul in time to get home. that was sort of my rationale. or maybe i just pussed out. i don't know. i can be a pretty impatient b-yotch when it comes down to it. but fike jumped. so that's cool. got the whole thing on video.
we left there at almost 8 pm, and didn't get back to seoul's express bus terminal until after 10 pm. keep in mind, i'm still going on what little sleep i got from the itaewon subway floor and random park bench in hongdae. so still on the bus, and i get dropped off at hongdae again. at this point it was nearly 11, so i said fuck it and took a taxi back to ilsan. an expensive taxi, but i was so damn tired.
so that's it. that's my underwhelming bungee jump that never was story. oh yeah, there were lots of families and very small children who were bungee jumping there. also, sometimes the guide person at the top (the one who straps you in) would push people off if they were being pussies about it (including one terrified 10 year old girl). i'm thinking maybe that's different than how they do it back en los estados unidos.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
i have a french press.
so i'm officially a lot cooler than you. sorry.
this is going to be another one of those "my job is fucking awesome" blogs. so tune out if you're sick of my recent bout of optimism.
the owner of my academy decided to pay the ilsan branch a surprise visit yesterday. i've been around dude-man on numerous occasions already, so it should have been no problem, but here he was at my school where i'm the only foreign teacher. so my nerves were a little unstable, compounded by the espresso-like sludge yielded by my wonderful french press earlier in the day. i felt a little shaky.
my boss didn't really observe my class, but he did take the time to ask every single employee what they thought of me in individual private meetings with him. so i was pleased to hear that i had gotten a glowing review. what's also cool was that he didn't tell me i was doing anything wrong. this wasn't just to be polite, i don't think. because in the past he's commented on lots of little things he likes or dislikes (for example, when i was giving a speech a month or so ago, he said he didn't like the way i stood). he has no problem being blunt. so that was pretty cool.
then he took all the teachers out to lunch and forced each of them to talk for 30 seconds about what they liked about me as a teacher and as a human. the general consesus was that i'm great, i don't complain, the students love me and i'm the hardest working foreigner they've ever seen. i think i don't deal well with compliments, never have. i always get embarassed and become overly humble--compliments have even been known to make me cry. or when people do really nice things for me for no apparent reason. i'm so used to ulterior motives that it's shocking when there aren't any. anyhoo, i realized yesterday that accepting compliments doesn't make you an asshole, and you don't always have to downplay your strong points--something i've done for far too long.
went drinking on tuesday night with my friend sunghee. i think it would be an understatement to say that some long overdue craziness ensued. i'll keep my exploits vague at best in this here blog. but i will say that the night involved lots of alcohol and a pink bowtie...
this is going to be another one of those "my job is fucking awesome" blogs. so tune out if you're sick of my recent bout of optimism.
the owner of my academy decided to pay the ilsan branch a surprise visit yesterday. i've been around dude-man on numerous occasions already, so it should have been no problem, but here he was at my school where i'm the only foreign teacher. so my nerves were a little unstable, compounded by the espresso-like sludge yielded by my wonderful french press earlier in the day. i felt a little shaky.
my boss didn't really observe my class, but he did take the time to ask every single employee what they thought of me in individual private meetings with him. so i was pleased to hear that i had gotten a glowing review. what's also cool was that he didn't tell me i was doing anything wrong. this wasn't just to be polite, i don't think. because in the past he's commented on lots of little things he likes or dislikes (for example, when i was giving a speech a month or so ago, he said he didn't like the way i stood). he has no problem being blunt. so that was pretty cool.
then he took all the teachers out to lunch and forced each of them to talk for 30 seconds about what they liked about me as a teacher and as a human. the general consesus was that i'm great, i don't complain, the students love me and i'm the hardest working foreigner they've ever seen. i think i don't deal well with compliments, never have. i always get embarassed and become overly humble--compliments have even been known to make me cry. or when people do really nice things for me for no apparent reason. i'm so used to ulterior motives that it's shocking when there aren't any. anyhoo, i realized yesterday that accepting compliments doesn't make you an asshole, and you don't always have to downplay your strong points--something i've done for far too long.
went drinking on tuesday night with my friend sunghee. i think it would be an understatement to say that some long overdue craziness ensued. i'll keep my exploits vague at best in this here blog. but i will say that the night involved lots of alcohol and a pink bowtie...
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
raindrops keep falling on my head.
well, not exactly. for starters, i'm sitting at a computer at work, totally sheltered from the outside world. but i do think an umbrella has magically fused itself to my left arm. seems like it's been raining in korea for longer than i've been alive. i don't remember when i saw sunshine for more than 20 minutes.
so yes, the rain continues, but i must say, i don't mind it one bit. i like the way it looks when the drops hit an already formed puddle. i like the way it smells, or what the smell reminds me of--eminence, missouri, family reunions and the backwoods demeanor of random derelict cousins on my mom's side. or swimming at stephen's lake in the wee-est of morning hours, cans of piss-warm stag orbiting me like satellites. i like the way it sounds. shit, ran out of metaphors. i guess rain sounds like rain, and that's purty/nostalgic enough. i particularly like all of these things when i'm walking home from work at 7:45 pm protected in the bubble-like cocoon that is my mp3 player, navigating the dark sidewalks and streets. this just might be my favorite part of the day. but sitting on my "veranda" looking at the plant that i have somehow managed not to kill is pretty swell too. small victories.
ilsan has this air of newness about it (and i am, in part, referring to the actual air in this city. seems cleaner than regular air). everything is lush and green, almost preternaturally so. so it's nice to smell the wet dirt and the plants and see the earthworms plugging away at some vague journey. a reminder that the rain is real. this damp-smelling earth is real. the cacophony of the cicadas is real. seriously, has anybody else noticed how fucking loud they are? there have to be a million of them hovering in the trees and bushes at any given moment...plotting. and, finally, the happiness yielded by such minutiae is perhaps the most real of all.
shitballs, it feels like it's been a while since i blogged.
this is my last week of summer intensive courses here at my jobby job. next week back to teaching 6 hours/day m-s. that's a routine i feel like my body's actually accustomed to. when i worked at shakes--the longest running job i've ever had--it was always that late afternoon into the nighttime shift. my body is calibrated to such a schedule. nothing but utmost productivity for me during these hours. but i guess that was back in the day when productivity was measured by a ratio of shots of jameson/hour. hopefully it's still my peak performance time. all i know is that i can't think of anything worse in the world than waking up before 7 am. i absolutely hate it. every morning as soon as "old ringtone" goes off on my cell phone at 6:30, my first instinct is to shed a little tear for the atrocity that is having to wake up that early. moving on...
weekend shenanigans. let me first say, i am not dead from bungee jumping. that's because it was postponed until this weekend. so that gives everyone a week to tell me how much of an impact i've had on their lives and how they always were secretly in love with me. hell yeah i'm fishing for compliments! sunday's cancelled bungee jumping and rafting excursion was intended to mark two significant events--my first return to chuncheon since the fallout of over a year ago, and my last chance to see miss erica stief (my suncheon chingu) before she left for america.
but instead i found myself en route to the seoul gimpo airport at 8 pm on a saturday night. from there i headed to gwangju (i actually thought the plane was just going to drive me to gwangju, as it seemed to taxi on the runway for a lifetime). took the bus from gwangju to suncheon, rolling in to the favorite drinkery at 11:30 pm. it felt really amazing to be back in suncheon, honestly. that makes me sound like i'm a soldier, returning from the war or something like that, tearing up at the local fish paste stand. i've only been gone for a little over a month, but it was a bizarre feeling sitting on the bus as it navigated these same streets that i used to navigate with such regularity. perspective is a great thing. i guess the very nature of the word is a revelation to me. stepping back and seeing things as they truly are, not getting caught up in the details. i dunno. going back made me realize that maybe i wasn't as miserable there as i tried to tell myself. i think i get in these moods where i can't function unless i go through some period of imposed melancholy. the only way i can appreciate any happiness is to make sure i'm clearly not happy first. then snapping out of it seems so clarifying and life-affirming. sort of a shitty deal though...
anyway, met up with erica and fike and the gang. drank a lot. it was nice to be a social being again. seems like i haven't been that way in recent memory (aside from japan. but it was nice to sit and talk with people i know. and to feel funny and vulgur and like myself. not that i haven't felt like myself lately. but yeah, i enjoy being anti-social sometimes. but being social ain't a bad deal either.
drank until 4:30 ish in the am, woke up to realize i was covered in donut bits on account of some minor war the night before, with dunkin donuts the weapon of choice. it would require some real brutality to murder someone with a donut, i guess. but there are worse ways to go.
i guess this is all for now.
oh, i miss having persons of the male persuasion to harbor feelings for. there's no one here i get to lust after. don't get me wrong, i still have plenty of lust in my, uh, heart. but it sort of sucks when it has no focus. yup, random. whatev.
so yes, the rain continues, but i must say, i don't mind it one bit. i like the way it looks when the drops hit an already formed puddle. i like the way it smells, or what the smell reminds me of--eminence, missouri, family reunions and the backwoods demeanor of random derelict cousins on my mom's side. or swimming at stephen's lake in the wee-est of morning hours, cans of piss-warm stag orbiting me like satellites. i like the way it sounds. shit, ran out of metaphors. i guess rain sounds like rain, and that's purty/nostalgic enough. i particularly like all of these things when i'm walking home from work at 7:45 pm protected in the bubble-like cocoon that is my mp3 player, navigating the dark sidewalks and streets. this just might be my favorite part of the day. but sitting on my "veranda" looking at the plant that i have somehow managed not to kill is pretty swell too. small victories.
ilsan has this air of newness about it (and i am, in part, referring to the actual air in this city. seems cleaner than regular air). everything is lush and green, almost preternaturally so. so it's nice to smell the wet dirt and the plants and see the earthworms plugging away at some vague journey. a reminder that the rain is real. this damp-smelling earth is real. the cacophony of the cicadas is real. seriously, has anybody else noticed how fucking loud they are? there have to be a million of them hovering in the trees and bushes at any given moment...plotting. and, finally, the happiness yielded by such minutiae is perhaps the most real of all.
shitballs, it feels like it's been a while since i blogged.
this is my last week of summer intensive courses here at my jobby job. next week back to teaching 6 hours/day m-s. that's a routine i feel like my body's actually accustomed to. when i worked at shakes--the longest running job i've ever had--it was always that late afternoon into the nighttime shift. my body is calibrated to such a schedule. nothing but utmost productivity for me during these hours. but i guess that was back in the day when productivity was measured by a ratio of shots of jameson/hour. hopefully it's still my peak performance time. all i know is that i can't think of anything worse in the world than waking up before 7 am. i absolutely hate it. every morning as soon as "old ringtone" goes off on my cell phone at 6:30, my first instinct is to shed a little tear for the atrocity that is having to wake up that early. moving on...
weekend shenanigans. let me first say, i am not dead from bungee jumping. that's because it was postponed until this weekend. so that gives everyone a week to tell me how much of an impact i've had on their lives and how they always were secretly in love with me. hell yeah i'm fishing for compliments! sunday's cancelled bungee jumping and rafting excursion was intended to mark two significant events--my first return to chuncheon since the fallout of over a year ago, and my last chance to see miss erica stief (my suncheon chingu) before she left for america.
but instead i found myself en route to the seoul gimpo airport at 8 pm on a saturday night. from there i headed to gwangju (i actually thought the plane was just going to drive me to gwangju, as it seemed to taxi on the runway for a lifetime). took the bus from gwangju to suncheon, rolling in to the favorite drinkery at 11:30 pm. it felt really amazing to be back in suncheon, honestly. that makes me sound like i'm a soldier, returning from the war or something like that, tearing up at the local fish paste stand. i've only been gone for a little over a month, but it was a bizarre feeling sitting on the bus as it navigated these same streets that i used to navigate with such regularity. perspective is a great thing. i guess the very nature of the word is a revelation to me. stepping back and seeing things as they truly are, not getting caught up in the details. i dunno. going back made me realize that maybe i wasn't as miserable there as i tried to tell myself. i think i get in these moods where i can't function unless i go through some period of imposed melancholy. the only way i can appreciate any happiness is to make sure i'm clearly not happy first. then snapping out of it seems so clarifying and life-affirming. sort of a shitty deal though...
anyway, met up with erica and fike and the gang. drank a lot. it was nice to be a social being again. seems like i haven't been that way in recent memory (aside from japan. but it was nice to sit and talk with people i know. and to feel funny and vulgur and like myself. not that i haven't felt like myself lately. but yeah, i enjoy being anti-social sometimes. but being social ain't a bad deal either.
drank until 4:30 ish in the am, woke up to realize i was covered in donut bits on account of some minor war the night before, with dunkin donuts the weapon of choice. it would require some real brutality to murder someone with a donut, i guess. but there are worse ways to go.
i guess this is all for now.
oh, i miss having persons of the male persuasion to harbor feelings for. there's no one here i get to lust after. don't get me wrong, i still have plenty of lust in my, uh, heart. but it sort of sucks when it has no focus. yup, random. whatev.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
o, fortuna
last night i went to a production of carl orff's carmina burana here in the ilsan. it was simultaneously amazing and disappointing. and how is that possible? fear not, i shall explain.
i randomly saw a poster for the production earlier this week. i don't know when the first time i heard carmina burana was, but i seem to recall it came from alicia (my older, musically inclined seester) in tdk cassette tape form. this was back in the days of me and jules making mixed tapes that featured nelson, u2, and songs from sister act, all on the same compilation. notice i had to mention julie too, so that i'm not the only one incriminated here. i am very pleased to say that our musical tastes have evolved, which is not to say that we no longer appreciate nelson, u2 or sister act (I and II, back in the habit), but maybe just not all together. you know, sensory overload.
my other musical outings in korea have been dismal, at best. this doesn't include rock bands i wrote about before, i'm talking about musical/theatrical endeavors. they always tend to have a korean bent to them. i believe the last "production" i went to was subway line 1 in suncheon. and that was fucking terrible. just terrible. so i didn't have high hopes for this performance. despite that, i splurged on a $30 ticket after finishing work last night. the venue itself was amazing, monolithic and modern. richardson auditorium it was not. i guess i forget that i live in a suburb of not only the largest city in korea, but one of the largest cities in the world.
i went in, bought a program, found my seat. i wasn't sure what to expect (i think i say that about a lot of things over here...), but the program said there was a ballet also. oh. ok. cool! i really wanted to be both a ballerina and a mechanic when i was little. so it's not surprising that now, in my old age, i don't know shit about cars and i can't dance. it's probably for the best, as i would have made one very awkward ballerina. i'm graceful like a giraffe. but i do enjoy watching ballet.
onstage there was an interesting set featuring a large wheel (yes, of fortune) and the ruins of what appeared to be a courtyard. the choir was wearing monk/abbey looking robes (just like the ones on the new belgium abbey beer labels), as were the dancers. they eventually wore more traditional ballet garb--second skin pants for the dudes, flowy dresses for the chicks. so the production began and the orchestra was amazing, the set was amazing, the dancers were the most amazing, the choir was amazing, the large video screens with the english and korean translations were amazing. what was not amazing was the fact that they were singing all the songs to this beautiful latin opera in korean. i'm going to go out on a limb and say i'm not the only person who thinks the korean language isn't a thing of particular beauty. if anything, it's what comes to mind when you try to think of something that is distinctly NOT beautiful. nasal and whiney. i really have no idea why they sang the whole thing in korean and not in the original latin. even the choir who performed before the actual production sang a whole program in latin. so it's not that they couldn't do it, it's that they opted against it for some reason. i dunno. if you're going to an italian opera in new york, you probably don't expect the people to sing it in english. so the korean language definitely took away from the whole experience. there was no "dulcissime" it was turned into "naaaeeeee-ggggaaaaahh.!!!!" granted, the soloists were AMAZING, but it just would have been so much better had they sung in latin. and of course, the jamie who is continually down on korea thought oh, this is just another way that koreans are ethnocentric. "why would we want to perform this outdated opera in latin, when we are koreans? koreans sing in korean language." but it definitely made some parts of the production sound more like traditional nasal korean songs, than old, beautiful latin songs. like in the lemonade commercials here. yes, i realize how few people have any idea what the fuck i'm talking about when i mention korean lemonade commercials.
the highlight of the show, besides the vocal acrobatics of all the soloists, was the song "Cignus ustus cantat (The Roast Swan)". these two robed dancers came out carrying a pole with another dancer hanging from it. he was dressed in some sort of loin cloth/feathers ensemble. but as they hoisted this pole up and down, this man dressed as a swan-man did pull ups, one armed pull ups and other various acrobatic feats on this bar. but it was all done with the fluidity of motion of ballet. it was sort of unbelieveable. my jaw dropped. and i didn't have to worry about anyone next to me seeing my jaw drop, as the ticket lady made sure to give the foreign chick an entire row of seats to herself, lest the korean people have to sit next to me.
and yes, i went to the show by myself. i pretty much do everything alone these days. i have no problem with that, but so many other people don't understand why i don't want to surround myself with a posse or something. i don't think my self-sufficience should be a pitiable or enviable thing. it just is.
but anyway. overall i was thoroughly impressed with the majority of the production.
and that's that. busy, yet boring days for jamie leigh mcgeorge.
i randomly saw a poster for the production earlier this week. i don't know when the first time i heard carmina burana was, but i seem to recall it came from alicia (my older, musically inclined seester) in tdk cassette tape form. this was back in the days of me and jules making mixed tapes that featured nelson, u2, and songs from sister act, all on the same compilation. notice i had to mention julie too, so that i'm not the only one incriminated here. i am very pleased to say that our musical tastes have evolved, which is not to say that we no longer appreciate nelson, u2 or sister act (I and II, back in the habit), but maybe just not all together. you know, sensory overload.
my other musical outings in korea have been dismal, at best. this doesn't include rock bands i wrote about before, i'm talking about musical/theatrical endeavors. they always tend to have a korean bent to them. i believe the last "production" i went to was subway line 1 in suncheon. and that was fucking terrible. just terrible. so i didn't have high hopes for this performance. despite that, i splurged on a $30 ticket after finishing work last night. the venue itself was amazing, monolithic and modern. richardson auditorium it was not. i guess i forget that i live in a suburb of not only the largest city in korea, but one of the largest cities in the world.
i went in, bought a program, found my seat. i wasn't sure what to expect (i think i say that about a lot of things over here...), but the program said there was a ballet also. oh. ok. cool! i really wanted to be both a ballerina and a mechanic when i was little. so it's not surprising that now, in my old age, i don't know shit about cars and i can't dance. it's probably for the best, as i would have made one very awkward ballerina. i'm graceful like a giraffe. but i do enjoy watching ballet.
onstage there was an interesting set featuring a large wheel (yes, of fortune) and the ruins of what appeared to be a courtyard. the choir was wearing monk/abbey looking robes (just like the ones on the new belgium abbey beer labels), as were the dancers. they eventually wore more traditional ballet garb--second skin pants for the dudes, flowy dresses for the chicks. so the production began and the orchestra was amazing, the set was amazing, the dancers were the most amazing, the choir was amazing, the large video screens with the english and korean translations were amazing. what was not amazing was the fact that they were singing all the songs to this beautiful latin opera in korean. i'm going to go out on a limb and say i'm not the only person who thinks the korean language isn't a thing of particular beauty. if anything, it's what comes to mind when you try to think of something that is distinctly NOT beautiful. nasal and whiney. i really have no idea why they sang the whole thing in korean and not in the original latin. even the choir who performed before the actual production sang a whole program in latin. so it's not that they couldn't do it, it's that they opted against it for some reason. i dunno. if you're going to an italian opera in new york, you probably don't expect the people to sing it in english. so the korean language definitely took away from the whole experience. there was no "dulcissime" it was turned into "naaaeeeee-ggggaaaaahh.!!!!" granted, the soloists were AMAZING, but it just would have been so much better had they sung in latin. and of course, the jamie who is continually down on korea thought oh, this is just another way that koreans are ethnocentric. "why would we want to perform this outdated opera in latin, when we are koreans? koreans sing in korean language." but it definitely made some parts of the production sound more like traditional nasal korean songs, than old, beautiful latin songs. like in the lemonade commercials here. yes, i realize how few people have any idea what the fuck i'm talking about when i mention korean lemonade commercials.
the highlight of the show, besides the vocal acrobatics of all the soloists, was the song "Cignus ustus cantat (The Roast Swan)". these two robed dancers came out carrying a pole with another dancer hanging from it. he was dressed in some sort of loin cloth/feathers ensemble. but as they hoisted this pole up and down, this man dressed as a swan-man did pull ups, one armed pull ups and other various acrobatic feats on this bar. but it was all done with the fluidity of motion of ballet. it was sort of unbelieveable. my jaw dropped. and i didn't have to worry about anyone next to me seeing my jaw drop, as the ticket lady made sure to give the foreign chick an entire row of seats to herself, lest the korean people have to sit next to me.
and yes, i went to the show by myself. i pretty much do everything alone these days. i have no problem with that, but so many other people don't understand why i don't want to surround myself with a posse or something. i don't think my self-sufficience should be a pitiable or enviable thing. it just is.
but anyway. overall i was thoroughly impressed with the majority of the production.
and that's that. busy, yet boring days for jamie leigh mcgeorge.
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