Progress Report 10.1
Amyonghi hasseyo, bugger-lugs.
First up, let me apologise for the late submission of this report. I've spent the weekend at the Portapoint Rock Festival in Incheon (just outside of Seoul), and I was too poorly to attempt to write anything yesterday. In fact, I spent all of yesterday laid prone in bed watching rubbish American TV shows, apart from four hours in the early part of the day, during which I'm led to understand I went to work and taught English.
One of the programmes was about some craggy-faced cop in a small American town whose partner has a beard. Issues of international importance seem to regularly come to a head in this small town, and are always resolved inside of fifty minutes, thanks mainly to the application of small-town, down-home common sense by the aforementioned Hasselhoff-a-like officer. For instance, in yesterday's saga, the difficult issues of Germany's postwar guilt and Jewish forgiveness of the Holocaust were figuratively but thoroughly addressed when a Jewish peace-campaigning Holocaust survivor received a heart transplanted from a newly-dead neo-Nazi. The Nazi had come a cropper when his own son had accidentally shot him with the automatic assault rifle bought to celebrate the shooting of the Jewish peace campaigner's son, who in turn had taken a bullet for heckling a neo-Nazi rally which he had been advised against attending by our smalltown but worldly-wise cop-hero. It was all challenging stuff that never once veered into utterly ludicrous and toe-curlingly melodramatic nonsense - even the scene where the recently-bereaved peace campaigner was told that he had a Nazi heart pumping in his chest and discordant strings swelled over his shouts of 'no!!' as the camera tilted, zoomed and panned was tastefully and delicately handled. Anyway, the reason I mention it is because I want to know what this televisual treat is called. I can't tell you, as the titles are in Korean. Does it ring any bells with anyone? I think it's from the mid to late Eighties, and I imagine it would have occupied a similar timeslot to crap like The Fall Guy or TJ Hooker. Any assistance will be gratefully received.
Yeah, that was yesterday. I had sunstroke and a hangover and ninety per cent of my body was mosquito bites. I've displayed my usual man-of-steel capacity for sunlight by suffering both sunburn and -stroke only a matter of hours after summer began. Up until Sunday lunchtime, the rainy season was still with us and as it has been siling it down for the past three weeks, the festival ground was a mire of mud and water that would have made the Somme look like a golf green. But then, like a click of the fingers, Sunday went from grey to blue and the rain went away to wherever it spends the summer. However, little good this did us - we only had tickets for the Saturday.
This entitled us to see, in reverse temporal order, Placebo, Black Eyed Peas, some K-Pop nonsense and some Korean metal. I had only agreed to go on the basis that I would get to see Nuno Bettencourt's new band, but he'd been moved to the Sunday and so my post-ironic appreciation of Extreme's ex-frontman was foiled before it began. However, I did get to laugh at Placebo, yawn at K-Pop and witness a fascinating and once-in-a-lifetime statistical anomaly during the course of the Black Eyed Peas performance, of which I'll tell you shortly.
We arrived at the ground at the precautiously early hour of midday and spent the first hour wondering at the mud. There was not a blade of grass to be seen anywhere; it was all ankle-deep filth. Wondering gave way to drinking, when, after lingering on precipice of sobriety for precisely an hour too long, I demanded we decamp to a beer tent and procede to juice up. This we duly did, and to the best of my recollection, this is where we spent most of the rest of the day. I recall the occasional sortie to the main stage or, until drunkenness had chased off decorum and we'd started weeing anywhere, to the portaloos, but this small beer tent remained our base of operations for the better part of the day. Here company came and went, and here I met a nice girl from New York. Unfortunately, she embarassed me in a mortifying way.
She was sitting across from me under the canvas of the tent as darkness came to Incheon. We were chatting away pleasantly for some time. Until she let herself down, things were going very well for her.
The tables and chairs in the tent were arranged upon a raised wooden platform (some might say precariously arranged, but I wouldn't want to offer any pre-excuse), to prevent them being swallowed whole by the quagmire. It might be said that this platfrom was not of sufficient dimensions to hold all the furniture that it had been asked to, but I would dispute this, as nobody else seemed to be having any problems. Nobody except this New Yorker.
She had somehow contrived to unwittingly manoeuver one of the back legs of her chair a few inches proud of the platform, seriously reducing the stability of the apparatus. As a result, she concluded an anecdote by leaning back in her chair and, with a squeal, promptly disappeared from view. As two Koreans rushed to her aid, I did what any British person would do faced with similar circumstances - I lit a cigarette, picked at a hangnail, pretended I didn't know her. What else could I do? I was mortified. All the while, the kerfuffle remained purely in my peripheral vision. I monitored the helping-up, the recovery of the chair, the removal of mud, but was simply too embarassed to assist.
'Where've you been?' I demanded to know when she was helped back into her seat. This provoked her to come around the table and slap my back and shoulders.
Comeuppance was mine later in the night though. I went for a burton on the way into the dance tent at 4am, leaving me to try and retain verticality from a foot-deep puddle single-handed as she marched on ahead. No manners, these Americans.
But before then, I'd witnessed a singularly singular occurrence whilst the Black Eyed Peas were on stage. Despite the fact that the Black Eyed Peas manage to be the least cool black people in the world, the crowd were massed. This made what happened next all the more strange. They walked out, trying to shout 'Republic of Korea' in Korean ('Dae-ha-min-guk') but getting it laughably wrong. Still everyone cheered. They performed 'Let's Get Retarded' (renamed to 'Let's Get It Started' in the UK for obvious reasons of taste). Still everyone cheered. There was only one voice of dissent. Herein lies the miracle. As the Black Eyed Peas gave it their all in their own particular glakey way, there was only my own voice heckling.
Can you imagine that happening anywhere but Korea? It would be like getting struck twice by lightening whilst getting your sixth number on the lottery. Try and visualise it and you'll find it impossible to actually imagine: The Black Eyed Peas finish 'Shut Up (Just Shut Up Shut Up)' and only one voice out of ten thousand is shouting 'Get off!... Get OFF! You're SHIT!!'.
Later, the Korea Times would remark in a review of the festival that their perfomance was marred by "three white American boys throwing themselves into other revellers as they danced". No mention was made of the single voice telling it like it was - the journo obviously didn't want to risk their credibility. That, by the way, was the only off-colour note reported from the whole day - three Americans moshing a little. Compare British style - "the performance was slightly marred by hundreds of bottles of piss being thrown at the performers, the portaloos being up-ended and set alight, and a full-scale riot in the campsite in which several revellers died." You can tell this is Korea's first ever full scale festival, can't you?
Right, I should be getting along - I'm going to the gym. Just time to say express my keenest gratitudinal wishes to Keren 'Meow' No-Fixed-Surname for her extremely generous donation to my appeal. She sent me: Manhattan Nocturne, by Colin Harrison; The War Zone, by Alexander Stewart; Memed, My Hawk, by Yashar Kemal (not too sure about that one); Midwives, by Chris Bohjalian, and, because she evidently thinks I'm some sort of sexual pervert, The Story of O, by Pauline Reage. Frankly, this little haul makes Xanthe's contribution last week look positively ordinary. Think you can do better?
I would also like to thank Rob 'Llanelli Boy' James once again, as I particularly enjoyed his contribution - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. In the spirit of bi-directional giving, I'd like to send this book to the first person who emails me and asks for it. (Unless Rob wants it back of course, in which case, he's got first bagsies on it.)
Later this week, I should have some pictures for you, promise. Also, I hope to eat dog either this week or next. If you really, really don't want me to, let me know as soon as possible.
That is all,
Amyongh hasseyo,
S
First up, let me apologise for the late submission of this report. I've spent the weekend at the Portapoint Rock Festival in Incheon (just outside of Seoul), and I was too poorly to attempt to write anything yesterday. In fact, I spent all of yesterday laid prone in bed watching rubbish American TV shows, apart from four hours in the early part of the day, during which I'm led to understand I went to work and taught English.
One of the programmes was about some craggy-faced cop in a small American town whose partner has a beard. Issues of international importance seem to regularly come to a head in this small town, and are always resolved inside of fifty minutes, thanks mainly to the application of small-town, down-home common sense by the aforementioned Hasselhoff-a-like officer. For instance, in yesterday's saga, the difficult issues of Germany's postwar guilt and Jewish forgiveness of the Holocaust were figuratively but thoroughly addressed when a Jewish peace-campaigning Holocaust survivor received a heart transplanted from a newly-dead neo-Nazi. The Nazi had come a cropper when his own son had accidentally shot him with the automatic assault rifle bought to celebrate the shooting of the Jewish peace campaigner's son, who in turn had taken a bullet for heckling a neo-Nazi rally which he had been advised against attending by our smalltown but worldly-wise cop-hero. It was all challenging stuff that never once veered into utterly ludicrous and toe-curlingly melodramatic nonsense - even the scene where the recently-bereaved peace campaigner was told that he had a Nazi heart pumping in his chest and discordant strings swelled over his shouts of 'no!!' as the camera tilted, zoomed and panned was tastefully and delicately handled. Anyway, the reason I mention it is because I want to know what this televisual treat is called. I can't tell you, as the titles are in Korean. Does it ring any bells with anyone? I think it's from the mid to late Eighties, and I imagine it would have occupied a similar timeslot to crap like The Fall Guy or TJ Hooker. Any assistance will be gratefully received.
Yeah, that was yesterday. I had sunstroke and a hangover and ninety per cent of my body was mosquito bites. I've displayed my usual man-of-steel capacity for sunlight by suffering both sunburn and -stroke only a matter of hours after summer began. Up until Sunday lunchtime, the rainy season was still with us and as it has been siling it down for the past three weeks, the festival ground was a mire of mud and water that would have made the Somme look like a golf green. But then, like a click of the fingers, Sunday went from grey to blue and the rain went away to wherever it spends the summer. However, little good this did us - we only had tickets for the Saturday.
This entitled us to see, in reverse temporal order, Placebo, Black Eyed Peas, some K-Pop nonsense and some Korean metal. I had only agreed to go on the basis that I would get to see Nuno Bettencourt's new band, but he'd been moved to the Sunday and so my post-ironic appreciation of Extreme's ex-frontman was foiled before it began. However, I did get to laugh at Placebo, yawn at K-Pop and witness a fascinating and once-in-a-lifetime statistical anomaly during the course of the Black Eyed Peas performance, of which I'll tell you shortly.
We arrived at the ground at the precautiously early hour of midday and spent the first hour wondering at the mud. There was not a blade of grass to be seen anywhere; it was all ankle-deep filth. Wondering gave way to drinking, when, after lingering on precipice of sobriety for precisely an hour too long, I demanded we decamp to a beer tent and procede to juice up. This we duly did, and to the best of my recollection, this is where we spent most of the rest of the day. I recall the occasional sortie to the main stage or, until drunkenness had chased off decorum and we'd started weeing anywhere, to the portaloos, but this small beer tent remained our base of operations for the better part of the day. Here company came and went, and here I met a nice girl from New York. Unfortunately, she embarassed me in a mortifying way.
She was sitting across from me under the canvas of the tent as darkness came to Incheon. We were chatting away pleasantly for some time. Until she let herself down, things were going very well for her.
The tables and chairs in the tent were arranged upon a raised wooden platform (some might say precariously arranged, but I wouldn't want to offer any pre-excuse), to prevent them being swallowed whole by the quagmire. It might be said that this platfrom was not of sufficient dimensions to hold all the furniture that it had been asked to, but I would dispute this, as nobody else seemed to be having any problems. Nobody except this New Yorker.
She had somehow contrived to unwittingly manoeuver one of the back legs of her chair a few inches proud of the platform, seriously reducing the stability of the apparatus. As a result, she concluded an anecdote by leaning back in her chair and, with a squeal, promptly disappeared from view. As two Koreans rushed to her aid, I did what any British person would do faced with similar circumstances - I lit a cigarette, picked at a hangnail, pretended I didn't know her. What else could I do? I was mortified. All the while, the kerfuffle remained purely in my peripheral vision. I monitored the helping-up, the recovery of the chair, the removal of mud, but was simply too embarassed to assist.
'Where've you been?' I demanded to know when she was helped back into her seat. This provoked her to come around the table and slap my back and shoulders.
Comeuppance was mine later in the night though. I went for a burton on the way into the dance tent at 4am, leaving me to try and retain verticality from a foot-deep puddle single-handed as she marched on ahead. No manners, these Americans.
But before then, I'd witnessed a singularly singular occurrence whilst the Black Eyed Peas were on stage. Despite the fact that the Black Eyed Peas manage to be the least cool black people in the world, the crowd were massed. This made what happened next all the more strange. They walked out, trying to shout 'Republic of Korea' in Korean ('Dae-ha-min-guk') but getting it laughably wrong. Still everyone cheered. They performed 'Let's Get Retarded' (renamed to 'Let's Get It Started' in the UK for obvious reasons of taste). Still everyone cheered. There was only one voice of dissent. Herein lies the miracle. As the Black Eyed Peas gave it their all in their own particular glakey way, there was only my own voice heckling.
Can you imagine that happening anywhere but Korea? It would be like getting struck twice by lightening whilst getting your sixth number on the lottery. Try and visualise it and you'll find it impossible to actually imagine: The Black Eyed Peas finish 'Shut Up (Just Shut Up Shut Up)' and only one voice out of ten thousand is shouting 'Get off!... Get OFF! You're SHIT!!'.
Later, the Korea Times would remark in a review of the festival that their perfomance was marred by "three white American boys throwing themselves into other revellers as they danced". No mention was made of the single voice telling it like it was - the journo obviously didn't want to risk their credibility. That, by the way, was the only off-colour note reported from the whole day - three Americans moshing a little. Compare British style - "the performance was slightly marred by hundreds of bottles of piss being thrown at the performers, the portaloos being up-ended and set alight, and a full-scale riot in the campsite in which several revellers died." You can tell this is Korea's first ever full scale festival, can't you?
Right, I should be getting along - I'm going to the gym. Just time to say express my keenest gratitudinal wishes to Keren 'Meow' No-Fixed-Surname for her extremely generous donation to my appeal. She sent me: Manhattan Nocturne, by Colin Harrison; The War Zone, by Alexander Stewart; Memed, My Hawk, by Yashar Kemal (not too sure about that one); Midwives, by Chris Bohjalian, and, because she evidently thinks I'm some sort of sexual pervert, The Story of O, by Pauline Reage. Frankly, this little haul makes Xanthe's contribution last week look positively ordinary. Think you can do better?
I would also like to thank Rob 'Llanelli Boy' James once again, as I particularly enjoyed his contribution - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. In the spirit of bi-directional giving, I'd like to send this book to the first person who emails me and asks for it. (Unless Rob wants it back of course, in which case, he's got first bagsies on it.)
Later this week, I should have some pictures for you, promise. Also, I hope to eat dog either this week or next. If you really, really don't want me to, let me know as soon as possible.
That is all,
Amyongh hasseyo,
S
posted by Stephen Beckett at 2:28 PM
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