Low Life

Oh Hee-dong and his uncle Gwan-seok
(click any image to enlarge)

Low Life is a Korean TV heist caper set in the 1970s. It starts with a man, Gwan-seok, and his nephew Oh Hee-dong getting out of prison. They're nothing more than a couple of petty criminals. While in prison they had heard a story of a fisherman who had brought up a valuable piece of pottery in his net. The pottery had come from a wreck of an old Chinese vessel that was carrying gold and precious Song and Yuan dynasty pottery to Japan which had sunk in Korean waters in 1323. 

Gwan-seok decides that they'll try to dive on the wreck to recover some of the pottery which is extremely valuable. He connects with a shady pottery dealer, who deals in forged as well as authentic pottery, to use him as his fence. 

To fund the endeavor the fence connects him with Yang Jung-sook, the gold-digging wife a rich developer. She has her own agenda. Her husband is building an urban complex, and she plans on upping her social status by adding a museum to it where she will display the pottery. Well, display some of it in the front, the rest of the museum will be full of forgeries, and she'll sell the remaining pieces to turn a tidy profit.

Yang Jung-sook the financer for the looting

Gwan-seok gathers up his nephew and some flunkies and heads to the coastal village he'll run the salvaging operation from. The boat captain he intends on using, who is perhaps the sketchiest character on the show, decides his boat is too small and so he has to borrow his cousin's larger vessel. 

Everybody in the fishing village knows about the wreck, and so they quickly figure out what the boys from Seoul are up to. The local goons aren't happy to see Gwan-seok's gang roll into town and so a fight soon ensues. 

However, older heads prevail and they decide, due to the stakes of the operation, to pool forces because the job is too big to do alone. Regardless, bad blood simmers between the two groups which threatens to break into more fighting at any moment. Oh, they also bribe the local police to turn a blind eye to what they are up to. 

The Seoul goons face-off against the bumpkin goons

As the show goes on it becomes apparent that they really don't know what they are doing. They have no idea of how to loot a sunken ship, so most of their plans go completely awry and they try to fix things by brute forcing it with more people. This only deepens their problems because more people mean more shares to be divided, and dividing shares, which is already a complex enough problem, is made worse by their greed and mistrust of each other. And that mistrust is well deserved, because these dirtballs would, and do, back-stab each other in an instant.

Of course, it all goes pear-shaped, and watching things go off the rails is a lot of the fun of the show. It's well-done: nicely filmed, written, and acted. It is certainly worth watching. I saw it on Disney, I'm not sure if you could find it elsewhere. 

Their fine salvage ships

     

Baseball paintings

Click any image to enlarge

Now that the World Glass, or World Pot, or whatever that soccer tournament is called is over we can get back to more interesting and exciting sports. I'll admit to watching none of the World Dish matches. However, through some sort of cultural osmosis I figured out that, since penalty shots offer the highest odds of scoring, the most popular play is to flop on the ground and fake an injury to try to get a penalty shot. It sounds screwy to me, but what do you expect of a sport that uses feet instead of hands with their evolutionarily advanced opposable thumbs?

Anyway, since summer is upon us baseball teams, unless they've already bumbled their way out of contention, are entering the pennant race. So, to flush our memories of the World Cutlery matches, I offer up paintings of people playing the fine sport of baseball. They're mainly American, but since baseball is popular in Asia as well, I've also added in a few Japanese baseball paintings. 

Johnny Guitar

Get ready for an overblown weekend with Anastasiya Norenko,
Pavel Velikohatsky, Angelina Kharchuk, Tala Siekierzynska and Ekaterina Serbina

 

Preparing a meal in rural Nepal

The video is from a valley in eastern Nepal. It starts with the grandparents grinding corn and millet for flour. Their grandkids, who are visiting during a school holiday, gather fruits and greens. They tend to their animals and then gather to cook and eat a meal.

The valley they're in is very lush. I always pictured Nepal being nothing but snowy mountain tops with sherpas and Yeti running about. However, where they live it is very green with a lot of foliage. 

  

The Macchiaioli painters

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The Macchiaioli painters were active in Florence, Italy in the mid 19th century. They were revolutionaries who supported the fight for the unification of Italy. They broke from the academic style of painting and, through their use of color and form, are considered proto impressionists who emerged a decade before the more famous French impressionists who followed.  

Members of the Macchiaioli at the Caffè Michelagnolo

Total Eclipse of the Heart

Get ready for an occultationing weekend with Angie McMahon.

 

Walking in Yangon

Yangon is what the old city of Rangoon is currently called. In 1989 the military junta changed its name, as well as changing the country's name from Burma to Myanmar. The name changes business gets tiresome, but I guess since we changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, we can't complain too much.   

At any rate, the walk is through some very busy main and side streets. There were a tremendous number of food stalls everywhere. In my post on eating in ancient Rome, it was stated that the Romans primarily ate street food because their apartments weren't really set up for cooking -- I wondered if that wasn't the case in this city?

The buildings were a bit run down looking, with burglar bars even on upper story windows which is never a good sign. However, the people were dressed in new looking clothes and there were nice cars parked about. I'm guessing it was a middle-class neighborhood.