Goodnight, Irene

Get ready for a misstepping weekend with Ringo Nischack and Harry von Glahn.

 

September 11

9/11 sketch by Laurie D. Olin

I will never forget seeing what hate can destroy…
I will never forget seeing what love can heal…

― Steve Maraboli ―

 

Japanese pirates

Japanese pirates were call Wakō. While originally entirely Japanese, later they included Chinese, Philipino and other southeast Asians. The video is a good history that covers the growth, spread and the ebb and flow of the Wakō's fortunes (as well as a fight over a slave girl mentioned in passing, a seeming constant of history when it comes to warriors).   

 

Cantinières and other camp followers

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Old-timey armies, and for that matter modern ones as well if you consider civilian contractors, almost always had a cloud of non-combatants that traveled with them. Cantinières were women attached to an army to provide canteen services. Camp followers were people, generally women and their children, who would informally travel with an army. They provided a variety of services: cooking, laundry, nursing, selling goods, and companionship, both unpaid and paid. 

La Bamba

Get ready for a nuptialized weekend with Shut Up & Kiss Me! 

 

Turning scrap metal into rebar

This is a video of a Korean Daehan Steel plant where scrap metal is salvaged and turned into rebar. They also, oddly enough, grow vegetables at it. The photography is excellent; several shots are quite spectacular. The video is not narrated, but you'll want to turn the captions on. They are informative and amusingly flippant at the same time.    

 

Happy Labor Day

Going to Work by L. S. Lowry

Work - Henry Van Dyke

Let me but do my work from day to day,
In field or forest, at the desk or loom,
In roaring market-place or tranquil room;
Let me but find it in my heart to say,
When vagrant wishes beckon me astray,
"This is my work; my blessing, not my doom;
"Of all who live, I am the one by whom
"This work can best be done in the right way."

Then shall I see it not too great, nor small,
To suit my spirit and to prove my powers;
Then shall I cheerful greet the labouring hours,
And cheerful turn, when the long shadows fall
At eventide, to play and love and rest,
Because I know for me my work is best.

 

Paintings with beds

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We spend ~1/3 of our life in a bed sleeping or... uh... otherwise engaged. These are paintings of beds: some regular beds, some sick beds, some death beds, some made beds, some unmade. Enjoy.

Tamally Maak

Get ready for a torch toting weekend with Serge Nikol and Etric Lyons.

 

Mr. Queen

Mr. Queen, which is available on Netflix, is a television show with the premise that a modern-day Korean male chef is magically transported to a Queen's body in the Joseon era (19th century). Were it an American show with that premise I would never watch it, anticipating that it would be awash with endless humorless gender lessons. 

However, it is a Korean show, so the Western gender studies stuff is nonexistent and instead they just mine the absurd situation for laughs. The result is a very funny and entertaining show that I highly recommend. In most of this post, which mainly covers the first episode, I'll try to avoid spoilers about events later in the show.

The cook, Jang Bong-Hwan, is the head chef at Blue House (Korea's White House). He's an arrogant, skirt-chasing, alpha male who thinks very highly of himself. He gets framed for corruption in the Presidential kitchen, and while being chased by the police, he falls off his balcony into a swimming pool and bonks his head on the bottom. When he wakes a beautiful woman in flowing robes swims up and kisses him. He passes out once more.

When he awakes again, he's in an old-fashioned room. He's disoriented, and when he finds a mirror, he is horrified to discover that he is now a pretty woman. He decides that he must be dreaming, although he's miffed that he's dreaming he is the girl instead of being with the girl. Eventually, he figures out things are too vivid for this to be a dream which throws him into a panic. 

He goes into the hallway to find it lined with maids bowing down to him calling him 'your Royal Highness' which only increases his hysteria. He blindly runs around with a tail of maids and eunuchs chasing after him until, as shown in the clip above, he decides that some twisted human trafficking outfit kidnapped him and gave him a sex change operation. It isn't until the implication of them all wearing old-timey clothes sinks in that he realizes he traveled through time as well as ending up in a different body. 

He calms down enough to start questioning his maids as to what happened to the woman whose body he's in. They're puzzled by the fact that he refers to the Queen as someone other than himself, but by this point they're dialing into the fact that their Queen appears to be a bit bonkers since she woke up from her near drowning. He discovers he is in the body of Kim So-yong, the Queen Bi (the King's fiancé). He also connects the water she almost drowned in to the water in the swimming pool he fell into, and decides water is the key to returning to his body. 

First Mr Queen runs around dunking his head in every bit of water he can find: mop buckets, horse troughs, and the like, but that doesn't work. It only convinces the maids that their Queen has a few more screws loose than they originally thought. He decides the lake the Queen nearly drowned in is the key, so he cons his maids into showing him where it is. As soon as he sees a sign pointing to it he sprints off to do a swan dive into it, only to land in the mud at the lake's bottom because it had been drained to prevent any more drownings. 

Mr Queen then remembers he's the Queen, so he orders his flunkies to refill the lake. They tell him they can't, because the orders came from higher up. So, covered in mud, he sets out to find the King to get water back into the lake.

When we meet King Cheoljong, he's in a pavilion reading a Korean version of the Kama Sutra. His eunuch tells the King he has been studying the book for too long. The King replies that he needs to properly prepare for his most important duty -- producing an heir. Oh-oh, Bong-Hwan (a.k.a. Mr Queen) may have another problem besides returning to his body.   

The King then sees Mr Queen and calls him over. Mr Queen lifts his skirts and runs over. Mr Queen barely greets the King, instead he immediately launches into asking/demanding that the lake be refilled. The King tells Mr Queen that he can't fill the lake because the draining was ordered by the Grand Queen Dowager and that he won't, or can't, rescind the order. 

As soon as the King first saw the mud-caked Mr Queen he had started holding his nose from the stench. This only annoys Mr Queen even more, and he ends up slapping the King to knock his hand off his nose. The palace staff is horrified. Also, as is the habit of middle school boys worldwide, the King has disguised his racy book with a fake cover.  Mr Queen gets interested in it and grabs it to look at it. The King grabs it back, and soon Mr Queen and the King are in a ridiculous pissing match over the book while the increasingly aghast palace staff looks on. Eventually, after their fight manages to demolish the book, Mr Queen leaves to sow chaos elsewhere.

The series is a type of Korean historical show called a sageuk, which frequently feature a lot of palace intrigue and this show is no different. We soon meet the Grand Queen Dowager, the real power in the palace, and her slimy brother, who are the main villains. The Royal marriage is for political purposes, and they're worried that the news of the Mr Queen's current bout of bizarre behavior will leak out and ruin their plans. So, they move the wedding up to the next day. 

Needless to say, Mr Queen is repulsed and horrified when he hears that news. To his priority of making it back to his body in the future, he now has to add not getting noodled by the King in the meanwhile. First Mr Queen tries to tell the King that he actually isn't the Queen, that he's really a man from the future. All that accomplishes is Mr Queen getting dragged off to see if the Court Physician can treat his case of sudden-onset insanity. 

The day of the wedding arrives. Mr Queen, who is buried in layers of ceremonial garb, doesn't know, nor does he care to know, the procedures and etiquette of a Royal wedding so he just sort of plows through it making a hash of things in the process. The palace denizens keep getting more bewildered and alarmed by his strange behavior. 

However, he makes it though the wedding and the night of matrimonial bliss is on the horizon...

Mr Queen's two principal maids preforming their hopeless task
of trying to keep their Queen prim and proper

Would I recommend it? Absolutely. It has good production values, music, sets, costumes, sword fights, and is one of the funniest shows I've seen in a long time. The character Mr Queen is a supremely self-confident fish out of water who careens through whatever situation he finds himself in and imagines he is handling it perfectly. He also, when speaking, mixes in modern Korean expressions and English loan words so the locals often times have no idea what he is even talking about. Plus, he tries to flirt with every pretty female he encounters, although they are always mystified by what he is going on about. His loony decisions and unhinged behavior are hugely entertaining. The people around him are always baffled by what he's saying and doing, and their hopelessly confused reactions are spot on.  

I have to give a special hat tip to Shin Hae Sun, the actress who plays Mr Queen/Kim So Yong. She captures the mannerism of men, the way they walk, sit, talk and their expressions. Added to her excellent acting is a male voice expressing her inner thoughts, so the viewer quickly accepts that it is a man inside the Queen's body. Shin Hae Sun creates a memorably silly character in the process. I doubt the comedy would work as well with another actress cast in the role. She carries the film and steals nearly every scene she is in.

Another fine performance is Kim Jung Hyun as King Cheoljong. When first introduced the King comes across as a pompous dimwit. We'll soon discover that there is more to him than meets the eye; he's only a puppet King, but like everybody else in the palace he is engaged in endless scheming. He also always tries to maintain what he supposes is the proper level of dignity for a King. Since he is usually Mr Queen's straight man, his blustering over Mr Queen's nonsensical antics works well. 

Court Lady Choi, played by Cha Chung Hwa, deserves mention. She's Mr Queen's principal attendant and she's tasked with maintaining the decorum of the Queen's office. Needless to say, with Mr Queen that's an impossible task and poor Court Lady Choi has a slow-motion nervous breakdown as the show progresses.

Jo Hwa Jin, played by Seol In Ah, is the Royal Concubine and the King's girlfriend. In the clip below she is the woman called Uibin (that's her title). She would rather be the Queen herself and is none too happy about the king's betrothal to Mr Queen. Since she's pretty, Mr Queen naturally tries to flirt with her. However, as is the case with all of his flirtees, she has no idea what he is doing. Instead, she thinks his odd behavior is just Mr Queen playing a 4-D chess version of palace politics and replies with veiled threats which pass well over Mr Queen's head.

Royal Chef Man Bok, played by Kim In Kwon, comes to rue that day he ever met Mr Queen, who takes over his kitchen and torments him endlessly: insulting his cooking, infesting the kitchen with his maids, and at one point reducing the Royal Chef to doing nothing more than tending to the fire.

Finally, here's another scene of Mr Queen in action. It shows him at his macho best.

Bohumil Kubišta

Click any image to enlarge

Bohumil Kubišta (1884-1918) was a Czech painter. He was first influenced by Expressionism, and later by Cubism. He studied color theory and geometry in artistic layout. He was very influential in the development of Czech modern art. He died young from the Spanish Flu.   

Bohumil Kubišta self-portrait

Some Of These Days

Get ready for a flouting weekend with the Hot Sardines.

 

Mutton curry and cabbage

Somewhere in Africa, the YouTube video doesn't say where, a village woman cooks a meal of mutton curry and cabbage. The meat is steamed with a small amount of water in a pot, and then the spices to make the curry are added. The cabbage is mixed with vegetables. She then mixes some sort of a flour concoction, it isn't bread, rather it is more of a paste.

She cooks it all over an open fire while around her, her kids who are well behaved, and the chickens occupy themselves. They eat it with their hands.

 

Rudolph Belarski

Click any image to enlarge

Rudolph Belarski (1900 - 1983) was an American artist who specialized in pulp magazine art. At a young age he quit school and went to work in coal mines. During that time, he taught himself art via correspondence courses. Eventually he began painting covers for various magazines. He did crime, sci-fi and adventure covers. Late in his life he became an instructor for correspondence schools, completing the circle so to speak.

Rudolph Belarski

Cara Bonita

Get ready for a beauteous weekend with Los Kjarkas.

 

Walking in Rosario

Rosario is a village in the Cavite province of the Philippines. It is a fishing village, which both catches and processes fish. In the past it had the reputation of being a rough area, with a lot of local gang activity. As you can see in the walk, although there is no overt hostility, there are a fair number if hard looking characters keeping a close eye on the camera man.

The village is very basic looking, with shacks mixed in with simple concrete block  buildings. The beach, with the small fishing boats pulled up onto it, is very scenic.

  

Thomas Benjamin Kennington

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Thomas Benjamin Kennington (1856-1916) was a British realist painter. As well as portraits, he is best remembered for his paintings of domestic scenes, with both the well-off and the poor as subjects. He worked in oils and watercolor.

Got My Mojo Workin'

Get ready for a thaumaturgical weekend with the Little Billie Band.

  

Riding to heaven on the backs of turtles

 (Note: this was first posted on November 17, 2009. I'm reposting it today for the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing)

A few years ago I happened to visited Hiroshima on August 7th, one day after the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city.

When you get off the streetcar from the train station the first thing you see is the ruin of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. The atomic bomb detonated almost directly overhead of the building. With its few still standing walls, and its dome stripped and leaving only its framework, it is the iconic ruin of Hiroshima.

When you stand at that building, if you turn in a circle you realize your standing in a bowl surrounded by hills. Most of the rest of the buildings in that bowl were reduced to rubble by the bomb blast and resulting fires.

When they cleared the rubble they set aside several blocks of the old city as the Peace Memorial Park. You walk south along the river to get to the entrance to the monuments. At the entrance card tables are set up where there are petitions for peace that can be signed. You can buy peace t-shirts and listen to folk musicians strumming guitars and singing about peace. It is a fitting sentiment for this place.

The most visited monument is the Children's Monument for Peace. A young girl named Sadako Sasaki contracted leukemia after the bombing. As she sickened in the hospital she remembered an old Japanese saying that if one folds a thousand paper cranes one is granted a wish. She spent the rest of her short life folding paper cranes, but died before she reached one thousand. The Children's Monument for Peace was built in her memory, and in memory of all the children who died from the bombing. It is covered with paper cranes that school children have folded and sent to the park.

As touching as he Children's monument was, I most wanted to see a different monument. The monument pictured with this post. The Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the A-bomb.

There were tens of thousands of Koreans in the city when it was bombed. Most were forced laborers who had been brought to the city, housed in barracks and worked in the munitions plants of Hiroshima. Some 40,000 were killed, and a another 30,000 injured in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the Koreans in Hiroshima were from Hapcheon, South Korea, and so sadly two cities ended up bearing the brunt of the attack (Atomic bomb survivors in South Korea still feel the wounds).

The Korean Monument was built in 1970 by South Koreans living in Japan and sited across the river and outside of the Peace Park. The Japanese authorities would not allow it to be placed in the Peace Park. It took until 1999 for permission to be granted to move it onto the Park's grounds.

As I stood in front of that Monument I could not help but reflect that all the paper cranes in the world would not have helped the dead honored by this memorial. That the peace petitions, while a fine sentiment, were no more substantial than Chamberlain's umbrella.

The Germans dressed prisoners up in Polish uniforms and shot them to justify their invasion that started the wider war in Europe. The Japanese used bayonets to stage their low-tech version of Hiroshima in Shangai as they spread ever deeper into China. The allies pounded cities with high explosives and incendiaries from the air. All across the globe men died in combat and civilians died behind the fronts. 

A few days after Hiroshima's destruction Nagasaki was bombed. Hirohito then taped his surrender speech. That night a cadre of Japanese officers ransacked the palace seeking to destroy the recording and postpone Japan's surrender. How do paper cranes and petitions solve that sort of madness?

In the end, to me at least, this small place in the Park was less about the bomb and more about Korean farmers taken from their villages and used as forced labor. A life spent at the whim of masters. Another tragedy of the war. 

My family and I were the only people at the monument when we visited it. The insciption on it reads, "Souls of the dead ride to heaven on the backs of turtles." At its base are small stones with Korean characters painted on them (pictured). The guidebook said you should leave a gift for the slain worker's ghosts. All I had were a couple of cigarettes. I supposed the ghosts might like to relax with a smoke and so I left them. It was all that I could do.
 

 

Women with handheld fans

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Summer is upon us, and with it comes heat and the need to cool off. One of the age-old methods to do that is the handheld paper or bamboo fan. They work well and can be either plain or decorated (this post is not about their decorations; a topic for another day). Aside from cooling, wielded in the right young lady's hands they can also be an effective tool for flirtation. Due to the prevalence of AC, they are far more common in the east than the west. 

I'm Into Something Good

Get ready for an unfledged weekend with The Bird And The Bee.

 

Shilin Night Market

The Shilin Night Market is one of the night markets in Taipei, Taiwan. A night market in an area where streets have been closed off and it is full of food stalls, merchant stands, activities for children and young couples. They are very social places where friends and families can gather to talk, eat, browse, and get some night air. 

The markets are very pleasant. I've been to several, including the one pictured above, and always enjoyed myself at them. Then again, aside from my home, Taiwan is probably my favorite spot on the Earth. Many fond memories of the place. Hopefully the CCP will be thwarted from screwing it up like they do everywhere they get their hands on. 

  

Karl Hagemeister's art

Click any time to enlarge

Karl Hagemeister (1848-1933) was a German landscape artist. In the 1880s he spent time in Paris where he absorbed impressionistic influences. The play of light and form became more pronounced in his work, and he developed a richer and vibrant color palette. He was well known and regarded in his day. The German hyper-inflation after WWI financially ruined him and he retreated to a more private and eventually less productive phase before his death. 

Karl Hagemeister

See You On the Other Side

Get ready for an adiós Ozzy weekend with Sterling R Jackson. 

 

China Salesman

This is a review of the 2017 Chinese action/comedy/propaganda film China Salesman. I don't know if you can find it online, I bought the stupid thing for this post (I need to work on my money management skills). There will be spoilers in this review.

It stars Dongxue Li as a salesman for a Chinese telecom company which is bidding for a contract to sell superior Chinese 3G telephone equipment to an African country. Opposing him is an Eeeeevil Western telephone company that's trying to win the bid so they can tank the country's phone network, thereby restarting a civil war so's they can sell arms to both sides. Diabolical Westerners, hiding their illicit arms trade behind a telephone company! 

If battling phone companies seems like an odd premise, bear in mind that this was made around the time that Huawei's reputation was swirling down the drain, so much of the nonsense in this film is just touting the wonders of Chinese 3G technology compared to the junk the Westerners put out. 

The producers of the film also planned an international release and so, to bolster its overseas box office, they cast two huge Hollywood action stars -- Steven Seagal and Mike Tyson. OK, maybe 'huge Hollywood action stars' is an exaggeration, although in Seagal's case, considering his ample girth, huge certainly fits.

 

Ms Ling and the China Salesman,
who can't afford a radio phone to call their headquarters,
whine about not being taken seriously

We are introduced to the China Salesman and his assistant Ruan Ling as they are riding into the capital city on camels. Driving past in a fancy car are Susanna, the blonde woman who is running the bidding, and Michael, the salesman for the Eeeeevil Western phone/weapons dealing company. That seems like a bit of a conflict of interest to me, but what do I know? Susanna and Michael, from the comfort of their air-conditioned car, smirk at the two Chinese yahoos on their camels.  

Later, while the Westerners settle into luxurious accommodations, the China Salesman and his sidekick open up their old regional office in the Capital. It is dusty and pretty run down looking. At one point the China Salesman even complains to Ling that they don't have a radio phone to call their headquarters in China. Wait, this movie is promoting the wonders of Chinese 3G telephony, and these two boobs can't even call their headquarters? 

We then cut to a bar ran by Steven Seagal. It's kind of like Rick's bar in Casablanca, but instead of Humphrey Bogart you get Seagal waddling around. He's tasting some hootch from a barrel, declares it to be good and hands over crates of guns he's trading for the booze. Now, I'm not an international arms dealer, but it strikes me that Seagal got the short end of the stick trading of all those automatic weapons for only a few gallons of whiskey. 

Then, who should happen to walk in but Mike Tyson. His backstory is that he is a fearsome African Chieftan. However, unfortunately for him his entire tribe was massacred and exterminated. His big ambition is to reconstitute his tribe. How he plans on doing that when they're all dead is a mystery - I guess he's just an optimist. 

Tyson, Seagal, and Seagal's stunt double duke it out
(image from Film Threat) 

Since there are two high alpha action stars in the same bar a fight is inevitable. One problem is Seagal is in his 'beached whale' phase so all he can do is sit and wave his arms around as he does some fearsome chair-fu. Meanwhile, Tyson wants nothing to do with that, he just wants to run around punching people. To solve the problem of providing a mobile Seagal for the fight they hired the world's skinniest stunt double to do the duty. The three of them bust up the place, crashing through walls and demolishing all props in sight. 

When the required amount of promotional video has been filmed, the fight ends with a Tyson victory. Seagal, his contract completed, thankfully largely disappears from the show. Tyson continues as a minor character with an amusingly absurd faux-African accent that changes from scene to scene. 

The movie's plot is pretty much of a mess. It stitches together over-the-top action sequences while pumping the superiority of Huawei telephones, whining about the lack of respect for China, blathering about the incomprehensible civil war, displaying supposed African culture, and revealing devious Westerners. My favorite Tyson appearance was at one of the innumerable, technobabble infused telephony negotiation sessions. Tyson crashes through the front door in an armored personnel carrier and touches off a massive gunfight. Way to negotiate Mike.

Who needs guns when you have a Chinese flag?

Another ridiculous scene is when the China Salesman needs to get to the south to repair a vital telephone relay tower. However, there is only one mountain pass they can use to get there, and currently that pass is being blocked by the two warring rebel factions who are engaged in a massive firefight. Trying to solve this conundrum, the China Salesman thinks for a bit and then gets a brainstorm. He breaks out a gigantic Chinese flag, mounts it on the back of his truck and starts to drive through the pass. Hilariously the rebels all stop fighting and instead stand up and start shouting "Its China!", "China good!", "Yea for China!" so the China Salesman can make it through the pass. Yea, that sounds plausible.   

Would I recommend you watch it? If you can get it for free the plot is preposterous, and it is stuffed full of ludicrously transparent propaganda. Still, it is a hoot and entertaining in a crappy B-movie sort of a way.