Author: WillJang

I mean technically, I no longer have Korean citizenship.

I can never tell if I am going overboard when I exercise my reluctance to be “Korean”. Out of the many I have met with similar backgrounds, whilst living across the great Pacific, a great bulk have been very aware of their Korean backgrounds and yearned to return to a place that, to them, was far more familiar. However, at the same time, some of my Korean – or to expand this to a broader spectrum, Asian-Canadian – friends were more or less on my wavelength, dreading the thought of coming into contact, in Canada or elsewhere, with the Asian culture that they were no longer a part of.

My, conflict with myself derives from the realization that my rebellious nature towards accepting my Korean roots is essentially some sort of existential angst. But that is not to exclude the fact that my formative years were spent in the west, not the east. Insert snarky joke about the rising sun. Of course I naturally conform with western traditions…that is what I grew up with to a certain degree. But during my infancy, I also lived in Korea until I was five. I remember taking the subway in Seoul with my grandpa and enjoying the hell out of it.
But this conflict, despite not being resolved, leads to another problem. I find myself to be hypercritical of a great deal of Korean related, for lack of a better word at the moment, things. I find so many things to be ridiculous. The idea that kids go to tutors until 10PM is absolutely ridiculous; the fact that Koreans thought the solution to a horrendous appearance in the World Cup was to try harder is beyond insane (how about you change the system in which you coach the players? Oh no? You think trying harder is all you need to be concerned about? Ok, fine. Don’t make critical decisions); and it boggles my mind that plastic surgery is so deeply integrated into Korean culture.

Before, I didn’t think this level of criticism was problematic, but then I realized I was not being fair. A lot of these things are bad, but they are a result of years of cultural development. But that is as empathetic as I will get.

There is an article called About Face by the New Yorker. It covers the cultural importance of plastic surgery in Korea. It talks about the numerous ads in the Gangnam subway stations, showcasing before and after pictures of girls who went through plastic surgery. But it also introduces many other aspects that I did not know about plastic surgery or in a broader sense, Korea’s obsession with trends and the sense of a collective “I”. Apparently, in the midst of the Korean War, American surgeons offered plastic surgery operations to Korean civilians who were injured amidst the combat. Apparently this was how plastic surgery got introduced to South Korea. Do I resent America for bringing in something that I find absolutely disgusting now? No. Of course not. At that moment, although there were cosmetic benefits, it was to help an individual not suffer to exceptional degrees.

Nowadays, as the article mentions, there is a show in Korea that brings out individuals who suffer disfigurement or other ailments that cause their faces to be unpleasant. Surgeons then offer a free cosmetic makeover and they bring out the new and beautiful person out to the cheer and applause of the crowd.

Can I really be disgusted by something like that? I am not sure. Some of these people do deserve something like this, and plastic surgery certainly isn’t cheap. If it makes them happy, I guess there is nothing to really be disgusted by.

But then comes the scenario of an individual who looks fine to begin with, and gets plastic surgery to look more like a celebrity that either they admire, or is incredibly popular with the vast majority of the Korean population. That…is disgusting. That this is something that is encouraged, that there are parents in Korea who tell their daughters or sons that they would look more handsome if they got a nose job. What the fuck people. Seriously, what the fuck.

I think for the most the part, there is an inherent natural aesthetic beauty to a face, but once you start mucking around with the parts, the face becomes visibly alienated, even if the surgeon is Michelangelo with the knife. It really troubles me to see that. Or the numerous bandaged women who go walking around in broad daylight, stopping to get as many trendy shirts and shoes as possible, or the young couples that are entering shopping malls whose average price for a shirt is over $150. I am too judgmental, I know. I could pick apart myself and my family and friends could probably point out a hundred other flaws that I was too ashamed to admit. But Damn.

However, despite all this, a part of me still wants to be a part of Korea. I want to retain some semblance of a connection with the country I was born in. I can’t lose that part of me completely, but I am afraid I already have.

Here is a link to the article.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face

 

I have come to realize now, how there is only a month left in this semester, and how after that, there will only be two years left of college left for me. I am halfway through college already? What the hell man. Unless some divine intervention occurs in the next two years I don’t think I will be at all ready for life outside of academia. I am not ready to be exposed to the unsheltered Americana that awaits me as soon as I get a piece of paper that certifies that my parents paid for my college experience. Even recently, I had to fill out tax forms, out of sheer formality, because I made the little income I did make this year. So much for putting off any semblance of adult hood, the fact that I was filling it out, no matter how trivial, or how little content those forms had, I still felt the nagging sensation at the back of my head, telling me that I am a fucking child still, and probably will be for the better part of my near future. I heard once that the word sophomore originated from the Greek words Sophos, meaning wise, and moros, meaning foolish. Yes, there are moments when I feel I am that fool who thinks he is wise. Sometimes I do attempt to give myself a little credit for something that would be universally acclaimed by the adult world as not that special at all. But I need to convince myself now and then that I am succeeding in certain avenues of my life. I need to stay sane don’t I? But even this trivial experience with taxes, and the epiphany that I am halfway through college already (epiphany might be an exaggeration for most people, but my sense of time is horrendous), is this maybe not a moment of moros? Who am I to think that that is proof of me nearing adulthood? Fucking bullshit I say. I crack myself up, far too often.

Perhaps what is important is that you recognize the importance of remaining the fool, because if you are a fool for long enough, you eventually become wise – at least to a certain degree, for you may be no Da Vinci, but at least you aren’t mentally drooling over everything that isn’t immediately stimulating. Pretending to be wise is in and of itself a foolish act. So instead, I am going to spend the rest of my semester barely getting work done and acting like some blind probe in space, just try to find little tidbits of stimulation anywhere I can find it, then realizing it is already 1:00 in the morning, make the decision that I should go to sleep, but then be unable to go to sleep because I did nothing that day, then guilt trip myself for a bit, then wonder about the trivial things I talked about in this blog post already, then think about how I do like two of my classes this semester, realize a wonderful idea for a short story, I won’t write it down of course because I am already in bed, so I repeat it to myself over and over again and hope that I will remember it when I wake up from about 5 hours of sleep cause I spent all this time thinking in bed after getting in late in the first place, this rush of ideas will continue, ideas for various essays that I need to work on perhaps, and after all is thought of and not completed, I will tell myself, “fuck it, you are an idiot,” and then fall asleep.

Or I do something I have always done as a child: try to stay awake so that I can be consciously aware of the very moment I fall asleep at, so that I can specifically experience that elusive switch between awake and asleep. When that happens, I stay awake till I see the rising sun. Another day of foolishness, with a heavy sprinkle of sleepiness. A combination that everyone loves on a Monday.

I was recently reading an article titled “The Trip Treatment” in The New Yorker. It talked about the recent trials regarding the usage of psychedelic drugs on cancer patients in an effort to reduce anxiety levels. For the most part, the usage of psilocybin, the hallucinatory compound found in LSD, proved to be very beneficial. Apparently, psilocybin reduced activity in the default-mode network, a part of our brain that, “lights up when we are daydreaming, removed from sensory processing, and engaging in higher-level ‘meta-cognitive’ processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, rumination, and ‘theory of mind’ – the ability to attribute mental states to others.” Some consider it to be the physical counterpart of the ego.

The article reasons that such a finding reflects how users of psychedelics become less concerned with the self, and begin to find answers from the relationship between the self and the expansive universe, they revert to childlike wonder. Children are, in the words of Alison Gopnik, a quoted developmental psychologist, “…basically tripping all the time.”

But this recent development, despite its results, does not romanticize the psychedelic drugs at all. By no means does it suggest public access of psilocybin, for the patients that they administered the drugs to, were screened carefully and painstakingly observed by professionals.

However, let it be said, that I do think this is a very interesting idea. As the article itself questions, if we are going to die, why not die with a calm mind? Of course, this counteracts the very principle of what a doctor is supposed to do for their jobs are to save people. Yet, isn’t the way we die our own choice? This is a very hot topic of debate, and can get very messy, so I will try to stay on how this article affected me in terms of writing.

The reason why I started reading The New Yorker recently was, not because I wanted to be an intellectual snob, but because I realized that it made me feel very stupid. There were so many things that I didn’t know about. Culture, science, sociology, and so on – basically, I knew that reading this magazine would stimulate me and get the juices flowing.

This article was no exception of the intellectual and creative promise the magazine offered to me. This article alone filled pages and pages in my notebook in regards to ideas for short stories. It also made me realize how a lot of what I have written since high school are all fairly connected or at least, relatable to one another. It made me realize how I would love to try and write a novel like Pynchon in the sense that I would have an amalgam of characters that somehow relate, not necessarily narratively, but in terms of themes or ideas, or maybe even absolutely unrelated.

When you allow yourself to be stimulated by the other peoples work, you are really freed of your own boundaries. Finding these gems reverts you to a childlike wonder – basically tripping all the time.

It is really easy to be drowned by noise these days. But when everything just shuts the fuck up for a second, you quickly revert to a primal state, where deeply hidden feelings start to resurface. Now, the exact psychology of that, or what I am about to talk about, is a mystery to me, but it is, needless to say, important to me.

How I will get to start to talk about choice is a mystery to me, so I will provide this non sequitur to bring about this post to what I think is one of the most profound and beautiful things about human existence – choice. But my interest lies not in the creations that mankind has made due to the power of choices, but rather, my concern lies within the realms of far more general observations.
These thoughts that I dawned upon recently, came when I was watching, or rather listening to an interview that Philip Seymour Hoffman did on the subject of happiness. At first I thought about whether or not I was happy at this point in my life. However, I quickly realized I wasn’t and moved on, figuring that lingering on such a detail would amount to nothing. But what peaked my curiosity was Hoffman’s death, how he died of a heroin overdose. It is easy to say that such brilliant individuals, and especially actors, succumb to such addictions all the time – a very submissive view towards clichés. However, this removes a lot of the mysteries that are so interesting. What if (of course I cannot say this is true, it is only a hypothetical situation), that Hoffman became addicted to heroin, not because he was a walking cliché of ‘artist depression’, but rather, because of rotten luck? Such a ridiculous hypothetical perhaps suggests the nonexistence of a mystery instead of a perpetuation of one, but then came the question: then how much of our death is choice? How much of our lives revolve around choice? If there is this mystery of chance, of some absolute randomized power that is far beyond our intelligence, then what does choice matter? If we decide to chase after this elusive property of the universe, if we decide to pursue the ‘big questions of life’, then what does it matter what choice we have, if all it leads down to is the absolute – that we will never know?

But I think it is in this very conundrum that choice finds its beauty. We can choose what grants us satisfaction or what we want to grant the power of importance to in our lives. We can let all the unanswerable enigmatic questions leave our faculties, queries which we cannot even begin to understand in the first place, and focus on what makes us happy in each of the individual moments that riddle our lives. A sort of mental relaxation that is paradoxically taxingly active. Perhaps I was watching a movie, saw a child help another child that fell, was just looking at the ocean and a couple of birds tussling for a crab, or watching a dog nap away on the front lawn of a house I walked by. These ephemeral moments of happiness are incredible, because they are so fleeting. Then if it is so fleeting, is my happiness from those moments fleeting as well? I don’t think so. I think we have the ability to hold onto things that are inherently ephemeral. Also, if anything, I find that if you just calm down for a second, these moments come to you more often than you would think. But I think learning to appreciate these small moments of emotional victory, also leads you to an awareness of the beauty found in our saddest moments.
But of course there is the absolute that unifies us all: death. But if we had that, and the knowledge of the universe, the answer to the question, I don’t suppose our lives would be very interesting. In fact, I have to imagine that God is bored – most of the time. I sort of imagine an old man who fell asleep on the couch with the TV on – subconsciously listening to a bunch of white noise. Yet, I don’t think we were ever meant to think in absolutes. It is certainly easy (but at the same time, not really) to think in black and white. But absolutes are terrifying, because we not only accept them easily, but there is an indeterminable power that forces us into believing that they corner us. We are slaves to them essentially, and the ability to understand them is sometimes refused by the very entity that we consider being so specific a law of the universe. We feel the power of its effect, yet its definition eludes us. That is why perhaps when we are robbed of choice by the power of absolutes, we feel cheated, and more importantly in distress.
Perhaps thinking in conjunction with other elements can help dwindle this fact. To consider how nothing exists in isolation in this world. If you successfully understand death, and accept it as something that inevitably happens, you can finally live, because life is invariably connected to death.
I am not saying any of this is easy. By no means do I think that such exercises in conscious choice can be done on such a whim. But I think just the act of thinking of greying what we once considered black and white can help us not so much understand the world more, but enjoy what little we grasp of it. I mean this entire post is an exercise in choice. I am not at all nearer to happiness, but I do feel a sort of energy.
The fact that we as humans have such intellectual liberties is ridiculously beautiful. So why not exercise it more – even if it brings us to dark places, or just makes realize that we have been in the corner the whole time.

Having just finished reading Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon’s psychedelic noir that spins its yarn in a way that the story eludes you as it escapes into marijuana Haze that Doc seems to dwell in for the full length of the novel. But behind the amusing scenes that are a product of his stoner persona – for instance when he falls asleep on top of a roof while attempting to do a stakeout, a slumber, during which, the very woman he was supposed to be observing is found surrounded by the dead body of her husband and his ex-marital affair and the all too poignant fuzz finding Doc on top of the roof – is a vicious torrent that threatens an era and all it stood for, including a relationship that Doc still holds onto.

Time always proceeds forward; it is a force that cannot be stopped.

“…yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.”

I think this book is a fairly accessible Pynchon novel. It is very entertaining and although still scattered with contemporary cultural references, reaching to both high and low brow humor, it is still far less daunting than Gravity’s Rainbow (which I won’t even pretend to understand, at least not until I read it a second time, but even then…God…that fucking book, I can’t even map out the storyline, only a couple of parts).

I must admit that reading Pynchon puts me in a paranoid mood, or at least, reminds me of my paranoia that had been lying dormant within the recesses of my mind. The balance of power that seems oddly tipped towards a certain demographic that exists but also doesn’t seem to exist, at least not to those within the inner circle.

But even thinking about this novel, or Gravity’s Rainbow, a word trails into my mind, ‘pretentious’. I am not sure if it such a description is apt; for the Pynchon’s novels or even those who decide to read them. Most certainly, they are not the type of books to read on a beach or start talking about with someone you just met (unless interest from the other party is expressed of course, then by all means do so!). But they are so vividly interesting and so holistically invite you into the world that Pynchon has decided to explore. Pynchon’s use of his encyclopedic knowledge has a reason; it isn’t just to be pretentious (I mean would a pretentious person include so many low brow jokes?).

Inherent Vice has many moments where I laughed out loud, a incredibly rare occurrence for me when I am reading a novel. Other than the earlier scene I described, in the novel, the way Doc and Sauncho meet is when Sauncho, trying to buy a sifter for his marijuana has a sudden moment of paranoia and asks Doc, who is at the same supermarket late at night in order to satisfy a sudden chocolate craving, if he can put his sifter with Doc’s stuff at the checkout, to which Doc responds, “What about all this chocolate man?” So the two end up buying much more groceries than they ever needed. Then there is another scene where Sauncho calls up Doc. He had just watched The Wizard of Oz. So what he asks Doc is, when the movie starts out, the movie is black and white for us, but we imagine that Dorothy sees her own world as color, so when the movie shifts to Technicolor, what kind of psychedelic high-intensity color does she see?

Even if you feel reading Pynchon is pretentious, I think you need not worry about that that much. Just read this entertaining book, I guarantee it will make you laugh.

Starting off on a shot of the waters that are troubled by a ships path, The Master is a film that is as enigmatic and atmospheric as its opening sequence. Freddy, barely peeks his head above the barrier of the ship, like a turtle peeking out into the world that we do not see, with tired and withered eyes that profess a sense of boredom. Or much more?

At first I refrained from writing about this film because I feared the inevitable; my words will do this film no justice. However, given that I try to make my blog posts as impulsive as possible, instead of an approach that is calculated, I said fuck it, and now here I am, typing away on a Saturday night trying to rack my mind for things to say. Honestly, this entire paragraph has been written because I am stalling for my mind as it attempts to get online. I refuse to stop typing. Silly.

Interestingly, this film, shot on 65mm, this masterpiece, has some influences from a film called Baraka, a non-narrative documentary that is also shot on 65. The opening sequence of Baraka has a scene where we see a monkey high in the mountains resting in a natural hot spring, slowly lulling off to sleep. This very scene mirrors Joaquin’s first appearance in The Master. In fact, Paul Thomas Anderson told Joaquin about Baraka and that specific scene. (2:05)

(Another interesting influence is John Huston’s wartime documentary “Let There Be Light” check it out.)

I find this interesting, because Joaquin’s character (Freddy) is arguably devolved – a monkey in a homo-sapiens world. Whereas on the other side, Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character, has a God complex of sorts, believing himself to be beyond human temptations and primal urges. But Paul Thomas Anderson, in his clever way of exploring polar opposites by entering into the in-between point between the duality that persists throughout the film, suggests that even Hoffman (or Lancaster Dodd) is no more a God than Freddy is civilized.

Given this kind of in-depth and intricate character study, it is no wonder that an author like Thomas Pynchon approved of a script written by Paul Thomas Anderson (the script for Inherent Vice). But back to the master.

The film is, “technically speaking”, a very boring film. The entire movie is just people talking and all the characters kind of just end up where they began. But the gorgeous cinematography and the excellent, nuanced, and poignant acting by Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams get the viewer sucked in. You always seem to come back for more. There is something here, there is something here.

By now, I have seen this film at least five times. I dare not go into depth regarding what I think the film is actually about. So I will end it here by providing a trailer to entice those who do not like to read. Also I will say, I must say, I feel like I ruined the film for those who have not seen it. I shouldn’t have written this. And if you are one of those people who refrain from divining into these sorts of films because you are afraid to be considered “pretentious” to you I say, this film is not pretentious, it is beautiful, and also, who fucking cares?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ1O1vb9AUU