Tom Downey: his career might explain the downfall of traditional media

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Seoul-of-a-New-Machine-174966501.html


a) Using puns on Seoul in anything

b) "just finding any Koreans dressed as well as the people at this party would have been impossible back then."  materialism, similar to deliverance.  highest rate of suicide in the world, 50% above the #2 country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_suicide_rate

c) "the city now contains ten million people, 20 percent of the population of all South Korea."
considering that the city is connected by subways to almost every surrounding city and many people commute, i find this statistic barely accurate.  20million people are in the urban area.  anecdotal evidence from subway platforms across the city suggests that the official estimate is wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_population

d) "The now forgotten urban planners from decades ago should be national heroes,” Kang tells me. “They helped lead this city from ruins to riches. We hope the world can learn from them.”
yeah, you are right, go find those urban planners, because they are the real story.  not the crap you copied down on your return flight while you were hungover, you hack.

e) "Seoul residents are some of the earliest adopters of new technology in the world, especially cellphones and mobile computing devices, and their immediate access to the most up-to-date information means that the city’s hottest neighborhoods and sleepiest sections can change overnight."

It's called a monoculture.  what's cool, that's what people do, even if their lives suck as a consequence.   hence the suicide rate

d)"But when builders broke ground, they discovered that a whole section of Seoul’s ancient wall had been buried below the stadium. So instead, the city created a park to memorialize the archaeological remains, shrinking the footprint of the original Hadid project."

Didn't I read somewhere that there was a mayor who wanted seoul to be a fashion city who lost an election to a different mayor who wanted to make a re-elect-me-and/or-legacy project of his own so he changed it into a museum, and that the whole thing is wildly over budget?

e)  "For this native New Yorker, a night out in Seoul made me think, forget NYC, Seoul is the city that never sleeps."

Soju costs a dollar a bottle.

f)"For some inexplicable reason what’s emerged organically in Seoul is that its residents are ready to live by night."

Thanks for your timeless analysis.  It's probably because they have to work all day, and they can sleep at work, and if you're drunk get away with just about anything, including molesting children on a public bus.

g) "Somehow this once-sordid place has become one of the hippest addresses in Seoul, housing cafés and cocktail bars, architecture and design firms, not to mention a top private museum: Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art."

You know that stuff you said in the paragraph before this about everyone thinking this neighborhood was a shit hole?  That probably effected property prices.  If you look at a map, you can see that Itaewon is in the center of the city, is ten minutes from two of the largest train stations in the city, an hour away from the airport, 10 minutes from a mountain park, and 10 minutes from a river park.   Also, the Leeum museum was there when you were first in town six years ago.

h) “There are foreign bars and restaurants, foreign people, and that makes it an attractive place to live for returnees like me.”

Yes, but why?  I'll lend you some help with vocabulary:  variety, cosmopolitan, diversity, internationalist, globalization, global village, etc.

i) The paragraphs about people moving around the city and the art museum are actually insightful.  Half way through is a good part to start making real remarks.

j) "But as I slurp down the last noodles, I think how strange it is for there even to be such a thing as a North Korean specialty food, given the past couple of decades of squalor and starvation that have characterized life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea."

Maybe I thought that at first.  But then I looked on wikipedia and read that the city was founded in 1122BC.  I'm pretty sure they had food at least a few years after that.

k) "but between them lies the demilitarized zone, the most heavily guarded frontier in the world"

this blurb is so tired.  i guess the 2000 nuclear warheads the united states has aren't guarding the frontier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons

l) "Less obvious is what would happen if the North fell apart and the South were faced not with a military foe, but the prospect of caring for 25 million people, many of them malnourished from years of famine, unschooled in the ways of the modern world and deeply traumatized after living under one of the most brutal dictatorships in history."

I'm sure there are plenty of chinese, american, and other countries' businessmen who'd love to come in and get rich caring for them.  but hey, they're korean, so of course they'll be together forever, just like they are now.

m) "For residents of Seoul, who may even have relatives in the North that they haven’t seen for 60 years, worries and tension persist."

Prove it.

n) " I met a professor at an educational institution called the University of North Korean Studies, incongruously situated in one of Seoul’s most beautiful and well-preserved precincts, an area of historic houses, lush gardens and gentle hills."

Don't bother calling it by name, we all know its Jongno.

o) "Lee spends his life trying to understand the workings of a place he can only rarely visit."
And nobody can prove him wrong, because its mostly speculation anyways.

p) "... could start again and build an entire Korean city from scratch? What would it look like?"

you are learning! you answer your own question:

"only a small number of residents and businesses have moved in."

it would be empty, because everyone is already in the other huge city that's got everything going for it.    I'm guessing there are embarrassingly few people living there, because population information isn't readily available.

upgrading our pastes

how about some toothpaste that we can use right after we drink orange juice, or that we can drink orange juice right after we use

toothpaste hasnt evolved

its time we had some fitting toothpaste for our post-mayan apocalypse

no to alcohol? no to mitt romney.

mitt romney says no to alcohol in the same way that i say no to mitt romney. this isn't a question of religion, its a matter of trust, experience, creating jobs, and creativity, all of which are points explored below. god bless america!

we can't trust mitt romney. he has never explored himself through the lens of a who-am-i hangover. how can we trust a man who can't trust others to hold his life in their memories, and not his? the truth is that we can't trust this man, because he can't trust himself to have so much beer ask him questions, and let us answer them for him at brunch. as we all know, beer is not to be feared, it is to be trusted to knock lose the brain echo bullshit rattling around at the start of the weekend's warm up period (usually post humpday). mitt still has all of his adolescent, college, and young adult memories vying for his present consciousness, which explains the erratic and inconsistent nature of his policies. one day he is that naive 23 year old french speaking idealist promoting socialist healthcare in massachusets as governor nine years ago, the next he is is the middle aged angry white father telling his constituents-cum-children all about tough love tax rates to enshrine monopolist privilege. with out weekend warrior alcohol consumption, how can anyone maintain consistency? mitt certainly can't be trusted to.

mitt romney has no experience. he has no hangover cures to share, except the ones taught in prep school heath class: coffee, cold showers, exercise, and those don't fucking work. he's never experienced rebirth through a piece of toast covered with melted cheese, because he's never consumed 4 beers (5% alcohol by volume minimum) an hour for a seven hour period, and then gone to a diner. a life lived (can it still be said?) without beer bongs, keg stands, nor endurance drinking (power hour, kings, etc), his physical stamina remains an open question. there's no better way to prove the strength of both your resolve, your esophagus, and lungs than a 2 story beer bong. there's no better way to challenge your entire intestinal tract than a decade's worth of weekend's worth of six packs, which is equivalent to the stress caused by making decisions as president. and keg stands are great for building the muscles needed for back slapping, something at which any effective chief executive must strive to excel. in short, he'll have nothing to talk about that won't sound like gloating, so we don't need to give him the throne for four years. he can't pass the test, and we don't want him to.

mitt romney doesn't create jobs. alcohol drinkers, on the other hand, create jobs for all with an egalitarian flair: bartenders, clerks, beverage distributors, ice vendors, street cleaners, oncologists, oil companies, night shift emergency room workers, grain farmers, brunch wait staff, taxmen, and let us not forget our nation's finest men and women in uniform: municipal police. alcohol is the their cash crop, their killer app, their racket, the veritable clitoris for their power trip for a variety of fees, fines, levies and charges pressed against people charged with not thinking clearly after they have been legally permitted to decrease the clarity of their thinking (its ok to do it, as long as you don't do it anywhere). these committed citizens want to live in, and understand, society, so they must nobly pursue the use of alcohol to lessen the hate, confusion and disgust with the injustice of the idiots appointed to be our bosses, the new jim crow stacking up brothers in penitentiaries, as well as the litany of issues related to modern smartphone/social network use. romney defiantly abstains from supporting america's finest, and in the process damns the rest of us to a sober muddle of informational browbeating inanity.

mitt romney isn't creative. he's proven over his lifetime that he doesn't have the wherewithal to elevate systematically poisoning oneself to an art form. while he can make the best of meagre resources, as shown by his slicked back hair, he's surely never smell checked his clothes after waking up at six pm, then thrown together a steady-compliment-garnering outfit that lasted till sunrise the next morning, because he's never imagined that it was possible. he's never used three bottles of expired salad dressing to invent five new cocktails in a single night, or spontaneously engineered an osha proof way to remove thousands of hair-sized shards of glass from 6 liters of red wine in under 5 minutes, just in time for the NYE ball drop. perhaps his most obvious failure of imagination is evidenced by his continuing campaign, which will clearly fail. if he was truly a thinking man he would see that losing this election would feel a lot like something he has spent his entire life avoiding: a hangover.

for the sake of ourselves, for the sake of our country, and for the sake of mitt romney, he must lose this election. we can't trust a man who never says never again, who has never experienced the spins, done the cobra, nor woken up in a field with a crave case of white castle sliders handcuffed to his left wrist. losing is the only way he can help create the jobs america needs to create the leisure time needed to produce more drinking to produce more jobs. its the only way to bring mitt to our world of alcohol, to show that he has the vision to believe and relate to the rest of us. we must help him lose.

start

right now