Commonalities

I've been watching a 77-episode Korean drama, Yi San, from 2007, that is intriguing me in part because one of the characters is a "damo," a commoner in the Imperial art department, a talented young woman who, with some support from her childhood friend, the Crown Prince, rises above painter's assistant to actually being an artist. In a time when women aren't permitted to do such things, it always helps to have an enlightened friend in a high place, even if the main theme of the drama is that virtually everyone in the corrupt Royal Court is trying to kill him.  If I had started watching this in 2007, I'd be done now.  I had Volume 1 on hand a couple years ago, but at the time didn't realize it was only the first of four.  It's almost as long as Jumong.  But a little slower.  Not until episode 34, when the Crown Prince finally has a beard and comes to realize he actually loves the damo, and the King falls into easily manipulated senility, does the plot get really interesting. 

Facial hair seems to be a symbol of coming of age and maturity and in this case it certainly makes the Crown Prince look a lot more authoritative (and sexually attractive), even if he is only 25 years old.  There is another character, a loyal advisor to the Crown Prince, who has the most attractive eyebrows, like perfect kaishu calligraphy strokes.  I haven't been so fascinated by eyebrows, also a staple of Asian operatic costume, since the long multi-colored ones on the crazy old doctor in The Herbalist's Manual.

Crown Prince in childhood

Young Crown Prince recalling his childhood.

The mature, bearded Crown Prince

Trustworthy kaishu eyebrows

The "damo" plot recalls Painter of the Wind, another K-D that had oriental painting as a sort of character, and is just perfect as I start brush painting lessons with yet another teacher who has kicked my enthusiasm up a notch: he practices qigong and has promised to help me with my Chinese.

But back to my theme...77 episodes of commoners and the court is kind of the mirror opposite of "The King's Speech," the Oscar-winning two-hour movie I only just watched, about King George VI and his speech impediment.  It's a great movie and in addition to illustrating the grace of good manners (the Queen mum apparently had 'em; who knew Helena Bonham Carter was so regal), it is about a commoner, an Australian no less, who supported the reluctant Bertie in his destiny to become the King after the Prince of Wales abdicates (and it was a good thing, we think). 

As the damo and the Joseon king forge an alliance (I think she becomes a concubine and produces an heir, sometime in the next 20 episodes), so too did the uncredentialed speech therapist become King George's friend and supporter.  He apparently coached the King through every public speech he ever made, turning his stammering into an "asset," as Churchill said (at least in the movie) of his own tongue-tied condition.

As an American, I am always bemused by the way some cultures cherish their royalty--Asian dynasties, the British empire, the Hawaiian monarchy.  Sometimes I think the problems we have today in American politics are because we DON'T have a stable royal presence to look to.  We want our president to be a royal leader, a strong symbol of our nation, but alas, the candidates are all just commoners.  Usually rich, but common, still. All of our popular royal icons are sports, entertainment or business superstars, all of whom we like to point and laugh at when they prove to be, through failure, as common as the rest of us.  It is with some nostalgia we look back on the illusions of the Kennedy "dynasty" era, the "Camelot" which couldn't last and will never come again. 

In both Yi San and The King's Speech, there is a theme of loyalty and royalty, friendship and respect across the palace border, two-way service, that actually secures a better future for the people. 

The Yellow Emperor is my damo. But he won't let me paint!

Clamming Down

Has it been more than two months since I have posted something to this blog?  Yes.  Not that I haven't been indulging in lots of Asian film and serials, but I have been under pressure with a professional project and have neglected chronicling the whimsical side of my life.  So on another three-day weekend,  during which we are celebrating a holiday the rest of the country doesn't, King Kamehameha Day, and having completed the intense deadlined project which had been giving me mild anxiety attacks (thank goodness for Taoist breathing exercises),  I can finally clam down.

Intentional typo that, "clam down."  In my current wuxia series one of the subtitled bits of dialogue admonished a raving character to "clam down."  I have often been advised to "clam up," with its vaguely mafioso innuendo, but no one ever told me to "clam down."  Although I often say I am "happy as a clam," a phrase which usually omits the meaningful part: "at high tide." A sort of Taoist clam.  A bivalve not at risk of being dug up and steamed and drenched in clarified butter.   Maybe that's what clamming down might mean.  Like hunkering down. Clam creeps down.

Still, I would like to have had this as a tool during my project to clam everyone up or down.

Now this is a clam digger!

It's very creepy that this sword allegedly is infused with a spiritual aura as a result of having been crafted with human bones in the mix.  Personally, I would clam up about that.

Spirit of the Sword, typical wuxia, but not the greatest (so far, I'm only at episode 18 of 40),  has been kind of fun, featuring Nicholas Tse with a funky haircut, which distracts from his usual minimalist display of a maximum of two expressions in his acting.  Nick is always very pretty to look at, but his emotional range appears somewhat limited.  Here's a sample from the series:

Since April, I have also enjoyed several Korean dramas (including one with the delectable Bae Yong Jun that my Chinese DVD version's title, Wang 4 Credited Gods, should have alerted me that the subtitles might be truly bizarre: whenever the dialogue would have been "want to" it was rendered, Beijing-inflected, as "wanner").  There are also several movies that I watched, largely as escape mechanisms from the professional project, but I honestly can't easily recall what they were; since I was not particularly clam, I didn't even take time to jot down the titles. (Although it's beginning to
come back to me--fodder for a subsequent post.)  It's as if between the last holiday dedicated to Hawaiian royalty and this one, I have been in some space/time warp, all clammed up or clammed down.

But now I am emerging from my shell.

Lucky You Live...Someplace

Prince Kuhio

There is a saying we have..."Lucky you live Hawaii" and I'm thinking of that on this three-day weekend, celebrating a holiday that the rest of the U.S. probably doesn't even know about: Prince Kuhio Day, marking the birth of the last heir to the monarchy, and the first territorial delegate to the U.S. Congress.  It is in a way, the turning point of Hawaii's modern development and is probably marked with mixed emotion by the native population.  Hawaii is the only state that has actual holidays dedicated to royalty.

So how have I celebrated?  I watched The Descendants, the first Hollywood movie I have popped in the DVD player for a while.  (As usual, lots of Korean drama and Chinese films had priority.)  But The Descendants was on sale at Costco when I made my the regular 84-pounds-of-cat-litter run.  I'd heard about it, but not really paid much attention.  I live here, and I don't even watch Hawaii 5-0 and never watched Lost.  

The Descendants,at 115 minutes, has a plot (based on a novel) that Korean dramatists would stretch out over 20 compelling episodes, exploring character development and sub-plots with great emotional detail and exaggeration.  You can read about the story in the links (a hospital family drama mixed up with issues about real estate and property development). But what was compelling to me...apart from the comparisons to K-D (George Clooney can cry, with tears dripping off his chin, almost as well as Song Il-guk) was of course, the setting (and an extraordinary soundtrack of Hawaiian music).  It is a pretty accurate view of Hawaii, though I would point out if it isn't obvious, it was mostly set in very posh old-money neighborhoods and the usual beautiful beaches of Waikiki and Hanalei. We don't all live like that!  I live in a 1200-sf, three bedroom/two bath (all small) 10th-floor 35-year-old condominium in a wooded area of central Oahu; it's pretty low class. (I will sell it to you for a cheap $225,000. Needs work, fixer-upper, starter-home. Make me an offer.) I'm not sure, but the film placed Matt King's family in what I thought to be the house usually occupied by the president of the University of Hawaii.  But apparently not; the traditional old mansions of Hawaii all have a certain similar style, airy and spacious, and like New England in the tropics.

Still, this Hawaii was completely familiar to me.  In fact, when the cousins gather at one of the clan homes to finalize the big real estate deal, I was startled: I'd been in that house once, for a party hosted by some benefactors (not at all unlike the characters of the movie) of the non-profit I once worked for. 

I guess people who live in New York and L.A. or other big cities are used to seeing their neighborhoods in films and maybe even become a bit blase about it. I wasn't blase though when I watched a Hong Kong art film with a gay theme called The Map of Sex and Love, a Netflix find in the Chinese category.  It was 140 minutes of Hong Kong, some of which I'm not used to seeing in film: Lamma, Macau, and seedier parts of Mongkok and Central.  A Chinese-American filmmaker, who looked disturbingly just like a guy I used to work with in Honolulu, returns to Hong Kong to do a documentary on the new Disneyland deal--not too far from the theme of The Descendants.  He falls in love with a gay dancer/prostitute and both are friends with a girl who has suffered some sort of tragic breakdown in Belgrade, of all places.  (She makes lanterns and soup out of pomelo rinds.  I learn something new every day.)  In the end, I think the characters might say "Lucky we live Hong Kong."

Kim Nan-Jin

But maybe not Seoul. Possibly symptomatic of a serious addiction, I devoured the 17-episode K-D, December Fever, a sort of Cinderella tale of a woman in a loveless marriage residing in the in-laws' home, complete with horrible deceitful exploitative stepsisters and an utterly despicable MIL. She falls in love with a driving instructor. A younger man! How inappropriate! She's 30 and he's...27!  (Have they never heard of Demi Moore?) She ultimately leaves her children and neurosurgeon husband of 10 years (oddly with his blessing and medical instructions on palliative care) to take care of the young man as he dies (while she is washing his feet and telling a joke) of a brain tumor for which he has rejected treatment.  Seventeen episodes.  

The message of the story is that one should never be where one does not belong; one should marry for love, not position; one should marry their true love because second chances don't come around.  (Kind of like buying things at Costco: get it while you love it and it's there.) Of course, in typical K-D fashion, if people would just say what's on their mind at the time, a lot of misery (and episodes) could be avoided.  It was a sad crazy love story, but I'm not sure I would have stuck with it without the driving instructor, played by Kim Nan-Jin.  He could help me with parallel parking any day!  

Lucky you live...anywhere!

Fried Fast Food on a Full Moon

Not a good idea!  I should know better -- I do know better -- but something about the holiday season makes judgement fly out the window like a lot of reindeer on a mission, driven by a rotund guy in a funny hat shouldering a big bag of Jack in the Box...and I don't mean the archaic toys. My digestion last night was eclipsed even more profoundly than the actual eclipse of the night before, of which I did manage to catch the waning portion at 4:30 a.m.  It can't be that cold if I can stand naked on the lanai in the moonlight without shivering, although I didn't linger that long.

Last night I should have left my warm bed to sit upright while contemplating the full moon, trying a Moon Cream Meditation that was demonstrated last spring in Wudang, but I was tormented restless with excess stomach acid and vivid dreams, if I really was asleep, of Dickensian England and medieval Korea.  I'd just finished the 8th and final episode of Bleak House, Dickens's tale of an interminable lawsuit which pretty much consumes all the plaintiffs up to the point where the final will is discovered.  Simultaneously discovered is that the lawyers have consumed the estate, so there's nothing left to distribute anyway. The adaptation does have a positive, if not completely happy, ending (and reminds me that there is one last element in my father's estate, latent over five years, which could possibly pay for a trip to China...Resolution for Year of Dragon: must call lawyer.)  I don't think I could have endured actually reading Bleak House; the screenplay with the marvelous late Denholm Elliot and Diana Rigg, was compelling and sufficient, though I could tell there was probably a lot left out in the 8-hour 1985 BBC rendering: quantity, if not quality. (Dickens was a paid-by-the-word writer...where do I get a gig like that?) 

I thought I might try another piece from the BBC collection, but The Pickwick Papers failed to grab me; I succumbed to revisiting a favorite Korean drama, Emperor of the Sea.  I needed a Song Il-guk fix and though he doesn't appear until the fourth Korean hour of the 51-episode drama, when he does, it's worth it.  Just as savvy as Johnny Depp's Capt. Jack Sparrow, but more sinister, and less Keith Richards grubby, not BBC but KBS, the Pirate of the Yellow Sea may see me through the holidays, even though a new Korean Drama, a birthday present, waits to be opened up.

Song Il-guk as the delectable Yum Moon

How ironic to recall on this morning after serious lunar events and indigestion that SIG's character is named Yum Moon!

They Say It's Your Birthday

And it came and went, with a little help from my friends.  Although that's probably the wrong song.  This is the right one. This is the first birthday I have experienced where I have not prematurely rounded up my age to get used to it, to exploit it, in the coming year.  No, this one was a little more hesitant, the year of rabbit can continue a little longer for me before the dragon arrives; then I will acknowledge reality.  I celebrated less than I contemplated the aging process.  Birthdays are milestones, but meaningless really, except in that they give an opportunity to review one's progress and destiny.  Are we older AND wiser?  If the Taoist is actually returning to childlike innocence, immortal fetuses and all that, I only hope I can achieve it while maintaining control of bladder and bowels.

I spent my day in a fog, really, getting ready for acquisition of the Christmas tree -- my actual birthday present.  As I predicted, this year we scored a perfectly satisficing one in less than three minutes at the lot at Ala Moana Shopping Center.  These are not decisions that should require agonizing dithering. The next decision was equally easy: an party-of-two afternoon in both of our downtown Irish pubs, literally across the street from one another.

The day after the day, I tested my new all-region DVD player which failed to play my gift from my friendly Chinatown DVD vendor, Andy Lau's Future X-Cops, (what was she thinking?) which seems to coded be for a region beyond the Milky Way.  Perhaps just as well: I was bleary-eyed after finally completing Jewel in the Palace, a popular Korean drama about cooking and medicine, with some restrained romantic and political intrigue with an uncharacteristically happy ending.  My own trusty laptop has suffered--I hope sustained--a logic board failure, so I was using the Wizard's older one to access Dramafever.com.  His Mac drops signals and has some display issues, but I finally can say I have enjoyed this 54-episode classic of K-D. (That's 54 Korean hours, which are just about 60 minutes, more or less.) Since starting it some months ago, I see by my own reckoning, I have watched at least 40 other films and several Chinese series. Why can't I speak fluent Mandarin yet?  But the DVD player did let me enjoy a strange double feature:  The Magic Blade, a 1976 Shaw Brothers classic, and Chen Kaige's Together.  Still I can't get the haunting theme from Jewel in the Palace out of my mind.  Here is the same theme, in the "sad" mode.

I don't know why anyone would waste time with reality TV or the sitcom trash available on your standard cable lineup, when you could enjoy this:

Handsome and beautiful characters, engaging plots, scenery, costumes and soundtracks.  And that's just the historical stuff!

The Brush and the Sword

I like this Chinese wolf brush.  It has a slightly warped bamboo handle with attractive etched calligraphy, it has lost its hanging loop (if it ever had one), but the bristles are strong.  Or what's left of them.  It was losing hair, probably through my neglect, but I injected a little super glue into the base,  probably not a very orthodox treatment, and it seems to have stabilized. Although now that I study more closely the calligraphy on its handle, I see it is a shan ma (mountain horse) brush, although not as stiff and dark as my others.  A mountain pony, perhaps.

I was thinking about this brush a lot as I watched Painter of the Wind, a Korean drama very very loosely based on the lives of Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok, two important Korean painters of the 18th century.  To think I ever would have given a second thought--even a first thought--to Korean painters of the 18th century!  Getting hooked on Korean sa geuk has opened up whole new worlds beyond delight in the incredibly attractive, talented and teary actors who turn up in these things.

Painter of the Wind is about a young woman who has been disguised as a boy to be apprenticed in the imperial painting academy and her teacher who is strangely clueless (but puzzled) concerning her sexual identity, as is the giseang (geisha) who is the young painter's best...friend.  The plot has all kinds of gender identity overtones, and is complicated when the young painter is "sold" by her adoptive father to the man who also has "bought" her BGF and killed her father.  Like in wuxia, we have talented orphans seeking revenge with their weapons of choice. But here, the orphan wields a paintbrush, not the less mighty sword.  In real history, Shin Yun-bok was not a woman, but in the drama and history, his/her erotic paintings (by18th century standards) turned the Korean art world upside down, like a Joseon Mapplethorpe.

I have yet to determine if watching this while engaged in my new brush painting class with a Korean nun has informed my studies, although it was a pleasure to learn some things about making color, and watching the brush in action, a character in its own way, as much as the original paintings which drove the plot.  And I haven't seen such poignant unrequited sexual tension since Witness, the 1985 movie with Harrison Ford set in an Amish community.

I started watching Painter of the Wind with a set of DVDs I got a while back somewhere I don't remember, possibly from my Chinese video vendor, but more likely online on the cheap.  The set has dreadful nearly incomprehensible subtitles, and in the middle of the second of nine discs it simply failed.  But it is available on the awesome dramafever.com (please to excuse shameless promotion of commercial site) with far better subtitles.

Here's nice commentary about the series.  Not martial arts...just art, and completely captivating.

Painter of the Wind

POSTSCRIPT TO POSTSCRIPT

The North Koreans are moving right along, it seems, enriching uranium, if not their population's diet.

"Hecker said his first glimpse of the North's new centrifuges was "stunning."...The facilities appeared to be primarily for civilian nuclear power, not for North Korea's nuclear arsenal, Hecker said. He saw no evidence of continued plutonium production at Yongbyon. But, he said, the uranium enrichment facilities "could be readily converted to produce highly enriched uranium bomb fuel."

"From my perspective, it's North Korea continuing on a path which is destabilizing for the region. It confirms or validates the concern we've had for years about their enriching uranium," Mullen, the top U.S. military officer, said on CNN's "State of the Union."

All this Korean drama ...and I don't mean Hallyu, (which doesn't include stunning nudes or nukes)...just north of the DMZ. Maybe everyone involved would do well to settle in and watch Lobbyist. The script is all written.

NAKED NUDE AMBITIONS****

@@@Spoiler Alert@@@

If literal clarity was what I was seeking, I would have done well to spend more for my DVD set of the Lobbyist, K-D with Song Il-guk. My cheap acquisition's video quality was just fine, but the subtitles decayed exponentially after episode 12 of 24. (And the half-life of Korean drama is really long.) Capitalization, spelling, and word order seemed to reflect the increasing boredom of the translator, whom I suspect was Chinese. I don't know if Korean shares the Chinese language's lack of distinction in third-person pronouns, but it was a challenge sometimes to determine precisely who, or what, the dialogue was about. Song-il guk? His mother? A sheep? A nuclear submarine? But one perfects one's skill at figuring things out from context, taking a Taoist approach to cognition, and I was grateful to pause the DVD from time to time to decrypt the meaning (and sometimes just to gaze at Song Il-guk's eyes). It did prove the observation that you can understand words in a sentence if the first and last letter of the words are accurate, but watching whole sentences turned into a word scrabble from time to time.

I have made a living correcting bad grammar, spelling and punctuation, and typos are as entertaining as irritating. But I rarely come across such delightful twists as a reference to someone having a "bad tempter." Later, he was called "the madness temper guy." The character was a bit of a devil. He was way too "forcefuk."

In Lobbyist, Song Il-guk's wacky devoted sidekick (there's always one or two) in a nuclear submarine project formerly was a hotel doorman and black market racketeer. When he first met Harry/Haili (SIG's character) he suggested that if he wanted to impress his long lost childhood sweetheart, he could procure for his gift-giving what every girl likes: "bracelet, watch, cothes, shoes, handbag, case, golf cue, abd bear gall bladder (all sic)." (Forget the knockoff LV bag, bear bile always works for me!) Never mind that this girl was into submarines and revenge.

This guy, a little dorky, but one of the drama's most endearing characters, with spiky gelled hair and retro '50s eyeglasses, moves on to "Guba" cigars and Russian "eggbeters" (helicopters) before the really big acquisition...plans for a nuclear submarine featuring French technology and German engineering, a sure winner in any domestic arms build-up.

Lobbyist features the usual plot points involving orphans, love triangles, manipulative parents, naked ambition, (but never naked sex), revenge, politics, and weaponry, in this case not my personal preference, swords, arrows and martial arts skills, but guns, helicopters, tanks and submarines. (Although SIG does get to show off some nice kicking. And he's pretty cute when he's tinkering with a tank.) The political plot is driven by South Korea's longing for a nuclear fleet which Harry will help to acquire.

Until the American ambassador/CIA rep puts a stop to the plan. "Only conventional subs for you," he sternly warns the South Korean minister of the navy.

"But," the minister sputters petulantly, "China has nude!" Earlier he had lamented to Harry the lobbyist (or as sometimes translated, "persuasive talker"), "I don't have the ability to help in nude project." But South Korea can't argue with America. No nude! We mean it. (Nude:sic.)

The story comes to a not-nude climax (in episode 24) at a New Year's kick-off party for the submarine program on the deck of a dry-docked WWII-era destroyer. Save-the-date cards had been distributed much earlier by the conventional sub side. A peculiar element of this scene is when the bad guy sings The First Noel in Korean, very poorly, reminding us of Song Il-guk's earlier and utterly charming impromptu performance of I'm in the Mood for Love ...if it should lain we'll let it***...at a book signing party for the President's son who was a naive proponent of nuclear forces for South Korea in addition to being an accomplished cocktail pianist. These talented persuasive talkers and government officials! And Song Il-guk can tango too! What a guy! If Ronald Reagan can be US president, maybe SIG can be Korea president? Anyway, I've been to events like that kick-off party and book-signing.

But never like this: after searching all over the ship, Harry/Haili/SIG comes finally to the aid of his competitor (Maria/Malia, the love interest) who was representing the conventional sub promoter, albeit being horribly exploited by her boss, who is now holding a gun to her head, in a stand-off with Saturday night specials...the bad guy is killed, the exploited girl is saved, and it's not clear what happens to Harry. I suppose this is a metaphor for nuclear MADness, what happens when you have "a bad tempter."

But despite profusely bleeding wounds to the gut and drooping off into deadly unconsciousness, Harry is miraculously resurrected to join Maria who has given up her international arms ambitions to teach English to children in Kazakhstan, where she and Harry were really happy together before. Harry suddenly appears radiantly in the middle of her class in a meadow where sheep are grazing, not the first K-D where Song Il-guk makes a sort of Messianic return. (Though he failed to fulfill his promise to the Korean defense minister to "succeed in nude career with my own hands."*****) We see Maria is wearing the crystal pendant** he gave her when they were ten years old.

Lobbyist predicts The Divine Hero/A Man Called God. Only in Emperor in the Sea (Haesin) was it obvious that SIG would not survive the dozens of arrows piercing his body, like Saint Sebastian. (Here is a You-tube clip which accompanies Yeom Moon's death scene in Haesin with the U.S. Navy Hymn.)

Having finished the contemporary Lobbyist, I now look forward to Muhyul, a sa geuk follow-on to Jumong. I found it to watch on-line, with better subtitles. In Muhyul, Song Il-guk (of tremendous Jumong fame) plays Jumong's grandson, demonstrating one interpretation of immortality. I'm thinking SIG is in fact immortal one way or another. These dramas are accumulating like Gospel stories, and I fully expect him to be cast as Jesus one day. If you looked at that Haesin clip, you will agree, he could do it really well.

**CLYSTAL CREER

A curious side note to Lobbyist is its sponsorship by the Swarovski Crystal company. There is not a scene in which some elaborate crystal construction is not set on a desk or side table, dangling from a cell phone or ears, to say nothing of a franchise shop being a cover for one of the international arms dealers. Swarovski appears even in a terrorist camp in Kazakhstan, in particular an amber quail egg of a pendant which first is seen around the neck of ten-year-old Harry when he and his girl first develop their curious shared passion for submarines. The pendant gets passed back and forth between them from episode one to 24, a symbol of their lasting affection, but really, incredible product placement for Swarovski.

***THE LAIN IN SPAIN

Actually, don't you think this scans better than "rain?"

Let sleeping lains lie?

****This title is gonna get me a LOT of hits!

*****And this is making me think of scripting a drama of my own, working title, Cloning Vincent and SIG, a three-some love triangle with Zhao Wen Zhou and Song Il-guk...and me. Filmed in Hawaii, Wudang, a Buddhist Temple in Korea and, why not, Kazakhstan.

DERANGED MARRIAGE

I interrupt myself in the first few moments of hour six (of 24) of The Lobbyist, a contemporary Korean drama about international arms trafficking, and a kind of precursor to The Divine Hero, also staring the divine Song Il-guk. The only reason I'm watching this. So hot! With a simmering plot. Still, I pause to share some subtitled dialog which just made me choke.

A little arranging of a marriage for a clearly wrong (at least in episode six, who knows?) union of two attractive young Koreans who have no prior interest in each other is going on over a dinner table where the powerful parents are plotting the future.

Dad of the squirming groom-to-be (not SIG's character but hardly unattractive) says, "He has a goof future." (SIG=Song Il-guk. It would be confusing to indicate "sic" as I quote these subtitles.)

The FoG continues, "...but your doughter (so malleable? so rich?) is more excellent."

"To be honest, Meilan (the yeasty doughter) is not bad too," the father of the bride agrees.

At which point, the prim, proper and wistful mother of the apparently willing bride chimes in to point out, "Mr. Jiang, your son is hot."

If I had a daughter, and had a chance to marry her off to Song Il-guk...what else could I blurt out?

Bring Him Home for Dinner, Dear!

BLOODY CREATIVE

I am intrigued by a scene in my current K-D indulgence. The female protagonist, escaping an arranged marriage, has gone to the temple to pay respect to her dead parents. Her "wanted poster" identifies her as someone in mourning clothes. Coming down from the mountain, she is inadvertently close to a sword fight and her white hanbok gets splattered with blood. Her sword-fighting paramour, one third of the requisite love triangle, is very clever. He searches the body he has dispatched for a piece of charcoal. In the next scene we see that the sleeve and skirt of her dress is not blood-splattered, but sports an elegant plum-blossom design. Her savior has drawn in branches, no more mourning dress, but now tres chic.

Actually this technique, connecting splatters, is one taught by my Chinese painting teacher. I don't think I would have fully appreciated this scene without taking the painting class. How everything fits together! You just have to be open to the connections.

NORTH KOREAN DRAMA

Having finished the curious not-so-historical (and sometimes completely hilarious**) KD, The Divine Hero, and pondering the grand themes that might lurk in a TV drama based on a high-tech comic book hero, I watched with some interest the apparent transfer of power process happening in real time in Pyongyang.

The Dear Leader, (son of the Supreme Leader, no divine hero, really, though appointed "eternal president") who has the worst fashion sense of any head of state in the world, seems to have appointed his pudgy youngest son to carry forward the communist autocratic patrilineal monarchy in North Korea.

My observation was that perhaps The Divine Hero is a subtle political statement as much as a mindless sexy action thriller (accented with grand themes of justice, revenge, filial piety, "grobal" economic power, and romantic love). The fictional drama is about a gang of four corrupt businessmen, military and judicial friends who 25 years earlier stumbled into an arms and drug deal and made a huge amount of money, securing themselves in powerful positions in the economy and government. To protect their interests they tried to kill the family of the policeman who was a threat to their plans, succeeding in mom and dad's demise in a house fire, but unbeknownst to them, the children survived. The Divine Hero (played by the divine Song Il-guk, who is himself the grandson of a well-respected Korean general and recently married to a high court judge), carries out a revenge mission because the system was never going to bring the bad guys to justice. Their own children have been charged, in a Confucian way, to maintain their position and get rid of the the troublemaker. By keeping the power in the family, the tradition and the money remain intact.

Oddly, it's the daughters who help, unwittingly, to bring down the empire. One of them (a cop) discovers, too late, that in fact she is the Divine Hero's sister; another (a reporter) that she is the daughter of one of the bad guys. One lives and one dies. And not who you expect.

The Divine Hero, who has some serious issues with violence and taking the law into his own hands, is not exactly excused. At the conclusion of the drama, the reporter who discovered her father was one of the corrupt businessman, observes that if a legal system is inadequate, people will seek their own revenge and justice.

I'm wondering now if The Divine Hero has some subtle meaning in Korean. One of the tycoons is a pudgy guy with an even pudgier son who is basically stupid and, lacking any kung-fu, surrounds himself with martial artists (including a particularly amoral and deadly guy acquired from the family's casino in Las Vegas, closest to a serious threat to SIG's more skilled character.) The other target of Song Il-guk's revenge is a retired general (whose hair style is vaguely reminiscent of the former Prime Minister of Japan's) and whose son is as calculating as the other's is dumb.

They all appear to be archetypes in a corrupt economy and I would think some of these points would not go unnoticed by frustrated folks in Seoul who send care packages of ballpoint pens and plastic bags to impoverished relatives on the north side of the DMZ.

That the avenger actually comes through Hawaii is also ironic. Was it only a year ago that the Dear Leader of North Korea alluded to blowing the Aloha State out of the water?

**Subtitles and heavily accented English provide surely unintended entertainment. At one point in the story, Vivian, a gorgeous woman, yin to SIG's yang, who plays the Korean-Hawaiian connection, asks the hero, whom she has betrayed badly, "to have mercy on her soil." Also, she invites some businessmen anticipating high "levenues" (leveraged revenues?) from her project, on a tour of the planned island real estate development. "We can go up to the deck and then have a little butt cruise," she purrs in heavily accented English. Not making this up.

COS I SAID SEOH

An unexpected, unwelcome knock at the door Saturday afternoon. The Wizard called for me to deal with it, not being quite so bold as Liu Ling, one of the the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove.**

It was a neighbor, not one I really know, but recognize, and a uniformed officer of some law enforcement agency, holding a USPS Priority Mail parcel.

I listened to a lengthy and unnecessary explanation how the good neighbor had found the key to the parcel drop box on the floor of the mail plaza and summoned the officer (who I think had a U.S. Customs patch on his shoulder). The package was retrieved and tracked to my address.

I'd earlier gotten my mail (apparently overlooking the key that fell to the floor) and had been a little disappointed, anticipating my latest shipment of Korean drama DVDs might arrive. I'd had a similar false hope the night before with a package, but from my friend who is moving and sent me some remnants of her purging --cosmetics, room fragrance, a miniature bonsai kit, books, a fantastic red Japanese dragon kimono).

But yesterday, I was delighted, "Ah, it's my Korean Dramas, I was hoping they would come today," then thinking I should have bitten my tongue when I contemplated the possible customs violation.

I'd ordered these things earlier in the week from a site that was mysterious and ambiguous in its marketing and payment mechanism. It was hard to tell where they were coming from and though the DVDs were cheap, the shipping costs were rather high. But since I'll try anything once, I placed an order at the only source of the complete English-subtitled "The Divine Hero--A Man Called God," and for a few other things, but neglecting to specify my "free movie" with purchase.

So I was pleased to get an email within 48 hours, with a USPS tracking number, and a note that since I had failed to select a free movie, they would make a random choice for me!

I didn't expect the parcel to be hand-delivered. After I took delivery, the neighbor and the cop, who is a resident of our complex, lingered at my doorway; was I supposed to tip them or something? Sign a receipt? I thanked them and did the Hawaii thing and gave each a big hug. I've never before spontaneously hugged a lawman. (Or even not spontaneously.) At least there seemed to be no issue with customs. The DVDs came, legitimately, from Texas. (How they got to Texas is not my concern.) I recommend the vendor if you're in the market for these things.

Sorting through the package, I wondered what the free DVD would be. They guessed my preferences pretty well with "The Legend of the Shadowless Sword," although they couldn't have known I already have a copy of that movie, but still, what were the odds? Into the Christmas gift pile, along with a duplicate copy of "House of Flying Daggers" which my Chinatown vendor once gave me free. Free film with purchase of a certain size seems to be a standard practice. Makes up for the high shipping costs.

I loaded the "Divine Hero" disc with episodes 13-24, which I had previously downloaded in Korean with Chinese subtitles but now am hoping for the clarification of a couple of plot points. (It's not like it's hard to watch again; SIG's hairstyle is more reasonable in the later episodes.)

There are English subtitles, but clearly by a Chinese translator who knows pinyin working from the Korean to render*** the English: some very curious phrasings, typos and utter lack of upper case, adding a level of entertainment and enlightenment. (You can learn a lot about language this way.)

First, Song Il-guk's character, generally Romanized as Choi Kang Ta, becomes Cui Qianda or sometimes Qiangda. And "cos" means both "because" and "course." "Wanna" is consistently used as "want to."

More for your entertainment:

"Honey is closed to that man lately." (The female protagonist has been spending too much time with Song Il-guk.)

"Don't worry, I'm a shoemaker, it's the same like mending the shoes." (A Korean who makes the most beautiful Italian-styled stilettos sewing up Song Il-guk's wound, a frequent activity in this drama. Actually, there's a lot of focus on shoes in this drama, now that I think of it.)

"I thought of you cos I wanted to heard your voice."... "Of cos I saw the suspect." ... "Maybe here there's someone I gotta mee." ... "Then we pk." (Completely cryptic.) All these in episode 13. It's going to be a fun ride.

And there's my favorite so far, a simple common typo, "Don't worry, he can survive even in the dessert." Which makes me think of Song Il-guk smothered in whipped cream with maybe a cherry strategically placed. I must help him!!

**Liu Ling, a Taoist of the second century BCE, is described as a heavy drinker who never wore clothes in his own home. A visitor, perhaps his neighbor delivering a misdirected parcel, was shocked when he answered the door buck naked. Liu Ling said,"I take the whole universe as my house and my own room as my clothing. Get out of my trousers!"

***I had a piano teacher when I was young named Ludwig who looked exactly like Beethoven. In addition to being a classical pianist, he was also pharmacist. I once said, "How did you like my rendition of the Moonlight Sonata?" To which he responded, "One renders lard; one plays music."

ASTRAY WITHOUT TRANSLATION
Finished the second half of The Divine Hero, with Korean audio and Chinese subtitles, neither of which I have any fluency -- and here I stumble in my own language--the conservative English speaker in me doesn't quite know how to say that:

"in which neither of which I have fluency"...? Neither of which I understand much of? Editorial nightmare. Suffice it to say I can't understand spoken Korean and can't read Chinese characters. English is challenging enough.

But back to Korean drama. Was mesmerized through episodes 13-24, I was even dreaming in Korean, or dreaming I could comprehend Korean. Though there are a couple of loose ends in the plot, that's probably because I don't have the script. There was some strange business dealing going on, with short-selling and investments and partners that helped to bring down the financial empires of the bad guys. It was pretty easy to figure out what was going on; it's mostly action and character anyway. Or mostly this extremely beautiful man behaving decisively and honorably--his mantra, "I never hurt innocent people," a counterpoint to House, M.D.'s "Everybody lies." And his poignant emotionalism: the scenes where his sister (whom he thought had been killed with his parents) and his gorgeous doppelganger assistant die in his arms are just heartrending. There's something about a serious icy cool martial/action hero who can cry real tears--copious spontaneous tears, sometimes with running noses, seem to be a requirement for all these Korean actors. Even the bad guys tear up.

In the end, the woman who loves him (but who he used to bring her father down) and the woman he loves escape. And he apparently survives the finale explosion in a car, giving hope that he reunites with one of them (or both, why not) having ruthlessly, successfully avenged his family's death. Have heard nothing about a follow-on series, but I would watch it, even in Korean!

Can you figure out who's the bad guy?

SEOUL-FUL DRAMA KING

My latest Korean drama escape has been full of surprises and challenges. The Divine Hero-A Man Called God was pressed on me by my Chinatown video vendor, not just because I told her I liked Song Il-guk (SIG), the stunningly devastatingly handsome mega-star from somewhere south of the DMZ, accomplished triathlete, swordsman, horseman, and husband of a Korean high court judge, an Asian combination of Pierce Brosnan, Johnny Depp, Al Pacino and maybe a little Tom Hanks, if any of them were also serious martial artists or athletes.

She was also pushing the DVDs because the first episode of this 2010 Korean TV series was shot in Hawaii giving a little boost to our local film industry and Korean travel agencies, thus promoting two "vital" sectors in our state's peculiar economy. If it focused more on kim chee and spicy barbeque it would also be an aid to our restaurant business, although any potential Korean tourist can get that just as easily at home.

The drama started out like any Magnum P.I. episode, featuring some shady business (an illegal arms trade) going on in an exotic hotel location--in this case not so much Waikiki but a more recently developing area in the dreadfully dry Ewa plain, the last of Oahu's easily exploitable land. An area of former cane fields, an industrial park and a closed Navy base, one of

the hottest, flatest, driest places on the island, it has become home to a new pricey resort/spa/golf area, including a Disney property for visitors who find Waikiki too family-unfriendly. (And hopefully, Koreans who have watched at leaast the first episode of The Divine Hero.) Since most old money had long taken over the cooler higher typhoon- and tsunami-safe ground in the mountains, this area is also site of new, if not exactly affordable,

housing. Fortunately you can't really see the oil refinery from any of the locations, including an artificial lagoon and some very lovely beachfront. I recently attended a baby luau (a traditional Hawaiian one-year birthday party) at one of the naturally preserved spots next to one of the new hotels. Managed by one of the old land estates, it is as you can see here, a nice place to watch a sunset or have an intimate little wedding, below.

Had I been indulging in The Divine Hero at the time, I might have been fantasizing at the party about Song Il-guk, who in the series rescued, repeatedly, a journalist who was investigating the arms trade story, which came to implicate him (in a particularly amusing scene with SIG disguised as an Arab sheik). She later becomes his main love interest in the story, although as is typical in the KD

I have watched (mostly sa geuk, or historical, tales), there are at least three women in love with him (not including all the women viewers) to whom he is chivalrous, if not entirely honest.

After the Magnum/Hawaii 5-0-style opening episode, the series moves quickly into a strange melange of styles reminiscent of Ian Fleming (with SIG as Bond, supported by a couple of loyal and clever Korean science and technology geeks); Mission Impossible, The Avengers (with a particularly beautiful Korean woman in Emma Peel leathers with great martial skills), The Godfather, Noble House, and Spiderman. The series was actually based on a popular Korean comic, and one of SIG's alter egos in the story is Peter Pan, International Man of Mystery and Eternal Youth.

***SPOILER ALERT--JUST IN CASE

SIG as Choi Kan Ta/Michael King/Peter Pan is the apparent lone survivor of an attack on a policeman's family. At 7, he was adopted by an American couple and became a clever skilled agent (of intelligence or international crime, it is not clear) and becomes dedicated to avenging his family. He returns to Korea to wipe out the unscrupulous buinessmen and government officals involved in a major drug deal theft who killed his father, mother and sister in a fire.

His accomplice, Vivian, the Emma Peel character, (representing the strangely named Castle Resort group and its exotic Hawaii property rented by the first of SIG's victims of revenge -- Castle is the name of one of the original Big Five landholders in Hawaii) is charged with seducing the sleazy fat son of one of the bad guys, a real estate, construction and illegal drug magnate. She succeeds in about 30 seconds, even while whispering endearments like "tub of lard" and "idiot" in English, which he doesn't get. She would do anything for Michael, whom she loves but betrays after he becomes attracted to the journalist he rescued in Hawaii, the daughter of another of the objects of revenge, although neither of them know it (yet). The third woman in love with Michael is the ditzy daughter of yet another of the evil tycoons; he is using her to bring down his empire. A son of of the government official is the Korean "FBI" agent chasing Peter Pan, and is also in love with the journalist. He is working with a savvy and suspicious municipal policewoman who is not (yet) in love in Michael, which is just as well. She is his sister who was unknowingly rescued from the fire by another of the bad guys who raised her as his own daughter. You can just tell there are going to be complications.

All of these developing plot points are surmised. The DVD set I bought was only the first 12 episodes of the series, good quality DVDs with English subtitles, though my Korean DVD vendor insists they must be Chinese rip-offs. (I think he is perturbed that I acquired them in Chinatown.) Volume 1 concluded with a serious cliffhanger, or in this case, a bridge leap by SIG after his shooting enabled by Vivian-Emma Peel's ratting him out to the creepy FBI agent, who is reminiscent of Dave Foley from the comedy group, The Kids in the Hall, and thus hard to take seriously. It seems like sketch comedy when he takes on SIG in any kind of fight.

I unsuccessfully searched the web to find out if Volume 2 of the series had been issued (yet). All I could locate are downloads of the rest in Korean ...with Chinese subtitles. I am left with not so much cliffhanger as Tower of Babel. The Chinese subtitles are not very helpful; I can recognize about 3 characters out of every 3,000, usually "father", "person" and numbers. It might be easier if Korean wasn't so opaque to my ear, so to speak; it has next to nothing in common with any Chinese or even Japanese. It appears to be a language well suited to expressing fiery emotion; maybe it's the kim chee. As I watch the downloads, I can generally figure out what is happening, the first 12 episodes having set up the characters, action and storyline. But I'm sure I am missing subtle clues, if indeed there are any. Still it is enough really to hear SIG's surprising deep sonorous sexy voice threatening a bad guy or wooing one of the women. For some things, you just don't need subtitles.

Wooing or Threatening?