My last post being a bit off topic, I am going to refresh anyone still paying attention to me on the internet by updating them with some Korea news. The kids are getting more and more used to seeing my face everyday and I think are actually growing fond of it. For one, I am receiving completely adorable random hugs from students all over Wonderland. My youngest students, a class of four 3 year olds, have quickly become my favorite. They are definitely the easiest to entertain and do a spectacular job entertaining me back. We want on a field trip to the botanical gardens awhile back and I spent the whole time as their chaperone. It was awesome. Here are some pictures:


Katie and Megan posing as pretty pretty princesses (sleeping beauty and ...enthusiastic monkey)

Sean and Andy posing as super savage destructo ninja warriors

Princess/monkey cont.

Botanical Gardens group shot. 16.7% of this picture looks enthused.

Sean preparing for the dentist. Katie getting caught up in the excitement.

The notorious smirk


Anyway, its hard to discern whether things have been chaotically fast or mind-numbingly slow around here. Obviously, my blog took some serious damage in the month of September. This can be accounted for by my sheer laziness. I was perfectly capable of updating at least once after the first, but opted for embarrassingly long trips to Burger King and getting drunk in Suji. Well maybe half of that is true. I'll just pretend you know which direction of my logic is actually logical.

This past month was unwavering in its "put it off till later" and "holy crap I have to finish this stupid lesson plan before my flaking credibility as a responsible human being is ultimately flushed down the toilet." Ok, it maybe wasn't that drastic, but we did have these things called "Open Classes" this month that involved stress levels so high, they may as well have been irrelevant. An open class for Wonderland is where parents come to observe and evaluate their students' (and not-at-all legitimately trained teacher's) progress. Of course, like all things involving direct parent/school credibility correspondence, stress is pushed to maximum overdrive, ensuring no single thought escapes painfully precise preparation. I, with all the other teachers, was mandated to create a verbatim lesson plan of something inherently predictable and ultimately redundant. Not that I was above it or anything. I completely understood the risks associated with ill preparation. It was just the sheer tediousness of every single detail being mulled over and reassessed for an entire month that made things a little ridiculous. When the classes finally happened, I still managed to stumble near the end of both. Why? Because I realized how intense my freshly developed routine had been scrutinized under the high powered microscope of making a perfect first impression. In all that planning and working and devising, I forgot how to teach. I thought after any type of misstep I very well may have been a goner, but the stress ultimately proved futile. The only complaint made by any of the parents was a suggestion that I could've given the students a worksheet (more work) on top of an already absurdly condensed, nerve racking, fast paced lesson. Basically, it meant hitting the bars at raging head-on-collision force the following weekend.

Don't get me wrong, it actually wasn't all bad. I mean, I may be exaggerating a couple elements here. But I realized just how pointless stress can be sometimes. I'm aware it doesn't work for everybody that way, but I absolutely hate being stuck in the position where I'm supposed to feel like it shouldn't. Either way, it's over now and I am successfully teaching in my own "slack to the max without being foolish" style. I'm aware of my responsibilities and I will get them done. In fact, I thought today was the best, most consistently flawless teaching I've done since being here, and I did it all with little or no standard preparation. My routine, with obvious overhead regulation from Wonderland, has come into its own, and it makes me a more confident and better teacher.

Now, to highlight some things outside of school, Joel and I went to the Global Gathering festival in the Han River Nanji park a few weeks ago. With blissful intentions on observing and sporadically dancing to Royksopp, we went into the night full fledged psycho fans. It proved worthy and we were fairly certain we saw the infamous "chick from the Knife" (I swear nobody who knows of her knows her name) singing to their loveliest and grooviest tunes. I, as well as Joel, were much enthused. On top of that, Underworld played a mind-bogglingly awesome set- something I was definitely not prepared for. We'd come to see Royksopp and viewed watching Underworld as a mini-bonus to waiting for MSTRKRFT. Inevitably, that logic was thrown out the freaking window as Underworld blew away a significant portion of my mind. When "Pearl's Girl" hit the sound system, I just started jumping in pure excitement. I have never been in such entranced, spontaneous excitement.

Speaking of entranced spontaneous excitement, if you don't know my friend Ryan, you should. He has a recently started music blog called Billy D's Sunset Breeze and it is pure awesomeness. He recently posted a mix that I will honestly testify to being out of this world phenomenal. If you have any sense of transplanetary groove in you, then you must download, listen, and repeat. He is awesome.

Now That's What I Call Power-Pop-Folk-Metal!!!

After reading my friend Ryan's blog about media driven music labeling and commenting, I got pretty enamored with dissecting the labeling process even further. I find it fantastically interesting that an entire theory of social psychology can be extracted from a practically automatic human function. Categorization is somewhat of an inevitability when it comes to dense, multi-tiered artistic pursuits, but I find its automation almost always lies within too specific of parameters, essentially canceling its purpose out altogether. In the Shape of Time, George Kubler delves into this concept with a semantic approach on how history can be classified based on "style":

In practice certain words, when they are abused by too common use, suffer in their meaning as if with cancer or inflation. Style is one of these. Its innumerable shades of meaning seem to span all experience. ....gasolines and toilet papers have style (while) annual fashions in clothes are purveyed as styles. In between lies familiar terrain of "historic" styles: cultures, nations, dynasties, reigns, regions, periods, crafts, persons, and objects all have styles. An unsystematic naming of binomial principles allows an illusion of classed order.

Thus, style is illusory, having semantic significance too specific for far too many of the subjects it defines. This is just one example, and he didn't even mention music. Currently (and well, for the past sixty or so years), popular music has been driven solely by its never ending conveyer belt of labels. To give a generic consortium of these is pretty easy: Rock and Roll, Blues, Folk, Rap, Dance, Oldies, 80s, World, Metal, Alternative... I could go on. Whether these labels are media or fan based is unimportant, as they are what specifically defines them as popular music. And this is what makes the entire thing so interesting. Popular music in this regard, much like Kubler's analysis of style, is itself completely ambiguous. It is an open label broadly defining too much within too narrow of parameters. Clearly, when considered as such, Rap and Metal are entirely different musical concepts, working within practically opposite spectrums. Last.fm, Pandora, and cable packages that offer 24 hour popular music stations are subjecting thousands of distinctly dynamic pieces of music into "appropriate" (and sometimes wholly inaccurate) subcategories for the purpose of practicality. This is not to say specific popularized genres were not being exploited as such in the countless record shops strewn about city blocks 30, 20, or even 10 years ago, but is rather offering the assumption that increased global communication and technology will inevitably lump these popularized identifiers as what may be deemed "popularly necessary". I mean look at "Soul/R&B" or "Electronica/Dance" or even just flat out "80s". The categorizations inevitably limit themselves.

Not only this, but the cyclical nature of Pop music is something driven entirely by "inventing" new labels. Much of this "inventing" has fallen victim to specific formulas. Within the structure of these formulas lies what I believe can appropriately be considered "easier" means of achieving success in the Pop music market. Are those Now Thats What I Call Music!!! compilations still being released? Interesting how easily those things actually garnered sales. Sure, the songs were catchy and at rare points, innovative. But what if we were to ask the NTWICM's sales team what they considered musical integrity? Any genre represented by a particular song or group on those compilations can probably be traced back to some of its predecessor's (primary influence) more popularized works, and so on. This is not to say any genre represented by a song or group was entirely disingenuous, as inspiration and idolization define music as an art form, but merely observe them in a highly processed, easily discernible formula.

This is one major reason why I've gotten so into Disco recently. It was particularly curious to me that such a hugely popularized genre, defined exclusively within pop culture knowledge by the 70s, leisure suits, mirror balls, glowing tiles, and the Bee Gees, could be so incredibly dynamic and varied. It was literally an entire culture I knew nothing about. With that, it was also some of the most personally satisfying music I've ever heard in my life. Interestingly, I'd never really known its subtleties and variations until after stumbling upon them, and sifting past its most righteously popular definers. The irony here is two-fold:

1. I knew it as a popularized label and consciously or sub-consciously avoided its chasms of audible goodies because of this.
2. I explored those chasms and now expressly identify my tastes through this popularized label.

Granted, I could hardly say I am qualified enough to declare myself anything other than an enthusiastic listener, but my intentions are good. Am I conforming to a label or not? Should positivity or negativity be invited into this recognition? Did this blog even make sense? Comments?