This is a scene from Pyongyang, North Korea. It seems Pyongyang has no shortage of grey. If the nations of the world were just willing to pay serious money for grey, perhaps Kim Jong-il would be appeased and could live out his days hunting the tooth fairy with big defective weapons. Sadly, that is not to be.
The picture was taken by a Russian web designer visiting North Korea. You can find more of his pictures here. I find it hard to not find it interesting to see pictures of the very oppressed and secretive nation launching test missiles. I found the pictures earlier tonight on the Cult of Bush website, Powerline. Have a look at the post. When I first read it, I found myself locked in a brief state of bemused horror as I glanced across the words “North Korea is a perfect reproduction of the year 1950” just above a picture of a garden filled with the heroic statues of North Korean Olympians. Irony died a few years back, so there is no need to get excited. It’s just interesting to read an authoritarian cultist quoting a personal observation from one of the world’s most authoritarian nations, comparing that nation to the alleged dream decade of the garden variety authoritarian cultist. Odd, really.
I realize I’m pulling on way too many loose and unrelated threads here. Somebody should be along shortly with something interesting to say. Until then, talk amongst yourselves.
at the photo of North Koreans seeing a “white person”. South Koreans I’m sure see people of European decent more often. My adventurous husband though decided that we needed to go to South Korea’s huge waterpark when we in South Korea for the summer a few years back. It is a lovely waterpark too…..HUGE….. but in swimming suits there is so much more of a white person to see. I felt under a microscope all day…….it was really a bizarre feeling. We were the only European descendants there that day among probably a couple of thousand South Koreans, and they couldn’t help staring even though I know they tried not to. When attending a South Korean waterpark you had better bring your swimcap and your flipflops. Not because you have lice or athlete’s foot or because other people there do, it is customary and to not wear such things at the waterpark is considered nasty and icky and tasteless and just plain unhygienic for crying out loud you barbarians!
Got that feeling a lot in India and Japan .. went to a town on the far west coast of Japan, spent some time in a traditional guest-house run by family of an acquaintance and went to visit a temple. Got back to Toyko and got stopped on the subway by someone who had seen us at the temple in the west and wanted to talk to us. Scary …
Apropos or not, you’ve reminded me that my son and I had a (for a while) funny experience in Australia years ago. It was a period when the continent was really packed with Asian tourists. My son was a really cute blond four-year-old, and when I took him out, we were stopped again and again by Japanese tourists who wanted either to take just his photo or his with me, because they thought we were a typical Australian mom and son, lol. I imagined a hundred coffee tables in Tokyo with photo albums with pictures of us inside. Eventually it began to bother my son and he told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want to do that anymore. I understood how “natives” could think their souls are being stolen!
Indeedy, I remember the whole swimcap thing when I went over to the homeland when I was in my early teens. My cousins were surprised I didn’t have a swimcap, one of them lent me theirs.
And Korea is a pretty homogenous place. While Seoul it is very Westernized in many ways, there aren’t too many non Koreans there.
I remember before going over to Korea, my dad telling me that everyone there will know that I was different. That I wouldn’t have to even open my mouth for them to know I was an American-born Korean. I went to a month-long camp for people of Korean descent at Seoul University where I was around Korean-Americans, Korean-Brazilians, Korean-Chinese… It was quite an experience for all of us and it definitely helped us all understand where we were all coming from and face the stares from the Korea-born Koreans together.
I imagine a lot of the trees may have been cut for firewood, given the desperate situation there for the average person.
My favorite part of the photo is the building in the lower right with the green vines growing up it, almost as if it has a rash.
One wonders how quickly Kudzu will grow over the ruins of our own culture if the worst effects of climate change come to pass. Here’s a preview:
One
Two
Three
Fascinating. Thanks, Chris.
I’m still laughing at your headline.
Me too.
Just as a note, the time stamp on this is all wrong, but I didn’t fix it because I don’t want to keep other people from posting. It was up for about 15 minutes last night and then I decided I hated it so I pulled it before I realized Tracy had commented, so now it’s back from outer space.
I’m glad you put it back up. I found the photo diary facinating. When I was in East Berlin before the wall was torn down, it looked a bit like this. All cement blocks and completely devoid of color.
are those really ranches on the attack, or bi-levels? Either way, they look menacing.
I have recurring nightmares about marauding ranch houses, so I may just be superimposing a little personal insanity.
But…WAIT A MINUTE. HERE!!!
Who the hell do we think WE are to signify on the North Koreans!!!???
I mean…REALLY, folks!!!
Sure they are in trouble.
We are ALL in trouble.
They’re just not as gifted with resources as we are.
And sure they have taken a wrong turn.
But you know what?
I’ll bet the North Koreans overall are:
A-Healthier
and
B-Happier
than the average American.
You know…the pictures of the people that I see on this linked website look a DAMNED site better than equivalent pictures that might be taken by a tourist in some of the “forbidden” areas of THIS country.
Ghettos, run-down rural trailer park-ridden towns, depressed ex-industrial cities.
I could do a photo essay in a quick MINUTE in say Buffalo NY that would rival this one in sheer horror quotient.
Bet on it.
In some Lynndie English-producing, McDonalds and Wal-Mart poisoned West Virginia holle or in any of our literally THOUSANDS of deporessed, minority-filled ghettos as well.
We just make these areas “forbidden” using different fences.
The fences of fear, erected by the media.
Sure, you tourists. This is America, land of the free. Go take some photos of 5th Avenue in mid-flight, all consumption and no fear. But DO NOT GET ON THE SUBWAY AND TAKE THE 15 MINUTE RIDE TO JAMAICA, QUEENS!!!
You MIGHT get more than you bargained for.
And don’t you go visiting Wilmington Delaware, either. Outside of the credit card company high rise neighborhoods and country club gated communities.
OR Shit Holler, West Virginia.
Or East St. Louis or South Central LA or Debbie Does Dallas After Dark, either.
Who the fuck are WE
To complain about how people “choose” their leaders?
To mock people who “live in the 1950s”.
Here’s OUR “1950s”.
Nice , eh?
While North Korea 70 years later can’t even get it together to make one jiveass misslie fly straight for more than a mile.
Let he who is without sin cast the first bomb.
Who the fuck are WE!!!???
AG
When did Wilmington get high rises and when you write “And don’t you go visiting Wilmington Delaware,” does this mean I don’t have to go back there ever again?
Central Wilmington is FULL of credit card-scamming office buildings and their cloned daytime residents. Thanks be to Joe Biden, the Senator from MBNA.
And no…there is no need whatsoever to go back there again.
I have traveled regularly between DC and NYC by car over the last 15 years with one of the early, W.W. II Black Marines, who is now in his 90s and still burning. He has in many ways been my musical and personal mentor for about THIRTY years, give or take a few. He is from one of the earliest even partially integrated systems in America, a neighborhood in Philadelphia, and he used to say that his father and brothers would not dream of going any further south than Philadelphia if they could POSSIBLY help it.
One day I came up with a name…”The Manson-Nixon Line”…to describe the jumping-off place for the REAL south. Just south of Philly.
AND WILMINGTON IS SUBSTANTIALLY SOUTH OF THAT LINE.
Time travel, USA.
I worked quite often in a really good restaurant…perhaps the ONLY good one at the time…right opposite the Opera House in Wilmington during the late’90s/early ’00s,, and baby, 5 blocks in any direction and it was 1953 all over again. Made a wrong turn one hot summer Saturday night driving back to NYC and ended up in the rowhouse ghetto just north…???
Man, I thought that I had somehow been magically transported to Little Rock circa 1953. Who WAS this white fool in his hot rod Ford driving through OUR neighborhood at 2AM???
Same people on the sidewalk at 2 PM downtown?
“YASSUH, boss!!!” At least out front. I swear to God, I almost expected to see black people stepping out of the way onto the street so’s the gentry could pass.
Wilmington. One of my best friends grew up black there. He’s 60 now, and his eyes STILL get wide when he talks about what it was like.
Wilmington.
The Manson-Nixon Line goes right THROUGH it.
Bet on it.
AG
AND WILMINGTON IS SUBSTANTIALLY SOUTH OF THAT LINE.
Based on the sentence later in your comment, I think that you are talking culturally, sociologically, and in terms of temperament and attitude.
By that measure, Boston, MA is also substantially south of that line.
It would have to be, because Wilmington is slightly to the East, rather than to the South of the Mason Dixon line.
The Manson-Nixon is a WHOLE ‘nother line, Chris.
People cross THAT one all over the world.
AG
Ah, your own line. Sorry. Must have been asleep for that part of the presentation. I went back and reviewed.
No, I do not believe that to be true.
That line…as my friend and I and our many different co-riders interpreted it through many conversations…has to do with ATTITUDE.
Hope.
Resistance.
And/or a sort of resignation.
A particular KIND of resignation, of acceptance that this is how things are and how they always WILL be. I do not mean to imply that racism does opt exist everywhere in this country. Only that the particular FORM it takes…the potential craziness of Manson-like racists as harnessed by their Nixonian controllers…can only be found in certain areas of the country.
And as you travel down the eastern seabaord of the US, just south of Philly is where you begin to smell it. Where I begin to smell it, anyway.
Not everywhere.
But Wilmington/Baltimore/DC?
And environs?
Yup.
BIG time.
Farther south?
To tell you the truth…yes. Although I have spent NOWHERE near the time there as I have on the DC to Maine eastrn seacoast.
With the exception of Atlanta. Where I have spent a LOT of time, and where things are definitely better, in my estimation.
And maybe Savannah as well.
Charleston?
Maybe.
And Gold Coast Florida is a whole ‘nother universe.
But in the piney woods and mountains inland?
You BETCHA!!!
Manson-Nixon CENTRAL!!!
AG
I don’t know AG. I’ve seen high rises and these aren’t high rises.
Strange place you describe. I’ve never been there. When I was about 18 I was playing in a band based out of Chester, Pa and we’d sometimes play in Wilmington. One night the singer stopped off to talk to some friends – I forget which part of town. They didn’t seem to like him much, because as we drove off at a high rate of speed they started shooting at the car. Now that wasn’t the best time I ever had in Wilmington, but probably not too far off.
Call ’em what you will.
But they ain’t THESE rises, either.
AG
When I was in South Korea in the mid 80’s there were still parts of Seoul that looked exactly like this. I got to travel around Seoul and north of it quite a bit and have some photos that are similar. Most of these homes were built after the war and date to the late 50’s early 60’s have been added on to and renovated, just like any other culture. When the Olympic stadiums were built along the Han River the residents were forced out and their homes were bulldozed.