Korea Conference Day 1 - Demilitarized Zone

Regular followers of this blog are no doubt thinking, "What's up with this? Loring goes to a conference and all we get is lousy kim chee videos and a JPEG of a front-page. Where's the detailed coverage? And what's with this crazy J.G. Ballard and Black Lips stuff?" Well, organizing all my videos and photos is a massive task, particularly with the laptop still under repair. And giving a data dump on the entire conference without a few short subjects to break it up would have been a bit stiff. Anyway...



We took a bus to the DMZ Thursday morning, guided by photographer and author Lee Si-Woo. It was a sunny, cool spring day, with a fairly good view across the Han River at the Ohdusan Unification Observatory. It was also the day North Korea expelled IAEA nuclear inspectors from North Korea, which may have helped explain the news media presence.

Lee has spent time in jail for refusing to give up photos that the South Korean government deemed a national-security violation, a case he eventually won. He also has fought to win the right to sail small boats up the Han and Imjin rivers, directly into the border zone. He explained about the model villages the North Korean government maintains directly across the river, a favorite gawking spot for the many tourists. We were surprised to discover that the more public observation spots on the southern side of the DMZ have been taking on a Disney quality in recent years, with plenty of tourist attractions. The "bridge to nowhere" where prisoners were exchanged even had waist-size dolls of North and South Korean soldiers (I'm posing at a soldier-doll with Todd Ensign, director of Citizen Soldier).



We were allowed to take our group inside the Civilian Control Line, where few tourists or even South Korean residents get to visit. A restaurant in the village within the CCL made everyone a meal prepared almost solely from food grown within the DMZ, including homemade tofu. Delicious.



After lunch, we visited a close-in observatory where we could see a maquiladora created by South Korean companies within North Korean territory, a fairly large North Korean city, and the competing massive flags of North and South Korea on either side of a UN observation post.



On the way back to Seoul, we stopped at a village where several residents have become amputees due to US land mines, and talked to one double-leg-amputee victim who is getting international help to bring suit for compensation. The US use of land mines around the DMZ is more dense than any other US use of mines by a factor of ten, and is much denser than the North Korean mine fields.




The day ended with a song and exercise session back at Seoul International Women's Plaza, led by Sung-Yong Park, Yumi Kikuchi, and Dopehead Zo.

Black Lips at the Black Sheep

The Ramones are not dead. Neither are The Standells, or even ? and the Mysterians. They live on in the clean-cut Atlanta bash-n-mash antics of The Black Lips, who played Monday night at The Black Sheep in Colorado Springs. Perfectly executed, four-part-harmony stupid garage rock is non-stop fun. Line of the night from Cole Alexander, during banter with a loud audience member: "Look, we're from the South, we have centuries of experience in moral bravado, which is something you ADD-addled mountain people will never understand." Rock on.

RIP J. G. Ballard

Sunday morning April 19, right around the time I was flying over Sakhalin, J. G. Ballard stopped breathing. The 78-year-old author had suffered from a long illness of undisclosed nature. Most folks are aware of his two books that were turned into movies, Empire of the Sun and Crash. But Ballard also wrote far more important and disturbing works, including The Drowned World and The Atrocity Exhibition (which RESearch reprinted in the late 1980s as a medical illustration coffee-table edition of astonishing horror). The latter includes two personal favorite short stories, "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" and "The Assassination of JFK as a Downhill Motor Race" (also re-imagined as a video here).

Ballard used to be called a science fiction writer, before he started writing erudite and respectable novels in his latter years. But what he always was, was an unforgettable and irreplacable master of speculative fiction. What a body of work. Maybe, like Roberto Bolano, he will leave us several post-humous surprises so that the two deceased authors have a downhill race for the title of Tupac Shakur of literature.

The Best Kim Chee in Pyeongtaek

Too tired to blog much now. Here is the front page of Hankyore newspaper in Seoul, with conference speakers at DMZ. Below is a video of some of us sampling the finest kim chee to be found in Pyeongtaek. Will have videos and observations of the conference and South Korea later on.

Grandpa Neil has a Song for You

Some curmudgeons one just can't compete with. Neil Young's new album is full of songs about hybrid cars and revenue streams and hedge funds, but the title cut, "Fork in the Road", is one of his funniest ever. Go watch the video about blogging in the dark and repossessing your flat-panel TV and "bailout coming but it's not for me" and "support the troops in the fuckin war whose idea was that?" etc, etc. Video is here.

"In my day, we had cinnamon girls and gold rushes and spliffs as big as your arm. Not like this 21st century shit." Long may you run, old man.

Technical Difficulties, Censored Blog Items, and Apocalypse Now

I would have plenty to tell you this week about blog censorship and the power of corporations, except that the motherboard on my brand new Toshiba Satellite melted down, and the service warranty requires a three-week turnaround for repair. Suffice it to say for now that I was one of two bloggers (the other a full-time editor) whose posts for a media outlet were removed for critiquing the business plan of a company (no, not Toshiba, though they're not on my faves list). Later, I'll provide details and thrilling tales of editorial cowardice and things that go bump in the night. Right now, I'm just cranky over the Spartans getting creamed in the Final Four championships, laptops that don't play well with others, and media companies that fail to follow basic journalistic ethics. Stay tuned, understand if you don't see many posts, and do not adjust your set.

Space Symposium in a Snowy Week

I'm not posting much this week, as I am covering the National Space Symposium at the Broadmoor, when I can make it through the weird weather. Major speeches from the heads of Space Command, National Reconnaissance Office, Strategic Command, Cyber Command. This is the realm of war, national security, and civilian space that everyone should be paying attention to, and very few do. I'll have some business stories from the conference through Reed et. al., and you can see some clips at YouTube - follow "National Space Symposium."