Slacker, 25 years later

Spurred by the big Richard Linklater profile in the latest New Yorker, I decided to rewatch Slacker, the film he made in 1989 (it was released in 1991). When it came out, it was supposed to represent my generation, more or less -- I was in high school then -- but what strikes me about it now is how completely it inhabits a kind of just before.

Slacker is a film about isolation, dislocation, alienation. The characters drift, no one really seems to know anyone else very well, and the only people who seem to be doing anything are obsessives and cranks: the woman trying to sell Madonna's pap smear, the guy who collects TVs and video tapes, the Kennedy conspiracy theorist who's working on a book you know he'll never finish. Watching the film from 2014, what's astonishing is how many of these people's problems are solved by the Internet. For the TV guy, there's YouTube. For the Madonna girl, there's TMZ and eBay. For the Kennedy conspiracist, there's pretty much the whole damn Internet. For the guy who says you really ought to read the paper, and for the guy who can't manage to buy himself a USA Today, there's all the free news on the web.  For all the artists with weird ideas, there's Kickstarter. Heck, for the very end of the movie, when the guy throws a movie camera off a cliff, there's GoPro.

Throughout the film, with its talk of conspiracies and new forms of consciousness, you can feel the characters yearning for the kind of interconnectedness that was just about to become possible. We are living in a new consciousness. When you're in it, of course, it's much less magisterial than the Age of Aquarius or some kind of New Age breakthrough. It just feels like life, and life hasn't ceased being difficult. But the last 25 years have brought a profound change in the way that we understand ourselves in the world.

Last night I was walking along the street in New York, speaking into a small device that I carry in my pocket, and my girlfriend was speaking back on a similar device from inside a palace in Seoul. Tomorrow I'll fly to the other side of the world to join her, and I'll let all my friends and family know when I've arrived -- the word will go out to Seoul, Phoenix, New York, California, Japan, who knows where else. Last weekend I went to Tobago for a wedding, and now the steel drum band I saw there is visible to you. The isolation and alienation of the Slacker moment is unimaginable today.

That's not to say that we have banished loneliness, done away with drift, overcome alienation. The age of social media has its own forms of alienation: distraction, envy, endless mediation. But it's a different world. Slacker is a fine film whose characters yearn for the things that people of that generation were about to create. The last five minutes, when the movie goes from clever to brilliant, point to the way forward. What was hailed at the time as a kind of manifesto of nihilism was in fact a DIY manifesto: a kind of a guide or a roadmap to what to do next, once we invented a better way of talking to each other.

Because Koreans are funny (on purpose sometimes)

Some of the funniest stuff out of Korea. Enjoy.

Don't know thyself too well

In a New York Times op-ed, David Brooks talks about the world of distractions we live in, our inability to say no to them despite lots of scolding, and what to do about it. He suggests following our passions, the things that absorb us. He quotes child psychologist Adam Phillips:

You can only recover your appetite, and appetites, if you can allow yourself to be unknown to yourself. Because the point of knowing oneself is to contain one’s anxieties about appetite.

This goes against what we are often told, which is that we should get to know ourselves. Instead, Brooks (through Phillips) suggests that we should look outside ourselves. Instead of asking, "Who am I? What do I want?" we could ask, "What delights me? What am I interested in?" And even more worthwhile would be to get together with others and talk about these things. As Brooks has it, "the free digression of conversation will provide occasions in which people are surprised by their own minds."

Feeling overwhelmed by distractions? Whether this is the right solution, it's certainly one that sounds like fun. Finding the things that absorb you is a good way to live. Find places where you can play with what delights you, and where you can try out new things to see if they might. Meetup.com is a great place to start. Find yourself a joy, and a community that shares that joy.

The dark side of personal growth

"May you achieve just enough success to keep you from giving up and finding satisfaction elsewhere, but never enough success to truly relax."

This is the first curse on The Toast's list of powerful modern curses. It's a chilling list -- the sorts of things we tend to fear most. These are the backside of all that personal growth chatter that tells us to find the work we love, follow our passions, engage with our romantic partners, and generally be wonderful people who do great things. 

Sometimes, though, that's not where we're at. We ebb and flow. We work day jobs whose primary purpose is to pay for food and shelter and a moderate amount of entertainment. We slog our way through fallow periods that seem to have no real value, and it's possible that we won't even look back on them and see how they were actually teaching us valuable lessons. 

But if these are your biggest fears, then you're doing OK. If you're afraid of being misunderstood at work, that means you have a job. If you're afraid of growing distant from those you love, that means you have love. These are top-of-the-Maslow-heap fears. These are not the fears of street orphans in Ghana. And if you're doing OK, that means you've got the capacity to do something more, along with the freedom to blow it off for now. 

Not everything has to be building to something else. We live in the mess of real life, if we're not afraid to tune it out. I find myself reminded these days of the value of staying in the moment, of living for today, because this is my actual life. I work in an office where people misunderstand me. I make mistakes in my relationship with my girlfriend. I have a nervous fear that I'm forgetting to do something important, and several pounds to lose. I stumble. A lot. This is my life, and it's real, and it's imperfect, and it's good. I should probably show up for it.

Publishing on North Korea

It's been a while. What have I been up to? Along with reading a lot of critical theory (ah, course work!), I've published an article in the Asia Pacific Affairs Council (APAC) Journal, published by Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute. You can find it on page 8. I tell the story of a North Korean defector and how her life on the margins of several Northeast Asian societies is emblematic of the challenges these refugees face.

The hot tub and the swimming pool

At the Killington Grand in Vermont, where Google New York sends us on our annual ski trip, the party in the evening usually ends up happening in the outdoor hot tubs. They're adjacent to the outdoor pool, which is warm but not hot.

As I watched more and more people (including myself) crowd into the hot tubs, I began to think of them as being sort of like New York: clearly where the party's at, but uncomfortably crowded and probably filthy. The big pool, meanwhile, was like Vermont: not as much fun, and definitely colder, but kind of OK once you get used to it -- and there was so much space!

Whenever I was in the hot tub, being mashed against a concrete wall by whoever had just plunged in, I would think about making my way out to that big pool, though I knew it would be cold at first, and maybe a bit lonely. And after I hit the pool and got comfortable again, in a little while I would look at how much fun they were having in the hot tubs and decide to plunge back in.

I suppose New York is like that: it's crowded and exhausting, but every time I leave it, I decompress for a while, but then I just want to plunge back into the hot water.

Using family as a weapon

I once heard a North Korean defector say that the thing he missed most about his home country was his girlfriend. A defector friend of mine has been able to speak to her sister by Chinese cell phone from time to time, but hasn't been able to see her sister or her father for years.

For defectors, of course, there's no hope of family reunions through legal means. The highly theatrical family reunions between North and South Koreans are for family members who were separated during the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953. Time and again, North Korea has raised the hopes of these separated family members that they might be able to spend a few hours with their loved ones, only to dash them at the last minute. And now, having offered the reunions in the first place, North Korea is once again threatening to cancel them.

North Korea is notorious for using families as a political weapon. Its system of punishing families to the third generation for the (perceived) crimes of an individual is a powerful tool of manipulation and repression that extends well beyond North Korea's borders, preventing North Korean defectors from speaking out publicly or forming coherent political identities in South Korea and elsewhere.

In taunting the aging survivors of the Korean War once again, North Korea's regime is further demonstrating its profound inhumanity. These people are not criminals -- not even in the warped perception of the North Korean government. They are simply pawns, individuals whose feelings matter only insofar as they can be used for the regime's political purposes. Their personal human suffering is irrelevant. It is hard to countenance a regime that shows such utter contempt for its own citizens.