[memory, history, and the beatles]

What does it mean to remember an experience? Sitting with my parents recently, listening to the Beatles remasters that just came out, it became clear that what my parents remembered about the Beatles — the order things came out, which songs were on which albums — was a kind of visceral memory, often inaccurate when measured against the archival record. My father compared it to the way people of his parents' generation remembered World War II versus the way he grew up learning about it: they knew better what it was like, while he knew better what had actually happened.

Time also has a way of distorting our views. I know that I take Kurt Cobain a lot more seriously now than I did when he was alive. Until his suicide brought his art back into focus for me, I thought of Nirvana as a pretty good if simplistic and overhyped grunge band that was never as cool or interesting as Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. He wasn't the voice of my generation until he no longer had a voice.

That effect is probably even stronger with the Beatles, who shaped a generation far more intensely than Cobain ever could have. In the many years since the Beatles were a going concern, we've seen Wings, and Plastic Ono Band, and the Concert for Bangladesh. We've seen The Compleat Beatles and Anthology. We've heard Let It Be de-Spectorized. We've seen John Lennon martyred, and Yoko Ono transformed from witch to hipster icon. And we've grown more familiar with the canonical materials, while the uncollected detritus of abandoned pop culture — radio and television interviews, DJ chatter about new Beatles songs, the speculation of one's friends about whether the Beatles turn on, the newspaper and magazine articles — all fade into oblivion.

Above all, we know how it ends now. We know that Sgt. Peppter's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the highwater mark, that Abbey Road is the coda. We know that no Beatle ever did anything solo that was as impressive as the Beatles together. And we know that the story was closed forever by a pointless murder.

But what was it like to here "Tomorrow Never Knows" without knowing what was to come?

Sitting with my parents, listening to their memories of these songs when they were new, I got a taste of what that might have been like. And that got me to thinking about my own first experience of the Beatles.

Until 1987, what we had were the records — the American records. I grew up with an album called Song, Pictures and Stories of the Fabulous Beatles, a decidedly silly repackaging of Vee-Jay's Introducing... the Beatles that included a gatefold, drawings of the Beatles, blurbs on their likes and dislikes, and places to put heart-shaped photographs of oneself under photos of each Beatle and the words, "JOHN LOVES," "PAUL LOVES," "GEORGE LOVES" or "RINGO LOVES." It was a record meant to be bought by a schoolgirl, and it was, and that has some meaning to it.

What changed in 1987 was that the surviving Beatles and George Martin released something resembling the whole Beatles catalogue in what became canonical form, based on the British albums, with the stray bits and pieces gathered onto Past Masters I and II. I say something resembling the whole because they did away with the instrumental versions of several songs that populated the American versions of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, and because all of the canonical CDs were in stereo. To muddy the waters even further, in 1987 George Martin took it upon himself to redo the stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul, so we've been listening to different versions of those LPs than the already somewhat obscure British stereo records.

The newly released remasters are a useful corrective. The music sounds grand, which is obviously the most important thing. I don't imagine that it sounds quite like a brand new pressing of British wax played on a brand new hi-fi from 1965 — certainly not when I play it on my iPod, through quality earbuds — but it sounds clear, resonant, full, and punchy.

And the release of the mono remasters, complete with the original stereo mixes of A Hard Day's Night and Help!, makes it possible to hear something much closer to what everyone heard when the Beatles' music was new. For the first couple of albums, the stereo mix is pretty arbitrary, mostly an artifact of how the music was recorded for mono: the vocals are all in the right channel, and the instruments are all in the left. I'd go so far as to say that Please Please Me and With the Beatles are actually preferable in mono, even on headphones.

There's also the peculiarity that certain songs have different bits in them, depending on whether you're listening to the mono or the stereo version. The Sgt. Pepper that played endlessly on the radio was probably the mono version, in which "She's Leaving Home" is a faster number in a different key, avoiding some of the soupiness of the stereo version, and the reprise is noisier, layered with more crowd noise and crescendoing with some great shouting by Paul that's missing in stereo. (In other cases, the stereo versions are better. Who wants to miss out on Paul reaching for the high notes as he sings, "Every single day!" during the fadeout of "Got to Get You Into My Life," or Ringo's famous "I've got blisters on my fingers!" as "Helter Skelter" fades back in?)

Getting to hear all this music, in a variety of formats, is wonderful. And it's not too difficult to create a playlist that recreates the American discography (although you do have to live without those instrumentals).

So what's the difference? Well, often the songs were in different orders, and the whole experience of the early Beatles was shaped by the overlapping releases of Introducing and Meet the Beatles!. The latter album, which launched American Beatlemania, opens with the world-conquering "I Want to Hold Your Hand," but leaves out "Twist and Shout" (not released by Capitol until The Early Beatles came out in 1965).

Even more significant were the changes to the middle-period albums, which were my parents' favorites, and whose structure and release schedule helped to map their courtship and coming of age. The now-canonical albums aren't the ones my father remembers. Help! opened with a James Bond theme intro (not digitally available), and was full of instrumentals. It didn't contain Yesterday, which wasn't on a US album until after Rubber Soul.

And it's maybe Rubber Soul where the changes matter most. My father remembers that record as part of his experience of traveling around Europe in the summer of '66, being in love with my mother. In the US, it opened with Paul's lovely, folkie "I've Just Seen a Face," not the smirky "Drive My Car." Side two opens with "It's Only Love," a considerably sweeter number than "What Goes On." And the dark moods of "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" are left off completely. The result is an album that has a different ratio of love to chagrin. There's a different vibe.

Then there's the whole sea change that seems to come with Revolver. In the US, that change was spread out over two albums, with "Yeterday"...and Today coming first, opening with "Drive My Car," "I'm Only Sleeping," "Nowhere Man," and "Dr. Robert," and closing out with "Day Tripper" (not found on any UK album). In America, Revolver was a bit less trippy than in the UK, and provided almost a lull in the psychedelic experimentation before the summer of Sgt. Pepper and love in 1967.

Somewhere in my parents' house is a reel-to-reel recording of my parents calling in to a radio show and chatting with John Lennon while they were tripping on LSD. I'm not entirely sure whether I've actually heard this tape, or just heard of it. I can't remember what anyone said. But this sort of relic reveals the unbridgeable gulf between the canonical text and the lived experience. No one will ever release a handsome boxed set of snippets like that. But chatting with John on the radio was another kind of listening to the Beatles. I'll have to dig up that tape one of these days and find out what, if anything, they talked about.

[so what's this korean dance you're learning?]

This is a reasonable question that a number of people have asked me, including my mom. A quick search for Korean dance on YouTube turns up mostly pop, and if you throw in the word "traditional," you get mostly women. And I had to admit that even I wasn't very clear on what the dance style I'm learning is supposed to look like when a man does it. (When it comes to men's dancing, I'm much more familiar with the twirly hat stuff and the 사물노리 (samulnori) farmers' dance.)

So I went searching, and I've turned up a few examples, which I will present for you here without further ado (better to link through where you can see the YouTube videos in a bigger size):

• 1
• 2
• 3

The first one is, I believe, roughly what my teacher has in mind for me. The odds of my dancing that well are not high. My parents told me about a budding jazz singer they knew who started weeping when they played a Sarah Vaughan record for her, and I kind of feel like that watching this video.

All of these dancers are impressive, and having taking a few classes, I have a much clearer idea of just how challenging it is to move gracefully through these poses. It's a beautiful form of dance, and extraordinarily foreign to me. I remember how startling it was when a crowd of people started up with a folk version of this sort of thing during the halftime of Korea's quarterfinal game in the 2002 World Cup, dancing in a circle and banging drums and cymbals there in the dirt field of the local middle school.

Bonus: For those who don't know, Korea has perhaps the world's most badass b-boy culture. Please to enjoy. 멋있다!

[visiting my congressman]

This morning I went to Representative Michael McMahon's Brooklyn office to present my support for health care reform in person. I met a young, friendly staffer who's on the same side as me, but made it clear to me that McMahon sees himself in a tough spot on this issue.

McMahon is the Representative for NY-13, a district that until the last election was held by Republican Vito Fossella. Fossella was caught in a scandal and declined to run for reelection. Then the favored Republican candidate, Francis Powers, died of a heart attack. In the end, McMahon took 61 percent of the vote in a district Obama lost.

According to the staffer I met, the people coming to McMahon's office to talk to him on health care have been about 80 percent against, and this has got McMahon worried. He also said that they'd decided not to hold any town halls because of concerns that they would be unproductive shouting matches. I reminded the staffer that shouters are not the same thing as polls or surveys, and that the last time we had a major poll, back in November, we elected McMahon on a Democratic platform that included health care reform.

But I think there are two important points here. The first is that a Democratic Congressional Representative is saying that his position on health care is being swayed by the overwhelming number of people coming into his office to speak against health care reform. We need to get out there and talk to our Reps to make sure they do the right thing!

The second point, which I hope our Representatives will grasp, is that the shouters and doubters on health care were never going to vote for them in the first place. Does McMahon truly believe that if he caves on health care, these nuts will come around to the Democratic side in 2010?

If health care reform passes, the Democrats will look strong. They'll have a record of achievement. And they'll get shouted at by loonies during the next election cycle. If health care reform doesn't pass, the Democrats will look weak. They'll come into the next election cycle facing accusations of incompetence. And they'll still get shouted at by loonies.

I hope the Democrats in Congress realize that voting down health care reform is not a winning proposition.

[more dancing with the ajummas]

As my grandfather tells it, he always thought of himself as rather weak and small. He's short, and as a child he seems to have been somewhat bookish (though his idea of bookishness was to run five miles to the library, get a book, and run five miles back), and as an adult he became a corporate lawyer, not a role that necessarily calls for strapping men.

Then, in his forties, he took up mime. Now, this was before mimes became a horrible punchline, before that awful time in the eighties when mimes, like the homeless, became a constant urban menace. The way her learned mime, it was a serious, strenuous art form. He lost weight, gained strength, and developed a sense of physical presence and spatial awareness that was still serving him well into his eighties, as he would dance about the kitchen, closing cabinet doors behind him with his foot.

I take after my grandfather in a lot of ways, and certainly physically. As a kid, I was small for my age, and I was never much good at sports. Compulsory Israeli folkdance at summer camp was always a horror of ineptitude and humiliation. And you might have noticed that I have certain bookish tendencies.

But in the last couple of years, I've started to dance. I was not the quickest student in my swing classes, but I wasn't consistently the slowest, either. And at this point in my life, I'm willing to learn slowly and awkwardly. It's really OK. I make a grownup living and can spell and all that, so it's not really a big deal if my Charleston is a little sloppier than some other people's.

And now I've managed to find my way into Korean dance. Karen, the resident American who's been studying this stuff for 15 years, insists that I'm learning faster than most students, that I've got great lines, that I'm a natural. I kind of think this might be similar to the way Koreans have been telling me my language skills are amazing ever since I learned to say hello, but she might also be being honest. For once, it seems, my odd little duck walk may be paying dividends. I tend to walk back on my heels, with splayed feet, and I've been told this is the walk of a yangban, or traditional Korean gentry. And my years of swing dance practice have taught me to keep my knees bent. So maybe I am better at following dance instructions than I used to be. Maybe my physical prowess is greater than it was when I was 12 and practicing layups.

[more on japanese vs. korean coolness]

I was going to follow up on an earlier post about Korean vs. Japanese coolness, and wondering whether anyone in Korea would ever be doing something like this:

Yes, it's awful. But it's also cool in a way that I didn't think Korean culture would quite grasp: the cool of the avant garde.

So I went fishing on the Interwebs to see if I could find an equivalent, and lo and behold, I discovered Balloon & Needle, a Korean artists collective that does things like this:

For some reason, this gives me hope.

[make health care a movement]

Sudden thought: If small groups of right-wing teabaggers — crowds of a thousand or so — are disrupting town hall meetings and shouting down Democratic congresspeople, why not show them up with some giant marches in favor of health care reform? I think that progressive activists could probably muster a few big crowds in the tens of thousands at least.

[is korea getting kinky?]

"Abracadabra" from Brown Eyed Girls is the first bit of Korean pop culture I've happened across that makes explicit reference to either BDSM or female bisexuality. (It's much more common to see sadomasochism couched in a "horror" context, which makes it more acceptable.) It's a sexy video, and not just a cutesy pantomime of American sexy.

Back in 2002, Korea was not sexy or cool. It really wanted to be cool, but it just wasn't.

I had a friend who was teaching in Japan at the time, and she reminded me that Japan used to be the same way. Back in the 80s, Japan was Mr. Miyagi and the dorky car executives in Gung Ho. And then one day, somehow Japan was cool. It was weird techno and Cibo Matto and tentacle porn, and those cheesy anime shows we used to watch were suddenly part of a vibrant Asian subculture.

When I wondered whether Korea would turn a similar corner, I saw a few things holding it back, but mostly it came down to prudishness and conservatism. Where Japan has a long tradition of frankly bizarre erotica and exuberantly weird subcultures, Korea's long-reigning Joseon Dynasty emphasized Confucian values of propriety, frugality and restraint. And Korea today is home to a large and passionate community of devout Protestant Christians. Also, Korea doesn't really do irony, and irony seems crucial to finding your way into the hearts of American hipsters.

Even so, the Hallyu, or Korean Wave, has managed to spread Korean pop culture across Asia in recent years. Compared with a stagnant, aging Japan and a China where censorship still rules, Korean culture can seem downright (dare I say it?) dynamic.

Will it catch on in the US? And if it does, where in our culture will it fit? I don't know, but I do know that Korea continues to surprise me.

[dancing with the ajummas]

"Body like swan: above the water, everything slow. Down below the water, fast." "Like cha-cha-cha! Cha-cha-cha!" "Everybody, Fast! In a circle! She is thief, I am police!" With these and other curious exhortations, I was initiated tonight into the world of traditional Korean dance.

I found the class on Craigslist, where people seek to enlist their fellows in all kinds of bizarre behavior. I arrived at Lotus Music and Dance, a world music-oriented dance studio whose entryway resembles a dental clinic for a dangerous clientele — I had to sign in through a metal grate before I was buzzed into the office area, where I filled out forms and signed and insurance waiver. Once that was done, I was waved down the hall to studio A, where I found myself in the company of three middle-aged Korean women, a young American woman, and our teacher, Songhee Lee, standing resplendent in her hanbok and moving with daunting grace.

Korean dance is unlike any dance I've done before. For one thing, it's slow, requiring a smoothness of movement that, shall we say, does not come naturally to me. Second, its rhythms are dauntingly alien to me. And third, it involves keeping your arms in the air for extended periods of time, which is exhausting. (Toward the end of the class, I got to thinking about CIA-administered stress positions, and how they were inspired by North Korean techniques.)

In fact, my first experience of learning Korean dance was a lot like my experience of learning Korean: confusing, difficult, fascinating, and presented with a curious combination of welcome and wariness. Lee Seonsaengnim wanted my phone number and email, and so did the American (a dedicated Korean dancer, it turns out — I'll have to get her story), and everyone was terribly impressed at my ability to speak Korean. But as is so often the case with Koreans, the question of how I learned Korean shades into the more accusatory question of why I'm interested in Korea. There seems to be a general consensus among Koreans that while foreign fascination with her gigantic neighbor to the west and her rich and sexy neighbor to the east makes perfect sense, there's something a little weird about being interested in Korea. It's like finding out your friend is really into polka, or a huge Steve Gutenberg fan.

Nevertheless, the welcome won out, as usual. People are usually flattered when you find them interesting. Lee Seonsaengnim offered to arrange special sessions to teach me "man dance," and the American woman promised that she would give me free lessons. "Have you been to Korea?" I asked her.

"I go every year."

"Then can you teach me out to dance like the drunk old men in the park?"

She says she can teach me in an hour. We'll see.

[the cup]

Many years ago, I saw a lovely Tibetan film called The Cup. It has been a long time, but I finally watched it again, and I found it just as sweet, moving and lovely as before. It's the story of some monks in a Tibetan monastery in northern India — refugees, mostly — and one young monk's passion for soccer during the 1998 World Cup.

I guess I don't have all that much to say about it right now except that I would encourage you to see it if you can.

[i love my india]

This video from India's Got Talent, passed on by a Facebook friend, is a great example of what I find so compelling about India: the passionate mix of high and low, sacred and profane, beautiful and silly, devout and camp, until you're completely unable to tell which is which.