[pensioner schoolgirls]

North Korea retains its title as purveyor of the world's weirdest insults.

[online chats with kim jong-il]

Check it out.

[cinema faux]

The Korea Society is presenting three nights of happy workers: Films from the North will be shown on May 12 through 14.

I'm sure they're all stellar, like all socialist art. And who can resist any film that "took the Bulgarian box office by storm in the late 1980s"? That's Hong Kil Dong, a kung fu movie that sounds less horrible, or perhaps just more surreal, than the films about turning your town into a model socialist village and going to the countryside for emergency agricultural work, respectively.

So, who's game?

[misreading korea]

A friend of mine sent me a link to a Salon story titled A Taste of North Korean Beer Propaganda, which is centered around a bizarre claim that North Korea's beer brand, Taedonggang, has a picture of a historically significant American schooner on its cap.

One does not even have to read Korean to work out that Taedonggang is named after the Taedong River — it's mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the beer — and from there, it's not hard to do a little Googling and find out that the picture on the bottle cap is of the Chongryu Bridge, which crosses the Taedong in Pyongyang.

Why Salon so completely missed this is beyond me. It smacks of pure laziness. I expect we'll be hearing from them any day about the Marlboro-KKK connection.

[nuclear progress]

Excellent news.

[agreement]

And there they are, the guys who decided a deal was better than an ongoing nuclear standoff.

[whaddaya know?]

So the early report is that a deal has been reached with North Korea: energy aid in exchange for steps toward disarmament.

It's very preliminary still, and this whole thing could collapse over a North Korean demand for more energy than the other five powers are willing to give, or, more likely, over shifting North Korean positions on what disarmament steps they will take and when.

It will be interesting to see, as the details emerge, where exactly this leaves the Bush administration in terms of its North Korea policy. Did the hard line work? Were the Bushies right all along to toss the Agreed Framework over North Korea's dabbling with uranium? Were they right to insist on talking only through the six-party framework rather than one on one?

The last question is the easiest to answer: No. The North Koreans have proved far more willing to compromise since Chris Hill, our lead negotiator, started talking one-on-one with the North Koreans (albeit in a format that the Bush administration, never sticklers for reality, continue to insist doesn't qualify as one on one). As for the rest of it, let's keep in mind that we're now asking North Korea to roll back its plutonium-bomb developments, which wouldn't exist if not for the collapse of the Agreed Framework.

There is no indication that the central problem of a poor, hostile, dictatorial, aggressively criminal North Korea has been solved. Still, if we're all stepping back from the brink of nuclear war, that's good.

For more on North Korea, check out Richard Bernstein in the New York Review, who notes that back in the early Clinton years, conventional wisdom had it that the communist regime in North Korea would wither and collapse like so many others had in Central and Eastern Europe. At this point, I think a more realistic model is that of China and Vietnam, where the Communist Party has maintained control while transforming into something new and pro-capitalist. And the road to such a transformation is through engagement, not isolation.

The Kim dynasty seems unlikely to collapse through internal decay, though one never knows. And even if it did, that would hardly be the end of our troubles: a headless state full of fanatical militants with no food is not a pretty prospect for any of its neighbors. Only engagement has any chance of creating a North Korea that can join with South Korea to become a prosperous, peaceful Korea.

Update: It turns out that South Korea's lead negotiator is Chun Yung-woo, with whom I had the pleasure of working closely on a number of occasions when he was Deputy Permanent Representative at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations. In my experience, he was extremely intelligent, incisive, charismatic and tough-minded — ideal for his current role, really. Should an accord be signed, I will have to send him a note of congratulations.

[it depends what your definition of "is" is]

From the BBC:

This is not an instance of bilateral negotiations," White House spokesman Tony Snow told Reuters news agency.

"What you had ...this week in Berlin were talks with Chris Hill and a North Korean representative as preparations for the six-party talks."

Oh. Sure. Not negotiations, talks. Right. That makes all the difference. Thank goodness it was talks and not negotiations!

Either way, the US seems to be showing some flexibility on a number of issues, including economic sanctions, which means that there is now the actual possibility of negotiation at the upcoming resumption of the Six-Party Talks.

[the genius of diplomacy]

See, here's the crazy thing about diplomacy: sometimes engaging in it works better than declaring it pointless.

For years, the North Koreans have been trying to get the US to engage in talks. But the Bush administration has insisted that the only way we could ever possibly talk to North Korea is in the format of the Six-Party Talks, with Russia, China, Japan and South Korea in the room. The successes of this approach include North Korea's missile and nuclear tests last year.

Now, in a surprise move, the US seems suddenly to have decided that bilateral talks could be possible. How did this come about? Well, Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill made this discovery while in bilateral talks with senior North Korean officials.

Does this strike anyone else as spectacularly tortured? Our high-level officials met their high-level officials, with representatives of no other country present; at this meeting, they discussed the possibility of bilateral talks?

The whole argument against bilateral talks was that they would somehow encourage the North Koreans to more bad behavior by demonstrating that prior bad behavior got them what they wanted. And so we did: nothing. That'll learn 'em! Of course, this is typical Bush admin thinking, which puts talks with us on a pedestal as the ultimate prize to be earned for doing what we want, instead of seeing talks as how we convince other countries to do what we want. Traditionally, talks have been seen as relatively safe, even if they're not expected to produce results, while wars have been seen as relatively dangerous, even if they're expected to go well. The Bush administration has turned that thinking on its head.

But now something seems to have changed. This is good. Talking to North Korea is wise. Talking to all our enemies would be wise. And perhaps one day we will have a government that realizes you flip more bad guys with dialogue than with waterboarding.

[the two koreas]

Today's top story involving Korea ought to be Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon's likely appointment as UN Secretary-General.

Indeed, last night's annual reception for National Foundation Day was packed, attended by far more dignitaries, of far higher rank, than in past years. United States Ambassador John Bolton was there — Jenny remarked that he is shorter than she expected — as were the ambassadors of the other permanent members of the Security Council, as well as Japan's ambassador, who is currently the president of the Council. The big crowd was there, I am certain, because of the news that had come out less than an hour before the reception began that South Korea would be providing the next SG. Already the appointment was having one of its desired effects: raising South Korea's profile in the world.

At the moment, however, the big Korea news is that the North is planning a nuclear test. The timing is fairly typical of North Korea — these are the same people who managed to stage a naval incident in 2002, killing four South Korean sailors right around the climax of the World Cup hosted in South Korea. Whether today's announcement is meant to derail Minister Ban's appointment or merely overshadow it is unclear, but it is certainly bad news.

[weekly world music 13: songs for the dear leader]

Song of General KIM IL SUNG | Don't Ask My Name | Children's Music 1 (Music Gallery of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea)

애국가 (Aegukga) (National Anthem of the Republic of Korea)

Been hankering for creepy marches and disturbing paeans to terrifying totalitarian dictators? Your search is over!

In honor of North Korea's recent erectile dysfunction, here are a few tracks from the DPRK's charming Music Gallery, as filled with joy as everything produced in the jolly North. My Korean isn't good enough to understand most of the lyrics, and I'm not about to go wandering around the South Korean UN Mission in search of someone to translate North Korean propaganda ditties, so unfortunately I can't tell you exactly what these tunes are about. I did catch the children singing "김정일 ... 우리 아버지" (Kim Jong-il ... uri abeoji, or Kim Jong-il ... our father) at one point, but you knew that was in there somewhere.

In the interest of fairness, I've also included the national anthem of the Republic of Korea, whose title translates to The Patriotic Song — you may recall hearing it following some short-track skating event in the Winter Olympics. It's better than the North Korean stuff, although I find it disappointing that so many Asian countries have gone for poignant yet rousing anthems in the European classical tradition. Like, wouldn't it be cooler if the national anthem of Indonesia was the Kecak, or if India's was a raga that took 45 minutes? If Nepal can have its wacky flag, shouldn't someone have a truly bizarre national anthem?

Oh, and if you happen to be wondering why a "weekly" feature appears as sporadically as Weekly World Music, let's just say that I'm on summer schedule, and also that I'm sorta lazy. I'll try to keep up with it every week, but some weeks it'll slide. Life is full of broken promises.