The next morning we got up early- It was still rainy and awful. I’d misheard Mary and packed for 60 degree weather. It probably hung around 50, but I spent most of it in various states of dampness, which for those of you inclined to nerdery is something like a -5 check on a roll for happiness. Our trip would unfold like this: We’d take a bus from Mokpo about an hour away and another bus from there about 40 minutes farther. The second bus would deposit us near, but not AT, the temple. We’d been advised to just catch a cab from there as the temple sits on top of a mountain that resides somewhat on the “fuuuu” side of the leisure hike scale.

The first two buses were totally fine- We read and spoke enough Korean to comfortably purchase tickets and divine meaning from the weird arrival systems. It was still the Winter Olympics at this point and in every station people were packed around TVs, leaving the rest of the station weirdly empty. The second bus dropped us off in what could charitably be called the middle of nowhere and in all things resembled the kind of not-on-the-map places that dot the middle of America. While cabs were generally ubiquitous everywhere else we’d ever been in Korea, we were having a hard enough time finding living things let alone a hireable taxi. The experience was modestly hilarious- Two teenage Korean girls were utterly shocked to see two white Americans sitting on the side of the road and had their poor minds blown by our awful-but-extant Korean. A police cruiser pulls over at one point and the officers are also completely amused by our situation. We managed to hash out the fact that we’re waiting for a cab. They seem pretty optimistic and so we go back to waiting. At one point I find a cab, but it’s empty and parked outside of a barber shop. I poke my nose in but the place is empty. When we walk by the next day the cab is still there and the shop is still empty. Eventually the only yellow taxi I’ve ever seen in 7 months drives by and we hail it- It’s an older guy with his son in the front seat. The kid is thrilled to see us and the ride doesn’t take long, it’s about 5 bucks and 10 minutes up the prettiest, most picturesque mountain I;ve ever been on. The road winds up between the trees and the mist gets thicker as we go. By the time we reach the top of the mountain and the gates of the temple, I can barely see 10 feet out.

We still owe you a story (or a dozen) about vacation and I am just now finally settling into the 400 photo backlog I have waiting for me. It is coming! But of interest to you might be the story of the temple stay. Sometime around the hosting of the World Cup, Korea’s largest order of Buddhist monks decided to open up their temples to outsiders. For about $50 per person, per night you can sleep, eat and pray with the monks. Mary and I had a 3 day weekend and decided we’d temple stay one night and go see a nearby city for the other two days.

So, we decamped on Thursday evening. In keeping with late Winter Korean weather, it was drizzly, foggy and largely unkind to living things. We hopped on one of those hi speed trains and headed way down south to a coastal city called Mokpo. Mokpo has no beaches, but it has like 7 ports or something. Party! By the time we arrived in the late PMs, it looked like the set of a grisly horror movie- Creepy mists curled around our ankles while no other living thing seemed to be awake. Most larger cities have a selection of skeevy hotels available (Some rent by the hour, I’m sure you can provide the necessary calculus to divine why that is a popular option), but Mokpo seemed to have none. I made Mary angry by insisting that I heard heavy footsteps following us, pestering her with a made-up story about the Butcher of Mokpo and doing my best dramatic slow read of Korean shop signs (“You-mahn-skeen, I wonder what that means”).

Eventually we found a suitably terrifying alleyway filled with old Korean ladies who were asking us if we wanted to sleep. We passed them up and headed for the building at the end of the street that said HOTEL in enormous neon letters. It strikes me that if the Butcher of Mokpo wanted to kill and eat us, opening a roach motel with the only English signage in town would be an excellent way to go about it. The hotel was 25 bucks and we settled in for the night. We’d need to be awake in the morning to take 2 buses out to the countryside and then cross our fingers that we’d be able to find a cab to take us the mountain to the temple.

That turned out to be the real adventure.

The Replacements wrote a song about him called “Alex Chilton”, here’s Paul Westerberg singing it some 15 years later:

“Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton/ when he comes ’round
They sing “I’m in love. What’s that song?/I’m in love with that song.”

I heard my first Big Star song when I was 15 and I didn’t really get it. It was years until I really dug into Big Star, until it really made sense to me, but a song like is. It’s one of those songs that when you get it, it’s like someone wrote it for you:

RIP Alex. Seemed like a nice guy.

Alex Chilton died yesterday which is the saddest celebrity death of my young life. He was in a whole mess of bands, scoring a big hit with The Boxtops in 1967, then going on to start Big Star. Those Big Star records are absolutely legendary, but they’re the kind of thing you listen to and go: “Wait, this sounds like everything else” until you realize this was the FIRST time anyone had made music sound like this. Later in life he was a mercurial figure and dedicated his time to a lots of blues stuff, awareness etc. But he was also a genius songwriter and a fabulous guitarist. He’s been an influence on everyone who’s ever written a pop song after 1975. A serious bummer, through and through.

I’m going to subtitute a coy opening with a bone-chilling statement of fact: I am in charge of 25 5 year old Korean children for 1 hour a day, 5 days a week. I have been tasked with teaching them English. They are not yet totally square with the English alphabet. You can imagine the hi jinx.

It’s kind of like trying to train a litter of puppies, except that these puppies are bi-pedal scheming machines who demand to be entertained in their mother tongue. 25 of them, 1 of me. No Korean teacher present because it’s a voluntary (For who?) after school class. The arithmetic is brutal and cold and weird. Let’s do a thought experiment: You’re 5 years old. You are a tiny ball of irrational energy. One day this spotted Martian walks in the door. Your teacher tells you the Martian is going to tell you to speak MOON LANGUAGE, but in MOON LANGUAGE, not English.

There have been biting, impromptu haircuts, electrical outlets WHERE I DID NOT KNOW THERE WERE ELECTRICAL OUTLETS, permanent marker face paintings, knock down serious fist fights between 3 foot combatants, crying, screaming and, I think, learning.

We’ve been together for 9 days. We will be together for 91 more. 91. Holy shit, that’s a huge number. Truth be told, they’ve been getting a little better and so have I. Just keep them busy- I downloaded an episode of Yo Gabba Gabba only to find out that it was in Spanish. No one said a word, I guess all Moon Languages probably sound alike. Crafts and crafts and crafts and coloring. I have seen the face of true ADD-addled children, only they live in a country that “doesn’t really do ADD”.

And that’s why I’m sleepy.

The story of our temple stay tommorrow. I have a rare evening of nothing to do and I’m taking full advantage of the opportunity.

To be blunt about it: I’ve been busting my ass the last few days. I have a hellish afterschool class that is best titled “Me Vs. 25 1st Graders”. I don’t blame them (THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: You are 5 years old. A weird Korean guy walks into the room and tries to teach you Korean, but he only speaks Korean. What do you do?), but it has quickly become the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. My spare time has evaporated as I scramble around trying to think up new ways to keep them from tearing ass around the room, ripping everything off the walls while I futilely attempt to hold back the torrents of trouble that are amassing. I’ll recount the finer episodes later. This is about “In C”.

“In C” is the piece of music that puts my head back together when it has been rearranged. It is the piece of music that almost single handedly sponsored the American minimalist movement in contemporary classical music. Dudes like Steve Reich and John Adams might not be about were it not for Terry Riley’s harebrained idea to change music by destroying it. Radiolab (The 100% foolproof barometer for how much I like a person is how diehard of a Radiolab fan they are) recently did a small piece on it. And it was wonderful.

Anyway, the original recording of In C, part one, here:

Those of you with ambitions can find literally dozens and dozens of covers, remixes and performances of In C. They are almost all totally lovely. They put me back together.

I don’t have enough on my to-do list. Add “Learn Guided by Voices covers” to that list.

So, we started school again last week. This was a ‘good’ thing, ‘good’ as in the way that going to the Dentist is good for you. It begs to a higher purpose, the supposed “greater” good, things which are ‘good’ for you. It’s generally better, in my estimation, to be busy and purposeful than to be allowed to stew in your own existential juices. It just happens to bring with several aneurysms worth of struggle, conflict and Kafka-esque, eyebrow-pitched stresses. Allow me to cite a few:

They got rid of my 5th grade “co-teacher” who barely ever bothered to show up and mostly slept when she did. But they replaced her with a woman who speaks not a word of English and looks to be about 8 months pregnant. This puts me right about back where we started from, which is fine.

The 3rd Grade got a new curriculum. Good! But we didn’t have any books. Bad! They actually asked me, with a straight face, to teach the new curriculum without ever having seen the book. Wrap your head around that. This is what they said to me. They wanted me to tap into the great, shared celestial consciousness of man and somehow divine the contents of the text. My co-teacher eventually just went out and bought a copy of the book from some unnamed text book depot, which gave rise to a new quandary: The teacher’s edition of the English textbook is, front to back, in Korean.

When the kids arrived for the first day of 3rd grade instruction they all had books. I asked about this after class and no one knew where they’d gotten them from. I pushed a bit and they made some phone calls and found out that the books had been delivered 2 days prior, but no one had bothered to tell anyone. There’s a very common complaint among English teachers here that no one ever tells them anything. I’m starting to realize that the problem is not exclusive to us. It’s like an episode of LOST- No one tells anyone else anything ever, no matter how important it may be.

It’s largely your ability to just sort of. Take it in stride and say, “Okay! I’m going to teach without a book!” or “You canceled all my classes and didn’t tell me? Okay!” that will 98% determine your happiness in being here.

I’m still working on photos. It’s on my to-do list right after “Lesson plans for 5th and 6th grade, Grade 3 sessions 1 & 2 and all 5 afterschool classes this week”. Busybusy! They also gave me an afterschool class for kids who don’t know the alphabet yet. It will be, charitably, amusing.

What’s the opposite of a groove? A peak? A sharp, prickly peak? Yeah, that’s what I got back into. First day of school in Korea is such an enormous nightmare. To wit: I’m now teaching 3rd Grade, which is fine in as far as anything that doesn’t kill me dead is fine, but they threw out the old books before the new ones came in. I literally have no book from which to teach. I’ve also been told that the new curriculum has no English language teacher’s edition.

Do with that what you will.

Mostly I’m glad to be back. I like having routine and purpose. But juggling my free time is always tricky. I have that very unannounced project lurking down in my task bar, I’m still staring down a stack of vacation photos a mile high and I’m pecking my way through learning to plot waveforms in a tracker so that when I get down and out about being a miserable guitar player I can make cute little Gameboy songs to cheer myself up. I like having lots of free time for goofy projects. I am not always the wisest executor of it, but when I get under the gun (Haha, that means “Have a job”) I get kind of frantic and hop from project to project without any real regard for making progress on any of them. I need a personal assistant or something.

We went to Mokpo this weekend. We slept in a 500 year old Buddhist temple! We meditated with monks before dawn! We went back to sleep! Then other things happened. We’ll catch you up this week. School starts again tomorrow which is a goodbad thing. We’ve been slow to update the last few weeks as a couple of other projects have consumed our free time. I’m not going to talk about them yet- The best way to make sure a project never gets finished is to start talking about it to other people and then it’s like INEEDTOGETTHISDONEOREVERYONEWILLBEDISSAPOINTEDINME and you get to a point where the PRESSURE IS OVERWHELMING and you get to that “Whatever, dude, I don’t need your approval!”/”NO DAD WHAT ABOUT YOU” point and then you get to the “I’m an adult, I do what I want!” phase and you’ve CANCELED YOUR PROJECT over an imaginary concern.

Does anyone else do that? Chew on this, gnarly finger-tapping action around the 2:00 mark: