Koreans like Video Games (a lot)
It turns out that while we’ve been watching North Korea , trying to figure out if they can destroy the world, South Korea has been creating a culture of playing video games.
According to the NYtimes they play StarCraft , a game created in California by Blizzard Entertainment. StarCraft is one of those futuristic games where what’s left of the human race fights for survival against some alien race. People have written books on the plot. The game is played online and not on a personal game-box, it’s a MMORPG; A Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. In High School I had a boyfriend who played Civilization II online, he logged in and then shot other “people” on the web who were also playing. He would play for hours and hours.
Evidently people have died this way, in South Korea, by playing StarCraft for hours and hours and not stopping to eat or sleep.
People also become rock stars, in South Korea, by playing video games for hours and hours and not stopping to eat or sleep. One of the most famous is a guy called Lim Yo-Hwan, who’s 27 and good-looking.
One of the things young Koreans do for fun is visit a PC Bang, which doesn’t look half as exciting as the name sounds, it’s more like an internet cafe with no food, coffee, or beer where people play MMORPGs.
What I find most amusing about all of this is that I cannot relate to it in any way. The closest I can get is remembering the rush I got from seeing Super Mario Bros 3 for the first time on The Wizard . That looked really cool. Things change and computers are awesome–but while I realize that many Americans play MMORPGs, design video games, and play X-Boxes I cannot imagine a world where people would sit around and watch other persons play video games without being completely bored. I don’t see the US ever following the Korean model.
The only thing I see happening with this is maybe some folders and notebooks that crush on the video-game rock stars because that’s hot. I like outside.
Tote Bags!
The tote bag has received good PR though the years, being seen as a method of reducing the waste of plastic grocery bags and other throw-away carry items. The sack of co-op groceries and libraries, it has always been seen as honest and good but not at all hip.
Artists who design T-shirts and screen-printers, looking for another cheap and wearable surface to print on have at long last noticed the endless possibilities of a good tote bag and have begun to print things on them that you would never find in either a library or a co-op. These new totes are stylish, thoughtful, and sometimes ironic, everything the T-shirt is with the added bonus of one-size fits all.
I myself have procured one of these reinvented totes bags and noticed their magic: They are never completely full and you can always stuff more things inside of them… on a recent trip to the outside world I found that I could carry three magazines, two sweaters, regular purse stuff and no less then four 22s of beer. Function and art united for the common good in one little bag.
Andy Warhol
Gee, I think that it’s becoming cool to be a capitalist. I mean, really cool, even those artists and musicians that once would have been classified as having bohemian lifestyles think it’s cool to make a buck. All you have to do is turn on the TV to see that musicians don’t mind making music for car ads and evidence of artists thinking the same lay in some of The Vultures own telling links (We make money not art). People are aggressive about it, it’s almost like a revolution.
Business men and women such as Dov Charney of American Apparel make headlines for leading lives as cool and interesting as those of rock-stars. Stores seem hipper, more artistic, and not at all afraid to play the coolest thing in music. Business and selling have never been closer to the pulse of art and culture.
Now-a-days you congratulate your friends if they sell a T-shirt design to Urban Outfitters and designing an ad campaign can be just as neat as making a painting. I can still remember the days when that would have been called “selling out”.
Today, “selling-out” is rumored not to exsist and no one seems to loose street credibility when they make money–usually, they gain it.
The artist of the moment is Andy Warhol, back in the public consciousness because of the recent documentary by Ric Burns, because he embodies this mood of today. Andy Warhol made really good art, interesting and engaging to this day and he did it in a way that was easily reproduced (screen-printing). He made money, he made headlines, he was a star…and really that’s what everyone wants.
When asked if commercial art was more machine-like then fine art, Warhol had this to say:
“No, it wasn’t. I was getting paid for it, and did everything they told me to do…if they told me to correct it, I would. I’d have to invent and now I don’t; after all that ‘correction’, those commercial drawings would have feelings, they would have a style…The process of doing work in commercial art was machine-like, but the attitude had feeling to it.”
Log Blog, Abraham Lincoln:
For all of you who don’t know: blog is synonymous with the term web log. This means that a blog is actually a log, like a captain’s log, only it’s not on a ship or a plane it’s on the web.
One blog has dared to ask the question: What would have happened if some smart guy hadn’t decided to add the b to log? The answer is we’d all be talking about logs. The Blog of Logs, A blog devoted to the discussion of all things related to longish, rough edged pieces of wood cut (or fallen) from trees talks about logs everyday (evidently there is a lot to say).
Officially, there is a blog for everything.
In other late braking and eerily related news: Abraham Lincoln lived in a Log Cabin. Recently I’ve been seeing him on hoodies, in sleep medicine commercials, and on pencil toppers sold at Urban Outfitters.
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