Colin Marshall 콜린 마샬
@colinmarshall
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Essayist/broadcaster on cities & culture • Books on Cities, @NewYorker , @OpenCulture , @LAReviewofBooks , @Guardian , @TheTLS • 에세이집: 「한국 요약 금지」 • 팟캐스트: 「콜린의 한국」
Seoul, Republic of Korea
Joined December 2008
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이상하게 들릴지도 모르지만 모국어가 아닌 한국어로 쓰여진 제 첫 번 째 책 <한국 요약 금지>가 출시되어 있어요. 외국인의 눈으로 보는 한국 영화, 문학, 건축, 생활, 신념, 언에 에 대한 에세이가 수록되어 있어요. 전국 서점에서 온라인을 포함한 대부분의 오프라인 채널을 통해 구매가 가능해요.
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J.M. Coetzee published a new novel in August — but only in Spanish translation. My latest for the
@NewYorker
on the greatest living English-language's novelist's campaign against the English language itself:
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A thread of things Seoul has that give me serious reservations about ever living in any other city, to which I will periodically add:
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Thread of differences I've noticed between life in Korea and life in the United States
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First Tokyo, then Hong Kong — and could Seoul now be the next great cyberpunk city?
@noealz
@steveroe_
@LAReviewofBooks
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"All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else." -
@TylerCowen
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Like everyone else in my generation, I grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes. As a kid I naturally respected Calvin, especially for his expansive vocabulary and casual attitude toward schoolwork. I still admire those qualities, but now I find myself respecting Calvin's dad even more.
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There was a time in America when you could turn on the TV in the evening and see
@TheDickCavett
interviewing Akira Kurosawa for half an hour — and hear all the master's responses in full, in Japanese. My
@OpenCulture
post on this 1981 broadcast:
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RAIN... in LOS ANGELES? A SUBWAY... in LOS ANGELES? CHINESE FOOD... in LOS ANGELES? BOOKS... in LOS ANGELES? INHABITED STRUCTURES... in LOS
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The year was 1993. Billy Idol, of all people, became so enamored with the idea of cyberpunk that he based an album on it, even hiring
@Frauenfelder
to write its floppy-disk multimedia liner notes. I revisit this ambitious zeitgeist project at
@OpenCulture
:
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"We were not going to play only for the greater Soviet glory now that we knew there were millions of dollars to be had. We had learned more from Fischer than just chess."
@Kasparov63
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1. The card I pay for transit with is just my regular debit card (so no need to “fill it up”) and it works in every city in the entire country
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“한국은 국제화할 수도, 그럴 필요도 없다”...美 칼럼니스트 눈으로 본 한국”
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"Be regular and orderly in your life,” wrote Flaubert, “so that you may be violent and original in your work." David Lynch must agree, as evidenced by his habits — meditation, smoking, going to Bob's Big Boy — about which I've written for
@OpenCulture
:
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In Korea, people squeeze out the innards of grapes, eat only them, and then discard the skins into a wet little heap
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6. Literally everything I would ever need in life, up to and including higher education and hospitals, lies within a ten minute walk of home. (This is in no way an exaggeration)
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9. But I know the next bus will be there in five minutes because the screen at the stop tells me so, and somehow isn’t lying
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Non-native English speakers may have reasons to envy native speakers, but they also have reasons to pity them. From Olga Tokarczuk’s novel "Flights":
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2. Every subway station has bathrooms, without exception, and not the kind you would only use under great duress
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In Korea, "Hakuna Matata" gets airplay on classical-music stations
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In Korea, people press the "door close" button in elevators (and, not coincidentally, the button actually works)
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4. You save your table at a coffee shop by putting your most expensive personal item down on it. You don’t ask a nearby random to guard your stuff if you have to go to the bathroom
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In Korea, "essay" is a major category of book, so major that in some stores it takes up half the shelf space
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In Korea, people begin their e-mails almost without exception with a reference to the weather
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In Korea, people don't eat tomatoes like vegetables (i.e., they put them in fruit salads, and back in the day even put them on top of cakes)
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In Korea, when people get up to use the bathroom, they leave their most expensive possession (phone, purse, laptop, DSLR camera) on the table to hold their place
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In Korea, pasta — even Olive Garden-grade — is considered a "date" food. (If you take a date to eat something other than pasta, or eat pasta with a non-date, they may get the wrong idea)
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In Korea, no one seems to carry house keys; even the doors of not-particularly-new apartments have numeric keypads
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7. The crowd on the bus is the same as the crowd at the Starbucks — or anywhere else, for that matter. There’s no feeling of stepping “down a class” (or three)
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8. If I just miss a bus and the next one won’t be there for five whole minutes, I feel grievously inconvenienced
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The almighty Algorithm sent me this recently unearthed 1975 interview with Hunter Thompson, in which he speaks with remarkable cogency on his writing process and the constant "tension" it demands. Naturally, I wasted no time writing it up for
@OpenCulture
:
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In Korea, people do not make sarcastic mooing sounds when required to walk in a certain direction as part of a large group
When required to walk in a certain direction as part of a large group, Americans will sometimes make sarcastic mooing sounds. Nobody in other countries believes me when I tell them about it.
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In Korea, all subway stations have bathrooms you would dare enter
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In Korea, long commercial breaks generally come between television shows, not during them
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In Korea, people very often claim that their dream is to "own a building" (not a house, not a business, a building)
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I recently happened across a reference to Andy Warhol's having interviewed Alfred Hitchcock. Intrigued, I proceeded to search for more information on this unlikely meeting of icons — and found that I'd written an
@OpenCulture
post about it myself:
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Today marks ten full years that I've been writing for
@OpenCulture
, which comes to more than 2,600 posts so far. Over the next few months, I'll add 100 of my favorites to this thread:
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In Korea, certain categories of product (ice cream, snack foods, pet supplies, sex toys) are increasingly sold in unmanned stores
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18. The area around Seoul Station, widely considered one of the worst parts of town because of its number of homeless presence, has fewer homeless than I encounter on a walk through any American city
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21. I’ve been here more than three years and never had to walk across a parking lot
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In Korea, Elon Musk is very highly regarded by the general public, though for reasons not quite clear to me (and in any case, he still lacks the godlike status accorded to Steve Jobs)
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11. No tipping. (Admittedly, this is just a complaint about America)
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3. Almost every subway station has coin lockers (just a name, since I pay with the aforementioned debt card), so you seldom have to worry about dragging bags, etc. around all day
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Everything I've written about Jorge Luis Borges for
@OpenCulture
(so far): on his life, his ficciones, his film reviews, his conversation with William F. Buckley, and more
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Haruki Murakami talks classical, jazz, and literature in book-length conversation with Seiji Ozawa:
@LAReviewofBooks
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My ten favorite
@OpenCulture
posts of 2018: Malcolm Gladwell in cafés, Éric Rohmer in Paris, David Lynch at Bob’s Big Boy, and more
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In Korea, kids seem not to have "bedtimes" per se
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5. A Starbucks can move into a neighborhood — or more than one Starbucks — without “driving out” the smaller chains and indies, which just seem to multiply as a result
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23. I'd be remiss if I didn't add something about how you can get absolutely everything delivered, which a lot of people enjoy to the point of addiction, but I haven't had reason to try it for myself yet
6. Literally everything I would ever need in life, up to and including higher education and hospitals, lies within a ten minute walk of home. (This is in no way an exaggeration)
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In Korea, people put their own phone number in their car window so you can call them and tell them to move it when they're blocking you in (whereas Americans would just call the tow truck)
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When required to walk in a certain direction as part of a large group, Americans will sometimes make sarcastic mooing sounds. Nobody in other countries believes me when I tell them about it.
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10. Nobody has scratched up the bus windows. (But why do they do it in America?)
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Read dozens of my essays on cities, language, film, literature, Los Angeles, Korea, Japan, and more collected here:
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"It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object." — Roland Barthes on the DS, 1957
@OpenCulture
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20. “Mixed-use” doesn’t really mean anything, because most buildings are. (And commercial activity usually extends above the first floor)
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15. Multi-story movie theaters that operate 24 hours, or nearly so, all of which not just slow but require the reservation of specific seats
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In Korea, many people believe Woodstock from Peanuts is a flea
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25. People lobby FOR subway stations to be built next to their homes (unlike in some U.S. cities I could name)
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All the posts on self-improvement I've written for
@OpenCulture
, featuring advice on how to improve your habits in writing, learning, thinking, and more, from Martin Amis, Brian Eno, Richard Feynman, Bill Murray, Pico Iyer, David Lynch, Seneca and others:
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In Korea, people never put stickers on their cars other than those indicating a "new driver" or "baby on board"
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I don't know how to identify creative people, but you can identify uncreative people by their frequent use of the word "creative."
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In Korea, even people who aren't "Guns N' Roses guys" (you can imagine exactly what I mean) know Guns N' Roses
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12. You don’t have to press a button to beg to cross the street
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In Korea, many of the images in public spaces are visibly stretched to the wrong proportions or too low-resolution not to appear pixelated
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I'm making all the interviews from my world-traveling podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture available to stream on Youtube, and they'll appear below as I do so:
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Is it Christmas without Wes Anderson? All my
@openculture
posts on his work, featuring video essays, music and more:
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The Korean alphabet has impressed many Westerners. It impressed the Star Trek writer Joe Menosky so much that he wrote an entire novel about its creation by King Sejong the Great, subject of my latest piece at the
@LAReviewofBooks
Korea Blog:
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“Everything was moving fast, and I just wasn’t thinking," Laurie Anderson says about the technological and pop-cultural onrush of the 1980s. "That’s my excuse, anyway.”
My
@OpenCulture
post on her hypnotic Norton Lectures, now viewable online:
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13. When you come across a pile of garbage on the street, the garbage is actually in bags
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My ten favorite
@OpenCulture
posts of 2019: brutalist architecture, the great American road trip, Barthes on the Citroën DS, Houellebecq reading Tocqueville, and more
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There was a time when people got angry at avant-garde art — angry enough to write and illustrate an entire children's alphabet book attacking it. My
@OpenCulture
post on The Cubies' ABC, a charming and long-obscure entry in the annals of philistinism:
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In Korea, more than a few storefronts have speakers that blast K-pop out toward the sidewalk
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Everything I've written about David Lynch for
@OpenCulture
: on his films, on "Twin Peaks," on what constitutes the "Lynchian," on his comic strip, on his Japanese movie posters and coffee commercials, on his love of Bob's Big Boy milkshakes, and much more
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Nearly all Koreans have read "The Shower," a story of tragic young love between a country boy and city girl. Its haunting 1978 film adaptation is free online thanks to the Korean
@Film_Archive
— and the subject of my new
@LAReviewofBooks
Korea Blog essay:
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I've written at
@OpenCulture
for 3 years today. 15 favorites from my 791 posts, feat. D. Byrne, H. Murakami, Tintin:
http://t.co/bKGc6n5SDt
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I'm a simple man: I see the word "impactful," I stop reading.
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You'll find no more stimulating holiday binge-watch than First Person, the TV series in which
@ErrolMorris
intensely interviews a parade of geniuses, eccentrics, obsessives, heroes, and frauds. It's all on Youtube, and I've written it up for
@OpenCulture
:
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"Much of Western society—but American society in particular—is permeated with influential people who have deluded themselves into thinking that their ability to manipulate words, images and sounds gives them the ability to control reality itself."
@aelkus
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I haven’t set foot in Los Angeles for six years, but the next time I go, I’ll be keenly aware of the precise extent to which the city has become more like Tokyo — the subject of this 2020 piece I wrote for
@Archinect
:
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In Korea, people never wear T-shirts with messages written on them (the closest they get is meaningless phases in English or French)
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Asked why I moved from the United States to South Korea, I often say that it was because I wanted to live in the First World. Though it began as a half joke, the coronavirus' Stateside rampage has granted it a new and discomfiting plausibility.
@NewYorker
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I read no print publication as enthusiastically as I read the
@LRB
. When they put out a video demonstrating how they used to put together their layouts with scissors, an X-ACTO, and Cow Gum, I naturally clicked without hesitation:
@Openculture
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In Korea, coffee shops never, ever have bran muffins
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The more than 100 posts I've written for
@OpenCulture
on anime, Haruki Murakami, Tokyo, ukiyo-e, Akira Kurosawa, sushi, vintage ads, Yasujirō Ozu, Yan-san, craftsmanship, city pop, David Lynch posters, chindōgu, Marie Kondo, and many other things Japanese:
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There exists a film in which the Alfred Hitchcock of 1962 meets the Alfred Hitchcock of 1980 at the zenith of the fear- and TV-saturated Cold War, with a Borges-inspired script by Tom McCarthy — and as I write at
@OpenCulture
, you can watch it free online:
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