Their problems

Now, if I really felt part of this thing, I'd sum up what I wrote yesterday by saying that if we want to reach many people in the 99 percent we claim to being concerned with, we need to address ourselves to their basic problems rather than to continually try to get them interested in our particular problems. That is, I wouldn't expect someone who fears being laid off, fears losing benefits, and is living in a society with a decline of social services and a decaying infrastructure etc. etc. to be galvanized to take political action or adjust political views when the issue seems to be militants getting pepper sprayed and having their illegal camps broken up. I don't see most people identifying with that.

Btw, I'm not assuming that either those who pushed forward at the Capitol or those who pitched tents at Civic Center Park were doing so at the behest of the Occupy Denver general assembly, though again I don't know. My guess is that they're neither endorsed nor repudiated but that they're respected as participants in Occupy Denver and that a good deal of Occupy Denver energy will go to supporting them in their difficulties, supplying bail and so forth.

Update: Talked to a friend today who thought that since homelessness is a relevant issue, the pitching of tents is a relevant act. Heard a fellow protester who thought that if we keep putting up tents the city govt. will eventually decide it's not worth the cost of again and again deploying police to confiscate them, hence would be worn down into accepting the tents, hence the strategy is good. I think this is fantasy.

Most of the talk I heard today at Civic Center Park was about reaffirming nonviolence. Everyone I spoke to who witnessed the events believed that the violence at Civic Center Park was entirely on the police side, though a couple of people suggested that in the future we could act in ways that would make the police less frightened hence less likely to overreact, e.g., not surround them.

The tents had been raised in the northeast quadrant of the park but, according to people I talked to, when the police came they swept in through the southeast, their path going through a whole bunch of demonstrators who had nothing to do with the tents. I don't understand why the police would do that if they didn't want a confrontation. Of course I've not heard the police version of events.

But my point is this: Whether the police should or should not have been deployed, whether they acted well or poorly, the police are not the story. The police did not explode the financial system, the police did not create collateralized debt obligations or talk people into taking out home loans they didn't understand at interest rates they couldn't pay, and the police are not the campaign donors who are in effect paying politicians to roll back attempts to regulate such behavior. And pitching tents, which is what triggered the police action, not only did not result in any discussion of investment banks and mortgage lenders and unemployment, it didn't result in any discussion of the homeless, either: the discussion, among the protesters and in the press, is about skirmishes between police and demonstrators. Police conduct/misconduct does bring some attention and energy to the movement — there were more protesters milling about today than I expected — but that hardly helps to get the message out. (A few protesters I overheard today were saying fundamentally the same thing I just said, by the way.)

Coming To Terms With Ballads (Kim Bo Kyung and Barbara)

I thought that listening to huge gobs of Korean music would help me finally come to terms with ballads, since about a third of the music out of South Korea is not just ballads but is specifically in the genre "ballad" (as opposed to e.g. someone in r&b who happens to be doing a ballad). But what happened is that I realized I couldn't listen to everything. And as songs labeled "Ballad" and "OST" (most of the latter being ballads) tended to go in on ear and out the other anyway, those were the ones that got set aside.

About one in twenty ballads I hear I really like, and I wouldn't say I dislike the rest so much as I don't react and I barely differentiate one from the other. I couldn't tell you what's specifically different about the 5 percent I do like. I just get hit by something all of a sudden. So here's one I listened to by mistake and I love it.

Watch on YouTube

Barbara had a so-so album out earlier this year, Neo Beat Generation, which was breathy and stylized, as you'd expect from the title, the "Neo"–ness putting a screen between me and it. Whereas "꿈..그보다 아픈," while being just as musically audacious and self-conscious, rips through emotionally: held slow and impressively controlled but ready to let loose, which of course it does. Yet lots of songs do the same, so I don't know why this one succeeded in being special.

And here's Kim Bo Kyung's "아파," variously translated as "Sick" and "Hurt" and "It Hurts," and it's more familiar, a power ballad, rises and wails, full cataract, all engines running.

Watch on YouTube

From what I can tell, she's a former talent-show contestant who flourished by singing "Because Of You" and "Hotel California," though there seem to be several different Kim Bo Kyungs in Korean entertainment, as well as a footballer.

The quality of her records is scattershot, but "Suddenly" from earlier this year is good, very much along the lines of "아파."