In real terms, ROKon Magazine is so obscure at this point that it’s very surreal that ANYONE would be interested in it AT ALL. It was never anything more than a club run like a cult that came out with a zine once a month for a few months. (At least my version.)
Are you talking about me again, Jennifer 8. Lee?
The issue is, of course, the story surrounding that particular situation is so fucking surreal and bonkers that I’m using it as some of the inspiration for a six novel mystery-thriller project that is meant to be an old brown shoe for people who liked the original Millennium series by Stieg Larsson.
Anyway, I noticed in my Webstats that someone searched for ROKon Magazine. Now, of course, it’s possible they were looking for the magazine for Rokon dirt bikes. And, if that’s the case, so be it.
But, just the idea that someone, anyone MIGHT be interested in ROKon Magazine after all these years is enough to both fill me with curiosity and to spook me a little bit.
The only thing I can think of is maybe there is a minor amount of chatter being generated by people who are reading the public beta of the novel? Maybe? I have no idea.
While the earnest, well-meaning nature of MAGA “thought leader” Catturd enrages me, I saw a description of him that gave me pause for thought. I’m really self-conscious about my current loser lot in life and the way some smug Twitter liberals were describing Catturd could very well be pretty much applied to me.
And, I hate to admit it, in some ways at this specific moment Catturd is actually on a personal basis a lot better off than me. And, in fact, I suspect there’s at least one smug liberal out there who uses her encounter with me in Seoul many moons ago as something of a cocktail party joke.
I’m talking, of course, of Jennifer 8. Lee.
Many moons ago, back in Seoul, Lee came to Seoul to work on a book about fortune cookies. And while she was polite to my face, I think she and her friend Tomoko thought I was completely fucking bonkers — a total fucking loser. And, occasionally, I will see in my Webstats random poking around about my various write ups over the years of that event from my point of view.
I can just imagine how much glee she gets in talking about the crazy, loser expat she met in Seoul. Her friend Tomoko, who was working for the Asian Wall Street Journal at the time, I think, really, really did not think much of me. So much so, that to this day it kind of rattles my personal self-perception.
And, going forward, if I should manage to write the Great American Pop Thriller, I think I’m going to have to prepare myself things not to be as great and wonderful as I want them to be. Any inspection of my personal life over the last 20-odd years will leave Normal Smug Wealthy Liberal Elites aghast at what a fucking loser I’ve been.
But I can’t change how old I am and I can’t change the past. All I can do is just try to write a good a novel as I possibly can.
I’m obsessed with my Webstats and sometimes I see things that are…curious. Like, who is the person from Denver who occasionally looks at this site? Now, given how paranoid I am, I automatically assume it’s someone connected to the late Annie Shapiro.
The late Annie Shapiro and I in the good old days.
Annie and I had some good times….and we had some bad times in Seoul. And given how God-awful secretive she was in life, I could totally see the me of 2006 -2008 being seen as something of a ghoul relative to her family. I was not exactly very nice to Annie during the height of our “divorce” because of ROKon Magazine but, in my defense, she gave as good as she got.
All I can say is, I’m sorry. I feel horrible for my poor behavior in Seoul relative to Annie. I was not in a good place mentally or emotionally and if I could somehow convince the Shapiro family not to hate me, I would. And, yet, I think this not a situation that will ever be solved.
It’s all over but the shouting, as they say, and if it is someone directly connected to Annie who is occasionally looking at this site, it’s probably just a deep echo of long ago drama. They’re just curious to see what’s on my mind. They aren’t interested in patching things up.
There are sometimes things you just have to accept as being a part of your personal history.
Editor’s Note: I wrote this a really long time ago for ROKon Magazine in Seoul. I still think it’s one of the better things I’ve written over the years. — LSB
Mary DuMont and Myke Holliday before his death.
My first encounter with Mary DuMont was indirectly. Long before I met her in person, I experience the hailstorm of buzz amongst the expats I know in Seoul coming back from the Anmyeondo Beach Party last year. The more I learned about Anmyeondo and the story behind it, the more interested I became.
Months later, at a party held by Dennis Mitchell at his absolutely fabulous studio apartment in Hywha, I found myself talking to Mary. There was definitely…something about Mary. The older we get, the more difficult it is for those around us to not be just another brick in the dusty stonewall we call reality. But she seemed different. Her presence was a dollop of techno-color. “Who is that woman?” I thought when I first entered the room. I soon met Mary and her friend Joel. The two of them seemed to have a special relationship — like they’d be through a lot together. Mary and I flopped down on the couch and started to talk. Just as I was getting ready for a evening of flirtatious, wine-induced banter, the bomb was dropped.
She was a widow.
Not in the traditional sense, but a widow nonetheless. While currently she had a boyfriend — one of the more famous DJ’s in Korea, natch — her previous boyfriend, Myke, had died tragically and suddenly from cancer about a year before. I felt a bit of an existential chill. I was a character in the coda, the epilogue of a story that was on the cusp on ending. I found myself wanting to be a major character in whatever story was about to begin.
I mentioned to her the movie seemed to fit her situation perfectly — Moonlight Mile. The movie is a bittersweet, melancholy reflection on the effects of losing someone love suddenly and its after effects. Since we first met, I have frequently found myself thinking about her lost. I loved something a great deal, it was only a magazine, not a person, and I lost it, too. There is a reason they say that “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The thing that great loss provides you with is understand of the need, the power of compassion towards your fellow humans.
Since we first met, Mary has been just on the edge of my universe. She inhabits some magical land of DJs and cool kids where nerdy street urchins such as myself are allow to visit, but never live. Ever since my ROKon Magazine days, I have talked to her about doing a story about Myke. The more I got to know her, though, the more I realized the story is not so much about Myke as it is his effect on her. Myke seems ever-present with her, as though he’s just over her shoulder in her mind.
“I hated it here when I first arrived in March of 2004,” Mary says. “The people did not excite me and the superficialities that seem to be put in front of much bigger problems irritated me in amazing ways. Unsurprisingly, the more I settled, it became easier for me to want receive a culture so distant from my own.”
Before too long, Mary says, she found herself hearing about a fellow called Myke Holliday.
“I met him in the midst of a drunken night in Itaewon whilst waiting for my friends to grab a Kebab from the ‘Kebab guy’ I was shocked at the notion that this Myke Holiday standing before me, who didn’t make much effort to say hi at the moment, was the boyfriend of the ‘beautiful girl’ who worked behind the bar in the biggest club in Hong Dae, M2,” she said. “‘Who is this Myke Holliday?’ ‘Why I am always hearing his name scattered around town?’ At this point I had no recognition that he was a party planner and promoter. I didn’t really care either… “
Mary says later, their relationship would become more intense.
“My world revolved around his life, but I loved every second of it,” she says. “It’s so strange really, in the beginning he had small annoyances that I didn’t expect my heart to absorb. Not too long after getting involved, I was so empowered by this new love and life I was living. It was fun, exciting, and different. I was so devoted to him. Nothing else in my life seemed to take on as much meaning anymore. We always joked about being married from the very beginning. He would tell his friends “Mary will only marry me if it’s on a small island off of Greece. I’ll have to buy her a Vera Wang dress.. “
In the summer of 2005, Mary and Myke decided to organize another Anmyeondo party. It’s funny that something that seems such a important part of the expat experience in Korea is actually just a few years old.
“We began organizing it June and spent our Sundays in Anmyeondo,” she said. “We used to stay out all night Friday and Saturday promoting and then go straight to Nambu Bus Terminal and wait for the first bus to Anmyeondo at 7am. I learned so much from Myke. First and foremost, he taught me music. Myke had over 200 records (all of which were later given to me) and when he was at work, I would listen to the records he talked about and I would experiment on his decks.”
The 2005 Anmyeondo beach party was named Soulshine Summer Groove, 2005. Mary says that another foreigner, James from Australia, helped to organize and promote it. Myke would tell Mary and James what needed to be done.
“It was all brand new to me, but very very exciting,” Mary says. “Now that I look back, I didn’ t play such an important role on the organizing, but man did I think I did at the time. Myke taught me everything he knew about promoting. He used to always say “It’s all about getting people excited! that’s all promoting is.'”
The 2005 party did not go as well as Myke and Mary had expected, however. They failed to take into account a very important aspect of doing something on the beach — high tide. “We actually talked about it loads and thinking about it, we did take it into account. However, the problem was that we trusted a source and we went with it,” she said. It turns out the tide went up much higher than the source had said. There was a moment of panic, but ultimately some very expensive equipment was saved from destruction.
“It was crazy! I remember being so ashamed and embarrassed and Myke just laughed and continued to have an amazing time,” Mary says. “The party pretty much ended at 3am that night, but the music continued again in the morning. That’s one think about Myke, he always believed when no one else did. That was what was so great about him. He never let anything get to him…”
On the way to Thailand to recover from planning the part, they talked about the future. The two of them realized they wanted the same thing — a simple life back in the States. “He didn’t have a strong family background so the idea of genuine love was so appealing to him. He had grown up in Korea since he was 16. His father left when he was 18. Myke didn’t see him again until he got sick. He spent almost 9 years growing up in Seoul alone. He had loads of friends, but mainly just party friends. I think he starved for genuine love which is what I gave him… my family too.”
That didn’t work out, however, and they found themselves planning another festival the next year, the Anmyeondo Music Festival 2006. It was set to be a huge event, with international DJs descending upon Korea for the weekend event. Among them was InFusion, one of the best known DJs in the world.
This part of the story I learned face to face at the apartment Mary shares with her boyfriend. It reminds me of one I might see back home in Richmond. Mary brought out an assortment of teas for me to choose from. She pulled out a few pictures of her as a model in a lot fashion magazine. I thought back over the times I’ve seen her in the past. One image that stands out is seeing her with a brown ‘fro wig backstage of the big DJ event that took place on the Han River recently. The expression on her face as she watched makes the imagine iconic and leaves me wishing I’d taken a picture of it.
Mary says Myke had been complaining of abdominal pains for some time as we sip our tea. Whenever he went to a Korean doctor, they told Myke it was just too much spicy food. Myke finally went to an American service hospital to get a full check up. Throughout the experience, Mary stresses, Myke was the most positive person one could be.
It was July 6th, 2006, a Thursday, when he found out.
“He called me at work,” Mary said. The doctors said he had a tumor on his liver and it was inoperable. “That night, I didn’t stay at his house,” Mary says with a bit of sadness in her voice. Things went very quickly at that point. By July 10th, his father, Tom had come to Korea to be with him.
“By the end of July, he was in a lot of pain,” Mary said. “He was in so much pain, I didn’t know what to do.”
In the final days, Myke left the hospital and went to a hospice to die. Looking back, Mary says she has a few regrets she didn’t stay more with him while he was in the hospital. At the time, Mary says, she was so worried about her job that she didn’t stay over night. “Why was I so concerned about losing my visa,” she asks out loud.
As the days flew by, Myke “started to hate the doctors,” says Mary. Mary says she worried as the days went on that he might die without her being there. “I was so worried about that every sing night,” she said. In the end, however, she was there with him when he died at ahospice in Bundang, on July 24, 2006. He was 26.
She was determined, after his death, however, to see some sort of music event take place on the Anmyeondo Beach. Thus, with the help of some friends — most specifically well-known Haybonchon resident Hoppe — Mary was able to organize a new event that year, in honor of Myke. The called “Anmyeondo Beach Party 2006, A Tribute to Myke Holliday,” was a way for her to honor Myke’s memory in a way he would appreciate.
“I never had time to mourn,” Mary says of the time between Myke’s death and the beach party. “It was a tribute. this was his party. Everyone in Seoul knew it. It was his party.”
While there were numerous problems, Mary ultimately believes the party she and Hoppe organized was a success. “There were so many things that Myke wanted to do that he never got to do,” Mary said.
Mary says she learned a great deal about many different things due to Myke’s untimely death. She says it has put her life in perspective. She now knows to focus on the people who are really important in your life. “There are so many things that you don’t realize until you have an experience like this,” Mary said.
These days, Mary has her eyes on the future. She is taking online university courses and would like to snag a marketing job somewhere in the United States. “I don’t want to stay in Korea too long,” she notes.
I often see Mary around these days. She’s always got a smile on her face. Mary says there won’t be a Anmyeondo Beach Party this year and that saddens me greatly. I keep thinking of how determined she looked backstage at the DJ festival on the Han as her boyfriend played. My heart tells me that she was thinking about Myke and how his dreams will come true through her hard work.
We all want to believe in something. I guess I want to believe in Mary.
When I first heard that Annie Shapiro was dead a number of years ago, I didn’t believe it. She was just the type of person who would fake her death specifically to hurt me. The thing about Annie was, she really knew what made me tick and she would push my buttons to great effect.
The late Annie Shapiro and me back when I was cute.
Annie’s death is a tragedy and one thing that really bothers me about it is we never got a chance to reconcile in some way. The reason why Annie grew to be so important to me was I can articulate a vision but I have shit ability to persuade anyone to listen to whatever I think up.
She, meanwhile, was all persuasion. We made a great team and whatever success my version of the magazine had came from our specific relationship. ROKon Magazine — at least my original version — was never anything more than a glorified zine.
It was doomed to fail for a number of reasons, most of them directly connected to my own personal failings and inability to manage people. That’s why when it failed, I was kind of kneecapped emotionally in ways I am still recovering from. The other reason why Annie was so important to me for so long is she brought the magazine back without me — in secret! — and so I had to live through the deep shame of seeing what huge failure I was each month.
But that was a long time ago and nobody cares anymore.
The idea that Annie would be murdered in such a random way still rattles my cage. In fact, I think Annie is the only person I know personally to have ever been murdered. I still don’t believe she’s dead. Annie was very cruel to me on an emotional basis, but, then, I wasn’t exactly all that great to her during our “divorce” because of the magazine.
But she didn’t deserve what happened to her, nobody does. I like to think this six novel project I’m working on is something of an homage to what I remember of Annie.
The first big story I wanted to tell was what happened to me and Annie Shapiro with ROKon Magazine in Seoul. I struggled with telling the literal story a number of different ways but ultimately have settled for drawing upon my experiences at that point in my life as the basis for a six novel project set in the United States.
But it has occured to me that there is a way to tell the story of ROKon Magazine in fictional form. As much as I hate to admit it, the only way I can think of to tell the story would be with a framing device. I say that because I’ve always wanted to tell the story with a straight a-b-c chronology because I lived it and felt I could tell the story without the use of such a device.
And, yet, it has occured to me that if I ever had the means to tell the story here is how I would do it.
I would have a magazine reporter decide to investigate what happened all those years ago. As part of their research, they would track down different people who were involved with the magazine and then you would have extensive flashbacks of what they were doing in 2006-2008 as the magazine’s drama developed.
That way there is some sort of mystery that would keep people reading even though we would go into things knowing that the magazine ultimately failed pretty quickly because of, well, me. Or, at least, fictional me.
Anyway, the older I get, the more I realize I have romanticized what happened with the magazine so much that it’s something of a delusion. A lot of why I continue to think about the experience so much is it’s all kind of fused with my regrets about my dissipated youth.
In the end, I am telling the story of ROKon Magazine, just is a very defused, jumbled up way set in a small town in America over the course of 25 years.
Yet another expat from South Korea who I don’t know looked at my LinkedIn profile within the last 24 hours, which yet again makes me wonder if people in the South Korea expat community are still talking about me.
I don’t think you realize how colorful and over-the-top I was at the height of my bonkers behavior in Seoul in late 2006 – to early 2008. I was so over the top, so manic that someone even put me in a book about weird expats. That did wonders for my self-esteem, let me tell you.
“It was all long time ago and nobody cares anymore,” is what I like to tell myself, but I think maybe I’m underestimating the impact I had one my fellow expats all those years ago. There are two types of expats in South Korea — the ones who stay a short amount of time and the ones who never leave and go slowly insane. (I say this as someone who stayed too long and abruptly left South Korea because of “homesickness.”)
I love South Korea, but there is definitely a time limit for most people who live there for more than just a year or two. Something about Korean culture really, really gets to the Western mind and it takes a unique person with a hearty constitution to be able to survive for more than, say, five or six years.
Now that I think about it, my best friend from my Korea days is back in South Korea at the moment and I suppose it’s possible that in the process of catching up with people (she’s been out of country for a few years) I get brought up in conversation — expats love, love, love to gossip — and, ta-da someone gets curious enough that they look at my woefully unimportant LinkedIn profile.
The core of the six novel project I’m working on at the moment is pretty much what was going on in my life in late 2006 – early 2007 when I was running ROKon Magazine and DJing at Nori Bar in Sinchon. Those were the days, as they say. I am using my extremely romanticized memories of that era in my life — smashed into a few other eras of my life — as the basis of a murder mystery set in a small town in Virginia. The apex of my life to date. I’m hoping that I can ride those memories to sticking the landing with my first novels. Even if I’m going to be way too old to do such a thing by the time everything gets sorted out.
Anyway. I really miss South Korea, despite everything. But for the fact that little Koreans don’t like me (and I don’t like them) I would probably be still in South Korea, married to a Korean woman with a small brood of Amerasian children struggling to learn English like the rest of the Korean population.
I was really….unique…in late 2006 – early 2007 when I was living in Seoul as an expat. I was a DJ at the best expat bar in the city while at the same time struggling to keep ROKon Magazine afloat. I lost both of these things around my birthday in February 2007. Despite this, the memory of what was going on at that point in my life is seared my mind to the point that it’s pretty much at the forefront of my mind constantly even to this day.
The late Annie Shapiro and me back when I was cute.
Given this situation, I have really, really dug deep into what happened to me in Seoul for this six novel project I’m working on. In fact, I would go so far as to say there are maybe six or seven people in the world who, if they should ever read these novels, will be able to pick out exactly what the inspiration from Seoul I’m using to flesh out it’s universe.
In my mind, at least, there is a direct one-to-one between elements in this six novel project at what I remember of my life in Seoul. It all reminds me of how in “Young Shakespeare in Love” you get to see the real world inspiration for some of the major elements of The Bard’s works.
My time in Seoul was some of the most creative of my entire life. It all came at a price, of course — it all kind of drove me bonkers. The pressure of effectively rather abruptly, within the context of the microscopic Seoul expat community being a public figure really, really, got to me. And all of it was happening in the context of how being an expat in South Korea can really do a number on your mental health just in general.
I love South Korea and its culture, but living there long term is like having a really intense relationship with a really hot, but very eccentric girlfriend. You get to have all this fun with her, but all that fun comes at a pretty significant cost.
Anyway, there is probably a 50 / 50 chance that I will return to South Korea for a little visit before I drop dead. My current goal is I’d like to return around the 20th anniversary of me getting there the first time around in the summer of 2004. It’s not looking like that is going to happen at the moment — I’m just a broke ass writer — but A LOT can happen between now and then.
I sometimes write about my failed magazine I had in Seoul, ROKon Magazine. It was a success until it wasn’t. My version of it lasted from August 2006 to April 2007. It was a very wild ride with amazing twists and turns and extremely colorful characters floating in and out of the story repeatedly.
I learned a lot from that experience in no small part because I was also DJing at a bar called Nori at the time. And, in a sense, I’m using all those experiences from a failed magazine in Seoul to write six novels set in a totally different place. But that’s not the point of this post.
The point is — learned a lot about myself as part of that particular adventure. I learned what a quirky life I lead on an existential basis. I learned that I have a lot of vision and need a partner who is persuasive to actually get anything done. But I also learned that much of life is simply picking a direction, any direction and sticking to it.
The moment you have a vision in your head, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune come out. People will bombard you with all kinds of reasons for why your vision is wrong or how much you suck or why you shouldn’t even be doing what you’re doing in the first place.
In that respect, working on writing project with an imagined six novels to it is a lot like growing ROKon Magazine back in the day. I know my “true north” and I know what these six novels to be like, no matter how many different people try to make me feel bad about even doing anything to begin with .
I’m really good at the “vision thing,” but very bad at persuasion. That’s why in the early days of ROKon Magazine the late Annie Shapiro and I made such a great team. I came up with the vision and she convinced people to help us. But I’m all alone now and it’s going to be a massive accomplishment on my part to get a literary agent to take me seriously enough to help me get this first novel published.
But here I am. Hoping to try to be in a position around the fall of 2023 where I can sell a novel. I’m still smarting over how long post-production might be if I manage to make that dream come true. But those are the breaks. I just have to accept that I have to be patient.
I wrote a post called, “I Was Famous Once, And Young” and it’s been getting an unusual amount of traffic for a site that gets, well, gets almost no traffic. All the post is about is my lingering grief — way too many years after the fact — over a failed “English journal” in Seoul called ROKon Magazine.
My favorite ROKon Magazine cover.
Now, I have a very — VERY active imagination, so obviously I think someone is going to use that fleshed out outline I gave a manuscript consultant who ghosted me as the basis of a screenplay. Or something dark and dire like that. Or, I don’t know…maybe Jennifer 8. Lee is somehow interested in what happened with the magazine and that is generating chatter in her huge friend group and they look for “ROKon Magazine” and find that specific post which a “ROKon Magazine” tag attached to it?
It’s all very curious.
If someone is actually interested in that bonkers story, well, that would be great. Just don’t steal the story so much that I can’t use it as the basis of my six novel thriller project I’ve been working on for years now.
Only time will tell, I guess. But, as I keep saying — make decisions on what you do know, not on what you don’t know.
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