Alan Jacobs

A friend called a few weeks ago to tell me about a skyscraper that had to be evacuated after an earthquake in Seoul. For ten minutes the building made wide metronomic swings. Thing was, there had been no earthquake registered in the area. It was a mysteriously super local event. After a two-week investigation, the epicenter had been narrowed down to the building’s twelfth floor gym where the side kicking, upper-cutting, and fist-jabbing of seventeen middle-aged Korean women boxercising to Snap’s 1990s hit “I’ve got the Power” seemed somehow to have hit the building’s resonant frequency, sending the whole structure into convulsions. Surely the gods thought they were doing Seoul’s Technomart a good turn when, at the beginning of time, they decided out of all possible pasts and futures, for this building’s Achilles’ heel to be the improbably collection of seventeen Korean women on the wrong side of forty paired with 1990s American infomercial exercise culture.