Here’s the thing about the round-the-clock city immortalised by Frank Sinatra: it’s dead by 2am.
Tell me what time you wake up in the morning, and I’ll tell you how much this bothers you. But if the absence of life after 2am doesn’t irk, the claims to it ought to.
Those eager to correct me by citing a few drinking venues with late closing times are looking for something less from a city than a true urban nighthawk. I’m not undervaluing the hour of live jazz that I’m staggering to Smalls for, an hour or two later than I’ll need to arrive at a jazz venue in London or Paris. And I’m sure there’s something going on over the weekend in a warehouse in Bushwick.
But a clutch of venues awake does not a city make. These pockets of life are defined by a background of perfect slumber that’s un-roused by some trains rumbling underground, or by the odd taxi flitting from bar to club. By 11pm, the night’s on life support. The vibe at Bemelmans Bar involves the absence of one in any street between there and your next venue, when you leave at midnight.
Which brings me to the subject of this article. I’m given to believe that Seoul has never slept. Nightlife venues, a necessary but insufficient condition of this claim, make a worthy contribution to it. Not only can you find clubs, bars, and singing rooms open until your hotel breakfast’s being served, but you can find several entire districts brimming with them. You can shout to each other over beers and soju in a crowded pub at 5am, or drink a fine whisky over a cerebral discussion in a cocktail bar, with hard bop playing on an audiophile’s hifi rig, until at least 6am. (I know what you’re thinking, but others come, too.)
More tellingly, you can find a retail shopping mall open till 2am. You can go for a meal, or a coffee — reasonable ones, I mean — at every hour between midnight and office opening times. You can access parcel dispatch services. When you search for a 24-hour study room to sit and work in church-silence, it’s nearby, open, and it really won’t close. You’ll never be more than five minutes away from somewhere to buy a toothbrush, or replace a lost charger, at any time of the day or night. That I’ve had a large legal document printed, bound, and dispatched at 4am doesn’t speak to the lack of effort required to do so.
I’ve had samples made, labels printed, trims transported, branded steel signs laser-cut, and production meetings — at a few hours’ notice — at every hour of the day and night.
So exhilarating is the mere possibility of doing anything at any hour that I’ve spent more time indulging in it than I have accounting for it. There’s some evidence of a self-perpetuating economic ecosystem: sprawling wholesale night markets in the east district of Seoul, selling all manner of consumer goods, open for shops to source inventory after their own closing times. An economy for food and fun for the cascade of wholesalers finishing their shifts extends into the morning, beyond the window that services partying office workers on Northeast Asian hours.
But mostly this all just feels part of something, well, Korean. Until recently the least-known among the community of rich nations, South Korea is home to a culture of efficiency, with work ethics that live up to the regional stereotype. Tempers run high, and society sometimes feels like it’s respirating more frustration than oxygen, but there’s an atmosphere of capability: that solutions are not merely possible, but inevitable.
During the pandemic, the British government and press hotly debated Sweden’s health policy decisions, while South Korea — a densely populated country of over 50 million people that neither imposed a national lockdown, nor mandated working from home — was reporting a fraction of both deaths and GDP regression. By the end of 2022, the nation had endured 32,000 Covid deaths against the UK’s 215,000; GDP declined by less than 1% YOY in 2020, against the UK’s double-digit negative growth for the same period at the pandemic’s nadir. Those sceptical of Korea’s Covid reporting can review all-cause mortality data for the past five years, revealing no noticeable signs of a pandemic. This is a nation with form on ensuring the show goes on.
Doubtless there’s a human cost to keeping this sleepless urban machine whirring; a nation known for its violent labour movements, and for protests that attract seven-figure attendances, might go to increasing efforts to count it. Until then, though, here’s a real city that never sleeps, where inspiration from the most exotic and mysterious hours of the day would leave today’s Edward Hopper spoiled for choice.
belowtheline.blog 