The Associated Press has opened a full news bureau in Pyongyang.

From the KCNA:

[AP CEO] Thomas said the opening of the bureau would bring hundreds of millions of people around the world the cultural understanding and access to stories of political and economic development of the DPRK.

From the AP itself:

The bureau puts AP in a position to document the people, places and politics of North Korea across all media platforms at a critical moment in its history, with Kim’s death and the ascension of his young son as the country’s new leader, Curley said in remarks prepared for the opening.

“Beyond this door lies a path to vastly larger understanding and cultural enrichment for millions around the world,” Curley said. “Regardless of whether you were born in Pyongyang or Pennsylvania, you are aware of the bridge being created today.”

Check out the video below for the thrilling ceremony at the KCNA.

Our dear friend Joseph A. Ferris, a world-class sailor and talented photographer, has been writing about North Korea since we returned from the country last year. His site, An American in North Korea, is one of the best collections of essays and photos on the web.

Here are some of our favorite posts along with stunning images:

Pizza in Pyongyang

In the late 1990s, he summoned a team of Italian pizza chefs to Pyongyang to instruct army officers. One of the chefs, Ermanno Furlanis, later recounted how the Italians underwent x-rays, brain scans and urine and blood sampling on arrival, before being sequestered in a marble palace. One of the officers Furlanis was training asked him to specify the precise distance at which olives should be spaced on a pizza, he recalled.

Nightmarishly Strange Mass Games

Dancing chickens, cows, sheep, and even a giant pig — a nightmarishly weird boasting of agriculture and animal husbandry power and success during the North Korean Arirang Mass Games.

 Funny Old White Men in North Korea

Paintings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin in Kim Il-sung Square, Pyongyang, North Korea.

Credit: Joseph A. Ferris III

The North Korea Blog’s Gabriel Mizrahi has published a new piece about the DPRK in The Huffington Post. In the article, he explores the fascinating contradictions of the hermit kingdom. Here are some of our favorite moments:

On the local stand-up comedy scene:

In the Red-Confucianist spin on 1984 that is North Korea, even the laughs are planned.

On popular humor:

Dick jokes, it turns out, are huge in the DPRK.

On Kim Jong-il’s persona:

You only need to read about Kim Jong Il’s gastronomical obsessions or peruse the catalogue of 1,500 works he claims to have authored as a university student to realize that Kim Jong Il was the first dictator-clown in history.

It’s a worthwhile read to get a feel for this amazing place. Read the full piece here.

Dearly Departed Leader

Kim Jong-il, affectionately known as “Kimchi” among close enemies, died on Saturday from “a great mental and physical strain” on a “field guidance tour” of the People’s Paradise of North Korea.

“We feel as if the sky were falling down and the land were sinking,” announced the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

“Like a bolt from the blue”

Kim Jong-il was born on Mount Paektu in 1942, a miracle that was predicted by a swallow and foreshadowed by a double rainbow. Just three weeks later, the Dear Leader learned to walk. At eight weeks old, he began speaking.

As one propagandist colleague explained, the Dear Leader “possessed of personality and qualifications as a great man on the highest and perfect level was an outstanding thinker and theoretician who led the revolution and construction along the path of steady victories with his profound ideologies and theories and remarkable leadership.”

That leadership propelled his career as Chairman of the National Defense Commission, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army and Beloved Inventor of the Run-on Sentence.

Kim’s father, the Great Leader Kim Il-sung, founded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948 after reading George Orwell’s 1984. Upon discovering that it was not a trilogy, he decided to create the live-action equivalent, but with funnier propaganda and better haircuts.

In 1994, Kim Jong-il inherited the kingdom along with the most severe daddy issues in the dictator club.

The DPRK quickly descended into economic crisis and three years of famine that killed a handful of people and continues today. The crisis hastened new economic programs, including the export of children’s tears, and ultimately reinforced the country’s philosophy of juche, or self-reliance, which was also Kim Jong-il’s World of Warcraft handle.

Juche became the underpinning for North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. Kim announced his first atomic bomb in 2006, which led to a brutal game of nuclear just-the-tip — just for a second, just to see how it feels — deteriorating relations with South Korea and the outside world. He later offered to denuclearize in exchange for foreign aid and 8,000 copies of The Devil Wears Prada, but reversed his position when Miranda Priestley called his Stalin-chic onesie “so last famine.”

A consummate film lover, Kim made his cinematic debut in Team America: World Police, in which he explored the themes of leadership and loneliness as a dictator loosely based on himself. Ignored by North Korea’s film critics, the film gained a cult following in labor-camp movie screenings and opened up new opportunities for the dictator-artist, including a prominent role in North Korea’s “Party Rock Anthem.” He later made headlines for kidnapping inviting South-Korean director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife to help him realize his dream of producing films in the DPRK.

The Dear Leader wrestled gracefully with the idiosyncrasies of genius. He suffered from a reported fear of flying, preferring instead to take trains and cars, which offered more legroom than Economy Plus on Koryo Air. A sophisticated gastronome, he spent a reported $700,000 annually on cognac as the single largest consumer of Hennessy in the world, exceeding LA Laker Ron Artest and rapper Tupac Shakur.

Kim Jong-il leaves behind a body of work unparalleled in the modern world. He authored 1,500 works as a university student, including the coming-of-age tale Are You There God? It’s Me, Kimchi and the child-education book Not Everybody Poops. His six operas — written in only two years — are “better than any in the history of music,” according to his biography, which is now available on Kindle.

“We are under respected Kim Jong-un”

Kim Jong-un, the Dear Leader’s third son, has been elected chosen to take over the family dictatorship.

“Standing in the van of the Korean revolution at present is Kim Jong Un, great successor to the revolutionary cause,” explained the KCNA. Officials dismissed concerns about Jong-un’s youth, then remembered that they had left him in the backseat of the van.

Officials went on to praise Jong-un’s resolve, intelligence and cultural literacy, and dismissed rumors that he is the estranged lovechild of Horatio Sanz and Sandra Oh.

“Our party and people will strive hard to boost friendship and solidarity with the peoples of different countries,” the KCNA stated – unless those countries pursue destructive interests such as food and happiness.

Upon the death of Kim Jong Il, the Twittersphere went bonkers, keeping the team here at The North Korea Blog up until the wee hours.  Here’s some of the most hilarious tweets to come out of the media frenzy.  Enjoy!

@lindseykrueger In other news, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman are scrambling to find out who Kim Jong Il was

@jeffbryandavis Kim Jong Il’s son has some tiny shoes to fill.

@deathstarPR Kim Jong Il is dead. Who will be brave/insane enough to build Earth’s first Death Star now that he’s gone?

@workforfood ☑ Kim Jong Il ☑ Khaddafi ☑ Osama Bin Laden ☑ Saddam Hussein ☐ Internet Explorer

@MosheKasher There are more “Kim Jong Il was ill?” tweets being produced right now than there is food in North Korea.

@buckleysangel Kim Jong Il went to sleep with a fan on

@theartofcharm North Koreas currently describing Kim Jong Il as both ‘dead’ and ‘delicious, especially with a little soy sauce’

@ByTimGraham Looks like I picked a bad week to start Kim Jong Il in my fantasy tyrant league.

@JamesUrbaniak Herman Cain sending condolences to family of Lil’ Kim.

@Lamebook Kim Jong went from ‘Il’ to ‘dead’

@theartofcharm Rick Perry mistakenly referred to Kim Jong Il as “Kim Jong the Second”.  I blame sans serif fonts for the gaffe.

@chrisfranjola Well I guess I’ll take back Kim Jong Il’s Christmas gift

Theatrics are part of the DPRK way. As I wrote when I returned from North Korea,

everyone in the DPRK is, in some sense, an extension and a reflection of the state. The boundary between genuine and calculated, actor and citizen, is—or at least feels—much thinner in North Korea.

And no more so than in the announcement of Kim Jong-il’s death on state television this morning. The news, dripping with histrionics and reminiscent of Kim Il-sung’s death 17 years ago, was another performance in the hermit kingdom’s grand repertoire.

Below is the “special broadcast” announcing that the Dear Leader has died in Pyongyang.

Photo credit: Andrew Lombardi

North Korea is a staggering place. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s an eerie, perverse, brutal country — this we know well — but it’s also tender, funny and entertaining in a way I have never encountered. It’s the only country where you will visit the corpse of a dictator who still reigns, see a 100,000-person acrobatic spectacle, enjoy a hilarious round of dick jokes over afternoon spelunking, take walks with starving child soldiers, then finish up the day at a shooting range that serves alcohol — and all of this on a peninsula that boasts an enviable gene pool and one of the craziest chapters in history.

If that sounds absurd, it was. And I haven’t even told you about the citizen actors or stand-up comedy yet. The seven days we spent there were insane — and insanely interesting. We were on a straight-up high for a good two months after returning to the States. I think I still am.

Which is why North Korea is the perfect place for a bachelor party.

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Crumbling from end to end and punctured by gaping holes, Pyongyang’s massive 12-lane Youth Hero Highway is a free-for-all for the few dozen vehicles that actually use it. Trucks, buses and the occasional sedan weave in and out of oncoming traffic in order to avoid the sickly workers stooping to repair the road, a symbol of the mindless excess and abject failure of North Korea’s infrastructure. The road was built, James Bond Villain explained, by students and people under the age of 30. It is a point of national pride.

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