Well, anyone who constantly depends on a single school of thought isn’t thinking hard enough.

Noah Body,

Thanks for the clarifications. Wow, they literally called it “스몰 카지노호텔”… I’d have expected something a little more flowery than that!

Kangwon Land history is here:
http://www.kangwonland.com/Management/History.asp
The “Small” hotel and casino opened before the main hotel and casino. I remember it was open just a couple of months before the newspapers were running stories about these sad sack adults and grandparents who gambled away their family’s money.

Thanks!

Actually, from what I can find, they broke ground on Kangwon Land before the turn of the century (I love saying that for 1999/2000!), but only opened the casino in 2003. I could be wrong, but that’s what it seems to say here, among all the effusive praise. (And there was a neat-looking discussion of casinos — Korean & foreigner-oriented (Kwangwon Land being the only one then) vs. foreigner-only (there were thirteen) here for which Google had a sentence cached saying the same, but I can’t access the article.)

And for all that, controls on (casino) gambling here are still massive, and the industry is still considered as “for foreigners.” Though, oddly enough, maybe for a reason I never thought of: to prevent money laundering. Now I feel naïve.

Thanks for the recommendation on the ALPHA CAFE… I’ll add it to the list of things to check out. Do you happen to have a source for the info on Yaoi comics in Korea? I’d be interested in reading more! Even a print source would do.

Oh, there’s a guy who did a presentation on Hitchcock’s The Birds who took an hour (and tons of bird puns, and tons of unparseable language) to basically say something like, “I figure there’s something going on about anxiety, especially anxiety about sexuality in cultural transition, and nonreproductive sex, in that flick.” I was ready to throw a frozen chicken at the guy by the end. So much PoMo is like that: the big reveal is usually, “People hide their racism in sneaky ways,” or “Our ideas about women’s work are still kinda unfair and fucked up even now.” Except with big hard words.

Tangential, though, I hope, to the majority of what I’ve written here, though.

Yeah. It’s a different case in Korea than the young professionals in the US, as I’ve said.

As for the critical discussion of old films, well, it genuinely interests me, so that’s why I talk about it. I don’t know about your profs. Why not talk about it, since it’s a part of our shared culture and since its roots still express themselves in popular culture today? (Jim Crow and Zip Coon, two popular figures in blackface minstrel shows, are arguably still current icons being used in marketing hip-hop music today, and similarly, blackface minstrel tropes can be detected in modern entertainment, just a little more submerged.)

Anyway, since King Kong is a minor example that I’m using to contextualize a whole new set of tropes I think we can see in *Korean* pop culture. Seeing them in American culture helps one to see them in Korean culture, as well as to point out that I’m not one-sidedly accusing Koreans of doing something we never did ourselves. (We did it aplenty, in terms of race-transformations; race-transformation was a solid, core component of our popular culture in the US, parts of Canada, and Britain for a long, long time.)

By the way, I don’t think everyone in the past was a sexist, racist, bigoted jackass, not even by our standards. Not everyone in the past accepted slavery, either. There were ancient Greeks who called it an abomination. Most people, maybe, but not everyone. The question of why and how certain kinds of depictions “work” in certain cultures is fascinating nonetheless — why Western whites got off on what seem to me grotesque blackface minstrel shows fascinates me as much why Koreans seem to have a thing for feminized male pop stars. (And for whites-as-bad-guys that sometimes seem to be surrogate Korean males.)

I’m still not quite sold on the King Kong idea, but what I’m about to say pertains to my University experience, and not anything said on this thread. At first blush it looks like the “Aren’t we so much more enlightened than the people who made this film, book, poem, or painting” school of criticism, which while I guess is valid, leads to diminishing returns after awhile. I mean if everyone in the past was a sexist, racist jackass, what’s the point of studying all this old stuff?

You’re gay! (Just kidding.)

But the pink shirts aren’t just accepted here. They’re almost de rigeur, and it’s odd because that’s a variation on the Western fashion that Koreans have essentially adopted here (through a Japanese filter, I suspect). I assume this wasn’t the case when you were here, though I’m curious whether it was in Japan.

It’s so prevalent here now that even newcomers (who left North America after this newfangled metrosexuality hit the mainstream, to whatever degree it actually did) comment on it with great regularity, as in, “What’s up with all the guys in the pink shirts?”

Maybe it’s also the shades used: bright, or even hot, pink shirts. Sometimes with pictures of teddy bears on the front, sometimes, including logos with the bear statue in this picture, hat turned to the side (on the bear) like a little boy and all, though those shirts are baby blue. (Infantilizing, not feminizing, really.) Or cute little leather epaulets, or frill on their sweaters or… well, just plain feminine styled clothes, pink or otherwise. Sometimes combined with other accoutrements that don’t shout anything about having masculinity to burn, like, er, heavy eye makeup, or gigantic murses or enormous Louis Vuitton wallets that match their girlfriends’ purses but which no average Western man would consider a man’s wallet (you know, the long type of “wallet” made for keeping in a purse?), or girly sunglasses, or…

Well, anyway, pale pink dress shirts on a lacrosse player this is not. I guess all those pictures didn’t get it across. (Though there is a paucity of pink in the pics, I admit.)

But in any case, I’m not really dissing. It’s cool, they can wear whatever they want. But I do wonder why Korean society has adapted Western clothing in this way, specifically applying so much of what seems, in the original source, to be characteristic of feminine fashion to men’s clothing. Especially in a society that, a generation or two back, this kind of unisex or androgynous fashion was uheard of. And, further, why androgynous fashion, coinciding with an ongoing massive shift in gender roles (women moving into the workforce and so on) in Korea results in a more feminine version of androgyny, whereas in Western society androgyny or unisex-styled clothing seemed to consist of women donning traditionally more “male” fashions and men and women alike more commonly shunning feminine colors like pink and red and pastels, for darker hues, blacks and greys and whatever. (Your investment bankers aside, because I still doubt pink has taken Western men’s wardrobes by storm in anywhere near the way it has those of Korean.) I wonder to what degree the filter of Japanese fashion plays into it. I wonder to what degree aesthetics tramsitted in Japanese pop culture play into it. It seems like it might be more than anyone I know has suggested. I think it’s worth trying to puzzle it all out.

As for King Kong, see my post about it here (see also Stephanie’s comment there…). Anyway, it’s not just me. It’s a very widely discussed subtext of the film, and it makes a lot of sense when you think about the vast popularity of blackface minstrelsy in film (and live performances), and the (relatively) contemporary popularity of films like Birth of a Nation, part two of which tells a very similar story to Kong, with the “black” villain played by an white actor in blackface, as opposed to a black ape suit.

I’m as big a fan of sub-text as anyone, but what makes you think King Kong is a racist stereotype?