Tag Archives: culture

04/27/13
greaysaxman

What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 4 — Music and Identity

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series.

When my family moved from Nova Scotia to Saskatchewan, I had a pretty hard time of it.

Understatement of my life, but it’ll do. The move began a long period of having the shit kicked out of me, and then struggling to find a way to fit into a youth culture I didn’t really understand. I was almost certainly dealing with PTSD from all the violence; I was definitely emotionally a mess; I was lost and confused about who I was; and my peers were, like all schoolkids, none too sympathetic.

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04/25/13
photo-21

What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 2 — Ear Training

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series.

Right, so last time, I drew a parallel between my view of music in the modern industrialized world, and the way “foodies” think of food in that same setting: namely, as something that has been essentially debased for expediency of production by large corporations, in the name of profit.

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04/24/13
Tvdinner

What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 1 — Background, Caveats, and an Analogy to Consider

I’ve been working for about a week now to put together a blog post that simply isn’t working. Like a story built to fail, the damned thing just is not cohering, no matter what i do: it veers off the road, it catches on fire, and when I put out the fire, the engine won’t turn over.

So I’ve decided to break it down into pieces. Maybe. It depends whether that is still necessary at the end of this thing I’m writing now. It’s hard because, frankly, I think that what we conventionally include in the category of music includes a lot of things that are music, but far more things that, right at the bottom, involve music only tangentially. In other words, I think the world has misdefined the word “music.”

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03/19/13
The-Haunting-of-Julia

Horror and Culture: Anglo/American, Korean, and Japanese Perspectives

Note: This is another post from lat semester, when I was teaching a film class. I am not teaching now, but the thoughts seemed worth posting. (Because right now I’m too busy to write much new for the blog, but feel I should post more often than I have been.) The post is definitely not intended to be any definitive discussion, just interesting notes from a small class discussion.  

I had an interesting discussion in my class today about horror across the three cultures represented in my Understanding Anglophone Cultures Through Film course: Korean, Japanese, and Anglophone.(1)

We watched the Korean film <<여고괴담>> (Whispering Corridors 1), Juon: The Curse (Part 1); and the little-known but (in my opinion) excellent The Haunting of Julia, also published at one point as Full Circle. (The film is based on Peter Straub’s novel, which in different editions also has borne each of these titles.) I haven’t read the book–I kept seeing a copy in a huge used bookstore near my apartment when I was in undergrad, but when I saw the movie and decided I ought to read it, the thing finally had been snapped up by someone else, doubtless someone who’d also seen the film on the Showcase channel late one night. However, I’ve seen people say it’s easy to tell that the book was Straub’s first (horror) novel, so maybe I didn’t miss much… I don’t know.

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01/31/12

Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger

The first 120 or so pages of Shutting Out the Sun (2006) are fascinating, and indeed, Zielenziger’s portrayal of a number of Japanese hikikomori (shut-ins), their families, and those working the help bring them back out into the public world, manages to be very thoughtful and compassionate, and even, at times, moving.

Later chapters are less powerful, in my opinion, in part because of the way Zielenziger presents the social problems he chooses to tackle. Many, such as the falling birth rate, the lingering (relative) conservativism among men, the precipitously-declined birth rate, and the national obsession with conspicuous consumption of brand name-goods, are presented as if they were uniquely Japanese phenomena, when anyone who was in Korea at the time could have noted that many of the same issues were also of concern, and often more severe, in South Korea.

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06/13/11

Typology, Teleology, and Essentialism: Comparing Cultures Across Time

I don’t know if I’ll actually undertake this or not, but I certainly have it on my mind. In my Pop Cultures of the English-Speaking World course, I usually teach a segment on the Flapper Girl, inviting students to compare this American, 1920s concept of the “New Woman” with the phenomenon that arose in the mid-2000s, where young women’s consumption patterns began to draw criticism and the label “된장녀” (Soybean Paste Girl) came into sudden and widespread use.

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04/26/11

Enjoyment

While grading some homework from my course on Popular Cultures in the English Speaking World, something clicked for me. I was reading through student responses to the episode of How I Met Your Mother that we watched together, and discussed.

Something that really stood out for me was the way in which people talk about comedy, or entertainment in general. I’ve noticed it before, in the way many Koreans talk about music, but finally I think I put some pieces of the puzzle together. Now, I’m not 100% sure I have something here–it may be that my students are all just picking up the same phrases from the same sources–but it is an interesting pattern nonetheless.

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11/24/10

Scorning Science, and the Fear of Doubt

I meant to post this a couple of months ago, but better late than never. The anti-science movement in America: yeah, it’s a problem.

Indeed, it is a very frustrating problem, and this is, I think, one of the reasons that the Regenesis television series I just finished watching was so engaging for me: time and again, the characters run into the social/cultural problem of people either being scientifically illiterate, or anti-science, or science-phobic. The utter frustration of a number of characters on the show–but especially David Sangström–was one of those things that made the show so relatable to so many people who, whether they are scientists or just interested in science and supporters of that great odyssey of learning, feel when looking at the world as it is.

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09/21/10
The corset, the heaving bosom: the crippling clothing women were expected to wear when being a Gibson Girl was the "in" thing.

Addendum #2 to [Literary] SF: A Social Phenomenon (Plus Some Detours)

Note: This is an addendum to this original post, and to the first addendum I posted the other day.

Some of the discussion that has cropped up in the responses to the earlier post and addendum to which this is appended (and which I want to address) is concerned with the “colonialism” or “imperialism” of the status I suggested American mainstream non-SF media have for average Korean viewers.

That is to say, questions were raised as to whether this non-SF having a kind of pseudo-SFnal, utopian quality — in that it depicts a world not only radically different, but also a world aspects of which could be made real in Korea today — isn’t really a product of US hegemonic cultural imperialism.

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09/20/10

Addendum to [Literary] SF: A Social Phenomenon (Plus Some Detours)

Over at the Livejournal mirror of this site, I was asked, just now, to clarify something about my last post, titled “[Literary] SF: A Social Phenomenon (Plus Some Detours),” why in the point I called Access I placed so much emphasis on foreign works in translation. I thought I would clarify that, as well as adding a point or two from the recent paper I presented at WorldCon.

Note: I suggest you click that link, and see the original post first, before reading what follows.

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09/11/10

“Ya!”

(This post was written during my flight home, on 6 Sept. 2010.)

Before I came to live in Asia, I’d hear people explain how a phrase like “so desu ne” could mean all kinds of things from “I see,” or “really?” all the way to, “I’m glad you see it my way, and acknowledge the responsibility that falls upon you in this position given your involvement with my enemies, and the inevitability of this confrontation between us.” I’m alluding, of course, to the ambiguity of language which is universal: “Uh huh” can denote all kinds of things in English, and all one needs to do to see even greater versatility is to look at curse words and how they function in English. (Tom left his shit all over the floor and the cat shit on it; when he found out, he lost his shit and started screaming, “Shit! You little shit!”)

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08/16/10

Ev’rything I’ve Got

I have fond memories of Holly Cole’s dark and seductive version of this song (on Don’t Smoke in Bed), but that’s not online, and I found something even better — in a sense…

Truly bizarre: the music is… well, it feels like a cross between a high school marching band and some TV network’s in-house orchestra.

And then there’s the video, which looks like it cost a few hundred bucks to put together, plus the (can’t be too much!) wages for the dancers. What is that, some kind of abandoned train yard or something?

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06/6/10

Darwin’s Shockwave: On Violence and Human Nature

Last semester, I think it was, one of my students asked me what I thought about “나영이 사건” as an article topic for the campus English magazine for which students write articles in my journalistic writing course. If you haven’t heard about it — and you probably don’t live in Korea if you haven’t heard about it — “The Nayeong Incident” was a case in which a 57-year-old man raped a 9-year-old girl in a church. Brian in Jeollanamdo has the basics and some links, and all I can add to that is that there were a lot of variation in explanations floating around at the time. For example, one student said that 12 years is the maximum penalty for sexual assault in Korea (and that 5 years is more usual prison time); another said he “only got 12 years because he said he was drunk” whereas elsewhere the story reported was that he appealed on the grounds that he was drunk at the time.

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05/31/10

My Name in Korea[n]

A few responses have come in for my post about Names That Ain’t Workin’ so I figured I’d add something about my name, the use of “foreign” names, and more.

First, the last issue. I don’t really see the point in taking on a foreign name. Sure, it would give Koreans something to call me that would be easy for them to pronounce, and avoid them mangling my real name. (Which they sometimes do.) But I like to think human beings, languages, and cultures are flexible things. I like to think I could live in another culture and keep my own name.

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04/21/10

They Don’t Make ‘Em Like That No More… or, on the Soundtrack ofLes Liaisons Dangereuses

Maybe I’m exaggerating. But it seems to me movie soundtracks, however danceable they may be, no matter how much they may support a film’s action sequences, very rarely stand up on their own as art anymore. I do have a copy of the Lola Rennt soundtrack, but I can’t really call it art, not except in that cheesy industry way that any dipshit in skimpy or stylish clothes who can lipsynch becomes a “recording artist.”

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12/3/09

Pearls Before Swine, Or, The Time Has Come to Saw off the Brakes

You know.

You know better.

You know most people would rather eat what they always eat, think what they’ve always thought, drink what they’ve always drunk, read what they’ve always read. You know that so many people have no idea how interesting a world of diversity and difference is. They say “Everyone does it this way,” whether explicitly or implicitly, because they wish everyone was just as boring as they are.

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10/28/09

It is to Flunk

I was grading a stack of student assignments — specifically, feedback on readings, which I make them do on the theory that it helps them prepare for discussions of the texts — when I ran across a particularly saddening passage in response to “The Multiculture,” an essay about Torontonian multiculturalism, which I’ll only paraphrase here:

If I were a Torontonian, I would look at foreigners in two ways. In one way, I’d see them as invaders, because they would be speaking foreign languages and bringing foreign customs to my land. But I would also see them as bringing new life into my country, just like in Korea, where I can see so many Japanese signs in some neighborhoods, because of Japanese tourists. It makes me feel like I’m in another country. On the other hand, immigrants are developing the country because they’re making a living and having a better life after they flunked in their homeland.

And yeah, the emphasis is mine.

Here’s what my response was to that little bit of the sentence:

Why do you assume this? Do you assume all foreigners in Korea came here after “flunking” in their home country? Is “flunking” the only reason people would ever have to go abroad, and do you really think the only people attracted to Korea — the only people who would ever actually choose to live here — are those who “flunked” in their homelands? What an insult to your country!

It’s a quite sad and perplexing self-contradiction, this: so often people who say they love their country and are proud of it, also speak of it in this subtly disparaging way.

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