My friend Marvin has posted his review of the film V for Vendetta (with spoilers, be warned). In his review, Marvin complains that Hollywood doesn’t trust its audience. It doesn’t trust its audience to understand the standard themes of a future fascist-dystopian story, so it has to spell out every little thing. Now, I haven’t seen it, yet, as I’ve been too busy, but I’ve been seeing V for Vendetta posters all over the place here. (Actually, over here in Korea, “Bwee po Bwendettuh” — the fact that there’s no V in Korean makes the title funny on a few …
Month: March 2006
Bwee Po
You Can’t Always Get What You Waaaaaa-ant…
… but sometimes you luck out and a couple of things that can be made work work show up. One of my students works at the library here, and she helped me by explaining that, no, visitors to the library can’t browse what’s on the shelves directly. The shelving is too narrow, and people just can’t fit in there. Now, if the computer system could output catalog lists that were easily human readable — database output that could be scanned in a single “page” instead of short titles (mostly the Korean titles) hyperlinked to summaries (and that’s where the original …
The Ralph Ellison Experience
I don’t kno much about the man himself, but his book Invisible Man is is a hell of an experience. Can any of my readers attest to this? It’s a qualitatively different book than anything I’ve read in the last few years, in a few different ways. For one thing, it just grabbed me from the first page, and has drawn me on ever since. I found the book on the sale table in a shopping mall when I was walking with my mom and my nephew, and since it was only fifty cents, and a book I’d intended to …
The Revenge of the…
This week in my Media English course, we’ve graduated beyond the critical discussion of advertisements to another set of categorization systems, namely, social hierarchies and stereotypes — both of which are completely inescapable in popular media, and both of which, I think, are universally present but interestingly different across lines of culture. We were supposed to have finished dealing with Chapter 10 of Derek Kirk Kim’s Same Difference, published as the bulk of his bookSame Difference and Other Stories. I’m taking the “nerd” as a kind of emblem of cultural difference, as a kind of symbol of the figure within …
Absolutely HAD It, I Tell You
I’ve had it with Windows. You see, the Compaq Presario laptop I bought less than a month ago, it’s fine. It’s a little short on RAM, but when I first bought it, it did a bang-up job on media. In the last couple of weeks, though, it’s been choking and sputtering, even on mere audio-CDs; and a long session online with a support tech has convinced me that, yeah, the hardware is working fine. If I do enough System Restores, the drive starts working again, just as if there was never anything wrong with it. The problem is not the …
Calling any LJ users!!!
The Livejournal feed for my blog died last September when I migrated to WordPress, but the Gorduncle feed has not been updated. I can’t remember who created it — maybe Julia, or Kat? — but in any case, it needs either to be updated or a new one needs to be created. If any LJ user feels it’s worthwhile and does so, please let me know… but wait, and let me know first. I’ve been thinking about implementing a feedburner feed for my site, so I can get more feedback on my RSS readership and so on, BEFORE getting into …
Happy Birthday in Korea…
I was reading one of my student bloggers’ comments about it being her birthday, and I thought back to the rendition I heard at a recent department party. As usual, people were singing and clapping and the rhythm of the clapping struck me as totally wrong, but in a vague way — mostly because I just never devoted brain power to figuring out why. Now I know. You see, Koreans are ardent clap-and-sing people. People love to clap along with the beat at concerts (even sometimes when it’s inappropriate, as I witnessed occasionally at the Jeonju Sori Festival), and when …
Plan Your Next Vacation
Google Mars. via A Violently Executed Blog.
Too Expensive, but…
I don’t smoke, and I never will, but I still want these WWII Anti-Axis propaganda ashtrays. I wonder if there’d be any market for knockoffs, or something similar, but with contemporary figures. I betcha bin Laden ashtrays would sell well. And Bush ones, too.
Two More Via Ritu…
A Fatwa against terrorism was recently issued in India: Maulana Khalid Rashid of the 300-year-old Dar-ul-Itfa Firangi Mahal, one of the most conservative and most respected seminaries in the country has issued a fatwa against terrorists. And on a different line of thought, Nehru’s interview with Playboy magazine. As Ritu points out, the man himself was a playboy, so it makes a kind of sense. But whatever you think of Nehru, can you imagine any contemporary Western leader saying the following: Many years ago I read in the writings of George Bernard Shaw a passage that moved me and found …