It was an LP. It was a soundtrack. I had that whole thing memorized a few days after I bought it. Later would come Glenn Miller (my mom’s choice, since I was about to start playing the saxophone), and then Bon Jovi (yes, Slippery When Wet, I’ll admit it), Miles Davis, Guns’N’Roses (and then the famous backpatch jacket), and then John Coltrane (and then the tenor sax I still have with me), and much more… … but this was the first album I bought for myself, with my paper route money, and man was I happy to have it so …
Month: May 2010
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 …
Cosplay’d
Bizarre photo, I know. Miss Jiwaku suggested I pose with these two, probably because she found it amusing to see Koreans dressed this way; we were both quite surprised to see a costume like the woman on the left is wearing being used at all in Seoul, much less for a commercial property,on a Friday afternoon, in a mall. Cosplay is not a common thing in Korea — at least, not if you mean cosplay as in the costumes associated with manga or other superhero/SF/fantasy stuff. I’ve only seen it a couple of times, and this, the second time, it …
Glitch: Tersesat Dalam Waktu (My First Indonesian SF Film)
So, I’ve just finished watching Glitch: Tersesat Dalam Waktu (English: Glitch: Getting Lost In Time) as I write this. (It will end up being posted later, but I’m writing it now, so I’ll just write it in the present time.) It’s one of the DVDs I managed to pick up while in Jakarta that is actually an SF movie, as opposed to mainstream drama or horror. (SF seems rare there, but horror is practically mainstream cinema in Indonesia, from what I can tell.) Anyway, the premise is that some sort of time loops have been set up for some unknown reason, …
One abstract out… one to go (later).
Well, that’s one of two paper abstracts sent out. The deadline was the end of the month. This one I particularly want to get accepted, as it’s the WorldCon in Melbourne this fall. We’ll see what happens! (It’s basically a presentation of how (sometimes) I use SF in my classes not only to teach about the role of SF in American culture, but also to teach about American or global Anglo culture more generally, and also to throw current events in Korea into a kind of comparative relief to get students to look at, and talk about, things from a …