Month: March 2012

Blackface, Korean Media, and the Context of the American Vaudeville Show

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Apparently, there has been an explosion online regarding an incident in which Korean performers donned  blackface for a performance over the Lunar New Year: Yeah. And this isn’t all that rare in Korean media. In fact, Matt over at Gusts of Popular Feeling hits the highlights with an excellent and carefully-researched history of Three Decades of Blackface in Korea, though it’s not an exhaustive history — he doesn’t get into every example. Just the big ones, and especially those in programs (as opposed to in advertisements). Like, for example, the all-Korean production of Roots here. Yeah, seriously. Go give it …

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Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack

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While there are many books I’ve read in the last few years and thoroughly enjoyed, it’s rare that I read something and feel as if I had been missing something amazing for years and years, and felt a desire to kick myself for taking so long to get around to something. Because I feel like I’ve learned something about the world, reading this novel: something desperately important and something we have forgotten, to our own peril. I first read Jack Womack’s word in 2000 or 2001 — I’d say probably the latter, just before I left Canada for Korea — …

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Apologies

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I’ve been dealing with a number of different fires that have broken out lately, including: myself, then Miss Jiwaku, being quite sick in the last week and a half the necessity of finalizing audio tracks for the film we’re making before next Friday (though the deadline was initially today, when I was still quite ill!) a medical emergency with a fellow expat coworker, and all kinds of organizational (re: his family) and workplace fallout for that. (For those who know Michael, his brother has posted an update on his Facebook Wall, which is where the link above leads.) helping a …

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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto III

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This entry is part 5 of 57 in the series Blogging Pound's The Cantos

For those who don’t know, I’m writing a series of posts about Ezra Pound’s massive book-length poem The Cantos as I work my way through the poems. My readings, designed to help me write a novel featuring Pound as an occult adventurer (more on that here), will stray from the merely academic to the unusual and highly fanciful, so take all this with a grain of salt! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post, there will be a menu where you can go back to the beginning of this series. Today, I’m continuing with the Cantos, and specifically addressing …

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Guest Brewday: Earl Wit, With Rowan

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On Wednesday, I made the trek out to Hannam Hanam City, to the home of my friends Rowan and Sophie, in order to brew up a Wit beer with Rowan… a Belgian Wit beer made with Earl Grey tea… and that’s not the only thing that makes it unusual. This is the second experiment we’ve done with brewing a wheat beer, and the twist is that we supplemented the wheat with some pasta — in this case, rotini. We didn’t use a lot: though we added about 500 grams of it to the cereal mash, some got burnt to the …

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