Category: KOREA

Seoul Cthulhu Festival of Film: 28 Feb 2012

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This entry is part 57 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

UPDATE (8 March 2013): This event was a huge success, selling out all the seats in the cinema to a very appreciative audience. We’re happy it was so well-received, and hope that it will inspire the organization of similar such events in future! I’ll post photos when I get the chance… ORIGINAL POST: Fans of H.P. Lovecraft in Seoul will not want to miss the upcoming Cthulhu Festival of Film in Seoul. The evening will feature three film adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories: one Korean, one German, and one American. There will be subtitles for all films, to accommodate both Korean-speakers …

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Smooth? Are You Kidding?

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Okay, okay, I’m foolish. Fine. I was hoping out last couple of weeks on campus would be smooth sailing. Today, while in Seoul sorting out some paperwork, I encountered a really nice guy–a cabbie who was in his seventies, who was a real character. He was a cabbie who seemed to also fancy himself a comedian, with photos of all kinds in his cab. Some he used to communicate, some for comedic effect. I swear, he put on glasses with a fake nose just to make me laugh. He wasn’t that funny but his effort and friendliness were endearing. His last …

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“How My Mother Sees My Friends” and “How Others See ‘My Couple'”

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Found, by my wife, on a Korean website–and not the kind of site you might imagine. You can click the image to open the full-sized version, for a better look: This was uploaded, of all places, to a DIY website–a place where people  who do stuff like make soap, candles, and that kind of thing hang out. If you looked closely, I’m sure you caught the two disturbing things about it: first, that “How I see myself” is full of images of white people… but secondly, that image about “How my mother sees my friends” is… yep, a group of …

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Meditations on Junk, #1: Ugly Koreans/Ugly Americans

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I’m flipping through Min Byoung-Chul’s Ugly Koreans/Ugly Americans. (Which is, by the way, insanely overpriced on Amazon.com.) It’s a sort of typical book in Korea, basically intellectual junk crammed full of East vs. West generalizations and “explanations” by a Korean who doesn’t himself quite grasp what he’s taken upon himself to explain. (Also, to be frank, the first half of the book seems to be made up mainly of genuinely rude, disgusting, or dangerous behaviours common among Koreans, while the second half, supposedly balancing this, is full of very tame gestures and comments about how Americans are “impatient” with people …

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Normal Sadism, Weak Boundaries, and Social Unhappiness

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I was having a discussion with someone about life in Korea–someone who feels pretty much like I do about it–and something interesting crossed my mind. It’s the concept of “normal marital sadism” that was coined by the therapist David Schnarch to describe the very common form of emotional sadism that seems to develop in a lot–a lot–of marriages. He published an article on the concept back in May of this year, in Psychology Today: People who refuse to acknowledge their own hatred, vindictiveness, and punitiveness are the most pernicious people to those they love. You can’t learn to control hostile impulses you …

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