Ape @ KOFA this Monday…

I’m sure I’m the only person interested, but the Korean Film Archive is showing some old SF movies this month. That is, this weekend and Monday. My Friday is already spoken for, and I have a DVD of Yonggary here, but I’ve never seen Ape (1976) and I’ve heard it’s deliciously awful, and since I’m researching Korean SF at the moment, — and it is apparently some kind of a Korean-American co-production — I am definitely going to see it. It’s playing at 2pm this Monday at the KOFA theater. I’m sure I’m the only one deranged enough to be …

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The Imo Incident (or, The Incident of the Imo Year, or maybe just Eight Days, or Eight Days in the Imo Year)

Whew! Well, I’ve just about finished the finishing touches on a story I’ve been on-and-off working for a long time, my Sado Seja story…. which wasn’t originally a ghost story. Actually, I have heard a few people claim that there were ghostly happenings at Changdeokgung, and even Lady Hyegyong mentions palace ghosts — some poor woman who was executed for necromancy against the queen a generation or two back, for example, was thought to have left an evil spiritual residue behind — but strictly speaking, I’ve never encountered the story of Sado Seja as a “ghost story.” And yet Sado’s …

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빠삐코 + 놈놈놈 = 빠삐놈 (And an Update on the Starcraft Pansori, with Video)

Note: I’ve made a (substantial) couple of edits and additions to this post since it first went up. Those resulting from comments — changes — are clearly marked as updates, but those that are additions of information or observation aren’t, since it reduces readability to have a bunch of EDIT marks throughout. Anyway, apologies to anyone who suddenly notices a bunch of context that wasn’t there before! Here’s a very odd video that I’d like to briefly unpack for y’all, as an example of very neat, strange, and utterly Korean cross-fertilization of pop culture that goes on here, and especially …

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Madness at the Ministry of Bukkake: A Proposal for a New Mockery-Based Dokdo Strategy

For those of you not in Korea, you’ve probably never heard of Dokdo. Wikipedia has the scoop for you, and it’s pretty well balanced, but the bottom line is, Dokdo is a pair of rocks in the middle of the body of water that separates Korea from Japan. Dokdo is the subject of an ongoing territorial dispute with Japan. The issue flares up every so often, like a case of gout, and like gout, dominates life here for a while. Recently, the Japanese department of education announced that in new Japanese textbook guidelines, Dokdo is going to be described as …

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NCC-1492 and The Good Ship Daehan

This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Who's Complaining in Korea

This is part three in a series. You may wish to read the above links. If you don’t: Part 1 discussed reasons why so many expatriates complain about Korea. Part 2 seemed to rush off onto a tangent mostly focused on Iksan, a small city where I lived for a couple of years when I first arrived in Korea, and the unevenness of its development. I ended discussing a landfill crisis there, and describing how young locals were all dressed in their usual stunning finery, promenading serenely past barricades of trash bags blocking the sidewalk. Then, with promises to return …

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PiFan Book Fair: SF/Fantasy/Horror/Thriller novels and Magazines… in Korean!

This entry is part 6 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Well, I was told I could pick up my tickets at the ticket booth today, but of course, I couldn’t. Somehow, though, I ended up at City Hall and noticed a huge display of books and magazines near the ticket booth. It turned out to be the biggest collection of Korean SF, thriller, suspense, and horror novels I’ve ever seen. I had already picked up some of the books, but I still managed to grab the following titles (in translation) for Lime: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke (in hardback) Odd John by …

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Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind by Gerald Graff

This is, basically, an excellent book. Make a gift of it to those you know who are decision makers in departments. Read it if you want to help make things better for your students. More for those who want details, as well as my reflections on a few of the things I learned reading it, but for most of you who are teaching in departments (in Korea) where students actually have enough English to learn, you know, academic stuff, or for those teaching in the mother tongue of their students: trust me! Order it! Go! Now! University EFL teachers in …

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The Iri Yeok Explosion, and the Iksan Landfill Crisis

This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Who's Complaining in Korea

As you can see from the links above, this is the second in a pair of posts responding to the question posed by Roboseyo and The Korean. If you haven’t read part 1, go check it out before reading this. If you’re not inclined to check it out, here’s the nutshell: To complain is human. I Whinge, Thefore I Am. To complain online is even more common. We’d be reading whining blogs from 1380 is blogs had then existed. Expats probably complain a lot because of a few specific reasons: Many expats are English teachers, a relatively stressful (and in …

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To Unpredictable Passions: Yeşil Grena/yoonsookjin, Lip-Syncher of Turkish Tunes

(LJ readers, pop on over to my site to read this post if the videos I embed beneath the cut aren’t working… LJ sometimes takes the videos in stride, and sometimes hates my embedding anything….) At some point or other I stumbled onto the existence of a Korean by the name (or pseudonym?) of Yoon Sook Jin (usually written yoonsookjin) who achieved some degree of fame online doing those sing-along webcam type videos which, since the dawn of Youtube, have been competing with cat photographs for how much bandwidth can be, er, used up in unentertaining entertainment. But you know, …

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The Expattes Compleynte

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Who's Complaining in Korea

Roboseyo and The Korean (of Ask a Korean) have teamed up to pose a question that really does strike to the heart of the corner of the Internet that deals with Korea in English: Why do expats in Korea complain so much [online]? Note that I didnt use the word “blogosphere” anywhere: though lately I’ve been spitting insults at The Marmot’s Fleas (as I call the commenters at The Marmot’s Hole) the way some cowboys (used to?) spit chaw, let’s face it, there are other sinkholes of negativty, the forums on Dave’s ESL Cafe being a prominent one, and Dave’s …

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