The stunningly knowledgeable Helikkopter (of Indieful ROK), who was kind enough to remember I’ve been trying to get a handle on the status of SF fiction and film in Korea, very kindly notified me of the fact that in March of this year… a very odd little album was released by Ruby Record. It’s called Star Wars Project Compilation. SF fans, panic not! It features not some Korean form of the filk (perish the thought) but rather original works by (seemingly) competent musicians in homage to, reference to, or all about the Star Wars movie series. I can’t get the …
Category: MUSIC
Starcraft Animation!
Aha, I half-remembered this when I was writing about the Starcraft Pansori recently. Here it is! (Apologies to those who don’t have enough Korean to follow, but song’s essentially a cheerful little countdown of how four Zerglings get whittled down to one little fella during the trek home after being left behind enemy lines. For those of you too young to remember the 1998 game Starcraft, I hate you. (And yes, some people are still playing that game over here. That blows my mind too.)
PiFan Book Fair: SF/Fantasy/Horror/Thriller novels and Magazines… in Korean!
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 …
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, …
Voix Angelique
One of the things I miss, over here in Korea, is how few really interesting foreign acts come and do shows here — at least, how few of such shows are accessible to me, given my schedule and given the range of what comes here. There’s no demand here for, say, a group like the Trevor Watts Moiré Music Group, or, say, for someone like Pandit Ulhas Bapat to drop in on Seoul. Once, long ago when I still lived in Montréal, I got the chance to see Salif Keita live. Which, my friends, if you don’t know how cool …
Because the World Needs More Cheese…
… I’ve uploaded the uncut, massive single MP3 version (please right click and save the file, as it’s huge!) of the second-to-last musical performance I ever made in Saskatoon, back in 1998. My friend Mike invited me, my ex (the vocalist on the track), and two DJs I knew from high school (Phil Greer and Keenan Gauthier) to perform at what he was then calling “parties” (because, I think, “rave” was passé by then. We played a few gigs, and on the last one — just before I took off for Montreal in fall 1998 — Keenan got a buddy …
new free music
Free, and DRM-free, music: The new Nine Inch Nails album, “the slip”. via BoingBoing, hip-hop/bluegrass mashup madness: Gangstagrass Worth checking out…
Where Dead Voices Gather, by Nick Tosches
I have a couple of novels I haven’t reviewed, but I’m going to leave off discussing those till I have my thoughts gathered. For now, I want to write about the book I finished today, which is <i>Where Dead Voices Gather</i>, by Nick Tosches. It’s been a funny week, one of those weeks where whatever you’re into kind of shows up no matter where you look — like when you learn a new word and then hear it used a bunch of times soon after — everyone else either just learned it, like you, or else you were walking around …
What in the World?!?
So I was looking around for Hwang Sin Hae videos on Youtube, and found this bizarre Korean remake of that song Venus, by Shocking Blue. (I think of it as “by Bananarama” but that just shows my age and ignorance.) What the hell is this from? Video pasted in below for you non-LJers.
Why Can’t Korean Pop Culture Be This Bizarre?
I like the guy, and his writing, but the_flea_king is evil. Not as evil as some people, but still evil, for having done this to me (LJers, just click here instead, and then, if you’re still note satisfied, here): UPDATE: slightly less odd, but still bizarre, video for the same song: