I have a story in my mind, about time travel and moral yearnings and hope and the complete annihilation of everything you hold dear. It feels like this song: … and I don’t know if I can write it so it comes out that way. But it’s a good song, isn’t it? And yeah, I first heard it on Weeds, and couldn’t get it out of my head then.
Category: MUSIC
Ev’rything I’ve Got
I have fond memories of Holly Cole’s dark and seductive version of this song (on Don’t Smoke in Bed), but that’s not online, and I found something even better — in a sense… Truly bizarre: the music is… well, it feels like a cross between a high school marching band and some TV network’s in-house orchestra. And then there’s the video, which looks like it cost a few hundred bucks to put together, plus the (can’t be too much!) wages for the dancers. What is that, some kind of abandoned train yard or something? Vikki Carr definitely ain’t no Ella …
Mary Lou Williams
A student I know, who is into jazz, emailed this link to me. Listen up, Mary Lou Williams is hot on the piano, y’all…
Strangely Like Oulipo
So, I’m taking a break from a paper that’s almost done. Something distressing happened the other day, and while it’s sort of looking resolved, I’m still having trouble focusing. It’s interesting, though: I’m sort of performing a narrative analysis of a couple of independent creative projects that my students did in some classes I taught back in 2008-2009. The narratives of their creative works can be read not just as a generalized social critique of TEFL and its impact on Korean society, but also as an encoded, implcit critique of particular gaps in mainstream classroom TEFL practice, as well as …
Neo-80s Korean Music Videos (From 2008) and some Oldies
I’m busy grading but I thought I’d share this crazy stuff. Despite what it looks like, it was made a couple of years ago. Looks like the 1980s are finally back. I am both horrified and amused: And some more videos for you, by the same weirdoes: Bizarrely, I find these videos way more “authentic” in some way than mainline K-pop. Maybe because the people in the video look like normal Koreans — by which I mean, not plastic-surgeried beauty queens — just like in old K-pop? And because there’s an exuberant cheesiness in it. Now, some real old K-pop …
The Load is Over
Which is not to say exam period is over. I mean, I’m overloaded, so… I’ve done up a series of posts starting today, about the issue of using essays in Korean content courses. That’s going to be what my blog displays on autopilot this week, one post a day, as I work my way through the pile of written work needing to be graded. I’ll try get to comments as soon as I can — there’s been a flurry of them, all worthy of responses — but it may take some time. Also, I can’t find a decent embeddable version …
Last Weekend’s Jazz Festival… and Some Thoughts On Improving For Next Time
By the way, last weekend I also took in an evening of jazz with my friend Nick. It was, in some ways, a disappointment, though I always have a good time with Nick so all was not lost. As a brief summary: 정성죠 Big Band, well, we mostly missed them, arriving only in time to see them back some vocal jazz. Not my thing, and more depressingly, they played some charts that I myself played in high school and university big bands… and not as well as we played those charts, back in the day. The Nana Quartet came next, …
The Song of Days
(NOTE: I wrote the post below around this post a year ago today, but didn’t post it. Not sure why, but I found it as I was looking through the unpublished draft posts a week or two ago, and figured it was still worth posting. I scheduled it for the anniversary of when I wrote it, just for the hell of it.) Something about these guys, guys like Mississippi Fred McDowell, equipped them to sing what is just the absolute music of our lives. It’s the music of missed planes, the music of trains that leave on time, the music …
More Nigerian 419-Scam-Related Pop Songs
I posted yesterday about 419 scams and a pop song related to the topic, and after a little more poking around, I found a talk discussed here, in which a few more 419 scam-related songs are mentioned. Here they are: and: The first song “Yahoozee,” by Olu Maintain, while the second is “No More Yahoozee [The Reply],” by Harri Best Moradiyo. Both songs seem to be related to the travails and legalities of being a 419-scammer, in roughly the same way that being a business exec is glamorized, or criticized, in the American media. Which gives me an idea for some deep-future …
An EMP in Lagos
UPDATE: More here. ORIGINAL POST: Seriously, I get this weird feeling someday people might just be willing to support something like a sequestration of Lagos from the Internet, or some sort of EMP that would knock out all the computers there, creating a hardware shortage and making it difficult for Nigerians to replace their computers… maybe even getting other nations to forbid export of computers to Nigeria. Then again, how much spam comes from Korea? No, really. Maybe that EMP was a bad suggestion. The other night, some Nigerian scam artist like the kid mentioned in this article hacked the …