Category: FILMS&TV

Campus Damocles, and Regenesis

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The internet has been off on campus for two days–not in professors’ offices, and mostly not in department offices, but in a lot of classrooms, and of course the wifi is off. One person told me her Wibro (roaming wifi-like service) even seemed to be blocked–or nonfunctional, in any case–on campus. The official explanation is that pigeons disabled the power and internet on campus two days ago, but the idea that they haven’t managed to fix it since then, is growing more and more, well… you read my blog, and you know that except for an outage on Wednesday, there’s …

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Like Magic

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I had a student in my office last week who said something rather saddening. She was, of course, one of an endless parade of students who don’t know how to formulate a thesis, don’t know how to ask a fundamentally interesting question about the world, or rather, who haven’t been taught how one does so, but is now being required to demonstrate such skills… or so I thought. And I thought, it’s not their fault, but it does make me wonder and worry about how useful what we’re teaching them. We’re, in the collective sense. How coherent our curriculum and …

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Coming Soon: Gwacheon International SF Film Festival!

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This entry is part 40 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

So I should have posted about this before, but there’s an SF Film Festival on soon. It’s starting in a few days (28 October) and runs until 7 November, down at the National Science Museum in Gwacheon, South Korea. There’s a twitter account that’s announcing events and so on, but unless you read Korean, it won’t mean much to you. Much better to head over to the website. It’s a chance to see all kinds of SF films on the big screen, from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and the sequel) to an all-night Back to the Future trilogy marathon this …

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So True

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Miss Jiwaku and I happened to be around a TV when some woman was talking onscreen about the ridiculously-named Bucheon World Intangible Cultural Heritage Expo going on in Bucheon right now. The woman talking didn’t look Korean (she seemed more Southeast Asian, to me, but I’m told she is Japanese), but she was speaking in Korean. “Is she Korean?” I asked, just as the camera shifted to some white woman with curly hair who seemed to have worse Korean pronunciation than anyone I’ve heard before, and speaks the language with a tone of voice just like the Wicked Witch of the …

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방가?방가!

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So the other day, I got a chance (apparently rare!) to see the film Bang[g]a-Bang[g]a. I’d seen the poster around, but had I not been told about the wacky screening schedule, I’d have missed it completely. If you haven’t seen it and plan to, I strongly encourage you. I don’t think the film is perfect, but it’s rare to see a film that deals with multiculturalism at all in Korea, let alone one that hits some really right notes. The film has a very limited release, but it should be on screens on Sept. 30th. Yes, one day. I don’t …

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Robogeisha Taken? Okay, Well…

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Finally, a writing project post! I’ve had some time to get some work done on a few projects, and the ones I’ve gotten to have been coming along nicely… but I’ve also decided to tie up as many loose ends as possible (in terms of shorter writing projects) so that I can dedicate myself to writing a novel after this semester. Anyway, I dug up an old sketch of a short story which, in the form it was originally conceived, was of very limited potential: likely mostly to succeed as a kind of in-joke for Ubuntu Linux users, involving the …

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El Sistema, Musical Utopianism, and Social Change in Venezuela

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Have you ever wondered how to fix an unfixable mess? That’s the question that faced José Antonio Abreu, of Venezuela, except for one thing: he didn’t regard the mess that Caracas was in as unfixable. In 1975, he decided that there had to be a way to get kids off the street, away from the innumerable dangers vying for their attention, energy, and lives. He realized that there had to be a way to wake up families, to form communities, to give the handicapped and the poor a chance to be respected and shine. How? Music. I kid you not. …

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