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:
Category: MUSIC
Seoul Audiences: or, How to Buy Seats for a Classical Music Concert in Seoul, and What I’ve Seen of Late
Over the last couple of months, I’ve seen an unusual number of orchestra concerts, and mostly they’ve been quite good. I’ll get to all that in a bit, but I want to generalize a little about concertgoing in Korea first. The programs here tend to be even more conservative than what I was used to in Saskatoon, Sasktchewan, the last time I was attending classical music concerts regularly. In Saskatoon, you would often see a contemporary composition open a concert — often enough that I had something to really look forward to most of the time. But in Korea, it’s …
From a Student Paper
I’m grading at the moment, and I ran across something so priceless I couldn’t NOT share. (I am not mentioning the student’s name, so it’s anonymous, but as a piece of observation by someone from another part of Northeast Asia, it’s fascinating and made me laugh aloud!) It’s from a paper discussing the hybridity of Korean popular culture, and what foreign influences have affected Korean popular culture. It’s written by a foreign student who had the following to say about her experiences of “culture crash” (ie. Culture Shock) and the shock of coming into contact with real-life Korean culture, in …
Thank You, Gim Hyung Tae
I don’t know whether he’d like or approve of any of my fictional depictions of Korea, but I find Gim Hyung Tae a great inspiration in that area. Whenever I’m writing anything trippy, weird, or odd about this country in my fiction, I turn to his music for inspiration. It’s a strange combination of trance, rock, folk, and 뽕짝 — in proportions that vary from song to song and album to album, but always in proportions that both work, and sound absolutely like Gim Hyung Tae. By the way, if you’re looking for his CDs, you’d be best to ask …
Bananagirl Wins the Prize
Back in the days when I still played with Dabang Band, we used to joke about hiring telephone girls to dance for one of our shows. You know, the girls in vinyl skirts who get hired to dnace when new phone shops or hardware outlets open. (See here or here for examples. There’s girls with a dancing soju bottle here, too.) I never took the idea seriously, but seeing the video below, I now think Dabang should have permanently hired on a troupe of such young ladies, contracting them always to wear blonde wigs and zebra-print hot pants. (And a …
Wanna CD?
See that new block in the sidebar? Yep, I’m flogging CDs for a now long-disbanded rock group. I figure, what the hell, someone might actually want a copy. Better than all that plastic and paper and time and music gone to waste. Not that anyone in the band has seen a red cent for it — though to be fair I don’t know if it ever earned back the studio costs, but then again we’ve never seen numbers either to the best of my knowledge — but there are still CDs of Dabang Band’s Product album available through YesAsia.com. (For …
Dia-Gnosis
I mentioned having tests recently. I’m fine. The gut pain and rib pain seem, says the doctor, to be related to excessive leaning over during that editing project, and too much sitting around in front of my PC with bad, bad posture. Which doesn’t surprise me: other problems have been cropping up too — back problems, tension and even joint pain in one leg and ankle… Time to start exercising. Between Lime, the doctor, and me, there was a strong consensus that it’d be wiser to start with prodigious amounts of walking, and graduate to running later on, when I’m …
Torke
Michael Torke, that is. I usually review music in my horrible, pages-long bimonthly (or less often) catalogues of everything I’ve been reading, watching (films, TV) and listening to. But I just got my Michael Torke boxed set, Ecstatic Collection, and I have to say, it’s pretty damned wonderful. Michael Torke is a composer who was first mentioned to me by David R. Scott, a Canadian composer who was my instructor during my first year of studying composition. I followed up, and really liked what I heard — a strange blend of occasional snatches of pop music, Stravinsky, and good old-fashioned …
Back to Life…
Up for air again. I haven’t posted much of substance lately, and I’m not (really) about to start now. The editing gig I took on has hit that chunk on the exponential curve of increasing involvement where time for sleep begins to erode, where I stop even the minimal amount of tidying I try to remember to do, where I stop cooking or eating properly. This is not nice territory, but the gig is almost done, and the worst of it, I hope, is past. More time for other things, then: too-long-deferred grading, working on drafts, edits, submissions, my column, …
Recent Readings & Stuff, Late August, September & October ’07
Books The Blank Slate by Stephen Pinker may not blow away people with some real familiarity with the sorry state of affairs in the human sciences — like a friend who shall remain nameless (unless she wishes to comment here) and who said that the criticisms made in the book were not uncommon among grad students in her department. But in that it encapsulates the argument in a way really easily parsed by nonspecialists, frames it in terms of the harmful effects of Blank Slate-ist denial of inherent human nature, and movingly retaliates against the scummiest of Blank Slate-ists who, …