Category: REVIEWS

Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze by E. Taylor Atkins

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I cannot actually post my review of the book here — a review I’ve just finished, finally, though I got the book in late November. I can’t because I’ve actually just finished writing the review and need to send it to the Japan Times, for whom I was asked to review it. However, there are a few points I think are interesting, and worth mentioning here, not only because they didn’t fit into my review but also because they will probably interest readers of this blog who find the Korea-related or expat stuff interesting. If you’re one of those, read …

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The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

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You could say I’m catching up on stuff I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Much of that includes non-SF books, but there are also a lot of SF novels in the pile of books I’ve been meaning to read for ages. Among them number several by Charles Stross, but I was very curious to see what a Lovecraft/Spy-Thriller mashup would look like. (Especially since I have a specifically Lovecraft-meets-Chun-Doo-Hwan story brewing in the back of my mind now.) So, finally, I grabbed my copy of The Atrocity Archives and dived straight in! For someone like me–less well-read in …

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Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever by Salim Washington anmd Farah Jasmine Griffin

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Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever by Salim Washington anmd Farah Jasmine Griffin. The University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, 1998.) The collaboration between Miles Davis and John Coltrane is an interesting topic, and it’s especially interesting that it’s framed as such right from the title of this book. Coltrane, after all, started out as a “junior” to Davis, if not in age then certainly in credentials and in the establishment of a personal, individual style. It’d be difficult to argue otherwise, but Griffin and Washington acknowledge this. However, they …

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As Promised: Gorgeous Renaissance Music

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The other night, I was saying how the world is so full of beautiful things that one could hardly spare the time to be interested in all of them. (It was really my over-stated reason for not having managed to read any of Kelly Link’s stories yet; the real reason is just there are too many books, and SF pushes my buttons more than fantasy, even good fantasy.) I made some comment on how Renaissance music is utterly beautiful but almost nobody listens to it, and ended up promising to play some for the people who were over at my …

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Thoughts on Dexter

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Back when I was traveling around the US in the summer of 2009, a number of people were talking about the TV series Dexter, but it took me until recently to check it out. If you don’t know the series, it’s basically about a “moral” psychopath who hunts down people essentially like himself. He follows a set of rules that determine who “deserves” to die and who doesn’t, or at least that’s how he operates in the first couple of seasons. I haven’t read the books by Jeff Lindsay (upon which the series is based) but I have seen about …

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The American, Tron, and the “new” Harry Potter

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Well, I’ve seen a few movies in the last few weeks, went into all of them blind (because no, I still haven’t read the Harry Potter books) and there are two things I can say about those films. The first is that you can tell a lot about a movie by how badly Koreans took it. The American, a European film featuring George Clooney, has been getting some pretty negative reactions online in Korea. People are reporting things like a quarter of the audience getting up and walking out at some point in the film. Lots of people are complaining …

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Jah Wobble on Balance, Another Lovely Subway Encounter, and a Countdown

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I was listening to Jah Wobble’s album of William Blake-inspired music, which starts with this track: Doing a little more investigation, I found a neat interview with Wobble from around the time he put that out. He talks a lot about the  struggle to balance anger and integrity with the mental, emotional refreshment and grounding that one needs in order to be creative: He’s right: a certain degree of anger and honesty is energizing, but too much of it will just embitter you, and I know I’m certainly on the unbalanced side of it — and I know how it …

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짜증나는 로맨스

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Okay, the thing is, I knew I wasn’t going to be crazy about this film,  쩨쩨한 로맨스. It’s not because I have anything necessarily against love stories, to be honest… I don’t go for the Hollywood version of “romance,” to be sure, but look, love is the theme of the vast majority of mainstream literature, including tons of “classic” novels and even some I have liked myself. It’s bizarre to hate films that deal with love and relationships, if you like literature. That said, cinematic handling of love is usually unsatisfyingly shallow. Still, once in a while a film will …

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초능력자

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This entry is part 41 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Tonight I saw 초능력자 (Choneungryeokja, which you could translate as “Psychic” or “Person with Supernatural Powers”1) with Miss Jiwaku, and I have to say that it actually pretty much was what one of my students described: …pretty good for the first hour or so, and then ramps up an exponential curve of silliness until it hits infinite silliness at the end. That said, the film seems to have been received rather well by the Korean public, and some people are praising it. My experience is that films that are very highly praised in Korea are sometimes good, but often don’t …

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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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