I think the most beautiful lyric on The Smiths’ Singles collection is in “This Charming Man”, the line, “I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear… This man said, “It’s gruesome that someone so handsome should care.” There’s something really desolate in the line, something very Oscar Wilde, something horribly crunched-up inside, something a bit like Tori Amos but less insincere somehow than most of her work… and yet with the same weird feeling that in singing pain, one triumphs over it. With Tori, though, it feels like a therapy session; with Morrissey it feels …
Category: REVIEWS
Jongno
Another Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries piece… This one I found rather moving: Jongno. This, I have a feeling, I actually get. And yeah, for lack of an appropriate category, this is gonna go under “lit” in my archives.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Ah, yes, I dare put Philip K. Dick into the “lit” department, which is where he absoutely belongs. On a strange and almost-hurtful day a few weeks ago I found one beautiful thing in Seoul; surely enough to prevent a Gomorrah, that one beautiful thing in such a city. It was a pile of novels by Philip K. Dick, whose writing is these days much more easily gotten, at least in the nation’s capital. And so, responding to several years’ curiosity, I purchased The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and set it upon my shelf beneath such random books as …
New Music (Well, New To Me)
Here are some of the things I’m listening to these days which are new to me, or else which have reappeared in my life again, after a long absence: The Smiths. Myoung Jae loaned me a copy of the CD that collected their singles and it was funny, the conversation that he and Mer and I had about it. “When Myoung told me he’d loaned you the Smiths, I was surprised you hadn’t heard it.” “Yeah,” I said, sometimes it sounds like something coming from me myself, the lyrics feel like they’re coming from inside me.” “Yeah,” Mer replies. “I …
Well, Now That The Hobbits Have Conquered Cinema
… let’s just hope everyone has the sense to send them off to a nice, comfy retirement… in other words, let’s hope Hollywood has the sense not to do with the movie what was done with the books! I know that may sound like blasphemy to some, but the incredible and fabulous success of the books also spawned loads and loads of trash literature, fantasy novels simply retreading the paces of Tolkien, but less brilliantly, with less honesty and beauty and intelligence… to the point where, if you wanna publish fantasy and it’s not at least a trilogy, I’ve heard, …
Julia Houston
A pretty good SF columnist here, by the name of Julia Houston. :) I’m posting this more as a reminder to myself to go back and read her stuff, mind, as I’ve only read one piece by her… :) Still working on getting pics uploaded, and a continuing summary of my trip here. It’s coming!
Writers and Drugs
The other day I mentioned in conversation that we often romanticize jazz musicians, thinking that they’re usually best enjoyed once they are destroyed by some kind of awful oppression: Billie Holiday and the way her husband used heroin as a leash on her, for example, or the way Charlie Parker was pretty much controlled by his additions. Even Coltrane after he went clean had an air of a man who’d “seen the air of other planets” (to crib a line from the German poet Stefan Georg). It seems the same is true of writers… the romanticization, I mean. From Arts …
Ariranging
Horrible, horrible sound quality, but here’s a clip of me messing around with my flute. I’m playing the most famous of Korean folksongs, “Arirang”, which is one of those, “My baby’s gone, what shall I do?” lost-love songs. As you can hear, I still can’t really play the flute. But since it’ll be my only instrument for most of my stay in India (barring my buying something new to learn there), I shall probably be not-bad at it once I get back to Korea… as long as I practice everyday, that is!
Philip K. Dick
There’s a pretty good article over at Wired about The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick, specifically his popularity as a source for the Hollywood-movies machine these days. At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn’t really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a …
Kill Bill, Vol. 1
Ooops, I wrote this about a week ago but left it in draft format, and forgot to publish it. So now I am. Eeek! Over on my other little side-project, New Sophists’ Almanac, in a post called Asthmatic Aesthetics, my blogmate Marvin brought up this Quentin Tarantino film that he was excited about, called Kill Bill Vol. 1. Knowing only that it was Tarantino (but thereb knowing a fair bit) I decided I’d see it, if only to have one more “aesthetic experience” to discuss with Marvin. (We’re discussing that sticky area of philosophy, aesthetics, these days… tying to brains …