UPDATE (2 Feb. 2012): I’ve moved things around since 2003, including uploading some more music and also creative work from other fields. If you look up at the top of this page, you should be able to find links for all that. ORIGINAL POST: Okay, for people who skim… I’m gonna make this clear, because I mentioned it before but someone mentioned not seeing it. There are some recordings available on this website of me performing music. The Dabang Band tracks are probably very familiar, but the Apocrypha tracks may not be. So I’ve added them to my music section. …
Category: REVIEWS
Gigs
Right, here are our gigs, which I probably should have mentioned here before, but I haven’t had time. Tonight, which is Thursday night, at the new Jukebox club in Jeonju, at 9pm. And Sunday, at the Jeonju Natural Map, which is near the Gaeksa in downtown Jeonju at 7:30pm. We’re going to play loud. Do not be alarmed. Simply join us in rocking out. That is all.
I can’t find…
My Massive Attack CD Mezzanine. It’s kind of weird, I know I had it back in Iksan. But now I can’t find it anywhere. It makes me wonder where I put it or left it. It could be in someone’s stereo right now, or in someone’s computer’s disk drive. Maybe it’s sitting in the sleeve of some friend’s CD collection, or perhaps I left it on a bus or something. It’s quite odd, though. I guess I’ll download it so I can satisfying this urge I’ve had for the last week, which is just the urge to listen to that …
Wow! We DO Rock?!?
Not bad for a bunch of ajeoshis. We placed 3rd in the local K-Rock Festival auditions, meaning our band will advance to the 2nd round, and play a song in Seoul in November, competing for a chance to play in the K-Rock festival in December. For having placed in the audition, I am told, we will get 500,000 won, which is about $600.00 Canadian. Band money exists again! Nice, as we’re talking about the next album already. And here I was thinking the heavy metal girls in the tight clothes jiggling their tender bits would be a shoe-in for prize …
Mel Gibon’s Passion and AntiSemitism
Rabbi Daniel Lapin on Mel Gibson’s Passion on National Review Online Fascinating. The only thing I fear is his conclusion is wrong, and that Bush is the biggest threat to Western Civilization. Hm.
Lush Life
Sometimes when you feel like crap, it helps to listen to happy songs. And sometimes you have to listen to something that makes you feel sad. This is one of the classics of jazz, and one of the saddest songs I know. Sung by Johnny Hartman, sax by John Coltrane, and composed, of course, by Billy Strayhorn (I got mine from this page). Heartbreaking, sad, somehow hopeless but pretty anyway, like cut roses dying in normal air. (And by the way, the “gay” mentioned in the song is early enough to be understood as “happy” though this could easily be …
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Not having read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is an oversight that it took me years to address. It’s probably strange that this wasn’t the first Kafka work I’d read… I think most people read The Metamorphosis first and then move on to other tales or to Kafka’s novels. Yet what I’d heard about The Trial was much more compelling to me in the past, and I read that book last year. It wasn’t until this morning that I decided to pick up the beaten old copy of The Metamorphosis that I’d picked up a few weeks ago at the Foreign Book …
Yo La Tengo – Season of the Shark.
When I’m blue, this song makes me feel better. So do the videos here… especially the one for Sugarcube!!! Enjoy. I’m off to meet my friend for coffee and quiet talk and a movie.
A good article about a Very BAD Review…
The New Yorker ran this article on Edmund Gosse, John Churton Collins, and a very bad book review. There’s a moral to the story, so read to the end.
Jules Verne: Paris in the Twentieth Century
I just finished reading Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century about fifteen minutes ago. This book was quite surprising, for Verne is now much more well-known for his adventure stories, like Around the World in Eighty Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, there is a reason that this book remained unknown until the 1990s… his publisher, Hetzel, ironically rejected it as being too unbelievable. Far too unbelieveable to us is this verdict, for in Verne’s Paris of 1961, we see Paris with a working Metro, with electric lights and tap water everywhere, gas automotives and spun-metal …