Tag: culture

Jim Henson Called It, I Swear He Did…

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The Muppets have been on my mind, ever since Mrs. Jiwaku started working on a painting which is, essentially, a mash-up of the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink with Jim Henson’s Muppet characters. And you’ll probably be wondering what The Muppets have to do with bigotry, though I swear, if you stick with it, it’ll make sense. (And no, I’m not talking about the recent Muppet movie and racial coding of characters. I’m talking about Jim Henson as a political subversive, something I talked about in my classes, but am pretty sure I haven’t posted about here before.)

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 4 — Music and Identity

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This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. When my family moved from Nova Scotia to Saskatchewan, I had a pretty hard time of it. Understatement of my life, but it’ll do. The move began a long period of having the shit kicked out of me, and then struggling to find a way to fit into a youth culture I didn’t really understand. I was almost certainly dealing with PTSD from all the violence; I was definitely emotionally a mess; I was …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 2 — Ear Training

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This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

This post is part of a series. Since the posts build upon one another successively, I suggest you start with the first post in the series. Right, so last time, I drew a parallel between my view of music in the modern industrialized world, and the way “foodies” think of food in that same setting: namely, as something that has been essentially debased for expediency of production by large corporations, in the name of profit. But I’m sure those who aren’t feeling deeply insulted by this still have some sort of question in their minds about what it is I …

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Music: Part 1 — Background, Caveats, and an Analogy to Consider

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This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series What We Talk About When We Talk About Music

I’ve been working for about a week now to put together a blog post that simply isn’t working. Like a story built to fail, the damned thing just is not cohering, no matter what i do: it veers off the road, it catches on fire, and when I put out the fire, the engine won’t turn over. So I’ve decided to break it down into pieces. Maybe. It depends whether that is still necessary at the end of this thing I’m writing now. It’s hard because, frankly, I think that what we conventionally include in the category of music includes …

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Horror and Culture: Anglo/American, Korean, and Japanese Perspectives

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Note: This is another post from last semester, when I was teaching a film class. I am not teaching now, but the thoughts seemed worth posting. (Because right now I’m too busy to write much new for the blog, but feel I should post more often than I have been.) The post is definitely not intended to be any definitive discussion, just interesting notes from a small class discussion.   I had an interesting discussion in my class today about horror across the three cultures represented in my Understanding Anglophone Cultures Through Film course: Korean, Japanese, and Anglophone.(1) We watched …

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Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger

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The first 120 or so pages of Shutting Out the Sun (2006) are fascinating, and indeed, Zielenziger’s portrayal of a number of Japanese hikikomori (shut-ins), their families, and those working the help bring them back out into the public world, manages to be very thoughtful and compassionate, and even, at times, moving. Later chapters are less powerful, in my opinion, in part because of the way Zielenziger presents the social problems he chooses to tackle. Many, such as the falling birth rate, the lingering (relative) conservativism among men, the precipitously-declined birth rate, and the national obsession with conspicuous consumption of brand …

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Typology, Teleology, and Essentialism: Comparing Cultures Across Time

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I don’t know if I’ll actually undertake this or not, but I certainly have it on my mind. In my Pop Cultures of the English-Speaking World course, I usually teach a segment on the Flapper Girl, inviting students to compare this American, 1920s concept of the “New Woman” with the phenomenon that arose in the mid-2000s, where young women’s consumption patterns began to draw criticism and the label “된장녀” (Soybean Paste Girl) came into sudden and widespread use. While the (Korean) term has kind of melted into the background, it’s still very much present in the minds of young people, …

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Enjoyment

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While grading some homework from my course on Popular Cultures in the English Speaking World, something clicked for me. I was reading through student responses to the episode of How I Met Your Mother that we watched together, and discussed. Something that really stood out for me was the way in which people talk about comedy, or entertainment in general. I’ve noticed it before, in the way many Koreans talk about music, but finally I think I put some pieces of the puzzle together. Now, I’m not 100% sure I have something here–it may be that my students are all …

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Scorning Science, and the Fear of Doubt

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I meant to post this a couple of months ago, but better late than never. The anti-science movement in America: yeah, it’s a problem. Indeed, it is a very frustrating problem, and this is, I think, one of the reasons that the Regenesis television series I just finished watching was so engaging for me: time and again, the characters run into the social/cultural problem of people either being scientifically illiterate, or anti-science, or science-phobic. The utter frustration of a number of characters on the show–but especially David Sangström–was one of those things that made the show so relatable to so …

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Addendum #2 to [Literary] SF: A Social Phenomenon (Plus Some Detours)

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This entry is part 39 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

Note: This is an addendum to this original post, and to the first addendum I posted the other day. Some of the discussion that has cropped up in the responses to the earlier post and addendum to which this is appended (and which I want to address) is concerned with the “colonialism” or “imperialism” of the status I suggested American mainstream non-SF media have for average Korean viewers. That is to say, questions were raised as to whether this non-SF having a kind of pseudo-SFnal, utopian quality — in that it depicts a world not only radically different, but also …

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