My friend Marvin has posted his review of the film V for Vendetta (with spoilers, be warned). In his review, Marvin complains that Hollywood doesn’t trust its audience. It doesn’t trust its audience to understand the standard themes of a future fascist-dystopian story, so it has to spell out every little thing. Now, I haven’t seen it, yet, as I’ve been too busy, but I’ve been seeing V for Vendetta posters all over the place here. (Actually, over here in Korea, “Bwee po Bwendettuh” — the fact that there’s no V in Korean makes the title funny on a few …
Tag: KOREA
Bwee Po
The Revenge of the…
This week in my Media English course, we’ve graduated beyond the critical discussion of advertisements to another set of categorization systems, namely, social hierarchies and stereotypes — both of which are completely inescapable in popular media, and both of which, I think, are universally present but interestingly different across lines of culture. We were supposed to have finished dealing with Chapter 10 of Derek Kirk Kim’s Same Difference, published as the bulk of his bookSame Difference and Other Stories. I’m taking the “nerd” as a kind of emblem of cultural difference, as a kind of symbol of the figure within …
Happy Birthday in Korea…
I was reading one of my student bloggers’ comments about it being her birthday, and I thought back to the rendition I heard at a recent department party. As usual, people were singing and clapping and the rhythm of the clapping struck me as totally wrong, but in a vague way — mostly because I just never devoted brain power to figuring out why. Now I know. You see, Koreans are ardent clap-and-sing people. People love to clap along with the beat at concerts (even sometimes when it’s inappropriate, as I witnessed occasionally at the Jeonju Sori Festival), and when …
Horrid Little Amusements
Thank heaven for webpages containing lines like this: He is just a violent monster, a dead meat, a shame to his family and the country of South Korea. I wonder why this person “koreanvictim” hates this Mr. Bak so much. Anyway, check out the page while you can. It’s painful and borders on horrifying, but if you don’t wince too hard, and concentrate on the text itself, it’s like black comedy, a dreadfully funny hate-on, and I would even dare to suggest it might be a fictional work, the whole thing. Via The Party Pooper.
Subterranean Doctrine? Part 1
Jodi over at The Asia Pages recently (a few months ago) wrote about the complexities of dating someone from another culture while living in that other person’s culture. Actually, she writes about it fairly often, and I can see why, because it’s a really big thing in your life, in a relationship. Occasionally my criticisms of things Korean — cultural, governmental, traditional, or what have you — have led to some pretty hard arguments with my (Korean) girlfriend. It wasn’t because I wasn’t sensitive enough, it wasn’t because I wasn’t funny enough or even because of any basic disagreement; some …
Various Links of Interest
Links of interest found on the Lost Nomad‘s site: One BBC reporter’s diary of Bush’s Asian tour A judge with what seems like a proper appreciation of Gilbert & Sullivan (or at least their call to let the punishment fit the crime). And via peemil (first point also discussed by Lost Nomad): Do they want to rectify all misconceptions of Korea, or just the ones they don’t like? Take a wild guess… Damned cool jello sculptures. While he lacks the compassion uncritical praising content that most Koreans demand of their critics, usinkorea has a lot of interesting things to say, …
One Thing I’m Really Wondering
I don’t mean to be nasty about this. I really am wondering. So are most of the people I work with, and most of the foreigners I know personally in Korea. So if anyone can offer me some explanation, it would be very nice. I have found that that during the summer months, Koreans’ sense of a comfortable working temperature is, in general, on average, close to my sense of a comfortable working temperature. Sometimes I’ve preferred it a little cooler, and sometimes it has been Koreans I’ve worked with who preferred their office environment a little cooler than my …
Her Japanese Nurse Friend’s Favorite “Character”
Yes, my girlfriend actually has a friend who is a Japanese nurse. (Get your minds out of the gutter, all you naughty people.) The real question that came to my mind is this: what the heck is a “Miffy”? Calls out from the wilderness to Google, the Keeper of All Knowledge. Oh, that. Okay. Pan-Asian Cartoony cutesy character thingamadoodle. That was what I thought when I googled Miffy. That gave me pause. Why are these things so popular in Asia? I can understand a cultural difference in which people came to like “cute” things much more unabashedly here — I …
Decorum
This is one thing I think we miss. We miss, meaning we as a society long for it, we wish we still had it around. Or, at least, we think that we do. Or, at least, some os us think that we do. Not that your ancestors and mine are all that likely to have been courtly, or refined. Most of our ancestors were not like that. Most of us Westerners’ ancestors — those of us of European extraction, I mean — were drinking liquor all day long because the water was poisonous. They were dying at age thirty of …
The Book Hocker and the Real Percentage
Well, I can’t REALLY complain, I got a new book to scam exercises from, but I tend not to enjoy the kinds of “presentations” that some guys make which really consist of them hocking books. I can usually tell within a few minutes of silent scanning whether or not a textbook will be useful to me or my students, and all the talk in the world won’t change how I perceive my students’ needs. Of course, it might be thatI’m generalizing about students and that in fact, many classes could sort-of handle the kind of text we looked at today, …