Which is not to say exam period is over. I mean, I’m overloaded, so… I’ve done up a series of posts starting today, about the issue of using essays in Korean content courses. That’s going to be what my blog displays on autopilot this week, one post a day, as I work my way through the pile of written work needing to be graded. I’ll try get to comments as soon as I can — there’s been a flurry of them, all worthy of responses — but it may take some time. Also, I can’t find a decent embeddable version …
Tag: MUSIC
Last Weekend’s Jazz Festival… and Some Thoughts On Improving For Next Time
By the way, last weekend I also took in an evening of jazz with my friend Nick. It was, in some ways, a disappointment, though I always have a good time with Nick so all was not lost. As a brief summary: 정성죠 Big Band, well, we mostly missed them, arriving only in time to see them back some vocal jazz. Not my thing, and more depressingly, they played some charts that I myself played in high school and university big bands… and not as well as we played those charts, back in the day. The Nana Quartet came next, …
The Song of Days
(NOTE: I wrote the post below around this post a year ago today, but didn’t post it. Not sure why, but I found it as I was looking through the unpublished draft posts a week or two ago, and figured it was still worth posting. I scheduled it for the anniversary of when I wrote it, just for the hell of it.) Something about these guys, guys like Mississippi Fred McDowell, equipped them to sing what is just the absolute music of our lives. It’s the music of missed planes, the music of trains that leave on time, the music …
GBH and Unknown Famous Koreans
Be warned: this tune is slightly addictive. Not because Kylie Minogue is prancing about in a space-kimono getup, which is amusing the first time through, but because it has one hell of a groove. Not bad for 20th century music (of a relatively obscure sort — it has a poor release history, this track does). So is Towa Tei well known in Korea? Is it widely known that he’s a Zainichi Korean, or do most Koreans who hear of him assume (as does most of the West, I guess, and understandably) that he’s Japanese? It fascinates me which Koreans outside Korea …
Saxophonic Memories
The other day, I posted about memories of being teased because my name had been used for the alien in the TV Alf, whom I remembered as a sax player, like myself. My hunt for the saxophone version of the theme song led me to this website, where many examples of the “sax solo” that became a trend in 80s popular music are available for your listening pleasure (or pain, as the case may be). I now must say, it was not only because of that scene where a weirdly bejewelled Tim Capello plays saxophone in the vampire film Lost …
The First Album I Ever Bought For Myself
It was an LP. It was a soundtrack. I had that whole thing memorized a few days after I bought it. Later would come Glenn Miller (my mom’s choice, since I was about to start playing the saxophone), and then Bon Jovi (yes, Slippery When Wet, I’ll admit it), Miles Davis, Guns’N’Roses (and then the famous backpatch jacket), and then John Coltrane (and then the tenor sax I still have with me), and much more… … but this was the first album I bought for myself, with my paper route money, and man was I happy to have it so …
They Don’t Make ‘Em Like That No More… or, on the Soundtrack ofLes Liaisons Dangereuses
Maybe I’m exaggerating. But it seems to me movie soundtracks, however danceable they may be, no matter how much they may support a film’s action sequences, very rarely stand up on their own as art anymore. I do have a copy of the Lola Rennt soundtrack, but I can’t really call it art, not except in that cheesy industry way that any dipshit in skimpy or stylish clothes who can lipsynch becomes a “recording artist.” Not like, say, the soundtrack of the 1959 Roger Vadim film Les liaisons dangereuses. I mean, Art Blakey and the friggin’ Jazz Messengers? (As well …
If it’s going to be stuck in my head I refuse to suffer alone…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVjhwgoYc3U … because stuff one liked in high school should never be revisited without at least a little virtual support. And to think my friend Mike let me blast that in his mom’s car as we drove through the cold prairie night.
Charlatans and Wheat Beer
No, no, this is not a rant about Charlatans. During a Youtube music swap session on chat, I ran across a track by The Charlatans which I came to know in a strange way: my mom bought the cassette tape at a garage sale and gave it to me. I basically responded with, “Huh?” The cover featured an image of a bunch of bananas. It said “Charlatans UK” — the “UK” was because some band in the States had the same name, or so someone told me years later when I was working in a music store. “I bought it …
Nutters in Bloom, and Comments From Today, and a Song
Nutters: Wow, people on the internet are crazy. I’m not going to taunt Happy Fun Freak any more than to say that, despite temptation, except to note that when one knows absolutely nothing about a topic but insists on talking about it and pretending he does know about it, it’s absolutely clear to the people who do know something how little one actually knows. Comments: A few comments from today which need to be preserved, from a meeting on student presentation proposals, a chat with a professor about the Ministry of Education, and a chat with a teacher in another …