Tag: popculture

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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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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Thoughts on Dexter

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Back when I was traveling around the US in the summer of 2009, a number of people were talking about the TV series Dexter, but it took me until recently to check it out. If you don’t know the series, it’s basically about a “moral” psychopath who hunts down people essentially like himself. He follows a set of rules that determine who “deserves” to die and who doesn’t, or at least that’s how he operates in the first couple of seasons. I haven’t read the books by Jeff Lindsay (upon which the series is based) but I have seen about …

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The American, Tron, and the “new” Harry Potter

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Well, I’ve seen a few movies in the last few weeks, went into all of them blind (because no, I still haven’t read the Harry Potter books) and there are two things I can say about those films. The first is that you can tell a lot about a movie by how badly Koreans took it. The American, a European film featuring George Clooney, has been getting some pretty negative reactions online in Korea. People are reporting things like a quarter of the audience getting up and walking out at some point in the film. Lots of people are complaining …

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The Land of the Morning Neologism

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Yeah, I’m talking about Korea. John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar–one of the most neologism-heavy SF novels I’ve ever read–comes to mind quite often as I hear the new neologisms spinning out, month after month. If you’ve never read Brunner’s novel, then I suppose I’ll have to give you a few examples. 된장녀 (Dwenjang Nyeo) One, of course, was the 된장녀 (dwenjang nyeo), a truly nasty word that translates literally as “soybean paste girl.” Soybean paste, while the basis of a number of Korean dishes (like dwenjang jjigae), is basically a brown stinky fermented bean paste. It’s not all that complimentary, …

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Link Buffet

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I’ve got some stuff to do today, but I figured I’d clear out some of the links in my “To Blog” bookmark folder, so here’s some interesting stuff I’ve run across. Some are old links, but I found them all interesting. Niebelungenlied: after reading this review, I want this book. I have a boxed DVD set of the operas sitting here, waiting for me to watch them. I’m thinking this winter, I will do it, but I’d like to read this translation as well. And while, yes, the Nazis misused Wagner, and Wagner was a gross individual, that doesn’t make the …

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Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book by Gerard Jones

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Jewish Geeks, Italian Gangsters, Porn, Businessmen, Comics, Superheroes, Artists, Ghost-Artists, Wives and Girlfriends… and Superman. That, in a nutshell, is what this book deals with. But then, in a nutshell, humans are water, some meat, a little electricity, and dreams. That isn’t the story, and what the story of this book is, is the story of geek culture — its genesis, its struggle to survive, and its eventual triumph. Even if, like me, you’re more familiar with comic book characters through their cinematic adaptations, this book is worth a look. While I’m not a Superman fan, I was not bothered …

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Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

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Well, it took me almost a decade–due mostly to lack of interest, I’ll admit, since it’s less than 600 pages of text in total–but I finally have finished Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy.” I know there are more books in the series, but all I ever intended to read was that main, original trilogy. I read the first book in 2002, mainly because it was among the books I’d brought over to Korea, thinking a lack of English-language books would force me to read it. But there were more English books here than I expected, and I’m a slow enough reader that …

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Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex (video), and Grading Adventures

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Interesting thing: I am typing up the response sheets to the final essays for students in my Understanding English & American Pop Cultures course, and I actually had occasion to pass along the link to this video to one student who discussed Superman: (It is, of course, based very closely on Larry Niven’s original story.) I am not going to say more about superheroes, because I feel as if I’m a bit superhero-ed out, to be honest. It’s a huge genre, and there’s so much I don’t know about it… but I imagine it’d be fun to teach a whole …

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Random Linkage

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I didn’t know until this week, but both Corey Haim and Gary Coleman died this year. Which means little to me, except that when I was searching for other things, these two cases came up in Google again and again. Zenkimchi on the internationalization of Korean food, and how the guys claiming to spearhead it are going wrong… all a case of not knowing their market, and having things backwards. My rule about Korean restaurants isn’t quite the opposite of his title — the best Korean restaurants aren’t always the cheapest, though he’s right that the worst are usually the …

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