Ape @ KOFA this Monday…

I’m sure I’m the only person interested, but the Korean Film Archive is showing some old SF movies this month. That is, this weekend and Monday. My Friday is already spoken for, and I have a DVD of Yonggary here, but I’ve never seen Ape (1976) and I’ve heard it’s deliciously awful, and since I’m researching Korean SF at the moment, — and it is apparently some kind of a Korean-American co-production — I am definitely going to see it. It’s playing at 2pm this Monday at the KOFA theater. I’m sure I’m the only one deranged enough to be …

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빠삐코 + 놈놈놈 = 빠삐놈 (And an Update on the Starcraft Pansori, with Video)

Note: I’ve made a (substantial) couple of edits and additions to this post since it first went up. Those resulting from comments — changes — are clearly marked as updates, but those that are additions of information or observation aren’t, since it reduces readability to have a bunch of EDIT marks throughout. Anyway, apologies to anyone who suddenly notices a bunch of context that wasn’t there before! Here’s a very odd video that I’d like to briefly unpack for y’all, as an example of very neat, strange, and utterly Korean cross-fertilization of pop culture that goes on here, and especially …

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To Unpredictable Passions: Yeşil Grena/yoonsookjin, Lip-Syncher of Turkish Tunes

(LJ readers, pop on over to my site to read this post if the videos I embed beneath the cut aren’t working… LJ sometimes takes the videos in stride, and sometimes hates my embedding anything….) At some point or other I stumbled onto the existence of a Korean by the name (or pseudonym?) of Yoon Sook Jin (usually written yoonsookjin) who achieved some degree of fame online doing those sing-along webcam type videos which, since the dawn of Youtube, have been competing with cat photographs for how much bandwidth can be, er, used up in unentertaining entertainment. But you know, …

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Gender Iconography & Transformations in Korean Pop Culture: What Can We Learn From Japanese Women’s SF?

A lot of attention has been paid to Wonder Girls, to sexual imagery in advertising, but what about images of men an masculinity in Korean pop culture? This picture-laden post looks at both through the lens of a paper on SFnal treatments and transformations of gender in women’s SF in Japan by scholar Miri Nakamura. It’s long, it’s big, it’s one of those posts. Hence the excerpt.

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