Note: This post was pre-written for posting long ago. I set it to autopublish later on, as I won’t be having much internet access for the next few days. I do have it, off and on, but not enough to be logging in and writing posts for the moment. I’m working on a somewhat complex series of posts that in a sense distill and clarify things I’ve been thinking about (and writing about here) lately for a while, tied to writing, writing theory and writing books, Hollywood, and modern culture in general. But that “somewhat complex” means it takes time. …
Tag: race
What I Learned From the Edward S. Curtis Showing at the Sejong Center
So, look. I’m, like, bright enough to know that colonization sucks. It’s bad. It can be (and has been) a force for great evil and pain in the lives of untold millions. But the way we talk about this, and think about this, can be a strange thing. Last night, Miss Jiwaku and I went to see a display of Edward Curtis photographs. If you don’t know who Curtis is, well, he was a photographer who made a compendium of images of Native Americans living in what he called a “primitive” state — that is, those who has not yet …
The Lost Airbender
So, I only started watching the animation a month or two ago, and only here and there. Nonetheless, I quite like it, and I think it’s for the same reason I’ve been enjoying The Muppet Show, as I mentioned recently. And this reason becomes even more apparent on watching the M. Night Shyamalan adaptation travesty, which I did the other night. I mean, even the creators of the series backed away carefully when asked what they thought of it. You know, that means it’s really bad. Well, it was. The funny thing is that I happen to agree with a …
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 …
Zocalo’s Questions
A blogger who goes by Zocalo left a comment linking to a recent post about imperialist white male English teachers in Asia, and I started to type a reply. The reply got long enough that I knew it’d be multiple comments in the post, so I’m putting it here instead. Before you go on, you probably should read Zocalo’s post in full (as well as the post it links to). For those not click-inclined, here’s a snippet: I have mentioned a few times before that I read some blogs written by Caucasians teaching English in Asia. Some of these blogs …