UPDATE NOTE (3 July 2011): Not really an update, I just ended the final paragraph, as it was incomplete somehow. ORIGINAL POST: My friend Chris still hasn’t read HPL, though he is an excellent writer working in genre fiction and really, I imagined he would have somehow, for some reason, just because Lovecraft’s influence is so pervasive in the speculative arts. I think I was urging him to address that oversight, when he asked me which stories have meant the most to me. I figured I might as well blog it, and then, like most things I swear an oath …
Tag: reviews
Two Good Korean Films
I don’t watch a lot of Korean films these days, in part so few good ones are put out, but also because none of the good ones actually play in my neighborhood. No, it’s all junk in my neighborhood, and I’m busy enough that sometimes it’s hard to justify the trek out to Seoul to see something worth seeing. But the other day, Miss Jiwaku dragged me to a couple of great films that were showing in Guro. The first was the omnibus film If You Were Me 5 (시선이 너머). I never managed to see the third and fourth …
I’m Flattered…
Rich Horton had nice things to say about, among a bunch of novellas, novelettes, and short stories that he considered “strong work” from 2010, my story in Shine. (And mentions, in the same breath, Alastair Reynolds‘ story that appeared right beside it, which was a favorite of mine from the anthology.) So yeah, I’m flattered.
The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
You could say I’m catching up on stuff I’ve been meaning to read for a while. Much of that includes non-SF books, but there are also a lot of SF novels in the pile of books I’ve been meaning to read for ages. Among them number several by Charles Stross, but I was very curious to see what a Lovecraft/Spy-Thriller mashup would look like. (Especially since I have a specifically Lovecraft-meets-Chun-Doo-Hwan story brewing in the back of my mind now.) So, finally, I grabbed my copy of The Atrocity Archives and dived straight in! For someone like me–less well-read in …
Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever by Salim Washington anmd Farah Jasmine Griffin
Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever by Salim Washington anmd Farah Jasmine Griffin. The University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, 1998.) The collaboration between Miles Davis and John Coltrane is an interesting topic, and it’s especially interesting that it’s framed as such right from the title of this book. Coltrane, after all, started out as a “junior” to Davis, if not in age then certainly in credentials and in the establishment of a personal, individual style. It’d be difficult to argue otherwise, but Griffin and Washington acknowledge this. However, they …
Thoughts on Dexter
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 …
The American, Tron, and the “new” Harry Potter
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 …
A “Knockout”
My friend Tinatsu mentioned coming across a mention of my work in an article by Paul Di Fillippo, in an article of Salon. It’s a very flattering mention, indeed, as it’s mentioned in connection not just to the Shine Anthology, but also Di Fillippo’s take on the perennial question, “Is Science Fiction Dying?” He seems to suggest both the Shine anthology and my story is evidence that it is not, or something like that: One of the best anthologies of recent vintage is Jetse de Vries’ “Shine.” Its virtues are easy to enumerate. It offers a clear-eyed theme and unique remit: …
짜증나는 로맨스
Okay, the thing is, I knew I wasn’t going to be crazy about this film, 쩨쩨한 로맨스. It’s not because I have anything necessarily against love stories, to be honest… I don’t go for the Hollywood version of “romance,” to be sure, but look, love is the theme of the vast majority of mainstream literature, including tons of “classic” novels and even some I have liked myself. It’s bizarre to hate films that deal with love and relationships, if you like literature. That said, cinematic handling of love is usually unsatisfyingly shallow. Still, once in a while a film will …
초능력자
Tonight I saw 초능력자 (Choneungryeokja, which you could translate as “Psychic” or “Person with Supernatural Powers”1) with Miss Jiwaku, and I have to say that it actually pretty much was what one of my students described: …pretty good for the first hour or so, and then ramps up an exponential curve of silliness until it hits infinite silliness at the end. That said, the film seems to have been received rather well by the Korean public, and some people are praising it. My experience is that films that are very highly praised in Korea are sometimes good, but often don’t …