Not Very Nice, But Kind of Funny

Foreigners taking pictures of passed out Koreans at blackoutkorea.com.

I hate to admit it, but I LOL’d.

Adventures in Educational Fail

We use a range of materials at my school, both in terms of difficulty and quality.  For the most part I find them pretty easy to use, but it’s still kind of amazing what gets through the various educators and editors who put together and publish these things.

To wit, why would a collection of one-page stories (a “reader”) published only a few years ago include a piece about the wonders of baseball card collecting?  I doubt that many American kids know what baseball cards are any longer, let alone Korean ones.  And by the way, nobody uses pay-phones any longer either.  They can’t even fathom what pay-phones are.  And VHS tapes and vinyl records?  Excuse me?

Like I said, most of our materials are good.  The problematic ones are usually salvageable with some extra prep and hand-outs.  But when you get something that’s completely D.O.A. it’s a little sad.

Not to mention they make me feel old.

Have CD’s and DVD’s Sent From Home? Yeah, Right.

Mininova bites the dust.

The desperate sound you hear is that of thousands of ex-pats in Korea scrambling to find new torrent sites.

Pure Gravy

I love my friends back home, but it’s strange that they assume American holidays are celebrated throughout the world.  Not for us teachers at least.  I’d assume on the US military bases they do a lot of the traditional stuff, however.

That said, happy Thanksgiving to all.

Hawt

A new Polvo video.  Such a great album.

Not Rock-ist

Carrie Brownstein on the current state of mellow, male rock:

“What followed — at least in the world of indie music (and I use the term “indie” loosely and for lack of a better term) — was the rise in popularity of mostly bearded men making very sensitive music: Fleet Foxes, Andrew Bird, Bon Iver, Devendra Banhart, Beirut, Girls, Grizzly Bear, The Dodos, Iron & Wine, and so forth and so on.”

She makes some interesting points but also stakes out a strange position with regards to musical “authenticity” (scare quotes intentional).  She wants to get back to a genuine punk or post-punk aggressiveness and angularity (sounds good) but seems to insist it has to be done with guitars.  As a guitarist herself that’s understandable, but as a critic she seems to limit herself to a certain version of “rock” that always has been and probably always will be dominated by dudes who want their sincerity confirmed by a fawning (and mostly female) audience.  (Although I can name at least one bearded dude that hardly fits into her thesis — James Murphy).

More bluntly, I find it strange that she spends so much time listening to bands she doesn’t seem to like.  Is she that beholden to the “indie” ideal (which she admits is a useless term) that she has to torture herself by listening to every release by these mellow, unabashedly rockist men?

That said, I wonder if she’s into The Locust (YT).  Because they’ve got enough aggression in a single song to make up for the whimsical stylings of 100 Devendra Banharts, thank god.

Why Is It That America’s “Not Serious” Journalists Are Always Right?

Matt Taibbi on Sarah Palin and just about every other aspect of America’s dysfunctional media culture:

“At the end of this decade what we call ‘politics’ has devolved into a kind of ongoing, brainless soap opera about dueling cultural resentments and the really cool thing about it, if you’re a TV news producer or a talk radio host, is that you can build the next day’s news cycle meme around pretty much anything at all, no matter how irrelevant — like who’s wearing a flag lapel pin and who isn’t, who spent $150K worth of campaign funds on clothes and who didn’t, who wore a t-shirt calling someone a cunt and who didn’t, and who put a picture of a former Vice Presidential candidate in jogging shorts on his magazine cover (and who didn’t).”

Later, on how she’s managed to out-Rush Chairman Limbaugh himself:

“Palin — and there’s just no way to deny this — is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.”

So Stylistic

Boutique, Itaewon.

Leeum Museum of Art

Seoul is filled with great museums, but I heartily recomend a visit to the Leeum Museum of Art if you’re ever in town.

It’s not the biggest collection, but the range of pieces from early Korean pottery up to contemporary work is impressive.  My only gripe is that the interior layout is a bit quirky, and requires you to take elevators multiple times.

R. I. P.

Korean supermodel Daul Kim, age 20, found dead in Paris of a probable suicide.

The suicide rate among young Korean celebrities is tragic and ridiculous.