In a previous blog, with tongue partially in cheek, I suggested that Jay Gatsby and his excessive West Egg style might be a distant ancestor of Psy and his gaudy "Gangnam Style." We just finished reading The Great Gatsby in one of my literature courses, where we spent...

In Why Kerouac Matters, John Leland reveals that when Jack Kerouac, a self-described "solitary crazy Catholic mystic," came down from Desolation Peak in 1956, he was wearing a silver crucifix around his neck, a gift from poet Gregory Corso. Yet with the exception of the New York Times, magazines regularly...

The recent rocket launch by North Korea, just in time for the holidays and the South Korean presidential election, was the latest installment in what has become a theater of the absurd. As John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, points out, "North...

My colleagues and students at Kyung Hee University in Seoul have been asking me if I have any idea why Psy's "Gangnam Style" has been so ecstatically embraced in the U.S. The South Korean culture industry has been desperately trying to crack the U.S. market with bubblegum pop performed by...

When I first heard that Slavoj Zizek was coming to Korea to give a lecture at Kyung Hee University where I teach, I thought of the scene in "Stardust Memories" where Woody Allen is running after the aliens and they tell him, "We like your films [books], especially the early,...

Excitement surrounding the reclusive North Korean punk rock legend Rhee has intensified in Seoul this past month. As with all legends, specific information about Rhee's turbulent and lonely life is hard to come by. We do know that Rhee was raised by a wealthy family in a big apartment...

Hip hop first appeared in Korea in the 1990s with rappers such as Seo Taiji and DJ Doc. But the title of first rapper should probably go to Kim Byeong-yeon aka Kim Sat-gat aka Kim Lip aka Rainhat Poet, who was spitting rhymes and battling poets all over the...

"Disco deals with black, white, gay, straight. We are spinning basic black music, with some great White producers as well. Most of the spinners and promotion people are gay... Let's wake up, we can see the party, we can hear the music. We can enjoy each other having a good...

In a recent Portlandia sketch, Doug and Claire (Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein) decide to watch just one episode of Battlestar Galactica before going out to meet some friends. When the episode is over, Doug says "Wow, that was so well done!" And Claire says, "OK, let's watch one more."...

Views SW from Hwangjangsan on the Baekdu-daegan. Photo credit: Roger Shepherd at Hike Korea.

In Gary Pak's diasporic, Korean-Hawaiian novel A Ricepaper Airplane (University of Hawaii, 1998) a woodsman named Uncle Bhak serves a warm bowl of rice porridge, or juk, to Uncle...