TV Series Opening 22: Kingdom

The opening is simply beautiful.

TV Opening Series 19: The Man in the High Castle

One of the best tv series that came out recently.

The book... well, I will mercifully not talk about the book.

TV Series opening 16: Firefly

TV Series opening 15: The Expanse

TV Series opening 12: 12 Monkeys

One of the best tv series I have watched.

TV Series opening 10: The X-Files

[Book Review] Hyeonseo Lee - The Girl With Seven Names

Reading about North Korean people is like walking on a tiny path through quicksand at night. Surely, there's some thrill to it, but one wrong step and you may end up checking whether the sand has any bottom. The pitfalls of such books are easy to point out - we associate ourselves with oppressed people, those who desperately want to run or those who have no say and no opinion, being stripped of their human traits. Some weird people find other meanings - how wonderful Juche is, whole politics of songun and society "unpolluted by capitalism". It's best to deal with books about North Korea the same way we deal with every other documentary or autobiographical work.

Dystopian "Utopia"

   And this picture above would be actually everything non-disturbing, that can be presented from Utopia. Places and scenery are beautifully shot, with vivid, lush colors which sometimes can make you dizzy.

But colors are not the main problem here. The series is sick.

Media and Condemnation by Memory in the Internet Age

 There was a good article appearing in Korea Focus, dealing with recent scandal in Korea on top levels. This is why I think it's worthwhile to read a lot of words.

March 1st Commemorative Speech by President

Let's be frank, Lady President has a tough, chaotic and quite crazy country to lead. 

If you wonder what March 1st Movement is - I wrote about that here.

Post-Psy: Quo Vadis, Brand Korea?

 There is a quite good reason why Korea will always have the troubles to promote itself. Factions. It is still prevalent factor to country's inability to promote its cultural heritage as aggressively and wide as all the neighbours. There is always someone who says "but why your agency not mine?" and dampens down any efforts. I remember the Olympics in Seoul, and I remember there was nothing on Korea anywhere back then. Oh well, that pattern is not totally unfamiliar to me, in my country, we have exactly the same actions.

But then, if PSY is considered as Korea's brand, then maybe every viral video should be the symbol of the country it comes from? It's called "viral" for some reasons.

In a year of big elections, Japan’s was Godzilla

   I have quite an obssession with Japan, spanning through over half of my life. Obssession swinging from delight to absolute hatred. Last Sunday I spent 8 straight hours glued to the main page of Asahi.com following the voting. Although the results didn't surprise me, I had this eerie feeling of witnessing something weird, something dangerous and kind of mental.

Below is Reuters article on the latest election in Japan.

My note: Japan Restoration Party is a nationalistic party led by Hashimoto Toru and Ishihara Shintaro, both very... erhm, unique men. OK, let's call them lunatics. 

Providing Korea will have Miss Park as the President, talks won't be nice and fluffy, me seems. Well, maybe less heated as with president Lee, but still.

Korea's New President

   I swear, I was never much interested in politics, until Far East Asia came. Asian politics are quite different from usual, western one and after some bewilderment and shock, I came to one conclusion, similar to the one Indiana Jones said once: Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.

Korea ranks 108th in gender equality yet yesterday the country elected first female President.

I'm not jumping from joy though. It will be hard for her because of few reasons - she's a woman (and hello, we're in Korea afterall) and she's the daughter of general Park Chung Hee who held Korea in tight military regime.

Anyway, I gathered few articles presenting the new President of South Korea coming from conservative Saenuri Party.

Marry in a hurry

Picture from here.

   Usually it's a shotgun marriage leading to home disputes, fights and bloody divorce. Marriage between music and politics. Whenever politics is involved in art (be it music, literature or movies) the art ceases to retain its own principles. It becomes another tool implemented to turn the masses into kneadable dough.

JoongAngIlbo posted an article about comedy gag character singing the song "Animunida". The artistic values of the song are close to zero, since the very performer of it, Gyaru described the second song as “neither rap, nor a song, nor music.” But the problem lies elsewhere.

SM’s lawyers applied for arbitration on July 11

All that is written below is NOT mine.

*Arbitration in Korea may defer to your own country’s law system, so it’d be great if you could  accept as it says and try not to compare/adjust with your law system.

Arbitration refers : In order to solve an argument, the court intervenes in the parties involved by drawing agreements with mutual concessions so that the court can build bridges to the both parties.

- When one party applies for arbitration, the court can accept if it’s decided to be necessary, or reject it.
- If both parties have successful agreements by arbitration, the case can be concluded as a mutual settlement.
- If agreements are failed, hearings/trial begins again in order to make the judge’s ruling.

South Korean dictator's daughter to launch presidential bid

   Found this interesting article on Reuters and I thought it would be good to share it. The lady is pretty impressive, and even if I don't believe she can win in such a country like Korea, it would be awesome. Single, well-educated woman in politics. If there were more women in active politics there, maybe the social changes would be easier? Just look at Jasmine Lee, she's not that vocal yet, but she has different perspectives to Korean society and she knows what needs to be changed.

But still, she is a daughter of the dictator and some say she's far from usual people. Let's see.

Short notice

   As a committed blogger, I want to say few words on this war that started yesterday, few minutes past 9 pm local time. SOPA law is not effective yet, but they took down Megaupload and few other filesharing sites. Some may ask - how a law that applies to US only affects us? It does, and in a great deal. First of all, most of the hosting sites are based (or were based) in US. After being taken down, links are broken. Tinypic, ie., I used it to host lovely and dorky Kpop gifs I found on the net. They are all gone now. The one above is directly sent to Picassa (it does consumme the space).

Molotov cocktails in Seoul

A Chinese man, who claimed his grandmother was a “comfort woman” forced into sexual slavery by Japan’s military, hurled four Molotov cocktails at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul early Sunday morning.
The 36-year-old Lui, was apprehended at the scene after throwing the firebombs over the wall of the embassy at 8:18 a.m., according to Jongno Police Station.
Two of the four Molotov cocktails went over the embassy wall but did not catch fire. The attack caused no injury or property damage, police said.

Comfort Women new law

State should try to solve ‘comfort women’ issue

The Constitutional Court made a landmark ruling on Tuesday that it is the government’s duty to settle disputes over Japan’s refusal to compensate former “comfort women.” The decision carries significant implications as the court has expanded the scope of state obligations to better protect the basic rights of the people.

The court said it is unconstitutional for the government to make no tangible efforts to settle the disputes. It also stated that the government violated the rights of the comfort women forced to serve as sexual slaves for frontline Japanese soldiers during World War II. It made the same ruling for the Korean victims of the atom bombs dropped on Japan. 

Dokdo again

Two articles from editorial column from JoongAngIlbo.