A couple of weeks old already, but I didn’t notice till today: K.O.A. Zine has published yet another great interview! This time Joseph Kim has been talking to Jong-Seok Lee of shoegazer act Vidulgi OoyoO: Vidulgi Ooyoo: Pigeon Milk & the Fountain of Youth
Ever since the Lee Myung Bak Administration came into office, one of the principal campaign promises was to reduce the cost of private education. After fits and starts, the Administration is moving forward. (more…)
I’m back in the grind today. JJ and I both have tons of things that we have got to get done this week.
JJ has wanted me to post this photo of So-Hee for a couple of days now. She kept her tongue stuck only long enough for me to grab a few quick shots.
If you are reading this in a RSS reader I apologize for the glitches over the last couple days. I am trying to fix some old posts and few of them are showing as new posts on this blog.
I am using Ku Kim-Marshall’s book Once Upon a Time in Korea to practice my Korean reading skills. It is a collection of children’s stories that have fairly easy Korean vocabulary. I am currently reading 혹 달린 할어버지 (The Old Man with a Lump) Here is an excerpt:
옛날 어느 마을에 한 할아버지 살았습니다. 이 할아버지는 아주 착했습니다. 그런데 이 할아버지 턱 밑에는 혹이 하나 달려있었습니다. 세수할 때나, 또밥을 먹을 때 아주 불편했습니다. 그러나 할아버지는 혹을 떼어낼 수가 없었습니다. 그래서 할어버지는 언제나 슬펐습니다.
Once upon a time there was an old man who lived in a village. This old man was very kind-hearted. But this old man had a lump that was attached to the bottom of his chin. When he washed his face and ate food he was very uncomfortable. But this old man could not remove the lump.Therefore this old man was very sad.
I also downloaded Talk to me in Korean‘s workbooks for level 1 20-25 and level 2 1-10. I did pretty well on them but had forgot some of the vocabulary that I had learned.
I also cracked open Sogang’s 2A and started to work on chapter one again. I have finished about half of this book but have forgotten a great deal of it.
Other Korean Language Activities:
Actor Song Seung Hun has made a comeback after a two-year break by playing Lee Young Choon in the movie “A Better Tomorrow, 2010.”
Song said, “I and every man my age actually admired the movie ‘A Better Tomorrow’ in the past. In that movie, the actor Chow Yun Fat, who fired guns with both hands and lit a cigarette by lighting fire to faked bills, looked wonderful. I thought that I would be criticized anyway even though I performed very well in the movie.”
A Hallyu star, Song Seung Hun, came back to the screen by appearing in the movie “A Better Tomorrow, 2010,” which is a remake of director John Woo’s original movie “A Better Tomorrow (1986).” He made a comeback to the film after a two-year break since the movie “Destiny,” in which Kwon Sang Woo and Song Seung Hun had appeared as the protagonists.
During an interview held at a café in Samcheongdong, Song Seung Hun said, “We did not just try to reproduce the original, instead we produced a Korean style of storyline and a movie filled with Korean sentiment. The movie is not just a simple remake.”
The movie tells the stories of Hyuk (Joo Jin Mo), who belongs to an organization smuggling weapons, Hyuk’s younger brother Chul (Kim Kang Woo), who has to chase Hyuk as a policeman, and Tae Min (Cho Han Sun), who tries to conquer the organization by eliminating the others. The movie will be released on September 16.
Song Seung Hun played a North Korean defector named Young Choon who works at the weapon smuggling organization. He said, “I decided to appear in this movie because I have a deep-rooted trust toward the director, and since my debut movie, in which I had worked together with the director, I have always wanted to work with him again someday.”
Actor Song Seung Hun and the director, Song Hae Sung, met again 11 years after they filmed the movie “Calla (1999).” Since that time, the director Song had developed into a famous movie director by making movies such as “Failan” (2001) and “Maundy Thursday” (2006), and the actor Song had become a Hallyu star by appearing in many dramas and movies.
Song Seung Hun said, “Director Song has come to have more clear views of his own. He used to listen to actors’ opinions before, but he has changed to a person who wants to carry his own points” (laugh).
The original movie, “A Better Tomorrow” is a major work of Hong Kong Noir, in which Hong Kong’s star actors of the 1980s such as Chow Yun Fat, Leslie Cheung and Ti Lung had appeared, and it actually had a profound influence in Hong Kong’s movie industry as an action movie.
Song Seung Hun had inevitably felt pressured about the original, but he did his best to draw an evaluation from viewers saying that the remake movie came close to the original. For playing the character Young Choon in earnest, he started to smoke again even though he had quit smoking five years ago, and he had practiced disassembling a rifle at home to showcase a realistic scene. He had also learned how to play the piano and how to operate a boat. He did not even apply any lotion to his face to look as tough as possible.
He said, “Director Song asked me to show hazy eyes to express Young Choon, who had been ruined over a period of three years, but I could not understand his request and I even felt bitter about him. But, after I watched the completed movie, I could understand why he asked me that kind of request and I felt sorry because I might have been able to perform better if I had more time for preparation.”
After he had left the army in 2006, he had played muscular characters in works such as “Destiny,””East of Eden (2008),” and “A Better Tomorrow, 2010” because he had wanted to abandon his former soft and tender image shown in dramas such as “Autumn in my Heart (2000)” and “Summer Scent (2003).” Song said while smiling, “I had been described as a soft character in the previous dramas, but actually my personality is a long way from those soft images.”
He will begin filming the drama “My Princess” from the middle of next month and act with the actress Kim Tae Hee in the drama. By appearing in this drama, he will come back to the small screen with a soft image again. He stated, “I have never played a wealthy character before, I always had to suffer from hunger and I had been depressed all the time within the drama. I am used to taking the role of a son coming from a poor and complicated family. It will be the first light and pleasant drama after a sitcom drama, so I expect that filming this drama will be very exciting and fun.”
Hallyu star Song Seung Hun recently filmed the movie “Ghost” with the actress Nanako Matsushima, who has been popular in Korea because of her Japanese movie “Ring.” The movie “Ghost” is also a remake movie of the original movie (1990) with the same title, in which Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore played the protagonists.
He added, “Since I cannot speak Japanese, I felt frustrated because I could not express myself very well due to language, but as time went by, I could realize that language was not that important in acting. In the end, I could concentrate on acting and was deeply immersed in emotion even more than when I acted in Korean films, so sometimes I did not listen to the director’s instruction saying ‘cut’ and kept acting on the set.”
Former President Kim Dae-jung died at 1:42 p.m. Tuesday, Severance Hospital in Seoul said.
Kim, 85, has been under intensive care at the hospital since mid-July due to pneumonia.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts at reconciliation with North Korea, including a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in 2000.
Epitaph
Release Date : 2007
Director: Jeong Beom Sik, Jeong Sik
Writer: Jee Yoon Sin, Jeong Beom Sik. Jeong Sik
Cast:
Jin Goo
Kim Tae Woo
Lee Dong Gyo
Kim Bo Kyeong
Playlist URL
Sypnosis:
“In a modern hospital in 1941, doctors witness weird events and learn DEATH is the sole healer.” In 1979, Dr. PARK receives an old photo album from his twenties in 1941 when mysterious things befell him and his colleagues. PARK was bound by his parents to marry a girl whom he never met, but fell in love with a dead woman who happened to be his arranged marriage. Meanwhile, a little girl who was apparently the only survivor a car accident was haunted by ghosts every night. After two doctors (a married couple) involved in these two stories return to their hospital from Tokyo, a series of serial murders occurs around them.
Gallery:
photo credit : hancinema.net
In a stunning late play win, Yang Yong-eun, or Y.E. Yang as he is known, became Korea’s first male pro golfer to win a PGA Tournament and is also the first in Asia. What made the win sweeter than the .35 million in prize money? Perhaps it was the 3-stroke win over Tiger Woods.
Also consider that the Jeju-do native picked up his first golf club at 19 and is self-taught. It’s very much like the plucky movie, “국가대표,” a true-to-life story about Korea’s first Olympic ski jumping team.
Our good friends ,Jason and Jennifer, bought a boat at the beginning of the summer and have been trying to get us to out in the Gulf with them all summer. We finally had a weekend that we were all free. It happened to be our last free weekend before school started. Our other friend who was joining us happened to have lots of comps from the Island View Casino so he hooked us up with a suite and free meals. Check out the common room !
The Den
We had dinner at the new Carter Green Steak House and used every penny of his 400 dollar comp. I wish that I would have brought my camera. It was probably one of the best steaks that I have ever tasted. I had a Filet Mignon topped with lump crab-meat. AWESOME!!!! We topped off the meal with creme bru lei and bread pudding. It was a good thing that I didn’t have to pay for the meal. I would have had no money to gamble with.
We left dinner and hit the gaming floor for a few hours. JJ and I ended up sitting at the center bar playing video poker and enjoying free drinks. We didn’t win any money but still had a great time.
We got up around 8 and waited for the weather to clear before going out and buying fishing licenses and launching the boat. The weather was still somewhat overcast but it looked like we were going to be able to have a great day of fishing but it was not to be.
Heading out into the Gulf
The Captain and his first mate~!
JJ and our friend Dana
JJ and Glen
It took us about 45 min or so to get out past Ship Island. The sea was a little rough and JJ and I both were feeling somewhat seasick. We were just about to start fishing when Jason checked the radar and saw that a storm was coming into Gulfport. We decided that we would probably not enjoy being in really rough water so we ended up calling it a day.
Trouble Brewing
Even though we didn’t get to do any real fishing, it still was a great day. I can’t wait to get back out on the water in better weather. We did see some oil booms set up around Ship Island but didn’t see any oil in the water. We really didn’t get south of the islands and I was real curious to see if there was any oil washing up but the weather prevented us from checking it out. We made it all the way to the harbor when the rain started. We got the boat on the trailer in the rain and headed back to Hattiesburg.
The San Francisco Asian Art Museum has an exceptional collection of Korean art, extraordinary in breadth of periods, styles, mediums and scholarship. This gorgeous, large-format book halves each spread to display works of art prominently, surrounded by lots of restful white space, with concise paragraphs of description and lists of pertinent data, all annotated and referenced should one wish to
Korean American Books, Korean American Readings, Korean American authors