PicoBlog

In her response to President Joe Biden’s fiery State of the Union Address, Republican Senator Katie Britt declared herself shocked and appalled. “The free world deserves better than a dithering and diminished leader,” she huffed. Democrats and Republicans will disagree on whether “dithering and diminished” accurately describes President Biden. But they will agree that “the free world” deserves better than that. More importantly, they will agree with the underlying point that the President of the United States is the leader of the free world.

The trailer for Challengers, the latest film from Luca Guadagnino, came out yesterday and it looks pretty neat! From what I can glean of the plot, it’s about two friends being so obsessed with Zendaya’s character that they’re willing to have a pseudo-threeway with her, but, more importantly, learn to play tennis for her. I will never know a love so raw, passionate and uncontrollable that it drives me to figure out the rules to tennis.

Lorem Ipsum is the nonsense dummy text commonly used by designers and typesetters to lay out a page before the real text arrives for the big show. It’s the textual equivalent of a stand-in on a movie set helping the gaffer to get the lighting right while actual movie star Christian Bale hangs out in the wings and screams abuse at them. (For anyone wondering, that was a joke that would have slayed in 2009, around the time I lost the ability to generate useful new pop-culture references.

I had to struggle a bit to decide on a song for this week, with “justice” as our word. The fact is there aren’t many songs about that specific topic to choose from unless we veer into the realm of social protest music, which by its topical nature often doesn’t outlive the cause it is written to serve. Then I thought, what better time to revisit Country and Western music, with its focus on some of the big virtues and their counterparts, the big vices?

“It was in another country that I earned my harsh subsistence, a place that had everything and nothing, that same country which gave you everything in order to deny you it.” There are few Palestinian novelists, or writers of any nationality, who speak to the harsh existence of displacement as powerfully as Ghassan Kanafani. A writer who shaped the struggle of statelessness into sublime word, masterfully weaved together into a timeless novel, Men in the Sun.

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. — Thucydides, Athenian historian and general Woe to the conquered. — Chieftain Brennus (to the Romans) Inrecent essays, I spoke in protest of our civilization’s genocide against the living world. The word genocide, in my view, is the only one in the English language that comes anywhere close to accurately describing the ongoing global slaughter and annihilation of non-human life.

I wasn't expecting much the first time I watched "Miss Granny" (수상한 그녀) on a Korean Air flight. I thought it’d be fun, but nothing particularly meaningful. Not only did it turn out to be my favorite movie of 2014, but it’s become one of my all-time faves. When the Victoria & Albert Museum commissioned me to write about the history of Korean cinema for its Hallyu! The Korean Wave exhibit, I made sure that “Miss Granny” was included.

Like a dream in the night Richard Hamilton, The Father of Pop Art who designed the cover of The Beatles’ White Album, called Bryan Ferry his “greatest creation.” Ferry, whose father tended the pit ponies in coal mines, studied under Hamilton at the Fine Art Department of Newcastle University in the mid ‘60s. He had grown up enraptured by Hollywood glamor, and Hamilton, Ferry said, validated his “romantic leanings towards American culture.

There is a line in the penultimate episode of “My Ahjussi” (나의 아저씨) — or “My Mister” — where Lee Sun-kyun’s character offers encouragement to a despondent young woman: “When you feel like you want to die, don’t die. You’re a good person. Hang in there. I'm cheering for you." I’m guessing that many fans of the late Korean actor thought of that scene when news broke that Lee had died (most likely by suicide) this past December 27.