Nov 29
By Rishika Murthy
Editor’s note: The Local is 3WM’s choice venue for the Dripan Art Walk in Liberation Village 
Turn your head to cough and you might miss it. New to the Haebangcheon family of watering holes, The Local is the place to be if you are a musician, a fan of music or just a fan of cheap booze.
Owner and resident “hot bartender” You Ga Young opened The Local in late September. She said she wanted to “make a place where (local musicians) want to come and play.”
“In the HBC there are not many places to play and listen to music,” said Ga Young. “I wanted to open a place where people feel comfortable playing and having fun.”
She decided on this spot for her bar because she sees a lot of potential for the area.
Nov 29
By Maria Borland
Far from being radical or revisionist, the play is vague, bland and structurally bizarre. The first half is particularly bewildering. An ensemble of personalities populate the stage (I hesitate to call them characters as the word usually suggests some kind of motivating force, which is entirely absent here): a couple of young lovers, a French lothario, his sensual Italian lover, her laconic ex-husband, his lover, and some hysterical ageing lesbians. These archetypes/borderline archetypes, skillfully played by a talented cast, as well as the one room set, suggest the scene of a farce.
Nov 29
Just in time for this year’s holiday season, you can treat yourself to a romantic comedy set around the New Year. In Wintertime, written by Charles Mee, you’ll meet Ariel and Jonathan, along with Maria, Francois and Frank, and a slew of other fantastically funny characters to discuss love, its expectations and its complications.
Wintertime begins November 26 and will run Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays until December 12, 2010 at Roofers in Itaewon.
Nov 29
DRIPAN is a community art walk in the Itaewon area that brings together all types of artists and performers in a set up that sees audiences moving from venue to venue following the art.
Starting at the Laughing Tree gallery in Haebonchon and concluding at Rufxxx in Kyungnidan, DRIPAN will combine artists from all over the world with some of the greater Itaewon area’s most popular bars, cafes and performance spaces.
Featuring paintings, illustrations, installations, performances,
spoken word, music and much more. Join the movement and get involved in the freshest community art event.
Nov 27
Toon by Lee Scott; Writing by Iwazaru
As one of the busiest holidays in America takes place with millions of people traveling, the new airport screening rules have people up in arms. At all 450 of the nation’s commercial airports the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is using the new front-of-the-hand, slide-down screening technique for passengers who opt not to walk through full-body scanners, in addition to passengers who set off metal detectors at checkpoints without the scanners. The TSA also picks random passengers for the searches.
Nov 22
By Jesse Coy Nelson
If asked to describe the scene in the alleyway where his friend, Mike, and his girlfriend, Reggie, had found him after concern over his absence sent them on a search and recover mission, he would’ve drawn a blank. He remembered neither the pool of blood beneath his head nor Reggie’s panic, or Mike’s quick-thinking action of getting them to the hospital.
The hospital was where memory began to filter back to him, albeit in scraps, as though someone held a blanket that had been attacked by a knife in downward slashing motions, the strands of cloth that remained representing Scott’s memory, as impressions not necessarily connected by any fabric. There had been an x-ray, isolating the crushing pain that he felt in his head. There had been Mike, making some quip about Timothy Cotton, whoever that was, while they waited for the diagnosis. Scott had had no idea as to what Mike was talking about, and when he told him so, Mike continued on with the point, saying that that was the whole reason why Scott had left the cafe in the first place, none of which Scott could remember.
Nov 22
By Maria Borland
I like the idea of open mic nights—the promise of variety, emerging talent, a sense of risk… In reality, however, I have never quite reconciled myself to the ‘open’ bit. No matter how impressive the act, if you’re performing to an audience who have spent the last hour listening to navel gazing mumbled poetry or off-key ballads you’ve got your work cut out.
The Encyclopedia Show suggests an appealing alternative. A concept show originating in Chicago, an encyclopedia entry is distributed to various performers and writers who are given a month to create an original piece of work inspired by this entry. Here is the potential for a structured and coherent piece of theatre that still retains the off-the-cuff spontaneity of fringe performance.
Nov 21
SAWADEE KA LOVE N HATE
Solo Photography Exhibition by Joonyoung Kim
Nov. 26th, 2010 – Dec. 24th, 2010
Nov 15
By Jake Reed
You can waste away in a pub on a bender or walk the earth. Not the worst dichotomies to face on the subject of a vacation. Two weeks off in the middle of summer and nowhere to really go. My base of operations, Suzhou, the famed Venice of the East (a swamp with canals) had me marinating myself in my own juices since the beginning of June and the wanderlust was threatening intellectual blue balls if I didn’t think of somewhere to go and get lost at. Then I remembered being in a conversation with a coworker on the subject of not having a girlfriend due to what I called my unwillingness to indulge in the superficiality of trend. (I am cheap.)
“I think you should go and find a girl in Chengdu. They are wild, like to drink and dance and have really good complexions. It’s because of the spicy food they eat.”
Nov 15
By Sarah Clow
In a country where plastic surgery is common place, measuring and weighing candidates at interviews is practised and pop stars are revered—it is not an understatement to say that Koreans are image obsessed. I spent slightly more than a year in Korea and made some interesting observations regarding attitudes toward appearance while I was there.
Arriving in Korea was daunting. Although I am fairly well traveled, I was unprepared for the stares, finger pointing and jaw dropping. Being tall and blonde, it is somewhat difficult to blend in and your daily presence in the country never goes unnoticed. An advantage is the near celebrity status you are granted. One student even told me she thought I was an American movie star. The disadvantage is not possessing the innate porcelain skin that refuses to age (at least until you’re 70) or 24 – 20 – 24 measurements that the Koreans have been blessed with.
Nov 15
By Suki Kim
On February 16, 2002, the sixtieth birthday of the Great Leader Kim Jong Il, I was standing in front of a group of Workers’ Party leaders in Pyongyang, singing a South Korean protest song called “Morning Dew.” It was a strange situation for a fiction writer from New York’s East Village who is neither a political activist nor an entertainer. I am South Korean by birth and an American, having immigrated at thirteen. The American in me dismisses North Korea as off-limits, the bastard child of the cold war. But I am often haunted by the photographs of famine there that I see on the evening news.
When friends ask me whether I think the two Koreas will ever be reunified, I never know what to say. I know as much as they do, or as little. The one thing that sets me apart is that I am certain, no matter how evil North Korea is supposed to be, that I could never hate its people.
Nov 15
By Tiger and Bear with illustrations by James Wilson.
The town was a far cry from the Asian space-age metropolises of comic books and science fiction films that I had spent too many adolescent nights pawing over. Yet at the same time it was not exactly a traditional Korean village. Darkened streets, soju houses and makgeolli huts, slackened ties and discarded cocktail dresses in the private karaoke rooms, fluorescent signs popping and fizzing, painting the occasional soju causality with a lurid glow.
We had left the taxi driver back at the station, wandering through the streets in search of some direction and means to get to the festival. Yet as we rounded a corner I stopped dead. I grabbed Bear’s forearm. Before us were a group of men dressed in white shirts and black ties. My mind raced and made a connection through the soju haze—the Mormons from the bus station!
Nov 11
From Chuck Kang
I’m in a mountain. My main goal is to protect a “VIP facility” (and I’m pretty sure that you’d know what that means), and then the secondary mission is to protect Seoul. The G20 Summit is coming closer (maybe it’ll be around when you get this letter) so we’re getting busier and busier with training. And that old man Kim Jong “Ill” seems to be preparing something—gas, maybe. But I think it’s just for a show, for he’d not want to make 20 enemy countries.
Nov 08
By Maire Kulik
Oh G-20 how you torment the masses!
It’d be better if we listened to the wisdom of mass opinion
—and you didn’t arrive.
Because the wisdom of vast crowds has always been that of reason.
Harbouring your evil policies of mass-privatisation and neo-liberalism,
Further establishing the ownership of global resources.
Oh G-20!
To hinder a developing country with your waves of publicity;
So many headlines wasted that could have gone toward celebrity news.
Nov 08
by April Kim
This is what some people feel like about the the G-20 meeting: president mouse invites nineteen foreign mice to his mouse hole where a lot of mouse police are scurrying around on high alert. Two men, one of them a university professor, reportedly went as far as to go around painting rats on G-20 posters (see pic on right) supposedly as an “act of humor.” President Lee Myung-bak has been called “Gee,” a word meaning mouse (or rat) in Korean, by those who think he serves only the rich (and because he may share some facial qualities). So speaking of “G”-20…..
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