Links for November 10, 2015
Everything I Needed to Know about Poetry I Learned from #KPOP
With Seo Taiji came the revelation that you could import a genre or style (or maybe that it was so inevitable, at this point, that you just had to let it happen), but if you made the song yourself, you could tailor it to a contemporary Korean audience. This achieves a kind of authenticity that isn’t derived from tradition or the pretense of “real feelings,” but instead functions as a cross-section of contemporary, lived experience. Don’t get me wrong: our lived experience involves real feelings and the traces of traditions; but the point isn’t necessarily to delineate and recount those, but rather to see what you can build, or express, from the marked materials at hand.
The 12 Weirdest, Funniest, Smartest Twitter Bots
But reading through its output, one is struck by how non-formulaic the tweets are; no simple Ad Libs construction here. It is a technical marvel and also one of the sweetest and kindest things on Twitter. Every time it shows up in my feed, I remember to look out the window.
As we know, the Jedi themselves are inspired by Shaolin Monks, and there’s a particular kung fu discipline that Jar Jar’s physicality is purposefully modeled upon… Zui Quan, or Drunken Fist wushu. This discipline seeks to imitate the “sloshing,” seemingly random foibles of a drunkard, but in reality the staggering and stumbling is the use of bodily momentum, deception, and unpredictability intended to lure and confuse opponents.