The UCC Music Video Thing

I'd be interested to know which song started this whole fan music video imitating choreography thing... but it's sure fun.

You might know the Beyonce song "Single Ladies" which is everywhere right now, and the video's getting about a bajillion hits. Well the song, and the dance, is so catchy, that a bajillion MORE people are making their own versions of the song.

Here's the original.


Here's the fan version I like the best so far.


And let's not forget Justin Timberlake going wild on SNL.



This is not the first fan ucc video craze: just here in Korea, there was the "tell me" dance -- one of the genius moves of the WonderGirls' producer, the spectacularly not-handsome JYP (seen here with his face in a backup dancer's crotch) is coming up with dances that are cool and distinctive, but also easy enough for people to try to learn.

Here's the Wondergirls' Tell Me, for any of you who have forgotten.


And there were a zillion imitations of this one, too, among them...this one.


Which leads to horrific train wrecks like these.


Girls' Generation had to get in on the action, and I like the self-awareness of this video's intro, where they start out as indistinguishable mannequins before they come to life as indistinguishable mannequins that can dance. The song's catchy, with a driving beat, and another cute but not-too-hard dance that people can learn in their jazz-dance class at the health club -- kind of the choreographer's equivalent of the way many modern church praise songs are written to be played with simple chords, so that near-novice guitarists can still play them competently (see also: the vocal difficulty of every Korean Trot song ever written).


And then there were UCC versions like this: not that skilled, but must have taken those boys a lot of work and time.


or the rock version, the (actually pretty good) traditional instruments arrangement or the most common: the either inept, or mechanical living room webcam.

I wonder about the origins of this fancam music video thing, and where it all started...

I've been wrong before, but I think it might have started (or at least become cool outside Korea) with Michael Jackson's Thriller dance, which still pops up from time to time, in increasingly clever/random ways.

There was the just plain weird Bollywood thriller.


Prison Thriller


A couple of wedding thrillers.

And my personal favorite: the Tube Thriller.

Imagine being on this car.


And wait for it... how about this one. So nerdy it flips back and becomes epically cool. Imagine having the story of winning a Star Wars Dance-off by doing The Thriller as Darth Vader in your pocket: nobody'd know whether to give you a wedgie or buy you a beer.


Anyway, post your favorite Girls Generation, Wondergirls, or Thriller fan version in the comments. See if you can top Darth Vader.

Have a good day, my lovely readers.

WTF? A Korea Times Cartoonist Capable of Irony? Oh. Unintentional.

source
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that the comic portraying Obama supposedly casting ideology out of the realm of science, chooses to portray the archaic and anti-scientific ideologues as a dinosaur...


when one of their biggest ideological flash-points was the teaching of creation and evolution in school, along with the denial of dinosaurs' existence by some?

Portraying anti-scientific ideologues as dinosaurs would be kind of like portraying Salem's Puritans as warlocks, wouldn't it?

Korean fusion food. A-MAyonnaiZ-ING!

Now, anybody who spends long enough here knows about Korean restaurants' tendency to put (sometimes a lot of) mayonnaise or sweet mustard sauce on just about any food that is not considered "Korean". It's one of those funny quirks that keeps you on your toes anytime you're in a fusion or foreign restaurant here.

Well, if you read Zenkimchi's Andong post, you'll know that my new favorite thing is complaining to restauranteurs in pidgin Korean.

You'll be happy to know that while there is tons of good food to be eaten in Seoul, there are also ample opportunities to practice my new hobby.

Today I went to a restaurant and ordered a seafood salad. Wanted something fresh, you know?

Dear readers, the thing came swimming in so much sweet mustard/mayonnaise sauce that I couldn't even taste the shredded cabbage. (And you know, you could read that sentence and probably guess that I was in Korea, even if you knew nothing about this blog whatsoever). I actually got out the tissues and dabbed away the excess sauce, because it was so egregiously over-sauced, and built up no small mountain of sopping, saccharine napkins in doing so. (Photos when I get home and download them off my crappy cameraphone). Even so, there was still a puddle of sauce in the bottom of the bowl. It made me feel a bit nauseous looking at how much mayonnaise I could have consumed.

Thanks to crappy cameraphone the second, it's hard to see the veritable pool of sauce still in the bottom of the bowl.

And that was after removing this many napkins' worth of sauce, already.




This was a restaurant I used to like, too, until a few bad choices in background music (speed techno doesn't help me relax and enjoy my food, as awesome as Lee Jung Hyun is in other contexts), and this mayonnaise debacle left, um, a sour taste in my mouth.

Lee Jung Hyun: Wah. Try tucking in to a nice california roll with this on in the background.


However, not to be deterred, I got out my cellphone dictionary (after taking some gross-out pictures of the mayonnaise soup in the bottom of my bowl), and finally looked up the word "taste" and the structure "could/couldn't taste". When I went to pay, I was very proud of myself for saying, in broken Korean, "Too much sauce. I couldn't taste the vegetables."

Yep. After all that talk about complaining expats, I'm learning to complain in Korean.

Look out, world!

The Andong Trip at Zenkimchi

For those of you who can't wait for me to finish writing it up, Joe at Zenkimchi has written a nice account of the Andong Trip that's loaded with details about Joe's bowels pictures. Go check it out if you like.

Random photos...

Myeongdong Department Store is not a nice place to be on a Saturday afternoon.

It wasn't so much the crowding, as constantly getting jostled.


And not to go for the cheap shot or anything, but... yeah. As it pertains to being jostled when a split second's worth of patience and a hair's breadth of personal consideration could have prevented it... I will go for the cheap shot. See, stereotypes having been taken into account, last time I was in Beijing, the "have manners in public" campaign was still working, and every time we took public transportation, even though the Olympics were half a year past, people STILL waited outside the subway car for those inside to get out, before trying to pile in. Will Seoul need to have ANOTHER freaking Olympics for people to decide to start respecting the personal space of those around them? I was bumped, unnecessarily, a little less than once a minute, the whole time I was in the Lotte underground shopping center, and brothers and sisters, I'm never going back there again, like, ever.

meh. I'm not always this irritable. Maybe it's the yellow dust, or the fact Lotte Department store's food section is underground, and the added claustrophobia of no sunlight + low ceiling PLUS crowding is what set me off, but...
Lotte Department Store Myeongdong is an unpleasant place. Don't go there on the weekend.

Next: Brian discussed the way white males were absent in many ads for English classes, so I wanted to add this photo (for Pagoda) to the collection. (Taken in Myeongdong).

The female could be Korean... but she also could be non-Korean, between her coloration and the ambiguity of eye-shape a profile shot affords. Anyway, in conclusion, Korea is a land of contrasts. Thank you for reading my paper.

Something I saw in China: apparently Korea's not the only country stealing movie poster ideas.

Does this poster for a Chinese movie look familiar to you?
It should.

In other wackiness: in case you really needed a teddybear phone ornament that expressed your love for brand names, the day is yours: not only can you have a teddy dressed up in Louis Vuitton...
You can even choose your colour!

I saw "Old Partner" today with Girlfriendoseyo. It was great. I also saw this movie poster:

I hate when people use that face.
And it's usually only used when somebody wants something. Especially in tv dramas.

Speaking of TV dramas where people make mopey faces, in case you felt like you didn't have enough "Flowers Before Boys" memorabilia yet, you can get these socks.

I was flabbergasted a little while ago, not only to see the "Our boys are prettier than flowers" poster selling Bean Pole clothes in Coex subway station, but to see four Japanese tourists huddling together and ogling it reverentially. I guess they'd reached the goal of their pilgrimage: the land where flower boys sell overpriced clothing!

Went to a really nice spanish restaurant in Hongdae, and the caption selling Sangria to us sounded like it might have been written by the guy who usually works for Tourism Korea.

These cute shoes were at the flea market. They say "Left food" and "right food" - correction: that should be "left foot" and "right foot" -- the dangers of writing in a rush.