Culture Feature

The Real-Life Magic of "Lovecraft Country": Interview with a Korean Shaman

There is a growing movement to reclaim indigenous Korean culture, which has normalized the role of mudangs in Korean society.

South Korean Female Shaman

Photo by Jeon Heon-Kyun, Shutterstock

HBO's Lovecraft Country recently introduced mainstream America to a witchy Korean character called a "mudang."

This is not fiction, however; mudang is a real title given to real spiritual practitioners who are in high-demand in South Korea and the Korean diaspora community. The mudang depicted in Lovecraft Country is a pale comparison to real-life mudangs today. Who knows if the producers of the show even knew that mudangs were real (although plenty of people in Hollywood are aware, and some are even starting to consult with mudangs like Jennifer)?

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BTS at the American Music Awards

By Featureflash Photo Agency (Shutterstock)

One of the greatest film directors alive really loves BTS.

During the press tour leading up to the Golden Globes, Bong Joon-ho, the writer and director of Parasite, repeatedly expressed his appreciation of BTS. While appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Joon-ho said in Korean, "I particularly enjoyed the episode BTS was here." At the Golden Globes Awards, whereParasite became the first Korean film to win the Best Motion Picture in the Foreign Language category, Joon-ho was asked, "How does it feel...for your country to be leading the way in creativity and vision." He began his response with an unprompted shout-out to the boy band, "Although I'm here at the Golden Globes, BTS has three thousand times the amount of power and influence that I have." He added, "I think Korea produces a lot of great artists because we're very emotionally dynamic people."

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BTS at the American Music Awards

By Featureflash Photo Agency

Congratulations–you've survived 2019

We've been through haunting commercials, traumatically bad movies, and the fall of a favorite childhood author. But through it all, there's been Spotify, judging our music tastes like a disapproving boomer. And yet, we persisted. In alphabetical order, these are the top 50 musical lifelines of the 2010s. In the top 25 are the likes of BTS, Bon Iver, Kendrick Lamar, and Childish Gambino. Among the bottom 25 are FKA twigs, Tayor Swift, Julien Baker, and Charli XCX. Notably absent is anything by Ed Sheeran or Justin Bieber, because we don't believe bad listening habits should be encouraged. Happy listening in 2020!

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CULTURE

What Is Mukbang: These Beautiful Women Are Paid to Eat

Mukbang finds its massive audience by pandering to the three pillars of Internet culture: loneliness, sex, and absurdity.

YouTube

The concept of posting "food p*rn" pictures to social media was taken to new heights in 2010 when a bizarre Korean phenomenon featuring petite women eating impossible portions of food took off.

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TV Features

"The Masked Singer" Is Over: What's Next in Mind-Boggling Reality TV?

Imagine a show featuring Miley Cyrus teaching Nicolas Cage and Jenny McCarthy how to be vegan. Sounds like Fox network's next hit!

Miley Cyrus

Photo by Kobby Dagan (Shutterstock)

America's trust in television was broken long before NBC's The Masked Singer held up a mirror to our low standards for "expert judges" and our underlying fear of Teletubbies.

For the past two months, one of the top-rated shows on prime time has featured twelve has-been celebrities dressed as inbred Looney Toons. The singing competition is based on the Korean reality TV show with the same concept. Now that we know The Masked Singer will assault us with a second season next year, let's brace ourselves–the worst is yet to come.

Other hit Korean TV shows spotlight celebrities' moldy leftovers and strained parent-child relationships for the amusement of the masses. We're betting it's only a matter of time before one of these bizarre series debuts in the States.

1. Please Take Care of My Refrigerator

Ever want to see inside your favorite celebrity's refrigerator? Why would you? That's weird. Each episode of Please Take Care of My Refrigerator features eight of the country's best chefs and invites them into the guest star's kitchen, having them compete to create edible dishes using only the ingredients and old leftovers in the celebrity's refrigerators. They have 15 minutes. The celebrity then judges each dish and selects a winner. There is no apparent reward for winning, except for the chance to feed BTS' best boy, Jungkook.

For a US adaptation, we predict the E! network would milk this reality show for all its worth. Hosted by: Gordon Ramsay.

[ENG] Please Take Care of my Fridge BTS Cut_3rd Dish (Hot Braised Short Ribs)youtu.be

2. Dad! Where Are We Going?

Riffing off the common assumption that celebrities must be terrible parents, each episode features five celebrity fathers traveling or camping with their children. Sometimes they try to "cook" and other times they pull their hair out. We predict CBS would be the first to adopt this on account of its eagerness to exploit any celebrity for prime-time ratings (yes, we're talking about The World's Best).

[ENG SUB] Dad!Where are you going?-Hoo's 9th b-day party 후9살생일축하 20141221youtu.be

3. Human Condition

Six A-list actors are deprived of their phones, television, and the Internet as they live in a dorm for one week. But rather than being a simple Big Brother setup, each episode features a challenge imposing new restrictions, like not creating any trash or living on minimum wage. For a US version, we see this show on ABC. With moralizing shows like The Good Doctor and Grey's Anatomy but reality TV trash like The Bachelor, ABC would jump on the chance to teach celebrities about social issues like climate change while benefiting from their potential moral failures. Hosted by: Miley Cyrus

The Human Condition | 인간의 조건: Living on a Shoestring Budget – The First Episode (2014.12.03)youtu.be


4. The Return of Superman

It's another show banking on male celebrities being incapable of caring for their children. This time, celebrity fathers are left alone with their kids for 48 hours without any help from wives, family members, or the legion of celebrity nannies who keep Hollywood afloat. American actors like Steven Yeun have also guest-starred as "Uncles" left to take care of other's children on their own. NBC, America's publicist for family values, would love this shit.

[The Return of Superman] Steven Yeun's special way to feed a babyyoutu.be

5. Unpretty Rapstar

It's worse than it sounds. This music competition features aspiring female rappers competing against each other American Idol-style. Hosted by any mildly successful rapper, the show features challenges like diss battles and filming a one-take music video for an original song they've written and arranged themselves while on the show. Considering Fox's love of reality shows that sound wrong, the network probably has its eye on adapting this bad boy already. Hosted by: Iggy Azalea.

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Top Videos

Revisiting the YouTubers You Watched in High School

Hey Youtube! Hey, what's up you guys! Hey everyone! What is up everyone?

PewDiePie

Whether or not you support the culture and ethics of YouTube—the insensitive and salacious clickbait, and outrageous thumbnails—you understand that it's no different than TV and Netflix, or any other form of media you use to entertain yourself...

YouTube—a playground for the terminally bored, and the website you visit to learn how to make poached eggs—is a DIY platform where regular people jump online for ten minutes to talk about their weird Uber experiences, clothing hauls, new horror game releases, and quirky sugar daddy experiences. YouTube is the platform that best represents what millennials are all about—the "StoryTime" videos, the countless scare pranks where unassuming men and women are harassed in elevators, and teenage girls and boys garnering Beiber-esque fandom from vlogging, are all a mirror of Generation Y. Yeah, that YouTube, where the bully in your English class is somehow paying rent for his studio apartment on a schedule of three video uploads a week.

Whether or not you support the culture and ethics of YouTube—the insensitive and salacious clickbait, and outrageous thumbnails—you understand that it's no different than TV and Netflix, or any other form of media you use to entertain yourself after work, on the weekends, and during bouts of chronic procrastination. The catch is that your next-door neighbor is streaming his/her life online as a job. When dead bodies in the Suicide Forest aren't used for clickbait, or random exclamations of the N-word aren't accidentally blurted during a live-streaming shootout, YouTube can be a place of unbridled creation, DIY comedy, and unimpeded debate. But a website dedicated to the tides of culture—the newest drama online, hyped products on Instagram, and trending, social media fodder—is a website that introduces new starry-eyed college grads just as fast as it trades 'em up for baby-faced high schoolers.

Before you slam your head against your keyboard, declaring millennials as lazy, privileged brats, consider how millennials capitalized off of an of-the-moment market, a landscape where everyday charm is profitable to millions of subscribers. YouTube has some of the most noteworthy comeback kids in popular culture: regular people screwing up and miraculously recovering with heartfelt apologies and tweets (the type of contrition reserved for A-list celebrities). But not all of YouTube's celebs are publicly chastised after idiotic slip-ups; some simply take a break, you know, for personal reasons. And some have stuck to their grind, sharing their ups and downs with the world.

Ray William Johnson

Remember Ray William Johnson and his popular web series Equals Three (stylized as =3)? He reviewed viral videos, usually people falling, tripping, and slamming into things. He was one of the biggest YouTubers with nearly 10.4 million subscribers and billions of views total on his video archives. Johnson took a hiatus from Equals Three after publicly announcing he wanted to explore other business ventures—filmmaking (Riley Rewind), and developing a script with FX. Johnson also produced hilarious music videos under the name "Your Favorite Martian," a collection of pop-inspired tracks that were actually catchy and worthy of download on iTunes.

Charlie Puth

Before Charlie Puth was a celebrity pop star, making hits with Meghan Trainor and G-Eazy, he was a nerdy boy on YouTube who made comedy skits and music videos featuring his friends and family. If you're curious to see Puth's earlier work ("Who threw this pickle at me?!"), you'll be sad to know he deleted all of his original content. Puth is doing big boy things now, for big boy money. RIP Charlie Puth's YouTube vids.

KevJumba

Far East Movement's "Folk Music" opened Kev Wu's videos that were filmed in his house, often featuring his charismatic father, and everyday household props. Watching KevJumba was like watching the kid on your cul-de-sac you've never talked to—the one in basketball shorts and Nike sandals with socks, blasting hip-hop from his windows, with Sailor Moon in the background. He made uncool things very cool, and average parts of life hilarious and endearing. His recent upload on Christmas day confirmed rumors that his hiatus wasn't a weird stint in a religious cult, but a spiritual journey learning about Buddhism.

Julian Smith

Jellyfish…jelly fish…jellyfish. Julian Smith was the king of whimsical humor. Uploads of an odd and quote-worthy character named Jeffery Dallas brought in millions of views. Whether Dallas was making hot Kool-Aid, peeing with the door open, mispronouncing milk, or arguing about waffle equality, his quest to be heard never went unnoticed. In his latest video, Smith details why he took a one-year break from YouTube, and it's a refreshing take on Internet fame and popularity. Word of advice, don't eat a live jellyfish, lest you end up a Jeffery Dallas. In Smith's humble words, "I MADE THIS FOR YOU!"

Shane Dawson

The OG. (A classic YouTuber to those of us who graduated high school in 2013.) Shane Dawson is the boy who wore lipstick and wigs, and made millions of people laugh with his extensive theater of outrageous characters on "ShaneDawsonTV": Shananay (a drug addict and sex fiend), S-Deezy (a wannabe wanksta), Paris Hilton (a hilarious impersonator), Amy (a girl desperate for popularity), and Switch (a poster child for Emo kids everywhere). He's amassed 20 million subscribers in his career and is still going strong. Dawson has also ventured into TV and has one memoir, I Hate Myselfie: A Collection of Essays, and a book titled, It Gets Worse. Through the years, Dawson has remained one of the most entertaining voices on YouTube.

Simon and Martina

Your favorite Canadians turned Korean and Japanese expats hosted "Eat Your Kimchi," a channel exploring the differences between Korean and Western culture. A favorite among American K-pop fans, and a go-to destination channel for high schoolers who enjoyed every new Big Bang single, or Hyuna music video, "Eat Your Kimchi" was like the TRL of YouTube. Husband and wife, Simon and Martina Stawski, reviewed the latest K-pop singles and albums, commenting on the fashion and music videos trending in Korean pop culture. Their videos were (and still are) light, fluffy, and everything that makes YouTube special. Plus, their pets are adorable (and worth turning off your Google AdBlock plug-in to their support their channel).

What's your favorite channel on YouTube? Leave your interesting or creative responses in the comment section below.

Giphy


Shaun Harris is a poet, freelance writer, and editor published in avant-garde, feminist journals. Lover of warm-toned makeup palettes, psych-rock, and Hilton Als. Her work has allowed her to copyedit and curate content for various poetry organizations in the NYC area.



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