There’s a subtle arc to Jim Gavin’s first book, “Middle Men” (Simon & Schuster). Gathering seven stories largely set in Southern California, it opens with a high school basketball player and ends with Marty Costello, a plumbing supply salesman who “averages 50,000 miles per year, vast territories, circles of latitude, Inglewood to Barstow, sailing across SoCal, all day every day.”In between, we meet men of different ages, from Costello’s adult son Matt, also trying to make it in the plumbing sup

Books March 7, 2013

The Korea Herald is publishing “Korea’s Cultural Pride,” a 10-part series on the country’s cultural and natural heritage. A total of nine tangible and 14 intangible examples of heritage in Korea have already been designated UNESCO World Heritage items for international preservation. This year,15 cultural properties are on the tentative list, awaiting designation. This installment explores the Naganeupseong, Town Fortress and Village, in Suncheon, South Jeolla Province, which boast 600 years of h

Culture March 6, 2013

Ballet dancer Kang Ye-na enjoyed drawing cartoons while growing up, always featuring dancers as her protagonists. But she never knew she’d be designing ballet leotards decades later. The 39-year-old has debuted as a designer, after many years of dancing as a principal in the Universal Ballet Company (UBC). She launched her own dancewear brand “Yenaline” last month, introducing style-conscious leotards with vivid patterns and exuding a luster of colors.“For the last 10 years, I thought about what

Performance March 6, 2013

Kim Eun-ho, the head of local publishing house Hangilsa Publishing, has been appointed as the new chairman of Bookcity Culture Foundation, the organization said.Kim, who graduated from ChungAng University, worked as a reporter for major local daily Dong-A Ilbo from 1968 to 1975. He founded his publishing house Hangilsa Publishing in 1976, and has served a number of significant positions in the publishing industry ever since. In 2011, he served as the head of the Paju BookSori Festival’s organizi

Books March 5, 2013

For architects, it is like a huge, automated machine. For dancers and performers, it’s where they present their works and meet the audience. And for the rest of us, it is a place to enjoy stage entertainment. While most theatergoers focus on the performance rather than the venue itself, theaters can be seen and interpreted differently by those who work behind the scenes. Aside from the stage, the audience seats, the lobby and the ticket box, the property houses a number of closed spaces that ena

Performance March 4, 2013

The month of March opens here with the March 1 Independence Movement Day, a national holiday dedicated to commemorating the 1919 nationwide uprising against Japan’s colonization. The uprising, known as the March 1st Independence Movement, was one of the earliest public displays of Korean resistance against Japanese rule ― which ended in 1945 at the end of World War II.This month, Seoul’s theater scene is presenting a number of plays featuring the turbulent period of Korean history. One of them i

Performance Feb. 28, 2013

“Jack the Giant Slayer,” the latest phantasmagorical big-budget, special-effects film from “X-Men” director Bryan Singer, first got under way about three years ago. But back then it had a different director ― Singer replaced D.J. Caruso ― different writers (Singer brought in Christopher McQuarrie to rework the existing script) and even a different title: Somewhere along the line “Jack the Giant Killer” became “Jack the Giant Slayer,” and while “Fee, fi, fo, fum” is still in the script, no one sa

Film Feb. 28, 2013

Liberal arts and leadership education are crucial in today’s rapidly changing world, said the president of Claremont McKenna College, a prestigious liberal arts college in Claremont, California, noted for its leadership development programs.“Liberal arts is teaching you life-time skills,” said Pamela Brooks Gann, the president of CMC, during an interview with The Korea Herald in Seoul. “It’s teaching you critical thinking. Most of the hard problems that have to be solved today are interdisciplin

National Feb. 27, 2013

Fox International Productions’ first locally produced film was finally unveiled on Tuesday, featuring Park Chan-wook’s “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” star Shin Ha-gyun in the lead.An international production umbrella unit of America’s major film production house Fox Filmed Entertainment, FIP produces and distributes local language films around the globe. Known as one of the world’s largest producers and distributors of motion pictures, Fox blockbusters include “Avatar,” “Titanic” and “Star Wars.”T

Film Feb. 26, 2013

Park Chan-wook describes his ability as “more than perfect.” Actress Mia Wasikowska said working with him was so “easy and seamless.”Of the many who worked behind the camera for Park Chan-wook’s Hollywood debut “Stoker,”  one of its co-producers and interpreter Jeong Won-jo is the one who witnessed the English-language film’s production from the very beginning to the end. Throughout the project, he was the famed director’s “all-around aide-de-camp”; all of Park’s directions were delivered to the

Film Feb. 24, 2013

Keri Russell’s “comeback year” has the feel of a reinvention, a re-branding of the dainty young lovely who burst on the scene with “Felicity” back in the last century. But as different as her flinty mom in the new film “Dark Skies” might seem, as dangerous and “out there” as her Born Again Bolshevik sleeper spy is in TV’s “The Americans,” she refuses to label her return to public view a career makeover.“The great think about disappearing is that people forget about you a little bit,” Russell say

Film Feb. 22, 2013

What a conversation it was.The Book of Job. Hippos. The road life. The writer’s life (which, more and more these days, is the road life). Philly. Iowa. Rutgers. Bryn Mawr. Florida. Kafka. Dorothy Day. George Saunders (more on him later). Sharing an apartment with your sister. A bumper-car arcade of ideas and language.Such is an hour of talk with writer Karen Russell, sitting around her apartment near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sparkling notion-eruptions and prismed, faceted phrases. Her 201

Books Feb. 21, 2013

PhantomBy Jo Nesbø(Knopf)I once suggested that some Nordic crime novels are Jackie Collins or Harold Robbins with enough mildly leftist musing thrown in to make readers feel intellectually respectable. One reply to that comment put it this way:“It’s why I think ‘Downton Abbey’ does so well in this country, too. It’s basically an absurdly trashy soap opera, a notch or two down from the magnificent ‘Days of Our Lives,’ but because it’s on PBS and they’re speaking with English accents, it’s somehow

Books Feb. 21, 2013

Nora Guthrie had put off reading her late father Woody Guthrie’s recently unearthed novel, “House of Earth,” even after she’d agreed for it to be published. Having devoted much of 2012 to preparing events and projects surrounding the centennial of the singer-songwriter-artist’s birth, she said, she wanted to read the book at her leisure, when it wouldn’t feel like “work.”So it wasn’t until last fall that she started in on the manuscript’s pages and soon reached the lengthy, graphic sex scene in

Books Feb. 21, 2013