June 6: All International Edition

Menswear Moment: I already have a favorite piece of Korean popular culture, a television drama called variously Secret Agent Miss Oh or Call of the Country. I cannot understand what is being said, of course, but the set-up is quite "readable":

Oh Ha Na is a lowly policewoman who lacks a sense of duty and believes that it is worth bending the rules in order to achieve your aims. She meets and begins to investigate Go Jin Hyuk, an elite intelligence agent, and they clash instantly based on their different morals. Their initial dislike of each other masks their romantic attraction, but this development is hindered by the existence of Choi Eun Seo, Jin Hyuk’s first love.

So far, so standard. But what captures my attention is the actor who plays Go Jin Hyuk, Ryu Jin, and the fashion-forward style that was conceptualized for his character. The 37-year-old Ryu Jin is really insanely handsome, and gets to wear one creative, dashing outfit after another. He even sports Thom Browne-style highwaters and almost reconciles me to them. Here is Ryu with his co-star Lee Soo Kyung (quite lovely, but her character seems annoying even through the language barrier). Notice the crest on the blazer:

(Apologies, by the way, for getting the names of the actors in the series mixed up when I first posted this; I was relying on a Korean television website in English and copied the error from them. For all I know, they may have the character names screwed up, too.) 

True local popular culture often travels with considerably more difficulty than international high culture; paradoxically, it requires a lot more explaining for a distant audience, even though it is not meant to be consumed with great deliberation. However, there are an ever-growing number of resources to help you navigate genres as unfamiliar as "Arabic Lounge," which has a new Rough Guide:

http://www.soundroots.org/2010/05/monday-mp3-chill-casbah.html

Michael Orthofer is extremely entertained by the Egyptian novelist Mohamed El-Bisatie's Over the Bridge:

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/egypt/bisatie2.htm

While Arabic Literature (in English) provides teasers for recent Arabic novels that are not yet in English, to whet your appetite:

http://arablit.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/reviews-of-books-not-yet-in-english/ 

The Uruguayan artist Alexandro Garcia has a flare for the fantastic:

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2010/06/im-gonna-meet-you-on-astral-plane.html

Garcia's Russian contemporary Tatiana Plakhova -- they were both born in the Seventies -- is working in patterned abstractions in blacks, silvers, golds:

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2010/06/04/folk-complexity-by-tatiana-plakhova/

http://www.behance.net/Gallery/FOLK-COMPLEXITY/492245

Sergey Skuratov Architects has contributed a lively new building to the Moscow landscape, Barkly Plaza:

http://www.archdaily.com/62664/barkly-plaza-sergey-skuratov-architects/

Jacob Mikanowski of the Bright Lights Film Journal discovered some fine films at the Warsaw Documentary Festival:

The two films that made the deepest impression on me – The Miscreants of Taliwood, by George Gittoes, about the film industry in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, and Nénette, by Nicolas Philibert, about an elderly female orangutan in Paris’ Jardin des Plantes Zoo – were almost diametrically opposed in terms of subject matter and approach. A professor of mine used to say there were two kinds of historian: those who approach their subject from the vantage point of a skydiver, and those that examine it with the eyes of a truffle hunter. The same holds true for documentaries; these two films work at those extremes.  

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/blog/2010/06/warsaw-doc-festival.html

Among notables born on this date are novelists Thomas Mann, Eliza Orzeszkowa (Poland), and Jin Yong (China), poets Alexander Pushkin and Henry John Newbolt, playwrights Pierre Corneille and Harvey Fierstein, journalist Alexander Cockburn, composers Vincent Persichetti, Aram Khachaturian (Armenia), and Louis Andriessen (Netherlands), conductor Klaus Tennstedt, jazz saxophonist Jimmie Lunceford, singer/songwriter Gary U.S. Bonds, folk singer Holly Near, painters John Trumbull and Diego Velasquez, film director Chantal Akerman (Belgium), baseball player Bill Dickey, tennis player Bjorn Borg, American patriot Nathan Hale, explorer Robert Falcon Scott, and actors Sunil Dutt, Billie Whitelaw, Sandra Bernhard, Jason Isaacs, Dana Carvey, and Paul Giamatti. When I compile the birthdays -- which will run through December 26 of this year, so that I complete a year's cycle -- I often come across fascinating-sounding figures that I knew little or nothing about, such as the Chinese martial arts novelists Jin Yong (b. 1924). He wrote a massive cycle of 15 fictions set between the 6th century BC and the18th century that are beginning to appear in English translations -- one of the novels, The Deer and the Cauldron, takes up three volumes in its publication by the Oxford University Press.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinyong