Kim Yu-Na is the famous Korean figure skater, currently the reigning world champion and record holder for high scores at the world championships.

Since I don't watch figure skating, the only place I have the privlege of seeing this national hero is in the Lotte Mart (box store) coupon book, smiling with brand-name yogurt in hand. No joke.

Very nearly every commercial on television, nearly every poster advertizement and internet pop-up, features a celebrity of some sort, ranging from movie stars to TV personalities to athletes. The west's celebrity worship doesn't hold a candle to South Korea's.
And the interesting thing: celebrities don't even think not to go commercial and hawk every product imaginable. From cars to food to booze to air conditioners to medicine, there's a celebrity-centered commercial for it on TV right now. And these people are as famous for their advertisements as they are for their career skill-set. Music videos double up as ad jingles very regularly; the new Big Bang (boy band) song "lollipop" is also the name of a new high-tech cell phone, and the video appears identically on the music channel as well as on regular channels in commercial form.

Anyway, if you thought you could go to Asia to escape the shallow corporate materialism of the west, then think again. It's even worse here.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Her name is 김연아~ It isn't 김유나 :)
5:30 AM
Max said…
Ah! Sorry, I was translating it into Korean from the english romanization via google, and those romanizations are never consistent!
3:27 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 58

I do fear, sometimes, that the act of pondering aloud has become a cathartic experience and nothing more . It is hard in this town to find a diversity of thought, because we've all been raised in very similar ways with the same norms, experiences, and conventions. I find that the mightiest opinions of some of the the twentysomethings I know are so damningly narrow that they cannot possibly stand to the slightest breeze of doubt. Often the biggest theory is the thinnest. Our shadows grow long and starved moments before they disappear under the sunset. The natural world has cursed us with its indifference, its vaccuum of conscience in which deeds neither good nor evil subsist. I find the urge to view our species of conscious and conscientious beings as alien. It is as though the world we inhabit was never intended for us to inhabit it. In short, this town is a box. This country, political system, individualistic ideology, humanist dogma, faux rebellion against imagined authority; it ...
Read more

Day 212

It is very true that the best people in the world at any discipline, skill, sport, instrument (etc). are never particularly well-rounded people. There should be, as my grandma mentioned over dinner last night, a competition for "well-roundedness" with international competitors. In order to win you'd have to be physically capable, perhaps musical and mathematical, moral and charitable, very learned, and so forth. And that's the interesting thing, the jacks of all trades get absolutely no attention from the peanut gallery. But on the contrary, they typically have the healthiest and happiest and most fulfilling of lives. I can't tell you how many young pianists I've met, for whom piano was the sole self-measure of pride and value. And, like all people who have themselves judged for one thing, they are utterly miserable, feeling highs and lows that appear and fade as quickly as do the passing opinions of strangers. --- On a tangent: some of the most miserable girl...
Read more

Day 168

You hear non-religious people say it all the time: "If only there was a God! That would honestly be great, if there was a supreme moral arbier in the universe looking out for my every action and running the universe with me in mind. It's really too bad there isn't." I used to say that, until I came across a few authors who vehemently claim that such a wish is, in reality, a wish for slavery. When we ask for the comfort of a god (or fantasize for it anyway) were asking for a kind of absolution that only the slave can have. And the price for that is extremely high. And still, there times when I do wish I were this sort of slave, though I no longer say so with a smile.
Read more