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Category Archives: About LKL

The Euro Journal LKL interview

10-Aug-08

The Euro Journal LKL interview

Jeon Sung-min recently interviewed LKL’s blogger-in-chief for an article in the Euro Journal. The interview was conducted in English, and he translated it into Korean for publication in the newspaper. Here’s a slightly polished-up transcript of the interview, published with Jeon Sung-min’s kind permission. Euro Journal: How and when did you get interested in Korea and Korean culture? Philip: In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was lucky enough to work at one of the leading accounting firms. One of my favourite clients was the first European investment fund permitted to invest directly in the Korean market – the Korea Europe Fund. That got me started. They were always expanding because the Korean market was booming, and whenever they issued new ...
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LKL featured in Euro Journal (유로저널)

25-Jul-08

LKL featured in Euro Journal (유로저널)

I recently had a heavy soju and singing session with Jeon Sung-min (below right), who as well has being one half of a well-known kayageum / guitar duo and nephew of the founder of 해바라기 (Sunflower) is also a feature writer at the Euro Journal (유로저널), a Korean language weekly newspaper distributed in Koreatowns in Europe (also available online). Before attacking the soju in earnest we had a good chat about Korean culture and what I’m aiming to do with LKL. The interview went on for rather longer than anticipated, and so what was intended to be a standard one-pager ended up being spread over two or three weeks. The first episode appears in this week’s Euro Journal, available online here for ...
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The London Korean Links Facebook Group

16-Feb-08
Hi all I've recently set up an LKL Facebook group. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it, but obviously it's a place where you can meet other people who are LKL readers. One thing I will be using it for, though, is to send out emails with notifications of Korea-related events in London and the UK. For those of you who don't read this blog every day it will get the important news into your inbox. I already send out a monthly events email (identical to my beginning-of-the-month Upcoming Events post) to various contacts, but the mailing list is increasingly difficult to manage. If you join the Facebook group, you'll get that email, plus ad hoc updates when ...
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The LKL P&L

25-Jan-08
As one or two readers will know, in my work like I started, like Daeguowl and Jenny, as an accountant. So here is an entirely non-IFRS-compliant statement of LKL's activities for 2007. 1 Revenues As many readers may appreciate, the object of this website is not to make money. And because I prefer to have control over the look of the site I don't like having javascript ads all over the place. This means that my initial blog was ad-free, and when I joined Google Adsense in the second half of 2006, the advertising panels I introduced were extremely low-profile (as were, inevitably, the resulting revenues). Moving to version 3 of my blog templates ...
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Welcome to a new guest contributor

21-Jul-07
I'd like to thank Susan Pares for stepping into the breach today to report from the opening of the new exhibition of art from the DPRK. I wish I could have been there myself. Thank you, Susan, and also to Jim Hoare for some additional material Related posts:Welcome to a new contributor I’d like to welcome a new contributor to this site....Welcome to another new contributor I’m very grateful to Jennifer Barclay for joining the ranks...Artists, Art and Culture of D. P. R. Korea By Susan Pares For what is said to be the... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
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Welcome to another new contributor

18-Jun-07
I'm very grateful to Jennifer Barclay for joining the ranks of distinguished LKL guest contributors. In what I hope will be the first of many contributions, she's done a tremendous job of turning around a 1,000+ word article in a couple of hours to bring you a lively account of yesterday's festival in Trafalgar Square. Enjoy. Jennifer first contacted LKL a couple of months ago, and because she's in the publishing business and is also a writer (she has written a travel book on Korea which hopefully will hit the bookstores in due course) I immediately spotted a resource that I could shamelessly exploit. Fortunately, she was very willing to join the team. She was a valued member of the group ...
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LKL’s first birthday

09-Apr-07
Well, I've been going for slightly longer than a year, but 9 April 2006 was when I first tentatively launched the site on its current WordPress platform. The original idea came to me in early February, and I started writing the permanent pages on 16 February. After a brief trial in my personal webspace which came with my broadband package, LKL first appeared on 2 March 2006. For loyal readers who've been with me from the start, thanks for staying with me. For the nostalgic, here's what the site looked like in its former incarnation on Microsoft Publisher. Will I have the energy to keep going another year? Who knows. This site is taking up more and more time, and I've ...
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Welcome to two new contributors

10-Feb-07
Firstly, my apologies to Peter Corbishley for not welcoming him earlier. Peter kindly did the write-up of the Korea Business Reception while I was on my travels, and I hope he will contribute again in the future: he's a loyal follower of the various Korean cultural events in London. And welcome to Anna Lindgren from the Stuck with Free Music blog. Today she contributes a feature on the underground band Bloody Cookie. I hope she will introduce us to other interesting sounds from the Korean music scene. Visit her blog to find out what else she's listening to. Welcome, and thanks, to you both. Related posts:Contributors Here are the people who regularly contribute to LKL (or...New indie music sites Those who keep an ...
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New! Broadsheet BlogWatch

29-Jan-07
Following yesterday's flashy launch of Celebrity BlogWatch, a more sober RSS aggregation page: Broadsheet BlogWatchTM. The blogs aggregated here don't have pictures. They're the more serious ones. At the moment I'm taking feeds from the Froginawell Korean History Project, Darcy's Koreanfilm.org what's new page, and Mark Russell's Korea Pop Wars. If there are any other blogs out there which you think merit inclusion, let me know. The criteria are that the blog is more about Korea than about the author, and that the political coverage is limited or preferably zero. Also launching today in beta version is Tabloid BlogWatch, because actually Celebrity BlogWatchTM doesn't cover all your tabloid needs. It doesn't, for example, give you the Marmot's coverage of the opening ...
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Welcome to a new contributor

05-Dec-06
I'd like to welcome a new contributor to this site. Beccy Kennedy first visited this site a few weeks ago asking to be put in touch with Korean artists in the UK and with Korean societies in Manchester. Once again daeguowl came up with the answers. But it didn't take me long to spot that she had some specialist skills which this site needs: as you will know I have no special skills but lots of enthusiasm, so when it comes to specialist areas like the visual arts I'm floundering. Beccy studied Korean and Japanese History of Art and Archaeology at SOAS and now is doing a PhD, examining protest in contemporary Korean art at MIRIAD in Manchester. In which ...
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Fame at last?

25-Nov-06
Thanks to UK fan for letting me know that a (thankfully) heavily-edited version of my recent interview aired today on YTN as part of a bigger piece on the hallyu in the UK. The Times's recent Korean supplement was featured, as were Korean footballers in the premier league. They also interviewed Mr Choi who will be heading London's new Korean Cultural Centre. Best of all, though, they edited out all my clueless fumblings in a ten minute interview and just left the bit where I plugged Alice Bennell's campaign to get Dae Jang Geum on the BBC, and where I said I thought it would be a great idea to have the Pororo Christmas Special on TV as well. They ...
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My chance of media fame. Blown

27-Oct-06
At around 4:40pm on Monday afternoon I get a phone call on my mobile. It's from the Chosun 24 hour TV channel. They had my card from the Typhoon screening a couple of weeks back, when they were interviewing anyone they could find. They wanted to do another interview. A ten minute one. But I had an appointment to go off to right then to try to persuade someone to do something they didn't want to do, so I said: call back later. I got a voicemail later that evening that the subject of the interview was the future of Korean content in the UK. At 3pm the next day. Vanity got the better of me and I thought: what the ...
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Ratings for reviews

07-Aug-06
You may have noticed that I've started giving ratings to the books / CDs I'm reviewing. It's just a bit of fun really, and not meant to be at all scientific. Over time I'll go back and give ratings to all the books etc that I've reviewed already. The ratings are entirely subjective, and go from 0 (Stern(0,g)) to 5 stars (Stern(10,g)), in increments of a half. Obviously 5 stars is the best and equates to 10 out of 10. The ratings are basically a reflection of how much enjoyment I got from reading the book, watching the film or listening to the CD, and consequently how much I would recommend the experience to another generalist person in the street. The ratings ...
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Thanks for the mention - but you missed someone

05-Jun-06
Every City worker, or at least every sensible one I've come across, whether they be lawyer, accountant, banker or whatever, longs to be involved in non-City things. Most of them, given the chance, would give it up and take up garden design, travel the world, do something arty, charitable, anything so long as it involved escape from the Square Mile. In my own, very small, way I achieved something last week: my first and probably last credit in the catalogue of a show at a West End art gallery. I helped Stephanie with some of the text for display on the walls of the Air Gallery Traditional Yet Contemporary show. And she duly acknowledged this in the catalogue, along with the ...
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The cost of news

23-Apr-06
I thought I might investigate the cost of a subscription to the Yonhap News service. I'm a bit stingy when it comes to paying for things on the web, and would never consider paying for FT.com; but if it's going to be cheap then I might consider it. So I shoot off an email to Yonhap to see how much it's going to cost. I get the answer today. $350 per month. PER MONTH. That's around 10 Region 3 DVDs per month, PLUS a pint of London Pride per day. So am I going to subscribe? No, there are too many films I want to see, and I like my Pride. So I'll just have to make do with the all ...
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