“Spaghetti, Wrapping the Earth” (M2 YouTube channel)
Yee Siyeon: “Born in fire, passing through water—the strand that landed on a plate!” It’s a prelude so grand it could be the opening to a legend, but what it’s really talking about is none other than spaghetti. “Spaghetti, Wrapping the Earth” is a heartfelt special that hopes to help in establishing World Spaghetti Day, a dream shared by people around the world and championed by LE SSERAFIM. The title might make it sound like a current affairs program, but it’s actually the girl group’s comeback show on Mnet and M2 marking the release of their single “SPAGHETTI.” “Spaghetti, Wrapping the Earth” represents a new kind of Mnet comeback show—one filled with variety show skits centered around the theme of spaghetti. The show’s first segment, taking place in a so-called “flirting hell restaurant,” features popular comedian Eom Jiyoon’s alter ego, handsome and gentle influencer chef Eom Jihoon. With their cameras rolling KIM CHAEWON and HONG EUNCHAE drop by Jihoon’s restaurant, Got The Um, where they’re greeted by flirty waitstaff member KAZUHA, who charmingly announces that “guests  who are way brighter than our lights just showed up.” Meanwhile, HUH YUNJIN comes in to interview for a part-time job, only to encounter delivery worker SAKURA, whose own flirting skills are on another level. The LE SSERAFIM members take their roles and the shameless flirtation in the skit seriously, with hilariously clever performances.

The next segment adds to the spaghetti lore with chef Kwon Sung-jun, who won “Culinary Class Wars” under the name Napoli Matfia. Kwon prepares a special dish for the group called Mala-fim spaghetti, and they’re allowed only a brief taste test before being given just 60 minutes to perfectly recreate the dish in what the show calls the Decalcomanie kitchen challenge. While it might feel like this is simply a culinary reality show parody, the true appeal lies in watching the five LE SSERAFIM members’ personalities shine through in the process from cooking to presenting their final spaghetti creations. The five spaghetti dishes they create reflect the main metaphor linking the noodle to the group that fills their single’s chorus through wordplay in lines like “Stuck between your teeth, that’s SPAGHETTI” and “Stuck in your mind, that’s SSERAFIM.” When SAKURA realizes too late that she forgot to include cheese in her ingredients, for instance, her hopes are briefly dashed until she draws on her bottomless determination and secures some cheese from KAZUHA to give her concoction the extra kick it needs. HUH YUNJIN and KAZUHA, meanwhile, decide they’re “not following along” with the usual approach and “just going with my gut.” Saying they “just went my own way,” they go wild with the garlic and cheese, and even throw in some tomato sauce that wasn’t part of the recipe. From SAKURA and HONG EUNCHAE’s perfectionist spaghetti, to HUH YUNJIN and KAZUHA’s decision to take the “my way” approach, and KIM CHAEWON’s hot-as-Sichuan creation, it’s all undeniably LE SSERAFIM flavored. “Spaghetti, Wrapping the Earth” shows so much of how amusing the group members can be that it’s enough to wrap not just FEARNOT but the entire world up in their charm.

“choke enough” deluxe edition (Oklou)
Kim Doheon (music critic): Avril Alvarez, avril23, Lou du Lagon, Loumar … Ten years have passed since Poitiers, France native Marylou Vanina Mayniel, trained in classical piano and cello at a music conservatory, left all these noms de plume behind and settled on Oklou. Oklou’s trajectory mirrors those of countless underground musicians who freely uploaded their work to the Internet throughout the 2010s. She’s an innovator who’s connected with emerging Parisian DJs and musicians, like Sega Bodega and Shygirl, to probe the limits of pop through electronic music.

Her first studio album, “choke enough,” takes an existential attitude toward capturing her experiences with growth and survival. Or maybe you can say it’s an album that does its very best to capture them. The album sees producers working hard to carry on the legacy of artificially constructed nature sounds, mysterious ambient and electronic music, surreal fairy tales and animation, European folk songs, and PC Music. To live in the world today is to exist in multiple versions of the present, and “choke enough” asks us what it means to exist, and to really live, in both the real and digital worlds. The album and the questions it raises were praised in critical circles and described by Pitchfork as a “foggy” and “muffled ambience” of “metamorphic trance,” and the deluxe edition that came out on October 30 drives the feelings of uncertainty home. New tracks include “viscus”—a collaboration with FKA twigs where all the conflict and emotion wrapped up in the human body intertwine—and reinterpretations of three of Oklou’s previously released songs. “I don’t see why I should take” my earlier work away, she says. “Some of it is not good, but it’s normal. It’s part of the process. I’m not ashamed of it.” The sentiment comes across in her album, where she metaphorically links a suffocating reality to an innocent young musician who became a mother and realized how even the Internet—the place she turned in her loneliest hour—can’t last forever. There exists a whole forest of time and space, made beautiful because it’s unattainable. Oklou’s flickering glitch fantasy leaves a chilling impression on the landscape of the pop music of today. Be sure to check out her climactic, liberating acoustic “Tiny Desk” set, too.

“James” (Percival Everett)
Kim Boksung (writer): Like so many “classics reimagined,” author Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “James” seeks to bring justice to a marginalized character from the literary canon. The titular James here is the slave better known as Jim in Mark Twain’s classic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Told from Jim’s perspective this time around, the action in Everett’s version kicks off when Jim escapes his slave owner as the first part of a bigger plan to free his family. The major twist in this 21st-century telling is that Jim’s apparently unsophisticated view of the world is really a persona he puts on in the interest of self-preservation, and turns out to be an incredibly well-read individual when he isn’t feigning ignorance to avoid the wrath of white people. (Luckily, when he accidentally breaks character, it’s in front of the sympathetic Huck that Twain’s original novel is named for—the delirium that leads to this revelation in some way reminiscent of a particular scene out of the TV series “Beef.”)

As a testament to the author’s writing prowess, the story has its share of action and comedy, but it’s really an emotionally charged book about philosophy and empathy in a dark period of US history. Arguably, the reason the book was written today is because, as it repeatedly points to, slavery continues to exist in different forms even long after it’s legally abolished. “James” fits nicely between a reading of “Huckleberry Finn” and some historical nonfiction.