AI Literacy: Boundaries and Limits on AI Use

 

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Bangtan Hermana Notes: To be called, ARMY

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Bangtan Hermana Notes: Singing Beyond Empire

@rkive posted on IG Story the facade of the building where the APEC CEO Summit is held. This is today, October 29, 2025. @rkive, RM, Kpop Idol, Kim Namjoon of BTS, our Leader Nim will deliver a keynote speech. As he stands before the world’s business and political elite at the APEC CEO Summit in Korea, I reflect on the importance and significance of this moment, for South Korea and its management of the arts as an economic force, for countries in Asia that has a history of colonization and imperial influence, and for ARMY a diverse fandom who can approach this milestone with nuance.

At first glance, this might look like another victory for K-culture, another proof that Korean creativity has “made it” into the halls of power. But if we pause and listen with the ears of those who know his story, and the story of Bangtan, we might hear something more radical humming beneath the polite applause and our enormous pride as ARMY.

RM’s presence at APEC unsettles the very logic that built such summits. APEC is a space born of global capitalism and postcolonial hierarchies, where nations compete to sell, to produce, to consume. And here stands an artist whose body of work has long questioned those same systems; an artist who insists that the self is not just a brand, that creativity is not only a just commodity, that love and integrity are forms of resistance.

Through his words and his art, RM redefines what it means to lead, to represent, to succeed. He enters this space not to reinforce empire, but to remind it of its humanity. His talk on “Cultural and Creative Industries in the APEC Region and the Soft Power of K-Culture” invites us to rethink: What if power is not in the market, but in meaning? What if the truest form of growth is not economic, but ethical, relational, and imaginative?

For some of us, ARMYs, those who came to care and to think through their music, this moment is not simply pride in seeing “one of ours” on a global stage. It’s an act of reclamation. RM’s participation gestures toward a decolonial imagination, where artists from the once-colonized world speak not as cultural exports, but as equals shaping discourse, redefining value, and unsettling the West’s monopoly on modernity.

In a summit of CEOs and ministers, RM represents something that cannot be quantified: a people’s longing to be seen and to create freely, beyond the binaries of consumer and producer, colonizer and colonized. He stands not as the product of a system, but as its quiet critique. This is proof that art can inhabit power without surrendering its soul.

And maybe that’s why we, the ARMY who read between the lyrics, are moved. Because in that brief moment on the APEC stage, the story of Bangtan, our seven boys who turned their wounds into wonder, becomes the story of all of us still learning to sing beyond empire.

Apobangpo! Purple and true! 

Library Display: Mental Health Month at the Library

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ARMY of Bangtan Book Club: Basquiat’s Crown, Namjoon’s Voice

I can’t help but smile at the juxtaposition of Basquiat’s crowned dinosaur appearing beside Namjoon as he talks about art in a Samsung Art TV feature. The image feels serendipitous! Basquiat’s bold creature of selfhood meeting BTS’s message of self-love. Both carry that same beat: the courage to be raw, to be seen, to be yourself, even when the world insists otherwise.

Interestingly, Maya Angelou’s poem “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” was published as a picture book with Basquiat’s art. Her fearless verses wrapped in his fierce lines and bold colors. Angelou’s voice, like Namjoon’s, speaks of resilience; Basquiat’s brush, like BTS’s music, insists that vulnerability is power.

Namjoon, BTS, Maya Angelou, and Jean-Michel Basquiat — what a combination! Radical. Revolutionary. And utterly romantic in their shared belief that to live artfully is to live bravely.

Life Doesn't Frighten Me

By Maya Angelou

Shadows on the wall
Noises down the hall
Life doesn't frighten me at all

Bad dogs barking loud
Big ghosts in a cloud
Life doesn't frighten me at all

Mean old Mother Goose
Lions on the loose
They don't frighten me at all

Dragons breathing flame
On my counterpane
That doesn't frighten me at all.

I go boo
Make them shoo
I make fun
Way they run
I won't cry
So they fly
I just smile
They go wild

Life doesn't frighten me at all.

Tough guys fight
All alone at night
Life doesn't frighten me at all.

Panthers in the park
Strangers in the dark
No, they don't frighten me at all.

That new classroom where
Boys all pull my hair
(Kissy little girls
With their hair in curls)
They don't frighten me at all.

Don't show me frogs and snakes
And listen for my scream,
If I'm afraid at all
It's only in my dreams.

I've got a magic charm
That I keep up my sleeve
I can walk the ocean floor
And never have to breathe.

Life doesn't frighten me at all
Not at all
Not at all.

Life doesn't frighten me at all.

© by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes

Poetry: Love in Fragments

 

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Listening to the Hum of the Universe

This October, as we celebrate Indigenous Peoples Month, I shared our story, A Tale of Two Dreams (Lampara, 2013) at my workshop with the Gokongwei Brothers Foundation earlier today. 

It’s about a Mangyan child who dreams of a land he can farm and call home, while his friend dreams of seeing other lands far away. My friend Bernadette Solina Wolf—who illustrated the book—told me during our process of creation: “The Mangyan’s attachment to the land is not ownership. It is who they are.”

Having lived among the Mangyan, she understands the wisdom of our Indigenous people — a wisdom that preceded the knowledge of empire. But conquest came, and when colonial powers divided the land, they broke something deeper than borders: memory, and the knowing that we belong to the earth and are shaped by it. Being colonized meant that belonging turned into ownership, and kinship into control. Yet, the earth has a way of calling us back. 

That call resounds in Frankfurt, through the presence of our artists and storytellers: Rosie Sula, chanting with the Madrigal Singers, Renato Evangelista, carrying the ambahan of the Hanunuo Mangyan — slow, reflective, respectful; Darwin Absari, whose verse bridges Lumad, Moro, and Filipino worlds; and Kidlat Tahimik, our joyful indio-genius, whose films and creations remind the world that imagination thrives even in the power of empire. To reduce this to a mere trade fair is to silence the truth that every chant, every poem, every film born of our soil is already an act of freedom. 

Others call their presence at the Buchmesse as complicity, but it can also be a form of returning. Back to a place called home, before empire drew its lines and built hierarchies. Back to belonging, before ownership replaced kinship. Back to listening to the hum of the universe so we can sing our songs again.

#PHGOH #frankfurtbuchmesse2025 #indigenouspeoplesmonth