boston progress radio

Shuffled! is a special BPR column that appears every Thursday. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past shufflers.

Today’s Shuffler: Ed Lin

Ed Lin is the author of two novels, “Waylaid” and “This Is a Bust.” He has been widely praised in a broad range of publications, including Hyphen Magazine, Playboy, Booklist and Time Asia.

Ed was born in New York City and grew up in several different towns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Ed was an early member of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and a founding member of a nutty theater group, Peeling the Banana. He has also played bass for a number of questionable bands, the latest of which is Raven Steals the Light. Ed is a music nut, with thousands of records, 7-inch singles, minidiscs and CDs. And, apart from having a few ipods, he owns turntables, cassette players and HipZip players!

Ed can be reached at his web site http://www.edlinforpresident.com/ or at http://www.myspace.com/edlinforpresident. He says he’s on Facebook too—but you’ll have to find him.

Let’s see what he shuffled up… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.

with spring fever in full effect, there’s something in the air.

the past two weeks, there has been a jump in violence among the young people here in boston.  not so unusual for this time of year, as the weather gets nicer, people are finally allowed to occupy the public and push beyond their enclosed buildings.

in my neighborhood of jamaica plain alone, there have been 3 shootings, with one being fatal in the course of a few days, leading youth organizers, social justice orgs, city officials, cops, and residents to gather and dialogue.  as usual, it’s a series of rants of progressive neighborhood adults coming to testify on behalf of the youth, how they are misunderstood, how the cops are ineffective, how only now—when the shootings are creeping into the other side of the tracks—are city officials beginning to pay attention… all good points, but never any suggestions or strategies to address the root of this social violence.  and of course, the cops’ and politicians’ strategies are basic: more cops on duty (meaning more overtime, more money spend in the wrong places…)

the young people were straight up.  they said: “WE HAVE THE SOLUTION, we need more jobs for young people in the city of boston.”  simple. they got to the pressure point of the problem before the outcome of violence. their strategy was not reactive, but pro-active and preventative… but how to make this happen, and in a way that reaches a critical mass to alter the system has been a fight organizers have been tackling for a long, long time.

which brings me down a long winding road to this post and its relevancy to the apia community… with jobs being scarce and in dire need, you take what you can get, but when you have the privilege to choose your path, why take the one that’s “expected” or deemed “more valuable?” within the asian immigrant/refugee community there has always been a divide between jobs and professions, physical and mental labor, blue collar and white collar. 

my question is, where do the jobs with no-collar fit?  those jobs that transcend these old socialized notions of value… the type of work where you are engaged creatively, have no direct social structure of hierarchy or power, craft new programs without borders, invent job descriptions along the way… the type of job where you can’t be categorized and have the freedom to explore boundaries.  i’m talking about the community organizers, the freelance dreamers, the artists, poets, musicians, social entrepreneurs, the innovators, that put their nose to the grindstone day in and day out, but work from such a specialized skill set, it takes a lifetime to perfect.  

white collar vs. blue collar. i’ll take no-collar everyday.

Tags: Boston, Community, social expectations, youth.

I bumped into a buddy of mine on the T today and he mentioned to me how recently watching the Karate Kid 2 reminded him of his encounter with a certain Asian American celebrity. That got me thinking. I’m not a huge fan of making lists, but since my mind has been totally frazzled by my day job, I thought I would take a break from bits, bytes, and brain waves and make a list of “Famous Asian Americans I Want to Meet” in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. I use the term famous somewhat loosely here. Or maybe the people I admire are different from the people you admire.

Yuri Kochiyama. This woman needs no introduction. I have attended various talks where political activists talk about patriarchy, hegemony, colonialism, sexism, but I have never met an Asian American activist of her stature. I would love to be able to sit down and listen to her talk for 30 minutes. Just 30 minutes.
Read more

Tags: famous folks.

For many white people, the first time they ever heard of Q-Tip was when Deee-Lite dropped that crazy infectious single in 1990 “Groove is in the Heart.” Tip dropped like an 8 bar verse and appeared in the video as a body-less head doing the rappin rappin.

I do remember feeling marginally superior to white kids for being down with the Native Tongues. But that Deee-Lite song did turn me on to another musical figure for the first time, and that was DJ Towa Tei.

Weird mix that group was. The vocalist was some kinda trippy white lady, and the two DJs kinda saw their “foreign-ness” played up a little. One dude was a Russian cat with like a ponytail thing and the other was Towa Tei, dressed like a Japan-by-way-of-New-York/art school/club kid/pre-hipster type.

Read more

Tags: Appreciation.

Great timing! It’s Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and As I Am, the radio pilot from our friends over at UMass-Boston and the Institute for Asian American Studies, is going to be broadcasting nationwide at a public radio station near you.

Stations in North Carolina, Illinois, and now California will air As I Am this month. As I Am will be airing on none other than KQED, a public radio station in San Francisco. Check out their APAHM schedule if you want to hear it on KQED. I hope you’re as excited as we are because Boston Progress Radio was asked to help out with the music selection for the programming.

As I Am: Asians In America will be airing in the Boston area on May 18, 2008 at 7:30pm on 91.9FM WUMB Public Radio. As I Am can also be heard on 91.9FM WBPR Worcester, 91.9FM WFPB Falmouth, 91.7FM WNEF Newburyport, and 1170AM WFPB Orleans.

Of course, you can go listen to the pilot right now on the As I Am website. Tune in and enjoy the show with your Sunday brunch.

Tags: Boston, News, radio, San Francisco.

Congratulations Erik Spoelstra of the Miami Heat, for being the first-ever API head coach in the NBA!

You have a lot of work to do. Your team sucks dude. Sorry.

But it got me thinking, I know a lot of folks think Yao Ming was the first Asian NBA player, but he was third in a run of three from China, the first of which was Wang Zhi Zhi. The other - Mengke Bateer - ended up the first Asian player to win an NBA championship, when he did so as a member of the San Antonio Spurs. Around this time, there was Japanese-born Yuta Tabuse who played for the Phoenix Suns for about half a dozen games before he was bounced. (Much love to the Milwaukee Bucks’s Yi Jianlian, who was having an inconsistent, but generally ill rookie year before injury took him out for the end of it.

But anyway, many of us don’t realize there was an Asian American in the NBA before all of them. Oh yes!

Say hello Asian America to Rex Walters. Current head coach of the University of San Francisco men’s basketball team, and former Sixer/Heat/Net. But he was also a member of those Japanese American basketball leagues that have been one of the most consistent and constant sources of cultural connection for JAs in California for decades. (In fact, the homie Tad Nakamura made a movie about it…more on that another day.)

So raise your glasses of soju or grass jelly drink or, you know, Johnnie Walker to all the Asian ballers from front to back.

Oh, and I speak for most of us here at Boston Progress Radio when I say: go Celtics!

(And their API strength coach Bryan Doo.)

Tags: basketball.

So May is our Month. Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Like a lot of other things on the calendar, I’m not totally sold on the idea of having one month to celebrate our heritage. At least it’s not as bad or as commercialized as one day to say I love you, one day to recognize the work of mothers or one day to go out and spend a lot of money.

That being said, I do welcome the opportunity for us to collectively reflect on our heritage, to celebrate our accomplishments, and to get a chance to have a table at Barnes and Nobles that says “Asian American Literature” or maybe even a display in Tower Records that says “Music by Asian Americans.”

Here at BPR, we are going to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month by publishing a new post every day. Come discuss, reflect and share with us!!

Watch for Shuffled! every Thursday. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past shufflers.

Today’s Shuffler: Catzie Vilayphonh

Laotian American multi-talented spoken word artist Catzie Vilayphonh is the Fashion Director for two.one.five magazine where she also writes a weekly interview column called Catz Out The Bag. In the column, Catzie a.k.a. Catzuella questions all kinds of interesting folks from designers to directors and artists to actors. Previously, she was an editor at dorkmag.com, and a manager and assistant buyer at Ubiq.

When she’s not working at her day job, Catzie is one member of the spoken word group Yellow Rage. If y’all didn’t know they were featured on the first episodes of Def Poetry in 2000 (when it was actually still good). If you got the time, tune into their live interview here at Boston Progress Radio.

She’s been a citizen of Philly for nearly all her life and says she knows cheesesteaks like the back of her hand.

Now, on to the shuffle… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.