boston progress radio

In this podcast, you can listen to clips of songs by two artists who have long been on BPR and continue to put various shades of color into my days: Florence Yoo & Asobi Seksu. They both have distinct vocals and instrumentals that dazzle me, each in their own fascinating ways.

Here are the titles of the songs you’ll hear: Florence Yoo – “I Always Hopes That You Loved Me”, “The Car Song” and “Hello Hello”; Asobi Seksu – “Sooner” and “Walk on the Moon”. All these tracks are available from the iTunes Store. Two of Florence’s CDs are available from CD Baby, and Asobi Seksu merch can be purchased through their website.

 Impressions: Florence Yoo & Asobi Seksu [10:58m]: Download

Tags: Impressions, music, Podcasts.

There’s a fast-growing trend in the world of sports that many people are ignoring. You may have noticed it, and not given it much thought, so I’m gonna put it out there right now.

South Asians dominate the world of competitive spelling.

You may have heard that 13 year-old Kavya Shivashankar (representing Kansas. Word?) recently won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, an annual gathering of the best young spellers in the nation. What you likely did not hear is that desis have been winning this thing on the regular for years. After doing a rudimentary scanning of their names, it seems that 7 of this year’s 11 finalists are of South Asian descent: Ramya Auroprem, Aishwarya Pastapur, Kavya Shivashankar, Sidharth Chand, Tussah Heera, Neetu Chandak, and Anamika Veeramani.

Glancing back through the annals, it looks like brown folks have been coming out on top for years – including this year, 5 of the last 8 champions appear (again, based on name) to be South Asian. And of course, the biggest star in Scripps history is Samir Patel (aka the Dan Marino of Spelling), who has never won, but placed 3rd when he was the most adorable 9 year-old ever. (He also placed 2nd two years later, but wasn’t as cute by then.)

ESPN may soon be doing articles about “the disappearing white American speller” – just like they did about the NBA last year.

But yall need to accept it America! Someone is better at your language than you are!

I’ve been busy these days toiling away with my scholarly pursuits and haven’t had much time to write for this beloved blog. The recent news of Professor Ronald Takaki’s passing made me pause for a moment and turn away from my tasks for the day.

Over the next few days, you will hear much about the many contributions that Ronald Takaki has made to the field of American History, to the fields of Multicultural and Ethnic Studies, to our collective knowledge about ourselves as a people. He has revisioned much of American History with his seminal texts, “A Different Mirror” and “Strangers from a Different Shore.” He has deconstructed stereotypes and been a champion for affirmative action. So I won’t talk about it much here. There is much you can learn about Dr. Takaki from his books, but there is even more you can learn by listening to a lecture or by having a conversation with him.

I never took a class from Ronald Takaki. In fact, I’ve never taken a class in American Ethnic Studies or Asian American Studies, but I knew about Ronald Takaki. I was fortunate to attend a couple of his lectures that he delivered. The first time I saw Professor Takaki was when he ventured to my alma mater, the University of Washington, to talk about Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor. He spoke about why Truman decided to bomb Hiroshima. The next time I attended one of his lectures, it was at Northeastern University. This time, he focused on identity politics, and how Asian Americans see themselves. In both talks, though, the real subject matter, in my opinion, was epistemology and pedagogy: How do we know what we know? How have we learned what we have learned? The history, the identity politics, they only served as backdrops to those questions.

I was fortunate enough to talk to him for a bit after his lecture. I don’t actually remember the details of the conversation. I told him what I was doing, mentioned that I was a fan of his work, and said that I was truly inspired by what he had accomplished. Maybe I could have learned more about his vision for America, maybe I could have gotten his perspective on history, maybe I could have asked him about the basics of surfing. But in that moment, I was just starry eyed. Yeah, it was a man crush made in heaven.

Sometimes I wonder what America would be like if Takaki had decided not to go to Wooster College… he almost didn’t go. Well, he probably would have become one of the best Asian American surfers evar! But thankfully for America, he did go to college. Thank you Professor Takaki for opening our minds, for teaching us how to think critically, and for helping us validate our experiences as American. Thank you.

Tags: In memory of.

Hi loyal readers. You may have noticed that many of the regular contributors to BPRLive have not been contributing much recently. Thankfully, Sudo has been more than holding his own and keeping content fresh. I think with the rise of Twitter and inevitable craziness that comes with the arrival of spring – plus the fact that members of the Boston Progress family (Sejal, Emily, Scott, Tula) are in the process of moving away for good – it’s been hard to get people to spend more than 30 seconds writing anything for the Internets.

Enough excuses. We’ll write what we write when we write it. And today I decided to throw something up about this mark-ass buster named Alec Baldwin. I always had a pretty high opinion of Alec Baldwin – he’s a very talented actor (remember his scene in Glengarry Glen Ross? Greatest seven minute cameo in the history of cinema…) and actually has used his celebrity for some stuff that most high-profile stars would not do, like calling Dick Cheney a terrorist, then taking it back and calling him a “lying, thieving oil whore.” Not to mention he puts on a comedic-acting clinic every Thursday on “30 Rock.”

So I thought he was a dude you could actually feel good about liking until he went on Letterman and made a joke about wanting a “Filipino mail-order bride…or a Russian one” so he could have more children.

Yuk it up fellas. And then remember Susana Remerata was killed at 25 years-old by the husband who mail-ordered her from the Philippines in 1995. She was seven months pregnant at the time, and her two friends were also killed. Or Anastasia King – 20 year-old from Kyrgyzstan, I guess she’d be the “Russian one” Baldwin talked about – was strangled to death by the husband who ordered her.

I understand people do say ignorant things sometimes, and it doesn’t make them villains. It means they made a mistake, and they usually apologize and it blows over. This isn’t about that.

What this is about is that our world is corrupt that there is a thriving industry of buying and selling people- in these cases, young women – after which, they end up in a new country speaking a new language, with usually very little understanding of what rights they have (t)here. It’s fairly common for American men to “order” a bride, repeatedly assault and rape her, then have the marriage annulled on the grounds that she deceived the man into marriage, so the courts will send her back to where she came from.

What is so disturbing about it all is that anyone could think it was appropriate to joke about situations that are nothing less than tragic.

I don’t have time to tend my garden. I might have to purchase 4 or 5 slaves from Africa. HAHA!

In our American society, I get the feeling that people think it’s cool to joke about it because they assume the “grooms” in these situations are loner fat dudes holed up in their basements, who are essentially harmless. They ignore the fact that these lovable losers repeatedly commit acts of emotional and physical violence against a human being who has no real agency in that “relationship.”

Part of me is surprised we aren’t in a place in history when we realize that a “Filipino mail-order bride” isn’t a punchline.

Tags: News.

The other day, Sudo posted Emily Lawsin’s list of essential API* movies and it made me think about what would be on my list. So ta-da!

A little bit of background though: before I became the writer or whatever I am today, I was obsessed with film. Something about being involved with filmmaking was so romantic to me, and I made a few short videos in college, and played small production roles on some other semi-professional and professional projects. After college, I joined the DC APA Film Festival in its infancy, where I met the great George Lin; from there, my involvement in API* arts scenes grew and grew.

So here is my top 10 list of essential API* films (absolutely biased):

10. Yellow
A classic of Asian American film. BLT and F&F heads, this is the direct ancestor, and in my opinion, it will never be topped. There are only so many things you can do in a movie about the lives of teens, and Yellow does almost all of them. Holla!

9. Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart
Also hard to choose between this and Pushing Hands – but this one hits closer to my emotional center. It’s a crime that Victor Wong will be best remembered for Big Trouble in Little China…but I supposed at least he’s remembered. RIP.

8. My America…or Honk if You Love Buddha
And Victor Wong makes a nother appearance on the list. I love the way Renee Tajima-Pena structures this movie, because it’s similar to the way my mind works. Also, I heard the Seoul Brothers (the rapping duo in Seattle) were hella brolic and used to stand in the UW locker room waiting for someone to challenge them to a fight.

7. Lumpia
A superhero who fights bad guys by throwing lumpia in their mouths from a distance? YEAH.

Read more

Tags: film.

This Saturday, Boston Progress Arts Collective will hold its first East Meets Writers Open Notebook writing workshop facilitated by Emily Lawsin! Come give and receive feedback and of course WRITE. To keep the atmosphere intimate and engaging for participants, we’ve limited attendance to 15, so if you’d like to join us, please RSVP to bostonprogress at yahoo dot com. Here are the rest of the details and a description of Open Notebook:

Saturday, May 30, 2009 | 11 AM – 1 PM
$3 Suggested Minimum Donation
BYON & BYOL (Bring Your Own Notebook and Bring Your Own Lunch)
East Meets West Bookstore
934 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA

Open mic performances are often of finished or near finished work, but what if you want some structured feedback on a rough piece in the works before taking it to the mic or submitting it for publication? At Open Notebook, do exactly that: open up your notebook and share the ideas you’re putting together in a safe, receptive space. Add, edit, or write even more at the workshop too. Some weeks, the facilitator will be one of our own BPAC members, and other weeks, we’ll invite one of our featured artists to facilitate. The facilitators and exercises may change, but one thing will remain: you will write. And it will be ON = Open Notebook. Bring an open mind, plus any writing you want to get feedback on, or come give feedback to local writers sharing their ideas. Bring your own notebook and pens too.

Tags: Open Notebook.

When I stepped out of Anime Boston this afternoon, it felt like coming out of a time warp, as if three days had just passed in the Hynes Convention Center when just three hours passed in the rest of Boston. While this con — where fetishes are born, fulfilled and transformed — of course isn’t a distinctly Asian American venue, there were a bunch of Asian American cosplayers (yes, including lolicons), musicians (like some members of the Video Game Orchestra who rocked the auditorium with orchestral arrangements of videogame soundtracks) and artists. Among them was Brian Chan displaying Anime origami and drawings as well as rendering portraits. He was completely absorbed in that when I dropped by his table in the Artists’ Alley so I interviewed Brian’s friend Grace for this podcast in which she describes the cosplay vibe, some of Brian’s sketches and the Rozen Maiden origami figure Brian and I talked about in Aural Presence.

 Brian & Grace at Anime Boston 2009: Download

Tags: anime, anime boston, cosplay, Podcasts.

Earlier this week, Emily Lawsin brought to our attention that Arthur Dong’s film Hollywood Chinese will air on PBS later this month, and tonight, WGBH will have a free screening at their studio in Brighton! This documentary has great interviews with folks like Ang Lee, B.D. Wong and Justin Lin interspersed with clips from various movies spanning what seems to be the near entirety of Chinese and Chinese American participation in commercial filmmaking. Despite some hesitations (elaborated below), I attended a Boston Asian American Film Festival screening of this film at the Museum of Fine Arts, and I now feel this is a must-see for any Asian American interested in film; it shares the rich stories and perspectives of a variety of film directors and actors while tracing the intricate history of the Chinese in Hollywood and discusses present challenges and opportunities in the film industry.

Now some backstory. I was initially hesitant to attend a the screening of Hollywood Chinese, but Brian Chan said we should go, and we did. I had feared that this film would stir up my ill feelings regarding the largely disheartening relationship between mainstream film and Asian Americans, those ranging from disgust with stereotype-engendering/perpetuation mis/under-representation and exploitAsian to dissatisfactions with “classic Asian American cinema” like JLC and its ilk. Read more

Tags: film, Hollywood Chinese, PBS.