boston progress radio

A few weeks ago, the Boston Korean Adoptees, Inc. hosted an event with Lee Herrick who read poems from his book This Many Miles from Desire and talked about his perspectives as a Korean adoptee. It was a wonderful evening of artistically expressed ideas and feelings, personal stories and conversation.

Lee, who teaches at Fresno City College in California and has traveled extensively, has a warm personality, listening and speaking thoughtfully to individuals and audiences alike. You’ll probably get some sense of that in this podcast, which alternates between an interview with Lee and clips from his reading. To listen to this podcast, just click on the link below, and to learn more about Lee and his work, please visit his website.

[Photo courtesy of Anh Dao Kolbe. You can see more of her fantastic photography at adkfoto.com]

 Podcast: An Evening with Lee Herrick, hosted by the Boston Korean Adoptees, Inc. [30:05m]: Download

Tags: Anh Dao Kolbe, Boston Korean Adoptees, poetry.

Every so often, I notice that an iPhone ad or an image on Apple’s site has some reference to API* folks. Here are some of the latest I’ve spotted: the “you’re talking to your wife who says…” part of this iPhone ad (clip above) and this iChat screenshot (clip below).

I think that contacts with Asian American names show up from time to time on iPhone commercials as do references to sushi and Asian restaurants (like SF’s the Slanted Door), and an older iChat screenshot shows, I think, some non-Asian person video chatting with an Asian (American?) woman holding a little kid. While I have several opinions and hunches about all this, I’ll just mention one here… Maybe it’s all just a coincidence or an effort to be more demographically inclusive, but could it be that Apple targets its products towards a more “hip” multicultural audience that includes sushi connoisseurs and Asian Americans and people with Asian American romantic preferences? Any thoughts on this?

I must admit, I think that “Janet Cao” has a lovely smile…

Tags: advertising, Apple.

Shuffled! is a column appearing most Thursdays here on BPRLive. Each column, we welcome someone from the API* community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles. Since an American holiday is being observed on Thursday, this Shuffled appears on Wednesday.

This week’s shuffler: Pen Khek Chear

Charles Pen Khek Chear hails from Philadelphia, PA. He is interested in art, community, faith and liberation. That’s it for his biography. So, we’re just going to have to move right onto the shuffle.

Brooke Fraser – Shadowfeet

This song, and the album from which it belongs, gives me a lot of comfort. There is a Christian undertone but she’s not cheesy about it. A lot of depth but not overbearing. Something for my everyday life.

For me, it gives a better sense of what it means to live life in faith, more than any “manual” or rigid set of rules. It’s so good, I feel that talking about it spoils the silence I’m usually put in when I’m listening to this album.

I’m usually not one for contemporary rock/pop but Fraser’s album has become one of my favorite of all time.

Les Nubians – Makeda

Another great song from a consistently awesome album.

I still don’t understand most of what they’re singing about and for the exception of “Makeda” and “Tabou,” I haven’t bothered to translate their lyrics. I picked up the album in 1998 during a time when I became very interested in urban and world French music.

It’s a good album for spring cleaning on a sunny day. Read more

Franny Choi, Fatimah Asghar and Jamila Woods, all members of Brown University’s WORD! shared their vibrant and powerful spoken word poetry at the November East Meets Words open mic. If you weren’t there or would like to give their pieces another listen, here’s a podcast of their performances. The audio has only been minimally edited with the intensity of the applause lowered.

[ This file is compressed as an mpeg-4 audio file to make it as small as possible; it is playable with iTunes and Quicktime. ]

 Enhanced Podcast [42:34m]: Download

While many of us in the US are looking forward to a long weekend of food and festivities, this is one of those celebrations that elicits some discomfort for me…

Because the settlement/colonization/appropriation of North America by Europeans has many dark dimensions of oppression and genocide (another of which was recently brought to our attention by Danny Ho), I have mixed feelings about Thanksgiving. In the Bay Area, I’ve heard some folks call this holiday “Thankstaking”. On the one hand I think that the spirit of being thankful and sharing time with family and friends is very important, and on the other hand, we need to remember and recognize our collective history.

How do you feel about Thanksgiving? Please tell us in the comments section of this post!

And in an effort to share perspectives on this, here are directions you might want to look in:

No Thanks to Thanksgiving on Alternet
A People’s History of the United States
Blue Scholars: No Rest for the Weary
Understanding Power: the indispensable Chomsky

Tags: ambivalence, colonization, history, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Thanksgiving.

This has also been out there for a while, but I still think it is incredibly, frenetically awesome — the ending is, well, to quote the narrator “so sweet”. The poem is originally by Adriel Luis, and this video by Karen Lum really adds more excellent dimensions to the ideas of this poem.

Are there such a thing? I have to admit, the first time I heard an Asian American girl about my age say “honey” when addressing a significant other, I did a double take. Even now when I encounter Asian Americans affectionately referring to people as “sweetie” and “darling”, I still feel a little strange. So I started wondering what terms of endearment first and second generation Asian Americans might encounter regularly with family members and maybe significant others. In my experience, we often address people we adore with nicknames like mei-mei, Kuu-chan, min-min or some playful name the person has somehow acquired from a personal feature (e.g. Big Eyes or Heart Warmer–kind of loses something in translation) or infamous escapade (e.g. Mudtracker). Am I just old-fashioned or showing my idiosyncratic romanticism?? What terms of endearment do you use or prefer?

Shuffled! is a column appearing most Thursdays here on BPRLive. Each column, we welcome someone from the API* community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

Today’s Shuffler: Maanav Thakore

Maanav Thakore’s life work is devoted to building alternative systems side-by-side with young people—as well as deepening the boogie. He has worked as a youth organizer in jails, schools, community organizations, and on the street. He has lived in all corners of the country and it is his sincere belief that social change must begin within. Maanav is a deejay, producer and multi-instrumentalist as well as a badass chef. His next big projects are producing singer/songwriter GaBrilla Ballard’s next album, developing a co-op record label and opening a cafe.

Now, let’s shuffle… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.