November 24, 2010
This has been an exciting year for Asian American music fans. Taking off above a bubbling community of AAPI singer-songwriters and individual performers, we've seen Bruno Mars, who's of Filipino and Puerto Rican descent (and born and raised in Hawai'i) hit the top of the charts with "Just the Way You Are," and Far East Movement, the first-ever all...
Most history books mention only the mainland internment camps, relocation centers and Justice Department camps if they mention the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II at all. It's often stated that people of Japanese descent in Hawai'i weren't rounded up and imprisoned --- or that only a few were arrested, and then sent to mainland camps -- because...
We've scheduled one more visualizAsian call before the end of the year, with publisher Lisa Lee and editor-in-chief Harry Mok of Hyphen magazine!
If you're not familiar with Hyphen, it's the 7-and-a-half-year-old magazine that offers, as it says on the cover, "Asian America Unabridged." It's not only a fine, high-quality publication featuring strong writing and editing and graphics, it's one of the few national print media outlets that covers Asian American issues and pop culture, and it follows in the footsteps of many now-gone magazines, starting with the late, great A magazine and including such titles as TransPacific and East-West. Other mags currently being produced include KoreAm and Giant Robot, whose editor, Eric Nakamura, we spoke to earlier this year.
Our conversation with Lisa and Harry about Hyphen will be at 7 pm PT (10 pm ET) on Wednesday, December 8. Register here if you're new to visualizAsian (if you've registered before you'll receive an email with the phone and webcast information; you don't need to register again).
Like many magazines for Asian Americans, Hyphen is struggling financially, but the quality of its stories is never in question.
We'll speak with Lee and Mok about the successes and challenges of creating Hyphen. They both have a lot to say about why they're committed to Hyphen.
Here are their bios:
Mudra Dance Studio has been celebrating the dynamic traditions of classical Indian dance, and putting a contemporary spin on it, since long before Bollywood films became a popular genre here in the US with non-Indians. Namita Khanna Nariani, a brilliant, energetic dynamo of a teacher and choreographer, founded the troupe 17 years ago and turned it into a non-profit organization eight years ago -- all while raising a family and maintaining a career as an architect.
We first met Namita in the second year of the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival (the photo above is from this summer's festival), and she's been a regular every year since, closing out the festival with a one-two punch of her Mudras followed by the very popular Denver Taiko Japanese drummers. Starting the third year, at Erin's suggestion, the Mudras started collaborating with Denver Taiko and now that's become a regular cross-cultural highlight of the event.
The powerful Japanese drums have come to fit so well in Namita's South Asian vision of cultural fusion, in fact, that Mudra Dance Studio now incorporates a taiko drummer, Thomas Knight, as a regular part of its exciting annual performances.
This year's performance, ILLham, opens this Sunday at 2 pm, and then repeats Saturday, Nov. 20 at 5 pm and Sunday, Nov 21 at 2 pm, at the Lakewood Cultural Center. Tickets are available online at the Mudra website.
Each of the annual Mudra shows are carefully structured to be showcases not only of fabulous dance, music and multimedia, but also of an innate spirituality that is a part of the Mudra lifestyle. All its members seem imbued with this spirituality, because it flows down from Nariani herself. She explains the idea of ILLhaam, which is about cycles:
