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April 13, 2008

Whenever I see an Asian on TV, either in a program or on a commercial, who's the brunt of some comedic joke, my first reaction is to clench my stomach in anticipation of some personal embarrassment, as if the Asian on screen could easily be me. But here's a TV commercial that makes fun of an Asian guy, that manages to be funny and doesn't bother me (although the first time I saw it I did clench up, expecting that slap in the face), and respectful of the Asian dude's dancing ability -- that is, until, he screws up. The commercial, for Southwest Airlines, makes me chuckle every damned time, and I've seen the thing a lot. What makes me feel good about the video is that the African Americans in the scene start out skeptical of the Asian guy's ability to impress the woman (that's Ellen Cleghorne from SNL, isn't it?, but then everyone in the club, includig the DJ, give the guy his props and start urging him on. That's when he knocks over the turntables.. and the tagline for Southwest comes in: "Want to get away?"
April 13, 2008

I missed this NPR report a couple of weeks ago, about the impact of the character Long Duk Dong from the 1980s hit movie, "16 Candles." I had heard a promo for the report while driving but got home before it came on. I finally went back to check it out and it's worth hearing. The link to the report is at the top of the page; the text on the page is the report's transcript. Be sure to check out the extra interview clip with Gedde Watanabe, the Japanese American actor who played "the Donger" -- he doesn't really have a clue, unfortunately. And check out the comic that's included, "Donger and Me."
April 9, 2008

As a card-carrying baby boomer (I guess officially, with my AARP membership!), I was 10 when most of 1968 happened. It was a pivotal year, no doubt -- though in my consciousness, '69 left a deeper impact. AARP magazine does a fine job of using the Web as a story-telling device to revisit the year. This online special section kicks...

March 29, 2008

I was having problems with my Nikkeiview "theme" template, so I tested out some new WordPress looks. I like this theme, called "Cutline." What do you think? I'll leave it up for a while, and who knows, after some customizing, I may keep it. I'll need to swap out the photo images with my own images, though. Gil...

March 22, 2008

For Christmas, I bought Erin a pass for 10 visits to Dahn Yoga, an international chain of yoga schools founded in Korea in the 1970s that has several locations in the Denver area. One is close by, and Erin was interested in taking yoga, so I walked in. I left with the gift certificate for Erin, and a slightly sour aftertaste about the place, because of the high-pressure way I was urged to spend more money for a higher package of classes. I warned Erin that there was a little of "cult-like" feel about Dahn Yoga, but one of our good friends has been taking classes there for years at another location with the same instructor, so we figured it would be OK. Erin finally attended her first class last week, and also signed both of us up for a free class about brain health (Erin's an expert on the brain, and loves to learn anything about it).
March 22, 2008


Around the turn of the century (man, it's still weird to use that phrase in 2008), I started reading about a bootlegged series of cassettes making the rounds, of Cambodian rock and soul recordings from before that country's dark, post-Vietnam war years under despot Pol Pot. These recordings, I read, were all that were left, like audio archeology, of musicians who had absorbed Western pop and soul and rock during the 1960s and early '70s, and both covered those songs enthusiastically in their own language, Khmer, and wrote original songs using those sonic elements as their foundation. These musicians had all been slaughtered in Pol Pot's killing fields, the stories went, and these three-decades-old echoes were all that was left of that creative explosion. I finally got a hold of some of these recordings (some are now available via legitimate avenues including Amazon.com, no doubt cleaned up and sounding much better than many of the tinny recordings I got). They were exciting, and fun to listen to, but spooky when you realized all the artists were killed within a few years of the recording sessions. Sometimes they were faithful recreations of familiar songs -- until the lyrics came in. But whether they were covers or original, the playing and singing had an irrepressible and irresistible spark. Those recordings were enough to inspire a pair of California brothers to pursue the sound and make their own fresh echoes of long -ago Cambodian pop in a unique group called Dengue Fever, which has over the years evolved from re-creating the sound of the old Cambodian scene to integrating those sounds in a fresh take on world pop.
February 23, 2008

I've never seen Denver's Asian American community rally so quickly around an issue like they have around the botched satire, "If it's war the Asians want... It's war they'll get", that ran on the website of The Campus Press, the University of Colorado's venue for budding journalists. There's been a blizzard of emails flying around town from groups and individuals, outraged postings (including mine as well as Joe Nguyen's commentary on AsiaXpress), and TV and print media news reports. A collective of APA students who've organized a Facebook group called Colorado Asian American Organizations organized a meeting yesterday at Denver University, where about 40 people showed up. Erin attended, and also sent out notices to some of the local media, so there were TV crews from several stations on hand to cover the discussion. Attendees included not just students, but community activists, older APAs and also African Americans and Latinos.
February 21, 2008

I'm always amazed at how young "journalists" can write really stupid stuff and then hide behind the cloak of "satire" to defend themselves. That's what happened this week, when the University of Colorado's amateur student news site, CampusPress.com, ran a commentary by Max Karson titled "If it's war the Asians want... it's war they'll get." It's not very well written. It's self indulgent in an immature, self-possessed manner. It's confusingly filled with hate language and alarming statements for much of the column, then it veers into surrealism, and suddenly, if you weren't sure whether it's supposed to be a joke (I wasn't), you start to realize it's not serious. The problem is, so much of it sounds serious, and feels serious, and perpetuates racist stereotypes and statements about Asians that I've heard all my life. So why wouldn't I take it seriously?