It’s official: Banana 2 conference of Asian American bloggers set for Feb. 26 in LA

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Banana 2 is scheduled for Feb. 26 in LA

The Banana 2 conference of Asian American Pacific Islander bloggers is now officially set for Saturday, February 26 at CBS Studios in Studio City, Calif. If you haven’t heard of Banana, you can check out my blog post and photos from the first Banana gathering, which was an informal affair in late 2009. It was mostly one very large panel on the USC campus in LA, with most of us meeting up for dinner afterwards near Little Tokyo.

This year’s Banana will be an all-day conference with a handful of panels and breakout sessions, as well as a reception afterwards with entertainment (more details to come). And it’ll be held at CBS Studios in Studio City, with (I think) the reception planned for a New York street set for “CSI:New York.” Cool, huh?
I’m organizing a panel titled “Bananas, Twinkies, Coconuts & more: The rainbow of the AAPI blogosphere.” Here’s a draft description:

The Asian American blogosphere (as represented in the richness of Banana’s panels) covers a lot of ground, from the political to the whimsical, from foodies to Asian pop fanatics to bloggers that focus on specific communities. AAPI blogs can be about the Asian experience or exclusively about the Asian American experience.There are even blogs by Asian Americans that have nothing to do with Asian American culture, values or identity. What does it mean to be an Asian American blogger?

Other panels include:
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Happy New Year, Japanese-style

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Japanese New Year

Unlike other Asian cultures, the Japanese don’t celebrate Lunar New Year. Instead, they celebrate the Western calendar New Year, January 1, and some of the special traditions for the holiday, called “Oshogatsu,” have been handed down to Japanese Americans over the past century.

Japanese New Year’s traditions are different from Western (or at least, American) ones: First of all, New Year’s Eve isn’t the big holiday, and the focus isn’t on partying and waiting until midnight on Dec. 31 to watch the Times Square ball slide down, or to see fireworks or make hearty toasts. A lot of us do, because we go to parties to celebrate with friends — after all, we are Japanese American.

In Japan, New Year’s Eve and the days leading up to it are all about cleaning house, cleaning yourself and your soul, putting your business in order to prepare for the new year. It doesn’t sound like much fun. And traditionally, people spend New Year’s Eve quietly at home with family or friends. There are events, such as the release of thousands of balloons at Tokyo’s Zojoji temple to pray for world peace — pretty different from Times Square, huh? My mom’s hometown of Nemuro is at the easternmost tip of the northern island of Hokkaido, and thousands of people gather on Cape Nosappu outside of town past midnight on January 1, to see the first sunrise of the new year in Japan. Buddhist temples ring their bell at midnight to mark the start of the new year, a very spiritual sound.

There are other festive events throughout Japan too, with live music and fireworks just like in the US — it’s not all traditional.

By the time the clock ticks over into the new year, Japanese have spruced up their house with traditional decorations made of pine, bamboo and plum trees to bring good luck. On New Year’s Eve, families settle in with special toshikoshi soba noodles to bring long life, and watch Kohaku Utagassen, a men versus women singing contest that’s like karaoke on serious steroids featuring the country’s biggest enka (a traditional style of pop music) and J-pop stars. This show has been aired on New Year’s Eve since the end of World War II, and for decades it was Japan’s equivalent of the Super Bowl in popularity. Denver’s Japanese community has held a Kohaku Utagassen competition for many years too.

The main event in Japan isn’t New Year’s Eve and the midnight celebrations. It’s New Year’s Day, or Oshogatsu, and not because of college sports contests. The first days of January represent the start of a clean slate for everyone, and a time to celebrate family and friends by visiting people and wish everyone well. January 1 is also the day for a family feast that can put American Thanksgiving to shame.
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Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai releases 2nd spoken-word album, “Further She Wrote”

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Slam poet Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai I met spoken word artist Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai when she performed in Denver during the 2008 Democratic National Convention (you remember, the cool one where Obama was nominated) for an APIA Votes gala for Asian Americans. She rocked the room with a too-short set, and I bought her first album of slam poetry from 2007, “Infinity Breaks,” that night.

She released her second album, “Further She Wrote,” in early December and it’s available online via Bandcamp. Through January, you can name your price for the album (I suggest a minimum of $15 — we gotta support our peeps), to download the tracks to your computer. The CD version will be available in January.

Tsai’s a Chinese Taiwanese American born and raised in Chicago and now living in New York City. New York is a palpable presence in some of her poems, especially her sharply observed ode to her neighborhood, “he Ballad of a Maybe Gentrifier” in which she bemoans how the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood is changing as new diverse residents move in and the established black population gets pushed father into the margins. She notes the irony that she’s part of the new guard that’s changing the tenor of the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. I know the hood, since it’s where I went to college in the ’70s, at Pratt Institute. It was a mean-ass place then and it’s way different now. Sometimes changes — even “gentrification” is a good thing. She also draws a terrific picture of her hood in “Betp, Bed-Stuy Sketch #1.”
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Author urges women to date diverse men (good), then stereotypes men of color (bad) and says stupid stuff on NPR

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JC DavieHoly cow — I just read about this on Jezebel.com, and it goes way beyond the pale.

J.C. Davies, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker and blogger who’s published a book about inter-racial dating, “I Got The Fever: Love, What’s Race Got To Do With It?,” was a panelist on the NPR show “Tell Me More” for an episode about dating unemployed men. The other panelists on the program were Danielle Belton, author of the blog “The Black Snob“, GQ magazine Washington correspondent and TV pundit Ana Marie Cox, and the host is Michel Martin.

Davies began riffing off the topic at hand, and spouted off some incredible stereotypes as if they’re indisputable facts. Here are some passages from the NPR transcript:
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Memorial for Colo. Gov. Ralph Carr dedicated

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Ralph Carr memorial dedicated at Kenosha Pass on Hwy 285, reamed Ralph Carr Memorial Highway

Ralph Carr, the man who served as governor of Colorado at the start of World War II, had been largely forgotten for decades. But thanks to an effort by the Asian Pacific Bar Association (APABA) and a biography by journalist Adam Schrager, Carr’s making a comeback in Colorado, and his legacy is finally getting its due, with a fine biography, a stretch of Highway 285 named in his honor, and now, a memorial to Carr’s legacy at Kenosha Pass.

On December 12, representatives of Denver’s Japanese American community, APABA, and CDOT assembled at a scenic overlook just a few hundred feet west of the Kenosha Pass summit on Highway 285 to dedicate the memorial. (Here’s a nice report from the Canyon Courier about the dedication.)

It’s a massive stone tribute engraved with a message that explains the significance of Ralph Carr to Colorado.

A rising star in the Republican Party during the 1930s, Carr was mentioned as a future presidential candidate when he famously became the only Western governor in the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor to oppose first the harassment, and then the internment of Japanese Americans.
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