Tag Archives: bloggers

V there or be square: V3con update — panelists, schedules, Early Bird price ends tomorrow!

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Jane Lui -- performing at V3con

Jane Lui will be performing at the Opening Reception and Awards Ceremony for V3con.

We’re deep in the planning process for V3, the Asian American Digital Media Conference, scheduled for Aug. 25 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles with an Opening Night Reception and Awards ceremony on Friday, Aug. 24 at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. Most of the panelists are set and confirmed. We’re lining up performers like Jane Lui (shown here) to take the stage at the Opening Night soiree.

If you’re Asian American, a blogger, a social media maven, a journalist or just a fan of artists like Lui or David Choi or Clara C, or a reader of bloggers like Phil Yu of Angry Asian Man, Jen Wang of Disgrasian or Jeff Yang of the Wall Street Journal, you won’t want to miss this ultra-cool event.

They’ll all be there. Or V there. So don’t be square.

And, the low Early Bird price is only available through tomorrow, so register today and you can feel good about being oh-so-Asian frugal. If you’re a slacker Asian (like me), the pre-registration price ain’t so bad, only $10 more. If you’re traveling from outside SoCal, we’ve arranged for pretty good rates at the Miyako Hotel in Little Tokyo, just half a block from JANM and across the street from a row of ramen shops. Yowsa!
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More thoughts on the BANANA Conference and the different voices of the Asian American blogosphere

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With a week before BANANA, the first-ever gathering of Asian American bloggers, I’ve been thinking about Nikkei View’s role, or how I see my voice as part of the AAPI blogosphere.

The beauty of the Internet and of blogging as an avenue for self-expression, is that we can develop not just one mighty chorus of an Asian American voice, but that we can cultivate many, many disparate voices, all with different tones and characters. It’s like jazz — not everyone will play the melody; many prefer to play harmonies, or like the beboppers of old, turn the melody inside out. Some will come up with atonal free jazz; some will play safe and mainstream instrumental soft rock; some are suited for taking fiery, flying solos while others will be content keeping up the steady rhythm that allows the soloists to take off.

Man, I didn’t think I’d stretch the metaphor quite so far…. but it kinda works. My point is, I think of myself as a bridge in that I will write about very mainstream topics like a traditional dance concert, and then get all up in arms about racism or internment or whatever. Continue reading →

BANANA, the first Asian American bloggers’ conference, to convene in LA

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The Banana conference of Asian American bloggers will be held Nov. 21, 2009 in Los Angeles.

When I first started the Nikkei View as a weekly column in 1998 that ran in a Denver Japanese community newspaper (now gone), I posted the columns on my nikkeiview.com website. I wrote as a way of telling the world how I saw pop culture and politics through my Japanese American experience. In the decade since then, I’ve become involved in the larger Asian American Pacific Islander community, and converted the old website to this here blog.

At the time, I don’t think there were a lot of Asian Americans writing stuff on the web like I was. There may have been, but I didn’t reach out to find them. There were columnists who’d paved the way in traditional media (newspapers), like the late Bill Hosokawa, whose footsteps I followed early on, and Emil Guillermo of AsianWeek. The cool magazine Giant Robot launched back in 1994. The terrific Pacific Citizen newspaper had been publishing for decades, but didn’t have a website until a few years ago.

But there weren’t a lot of columns being posted online back in the day.

Now, the blogosphere allows for many voices from the AAPI community — the long list in my blogroll on the right of this page is always growing as I find new blogs to add — and a couple of them have risen to national prominence.

So Erin and I are planning to participate in a first-ever gathering of Asian American Pacific Islander bloggers called BANANA, Nov. 21 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (it’s a link to a Facebook page). It’s being organized by Lac Su, the author of the terrific memoir “I Love Yous Are for White People,” who ironically is not a blogger. (We’ll be interviewing Lac Su on Nov. 17 for visualizAsian.com.)

BANANA will hopefully establish once and for all that there’s an emerging chorus of voices that’s distinctly Asian American, that’s rooted in many Asian ethnic heritages, but is all tied together by shared experiences and values from living in, being born in and growing up in, these United States of America.

Not all of the bloggers I mention below will be at the BANANA event (see Joz’s comment below), but a couple of these voices have even developed a national audience outside the AAPI population: Continue reading →