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visualizAsian.com interview 3/16 with Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot magazine

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Giant Robot features the works of cutting-edge Asian and Asian American artistsHow cool is this? The March 16 visualizAsian.com show is going to be a conversation with Eric Nakamura, the owner, publisher and co-editor of Giant Robot magazine. Our call with Eric will be at 6 pm PT on Tuesday, March 16!

From movie stars, musicians, and skate-boarders to toys, technology, and history, Giant Robot magazine covers cool aspects of Asian and Asian-American pop culture. Paving the way for less knowledgeable media outlets, Eric put the spotlight on Chow Yun Fat, Jackie Chan, and Jet Li years before they were in mainstream America’s vocabulary.

Although Giant Robot has an Asian pop culture focus, it has earned a loyal readership of all colors. The readers are about half-Asian and half-not.

Under Eric’s leadership the magazine consistently has featured superior editorial content, innovative design, and a no-holds-barred attitude, garnering Giant Robot notoriety across a diverse crowd ranging from high schoolers to senior citizens. The magazine’s graphic sensibility has featured a slew of artists who have gone on to fame in the art world.

The magazine’s popularity even led to the opening of Giant Robot retail stores, selling the kinds of cool products that the magazine writes about. Continue reading →

Angry Asian Man on video and audio

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Filmmaker Steve Nguyen of FlipHD posted a cool interview with Phil Yu, the man behind AngryAsianMan.com, one of the truly essential Asian American blogs, earlier yhis week.

Coincidentally, Erin and I interviewed Phil tonight for , and although you missed the very lively live call, you can still register and listen to or download the archived MP3 file at your convenience, for the next 30 days.

BTW, next up on visualizAsian.com is an interview with Lac Su, the author of the kickass memoir, “I Love Yous Are for White People,” on Tuesday, Nov. 17 at 6 pm PT (9 pm ET).

Toward the end of our hour with Phil, we mentioned Lac (who’s also the mastermind behind the upcoming BANANA conference of AAPI bloggers in LA that Erin and I are attending) and we all agreed it’s a fabulous book, and if you start reading it you better call in sick the next day because you won’t want to stop until you’re done. We also agreed that all Asian Americans probably understand the books title; Phil thinks it’s the greatest title in the history of Western literature.

OK, so maybe he exaggerated a little bit. Still, it’s a terrific title, for a terrific book.

Many thanks to Phil “I’m not such an Angry guy” Yu for a great conversation tonight!

DON’T FORGET: SIGN UP FOR PHIL YU’S FREE ARCHIVED INTERVIEW ONLINE FOR A LIMITED TIME!

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 →

visualizAsian.com has three great interviews coming up: Filmmaker Lane Nishikawa, Angry Asian Man Phil Yu & author Lac Su

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Lane Nishikawa, writer, star and director of "Only the Brave," which comes out on DVD nationally on VeteranWow. Wow. Wow. It’s a triple play. It’s a hat trick. It’s an Asian American trinity, sort of.

Erin and I have booked three killer guests for our visualizAsian.com series of interviews in the AAPI Empowerment Series:

Next Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 6 pm PT we’ll speak to filmmaker Lane Nishikawa of “Only the Brave,” an independent movie about the Japanese American soldiers who fought during World War II that will be released nationwide on Veteran’s Day;

On Tuesday, Nov. 10, we’ll spend an hour getting to know Phil Yu, the man behind the must-read news site about Asian Americans, AngryAsianMan.com;

And on Tuesday, Nov. 17, we’ll meet Lac Su, the author of a powerful new memoir, “I Love Yous Are for White People.” Continue reading →

Next on visualizAsian.com: Dale Minami, rock star of AAPI attorneys who took on Supreme Court… and won

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Attorney Dale MinamiThe next interview scheduled for Erin and my visualizAsian.com project is one close to our hearts. The free, live interview on Tuesday, August 25 at 6 PM PT (9 PM ET) will be with with Japanese American attorney Dale Minami.

Dale is a rock star within the AAPI community — in fact, the entire U.S. legal community — as the lead attorney in Korematsu v United States, the landmark case that cleared the name of Fred Korematsu, a Japanese American who resisted being sent to internment camps during WWII and was sent to prison. A 1944 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision established the constitutionality of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. But Dale and a team of young pro-bono lawyers took on the case and in 1983, got Korematsu’s conviction overturned.

He’s most famous for the Korematsu case, which he won on a writ of coram nobis, a legal tactic that forced the court to admit that an error of “fundamental character” had been made in Korematsu’s conviction.

Here’s a must-see video about Dale made for an award ceremony when he received the UC-Berkeley law school’s highest honor:

But Dale has been fighting for the AAPI community all his career.

He filed the first class-action lawsuit over employment by AAPIs on behalf of AAPIs with United Pilipinos for Affirmative Action v. California Blue Shield, and he helped the Spokane chapter of the JACL take on Washington State University with a class action suit to establish an Asian American Studies program. He also led a fight against UCLA over tenure that was denied an Asian American professor that revealed the layers of discrimination in the academic community. Continue reading →