The glow of Tebow-mania will fade as the Broncos head into the off-season, but the quarterback's remarkable run with the team put the spotlight light on Denver's Filipino community before the season's end. Tebow has a deep connection to the Philippines: he was born there to missionary parents, and he funds healthcare organizations there with his Tebow Foundation. NBC Sports ran...
NOTE: UPDATE BELOW, ON DEC. 16 Lowe's this week backed out as an advertiser on the TLC network's superior reality TV show, "All-American Muslim," which follows the lives of five Muslim American families in Dearborn, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit that's home to the largest Mulsim population in the U.S. I visited Dearborn when I attended the 2011 convention in Detroit of...
I find this magically powerful. It's a sweet rendition of one of my all-time favorite songs (and one I was just playing last night on the guitar). And it's also an expression of hope, community and rebirth from musicians in the Tohoku region of NE Japan, set amidst the cleaned-up but still devastated area hammered by the March 11 earthquake...
It struck me towards the end of the first day of the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival that the clash of cultures I had just witnessed perfectly encapsulates why I’ve been a volunteer for this event since it was started in 2001.
(Full disclosure: Last year, my partner Erin Yoshimura took on the role as executive director of the festival, after volunteering from the beginning. I help out with media, the website and emceeing on the main stage.)
As the first day of the two-day event came to a close, the main stage lineup included a sampling of performers from the festival’s very popular Cultural Unity stage, a showcase of Colorado’s diverse hip-hop community.
The hip-hop sampler was fantastic – and showed why their stage is always so jammed that you can barely see through the crowds surrounding the tent, especially when the dancers are spinning on the ground.
The elevated main stage offered an eye-popping view for the audience, most of whom hadn’t gone by the Cultural Unity area before. The performance was a 20-minute introduction to the artistic principles and driving aesthetics of hip-hop culture, starting with naked rhythm from a conga drum, then showing the evolution of the rhythm into the DJ’s scratching with turntables and vinyl records.
Then the B-boys and B-girls assembled around the stage in a half-circle took turns strutting their stuff to the rhythmic riffing, spinning, flipping and contorting their bodies into unbelievably elastic poses and leaving the audience agog.
The set emphasized the multicultural appeal of hip-hop and pointed out how the performers on stage with him ran the ethnic gamut: Asian, Caucasian, African American, Latino.
Following the Cultural Unity sampler, which drew a huge crowd to the stage, most of the audience stayed for the Colorado Okinawa Kenjinkai, a group of women from Okinawa who preserve the traditional dances of Okinawa, a culture that’s distinct from Japan.
Many thanks to FOX 31 weekend anchor Deborah Takahara and reporter Chris Jose, as well as the FOX 31 crew and Dragonboat Race Association of Colorado (DRACO) members who manned the dragon boat for this shoot on a hot summer day! My wife Erin is the executive director for the Colorado Dragon Boat Festival. We volunteered for the first seven years...
KevJumba is one of the biggest stars onYouTube, with more than 1,631,596 subscribers who've clicked an incredible 173,609,339 times on his funny videos about life as, well, as KevJumba. Along with his pal and often co-star Ryan Higa, KevJumba (that's his YouTube username; his real name is Kevin Kai-Wen Wu) has managed to invented a new form of superstardom, using...
I have to hand it to George Johnston, a Japanese American journalist and entrepreneur who is a veteran of news media.
After he got laid off from the Hollywood Reporter, where he'd been web editor, he launched Nikkei Nation, a site that features news about Japan and Japanese Americans, in categories from Arts & Entertainment, Sports, Events and Science & Technology to Japan & Asia, Community, Obits and Obon Schedules. He has a partner Susan Yokoyama handling the business and marketing side as Associate Publisher, but this is a one-man band, editorially speaking.
Johnston serves up the news several ways: Original reporting (he's a fine straight-ahead reporter as well as a seasoned columnist), repurposing of press releases and aggregated links to many other sites with headlines and brief descriptions, such as these for yesterday:
Obama, Kan to meet on Thursday (Sun., May 22, 2011) U.S. President Barack Obama will hold talks with Prime Minister Naoto Kan on May 26, the first of a two-day Group of Eight summit meeting in the French resort town of Deauville, the White House says. (Japan Times) Hawaii’s Rep. Mazie Hirono announces U.S. Senate bid (Sun., May 22, 2011) HONOLULU — The democratic field to replace retiring Sen. Dan Akaka doubles as Rep. Mazie Hirono announces her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. (KHON2.com) Budokan lease approved, fundraising is next for Little Tokyo sports complex (Sun., May 22, 2011) The Budokan of Los Angeles gets final approval to move forward after the Los Angeles City Council voted to grant a long-term ground lease to build the $22 million sports and activity center in Little Tokyo. (Downtown News) Obama’s appeals court pick Gordon Liu blocked (Sun., May 22, 2011) WASHINGTON — President Obama lost his first vote on a judicial nominee, as Senate Republicans derailed the nomination of a liberal professor who leveled acerbic attacks against two conservative Supreme Court nominees — both now justices. (Boston.com)I included George during my panel last month, "From Newsprint to New Media: The Evolving Role of Nikkei Newspapers," because he's diving headfirst into an online-only business model. This month he took the bold step of announcing the free email subscriptions many of us have been receiving for months with daily roundups of all his news headlines will end, and if we want his news, we'll have to pay for it.