President Obama never fails to inspire with his speeches, and for me, especially his speeches in support of the Asian American community. The video above is from his speech in Washington DC on May 18 at the 18th Annual Gala of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies. And while I'm at it, I'm embedding Obama's historic interview yesterday with...
I happened to catch a terrific documentary the other night, "I Am Bruce Lee," which combines a well-researched biography of the late great martial arts star Bruce Lee with interviews with everyone from his wife Linda Lee Caldwell, to LA Lakers star (and martial artist) Kobe Bryant who discuss Lee's legacy and enormous influence on American pop culture. Much of the...
Project Renew was a night of cross-cultural splendor, with hip-hop dance groups alternating with traditional Asian cultural groups, including adorable little girls from the Lao Buddhist Temple; Denver Taiko's thundering Japanese drums; a troupe that showed the Spirit of Cambodia; and Mudra Dance Studio, the energetic and dynamic group that mixes classical Indian dance with the flash and pop instincts...
Once upon a time, I went to art school. And although I graduated with a completely useless (career-wise, anyway) BFA in Painting, I chose art school because once upon a time, I wanted to work for Marvel Comics. Real bad. See above.
When I was a kid, I loved Marvel's lineup of superheroes because they had all-too-human frailties when they weren't busting up crime in their empowered alter-egos. Spider-man, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Silver Surfer, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., Daredevil, The Mighty Thor, The Avengers, The X-Men... I collected 'em all. I also had a few issues of Superman and Batman and other DC comics lying around, but I wasn't a DC fanatic. I was, however, card-carrying member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society, the fan club started in 1964. I had posters (Thor against a psychedelic rainbow in black light in my room looked very cool), stickers, notepads and lots and lots of comics. I had a comic-fan penpal in Australia that I still think about now and then. And, I wrote letters to Marvel about every other month in the hopes of having one of my missives published. Alas, none of them ever ran.
I also drew comics. I wish I'd kept some of them, with dialogue, panels and all. They sucked of course, but they were drawn with the complete self-absorption of of a pre-teen, and that passion eventually turned into some bit of talent, enough to get me into Pratt Institute in New York... a few steps closer to Marvel than high school in Denver. The rest, as they say, is history.
Punk rock, college radio, guitar, big ol' canvases, The Village and New York's many distractions distracted me away from my commercial art career, and I eventually ended up a writer -- go figger -- much to my tuition-paying parents' chagrin. Besides, my too-Japanese mom decided to eliminate my brother and my clutter when we went off to college, and threw out anything of consequence from our childhoods... including my remaining boxes of comics.
But I still have a soft spot for superheroes, especially ones of the Marvel variety.
So it's been great over the past decade to watch the Merry Marvel Marching parade of comic-bound characters spring to glorious computer-animated life on the movie screen, with each new movie taking advantage of ever cooler, ever newer technology to create the best special effects ever. Of all of these, I have to say that I've enjoyed the smart, funny spectacularly entertaining Iron Man movies best.
JACL Says “Get Everyone Counted in the 2010 Census†By Phillip Ozaki and Carla Pineda Another decade has gone by, so that means its Census time! The JACL is making extraordinary efforts to make sure everybody in our community gets counted. Over $400 billion in federal funding is at stake. One person left out is equal to a loss of $1,300 over the next 10 years to his neighborhood. Everyone deserves a piece of the pie so make sure to get your forms in at the beginning of April. Historically, racial minorities have been undercounted including Asian Pacific Americans, and the JACL hopes to prevent that in 2010.
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: