4:23 - I'm late to this four pm event at I-Hotel/Manilatown Heritage Foundation, but we're nowhere near starting yet. We're on PoC time. Yeah, I said it.
4:24 - Quick greeting and hug from Jason Mateo, who says "Don't write nothing bad about us." This will be a theme. I can see it now.
A little background: this performance ,"Speak Out," is by Youth Speaks. One of the nice things about doing away with the APAture age limit is that we can get even younger folks out to APAture. I think this is the first time. I'll check later.
4:26 - Cathlin: teacher, works with KSW, happy to work with Youth Speaks, bring the youth. First hour is youth and second half the adults. Welcome Jason Mateo.
Jason: call for shouts. Pitch on Youth Speaks. Talked to Ellen, and juiced that young ppl part of APA continuum. Youth Speaks known for giving big events but are working in community. Whole geographical and ethnic gamut here. Please respond when the kids speak. If you're moved, move.
4:30 - Mandeep ??? from Southeast india. first piece "Where do we go from here?/ I thought my ppl would be proud of their heritage/instead they wanna bury it."
His ancestors from Punjab. He's Sikh. From Los Angeles. "in the country where I'm feared/ it's trendy to be scared" About being Indian in hip hop. He's perfect in the genre, but good at it: the right hand gestures, the right dialect. Goes slow enough, relaxed, committed.
4:35 - Jason emphasizing the "P" in APAture, Pacific Islander, Balboa High, from football field to page. From Samoa Andrew Vy?
Andrew: (button down shirt and wild, long hair.) first thing people say is "you probably play football" gets on the mic for future Pacific Islanders; they can say "are you a writer? Are you a lawyer? a good lawyer?" Shout out to Pacific Islanders.
Vacation spots, athletic ability, nuclear testing, trapped bilinguals, ghetto gang members, new label: "poet," Motherland.
Vision of traditional warriors, different viewpoints: first the warriors, then the foreign soldiers seeing savages hitting themselves. Difference between "soldiers" and "warriors." Describing his experience as one warrior. Traditional chant.
4:43 - Jason: been with Youth Speaks since he was sixteen. Probably still looks like he's sixteen but it's been 13 years. One of his goals is to get more Pacific Islanders into the mix. More connected with spoken word and oral story. Drew and next poet represented SF in int'l youth team poetry slam in DC last July. Russell Simmons did a documentary on the festival. They were documented by crew from HBO.
4:45 - Jacqueline Wang: doesn't need a mic. all love in here. Korean American performing after a Samoan.
Starts out on MLK. Does what he meant linger here? Corpses, silenced. "If the air is still heavy with the beauty of love." Air still tainted by color distinction. Mother trying to mask color. "Love is not a dead language when there is still suffering" "Try not to pity my own mother ... this place will never open up to her because oppressors are all the same." mention of "the struggle". "Liberation is a language that is not dead." (A lot of maybe too many? images flying by too fast.) Very sad.
4:50 - Caskets are empty. North and South distinctions, "i want to take my father home without exposing him to emaciated bodies" "she was supposed to be the moon in the dark night but got dictated" Kim's regime, 30th parallel, let my people go, 50 years war and still counting, coming home, he'll still feel foreign, 'cause once a refugee, always a refugee; his casket will remain empty, when his day comes we'll dig out a place here.
4:54 - Jason: you are seeing the final product. We go through a process. Next poet represents Excelsior. It's hard to live there right now as a young person. Youth Speaks Poet just got murdered George ?? They went to school together. Important that we're committed to young folks as writers. It's not easy being young in America right now. If we give them the support they need maybe they can speak a truth so Jason's son doesn't have to go through this.
Student of June Jordan High School, Tino.
4:56 - Tino: his friend just died last month. Hard to write stuff. He was a person Tino was writing with. A song he put together quickly.
Backing track runs. Gets audience hands up. Misses his cue and goes back. Doesn't really perform like this.
Raps for a while. It's a little hard for me to follow. Pretty fast. It's new material. Shout outs to passed friends. Living in the hood. Looking out for cop cars. Forgetting his rhymes, ad libs. Takes it in stride, with humor.
5:01 - Next one from East Oakland. You better clap and be afraid of East Oakland. Part of YS for a while. Came in as intern. From Laos.
Bryan Phan: Ancestors came from Laos, but he's Mien. Long hair, like a boy, but face getting older.
Came from city "Killer Cali" funny city named for its trees is killing its seeds. "It's just Oakland" image of flowers around a picture on a telephone pole. It's a miracle we went two months without violence at a taco truck. His "I'm sorry" routine whenever someone tells him a friend has died. If you put us on a music sheet, we'll compose our own sunlight. Description of what you see and hear when you walk down the street in Oakland. We were never completely broken, we just have our downfalls. We are living in Killer Cali. and here we are, growing. Stumbles, but beautiful.
5:06 - Christopher Columbus of the playground; this society doesn't believe in anything that comes from a third world country. public enemy number one, one at a time. For every Asian that doesn't know how to let its foreign caged bird sing. Help me find the courage to resurrect my culture.
5:08 - Jason: speak truth to power. Tino wants to spin a verse without the beat. Jason: redeem himself.
Living in hood. Gas prices up, dropping bombs. Michael Jordan reference. We used to be kings and queens now we living in the projects. Works hard for the money. Rhymes "block" with "stop." Abusive marriage story. Strange, he sounds muffled on this mic.
5:11 - Last poet of Youth Speaks segment. Student from UCB ancestors from Africa and japan.
Teruko Tabashi: (Yes, she looks African and Japanese ;) lovely hapaness.) Through the eyes of a child. Abused crack baby story. Too dumb to japanese, too smart to be black. Wanted to be white. Bi-bi girl, trashed in the street. parents told her she was a mistake, thanks God for life. lists all the schools she got into. ADHD. Cutting, observing mom, foster care broke down body and heart.
5:16 - Justice. "he only had bullet holes and a lifeless expression." "Meth head who looks for crystal while she really is a diamond in the rough" trashing everyone stupid: gay marriage haters. Never will I wither, give up, or give in. people telling her she only got into Berkeley because they thought she was solely Japanese.
5:20 - Calls out Jason to end the reading. Jason: this is part of a larger conversation at Youth Speaks. Mission to break boundaries. Invites everyone in the room to be part of conversation. Introduce books and writing to young people.
Jason: writing a script. First time he's read something from the script. "Bury Marcos" in 200something he goes to Philippines and his cousins take him to Intramuros to see Marcos' corpse. My generation doesn't really talk about Marcos. But my mom, every day she wakes up she's affected by his legacy. Big disconnect between his and his parents' generation. Marcos is part of it. Wife's "hella shoes," his Napoleon way of going about it. What if I bury Marcos?
5:25 - An attempt to conquer defeat. to face the dead. To face my death for the life of my children. To bury a giant, to reconnect with my giant. Not to be forgotten but to be forsaken. Let time make stone of its becoming. An act of love.
5:27 - Busts out a spoken word piece. Completely different energy, different dialect. Doesn't even need a mic for this one. I'm a giant, that's why I carry my giant spoon fork and knife wherever I go. Anti-anti-miscegenation. You gotta know about me. Forgets lines. Brown like a tree.
5:30 - Cathlin: don't go anywhere b/c three adults are coming up. Liked "bottom of a burnt rice cooker." I'm Asian, need to write about rice cooker.
First poet Adrian Salazar. Magician/poet/prophet. Raised in San Jose but lives in Berkeley.
5:31 - Adrien Salazar: Thanks APAture and Manilatown. (nice windbreaker)
Prayer: images of father and mother, churches, experience in churches and of priests, flowers, communion, hospitals, oil and ashes on forehead, open caskets, coming out, emptiness, isolation, this war, (yes it really is a list this simple, read a bit tonelessly.)
Twenty years in Altar?: more lists of very brief images, comparing daily images with religious images. This is the same poem as the last one.
New poem ?? something revolution: throwing bricks and molotov cocktails; I a slave. (Story of a revolutionary. Where? No matter, a sort of everyrevolutionland.) I bleed my spirit into gunshots.
5:39 - Cathlin next poet worked with her at Bindlestiff. He's lived in all area codes in Bay Area.
Conrad Panganiban: Doing scene from a play about youth. "Lola's apple pie and ???"
This is an actual play. He has a woman up there performing with him. A guy meets his roommate's dance partner for PCN (Pilipino Cultural Night) to convince her to wait for the roommate, who will be late. Flatters her. He's written a script for PCN. Shows it to her. It's about a guy "who comes to the realization of his identity when his grandmother is dying." Play within a play. Making fun my-grandmother-cooks-rice narratives. Girl critiques this. Here comes the lesson: why make fun of our own people with the thick accents? Wow, is this an actual PCN script? A PCN script within a PCN script?
5:50 - Boy challenges girl to come up with something better. Girl goes into poem elegizing Lola. Oh, my god, the Lola even cooks rice for the girl in this poem. Ai ya, this is turning into a romance. Enough.
5:55 - Yael Villafranca: "Daly City" this is poetry reading, not spoken word. I will not use articles because Yael will not use articles. She's that kind of poet. Oh. There's an article. Why "the crosswalk paint" and not just "crosswalk paint"? Sorry, I need to get off this, just a pet peeve.
"San Francisco, Where I Went Missing":
6:01 - (Boy this liveblogging of readings is really, really hard. It's surprisingly easy to translate nonliterary work into words. But for literary performances, the words that describe them have already been colonized, and all I can do is quote, or paraphrase, neither of which is particularly satisfying.)
6:03 - Last poet G Reyes.
Reading a play? Sets up some chairs. I hope this doesn't take long. My generosity is drying up.
I'm contagious. (What's the contagion?) Rant about obscure poets.
6:07 - (I might have to run to the bathroom. I'll try to hold out.) Bitching about not winning teacher of the year. Teacherwhores. We're getting a little too much into shop talk. He's used to performing for other teachers. Oooohhh, that's the contagion. Teachers. This shouldn't be a poem or a play. It's too dilute, prosy, monologuey. It should be a speech. Methinks somebody doth protest too hard. Nope, the contagion is something else, something vague. Why did he set those chairs up? Oh no, is he doing another piece?
6:12 - Oh my god, I don't care what your sign is. Oh, I see. The piece is about your sign--gemini.
Bathroom ahoy. This probably isn't that bad, my brain is just mush and can't take anything else in at this point. I'm out.
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