APAture Live

LAP-POP/ Web and Blogging

I'm running a little late, but we're on Asian time today (which is not as late as general PoC time, but still late). I run into Min Jung Kim, today's emcee and organizer, and Annie Koh in the doorway to Theater Rhinosceros. Haven't seen Annie in at least three years. APAture OG, Annie is, the youngest of the first crop. She got a grant from the Yale Asian American Alumni group to pay for her to do a summer internship at an Asian American org, and she chose KSW. Great timing, because when Annie came out in May 1999 APAture planning was hella heating up and I really needed help in the office.

Annie threw up the first KSW website in a week (that's right, we didn't have a website until May 1999), which was a cool blue affair with b/w photos of KSW artists as icons. We also put together KSW's links page, which was the first, and may still be the most extensive, Bay Area and Beyond APA nonprofit resources page. Annotated.

Annie turned 21 in the KSW office. She had a strange position at KSW: younger than the majority of artists and volunteers of that time, but in a leadership position. Maybe this is what convinced her to stay. Her internship at KSW was supposed to just be a summer thing. In the fall she was going back east to train at ... MASSPIRG was it? She went, did the training, and then came right back, a week before APAture. And stayed for several years in the Bay Area before moving to Korea.

She and Jane Kim flanked Julia Kim that fall (1999) when Julia started Locus 1640, which came out of the opportunity offered by the mostly unused bar space on the ground floor of the Korea House restaurant building (at 1640 Post St.), which Julia's parents owned. Yes "Locus" referred to the fact that there was an actual locus, which they were using to gather young Asian American arts and pop culture stuff.

From the beginning, there was a strong distinction in the minds of the organizers of both organizations, between what was Locus and what was KSW. Although Locus arose in the aftermath of the first APAture, and was empowered by its zeitgeist, it wasn't by any means an offshoot. Locus was ... younger. KSW-next (the KSW next generation group that organized APAture) was about younger folks incorporating themselves into the older KSW. Locus was about new technologies and new forms. KSW was about how new technologies and new forms drew from traditional forms, and how they were incorporated into the traditions. Locus could have consolidated its separate identity, but instead it lost its space, its locus, and became the wandering LocusArts. While still "younger" than KSW, it began to draw more and more on the resources and collaboration of older orgs, especially when it located itself at Galeria de la Raza for a few years. And when it joined KSW at Space 180 a few years ago, one really had to wonder, at least from the outside,  what the distinction between the two orgs was now.

I write all this because APAture's LAP-POP is the second edition of a Locus event (started two years ago), and the perfect example of the official melding of Locus and KSW, which happened this summer and will be formalized at an event this fall. Annie's presence here underlines it, as does Min Jung's.

1:16 - Min Jung Kim: welcome. LAP-POP a showcase for blogger Asian American rock stars. Intro Ellen.

1:17 - Ellen Oh: Welcome; APAture founders in the room. How many people are attending first KSW event? About half the people raise their hands. So for them Ellen gives the KSW/APAture speech. Thanks to Min Jung and Glenda for putting this together. LAP-POP has been around for a while but this is the first time we've presented it at APAture. Thanks to sponsors. Intro for Glenda, new member of KSW's board.

1:20 - Glenda Bautista: former director--one of many--of LocusArts. Has merged with KSW in late August 2008. This is the groundbreaking stuff they'd like to continue with KSW. Intro Annie Koh. Was APAture OG and LocusArts founder.

Random pointless thought: damn, I haven't seen her in years.

1:21 - Annie: Lives currently in South Korea. Moved to SF for the first APAture. Can't believe baby's all grown up. Almost in middle school. Her website is a preemie, not properly born yet. The stories she wants to tell aren't always hers. Info about cultures and communities in Asia aren't accessible to English-only readers. New York Times Korea stories are by expat bloggers only. Annie's also an expat blogger, but identifies and Korean and Korean American. Frustrated by lack of info available.

"Movement": reading piece about subway. Turns into a description of moving through the city. Annie: interested in stories we see from outside faces pressed in. Voyeuristic peeping into people's lives from public transit.

They're doing "taxi driver restaurant" culture in Seoul. There are no diners in Korea, everything's 24 hours. Ask the drivers where to eat, they know really good food for really cheap. A culture of taxi drivers. Class distinctions clear in Korea and drivers are very upfront about their critique of society. Putting together a book: guide to taxi driver restaurants in Seoul and also interviews.

Showing web-only clip of trying to fit into Seoul. No matter how much her face looks Korean, at heart she's American. "Chromomorphosis." (I can't find where the actual clip is. Can any put a link in the comments?) First one-minute film. Annie wandering around Seoul in a (obviously green) dress that changes color as she goes into different areas of Seoul. Indy rock music background. Simple. Interesting how long a minute is when there's no dialogue or text. Time for a whole day's images.

1:31 - Min Jung: Annie has a wide creative capability: poetry, live SPAM-eating, etc. Never takes herself seriously. Intro Hasan Minhaj, whose name rhymes with "awesome." (ETA: no it doesn't, bitch. I had to go in later and correct all the "Hasams" I wrote to "Hasan." "N" not "M.") Named up and coming comic to watch by NBC. Has a show at punchline tomorrow.

1:32 - Hasan Minhaj: was at APAture last year and had a great time. (I remember him from the comedy night last year. It was a good set, but being tall and good looking doesn't hurt him at all in the memorable department.) He's gonna do a stand up routine. Bit about: had a full time day job before for the health benefits. To get the benefits he had to fill out an application and decide what racial box to check. Why don't they have a category for Indians? Half the world's population. Okay, that's a slightly new spin on an old subject.

Bags on Alaskan natives. They have a whole category but has anyone ever met one? (I raise my hand. Bitch, I lived with one. Well, she wasn't from Alaska, but she was Inuit. He doesn't even know the word.) Alaskan natives need to picket his next show! (Seriously, it wasn't that offensive, but also not that funny.) Dumb jokes about how there aren't any live Native Americans. "Dead people are more important than Sanjay over at Oracle." That's not cool or funny. And it's not apparently deliberately uncool. Well, I can't really tell. That's the problem with politically incorrect humor: if it's not perfect, you can't tell if the comedian is trying to be funny or if he's really that ignorant, which is not funny. Blah blah, round up to the nearest ethnicity. So he plays the race card in HR. "Something's not right? Is that because I'm black?" Okay, that would be funny if ... I don't know, he seems to be off today. And maybe the joke's context needs punching up? Not sure.

Talks about working at Microsoft and wanting to kidnap Bill Gates. What would you do if you had that much money? He would wear a cape. Again, I think he's off today b/c I want to enjoy that joke but it doesn't hit the bullseye. Jokes about "pardon my French." Turns it into another black racist joke. Running gag about how he wants to be black. Kinda funny. Gets some mileage from repeating "a friend's racist jokes," and talking about how uncomfortable it makes him. Boo. "Captain Planet" racist TV show from childhood. Everybody has a real superpower except the Indian kid, whose power is "heart." He's also the only one who doesn't have a girlfriend. He has a monkey.

Riding a line with these racial jokes that only works if the jokes are really funny and he's really working them.

Brings up Kanye West and gets a single, solitary hiss. Bags on Kanye for his ego, as performed in concert. I've never heard any Kanye ego jokes, but I feel like that topic is overplayed. Maybe it's just Kanye who's overplayed.

Show tomorrow at Punchline. Will be doing stand up and sketches.

1:51 - Min Jung: our next performer is Eric Wu of Eric Conveys An Emotion.

Eric Wu: Wasn't expecting to be here. MJ facebooked him two days ago. Started his website ten years ago in college one night when he was bored. He put together a bunch of photos of his face expressing different emotions, and emailed them to friends. They sent him requests. It became a user generated content thing.

So today he'll bring people on stage for a face-off contest. Invites all presenters today to come on stage. They do, all except for Annie who has disappeared.

Face battle: Eric will call out an emotion to depict. Then they will turn around and flash that emotion and hold it for a few seconds. Audience will clap for the winner. Yes, this is awesome! Too bad it's not at night and people aren't drunk!

First team: Dino and lolcatz Eric: "sad." Dino looks like a classic harlequin. "angry." Dino is winning this one. No doubt. Audience concurs.

Second team: MJ and Ernie: "surprised." Pretty equally surprised. But MJ broke character. "annoyed." Ernie is funnier. But I wouldn't want MJ annoyed at me. Ernie won, clearly, but MJ got a lot of love.

Third team: Hasan and lolcatz Kari: "fear." Hasan gives fear and Kari crouches down so you can't see her face. "shy." Kari has a better shy but it's funnier on Hasan. (Sudden typical gender role moment. Men don't do shy-face, even when they're shy. It comes out as truculence instead. Wow, that's the whole plot of Pride and Prejudice right there.) Equal clapping. Tie breaker: "suave." Eric: no that's sexist (hunh?) "indecisive" is shouted out. "constipated." Hasan actually bears down on this one ... and clearly wins.

All three competing at once: "sauve." I have just enough time to think "Who's gonna do finger guns? Probably at least Dino," before Dino does finger guns. Ernie is winning for me; he's moving around, stroking his face and chest. Hasan does James Bond, but his face is kinda frozen. Hard to tell who won. Tie breaker between Ernie and Hasan. "intrigued." Hasan balks but is slapped down. Ernie does sexually intrigued. Hasan does confused. Ernie wins, of course.

Time for final face-off between Emotion Eric and Ernie, the winner. Eric asks audience for the emotion. I call out "O-face". They have to do it once the audience starts chanting "o-face, o-face."

I shouldn't have shouted that. I really didn't want to see this. Ernie does a whole scene, ending with a cigarette. He blinks rapidly at the beginning. That's classic. You don't wanna know what Eric did. Eric insists that Ernie wins. End of Eric's segment.

2:07 - MJ: intros Ernie Hsiung of iistix, little. yellow. different., 8Asians.

Ernie: asks audience if they want funny or sad first. Sad.

Reads a post titled "Word Association": (I'm noticing that Ernie's T-shirt says "Sometimes, when I'm alone, I google myself.") Christmas. His sister is bipolar schizophrenic. Her drug cocktail keeps her psychosis in check. Her manic phase is like a game of word association. Ideas lead from one to another. Tries to find method to her madness.

Reads another post titled "Change it to the Butterflies": divorced parents. Needs to buy mom new computer. He's doing his mom in Mandarin. (ETA: I mean that he's doing an impression of her, bitch!) He's worried that mom will find his blogs, but English to Chinese translation is a failure so far. Buys her an iMac for Christmas. Sets it up. Sets up her Yahoo, because he works at yahoo. She wants the butterflies (MSN). She likes the butterflies. But she doesn't have an email address. So he just wasted his money. Somebody leaves a comment as his mom, calling him her "little Asian David Sedaris."

2:20 - MJ ten minute break.

I go outside and bust into a conversation between Amy Lam and Brandon Bigelow. Amy is a longtime KSW participant and member of the Board. Brandon is a new member of KSW's board, came on board from Locus with the merger. I make some obnoxious jokes about how Locus should promise in the wedding ceremony to "love, honor, and obey" KSW that go over like lead balloons. If I ever learned diplomacy at KSW, it's aalllll gone. I guess political incorrectness is catching.

2:37 - We're back!

MJ: has been blogging ten years at minjungkim.com. When she started, she'd been writing as humor columnist at Ernie's site (iistix). There weren't a whole lot of Asian American women bloggers at the time and was periodically freaked out b/c she wrote about a lot of personal stuff and had a lot of stalkers. Her dad was worse at internet/computer stuff than Ernie's mom. She had to teach him how to double-click. Kids of people from his church would find her stuff and she passed it off as her Koream Journal writing. Her dad is an interesting caricature on her blog. One of the reasons she moved to Cali (from Michigan) was to escape her family, so she could embarass them online, by telling stories about them: like her Dad trying to set her up with a peach farmer in Fresno, or wanting her to go to church to meet boys, or wear a skirt because she has "nice leg."

Her older brother didn't know she was blogging until he was working at startup in Korea, and one of his golfing buddies said he was in love with this girl in California who blogged about people bothering her with weird stuff like asking her in grocery stores what a ripe zucchini looks like. She had a lot of traffic from Seoul. Thanks to bloggers today who put themselves online.

After 12 years in SF, involvement with KSW and Locus, she and hubby are moving to Seattle. This is her last event. Big general Awwww. She's remembering when her Dad came to visit. She was showing him the sites. He's impossible to have conversation with, especially if a TV is on. But she took him on a tour of SF and she was bringing him back from dinner in East Bay with Korean Catholic friends from church, wearing a short skirt, just to prove herself. He was tired on the way back and he started singing to San Francisco to take care of his daughter. (She does the song.) And she's thinking "Oh my god, I'm so gonna blog about this!" Thank you to SF for taking good care of her. Thanks to everyone she's met in SF. Everybody sings her Dad's song: "San Francisco, take care my daughter. Okay."

2:46 - MJ: showing her film. "BA-AME" Best Asian American Movie Ever. by MJ, Dino Ignacio, and Glenda Bautista.

Voice over from MJ and Dino about identity. Images of food products and stereotypically chinky things. Lots of giggling from Glenda in the audience tips me off that this is a parody. Damn, I wasn't sure. It's perfect, especially after seeing the shorts last night! Voiceover: fists in the air, dragons, if dragons had fists, fake sad melancholy tone. Robots and zombies. I think I like ham sandwiches. Books and Koream Journal magazines. Glenda comes down some stairs and kicks the shit out of poor Dino, who is filming the chinky floor design. Do you think Chi-hui is going to show your piece of shit film at the film festival? No one wants to watch your bad vacation video with spoken word poetry over it! We're making a film, asshole! Stop oppressing me! Much cheering. (The film will be up on YouTube.)

2:52 - Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, founders of icanhascheezburger.com Yay! The lolcatz people!

Dino accidentally turned off the projector. Tech moment. I'll take this moment to briefly outline who these folks are. If you've ever seen these, the lolcatz are photos of cats with captions directly on the photos in lolcatz language, which is bad grammar and internet-style typos. The classic one is the photo of the cat that says "I can has cheezburger?" They have a website collecting these pictures. (If you read on below, you'll find out how they started and what it's all about.)

Powerpoint presentation. Eric: A lot of people didn't know they were Asian. They're from Hawai'i. Met MJ a year ago. Had no idea it would become this ridiculously popular. They love helping people making their sites better and get more traffic so ask lots of questions later.

Eric: Didn't know what the lolcatz pictures were called before but started calling them lolcatz. These are pictures of animals or things with captions on them. Kari: hard to describe what it is without sounding dumb. It's just finding pictures of animals that are funny and putting text on them. Eric: it can take an hour to explain it.

Eric: how it started: nighttime, at work, abusing chat privileges. My job sucks. Kari: Had the cheezburgerpic and sent it to Eric to entertain him. She files away pictures in "cute" or "funny" folders. Eric: sometimes you see something on the internet that has to be erased. He felt really happy. So he bought the domain name with the text and sent it back to her as a joke. She said okay let's make it a blog. The whole thing happened in less than 24 hours. (On Dreamhost originally?)

Eric: initially Eric took "chz" and Kari took "tofu" usernames. They had avatar/icons of burgers, pixellated. There were forums out there that had already collected all these pictures. Kari: but they were just image dumpsites: some with captions and some without, but no organization. They put them in a blog and added tagging, Web 2.0. Added tags on Wordpress. But nobody can use their tags because they over-tagged.

Eric: it was just for them but people liked it. They were always talking to visitors. LolLanguage developed during conversations in comments. They put in adsense (advertising for blogs that pays bloggers). Kari: their first goal with ads was so they could buy Nintendo Wiis, then we can quit and retire.

Eric: So we started getting popular. Got boingled and got 17,000 visitors. Xeni Jardin (of Boing Boing) loved them then. People trying to figure out what was going on and we couldn't help them. A lot of people popped up with rules. It started hitting big newspapers and magazines.

Kari: XKCD (web comic) was the moment they made it. Eric: it's great when your mom sends you a link to your own site. Getting into XKCD was it. Growing pains: it was always the two of them. Awake 20 hours a day blogging about cat pictures. Both had full time jobs at the beginning. But then their hobby became more interesting, fun, and popular than their jobs. He quit his job in May. Millions of hits a month. Once he could pay for rent, car, food, he was gone. They didn't sleep. The viewers wanted t-shirts, collectibles. Quadrupled workload. Kari: they were doing fulfillment as well. One package for one t-shirt, one button. They still don't sleep.

Eric: Lolcat generator makes lolcat phenomenon really accessible. Were getting 2000/day in September. More and more submissions so they started letting people vote after they filtered out the graphic and violent ones. That's when the site stopped being about them.

Traffic graphic. Tracking for this started Jan 07. Traffic quadrupled in a year. Then the server balked and they had to take site down and put up a donation button. Moved to megacheez server. Went through quota in fifteen days 2-3 terabytes, paying hundreds of dollars a month. Kari: They really only needed so much space for cat pix storage but needed more bandwidth for traffic. Each terabyte costs $1000. Never disabled hotlinking. Kari: that's how the site became popular. They didn't want to disable that. Eric: that was scary. So they wrote to Wordpress (their blogging service) and asked for help. They had one mill hits/month at the time. Asked Wordpress, can we do a VIP account? Eventually they let them on. Then they could stop caring about servers and went back to focusing on the site. Not getting distracted by traffic.

Then there were spin off sites everywhere. Arizona Bank did an ad for a free cheeseburger aimed at college students that bit the original cat pic. In 2007 Halloween people were dressing as lolcatz. Saw the language everywhere. Eric shows walrus bucket saga and gets a big laugh. Glenda runs up on stage and gives Eric a bucket. Eric loves the lolrus. Lolcode created. Geeks get involved. Kari: started out as a joke. Eric: lolpresidents. big laugh. lolbots. loltrek. There was stuff people made that we didn't get, but said go ahead and make it. Kari: lolgayz and lolbrarians. lolbible with ceilingcat. (I loove the lolbible!) They're 75% finished with Bible translation into lollanguage. Lolspeak. If you go to the site, that's all they use in comments.

Why so popular? It's fun (communist cat image). Cute and geeky. Techy. Serious. Sometimes they're perfect in themselves and aren't a reference back to another. Kari: explains Ceiling Cat. "Omnomnomniscient" cat. Eric: ceiling cat is the all-seeing and basement cat is his counterpart. Shows bukkakitten and gets a lot of groans. Got them in trouble. Relevant. Azn cat (siamese cat "me no rike remonade") Kari: this is the most controversial. Eric: People said racist. It's teh internets!

Eric: They had a million pictures submitted that had never seen the light of day. Ppl came up with all kinds of ideas: make a book. Had a lot of time on their hands. They were finally able to stop working on the site, end of July. Were working 20 hours a day on the site and very burnt out. Found a guy to help. Kari: at some point they couldn't figure out what was funny anymore. Eric: at the beginning it was just their humor, but then it switched over to being the community. They'd have to ask ppl what was funny. It was hard to find help, to find someone who would find things that you think are funny. Kari: started out as their thing and it was hard to open up.

Eric: Transitioned off to Ben CEO and he hired real people. The site started floundering but when Ben took over it tripled in traffic. Doing a lot of sites with focused niches. They took a break and decided to do a book. Ben gave them a hard drive with a million pictures. A folder with literally a million pictures. His hard drive crashed. He's writing scripts just to look at these photos.

The book is real world. Getting okays from ppl was complicated. Didn't understand why ppl wanted a book. Book in stores Oct 7th.

They're doing lolzoo at SF Zoo this Saturday at 1 pm. They will adopt an animal, and have a caption contest. Last photo is happycat eating the cheeseburger.

Q & A: I ask about the bible wiki. Do they know the people who do it? No. They leave it up to other people to run with the concept and don't need to know or give permission.

Can they locate the people who make the photos to get permissions? Eric wrote a program to find email addresses from the submissions Were there ones they couldn't find the owners for? Yes, there's a lot of really great stuff that they couldn't use.

What's the submission to accepted ratio right now? Gone up. 8000/day and choosing 20. First have to sort out NSFW images and inside jokes. So ratio is more like 1/500. There are other sites too. Ihazahotdog, with dog pictures. They have an Engrish site. Failblog.

How did they deal with copyright? Had the publising company contact each person. They're all credited in the back. Had some classic ones and ones that no one had ever seen. Only about 100 made it. People were demanding money. Totally different from internet, really want everything under control.

Glaenda: the book is available on internet. Thanks for coming.

Express Yourself/ Multidisciplinary Performance

6:59 pm - We're back at Space 180 (180 Capp St. between 16th and 17th Streets) tonight for "Express Yourself," a multidisciplinary performance night.

It doesn't say so on the website, but I think Sam, or Ellen, told me that tonight is specifically LGBT performers. Not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, having all queer stuff in one night gives the queer community a chance to rally around one particular event at APAture, and outreach can go farther out into the community than just Asians. Everybody can make an effort to show up tonight, instead of frittering themselves out over several different events and missing each other. It's that much-vaunted term "community-building," live, in the flesh.

On the other hand, it's Monday night, which is a ghetto in itself. Community arts ghetto night. And having all LGBT stuff in one night gives normative folks the opp to just ignore the whole thing. And it probably strips the other nights of queer artists to a much greater degree than otherwise ... although I'm sure not all queer performers are slotted into tonight's thing.

I just asked Ellen and she told me that someone had curated this night specifically. I didn't catch the name (Elokin) but it'll come out when they start, I'm sure. So that makes sense, although my concerns still hold.

7:08 - Thinking back now, we never separated queer artists out, and always had heavy queer presence in APAture. The most obvious one the first year was the GAPA dance troupe, which was, hands down, one of the crowd-pleasin'est gigs of that entire, 14-hour day. But we also had Las Cucas (which, to be honest, was basically a Latino band. Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa's Pinay half was the APAture hookup), filmmaker Stuart Gaffney, poet Truong Tran, a video from Sta-Prest (which also was hooked up to APAture through half a Pinay), and a buncha others which I would break out and list for you only I'm feeling uncomfortably ghettoizing now myself. (YOU are a queer and YOU are a queer, and YOU and YOU!)

So this is new, is what I'm sayin'. We'll see how it turns out.

Since I'm at KSW I'm going to post as I go.

7:20 - Ellen opens it up. Who has attended KSW and APAture before? Usual KSW pitch. Shout out to sponsors. Thanks Elokin Cheung  for putting this together.

Elokin: thanks blah blah blah. Intros The Rice Kings, drag king troupe.

7:23 - The Rice Kings

Three Drag Kings, one in ordinary blazer and pants and t-shirt with red scarf (Dang Kinki). Play sound: voiceover of a fashion show. This dude is a model. We hear what he's thinking in voice over. Asian women from Asia are great; Asian American women are crazy.

Tito Ray-Ray Pansit On My Face wearing "classic dirty uncle" attire. Leather jacket and vest, cords, fedora, green shirt. Pinoy accent. We hear him thinking. Aggression toward white man with Asian woman.

Big Daddy wearing cheesy hip-hop outfit, badly put together. He's from the M.I.A. school of "fashion." He's thinking: have you ever been mistaken for a tourist? Oh, he's a hapa, cuz he hate da whiteness inside him too.

That was interesting. Mugging to a voice over. Now they're arguing (in real voice) over who's the best cook. Wait, that was it? Wow. That started out interesting, then ... ended.

7:29 - Elokin intros Amir El-Chidiac for a poetry reading.

Okay, we start with pseudo-sensuality, which takes a creepy turn when he remembers the bars of his crib in his lover's arms. Next poem: battle "I know what it's like to be an orphan" ... something about white American dreams. This is better, despite the clichés. "A New Quarterback". Gaza strip. (Ai ya. Just observe that for a second: Gaza Strip. ... Okay, we're back.) Interesting. He has a guy actually being a quarterback on the Gaza strip. Not bad.

Last pome: when you go home google Mahmoud Daweesh (?) one of the most important Arab poets and just passed away this month. "Wayne's Words": poem addressed to "Mahmoud" and evokes him. Oh, somebody's been reading too much Lorca. Maybe it's Mahmoud. Derivative, but lovely.

You can purchase his work in the last Intergenerational Writer's Lab chapbook.

7:37 - Elokin intros Celeste Chan. Usual stuff: MFA, performed here and there. Oct. 5 in Hapa Hard Core

Celeste: trying to channel her Jewish mother. Child abuse story in her mother's voice. Her father beats her up. (Celeste is wearing bright red lipstick and a black, empire waist dress; that's my schtick. She has a rich, low voice that keeps breaking, either because that's how it sounds or because she's nervous. The effect, however, is that she sounds like she's gonna cry at any moment.) Wow, that ended abruptly. And wasn't very interesting. Undifferentiated memories with no arc.

Poem: Ai ya. "press ear to wood ..." What The Fuck Is Wrong With Articles? Dude, articles GIVE ENGLISH ITS RHYTHMS. Damn. Start dropping articles, and you might as well stop busting, as far as I'm concerned.

7:42 Elokin intros Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, queer mixed Sri Lankan high femme powerhouse. Much published, much organized.

Leah: She's been helping med students visualize female genitalia. "Hurricane" spoken word. Uh oh, sensual spoken word about "my lover." Turns it into a discussion of how she learns to speak Tamil. I wanted to call you "lover" in my language. Hmmm.

Here's her hapa family pome. Not the cool family like Obama's. Tells folks' story: working class Mom on Fulbright. Dad is queer. Meet in London 1969. Fucking on a table/a lava bed of empire. Cool. White mamas who are racist. Absentee Daddy. Actually, sounds a little like Obama's family. This isn't a story of resistance, except it is. Those children grow up. To be as untamable as our hair. Typical hapa empowerment structure. But good piece.

Brown Best Friend Femme one: (She's wearing a hot pink flower over her left ear. That's awesome.) Very sweet poem. Liked it.

7:55 - Pause to seat the people standing in the back. Switch it up to nonliterary part of the night. Shout out to folks in audience, who did building work for the queer community. Thanks to Trinity Ordona, who teaches at City College. Also Madeleine Lim.

Intros Amar Puri, who does, among other things, stilt walking. Bet he gets some mileage off of that line at bars.

7:58 - Amar - is in drag. Hot pink polka dots. Dances down the aisle, to a keyboard, where he starts to play, despite the crackliness of the amplification. That is a pretty boy there. Starts singing soul. Nice voice too. Song deteriorates into deliberate chaos, and moves to next song. He should be standing, and not hiding behind the bangs of his wig. And work harder on the voice. Slight oversouling, without the cream. And the mic needs to be closer to him.

Okay, I'm bored. Dude, you don't start out all dynamic, and then make us aware that are butts are going numb in these stupid folding chairs. Get up and DO SOMETHING! Ai ya, now he's singing "My Baby Just Cares for Me" but his voice is actually overwhelmed by the keyboard. Also rushing the tempo a bit. Yeah, a mic with a long arm and a standing position would improve this performance by about 50%.

He gets a lot of love, though. Alright, I give him love, too.

8:07 - Amber Field, queer Korean adoptee, specializes in world fusion music. She's standing right behind me. I'm switching to another screen for a sec.

Oh my, she has a digeridoo. You buzz that thing, girl. (We had an awesome digeridoo musician second APAture. Didn't know there was a basis for comparison, didja?) She's throwing some vocal cries into this. Is that what it's supposed to sound like? It's like when you're playing a kazoo and you don't quite engage the "zoo" part and you can kinda tell it's your voice. That wasn't all that exciting. She learned that in India? Huh?

Now she's reading poetry/spoken word (?). "Boom is the sound of capitalism." "I was the product of capitalism." Blames outsiders for convincing women to sell their babies. Blames the war in Korea on the US. Lotsa unpoetic blame here. Blames the patriarchy. Boom. Ai ya "I am the mirror for your projections." Ai ya "ching chong chinaboy" yeah, she said it. "And we should all be able to freely choose our own identities." Zzzzzz ... *snort* huh? What? Identity what?

Oh. My. God. Her last piece is played on a TAMBOURINE. And she's singing. Mothers ... Fathers ... Thank god she can't enunciate well enough for me to understand what she's really singing. You know, songs generally have structure. I mean, musical structure. Doesn't matter what culture you're in, there's actually a structure. You know, where there's a shape to it? Oh ... never mind.

8:18 - NaR is the first queer Arab hip hop crew. Intros different members. Means "fire" in Arabic.

Awesome. Butch girl and gay boy. Damn, they're cute. "I'm the definition of a Semite." They're a little stiff. Rhymes good so far. Okay, I declare a moratorium on the word "colonialism" in hip hop. Find another way to say it, dewds. It's like dropping an f-bomb at a formal dinner. Stops the conversation. Girl can rap. Boy can move. Oh ... okay ... you educate us about the misnomer "anti-Semite." Yeah, don't worry about the beat. You just let it trail away while you lecture us. It's cool.

The beats are not beast enough. And they need some more practice and confidence, but ladies and gents, we might have something here. Oh, I don't know about the obvious rhymes. Work more on that flow. Yeah. I'll hold my breath a bit. No, no, no, you don't need to bust out your research! That's not hip hop! Are you gonna cite your sources now? Want me to get my MLA handbook? Argh! If you wanna give a speech, then give a damn speech!

Another moratoriam on "orientalism," "capitalism," oh, yeah, and on rhyming "isms" based on the "ism" part. ... You know, the lecturing thing could work out really good, but they gotta tighten it up a bit. They're both still hella cute.

Mangoes with Chili, some sort of tour.

8:35 - Closing performance with Rice Kings.

Lip-syncing boy band. I do not know what language this is. They're really engaging and cute, if not terribly convincing. Get a lot of love for ripping off their red overalls and/or bathrobe. Now blowing bubbles. Am I missing a reference here?

8:49 - Aaaaand we're done. In, out, and on with our lives.

10:13 - That was actually tightly curated, and they kept the performers to their time. Well done.

Act Out/ Performance Night

8:20 - Intersection for the Arts. What?

This is a general mixed performance night, much more in line with traditional APAtureness, where all disciplines are mixed in together. Tonight is also Sam Chanse's performance. Sam has a longer history with APAture at this point than I do. And she's the featured artist in performance.

8:22 - Ellen Oh welcomes us. Day Seven. Year Ten. Upcoming events. Upcoming programs. Thanks sponsors. You know the drill by now, right? Intros Jack, committee member. Bar is open.

8:25 - Jack - welcome. Pitch for the rest of APAture and t-shirts and booze.

Philip Huang (writer) born in Taipei, lives in Berkeley. Model turned actress. (Plus, he's a kickass writer. Seriously. One of his readings actually brought me to tears. Me!

8:26 - Philip - sneaks out the curtain. In character. Asks for cup of tea. Khalil brings it and sits down next to him. Giving us character: nervous giggly diva. Making a lot of our sipping his tea. Licking the cup, spilling it all over himself and licking it off. Shy giggling again: it's delicious. How's everyone doing tonight? Welcome my fellow Asians and Filipinos. Big laugh. Turning 33 next week. Prime number, lucky year. Bittersweet: year that Jesus committed suicide. Maybe accidental overdose. Love that you can interpret the Bible any way you want.

Went to Israel last year. Had so much fun in Israel got AIDS twice. Talking back and forth with woman in the audience. Wanted to have a three-way with an Arab and a Jew on top of the Wailing Wall, while shooting an M16. Didn't get to do that. Did get to shoot at the wall and accidentally shot a child, but it was a girl.

Did meet with a rabbi, Kabbalah. He shared the unspoken name of God with Philip. He'll share it wiht us tonight. Makes sucking sound while pointing at it his dick.

Did an "internment" at an animal shelter. Internship. I'm not Japanese. Khalil Solomon everyone! They're community activists; want to promote awareness about a health issue. Khalil is the black Alicia Keys. Khalil gets a guitar.

(This stuff is so offensive it would be funny, but timing is a little off.)

Singing that Beyonce song "to the left, everything you own in the goiter to the left" singing about a goiter. Ties a scarf around his throat to look like a huge goiter. Goes off on a rant about the goiter. Goiters are treatable. Tells story about having a goiter in the Philippines when he was ten. Falls into sobs. Khalil starts singing goiter song. Philip runs around doing interpretive dance. Goes into the audience and makes people touch the goiter.

Philip: can we hold hands? We can end goiters tonight.

Is that the end? That was weird, Philip. WTF? Wow, that was a weird little trip through Philip's freaky fuckin' mind.

8:42 - Jack: does a bit of a spiel about KSW and APAture. Intros Irene Fay Duller. Founding member of 8th Wonder, more stuff that I can't keep up with. New piece from her called "Skywalk" about finding home. All stories are true.

Irene: has a group of performers with her. using black boxes a set. Four characters. Girl talking about climbing a mountain. Boy talking about going back to find his roots. Girl talking about being out there and having a dream of ancestors.

(This is very Bindlestiff-style. Dance, movement together with monologue, identity stuff. Dream stuff.)

Now they're interacting. Texting in the Philippines a different language. We're a clever and creative people. Made up conflict between a guy and a girl about whether or not text language is good.

Going into a poor area to observe poor people. Leave your first worldliness. Guy gets grossed out. Describes the garbage by listing it. No one should live here. You are so first world. Monologue about his feelings.

Dancing bell-bedecked woman comes out. Music. She has a boa of fake flowers. Gives it to a girl. (Okay, so this is an esxperience of traveling back to the motherland, having dreams; failing to have the experience you wanted.) Takes the flowers away. Girl wakes up. Gets excited about the dream. She came to me, the river goddess. In touch with the earth. She's been researching this stuff.

(Damn, she's got some sharp things to say about roots searches. Could be a little tighter. It's kind of slow anyway and the performances aren't paced right.) They go out to the forest to collect the things the goddess told her in the dream. Her offering doesn't work out the way she wants it to. This was her test.

The mountain climbing part. Three of them describing the scene. Trying to keep up with the effortless guides. List of things back home they're thinking about. The grant proposal. Rice terraces full of blues music. Singing a canon. Goddess comes back out and dances. On the peak.

Wow, that was interesting. I'd like to see the whole piece when it's finished. I always wondered what the next step for Bindlestiff-trained writers and performers was gonna be. There it is. That is definitely a development.

9:06 - Jack: all artists are volunteering tonight. Please go talk to them and ask them when they're performing next.

Intro dance number. Rogel Camba. Danced on MTV show. Funkanometry. "Dark Identity" piece.

Rogel: group of six dancers all in black. Interpretive hip hop dance, to Portishead. If I'd been a dancer when I was sixteen and hiding in my room, listening to the Smiths, this is what I would have choreographed.

Okay it's picking up now. Aaannd we're back to agonized. Aaaannd we're picking up again. Each dancer gets a spotlight in one of these segments. Oh, this is the sexy segment. Good thing there's three boys and three girls! Feeling each other up and freeze-framing. Now we're writhing on the floor. Yeah, let's end with that ... with one of the boys doing one of the girls doggy style. Oh, it was Rogel doing the girl doggy style. Ladeez? Whatcha think?

9:22 - We're still in intermission. Pireeni stole the rest of my burrito. Mark stole the rest of my chips before the performance even started. Somebody opened the door so I can tell it's cooling off outside.

9:31 - Jack's back: people are milling, trying to find seats. Somebody gets into my personal space. Get out of my personal space! Jack intros Truthisreal TIR. www.truthisreal.com.

Sam comes out. Doing spoken word act in a black hoodie. Wisdom is knowledge. Pumping herself up. Pome about her grandmother. Called "Grandmother." (Hitting it all: "rice," "gold mountain," "sour plums," "other," "mango")

Now she's doing another character. Suzette Law, doing a weird voice. She's a volunteer for APAture festival, Professor Dariotis forces us to be here*. Conscription. Suzette has to be personal emcee for some girl, I mean woman. Intros Samantha Chanse. New stuff.

Now she's doing herself. HOW META!

Opening remarks: I am unworthy. Wasting other people's time. Quick to pass judgment on others. Unsuitable for employment. Quick to anger and to remorse. Bad at finances. Sometimes I laugh at babies ... falling. I hate you all but most of all I hate myself.

9:47 - Doing her dad? Calling somebody. His son is in medical school and coming home for a visit. Making a reservation with a friend at a restaurant. Daughter is Suzette, creative writing major at SFSU. Oh! Dig at "community organizers." Yeah, she said it.

Back to Suzette. Presenting the next piece while Sam prepares. Brings Goh Nakamura up. Childrens' book by Sam as a child, called "Fright Night," projected onto screen. (This is a real book Sam made as a kid, actually. She forced me to read it at her birthday party when she was drunk.) Suzette reading Sam's notes. It's a metaphor for bifurcated identity. The monsters coming out of the cemetery are people of color trying to invade white communities. Goh is playing atmospheric woo-woo music in background. Dismantling white hegemony.

9:58 - Sam playing Sam as very insecure. Pulls in bit from stand up about her last name. I like this bit, or would like it if I hadn't seen it twenty times already. Okay, not her fault. White kids with Down Syndrome. "Bitch you think too much Syndrome" thing. (This is interesting. She's playing it really slowly ... maybe b/c it's a "theater piece" and not a standup routine. It's really working. What's the lesson here? Slow it down.) Ooo. She added a weird little incestuous element to the end.

Back to the Dad. He's on the phone again. Same guy. Wants to add one more person to the table. The guy he's talking to is the chef. How messed up China is. They do Chinese things better in SF than in China.

10:08 - Sam's back. She's hapa, multiracial. Grew up in New York, there weren't that many of us. Wrote a song about her experiences being mixed (with Goh backing her up.) Song called "hapahapahapahapahapa." This'll get better with time. Food metaphors. Ouch.

Suzette again: there's real stuff going on in the world. We're going to have the first multiracial president and nobody talks about it. And all she's talking about is her identity.

Dad's back: calling him again. Why don't you bring a friend? Slight change of plans. His son's bringing "a friend" who's not a girl, so I can't go. I'm not comfortable with it. They don't want to get married so you can still go.

Sam again, doing her stand up thing about her Dad. Suzette: theres only one more thing left. Thanks to Intersection and volunteers, and people in light and sound booth, and audience. One more thing she's gonna do.

Dad's back: talking to Suzette. Arguing about not getting over Chris' five year relationship.

10:24 - Lots of applause. That was really good. Best thing I've seen so far at APAture. And she didn't pay me to say that.

Jack: last words.

And we're done.

* ETA: "Professor Dariotis" is Wei Ming, who wasn't "Professor" yet when we started APAture, but was a lecturer at SF State. She has stocked APAture's volunteer corps with her students since the beginning, by requiring them to do community service, and then telling them that volunteering at APAture would do the trick. Nice, huh? The first hired APAture coordinator, Andrew Amorao, was one of Wei Ming's students, and nearly every APAture intern has been too. Wei Ming hooked us up with the Filipino fraternity (can't remember the call letters), who did security for us the first three years. For scale, just realize that during the first few years, we required about 80 volunteers for the entire festival. I can't understate how key Wei Ming's professorly arm-twisting has been to the success of the festival.