APAture Live

Listen Up/Music Night

Here at Make Out Room for APAture Music Night.

7:45 - Lyman Yip, Board Member does KSW welcome. Usual stuff.

The place is almost empty. It may be too early for music. When I used to go see shows I never went to a show earlier than 9. So maybe other people are following their training. Lyman announces me and somebody comes up and hands me a zine. Just one 8 x 11 sheet folded in half. I'll check it out later.

First Band is Dirty Cupcakes.

"We're Dirty Cupcakes and we don't put out."

They look like they're all wearing Prince Valiant wigs. They can't all have the same haircut in different colors, can they? But I won't assume anything. The last time I told someone I liked her wig, it turned out to be her actual hair.

7:49 - First song over. This is their first show. Somebody's been listening to too much Ramones.

Pause to put toilet paper in my ears. God, I'm old, but I have no interest in tinnitus tonightus. What kind of music venue doesn't have earplugs behind the bar? We're at the Make Out Room, by the way. (I remember going to a show here in 1991 or therabouts. Do I remember correctly? Or was it another venue? That just looked like this one?)

Did I mention this is an all-girl band? All-woman band I mean, but I think it's okay to talk about women as girls (grrrls? Or does that hopelessly date me?) as long as they're in bands and you're talking about their bands.

PA system is horrible. I still hold out hope that someday I'll go to a club show and be able to hear the singer's actual voice, (I'm not naive enough to think that I'll understand the lyrics, ever. That's what recorded music is for.) Actually, I take that back: I CAN hear this singer's voice. There's an interesting duck-like flatness that comes out when she emphasizes something in a phrase. Not quite nasal. She should work that tone. It's interesting. Uh Oh, we just rhymed "money" with "honey." Hey! I understood a lyric!

I risked an ear for a while but no more clear lyrics were forthcoming. Toilet paper ahoy.

7:58 - Now Dirty Cupcakes is over. Four songs, I believe. Calls of "encore!" I don't think they have any more songs, though. I like them. If that's their first show, they're pretty damn promising. They've probably all been in bands before. The drummer's arms are covered in tats; the bassist has one arm tat showing, and the singer/guitarist none. That's the progression. Another progression: the drummer is dressed butchy in t-shirt and jeans, and the frontwomen are both wearing t-shirts under mini dresses. The bassist has Keds on, the singer/guitarist kitten heels (really? Now I see her wearing boots. Did I just make that up?) Yes, bands are 'bout the look, too. Deal with it.

8:06 - I've never figured out why there has to be SO MUCH putting your stuff together during a show. Why not set up all your stuff before the show and just remove stuff as you go along. The next band looks all-guy, but all-Asian-guy. Wow. Never seen these dudes before but that's not a huge surprise. Like I said, I never go to shows anymore.

By the way, I came here from Space 180, where Sabina Chen, APAture OG, is having her 40th Birthday Party, which she's using as a fundraiser for KSW. Sabina says she thinks she's the oldest OG, but I think there's one older. We're all right behind her, though. See what I mean about "the younger generation" having more than one generation in it? When Obama wins this election (PLEASE GOD) We will officially no longer be the younger generation anymore. We'll be the reigning generation, in the same way the Baby Boomers took complete charge when the Clintons went into office. Okay, I don't need to be thinking along these lines at a music show.

8:10 - Okay, I know it's a style, but I'm sick of the unremitting red at the Make Out Room. It would be nice if they could get some blue gels into those lights. Or just one spotlight. Just one.

Looks like there are more people here now, but it might just be because people are standing up. No, they're standing three-deep at the bar. There are definitely more people here. Dude, how many times do you need to tune your guitar? The band is putting their earplugs in. That's a bad sign. Toilet paper ahoy. These guys are boringly dressed in jeans and t-shirts. Another bad sign. Among white indy-rock bands there's often a competition to see who can be most boring and uncharismatic onstage, and I've noticed that Asian American bands seem to have their own master's competition, putting the white boys into the shade. I'll be grateful if at least one of these guys dances around a bit. I'm taking bets. Do we have a dancer here?

8:16 - Here comes Lyman again. Thanks Dirty Cupcakes. Shout out Locus and KSW are merging so they're celebrating a wedding. soemthing else I missed, and the APAture retrospective.

Next band is Bento. Began as a side project. Named that because a bento is a variety of bits and pieces coming together to form one. Influences = Smashing Pumpkins, Pixies, Beatles, and a couple of more derivative bands I immediately forgot.

Okay somebody can play guitar. Naturally, it's the guy with the khaki-looking safari button down and the longish Michael Chabon hair, that I pegged as the potential dancer. Nope, doesn't dance, but he does strike a guitarist pose with one leg out, tapping. The short-haired t-shirter in the middle (natch) playing rhythm guitar is the singer. Okay, I slandered the sound system. I can hear his voice too, and occasional lyrics like "on my knees." Come to think of it, I'm glad I don't hear more.

They're pretty tight. Singer is relaxy and, though he doesn't dance, loses the boring contest. Damn, three way harmonies on the chorus. Damn. Somebody's a little flat on the three-way. (Boy, I don't get to write that every day.)

8:29 - Okay so this is a side-project. Clearly these guys know what they are doing because they are in other bands, and this is--maybe?-- their Asian American project. The music is veering to the middle-of-the-road indy-ish rock. Not a lot of surprises here. I want this otherwise handy drummer--cool Flock of Seagulls haircut nowithstanding--to learn some jazz and Latin. And to touch his toms more than four times per song. God, I'm such a bitch.

The lead guitarist just said something really quickly that I didn't catch. He doesn't have the good mic.

Oh yes, work those toms! Oh.

8:34 - Why am I getting a desert rock hit off these guys? It must be the flowy, sidewindy, lead geetar. Lead geetarist says something else quickly and incomprehensibly. Lead singer says they're selling a CD.

Last song. This is more interesting. It started out like an indy-desert-rocky Squeeze song. Then it went all typical.

So this is how I work. I'm nice to beginners, but god forbid you should raise any expectations with me, 'cuz then I turn into a bitch. You've seen it happen here. Live.

OMG, they did a big rock finish on their last song. I'm really not down with that.

8:42 - Sadie and Han of Invisible Cities are standing by the stage, awaiting their turn. Yay! Invisible Cities is next! Of course, I have one simple question for Invisible Cities: WHERE'S MY NEW ALBUM, BITCH?

I've so overplayed their first album on my iPod it's not even funny. This is really versatile singer-songwriter pop-rock with a leeeeetle bit (not much) of nasty. They really bring it--melody, imagination, not to mention chops on every front. So I can't wait to see where they go with the next album (if anywhere. They better be going somewhere or the bitchiness will know no bounds. I love tough.)

8:50 - Oo! They brought a drummer. And a bassist! OMG is Sadie gonna play geetar? I've never seen her play. I think Ima go toilet paper free on this one. Not super packed in here, but a respectable crowd, I guess. Why? Why is there no packy-packy for this event?

8:53 - NO! Sadie brought a leetle keyboard. Too cute!

8:55 - Drummer wearing red Wilco t-shirt ("wilco" in chinky font) with tiger. What does it mean? Is that a good or bad sign?

8:58 - Sam Chanse comes by and says "Death to bloggers!" again. I guess she thinks it's funny.

8:59 - Still waitin'.

9:00 - Finally. Lyman comes up again. Lots of screaming and "love yous." Usual KSW and APAture pitch. Ten days of art and music. Check out rest of events blah blah blah. Upcoming events: merging with LocusArts wedding fundraiser Oct 1; upcoming workshop in classical Indian music. APAture retrospective. Pitch.

9:03 - Han Wang and Sadie Contini met on Craigslist and sent tapes back and forth. Play in different configurations. reshape songs for each performance. Listing of various musicians who play with them. Odd shaped and slightly ugly shiny things, noise noise, noise, song crafting, decent lyrics, pretty sounds.

Song about a bulldozer from Sadie. Sadie on leetle keyboard, with Han on guitar. Holy shit that's a kazoo she's playing. Bulldozer, your heart knows my crash course. Spill, Baby, spill. Girl, you move between your head and chest voice. Heh.

Song from last album. (I don't know any song titles. They didn't transfer to my iTunes.) Han keeps threatening to dance. Do it. DO IT!

9:10 - It's hard to dance with a laptop, but I'm doing my best.

9:12 - Sadie: thanks to APAture for bringing us and shout out to Dirty Cupcakes and Bento.

Sadie: "This is a song about a pigeon." Also a new song (to me). Yes, it is a song about a pigeon. Sounds a little muddy. Unarticulated rock. Toilet paper ahoy. I like the abrupt endings, but maybe too abrupt every time?

9:16 - Oo. This is one of my favorite songs. I think of it as the "Oh Yeah" song b/c I don't know the titles. Another new song now. Why are their new songs all so ... arranged? Oh, here's some quietloud. See? You have five or six whole drums to work with, haircut! That's how it's done: change it up.

9:22 - Chris Brown is takin' da pitchers. Where's Jay Jao?

"Shooting Star" song. Han's first singing deal tonight. Okay, maybe that isn't the bad mic. It's coming through. They sound good. What makes the difference here? More practice? More time spent on imaginative work? I wouldn't think to call them a tight band, especially since the members change so often. But they are tight. It's just not what you notice. Maybe they just pick better musicians.

9:25 - Sadie: Nick Mirov on bass. Dan Beber(?) on drums, both of Love is Chemicals. New song (to me) chorus is also a bit muddy. Is this deliberate? Or are all the songs a bit muddy in the loud parts and I just don't notice with the songs I know b/c I know what they sound like in clean recordings?

9:28 - Sadie: How are we for time? Two requests for tube song. A sad way to end. (What's the tube song?) I don't know this song. Sad, slow song.

9:33 - That was a VERY abrupt ending. And yes, that was a bummer song to end on, but pretty. Good set. Too short. But heeeey. They ended on time!

Aaaaand that's all folks! Cigarette time and then I'm back to Sabina's party. I'll post this there (there's no open wireless here.)

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.

Groove It/ Music Night

7:00 - So the big question tonight is really: who will bother to come out for APAture music and who will stay in and watch the debates? It was definitely a question for me, but one solved by the simple fact that I don't have a TV and will have to wait for the debate to show up on YouTube anyway. Which it will. Soon.

So anyway, here I am at the Make Out Room again, again in the corner near the front of the stage. I need to get some wine and toilet paper: the latter for my ears and the wine for my brain. Yeah.

7:07 - Okay, so I'm boozed and toilet papered and I still have 23 minutes before the show starts. Bummer.

7:09 - I don't have any music-specific thoughts right now. Lessee ... some of the best music moments of APAtures past: the first one is David Ewell putting together a kickass Jazz combo for APAture 2, even though we didn't have the money to pay anyone, and then giving us all the love afterwards. David is kewl. Teri Untalan played that APAture too, I think, and she might have been at APAture 1 (she later became my roommate for three years so it's shocking that I don't remember.) Also at APAture 1 was Ernest Mark singing "Someone to Watch Over Me" with a guitar, and Doug Hirai, with his long, long hair, doing an awesome, squiddly electric guitar solo. There was the digeridoo soloist in APAture 2 as well, who did nothing but play digeridoo and kept the audience riveted for ten solid minutes. The Western States played at APAture 2 or 3 (maybe both.) They were definitely my favorite local Pinoy punk flava. I liked their first name better though: the Chun Han Avengers.

There was also this awesome duo at APAture 3 whose name I don't remember. We saw them playing in a doorway in the Castro during Pink Saturday and, since one of them was apparently Asian, handed them a submission form. The other one was hella mixed, including some Hawai'ian, if I remember correctly. They came and played and were beautiful and awesome, and brought a kind of smartass, fiery, dramatic energy to the music segment they were in that we don't often see in APAture music. Who were you guys? What was your name? I'll have to look that up later and hope they're on the website. (ETA: it wasn't Maxwell Horse, was it?)

Goh Nakamura has played more than once; most memorably for me was last year when he played closing night, at a time I (and others) were feeling very sad about the loss (in late summer/early fall 2007) of both Jack Davis and Bill Sorro. Jack was the executive director of SomArts Cultural Center, and the one non-KSW person who had championed KSW-Next and APAture from the very beginning. He had offered Jean Chen free use of SomArts for KSW-Next salons, an offer he extended to me, although I didn't take him up on it because our salons were too small for that space.

But we did take him up on the offer for APAture 2, and SomArts was the home of APAture from 2000 to 2005 or 6, thanks to Jack. He made sure the space was affordable for us, along with Mike Dingle, Rene Yanez, and Cathy ??? smoothed over all difficulties, and all around made us feel welcome. In late 2000, when we were being evicted from our space on South Park, Jack created an office for us at SomArts at an affordable price. He was always in KSW's corner, always a prime supporter of APAture, and he put his considerable knowledge and resources at our disposal. He died last fall of a heart attack.

Bill Sorro was a resident of the I-Hotel, along with KSW, at the time of the eviction in 1977. His history with KSW predates the founding of the org. After the eviction, Bill helped found the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, which, a quarter century later, got the I-Hotel rebuilt. (We saw the Youth Speaks APAture event there last weekend.) Bill was a profoundly respected man who always gave everyone profound respect. There's a lesson right there. His attention validated and empowered all the young people he came into contact with--including me. Bill was one of the first longtime KSW constituents who acknowledged my role at KSW and gave it context and importance. He brought me into the community and gave APAture a background and tradition, an importance in the flow of community history, in which Bill himself had played such an integral part.

So last year, I felt strongly, especially during APAture, the loss of these two men who had contributed so much to the event, and whose names were unknown to most of the current organizers and artists, because they were satisfied with supporting roles. When Goh played his set that closed out APAture, it was in exactly the melancholy, longing, and hopeful mood I was in, and it closed APAture for me with an unconscious tribute to Jack and Bill.

7:34 - Okay, Brandon looks like he's getting ready to open this shit up. It's pretty empty tonight. I count 30 heads, including the band. Not even all the tables are full. It's the same problem we had with the last music night: too early. But here's the advantage of the Make Out Room: the atmosphere is always good. It's fun to be in here, and there's always a sense of anticipation before a show starts here.

7:40 - Awesome. Dude's setting up a kulintang. Is this Lumaya? I can't access the internet here, so I can't see the bios and lineup.

7:42 - Lyman: welcome. Four bands tonight. Intro to KSW. Intro to APAture. Upcoming APAture events. Shout out to me. Thanks to May APAture coordinator, Ellen, etc. Thanks to sponsors.

First band: The Autonomous Region. Metal, hip hop, punk, funk, R&B and Jazz. Infused with progressive commentaries. Blah blah.

7:46 Autonomous Region: five folks. Start with recording of , and guitar played over it distorted to sound like sitar. Cool. That ends pretty quickly.. We have two guitarists, one is sitting behind the kulintang. The one up front is doing hella sound effects with his. Okay, now drums and bass, and squiddly rock guitar from kulintang guy. Kutintang guy takes squiddly guitar off and starts playing kulintang. Hmmm ... it just sounds like a marimba with a strange resonance to it. That's how he's working it. Yes, I was detecting a slight jazz fusion note to this before and the marimba/kulintang underlines it.

Caveat here: not a fan of traditional jazz fusion, although I acknowledge that a lot of interesting stuff comes out of it. Oh, okay. We're in straight up rock now. Power chords, snare-bass-hi-hat, dumdumdumdum bass. Woman singer gets up and starts shout-singing. Time for toilet paper. Yay! Singer is dancing! And emoting. And wearing a red dress. See? I think all bands at APAture should be required to have a kulintang onstage, even if they don't use it. It will remind them of their island-tribal-ethnic-grandmother-loose-hipped-ground-down-squatting roots. And make them more fun to watch.

7:54 - Okay there was more energy in that song than in all the other previous bands (except Invisible Cities) put together. But I didn't like the song. Now a love song to SF called "Took My Breath Away." Modified ska, without the hard and fast. Nice and melodious. Okay this song could be a little harder and faster. I wish I could hear the lyrics. Taking the toilet paper out doesn't help. I'm not really hearing kulintang guy's guitar. Maybe front guitar guy's is too loud, or maybe kulintang guy isn't really doing anything. No, I think he's just too soft. Singer's got a good, strong voice, but drowned by the guitar.

7:58 - Oh she heard that. She asked for more vocal. Yes, please! Intros the band. Last song homage to important event: "I-Hotel." How exciting! I'm thinking this band might actually pull it off. They switch it up again. Now we're doing funk-rock. What a choice for the I-Hotel. She's got some range in that voice. She's doing rock-funk now, and it's working. Okay, the bass solo was a little pedestrian. Geetar solo is okay, but ... What I can hear of the lyrics is interesting. Something about "brick by brick" and the sound of thunder. Wow, I hope they do a clean recording of this. I wanna hear it. No twiddly ending, just boom.

8:03 - Not what I would choose to put on my iPod, but they did what they set out to do and did it well. And that I-Hotel song got me really curious. I want to hear it again. (ETA: Oh yeah, it's on their myspace page. It was better live.)

Oh, somebody just put on Roxy Music's Avalon to break down their equipment. I love you.

Can I just say here how gratified I am that somebody made the I-Hotel into a good song? The I-Hotel is almost inevitably the coercive ingredient in a bad piece; the ingredient that prevents the audience from tuning out, leaving, or bitching. You know those moments. This song seemed more about really imagining the life of the building and the community in it, rather than using a hot-button issue to get attention for your weak word-and-note-mongering. Okay, moratorium on bitter tonight.

Three piece band, oh this is Lumaya, I recognize the singer from a video they made. Woman singer/guitarist. Glenn on bass, guy drummer.

8:12 - Place is filling up and you can really hear a lot of talk in the background. Lyman - intros Lumaya. Ethereal and aggressive.

(Can I just complain here for a second that the singer is wearing jeans under a dress? I hate that look. Either wear a dress or don't!)

Drummer starts with what would sound like a military beat if it weren't played entirely on toms. Singer comes in over it. Guitar and Bass underline the beat. Singer is nice and loud. Good voice. Can almost understand the lyrics. Transitions slightly awkward. Okay, they're getting warmer. Drummer is carrying a lot of weight here. Strongest element framing the voice. Like it.

8:17 - Her strumming is the awkward part, not a perfectly smooth rhythm, not a lot of confidence in it. I was thinking earlier, how can you play guitar with that many rings and a cuff on your strumming hand? One answer: she's not resting her wrist on top of the guitar to strum, but also not really moving that hand up and down. It's noticeable because the strumming motion of the guitarist is part of the visual element of a rock show. Like Pete Townshend's windmill. This looks (and sounds) rather tentative, while her voice is completely commanding. It's interesting and sad: interesting because it forces, like I said, more weight onto bass and drums. Sad because there are so few good women guitarists out there, and having her choose between voice and guitar feels unnecessary.

8:20 - Did I mention that this is a really tight band?

8:26 - Except that the dominant rhythm gets a little overbearing and tedious after a while. Not enough variation (unlike the first band that may have had too much.) A little too much reliance on the voice to bring all the meaning and texture into the music. (Wow, I'm just being critical and not really bitchy. It's hard to be bitchy when you're dealing with competence. Sorry I can't be more entertaining and mean.)

8:30 - Lyman briefly, give it up for Lumaya again. So there's maybe 50 people in here now. It still feels empty-ish, but there's more activity and energy than before. People standing up and grouping. The night is good so far. I'm impressed.

8:44 - Lyman: next band is Bloodwire. Started in Oakland. Leader from goth/industrial. Three piece. Asin chick singer in minidress, guitarist, drummer.

Chick singer: we're here to get your rock on. Toilet paper time. Geetarist has Hello Kitty guitar. Singer has a cantopop voice. I'm having trouble hearing what's going on. Is there a prerecorded synth back there? No, sorry, prerecorded bass. Not goth at all. I'm actually getting a hard-rock Talk Talk hit here. Weird. Yes? That's a synth? I really need to take this toilet paper out. But they're so loud.

They're good, but not at all original. What are we listening to? This is rock that could fit into any of the last three decades without comment. Oh, now he's actually playing keyboards. How did I miss that before? I just didn't see it.

8:52 - There's nothing wrong with this band. I'm just getting my bitch back on here. I understand the need for a band to stake out stylistic territory to be commercially viable--I mean look at how I complained about the variability of The Autonomous Region--but how do you avoid tedium when you know exactly what's coming next? Either you're dancing, or you're fucking, or you're committing suicide to the music. It's basically a groove background to a particular action, not a profound aural artistic experience. Okay, I'm gonna shut up now.

8:56 - I'm getting a lot of eighties band hits off this but I'm not sure who they're really reminding me of. I wonder why I alighted on Talk Talk initially. That's not really it. The swelling synth is a bit generic John-Hughes-soundtracky.

8:59 - Weird. Chick singer has a receiver clipped to her back, but she's not wearing a head set. She's singing into a mic with a cable. WTF? Was that her monitor? Weird.

9:09 - Ohhh, I know why I was getting a Talk Talk vibe. Because the background music tonight has been Roxy Music. Duh. Weird, now we're just into Bryan Ferry. God, I'm soooo dating myself.

9:13 - Lyman: thank you for coming out. Hand for Bloodwire, Lumaya, Autonomous Region. Board member. Tenth year of APAture, 36 years of KSW. Pitch. Blah blah. Still not very full in here. Same number of people as before. Last band Feral Typewriter. Span several genres. Solid melodies, interesting arrangements ... what? Toilet paper time.

I like the name. I hope they don't think of themselves as a "literary band." One Asian guy, three white guys. The Asian guy is lead guitaristish, but I can't hear him at all. Dude, turn him up. I seriously can't hear a thing, even when I take the toilet paper out. Alright, I'm exaggerating, but it's pretty small and soft. Wow, that was distressing. It's so harsh to watch a band where someone is playing and you can't hear them play.

Yikes, they're doing the Beatlesesque thing. Argh. Lead Guitaristish is playing keyboards now. What? Do we all have to slide into XTC territory when we go this route? I guess there are only so many musical tracks.

Okay, breathe. Remember your affirming mantra: "It's okay to say something positive."

:

They're good. They're doing what they said they'd do. It's okay if it's not my cup of tea. It's okay if the second guitar is inaudible. See? look at all that energy! They're really enjoying themselves. Or, at least, comfortable enough with the material to jump around a little. Really not bad.

I still can't hear him.

I love the drummer. He really IS enjoying himself. And why wouldn't he? He's the drummer.

These guys are seriously, hands down, the most personable musicians who've performed at APAture this year. Not a hard category to win, given the contest for stiffness and awkwardness still taking contestants in Asian America, but still. They're fun to watch. Okay, I have to say it: the singer needs to work on it. He's flat every three measures. He's got the right pitch and timbre in his voice, too: not too boyish, but still up in tenorish (actually, it sounds like he could go pretty low if he chose to but he does not), not too muddy and low. He could make something of it, but he's got to work on precision and accuracy.

9:30 - Oh, is that it? Nope. "One more quick one." Yikes they're from Fremont. No wonder. (I don't know what that means.)

This is their "hit song." Yikes. I can't tell if the synth is flat or the voices are, or if the whole thing is just so loud that it's all getting distorted in my ear canal thingies. Still can't hear Asian guy's geetar. No, it's not just me, the keyboard is definitely in a different key.

Wait, is it "Farewell Typewriter" or "Feral Typewriter"?

I like the latter. (ETA: bummer! It's Farewell Typewriter! How boring! I vote they change it to "Feral Typewriter.")

And we're done.

Asian American Hip Hop for Dummies/ Roundtable Discussion

3:13 - Back at Space 180 on the LAST DAY OF APATURE! w00t.

I'm here for the roundtable discussion on hip hop.

3:15 - Andrew: intros workshop. Only thought of it a couple of days ago. DJ Phatrick (Patrick Wong), Adriel Luis from Literacy.

Phatrick: DJ for 10 years. Grew up in Sugarland TX, upper middle class. Got involved in DJ community in college. Worked with Native Guns.

Adriel Luis: grew up in Union City. ILLiteracy. Orgy of fun? At APAture. Hosts radio show on KPFA first Thursday of every month. (He has a big ol' shell necklace with hella metal coil beads. I can't read it.

Asks audience for hip hop artist or song that helped you with self definition.

Phatrick: Vanilla Ice brought him to hip hop. Seriously. Wow, that takes balls. Adrien: you were saying it for shock value. Phatrick: but it's true!

Kyle: Mac Dre "Thizz Dance" his first Bay Area hip hop experience. Annie: Will Smith/Fresh Prince. Phatrick: Fresh Prince comes up a lot. Adriel: AA families it's awkward with LL, but Fresh Prince not so awkward in front of your parents. Another Annie: Korean hip hop. Big Bang.  Jin. One Time, Big Bay, etc. Matt Abaya: Public Enemy "Fight the Power." Adrien: What do you think of Flav now? Matt: Sad. But Flav brought the fun. Phatrick: he created a balance. Michael Moon: "Planet Rock" Afrika Bambaataa. Andrew: Bel Biv Devoe, SWV, Wu Tang. Andrew goes on a bit. Hip hop helped him with his stutter. Phatrick: tells about an MC for whom Wu was the goth period. I talk about how old I am and not liking any rap until De La Soul, Arrested Development. Rachel: Beasties "Brass Monkey." Lauren Hill. Snoop Dogg's "What's My Name?" Ellen: hasn't changed her life. "You Be Illin'" Run DMC (changed it to "You Be Ellen.") Adriel: Outkast "Rosa Parks" harmonica breakdown. Love/hate: resistance to changing the formula but when they do, they do it like crazy.

Phatrick: generational differences. A lot of hip hop analyzed on the surface, not on a historical level. Adriel and P. workshop to modify ppl's definitions of hip hop.

Adriel: double-edged sword about hip hop and Asian Americanness: breaking out of something that has been defined for them. Perception/stereotype of what hip hop is. AAs also always defining selves negatively: "I am not ..." AAs in hip hop really corny or cliche or else it's somebody complaining in an echoey room. Hip hop isn't respected anyway.

Asian American Hip Hop: three terms "Asian" "American" "Hip Hop": all the terms here are fuzzy.

"Asian" from the continent of Asia originally. Borders drawn by Europeans. Within the borders of the Orient. Expanded to include people of Pacific Islands. Including Middle Easterners after 9/11 experience of discrimination. Not absolute. Central Asia, Russia. These definitions are based on national borders, maybe not always real.

"American" passport (as a government definition). By Andrew's definition Sarah Palin wasn't American until last year. Born in America. Also has lived here. Naturalized citizen. Here for five years. Period of time. White people. Nationality vs. Ethnicity. "Nationality" is government category. "Ethnicity" is heritage. When they came over: what era. Ownership over label. "American" as disowning ethnicity. Language.

"Hip hop" music, art, innovation, spontaneity, typically has a beat behind it. Breaks away from folk music. Hip Hop as a realm under which there's music, dancing, poetry, and visual art. Political element. Youth: lower and lower middle class youth. It's everywhere. Pop culture. Co-opted. Influential. Rapping makes hip hop unique.

3:49 - Notice differences between the types of words chosen. "Asian" is based on location. "American" based on things that are accomplished or acquired. "Hip hop" is descriptive. Come from three different realms of description.

So M.I.A. is she an Asian American hip hop artist? Plays "Paper Planes." Play a rap. Plays "Bamboo Banga." Is she hip hop? Some yes and some no. Guy says: sounds like house/club music. Sounds like she's trying to invent a new clothing line. But she is rapping. Music. Hip hop and rapping is two different things. This guy can't break down what he means. He puts hip hop against rap, Beasties against Tupac or Dre.

No one's really talking about race. You can't really say this is or it isn't. Never would have thought that M.I.A. is hip hop. She's in electronical actually, and house. She's working within the hip hop community now. Kanye is singing on his new record. A big part of it is race.

(Wow, I'm really not caring about what "real hip hop" is supposed to be.)

What would quantify "real hip hop"? What's the right race for hip hop? Black. Male, "urban" (poor, ghetto). What defines mainstream? Accessibility. Exposure. What gets most exposure?

4:00 - Basically we're in a situation where hip hop comes out of black culture. Distinction btw. hip hop and rap. "Rap" = rhyming over beats, conventional. Adriel: hip hop is valid and rap is invalid. Searching for validity.

What API hip hop do you listen to? Native Guns, Power Struggle, Jin, Blue Scholars, Deltron 3030, Lyrics Born (used to be Asia Born), Skratch Piklz, Q-bert.

How do you define these groups as Asian American? (This is such an uninteresting question.) Sir Mix-a-lot's DJ was Pinoy (Nasty-Nes). Pay more attention to MC. Blackeyed Peas.

Important to complicate these issues.

Brief talk about early years. What has changed? Less distinction between hip hop and R&B. We're in a time when definition has become theory. Very blurred because of "me" attitude. A lot of influences are coming in (not true: hip hop/rap has always been very syncretic.) Tremendous confusion over what it means to be hip hop artists or audiences.

Final Note: what can you consider a uniquely Asian American pop art form? Hip hop is a black and brown art form, but APIs use it as a tool b/c it's so accessible. In the future what do we consider a uniquely Asian American art form? Oliver Wang: import car racing. Going back to country of origin and bringing back traditional instruments or forms. It's really more about content than form.

4:17 - This really needs to end now. I'm so done with this. Okay. I'm done. Somebody's still talking but I'm putting the computer away.

4:48 - Whew. Made good my escape. I think the every-day-APAture-every-day and all the people is finally catching up to me. I was just ... done all of sudden. Not because of what anyone was saying. In fact, the "unique Asian American pop art form" question is an interesting one ... or would be on another day. Whew. Glad it's almost over.

Okay, back to duty: that was a really good workshop. Some of the questions were too general or broad, and some of them got to the bases of identity that all of APAture deals with implicitly so I'm not sure they needed to be dealt with there (although maybe they did), but overall the workshop DID "complicate" definitions--and reveal some biases people were carrying. I would have liked to have done that the first weekend of APAture. It would have been a great intro to a lot of the issues--identity, ethnicity, art forms, syncretism--that run through all of APAture.

I'd really like to see that workshop done again next year, with a LOT more advertising in a much bigger venue. There was a good turnout for this: about twenty people. Maybe the thrust of the workshop could be "is there a unique APA pop art form?"

The rest of the thing was sad. There was NO turnout for the tablers. And there were seriously only like three tablers, plus Chris Brown with the sewing table (make a bag out of old APAture t-shirts, which has been a really fun workshop in past years.) The atmosphere was depressing. I hope there's a better turnout tonight.

Closing Performances/ Final Night

This is the last event. I'm here late. I ran into APAture OG Robynn Takayama outside. She was going to meet Michael Cheng (second year committee member) for dinner, and we went together. After nearly an hour of waiting at two different restaurants for a table for pizza, it finally occurred to me that they'd get a table much quicker if I just came back to KSW, so here I am. I had forgotten why I avoid the Mission on weekends.

Don't know what I missed yet. I'll reconstruct it by process of elimination later.

7:52 - No idea when they started. I walked in on a South Asian woman reading (with a lot of energy and personality, thank oG) a memoir-sounding piece about a girl arriving in ... the US? She's learning to shave her legs. Wow, that's investing a lot of meaning in leg-shaving.

7:57 - Chris Brown: That was Bina Patel. I remember the first time I shaved my legs. Calls for Wilson Wong. Chris has embarrassed Wilson at past APAtures by taking his hat and passing it around as a collection basket. Intros Wilson Wong, presented at film/video last year. We also know him as a musician. He's been a great KSW/APAture supporter.

Wilson: comes out with guitar. Wilson, you bettah bring it or I'm gonna be mean! Even though I said I wouldn't.

First song "Homeland." Whoa. He has a voice. Okay, I've only heard two chords so far, he's just going back and forth between two chords. Okay, the bridge. Was another set of two chords. We need some music theory on this.

Wilson shouts out to me and gets me a round of applause. Then says to say something nice about him. No pressure, though ;)

Singing a Chinatown blues now. More a traditional song structure. Story of couple in Chinatown, working. Good voice, needs to have more confidence in it. Has CDs for sale. Very grass-rootsy.

"Still Trying to Sort it Out" another bluesy number. Very Dylan-y. He's even going a little nasal-y on it. Okay, he gets extra points for the line "well, filial piety is a bitch." Mostly works except for the title line, which is awkward rhythmically.

Taking it back to the nineties. (Called himself on the Dylan stuff.) What's he covering? Is this a cover? If it is, I don't know it. But it is very nineties-esque. Very so-and-so unplugged. Actually, this one does sound a little familiar. So, Sally can wait ... oh. It's Oasis. Funny, he's much more confident with this song. Dare I suggest he's more familiar with a song he didn't write than with the songs he did?

8:17 - Chris takes Wilson's hat and passes it around. Intros the Weather Undersound.

(Mark Jaramilla comes over and takes a picture of us together. Mark has been volunteering at APAture since the beginning. At APAture 2, I arrived at SomArts at 10 in the morning, thinking I'd be the first person there, and Mark was waiting for me there. When I closed up the building at 3 in the morning, the last person I let out was Mark. Yes, he was there the WHOLE TIME. He tells me he's working for SFSU now, organizing events. Perfect for him.

ETA: Mark was in the Filipino fraternity XPO--pron. "expo"--when he started volunteering at APAture. XPO is a service-oriented fraternity and members need to do a certain amount of community service every year, so for the first few years of APAture, XPO contributed 5-10 huge guys to do our security. I'm not joking: I thought for years that a prerequisite to membership in XPO was that you had to be built like The Rock.

These guys were great. They'd just show up, handle everything, and then leave at the end. No drama, no fuss. And they gave us a lot of love. They were just really interested in all the things community members were doing and wanted to be a part of it. I love that. Anyway, last night, Mark explained to us that the "X" is the mathematical variable, and the "PO" means "Philippine Origin," which means that anyone of Philippine origin can be a member of XPO--as long as you're male, that is, since it is a fraternity. Cool.)

Weather Undersound: one of the MCs read at the Youth Speaks event. One of the MCs spits a pome (Delrokz). Pinoy empowerment.

Now the other two are rapping over music. Mandeep Sethi (the one who was at the Youth Speaks performance) and the other one, whose name I missed (RTQLT?). They're doing Mandeep's spoken word piece from the YS performance but rapping it instead. Interesting, especially after today's hip hop workshop, to compare the rap to beats with the spoken word version. Yes, I like both. And it's a qualitative difference. Funny that the rap is slower than the spoken word. Easier, more relaxed. Mandeep is a lot more comfortable tonight. He's not alone, but maybe he's more of a rapper as well?

Now they're doing call and response. They're not getting a great response, but they're pumping themselves up, and getting their own energy up, and taking us with them. That's quite a trick. Beats are good. Standard, but good. Mandeep freestyles off "Kearny Street Workshop." That's right. He said it.

RTQLT ends with spoken word. Soapbox people, coop people, dope spot people, botox people. That's right. He rhymed it with Don Cheadle. Sweet.

8:37 - Chris: pitches catalogue. Intros May Nazareno. She intros herself. She's here because of Chris. She's from New York and new to the area. Solicited her application. Because of Chris, Glenn and Ellen. Playwright, actor, producer, singer. Was in Manila doing research on Jewish community in the Philippines. Ai ja, "hopefully you'll find some of yourself in what they have to say."

Starts singing. Sits down and does character, Juliette, talking to May about Duende (little elves, not Lorca's duende.) Raised in Philippines during war. Manila looked like Stanford University before the war. Born in Shanghai, English father importer. Different from Jewish refugees from Europe. They came earlier. Childhood memories. Then Japanese came for them. Took them to Santo Tomas. Not going back home anytime soon. Gives a letter with money to a driver who brings them a mattress. There for 3.5 years. Japanese fed them banana once a week. Their clothes are in shreds so a woman gives her a strong dress for when they get out.

After Tagaytay guerillas attack, Japanese take them to a different prison. Eventually she sees parachutes and pulls out dress and it's being eaten by termites. They're taken to San Francisco. (She's singing "take my heart to San Francisco." Strong voice, but I don't think she knows what melody she's trying to sing.)

New character Zvi. Jewish community in PI was too small for anti-Semitism. It was there, imported with the Spanish church. There are always people who hate Jews. They're always fearing hatred. They're coming out of it. But it takes a long time. She thinks it's like the African Americans. Why do they always see things as being against their community? People forget they've seen centuries of enslavement. And they're probably partly right.

But she doesn't feel that in PI. All drama queens. But not judgmental. Her feeling is that if Jews had gone through what the Filipinos had gone through with the Japanese, they'd be more uptight about it. They haven't forgotten, they just have a way of looking at life. And this has changed the Jewish community here. They feel Filipino. They feel part of this society. Children grow in a certain place and everything in your life will always come back to the place where you grew up. Hebrew poet: man is molded by his landscape and it never leaves you.

She's traveled to the South in the US. Visited synagogues. Very different kind of America. It's different from Filipinos, in the South you have a strong undercurrent of racial history. All the synagogues are abandoned because in the 60s Jews weren't welcome. It's so sad to see an empty synagogue. It used to have life and now it's just a monument. Like in Iraq. The war exposed all those beautiful synagogues in Iraq. They've been there for thousands of years. I wonder if this generation will pick up where their parents and grandparents left off.

Singing again. A hymn. New character. Has a head scarf. When you are married, you always cover your head, because hair is very attractive to men. Born Catholic. Rosemary. Biomom gave her up for adoption at 1.5. Changed name to Rosario Wang. Father Chinese. Went to convent school and wanted to become a nun. Switched to another school, wanted her to get married. Grace Christian HS run by American missionaries. Why had to pray to JC before everything else? Not to God the father? Baptist: no saints, no rosary. Okay, I'll try this religion, but wasn't satisfied. Not gonna be a buddhist (no god) or a muslim (a god but totally different and very confusing.) Not desirable according to mother. I don't ask questions.

Joined missionaries in our school. Met husband and they got married. He never went to church. A lot of questions in his mind that he could not answer. He wanted to learn about Judaism because of one God. Shabbes changed to Sunday because of the resurrection. Why should the son of God die such an insulting death? No logic to that. Never occurred to her. No one would help them. Private place and didn't feel welcome. Bought books in New York about it. Didn't know any Filipinos like them.

In 1985 house burned. She sings and asks the wind to blow in another direction and the house is saved. 1996 finished a cooking course. Wants to open a restaurant. Husband says she can't open the restaurant b/c he wants to go kosher. So she decides to go kosher. Buys 21 pails of pork, duck and seafood, and kilos of salt. Mother-in-law furious b/c all the blood is removed and everything turns out white. Has to segregate Mother-in-law's food. Still eating shellfish and pork. Very happy because they're eating kosher now. Sing hymns from church.

Goes to see Suki (the one you buy everything from.) Buys a tape of Fiddler on the Roof. That night she and her husband are up until 4 am arguing. So she goes to watch the video. And she starts crying. Never realized how beautiful Judaism is.

Sings again. (That last part was too long and detailed.) She also needs to learn to use a mic when singing. Hold it farther away from her mouth.

9:11 - We're at 35 minutes and she's starting another character. I'm kind of done with this, actually. It's really good--really interesting: she's very professional and polished, and her characters are distinct without her having to ham it up at all; the writing is really strong and the material is unique--but I'm not ready to concentrate this hard for this long. Too much about religion all at once. And she's not dynamic enough; she's not moving. She's sitting.

I've completely ignored this last character. Sadly. This is a scheduling/curating issue. You have to take the attention span of your audience into account. These are working adults so they can multi-task and they can focus on one thing for a long time. But asking them to do both in one night is unfair, both to the audience and to the performers. For a variety show you have to keep each piece short. That would have been perfect at 20 minutes or 30 minutes.

9:17 - Chris introing final performer of the festival. Aimee Suzara. She has a workshop coming up. Aimee is doing one called Writing to Remember with Aimee Suzara.

Aimee: she's feeling a little under the weather. You can't tell. She's beautiful and has a really nice energy. (Not that the previous artists weren't beautiful, too :P) Has everybody say "mabuhay." Excited to do the workshop. Loves getting people to bring out the stories within. Going to do three short poems from her chapbook "The Space Between".

A lot of her poetry comes from visiting the Philippines. Military situation and toxic waste.

"Some Days?" Poem about the effects of toxic waste on her family. This is good. I'm done with this blog. I'm gonna shut this down now and just enjoy the last couple of poems.

G'night.