APAture Live

Welcome!

Welcome to APAture Live, your liveblog for Kearny Street Workshop's Bay Area festival, APAture: A Window on Emerging Asian Pacific American Artists! This is the APAture event's first blog; it's also a liveblog, that is to say, I will be posting here live during the APAture events, describing the smell of the greasepaint and roar of the crowd. The comments section below is open; please use it! I'll be responding to comments and questions throughout the event. I'm planning on attending all or most APAture events, so keep an eye out for me. I'll be the one with the laptop!

Opening Reception/Visual Art

6:10 pm - Here I am, at Space 180, the office and gallery space that Kearny Street Workshop shares with LocusArts and used to share with Derek Chung's Tactile Pix, before Derek went off to New York to do grad school.

I get a certain bittersweet charge every time another APAture starts. I say "bittersweet charge" and not "nostalgia" because KSW has been such a geographically nomadic org for so long that every few years, APAture is run out of a different building. There's no longtime there there. KSW has been at Space 180 for about three years now, so they're building a history here. But that history largely isn't mine. I've been to shows at this space but I haven't actually done my own work here. In fact, this blog will be the first time ...

6:21 - So the internet went down for a second so I ran around like an idiot until Chris Brown (KSW board member) suggested I turn off my airport then turn it on again. Duh. Now I'm using Scribefire, so if it happens again, I won't lose anything.

6:35 - Just restarted the 'puter to clear out all the crap and was approached by Jason Mateo, carrying one child and monitoring another one running around. Yes, his own children. That's how long it's been since I've seen this spoken word artist. He doesn't look any different, and says he's still teaching at Youth Speaks, and working on writing for performance. His kids at Youth Speaks will be performing at Manilatown Heritage Foundation for APAture on Saturday.

6:41 - Lucy Kalyani Lin just came over--she insisted I use the "Kalyani" even though it's her middle name because "do you know how many Lucy Lins are on the internet on porn sites?" She's the lead curator of the APAture visual show this year (together with Lyman Yip and Jack Cho)--to check and see if I was writing good stuff. I told her she'd have to bribe me with regular glasses of wine. Told Ellen Oh the same thing. Ellen is KSW's new Executive Director; this is her first APAture, poor sucker!

I grabbed artist Christine Wong Yap as she was cruising past -- she'll be in the APAture ten-year retrospective later this fall/winter (as will I be.) She was one of the artists in KSW's 35 anniversary show Activist Imagination and has blogged at KSW's blog herself. Christine was originally known in the community as an "activist artist," making explicitly political work in printmaking and painting/muralism. She's remade herself as a conceptual artist and has work up at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as we speak, in the Galleon Trade gallery of Bay Area Now 5.

I also spoke briefly with game designer and skratch DJ Michael "MercuryBonez" Cheng, who was on the organizing committee for APAture 2000. He recently moved back to the Bay Area from ... Texas? He used to perform with the lamented Dhamaal. Now, I just don't know.

6:52 - The gallery looks different tonight. Slightly different. We're on the third (top) floor of a loft space and it looks like the attic up here. There's a fire escape, and warehouse windows, a wooden floor with paint drips everywhere (begging to be sanded and finished) and pipes and electrical conduits worn externally. Gordon Lee made two movable walls during the Activist Imagination show and they're being used to good effect, but somehow, there's something about the installation or the lighting that makes the space look a bit ... cleaner--more gallery-like--tonight. It's the versatility of the space, the potential versatility that hasn't been entirely tapped yet, that makes this space a prime candidate to hang nostalgia on. You can do things here. It's not just an office and meeting space like the last four spaces KSW has had.

6:59 - Ellen just called everyone to order to start the announcements and welcome part of the evening. You know the drill: "thank you for coming, this is APAture, thanks to Lucy Kalyani Lin, our curator, thanks to May Briosos, the APAture Coordinator, thanks to our sponsors, blah, blah, blah." Okay, I'll link to the sponsors here later. (ETA: go look at the postcard image for the sponsors, there's no listing that I can find.) Oh, and there are twenty artists in the show. She also gave a shout out to me, sitting here in the corner, bloggin'. And Sam Chanse, former KSW Artistic Director, thought she'd be a smartass and shout "death to blogger!" (I think.) WTF?

Then Lucy: thank you, happy , thank you to may, ksw board, lyman, took so much work to prepare gallery, ellen, artists, hope you like the way the show came together, those who worked with her personally and trusted her enough to see how she envisioned the show; audience thanks for support; all artists have nametags green with blue collars, go up to them and talk about their work, can't encompass this herself so won't try; many intricacies, ask them where they'll be showing next.

Vid: board chair of KSW, doesn't usually use a mic; quick intro; thank everyone; artists, organizers; vips--funders, supporters, potentials; forget that folks who present here this is their first exposure to the world, ksw makes this possible; pitch for cash; please please please, thanks for coming and supporting in person; hope you'll come back and think about giving us an individual donation today here or online. if you're a funder, hook us up with a grant; to support this we really need your help.

Damn, no wonder everybody was excited about Vid when he came on board rather randomly. That was a good pitch. Short, to the point, included all the talking points. And he even came back to say "Bar is open!"

Jay Jao is in the hizzouse, documenting with photos. Jay is a digital photographer, who goes to all the APA events (and has for YEARS), taking photos of people and of the work at the events themselves. It's his service to the community, and his photos are awesome. Here's a link to his website, where he posts everything he shoots. I'm trying to be a text Jay Jao with this liveblog, documenting all these events with the proficiency and volume with which Jay documents our world.

7:13 - Bob Hanamura is here, talking to Sam. Bob is an interesting guy: an architect, designer, and artist, he was in an internment camp and studied in Chicago (I believe; I could have this all wrong) after the war. You can see him in the KSW publication Pursuing Wild Bamboo: Portraits of Asian American Artists. Bob is the only member of the older generation of KSW adherents who makes it out to (I swear) every event. He still curates shows and knows what's going in with da Youtt. I see him at every APAture.

Speaking of the "older generation" (we're talking about any generation older than those who started APAture, by the way. But those of us who started APAture are already a generation older than a lot of the artists showing in APAture. Just thought I'd point that out.), Nancy Hom is here and so is Genny Lim. Nancy joined KSW in 1974, two years after its founding, and has been active with the organization for about 33 years. She was the executive director from about 1995 to 2003, and it was on her watch that APAture was founded and established. Her presence at every subsequent APAture is like a secular benediction ;) Nancy's printmaking work will be shown at the Chinese Culture Center in collaboration with the De Young's Asian American Art show this fall.

Genny is part of the Bay Area's cultural treasure as well. A longtime poet and interdisciplinary collaborator. She was teaching at New College for a long time but when New College went under recently, she found herself out of a job. It's a terrible pity when our great poets have to scramble to support themselves. Here's someone (Nancy too) who has earned her place. Why don't we have a more socialist (yeah, I said it) government that supports artists?

7:20 - Just met Mimi Wong, newest member of the KSW Board. Had to explain who I was. Wow, it's been a long time since I've been down KSW way ;)

And then it's Min Jung Kim! Amazing! I haven't seen her since I spaced her wedding over a year ago. Min Jung is a longtime Bay Area APA fixture, a blogger with iistix, with minjungkim.com, and a writer for Koream Journal (which is in financial trouble, y'all. Go support.) I haven't seen her since she got married and now she's moving to Seattle. Boo! Min Jung is organizing an APAture event: "LAP-POP," a blogging event in which bloggers *gasp* perform live. "Kinda nice to have a digital media showcase as part of APAture." I agree ;) One complaint: MJ had to pay to get into this event though she's coordinating an event in this APAture. Typical of APAture. Organizing low budge.

7:50 - Rania Ho comes by. Wow. It really has been years. Rania was a member of the awesome sketch comedy group 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors for years, but now lives in Beijing with her husband (who is Chinese, that's why.) They run a gallery called Arrow Factory in the center of Beijing near the Confucius Temple. She's back in town because her sister just gave birth to twins; funny, because the last time I was in Beijing it was because my sister was giving birth (though not to twins.) We talked about her gallery--self-funded, not commercial, all new work; and the Beijing arts scene, which Rania said is somewhat tainted by commercialism. Promised to have brunch soon.

8:05 - Ellen again, no longer a VIP announcements but the general one. Come to the events. Follow along online with moi. Please comment. If you just can't get enough of APAture we'll have retrospective from October 24 to January 23. Exhibition in gallery, perf, lit, music, panel. Info at the front. All sorts of programming year round. Stay with us. Thank yous. Twenty artists. (applause). Took a lot of work by volunteers and amazing support staff. May Briosos APAture coordinator, Lucy Kalyani Lin Visual Curator, Coordinating committee of 8 people. Thank sponsors.

Lucy: screaming over the noise of the crowd. (I'm shushing people.) Usual thanks. Board did all the gallery work. Thanks to Ellen. (Wow, there are a lot of people here now.) Artist green name tags. Talk to them. Some of the work here is priced to sell.

8:20 - And here comes Manami Kano, apature OG. Manami was part of the 17-person original APAture committee. I got to know her at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival (whose director, Chi-hui Yang, is also here tonight). She's a nonprofit hack, like me, like you, and was in New York for a while, going to grad school. (right?) She just moved back to the Bay Area and did NOT announce her return. She also complained. Manami's name was not on any list downstairs. Also, she's looking for a job. She's a highly trained nonprofit hack.

Former KSW Board member and graphic designer Choppy Oshiro was so taken with my French pedicure that she gave me a (half) foot massage. APAture OG and recently formered Chinese Culture Center executive director (writer and highly trained nonprofit hack) Sabina Chen also flitted by.

8:39 - APAture OG Robynn Takayama comes by, with big headphones around her neck and a mic tucked into her shirt. Robynn's a radio producer. I ask her for a quote and she gives me a big smile. "I feel old now that I'm a KSW 'alumni'. I would rather have been a 'KSW veteran'." Sabina would have preferred "APAture OG." Me too, obviously. Nancy's also an "alumni." (The lack of proper grammar, of course, horrifies me.) Nancy should be something better. Manang, maybe.

8:45 - Poet Pireeni Sundaralingam stops by, her fingers in her ears, to see what I'm doing. She can't stand the noise (there's a DJ playing now) so we don't really talk. Pireeni's another friend I met through KSW. She and her partner, violinist Colm O'Riain, formed a performance group many years ago called Dhaia Tribe--mostly spoken word performers, which is now defunct.

8:49 - Ebony McKinney from the SF Arts Commission stops by and embarrasses me for not remembering her. Amy Ho is dressed as a durian. No shit. A durian. I actually thought she was dressed as a hedgehog.

8:52 - Ebony likes Weston's piece. A three piece excerpt (?) of a series of paper drawing/collage. Very intricate, layered, the pieces that have windows ... (conversation goes on but I don't record it.)

8:54 - Artist Suzanne Husky takes Ebony's place. Suzanne's opening a show in the South Bay in early October. She made dolls of her friends for her last piece and put them in a miniature SF scene. I complain to her that my doll was wearing checks and I haven't worn checks since the eighties.

Lisa Leong, APAture Intern comes by. She lets us know the drinks are really strong tonight. I ask her for another white whine. K. Lo comes back. He fled when he saw me blogging before. K. Lo's quote: *a shrug*. Lisa comes back with a kamikaze shot. It tastes like lemonade.

9:32 - I'm very done with this. I'm about four drinks into the night and tired of trying to blog and talk to people at the same time. I just took a long break. It's hot in the gallery and noisy. The music is way too loud! I'll reflect on the show tomorrow. Goodnight.

New Blog Site Already!

Hey all,

So just a heads up: if you've linked to this blog, or want to, I'm at a new site. The old Wordpress site doesn't support Javascript (WTF?) so I can't collect data on where our traffic is coming from. So I had to switch to good ol' Typepad, which hosts my own blogs.

FYI: this APAture liveblogging thing arose out of a call for proposals for artist commissions from a grantmaker that shall remain nameless unless I get the grant. The project is twofold: I will be liveblogging APAture to creat a text documentation of the event, and I will be tracking traffic to see if people are interested in a text document, how people find out about the blog, and how they use the site. So I really need to be able to track traffic properly-like.

If you'd like to help me out in this project, please post a feed to this blog on your blog or website for the duration of APAture (Sept 18-27, 2008). Here's the feed URL:

http://clairelight.typepad.com/apaturelive/atom.xml

Gallery Opinions

Okay, to be perfectly honest, I didn't feel like I was able to spend enough time with the work at the APAture gallery show. I don't remember the quieter work, because there was no quiet.

The gallery opening is always a crazy schmoozefest and, even though I got there early, I didn't get there first, by any means. So I saw the work quickly, in and around saying hello to people, and then moved onto the schmoozy/boozy part of the evening, which you may witness below.

Some first-impression images and thoughts:

• Weston Teruya's work--the featured artist--has the hallmarks of some of the most fashionable trends in drawing right now: fine line drawing, of structure/objectscapes, mixture of architectural angles and natural objects/growths, collage but not of found images, rather a collage of images the artist drew and created, lacy paper cut-outs, following the architectural lines of the objects represented, and lots of white space.

• Simple but strong piece of adult and children's shoes painted traditional camouflage and "hidden" on swaths of astroturf. The astroturf is cut into the letters "I" and "T," which I thought was a direct comment on how the cultures of H1 visa holders gets hidden in the hi-tech culture they're immersed in, but the wall didactic doesn't say anything about "IT" so maybe I'm wrong.

• Prints of flowery designs drawn from wrappers on Chinese-made products. They reminded me of the designs on glazed ceramic tiles I saw in Hong Kong and China in the late seventies/early eighties. I don't remember these specifically so much as recognized them in a gut way when I saw them. Kind of like recognizing the smell of Hong Kong after rain in the after-rain smell of wherever you are now. Rather lovely and exactly the sort of evocation visual art can, but does not often, commit.

• A flower pattern of tank silhouettes cut out of varicolored felts is placed very effectively across the gallery from the flower design prints. Not sure this piece would work on its own. Too simple. Needs other work to resonate with.

• Ali Dadgar furthers his self-obsession in boxer shorts. I'm wondering if people who haven't seen his work before can make anything of these three pieces. Then I'm wondering if it's possible for people in this particular scene not to have seen his work before. I like these, they're ... simpler than his other stuff, without being simple.

• C-prints of a fairytale woods scene involving Han Pham in a prom dress. Yes, this is a scene.

• Large charcoal drawings of somebody with a lot of hair. I used to draw women with long, dramatic, dark hair when I was in high school. But I've never had a hand like this. This artist can fuckin' work that charcoal.

• I dig the installation on the ceiling you have to stick your head into. Your head is surrounded by a field of paper grass and some mirrors, so you can see yourself looking around a field of paper grass. Not sure the point, but it's fun.

• Not satisfied with Mark Baugh-Sasaki's piece: two small trees bolted together. It's too hard to see where it is, hanging in the middle of the gallery. Mark is a bit sui generis in this crowd, not really drawing from any prevailing APA arts trends. He's more like (if I must) the lovechild of Andy Goldsworthy and Joseph Beuys. (seriously, don't you just want to write slash fiction about that pairing?) So it's hard to find a place for him amid all the fragile paper farting around identity and society.

• Prints of old school Ceylon tea ads reappropriating the milieu for the natives. Nice idea, but images are a little too fussy and hard to understand without the didactics.

What's missing: photographs from people's trips to Asia. These usually start out as a roots trip to their families' countries of origin or a trip to some Asian country to teach English after college. Then, the photographin' Asian American starts branching out to other countries, secure in the knowledge that their images of Japanese commuter trains and Vietnamese fishermen will have a depth to them that white Americans' won't. Funny thing is, they're usually right, especially when showing these photos in the context of APAture. There may have been no such submissions this year; APA artists may be too sophisticated now, but there should always be a place at APAture for Asian travel photos, because this is something APAs are always doing.

What's missing: personal or family experience of war or revolution. Think about it: Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos; Iran; Cultural Revolution in China; Sri Lanka; India/Pakistan ... think how old the artists and writers of these conflicts are now. Too old for APAture. And the more recent conflicts? Tibet, Afghanistan, Burma ... where are these artists and writers in the US? Not at APAture ... so far. I'll keep an eye out.

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.)

Speak Out/ Spoken Word

4:23 - I'm late to this four pm event at I-Hotel/Manilatown Heritage Foundation, but we're nowhere near starting yet. We're on PoC time. Yeah, I said it.

4:24 - Quick greeting and hug from Jason Mateo, who says "Don't write nothing bad about us." This will be a theme. I can see it now.

A little background: this performance ,"Speak Out," is by Youth Speaks. One of the nice things about doing away with the APAture age limit is that we can get even younger folks out to APAture. I think this is the first time. I'll check later.

4:26 - Cathlin: teacher, works with KSW, happy to work with Youth Speaks, bring the youth. First hour is youth and second half the adults. Welcome Jason Mateo.

Jason: call for shouts. Pitch on Youth Speaks. Talked to Ellen, and juiced that young ppl part of APA continuum. Youth Speaks known for giving big events but are working in community. Whole geographical and ethnic gamut here. Please respond when the kids speak. If you're moved, move.

4:30 - Mandeep ??? from Southeast india. first piece "Where do we go from here?/ I thought my ppl would be proud of their heritage/instead they wanna bury it."

His ancestors from Punjab. He's Sikh. From Los Angeles. "in the country where I'm feared/ it's trendy to be scared" About being Indian in hip hop. He's perfect in the genre, but good at it: the right hand gestures, the right dialect. Goes slow enough, relaxed, committed.

4:35 - Jason emphasizing the "P" in APAture, Pacific Islander, Balboa High, from football field to page. From Samoa Andrew Vy?

Andrew: (button down shirt and wild, long hair.) first thing people say is "you probably play football" gets on the mic for future Pacific Islanders; they can say "are you a writer? Are you a lawyer? a good lawyer?" Shout out to Pacific Islanders.

Vacation spots, athletic ability, nuclear testing, trapped bilinguals, ghetto gang members, new label: "poet," Motherland.

Vision of traditional warriors, different viewpoints: first the warriors, then the foreign soldiers seeing savages hitting themselves. Difference between "soldiers" and "warriors." Describing his experience as one warrior. Traditional chant.

4:43 - Jason: been with Youth Speaks since he was sixteen. Probably still looks like he's sixteen but it's been 13 years. One of his goals is to get more Pacific Islanders into the mix. More connected with spoken word and oral story. Drew and next poet represented SF in int'l youth team poetry slam in DC last July. Russell Simmons did a documentary on the festival. They were documented by crew from HBO.

4:45 - Jacqueline Wang: doesn't need a mic. all love in here. Korean American performing after a Samoan.

Starts out on MLK. Does what he meant linger here? Corpses, silenced. "If the air is still heavy with the beauty of love." Air still tainted by color distinction. Mother trying to mask color. "Love is not a dead language when there is still suffering" "Try not to pity my own mother ... this place will never open up to her  because oppressors are all the same." mention of "the struggle". "Liberation is a language that is not dead." (A lot of maybe too many? images flying by too fast.) Very sad.

4:50 - Caskets are empty. North and South distinctions, "i want to take my father home without exposing him to emaciated bodies" "she was supposed to be the moon in the dark night but got dictated" Kim's regime, 30th parallel, let my people go, 50 years war and still counting, coming home, he'll still feel foreign, 'cause once a refugee, always a refugee; his casket will remain empty, when his day comes we'll dig out a place here.

4:54 - Jason: you are seeing the final product. We go through a process. Next poet represents Excelsior. It's hard to live there right now as a young person. Youth Speaks Poet just got murdered George ?? They went to school together. Important that we're committed to young folks as writers. It's not easy being young in America right now. If we give them the support they need maybe they can speak a truth so Jason's son doesn't have to go through this.

Student of June Jordan High School, Tino.

4:56 - Tino: his friend just died last month. Hard to write stuff. He was a person Tino was writing with. A song he put together quickly.

Backing track runs. Gets audience hands up. Misses his cue and goes back. Doesn't really perform like this.

Raps for a while. It's a little hard for me to follow. Pretty fast. It's new material. Shout outs to passed friends. Living in the hood. Looking out for cop cars. Forgetting his rhymes, ad libs. Takes it in stride, with humor.

5:01 - Next one from East Oakland. You better clap and be afraid of East Oakland. Part of YS for a while. Came in as intern. From Laos.

Bryan Phan: Ancestors came from Laos, but he's Mien. Long hair, like a boy, but face getting older.

Came from city "Killer Cali" funny city named for its trees is killing its seeds. "It's just Oakland" image of flowers around a picture on a telephone pole. It's a miracle we went two months without violence at a taco truck. His "I'm sorry" routine whenever someone tells him a friend has died. If you put us on a music sheet, we'll compose our own sunlight. Description of what you see and hear when you walk down the street in Oakland. We were never completely broken, we just have our downfalls. We are living in Killer Cali. and here we are, growing. Stumbles, but beautiful.

5:06 - Christopher Columbus of the playground; this society doesn't believe in anything that comes from a third world country. public enemy number one, one at a time. For every Asian that doesn't know how to let its foreign caged bird sing. Help me find the courage to resurrect my culture.

5:08 - Jason: speak truth to power. Tino wants to spin a verse without the beat. Jason: redeem himself.

Living in hood. Gas prices up, dropping bombs. Michael Jordan reference. We used to be kings and queens now we living in the projects. Works hard for the money. Rhymes "block" with "stop." Abusive marriage story. Strange, he sounds muffled on this mic.

5:11 - Last poet of Youth Speaks segment. Student from UCB ancestors from Africa and japan.

Teruko Tabashi: (Yes, she looks African and Japanese ;) lovely hapaness.) Through the eyes of a child. Abused crack baby story. Too dumb to japanese, too smart to be black. Wanted to be white. Bi-bi girl, trashed in the street. parents told her she was a mistake, thanks God for life. lists all the schools she got into. ADHD. Cutting, observing mom, foster care broke down body and heart.

5:16 - Justice. "he only had bullet holes and a lifeless expression." "Meth head who looks for crystal while she really is a diamond in the rough" trashing everyone stupid: gay marriage haters. Never will I wither, give up, or give in. people telling her she only got into Berkeley because they thought she was solely Japanese.

5:20 - Calls out Jason to end the reading. Jason: this is part of a larger conversation at Youth Speaks. Mission to break boundaries. Invites everyone in the room to be part of conversation. Introduce books and writing to young people.

Jason: writing a script. First time he's read something from the script. "Bury Marcos" in 200something he goes to Philippines and his cousins take him to Intramuros to see Marcos' corpse. My generation doesn't really talk about Marcos. But my mom, every day she wakes up she's affected by his legacy. Big disconnect between his and his parents' generation. Marcos is part of it. Wife's "hella shoes," his Napoleon way of going about it. What if I bury Marcos?

5:25 - An attempt to conquer defeat. to face the dead. To face my death for the life of my children. To bury a giant, to reconnect with my giant. Not to be forgotten but to be forsaken. Let time make stone of its becoming. An act of love.

5:27 - Busts out a spoken word piece. Completely different energy, different dialect. Doesn't even need a mic for this one. I'm a giant, that's why I carry my giant spoon fork and knife wherever I go. Anti-anti-miscegenation. You gotta know about me. Forgets lines. Brown like a tree.

5:30 - Cathlin: don't go anywhere b/c three adults are coming up. Liked "bottom of a burnt rice cooker." I'm Asian, need to write about rice cooker.

First poet Adrian Salazar. Magician/poet/prophet. Raised in San Jose but lives in Berkeley.

5:31 - Adrien Salazar: Thanks APAture and Manilatown. (nice windbreaker)

Prayer: images of father and mother, churches, experience in churches and of priests, flowers, communion, hospitals, oil and ashes on forehead, open caskets, coming out, emptiness, isolation, this war, (yes it really is a list this simple, read a bit tonelessly.)

Twenty years in Altar?: more lists of very brief images, comparing daily images with religious images. This is the same poem as the last one.

New poem ?? something revolution: throwing bricks and molotov cocktails; I a slave. (Story of a revolutionary. Where? No matter, a sort of everyrevolutionland.) I bleed my spirit into gunshots.

5:39 - Cathlin next poet worked with her at Bindlestiff. He's lived in all area codes in Bay Area.

Conrad Panganiban: Doing scene from a play about youth. "Lola's apple pie and ???"

This is an actual play. He has a woman up there performing with him. A guy meets his roommate's dance partner for PCN (Pilipino Cultural Night) to convince her to wait for the roommate, who will be late. Flatters her. He's written a script for PCN. Shows it to her. It's about a guy "who comes to the realization of his identity when his grandmother is dying." Play within a play. Making fun my-grandmother-cooks-rice narratives. Girl critiques this. Here comes the lesson: why make fun of our own people with the thick accents? Wow, is this an actual PCN script? A PCN script within a PCN script?

5:50 - Boy challenges girl to come up with something better. Girl goes into poem elegizing Lola. Oh, my god, the Lola even cooks rice for the girl in this poem. Ai ya, this is turning into a romance. Enough.

5:55 - Yael Villafranca: "Daly City" this is poetry reading, not spoken word. I will not use articles because Yael will not use articles. She's that kind of poet. Oh. There's an article. Why "the crosswalk paint" and not just "crosswalk paint"? Sorry, I need to get off this, just a pet peeve.

"San Francisco, Where I Went Missing":

6:01 - (Boy this liveblogging of readings is really, really hard. It's surprisingly easy to translate nonliterary work into words. But for literary performances, the words that describe them have already been colonized, and all I can do is quote, or paraphrase, neither of which is particularly satisfying.)

6:03 - Last poet G Reyes.

Reading a play? Sets up some chairs. I hope this doesn't take long. My generosity is drying up.

I'm contagious. (What's the contagion?) Rant about obscure poets.

6:07 - (I might have to run to the bathroom. I'll try to hold out.) Bitching about not winning teacher of the year. Teacherwhores. We're getting a little too much into shop talk. He's used to performing for other teachers. Oooohhh, that's the contagion. Teachers. This shouldn't be a poem or a play. It's too dilute, prosy, monologuey. It should be a speech. Methinks somebody doth protest too hard. Nope, the contagion is something else, something vague. Why did he set those chairs up? Oh no, is he doing another piece?

6:12 - Oh my god, I don't care what your sign is. Oh, I see. The piece is about your sign--gemini.

Bathroom ahoy. This probably isn't that bad, my brain is just mush and can't take anything else in at this point. I'm out.

Keep It Reel/ Film & Video Night

8:00 pm - Wow, APAture has hit the big time! I'm sitting in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening room. Very nice space. Great place to do APAture's film and video night. The first year we did it at Artists Television Access, which is a space I love, although seating is very limited. There was Pilipino karaoke that year: Iraya Robles and Sta-Prest did a video and the Mail Order Brides had two karaoke vids we tortured audience members with. Two volunteers even got up and sang into a mic. Awesome.

Matt Abaya curated the first year's film/vid by himself (subsequently done by committee, although Matt continued to take point for a few years.) Just saw him outside and inside. He's the one wearing Yasmine Gomez's badge and rockin' a fauxhawk. He was one of the younger APAture OGs, though that still puts him in his thirties now. Damn, that makes me feel old.

8:06 - Wilson Wong just introduced himself. He's performing solo music closing night and has taken the lesson from this blog that he's not allowed to look "indie." My work is done here. He says "Hi Mom!"

The film/video night has always been one of the most popular events, and we had to move the whole works to SomArts the second year anyway. So from that point on, attendance was always over 150. We'll see how many of these seats fill tonight. There are about 100 seats in here. Starting to fill up now.

So I'm realizing that each different type of event will require a different method of blogging. Tonight I think I'm going to take notes on the commentary and then watch each short through before blogging about it. Or maybe I'll have things to say as I watch, but I doubt it. I'll try that. (ETA: obviously, I didn't do that ;))

8:16 - Chris Bucoy Brown, board member, does the welcome. What APAture is. Tenth year. Retrospective with De Young, starting next month.

Tonight's work of a great crop of emerging artists. Writer Chris, Artist and designer Amy Lam, and filmmaker Yasmine Gomez were screening committee this year. They're all board members as well. Shout outs to all participating filmmakers in the audience. Big hand for Matt Abaya.

(There's a guy here who is APAture 5 coordinator Scott Louie's mini-me. Ringer. Just thought I'd mention that.)

8:20 - First Film "Pigeon Wings" by Stephanie Yang

A poem, a journey, a film. Black and white images of China? Taiwan? Where do I belong. community, love. Wow that was rilly short.

8:22 "Over Pho" by Rui Bing Zheng

In the Vietnamese  restaurant, the one in Chinatown on Portsmouth Square. Girl flirting in the restaurant to the sound of a piano playing "The Entertainer". The girl is writing a note to the cute boy she sees. She's getting the waiter to bring the note to the guy. "Hi my name is Lena what's yours?" "Jay. Why?" He's eating pho. So's she. We're seeing their convo both on the note and in the black silent-movie-style break out sections. The waiter is over it. The waiter is smoking outside. So the guy gets up and goes over to her. Nice shot of her hand with a hair squidgy around it. Freeze frame on them facing each other. Very cute.

8:28 - "Snapshot: Six Months of the Korean American Male" by Valerie Soe.

Voice over about why John Cho is so sexy. Images of John Cho on red carpet and in Harold and Kumar. Cuts of news stories about the James Kim family. Vids of Kim from television. Devoted father and husband images and quotes. Yul Kwon, puppetmaster, in control. images and quotes. News story about Koreans and blacks in LA, shots of Korean grocers with shotguns on rooftop. Images from movies of grocers. Text scrolling of language about Korean grocers exploiting black communities. There's a date before each of these segments. Name of Virgina Tech shooter confirmed. Scrolling text about him. Very thrilling and fascinating. Not preachy.

8:33 - "The Pain With Being Thirsty" by David Yun.

Aerial shot of landscape. Vintage shots of various things, color film stock from mid century (?).  Voiceover: captivity. The first minute of captivity is the hardest. Being in prison. Voiceover describing life in prison. Images of people building barracks. Color stock but looks like 1940's. Pan of barracks. Looks like internment camp. Yes, slowly it's revealed that this is a JA internment camp. Shots of JA storefronts. A shot of a JA child playing in the dirt. The voice over is apparently from a narrative of the internment experience. Why is all this footage in color? This footage is mesmerizing. No sound except the voice over. Brush burning with JAs working superimposed over it. This is really lovely. A quote on green background.

Later text states that: images were of Poston internment camp; voiceover text written by Babar Ahmad in 2006. Didn't catch who he was, but I think we can guess. I love that he only tells us at the end, and leaves us to discover all this slowly.

8:40 - "Home Sweet Home" by May Balingit.

Shots of a Asian-looking family home. Voice over of girl talking about her parents' fighting. Teenaged girl's voice she has tagged up her wall over her bed over and over. Another girl talking; shots of her walking. Her fights with her mom. At BART station. another girl talking about her parents' divorce. Now we finally see one of them talking. Her dad was cheating. Her mom did something bad to herself and ended up in hospital. She wasn't sad about it. More sad about not getting to stay at the party she was at. Never going to be a family again.

8:43 -  "Parallel Adele" by Adele Pham & Adele Ray.

Two girls named Adele, both Hapa Vietnamese going to Vietnam at the same time to make films about their families. Through the film they met a lot of other people with similar stories. They define the word "hapa". Uh oh, we're getting into veeery familiar territory here. Hapa talking head. Hey! That looks like Carmen Van Kerchove.

One of the Adeles looks like she could pass and the other one doesn't. Are they going to make something of this? No. This piece is basically a compilation of experiences, with food smells and stuff, with a number of hapas. Carmen is talking against a backdrop of Kip's photos of hapas. Hah! Footage of a buncha hapas sitting around a table eating together and talking about what they are. That's not familiar at all! The film's structure is a little muddy. Has all the usual stuff. But it's very engaging, and it is pretty thorough. They're doing all the issues.

8:59 - "Flying" by Kirthi Nath.

October 5, 2003. Indian couples walking in a park. Voiceover talking about ... stuff. Food. A story about a divorced couple. Filmed in Bangalore. What is this about?

9:02 - "Save Me" by Maya Lorton.

Kids talking about going to Church. Korean kids in Sunday school.

Argh! I did the cleanup on the part below, but I didn't save it and now it's gone! So I'm posting the notes I have and maybe I'll do the cleanup later. Argh!

9:07 - fear is a number tetraphobe by matt
abaya abandoned.. i don'tknow which one of these is the title. van
pulls up and ses a car in its usual parking spot. looks in the car and
sees the keys on the seat. door is unlocked., civic. four fous on the
license plate. decides not to do it. goes into the house.  now watching
tv.  and eating. hears sound. car is still there. later at night in
bed. hears knocking. oming from car.. it's four fourty four. sees a
shawo in ihs room. hides under his covers. car is still there. in the
morning when he drives aaway. he goes to work with his toolbox. plus
into number four plug. radio on hears a transmission. all the numbers
are four. we see no other people anywhere. back to his house and the
civic is still there. goes bafk to th car. the keychain hs a four on
it. he's trying to report it but they own't pick it up for another day.
nighttime now. the keys are on his bedside tabel? we see the trunk
opening and a figure getting out. flashing lights. it's dead. goes to
the house and knocks. next day he's in his van. girlfriend packing to
go somethwer for two months. he givers her the keychain.  this is a
flash back. so the keychain was something he gave to her. the civic now
has a parking violation notice on it. nighttime again. the flashing
lights show us the dead body. he goes outside t the car ith a
flashlight. opens the door and retrieves the keys but they aren't
there.  opens the trunk with the lever and looks in. sees nthe body and
it opns its eyes. hes own eyes stat to glow. the body gets out. okay
i'm going to sto p here. spoilers.

9;22 - tried to show
parallel adele again. Over the table by andrew ong.. pinoy guy talkiing
about taking jeepneys while a kid comes out of bart. kid walks down
mission street. pinoy tlaking about being poor and borrowing money from
enighbors and taking credit at grocery store. obviously we're
paralleling life back in the philippines with life in the mission.
okay, but he lives in the avenues, looks like. the voiceover dude was
tlaking to the kid who was wandering around.

9:27 - self
absorbed. filmmaker?  young woman making herself up and talking to the
mirror turns a guy with a petition way from the door. she get's a
necklce, puts it on and turns into a mop. the note says that the amulet
will give her her power.  awesome mop costume. . uh, this is silly. i'm
not going to detail it. oh this is yasmine's piece. made with a group
of peeps.

9:33 - Chris Brown: shorts over. We're going to do Q
& A with filmmakers later because we're running behind. Bring up
Richard Wong and HP Mendoza.

HP: going to show clips. Roll clip.

HP
singing in front of a curtain. it's a musical. this is really hard to
describe. oh, it'ws an ad for the film fest. very cute. 2007

Rich:
"Colma" premiered at film fest 06. Became friends iwth guys and Chi-hui
asked them to do teh trailer. Thought "People have to watch this ten
times" so came up with something that ppl can watch over and over.

HP:
Taro Goto wants the song to be a literal history of asian americans. It
sucked. chi-hui said be as oblique as you want. so they wrote a song
about bears.

next clip: third musical scene in colma called
'crash the party" nope. having technical problems and can't find the
right scene. HP spent high school years in colma and decided to write a
concept album. talk of making it into a stage play. a gift for his best
friend. blah blah blah. rich wanted to do something creative and HP
showed him the album. can't figure it out so next clip

Rich's second film 'Option 3" i have no diea what this clip is about.

9:50 - got
a grant from CAAM and split it in half and each made his own movie.
This one wasn't made to be sold or get distribution. Made from personal
experience.

HP's film was called "fruit fly": the clip is of a
song called "fag hag." god, I hope this is on youtube! Got sick of
reference to fag hags, Margaret Chos. In gay culture Asian women are
fetishized even more by gay men. most fag hag-centric stories are into
gay men, not celebration of women at all. just finished production on
it.

9:59 - Chris: won't be able to screen the colma clip tonight. any quesitons for the guys?

Sam asks something about music. HP doesn't think of self as musician. has scored hitchcock films? Nerd rock.

what
was your budget? Colma's budget was $50k. romantic summer project. had
always wanted to do a movie together. option 3 and fruit fly, not so
much romantic summer movie. they were funded.

Didn't hear the
question. option 3 was what he made when he was depressed. Rich
co-directed princess of nebraska and his diary for that was the same as
the diary for option 3 (was the question)

if you collaborate
again what will it be? definitely stuff they're trying to do together,
but it depends on the money. also solo work.

Chris: we're fans
of collaboration. Thanks to guys for coming out and honoring us with
their stuff. Thanks to YBCA.  Won't be able to do a Q &A with other
filmmakers. 7 more days of apature. get a program. membership pitch.Okay, so I was touch-typing in the dark last night and this required a LOT of cleanup. So I'm posting the part that I've done now and will post the rest tonight when it's finished.

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.

Monday Thoughts

So I've been liveblogging APAture for four days now and I have some thoughts:

1. No more extensive notetaking. As the film night fiasco has proven, if I can't clean up the post and put in links in a hour or less, it's not worth it. The whole point of live-blogging is that I don't have to go in afterwards and spend the rest of my life making it purty.
2. People seem to like my bitchy opinions. So more opinions, bitchy if at all possible. (Of course, people only like bitchy opinions if they're turned on someone else. So bitchy opinions on everyone ELSE, please.)
3. I need to be enjoying myself more, so maybe record less. For example, I had a nice, long conversation with Dino Ignacio when I got to LAP-POP yesterday, of which I didn't record a single word. I hadn't seen him for a year or two. Dino's somebody I used to see at every event, especially the endless APAture fundraisers that used to happen every month the summer before APAture at somebody's house (often Dino's). He is probably the nicest guy in the community, and definitely one of the most fun. He's also a filmmaker, animator, game designer, and music video maker extraordinaire. All for the love, of course, although he tells me he's been making a living at some of this lately. Awesome. ... See? I can't help myself. I have to record everything.
4. More quality time with my cat.

In conclusion: shorter posts? We'll see.

Also, I've CREATED A SURVEY. Very short. Please take it and help me to figure out if this live blog was at all a good idea. Thanks!

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.