8 Asians

A new website for DJs, mixcrate.com, created in part by 8asians alumnus Genghis Mendoza, has a story about how the DJ scene in San Francisco Bay Area became large and influential.  Turntablism is now practiced worldwide, and many legendary DJs like Qbert and Babu are Filipino-Americans from the Bay Area.  CSU Long Beach Sociology professor Oliver Wang did his Ph.D dissertation at UC Berkeley on this subject.  “Spinning Identities:  A Social History of Filipino American DJs in the Bay Area” chronicles the history of the mobile DJ scene.  He has created the web site http://legionsofboom.com/ for sharing this work.

The Bay Area DJ scene definitely has had influence, even in my family.  My nephew Ryan Buendia, who is currently a music producer for the Black Eyed Peas, started out as a turntablist and is part of the Fingerbangerz crew .  This DJ crew has produced a lot of music for the dance crew Jabbawockeez.

As I mentioned, mixcrate.com is a site where DJs can share and promote their mixes.  Created by Bay Area DJs (Genghis is also a DJ), it too is part of the ongoing heritage that Wang describes.

There’s a ton of stuff going on in L.A. all the time, but if you love music & art, check out this awesome event “BY ANY DREAMS NECESSARY” featuring work by artist and designer Timothy Teruo Watters, a hapa, who was inspired by his grandfather. One of the singers is Jessie Malay, a super talented hapa. Don Chow Tacos, a Chinese taco truck, will also be there.

BY ANY DREAMS NECESSARY
LIVE ART. LIVE MUSIC. LIVE FASHION.
OPEN BAR. DON CHOWS TACO TRUCK.

Date & Time: November 14, 2009, 8pm – 1am
Venue: Gallery 1018, 1018 Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Artwork by TIMOTHY TERUO WATTERS
Live Music by JESSI MALAY, TERRA INCOGNITA, SIX REASONS and more…
Live Fashion by DANIELLE KELLY
JOSEPH GETTRIGHT, DJ IZM, TRUTHLiVE, BZ and ED GOLD spinning all night

OFFICIAL RELEASE PARTY FOR DJ SKEE MIXTAPE “ENDANGERED SPECIES” featuring BRIAN “DEEP” WATTERS, PROPHET and SIX REASONS

TERUO ARTISTRY debuting its Fall Men and Women’s line
COL.ABO presents KORRUPTION: A Vinyl Toy Project

Art raffle benefitting A PLACE CALLED HOME

Sponsored by EVERYDAY and JLP “The President’s Tequila

Want to learn more about what Teruo Artistry is about? Check out these videos by Skee.TV:

h/t: Koji

Lodestone Theatre Ensemble will be putting on their farewell production with Grace Kim & the Spiders from Mars. Written by Philip W. Chung and directed by Jeff Liu, this show was specifically written to be the last show for Lodestone’s tenth and final season. I can’t believe Lodestone will be retired for good after this run.  If you live in the greater Los Angeles area, I would add watching Grace Kim & the Spiders from Mars to your “must-watch” list and get your hiney to Burbank.

The play is about a young Korean American woman, who withdraws from the world after the death of her mother. Things go topsy turvy when she falls in love with her sister’s fiancé.

Tickets for opening night, November 14, are sold out, but you can catch their other showings. The play runs through December 20 and they’ve slashed ticket prices to their low 1999 rates to celebrate their 10th and final year.

Whether you’ve seen a Lodestone production or not in the past, this is your final chance to see them and say farewell to this long-time fixture in L.A. theatre. We’ll be keeping an eye out on the masterminds behind Lodestone– we know they’ll have new endeavors– but until then, don’t miss the final Lodestone production.

Visit their website for more information on their final show.

Last Friday, 30 October, 16-year old Melody Ross was shot while leaving Wilson High School’s Homecoming football game. She was an honors student, on the school’s track team, and college-bound: Student at Long Beach’s Wilson High fatally shot after homecoming game. At the time of the incident and a few days after, no perpetrator had been identified and Long Beach City Police even offered a $20,000 reward for concrete leads on the shooter. Friday, 6 November, two 16-year olds, Tom Vinson and Daivion Davis, were charged with first degree murder for the death of Melody Ross and attempted murder of two other men.

In reading several articles on this story, what stands out to me is the fact that Melody was the daughter of Khmer refugees, Chantha and Vanareth Ross. Her parents and other family members escaped Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime to Long Beach, California, home of the largest Khmer community in the West Coast.

During college, I took a course on the refugee policy in the context of the refugee flows out of mainland Southeast Asia in light of the Second Indochina War. One of the salient points my professor made regarded the ways trauma from the violence experienced in their homelands traveled with the migrants through refugee and transit camps to their eventual country of resettlement. For Melody’s family who escaped the Khmer Rouge genocide, how does her death as an innocent bystander speak into her family’s history? Living in a city with a high crime rate and gang activity, Melody’s parents had even moved their family to a safer neighborhood. Her uncle, Sam Che, commented to the press on his niece’s death, “It’s so senseless. We escaped the Killing Fields.”

In attempting to understand the Khmer refugee experience of displacement and resettlement, Melody’s death brings together both the trauma of her family’s flight from Cambodia and the pains of the immigrant’s life in the US. Both Vanareth and Chantha work 10-12 hour days, six days a week to provide a better life for their children. Vanareth, her father, expressed, “I have a little regret we didn’t have more time for her.”

Why yes, this would be fellow 8Asians bloggers Joz and Jee, and here they are in a video promotion with Steve Nguyen to promote BANANA, the FIRST-EVER gathering and round-table discussion/panel of Asian American bloggers at the USC campus on November 21st. I’d go into more detail, but event creator Lac Su explains it all the more eloquently (he did write a book, after all):

BANANA, [is] where we will get into important discussions about the future of our voice, where it will lead to, and how we can come together to find common grounds and focused endeavors to voice our opinions about relevant issues affecting our community. Why? Because the time is a-changing. We rise.

Steve Nguyen, a television/film producer and head of the Los Angeles ChannelAPA.com division, will be there to co-host and capture the event on film to help promote our voices and to introduce the faces behind such blogs.

Unfortunately, Joz will be in Asia during the event, so attendees will have to put up with grumpy, cynical me traveling down from San Francisco to be one of three 8Asians representatives. Whether this event is an Asian love-fest or an all-out shouting match is anyone’s guess, and if you’re in the Los Angeles area, you’re more than welcome to attend and watch what happens.

The biggest news this weekend from Arcadia, CA was Zenyatta coming from behind to clinch her 14th win at the Breeders’ Cup Classic at the Santa Anita Race Track.  It was actually quite an amazing feat considering how far behind she was.  But lost beneath the headlines was the opening of the race track’s new exhibit about the race track’s often forgotten association with Japanese Internment.

Signed in February 19th, 1942 by President F.D. Roosevelt, Executive Order 9066 granted military personnel the right to move en masse many Japanese Americans, of which the majority were American citizens, into internment camps for a good two years.  The move forced many of these individuals to sacrifice much of their possessions, property, and even family.  People like Star Trek star George Takei, Malcolm X’s confidant Yuri Kochiyama, civil activist Richard Aoki and about 120,000 others had their lives shaped by these internment camps.  In short, Japanese Internment is seen as a black stain in American history, and is often considered a hypocritical blind move by the American government by many due to its various associations with the Nazi’s concentration camps, but I digress.  The most well known of these internment camps is in Manzanar, CA but before much of the interned were forced into Manzanar, they first settled into temporary staging areas held at various stables and race tracks in places like Pomona, Fresno, Salinas, and so on; the most famous of them the Santa Anita Race Track.  The exhibit hopes to bring much of the forgotten history of Japanese Internment back into the forefront of our view on World War II, which is generally viewed as the perennial battle in which the good of the Allies defeated the evil of the Axis.

I grew up around the area and often drove by without drawing any connections between the race track and its dark, hidden past.   The race track sits right next to a modern mall and when I went to the mall in middle school, I always considered the track to be a relic of the past; mostly because I failed to understand the excitement of horse racing and failed to recognize the significance of the venue to the sport.  I guess it would be as if I looked down upon the Rose Bowl simply because I didn’t watch football.  I didn’t know of its purpose, let alone its role in 1942.  Therefore, I’m excited to visit the exhibit not only because I hope to catch some great exhibits and read some excerpts from primary sources first hand, but also because it gives me a reason to step into a place so heralded by horse racing enthusiasts.

We love it when Asians behave badly. It gives us something to gossip about and also, it makes us feel pretty badass. It’s true. It’s like a slap in the face to that annoying stereotype about being submissive model minorities. You want high SAT scores? How about a dumb lawsuit?

Of course, this doesn’t mean we condone any sort of bad behavior. No, you shouldn’t lie about getting job offers and you shouldn’t try to steal money from cute boys. Actually, what am I even saying? These people make us look bad. Maybe I shouldn’t write about this.

So I’ll just say that I’ve been enjoying the case of 19 year old Rachel Lee and her burglary “bling ring”. If you’ve ever needed proof that paparazzi sites like TMZ are bad for society, then here you go: thanks to the proliferation of Hollywood gossip blogs like TMZ (and probably Google Maps), Lee and her friends were able to track down and rob the homes of Paris Hilton, Rachel Bilson, Lindsay Lohan, Audrina Patridge and other famous people who probably deserved it.

(I mean, let’s be real. They didn’t even have to break in: these people never locked their doors. Plus, like Paris Hilton ever wears the same outfit twice? Rachel probably put good use to those diamond watches.)

Conclusion: Rachel needs a book deal so she can tell us what exactly is inside Lindsay Lohan’s house. Cocaine? Discarded hair extensions? What’s left of her career?

Rachel. You’re Asian. You should be smart enough to get yourself out of this mess. Make us look good!

You read that right– anime hip-hop martial arts musical! It’s all that and a bag of chips!*

East West Players has gathered a creative team to develop a new musical that utilizes all three art forms and a 25 minute presentation of this work in progress will be performed on Friday, November 20, 7:30pm at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. A Q&A discussion will follow.

The working title for the production is KRUNK-FU BATTLE BATTLE.

Description: The heart of hip-hop is in the battle. Young Norman Lee must learn this if he hopes to survive his new high school life as an Upper Westside import now transported to Bushwick, Brooklyn, after his Mom loses her 6-figure salary job. After being bullied, beat-down, and watching his Mom swallow her pride by accepting a job as a fast food fry cook, young Norman Lee enlists the guidance of Sir Master Cert to help him learn the ways of b-boy to compete against the baddest crew in Bushwick for respect, honor, and a chance to prove to his Mom that this life away from material wealth can and will work.

The creative team includes: bookwriter Qui Nguyen, lyricist Beau Sia, composer Marc Macalintal, hip-hop choreographer Jason Tyler Chong and anime consultant Jane Wu. The presentation is directed by East West Players’ artistic director Tim Dang and reunites Dang, Chong and Macalintal after their successful collaboration of the 2008 hit run of PIPPIN.

The Writers’ Gallery offers public readings of works that are being considered for the mainstage at East West Players and are presented in conjunction with the Japanese American National Museum and The National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. This workshop is made possible in part by The James Irvine Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts which believes that a great nation deserves great art; and by the support of individual donors.

The Writers’ Gallery presentation of KRUNK-FU BATTLE BATTLE (working title) will be on
Date: Friday, November 20th
Time: 7:30pm
Venue: National Center for the Preservation of Democracy
111 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Admission: free

For more information, please call East West Players at (213) 625-7000 or visit www.eastwestplayers.org. Dates and details are subject to change.

*Ok, I lied. No chips– no food and drink allowed inside at National Center for the Preservation of Democracy