From The Huff:
Since releasing the iPod, Apple has dispatched challengers with Jedi-like ease, brushing aside giants and upstarts alike to become the most valuable tech company in the world. In the meantime, they've built a giant fanbase whose love for the company borders on the religious. The Apple advantage is good taste, and the originator of that taste is CEO Steve Jobs.Read it in full.
Hosted by Kathy Choi and Danny Cho, "Real Talk" featured three of the eight Asians including Joz, Moye & Koji as well as Dr Eliza Noh of Cal State Fullerton.
You can view the episode online next week at Real Talk's website:
http://www.arirang.co.kr/Tv2/Tv_About_Content.asp?PROG_CODE=TVCR0583&MENU_CODE=101304&code=Po2&sys_lang=Eng
Militant:
I figure I could write up an e-mail and send it your way, but I feel like posting, so I guess that's what I'm going to do - but I was checking out the last few posts - and you know what I've always liked about them? They're just real - down to the core - in a way something I can never do - and yeah - everything is what it is - but at the base - when it comes to the posts - to the blog - you just represent - you put out a voice that's distinctly you and while it takes time to traverse things - figure out which way to go, what to keep behind closed doors, what to let go, and what to go after (in the good and the bad) - I'm always appreciating the voice you put out there - the stories you talk about in an unflinching way, sometimes from the most personal of vantage points.
And I respect that.
Because some things just need to be said.
You know what I love about the vizualizAsian series - besides the silky smooth voice of Gil Asakawa - it's just all the API goodness that comes from it.
It's just that damn good - and if you've never gotten the chance to throw some questions out the Disgrasian way - on telephone no less - now's your chance.
Sweet.
I'm a little late on this - been catching up on some reading - and while you probably already know this if you're a daily reader of Racialicous - Carmen Van Kerckhove, after spending eight years online and offline talking about race and racism, is moving on in another direction.
When I first started up this blog one of the places I hit religiously was Racialious, and while I'm more of a skimmer these days and I never got to know Carmen Van Kerckhove - I'll always be grateful for the space that she created where people like me, getting a feel for what they wanted to do, could send in a link, check out a post, and just see another Asian face doing their thing in the blogosphere.
Thanks for all that you did and those that you inspired.
First Jason Chen, now Dwight Howard.
The Orlando Magic center was fined $35,000 by the NBA on Wednesday for criticizing officials on his blog, the second time this season he's been penalized for posting such comments. Howard was in chronic foul trouble and constantly complaining about officiating in the Magic's series sweep over Charlotte. He fouled out in the last two games, played only 105 minutes and committed 22 fouls in four games.If bloggers aren't journalists they're sure getting fined like they are.
From the NYT:
It's not so easy being Han Han, the heartthrob race car driver and pop novelist who just happens to be China’s most widely read blogger.300 million hits?
Traveling incognito is all but impossible. Local officials frequently vie for his endorsement of their latest architectural boondoggles. (He politely declines.) And love-lorn young women often approach him after races with letters bearing his name. (He says the women have been duped by impostors who have assumed his identity.)
But Mr. Han’s most vexing challenge comes from a more formidable nemesis: the unseen censors who delete blog posts they deem objectionable and the publishing police who have held up the release of his new magazine, “A Chorus of Solos,” a provocative collection of essays and photographs. “The government wants China to become a great cultural nation, but our leaders are so uncultured,” he said with a shrug, offering his characteristic Cheshire-cat grin. “If things continue like this, China will only be known for tea and pandas.”
Since he began blogging in 2006, Mr. Han, 28, has been delivering increasingly caustic attacks on China’s leadership and the policies he contends are creating misery for those unlucky enough to lack a powerful government post. With more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world.
For the second year in a row the crew down at 8Asians is one of the five finalists for Best Group Blog in the 2010 Bloggies along with The Huffington Post, Lifehacker, Serious Eats and Momversation - and as you might expect - 8Asians is also one of the few Asian American blogs that have ever been nominated for the category.
So get on out and vote.
Forgetting the fact that they're a part of the beautiful people (who we all love to hate - and by we I mean me), the crew from YOMYOMF really does have some great looks into Asian Americans and media simply because of where they sit.
Here's a snippet from Justin Lin's recent post "Am I “retarded” for making Asian American films?":
“For a group of people that are supposed to be good at math, you guys must be retarded to keep making Asian American films.” That is a direct quote from a conversation I had with a veteran film producer last week about one of my upcoming projects. But before you make any judgment, you need to know that he is Asian American.Read it in full here.
Such remarks are not uncommon from a lot of Asian Americans working in the industry. In fact they tend to be some of the loudest naysayers and, at times, biggest obstacles on anything ‘Asian American’ (I will get to that on another day). That being said, I do understand his point. He was referring to Asian American cinema as a business. “Screw business!” you might say, but the reality is that filmmaking is a collision between art and commerce (even the cheapest of films will cost more than your average Mercedes). And within the context of Asian American films, the big elephant in the room has always been its business viability. “It’s a young man’s game,” a filmmaker once told me about Asian American films, “it’s fun to talk about representin’ and stuff until you get a mortgage.” And as a business it definitely makes no sense.
A guest post I wrote up for the good folks down at Bicoastal Bitchin.
And my seventh prediction for 2010
Alone in a dark alley as I'm cupping my balls praying that I can still have children the echos from my attacker screaming at the top of her lungs "I did it for you Jon! I did it for you!" haunt me for months to come...
Got this passed via e-mail and then saw this down at AAM via OriginalSpin and wanted to make sure and post it on up:
Okay, friends, readers and opinionated souls: Really need you on this one. I'm compiling my annual ASIAN POP BEST & WORST OF 2009. So please be generous to me with your wit and wisdom, and the karma will be repaid sevenfold in 2010, I can nearly guarantee it. Tell me, with humor, passion and verve:And you're waiting for?Comment your take on both here or email me at originalspin@gmail.com.
- What Asian/Asian American events, people or phenomena made this year worthwhile?
- What Asian/Asian American events, people or phenomena made you gasp/cringe/scream?
Thought I would give a plug to the blog Absolutelyfobulous who've apparently been adopted by Gil Asakawa and Erin Yoshimura - and really - any blog that has a post on a Chinese artificial hymen is worth checking out at least once.
From The Daily Texan's "Angry Asian Man aims to trump stereotypes":
Rasp - Go back to Mongolia, you stupid gook. We don't need, or want, your kind in our White Christian country.I wonder if other people feel as enlightened as I do?
I caught this picture down at the Alpha Asian blog and it just made me laugh so I wanted to post up the link. Check it out here.
Books + Food = Warm Goodness:
Former Viking assistant editor Ann Mah left New York for Beijing, took a job as the dining editor for the English-language magazine That’s Beijing, and wrote a novel about a young Chinese-American woman who moves to Beijing in the midst of an identity crisis. Mah spoke to PW from Paris, where she now lives, about Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself, which Avon will publish as a paperback original in February.Check out the full interview here as well as Mah's blog
PW: What surprised you most when you moved to Beijing?
AM: I’m ethnically Chinese; I was born in the States and grew up in the States [in Huntingdon Beach, Calif.]. I thought I knew everything about Chinese food because I grew up eating it every single day. But one of the things that surprised me the most when I moved to Beijing was how different [the food] was. I realized I grew up eating a type of Chinese food from a specific region of China, and there was a whole country of regions of cuisine to discover. That’s what inspired me to start the book.
Got this sent in my way from Steven Nguyen of Flip HD and Channel APA and wanted to post it on up because just like you - I was really curious about the hand gesture.
Nice.
A few minutes ago I happened to catch an article on this whole affair concerning an Asian American blogger named Rosemary Port (and I use the term blogger loosely because there were only five posts) and model Liskula Cohen who tried to get Port's identity known after she kept on calling her a skank (in her five posts), won, where now Port is suing Google to the tune of 15 million for usurping her right to privacy with the argument from her attorney as this:
High-powered attorney Salvatore Strazzullo has taken on Port’s case and is ready to go all the way up to the Supreme Court with it. “Our Founding Fathers wrote ‘The Federalist Papers’ under pseudonyms. Inherent in the First Amendment is the right to speak anonymously. Shouldn’t that right extend to the new public square of the Internet?,” Strazzullo said.Yes.
