The Last Resort

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Road to Love

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Watch On YouTube (And Comcast): Nice Girls Crew

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Wednesday Retro April Chase

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Secret Identities Universe+Shattered

Definitely sounds like something I'd want to have at my school...if I owned a school.

The creators of the groundbreaking Asian American comics anthology SECRET IDENTITIES are back, bringing together the most exciting Asian American talents in comics and beyond for SHATTERED — a brand new collection that upends and subverts the negative and cliché stereotypes that have haunted Asian America for generations.

Now, the SI UNIVERSE team is preparing to go on the road with a unique interactive, multimedia program designed to bring the historical context and sociological consequences of these stereotypes to life — incorporating both the ideas and stories of SHATTERED and the rich artifacts of its thematic companion, the acclaimed museum exhibition “MARVELS & MONSTERS: Unmasking the Asian Image in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986,” curated by SHATTERED editor-in-chief Jeff Yang.

“SHATTERED and MARVELS & MONSTERS evolved side by side, and share a common structure —they both explore a set of pervasive archetypes that have shaped how America has seen Asians for the past 200 years,” says Yang. “MARVELS & MONSTERS shows how these images have been internalized in American popular culture — and SHATTERED brings together some of Asian America’s most talented and celebrated creators to reinvent and subvert those images. This tour is our way of bringing the two together, and getting them in front of as many people as possible.”

SHATTERED Tour programming includes one or more of the following:

A live multimedia presentation by SI UNIVERSE’s creators, featuring images, video, and audio;
An interactive “Build a Hero/Villain” workshop, in which SI UNIVERSE artists and editors work with the audience in real time to develop and draw an original superhero or arch-villain that reflects a complex, nuanced, and authentic cultural identity;
Kiosk installations that showcase the history, cultural context, and comic book depiction of the five pop-culture archetypes addressed in SHATTERED: the stoic Brute (coolies, gangsters, henchmen, and martial artists); the cerebral Brain (mad scientists, ancient wise men, maladroit nerds, and overachieving whiz kids); the exotic Temptress (the sensual femme fatale of a thousand faces); the inscrutable Alien (the eternal foreigner, utterly incomprehensible, totally unassimilable); and the devious Manipulator (puppet master and conspirator who seeks to control and conquer from the shadows); and
Guided breakout sessions that allow deeper sharing and discussion of the personal impact of stereotypes on participants’ real lives.

The SI UNIVERSE team is currently in discussions to bring the tour to schools and community groups in a series of major U.S. cities including, but not limited to Boston, Chicago, New York, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. If your school, museum or other institution is interested in hosting the tour, please visit the official website and fill out the form located at http://secretidentities.org/Site/The_Tour.html, or contact Keith Chow, SI Universe Outreach Director, at keith@secretidentities.org.

ABOUT SHATTERED: THE ASIAN AMERICAN COMICS ANTHOLOGY
The pioneering collection SECRET IDENTITIES looked at the Asian American experience through the lens of superhero comics; its sequel, SHATTERED, expands its horizon to include edgier genres, from hard-boiled pulp to horror, adventure, fantasy, and science fiction. Using this darker range of hues, it seeks to subvert the hidebound stereotypes that have obscured the Asian image since the earliest days of immigration: the stoic brute, the prodigious brain, the exotic temptress, the inscrutable alien, the devious manipulator.

Its eclectic and impressive lineup of contributors includes many leading comics creators, including Bernard Chang, Greg Pak, Takeshi Miyazawa, Gene Yang, Ming Doyle, Sonny Liew, Sean Chen, GB Tran, Christine Norrie, and Larry Hama; as well as stars from other media such as rapper Adam WarRock, slam poet Bao Phi, filmmaker Michael Kang, author Jamie Ford; and many more! Their original graphic short stories cover topics from ethnic kiddie shows, China’s AIDS policy, and airline security procedures to the untold backstory of Flash Gordon’s nemesis and the gritty reality of a day in the life of a young Koreatown gangster.

Eisner-winning graphic novelist Derek Kirk Kim (Same Difference) calls SHATTERED “a highly eclectic grab bag,” while best-selling YA author David Yoo (The Detention Club) says, “there truly is something for everyone… these stories are all ridiculously unputdownable!” Spoken word artist Beau Sia says SHATTERED “would have been a truly beneficial graphic novel to have while growing up, unsure of my place in the world.” And Konrad Ng, director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, calls SHATTERED “a visual delight that envisions how the rich tradition of American comics is an Asian American experience. The result? A novel and entertaining form of empowerment.” SHATTERED incorporates thrills, chills, and delight while exposing the hidden issues and vital truths of the nation’s fastest-growing and most dynamic community, and features a cover designed by DC Comics' superstar Cliff Chiang.

ABOUT MARVELS & MONSTERS: UNMASKING THE ASIAN IMAGE IN U.S. COMICS, 1942-1986
New York University's Asia/Pacific/American Institute commissioned SECRET IDENTITIES editor-in-chief Jeff Yang to curate MARVELS & MONSTERS on behalf of NYU’s Fales Library, which had received a bequest of a unique collection of comic books gathered by science fiction author and cultural studies scholar William F. Wu over the course of four decades of adult life. The Wu collection wasn't notable for its size or the rarity of its contents; what distinguished this archive was its subject — Wu had spent dozens of years painstakingly gathering and organizing mainstream comics that presented images of Asians and Asian Americans, creating a fascinating timeline of evolving social and cultural perceptions from 1942 to 1986, a span that was among the most turbulent period in relations between the U.S. and Asia, when America was engaged in nearly continuous conflict with Asian powers, while also opening its doors to large-scale immigration from Asia for the first time in its history.

Yang, who with the SI UNIVERSE team was in the process of working on SHATTERED, developed the book and the exhibit side by side, using the common theme of illustrating a set of persistent archetypes that still define Asians in the popular eye as exotic foreigners, cerebral nerds, impassive brutes, fiendish manipulators, and sultry seductresses. In MARVELS & MONSTERS, these depictions — originating in racist editorial cartoons and xenophobic propaganda — are seen in hyperreal, four-color form in a medium conceived of as children's entertainment. The full show has been exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and Purdue University in Indiana and is headed for Los Angeles in Fall 2013. A pop-up mobile version of the show is being developed as part of the SHATTERED tour.

For more information on SHATTERED and real-time updates on the SHATTERED tour, follow the Secret Identities Universe on Twitter at @SIUniverse; on Facebook at facebook.com/SIUniverse; or visit the website at www.secretIdentities.org.

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East West Players + Tea With Music

East West Players (EWP), the nation's largest producing organization of Asian American artistic work and the longest-running professional theatre of color in the country, has partnered with the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center (JACCC) and USC Center for Japanese Religions & Culture (CJRC) for the world premiere of TEA, WITH MUSIC.

Book and lyrics for TEA, WITH MUSIC are by acclaimed playwright Velina Hasu Houston, music by Nathan Wang and choreographed by Giovanni Ortega. This production is directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera. The musical features Joan Almedilla (Miss Saigon, Les Miserables), Tiffany-Marie Austin (Miss Saigon, A Little Night Music), Yumi Iwama (Our Town, South Pacific), Jennie Kwan (TV’s California Dreams, Avenue Q), and Janet Song (Twelfth Night, Medea).

Founded in 1971, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center is one of the largest ethnic arts and cultural centers of its kind in the United States. The JACCC is the preeminent presenter of Japanese and Japanese American, and Asian American performing and visual arts nationally. Their mission is to present, perpetuate, transmit and promote Japanese and Japanese American arts and culture to diverse audiences, and to provide a center to enhance community programs. The JACCC also provides office space to a wide variety of nonprofit cultural, educational and community-based organizations in Los Angeles.

"The Japanese American Cultural Community Center (JACCC) fully values a partnership with other arts groups that present quality works of art for the community. We share much in common - and we can only wish the greatest success for EWP in this production of Tea, With Music!" says Bill Watanabe, Interim Executive Director of the JACCC.

The Center for Japanese Religions and Culture was established at USC in September 2011. The Center’s mission is to promote the study of Japanese religions and culture at USC and in the broader intellectual community of Japan Studies. The CJRC will foster this area of study by funding faculty-led research projects; planning conferences, colloquia, and workshops; providing faculty and graduate student research support awards; and by building our capacity to host visiting scholars and postdoctoral fellows in the near future. CJRC is the first research center for Japanese religions on the West Coast of the United States, and only the second such center in the country.

"We are honored to be associated with one of the most important plays on the post-war Japanese-American experience, Tea With Music by Velina Hasu-Houston,” says Duncan Williams, Director of the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. “We are excited about this collaboration with East West Players to celebrate one of our faculty affiliates' major works, this time as a musical production. The struggles overcome by the war brides depicted in the play are one of the many stories that represent the fabric of the U.S. - Japan relationship today."

Generous support for this production is provided by the S. Mark Taper Foundation Endowment for East West Players. Additional funding for TEA, WITH MUSIC is provided by the James Irvine Foundation, the California Community Foundation, Shubert Foundation, The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.

All performances of TEA, WITH MUSIC will be staged at the David Henry Hwang Theater at the Union Center for the Arts at 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012. Previews run from November 8-10 at 8pm, and November 11th at 2pm. TEA, WITH MUSIC opens November 14th and closes on Sunday, December 9, 2012. Opening night will be accompanied by a pre-performance cocktail reception and a post-show reception with the cast and creative team. Performances are Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays at 2pm. The Pay-What-You-Can Performance will be held Wednesday, November 21st at 8 pm. The post-show discussion will be held on Sunday, December 2nd.

General Tickets range from $31-$41. Preview tickets are $21 general admission, $16 for students. Opening night tickets are $65 for all seats. Tickets are currently on sale. For ticket purchases or more information, please call East West Players at (213) 625-7000 or visit www.eastwestplayers.org. Senior, student and group discounts are available. Dates and details are subject to change.

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Friday Ice Cream

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Kina Grannis: Gone

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MANAA + Cloud Atlas + Yellow Face

From the important PR:

MANAA ASSERTS OFFENSIVE USE OF YELLOWFACE MAKE-UP AND
EXCLUSION OF ASIAN ACTORS IN THE FILM “CLOUD ATLAS”

LOS ANGELES-The Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) is criticizing the new Warner Brothers motion picture “Cloud Atlas”—promoted as artistically groundbreaking because its actors swap racial and sexual identities—as business-as-usual in its exclusion and offensive yellow-faced renditions of Asian people.

A multi-ethnic epic spanning 500 years and around the globe, “it’s an artistically ambitious approach to filmmaking,” according to the organization’s Founding President Guy Aoki.
“Unfortunately, it reflects the same old racial pecking order that the entertainment industry has been practicing for decades.”

“Cloud Atlas,” written and directed by Tom Tykwer (“Run, Lola, Run”) and Lana and Andy Wachowski (“The Matrix” trilogy) and based on the novel by David Mitchell, utilizes an all-star cast that includes Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, and Hugo Weaving. In order to stress a thematic continuity among the movie’s six different interwoven stories, the filmmakers cast many of the same actors as different characters in each time period.

One of the stories takes place in a totalitarian, mechanized Neo Seoul Korea in the year 2144. An Asian female clone (South Korean actress Doona Bae) is encouraged by another female clone (Chinese movie star Xun Zhou) to break out of her oppressive pre-programmed routine to serve men and become an independent thinker. The segment also includes White actors Sturgess, Weaving, and James D’Arcy as ostensibly Korean characters, using eye prosthetics to make their Caucasian features look more Asian.

“’Cloud Atlas’ prides itself on its ‘multi-racial cast,’” said Aoki, “but that basically means White men and women of color, like La Jolla Playhouse’s ‘The Nightingale,’ which was criticized last Summer for using only two Asian American actresses but allowing five White men to play Chinese characters.

Aoki said, “’Cloud Atlas’ missed a great opportunity. The Korea story’s protagonist is an Asian man--an action hero who defies the odds and holds off armies of attackers. He’s the one who liberates Doona Bae from her repressive life and encourages her to join the resistance against the government. It would have been a great, stereotype-busting role for an Asian American actor to play, as Asian American men aren’t allowed to be dynamic or heroic very often.

“But instead, they cast Jim Sturgess in yellowface,” Aoki continued, referring to the historically frowned-upon practice of using cosmetics, such as eye prosthetics, to make Caucasian actors look Asian.

“In fact, every major male character in the Korea story is played by non-Asian actors in really bad yellowface make-up. When you first see Hugo Weaving as a Korean executioner, there’s this big close-up of him in this totally unconvincing Asian make-up. The Asian Americans at the pre-screening burst out laughing because he looked terrible--like a Vulcan on ‘Star Trek.’ It took us out of the movie. And Jim Sturgess and James D’Arcy didn’t look much better.”

MANAA Vice President Miriam Nakamura-Quan stated, “In the modern age of movie make up, it is disturbing to see poorly done Asian eye prosthetics to make Caucasian men look Asian. The race-changing make-up totally disrupted the flow of the film. The old yellowface movie characters of the past like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan looked more realistic than the characters in ‘Cloud Atlas.’ Why couldn’t they have cast a handsome Asian American actor of mixed race to play the multiple roles in Neo Seoul and the other time periods? It would have made the movie more believable.”

Added Aoki, “It appears that to turn white and black actors into Asian characters (black actor Keith David was also Asian in the 2144 story), the make-up artists believed they only had to change their eyes, not their facial structure and complexion. In two scenes in other segments of the film, Bae and Zhou are made up to appear Caucasian. The filmmakers, Aoki said, “obviously took more care to make them look convincingly white. The message the movie sends is, it takes a lot of work to get Asians to look Caucasian, but you can easily turn Caucasians into Asians by just changing the shape of their eyes.”

In another story set in the South Pacific in 1849, Maori slaves are played predominantly by blacks, including Afro-British actor David Gyasi. “You have to ask yourself: Would the directors have used blackface on a white actor to play Gyasi’s role?” asked Aoki. “I don’t think so: That would have outraged African American viewers. But badly done yellowface is still OK.

“In any case, this was a lost opportunity to cast real Asian Pacific Islanders. Why weren’t there any real Asian male actors portraying any of the major characters in this supposedly racially diverse film?” Aoki concluded, “It’s a double standard: White actors are allowed to play anything--except black characters--and have the dominant roles; Asian male actors are non-existent. And Pacific Islanders are played by blacks.”

Asked Nakamura-Quan, “If, in the making of this complex movie, the creators of ‘Cloud Atlas’ can make creative leaps in time, place, characters, race and gender, why can’t they also take a creative leap in the casting?”

MANAA, the only organization solely dedicated to advocating balanced, sensitive, and positive depiction and coverage of Asian Americans, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. It led nationwide protests against the movie “Rising Sun” in 1993 and challenged Sarah Silverman’s use of “chinks” in her joke on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” in 2001.

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Must Read On The NPR Cover Up: Hyphen Magazine And Kao Kalia Yang's "The Science Of Racism: Radiolab's Treatment of Hmong Experience"

Hands down, one of the most powerful articles I've read in a long time and a huge shout out to Kao Kalia Yang and Hyphen for getting this out, making this statement, and telling it like it happened.

Read it now.

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DFD: New Chick

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Hibakusha: Choz Belen, Steve Nguyen, Karin Anna Cheung + More

While the screening down at the JANM has passed, the life of this film looks to be just beginning, and with an amazing group of people involved, it should go a long way.

ABOUT

“HIBAKUSHA” is an animated documentary/drama featuring Kaz Suyeishi, a 57 year old Japanese woman, who recalls her most vivid and horrific experiences as a 17 year old Hiroshima student during the morning of August 6, 1945 when the atomic bomb dropped on her hometown.

This film is inspired to bring awareness to the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings in hopes that nothing like this will ever happen again and over time, show tremendous forgiveness after these terrible incidents occurred. This project will commemorate the 66th Anniversary of the bombings and is dedicated to the Association of Hiroshima & Nagasaki A-bomb Survivors.

CAST AND CREW

FILMMAKERS
CHOZ BELEN (DIRECTOR/CO-WRITER)
STEVE NGUYEN (DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/CO-WRITER)
IVAN TSANG (CO-WRITER)
DEAN MATSUDA (PRODUCER)
BRIAN L. TAN (PRODUCER)
MARVIN ORENDAIN (DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY)
TOMMY SU (CINEMATOGRAPHY)
HANS WANG (2ND UNIT DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY)

CAST

KARIN ANNA CHEUNG
PRISCILLA GEE
CONNIE LIM
DAISUKE SUZUKI
GRACE SU
JANE LUI
WILLIAM KNIGHT
PAUL DATEH
KATO COOKS
ERIC MCALISTER
JOSHUA WILLIAMS
RYAN SUDA
JASON Y. LEE
JENNIFER TAKAKI
YUAN-KWAN CHAN
RYAN TAE MCGILVRAY
POH CHOO SIM
KANE DIEP
KAZUE TANI PECK
JAMES BAK
FARAH MORIAH
KYLE GRIFFIN

http://www.hibakushafilm.com

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Kollaboration Star 2012: Episode 1

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Dance Showdown Episode 3

Just in case you didn't know about this...well..now you do.

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Best Comment On Jeremy Lin's "The Unexpected Ones" Volvo Commercial On YouTube

I really don't know the exact comment "George Michael" was replying to in the Lin Volvo commercial comments, but this was just funny for me:

"White men also seem to have small cock and can't drive for shit..."

When I read that I just couldn't help but think of someone's aunt who had some really bad dates on Match.com never to return again to the dating scene, bitter at the small white penises that almost got her into numerous accidents on the way to what they described as "a really authentic Chinese place" nestled between a Big Bowl and Leaann Chin.

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Maroon 5 Holds One #1 And PSY Has The Other

Number 2 on the Billboard 100 still isn't bad...and if you can't get #1 because of some scruffy white guys, at least take solace that your #1 on the Billboard Social 50.

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Where'd that week go?

Work. Sleep. Flu like symptoms.

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Watch It Again: Getting Pulled Over

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Netflix Watch: A Beautiful Life

Shu Qi in her Golden Horse and HK Film Award nominated role (her first since winning in 2005 for Three Times) and the director praised Liu Ye.

And yes...

It didn't make me blubber like Hula Girls (because when they do the dance at the train station trying to get Hirayama back, all bets are off) but there was some...quite blubbering going on that is.

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New Heights: Peaches (Live at Compound Studios)

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