speach tree

For those of you just joining this thread, click on the "anime/manga" tag in the column to the right, to find out what I’m talking about. I just wanted to throw up my work in progress, so bear with me as I edit this over the next few days. This is maybe the 3rd major anime convention I have ever attended in my 23 years of life on this planet. The first two times, I went to the Baltimore Otakon 2000 and 2001 (I don’t remember the exact years) with some friends during high school. I find it kind of interesting to mention a few comparisons between Otakon at the turn of the millennium and the New York Anime Festival in 2007. *Disclaimer: This exercise is obviously problematic, since: Baltimore and NYC are totally different cities. Furthermore, Otakon had already become an established event in the DC-metropolitan area by the millennium, whereas NYAF - according to Show Manager Peter Tatara - is only in its first year as such (there has been an annual New York Comic Con for a while...

As promised, one down a half-dozen to go. But first, let's define some terms. "Shoujo" is a genre of manga with some or all of the following: a pubescent or adolescent girl protagonist heterosexual romance heterosexual tensions including a.) unrequited love b.) jealous female or male rivals c.) pheromone-drenched young male eye candies in multiples of 2 or 4, or d.) all of the above high school or middle school uniform with slouchy socks (late 90s, early 2000s) elaborate, melodramatic eyes fireworks, beach scenes, girls in yukata, and other summer fare the conspicuous absence of homework Of course, I am dating myself. Before the 80s, you would have seen a lot more European white girls with some aquarium-sized glistening eyeballs in the shoujo genre but for some reason no one really cares about Isabella or Claudette anymore. OK so. As some of you may already know, I am currently translating (at non-unionized wages) a shoujo manga called 3-Ai, which is not the real name of ...

Remember how I talked about the imagery and Christian themes in the first 20 episodes of Death Note? Well now I'm going to talk about the second opening, which has a soundtrack that is much less pop than the first one. "Hey hey human sucker, Hey human fucker" is a refrain, which, along with "convenience Banzai human" sort of sums up the whole song, I think. But the imagery! So interesting! Doesn't the opening reflect more of the international audience of Death Note? Do I detect a compositional reference to the Black Panthers? Does Amane Misa finally turn into a porn star? Is there a Matrix allusion? And is it just me or does Light seem to really lose it in the end? Below are some frame stop times for you if you want to take a look at what I'm talking about. (Just look up "Death Note 2nd Opening"on youtube and you will probably find a 1min20sec video with corresponding frame-times): 0:00 - 0:08, "Death Note" in a bunch of different lan...

(for up-coming blog pieces, still in the works) Space-Cadets in the Classroom (Students who take up a lot of space) Differences between Wall St and Pearl St (Murry Bergtraum vs Economics & Finance) Black & Asian Segregation When Straight People Make Mangas about Gay People Comics/Animation & War Nanking, The Movie that Happened Because the Vice-Chairman of AOL Was Traveling in the Caribbean in 2005 Aaaaaaah I am so behind! Plus, I am going to volunteer at a huge anime convention this weekend, which means I'll be even more behind! WAAAUGH!

Death Note Notes, Part 2 I finished watching the Death Note series on the internet over Turkey Break. My earlier observations remain with no major modifications. I don't want to spoil the ending for those of you who are still watching, but I do want to talk a little bit about a few trends that I see in Japanese pop media. #1 The Thriller. As I said before, this series masterfully juggles suspense, fantasy, and thriller elements into what I consider to be the epitome of good anime: It does what live-action movies can't do, it does what novels can't do, and it has a great soundtrack. So fun. On another note, I think that many viewers of this anime (myself especially) have been so thoroughly trained to consider the Greek Tragedy to be Good Form that we can't help but get sucked in. According to Greek Tragedy formula, Light is a Tragic Hero because he comes from a "good," noble family, is good-looking, smart, attractive, and has a Tragic Flaw : Hubris (in Engli...

Lately, I have been watching the anime series Death Note obsessively on youtube. Here is the premise, in my own words (you can also check out Wikipedia etc): Light Yagami, the smartest kid in school, one day finds the “Death Note,” a magical notebook that gives its owner the supernatural ability to kill anyone by merely writing the victim’s name in the pages of the book, while thinking clearly of the victim’s face. without both the name and the face of the victim, the owner of the Death Note cannot complete the killing. Light decides to create a “perfect world” by killing all criminals. Eventually the most powerful political institutions of the world appoint a mysterious genius detective, known only as “L”, to solve the mystery of why all the world’s criminals (that make it onto the nightly news) are dropping dead. (To find Death Note episodes free on youtube, look for “DN ep 1” or some other variation. If it’s overly obvious, the people who hold the rights to the DVD will pull it of...

DW found me an article by Michio Kaku (famous physicist on string theory and - apparently - sometime anti-racist cultural critic) anayzing the history of racist Asian imagery/stereotypes in U.S. comics! Amazing! and I am also reading a feature article in the Japanese magazine, PEN with New Attitude, about the history of world comics and its impact on Japanese manga! The analysis, to come.

This is turning into a weekly installment brought to you from Wall Street... J-Class! ...I need to think of a more catchy name for it... Operation Asian Sabotage... hmmm, too Fu Manchu. After this Tuesday's class, I decided to try to write a post about performing/entertaining for my students in after-school. Basically, my supervisor keeps telling me that I can't expect to turn out fluent speakers by June. We meet for basically an hour once a week to learn whatever we can while eating pizza or mochi after being in school since 8am. What can we possibly do in such little time? (The answer, of course, is a lot, but first...) I am worried that in the absence of real material, I am basically performing a racialized culture of "Japaneseness" for the entertainment of my students and for the agency that employs me, instead of being a facilitator/educator. There are a few reasons why I feel this way: My students see me as Japanese. And I am. But that's not the only thing t...

This week, we got around to talking about the indigenous peoples of Japan. Concepts that we touched on: - “Assimilation” - “History is written by the winners,” and therefore - “Losers are depicted by the winners.” - “ethnic groups” - “minorities” In the first half of the class, we watched a movie – 『もののけ姫』(Princess Mononoke) – which was the most popular movie in Japan until Titanic came out afterwards. It was also the most expensive animated movie to make, up until its release date (2004), at a production cost of about $20 million. I introduced the movie by talking about the setting – Muromachi Period (1336-1573), roughly contemporary with the Ming Dynasty and the arrival of C. Columbus in what is now known as the Caribbean. The main character of the movie is an Emishi prince, from a clan of natives who have continued to resist the Japanese Shogunal government. (Historians say that the Emishi natives were all assimilated by 1300.) The main character of the movie is based on a historica...

I have been wanting to keep a log of all the movies I watch, since I keep track of all the books I read on goodreads.com. It would be nice to get better at critically analyzing the movies I watch, just because it's so easy to watch a movie but to think about what I've seen is complicated. So I will start today with a Japanese movie, made and released in 2006, called Boku wa imouto ni koi wo suru . My translation: "I fall in love with my sister." It stars Matsumoto Jun (he's in all the high-profile J-dramas these days like Gokusen and Hana Yori Dango , both of which were adapted from manga.) Not surprisingly, this movie is based on a manga of the same title, written by Kotomi Aoki and published by Shogakukan Publications, Ltd. Since I'm interested in social politics through manga as a medium, I'm going to talk about how the movie works in a social context. There are two different issues I want to talk about: Japanese geographic culture and Taboos. Geograph...

I just re-read the first paragraph of the article I wrote for the College Hill Independent after I got back from visiting Zapatista communities in December 2005. Wow. Yeah. Anyway, I will spare you the self-flagellation and just give you the link so you can see for yourself. Here it is! http://www.brown.edu/Students/INDY/cms/content/view/125/73/ Part of the impetus to write this blog is to figure out how to bring what I've learned from the Zapatistas back to my every-day life. Which is wierd when my life feels less stable than hydrogenated oils in a deep fryer. How to be a politically responsible person when making less than $300 a week as a transplant in NYC?

(10/8/07) I’m actually writing this the day after Day 2 before I head to Day 3 because last night, after the convention, I spent the rest of the afternoon/evening at Party for the People in BK. (It was excellent, but that is a different post entirely.) After P4P (or PftP as it is also known) I spent the night snacking and chatting with my room-mates DW and RL, and DW’s sister and our friend JW, aka Janejane. JW asked a lot of fun questions about my recent (?) interest in anime/manga, since we hadn’t talked in a minute. So I decided to talk here a little bit about what I’m trying to do. This is true of a lot of pop culture media but anime/manga (as most people in the US know it today) is full of the problematic gender/race/class stereotypes that permeate its source society (Japan/USA). A lot of people in the U.S. today think that anime has something to do with crazy big-eyed and impossibly skinny animated characters often involved in either magical/fantasy fighting scenarios or octopus ...

I have been facilitating an after-school Anime Club at two high schools next to Ground Zero, alongside teaching Japanese after school (there is a lot of overlap in the student participants). As I do more and more research on Anime and Manga availability in the U.S., I meet increasing numbers of young people of color from all kinds of backgrounds who are consuming and producing their own anime-related work. Yet the culture of Anime and Manga consumption/production in the U.S. is still dominated by white (and Asian) males, although there seems to be an increasing number of women being recognized on an institutional level. As an artist and teacher who was raised on anime/manga (I learned Japanese by reading and watching) I'm pretty interested in the changing social impact of Japanese/US manga and anime culture. So I decided to hop on NJ Transit bus #129 after work today and attend the 2nd annual MangaNEXT convention (only the second convention devoted exclusively to manga ever held in...

(It's been a while since my last post! I have just begun my first job in NYC!!! Teaching after-school classes in Japanese Language and Anime Culture in a inner-city high school in dowtown manhattan! Welcome to the first installment...) "You better have a leg in it," said N__ when she heard how many students I had in my Japanese class: over 30. I had to ask what that meant, but I wasn't feeling any kind of ominous energy from the students who had signed up for after-school Japanese Language Club. What I mean is: Who signs up to stay at school for 3 extra hours unless they really want to be there??? After trying (and failing) to set up a DVD for the first hour, waiting for the students to trickle in, and being herded into a corner by a Student Government meeting, I began class. The first order of the day was to break up into groups and brainstorm what the students expected of each other, of themselves, and of me as a teacher. Many of them said the same things: for the t...

was so fun. i just got back after SM-H & i took some of the high school interns to the open mic there, hosted by Bomani (D'mite) Armah. It was fun although not as packed and not as high-energy as Mocha Hut on U St on thurs nights. i read "August" because i kind of forced the high school students to share their poems, and because i wanted a chance to get in front of a big group of people and shout out both Free Minds Collective and the anniversary of the Aug 9 atom bomb on japan. i also learned that the haitian revolution happened in august. and a bunch of other things happened in august that i can't remember. a lot of FMC staff showed up and showed love too, so that was nice. besides FMC people, though, it was a hard audience. Bomani shared this song at the end of the set, it's set to a beatbox/remix of beethoven's 5th and it's called "read a book": READ A BOOK READ A BOOK READ A MAAFUCKIN' BOOK (2X) R-E-A-D-A-B-O-O-K! (chorus 2X) YOUR BO...

in response to "Lineage for Mika" look up i say: look in the dirt my eyes are as diamonds in a deep cave with no light and i am my best and only friend. will you be there for me? when i dis-integrate, will you be laughing at the law of entropy. can this room grow to fit many rooms? all rooms? because as deep as i dig no ancestral mouths emerge to fill my blood with music that only happens when i step onto the streets of Kochi in late summer, the through-ways of the old arcade shaking with the rattle of naruko (clapping like fleshless hands) and jumping with the stomp of sole-based beats. my mouth fills with the wind of this island moving me to the ocean where i turtle up and down the beach, dragging me and my long shadows along the shores because i yosakoi - only come around at night. I’ve never been to Hiroshima, but I am Nagasaki on a white hot august day. i am comfortable blinking stars away but it kills me to drag my body, growing heavier and more worried, back into the w...

text: how complicated can a person get how about as complicated as an onion how about as a newspaper as an imaginary aquarium as the organ that serves as a floating device in certain fish as a political thriller??? (and on the back...:) as compplicated as a 3 year old asian girl who sits on the steps of her family's row house and says hi to anything that moves how about

text: how deep/ can this room grow as deep/ as deep as our voices/ as the Pacific/ and the words/ that wander and run into the walls like flies/ the fireflies,/ they rise up from the bog/ outside the Kaleidescope Room/ like spirits from their graves/ noting nothing/ after all they are not/ tourists falsh- ing shiny asses at the sun, / the moon/ and everything in between/ and meanwhile you/ and i we think of/ nothing, or anything, whichever/ you prefer because after all/ we are not fireflies/ and we can say/ whatever we can think of.

providence can be a brutal city, just like any other. in this glass box I watched the ocean fall in sheets outside computer clusters, braid inside the gutters. umbrellas made no difference. this is the version i actually ended up using: Providence can be and has been just as brutal as any other city in the country, but i was safe and desperately warm within the glass cage, watching the Atlantic fall in sheets, watching the acid rain braid itself into the gut- ters, wringing words like fair- trade coffee from my strained eyeballs to stain the imaginary page on my computer screen.

There is a difference between conducting a media campaign against an Ivy League university and addressing racial and youth profiling of young bike-riders in Prince George's County, MD. I talked with GM who has a lot of experience in local goings-on and has lived in the area for a long time. Here are some notes on the conversation (not direct quotes): msn (me): i had a conversation today (friday) with the students in our summer camp bike program about racial profiling, or "biking while black/brown." it reminded me a lot of the work i did at brown university to try to connect racial profiling on campus with police brutality off campus. GM: it's really important to express support for the victim(s) so that they know that they are not suffering alone. it's a problem though when campaigns become all about cultivating empathy for the victims and the victimized. msn: that may have been the main problem with our efforts to address racial profiling at brown. that's why...

RACIAL PROFILING – Bike Safety & Repair Program, Free Minds Collective Summer Enrichment Camp @ William Wirt Middle School & Center for Educational Partnership Riverdale, MD (Prince George’s County) July 2007 1. ASK: what is racial profiling? (See definition below) Have you ever heard of the phrase “DWB”? Driving While Black/Brown definition: (From an education website: http://www.education-world.com/a_lesson/02/lp252-05.shtml ) racial profiling is the practice of targeting a person for criminal investigation based on his or her racial characteristics. Profiling can also be based on other characteristics, such as age (YOUTH) or gender (MALE). Discuss the following statement from ACLU: “A July 2001 Gallup poll reported that 55 percent of whites and 83 percent of blacks believe racial profiling is widespread.” 2. How is this related to bike-riding? (BWB – Biking While Brown???) 3. ASK questions below – how would you feel etc.? Ask students: Have you ever been stopped by police a...

mi-house (instead of mikasa) mikamion (mi camion) mikarro (mi carro) mikamisa (mi camisa) pinky chika reddy chu-chu

July 19, 2007 I’ve been thinking about this all week, and I finally got to talk about it with GC and DW last night, which was very helpful. But first, I should start with the problem, which is that: I tend to get more or less flustered when one of my students asks me to talk about something that I have complicated feelings about. It hasn’t always been easy to ask people about their feelings or about their families, or where they come from; but now I find this much easier than to talk about feminism, or white supremacy, or immigration. The other day one of my students (IJ) asked me about the shirt I was wearing – depicting a Zapatista with a bandana around her mouth and braids down the sides. Below, the letters EZLN. He was like: - What is that – EZ…L…N? Is that like a gang? I ended up saying something like - Well, … they’re more like… freedom fighters. To which he replied: - So are we gonna fight? And I said: - Uhhh… well, first you need to know what you’re fighting for. - We fight for...

i shd explain the name of my blog but i want to wait a little while first. i will give a small hint tho. :) it is the name of one of my favorite poems that i wrote! ahhhh, i hate having favorite poems it's kind of like having a favorite child. but i cant deny it.

from kundiman: c/o Regie Cabico ! This exercise helps you work on your comic timing! stand around in a circle one person starts by clapping her/his hands once while looking into the next person's eyes the next person must "catch" the clap by looking into the clapper's eyes and clapping in time to the original clap the person who catches the clap must then turn around to face the next person in the circle to pass on the clap. to shake things up: clapping twice sends the clap back to the clapper. another one from Regie: stand in a circle and each person has to say a letter of the alphabet, but in 3 totally different ways with three different dramatizations. from summer camp: This exercise is sometimes called "A Big Wind Blows" but I think that name is totally dumb. So I call it "Revised Musical Chairs," or if that doesn't work, " Shout Outs ." One person is in the middle and says "I love all my peoples who..." Anyone in the ci...

The Orange House, headquarters for Estacion Libre in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chis., MX, home base for all delegations to Zapatista Liberated Territory from the U.S. since 1998, safe-space for people of color... will cease to exist after August 2007. from the Estacion-Libre listserv: "Dear Sisters and Brothers, We are writing to you after a long silence to officially let you know that we will be closing down the Orange House that has served as our home in San Cristobal. The house has served as a container for beautifully frustrating and productive struggle. In the beginning, as you all may know, we opened our home to address the need for a People of Color space in a revolutionary setting. Our goal has been to learn from the Zapatista struggle about rebellion and how to bring these lessons to our communities in the United States and Canada. It served as a space for movement building, fostering connection, popular education, strategizing, refining our political analyses, transce...

a lot of these come from various anti-oppression workshops, but we just did these recently at the Free Minds Collective "Educator's Institute" - a 28-hour anti-oppression training for educators in the Free Minds Collective Summer Enrichment Camp 2007. the educators come from various backgrounds: me from brown u. and japan and suburban VA. WF (teaching bike repair with me and AS) from the Dominican Republic by way of the Bronx and now Greenbelt MD. Ms JM from 30+ years of teaching in the public school system. CC raised and educated almost entirely in Prince George's County... i would say that of the 30ish educators who attended the institute about 8 are college students at the University of Maryland, 9 are high school interns from the area, and maybe 9 or 10 are teachers who have been in the system for anywhere from 4 to 30+ years. Then there were a few random recruits from craigslist (the photography teacher, from El Salvador by way of FL) and other networks, like the...

(from the Free Minds Collective Yahoo Grps "Description"): "The Free Minds Collective is a summer enrichment program at the Center for Educational Partnership and William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale Heights, MD. Educators are teams made up of lead instructor(s), a University of Maryland student, and a Parkdale high school student working with middle school students. Programs include breakdancing, photography, bike repair, organic gardening and cooking, drumming, drama, capoeira, spoken word, and mural painting. We value multicultural, peace-centered, democratic education." I am really inspired right now by how this model is happening for us. I've been talking to a lot of people about what inspires me and what frustrates me about this experience - so forgive me if you've already heard a lot about this. I just want to post periodically throughout the rest of july about some experiences here, in the hopes that these experiences might be useful to others tha...

This is one of the retreats that gave me some real strategies to take back home... For those of you who don't know about Kundiman go to kundiman.org! This is a revised version of what I submitted to the directors as a testimonial: Language is my homeland, and even this landscape is always moving and changing. The Kundiman Retreat was like an unexpected homecoming. Unexpected because I never knew I could feel so much connection, despite the initial awkwardness. At first, I felt a little “out of place,” and was self-conscious about the fact that I had only begun to really embrace poetry within the past two years. I never doubted that I was a poet, but I didn’t feel comfortable connecting with other, more experienced poets about the process of creating it. But on the second day, my workshop faculty member brought about a huge movement in how we related to each other. Myung Mi Kim found what connected the very different poetics in our workshop, while recognizing the very different expe...

this blog is the result of a few deliberate thought-threads and a few spontaneous ideas: the internet is crazy and by no means as democratic as a lot of people want us to think. but it has its uses. the gym class heroes made a song about facebook. there are so many good ideas floating in the world that ought to be shared. i feel like i always do these retreats that are life affirming for a minute, then i return to this place that everyone calls "the real world." (what's so real about it?) i love sharing strategies. i love telling stories.