speach tree

I'm really into Lupe at the moment. So much in fact, that I even designed one of my main manga characters off of him. Avery takes a page from many of my former students (mostly black male high school students) but he is supposed to look like Lupe. OK, so given the dearth of realistic black characters in the manga of my youth, i have to disclaim the unnatural look of my black characters... Hopefully I'll be able to throw up some samples so you can judge for yourselves. But yeah, with practice, hopefully...

i was talking to DW the other night about random things, and the topic of how to reconnect with our past selves came up. i mentioned that the manga project has done a lot to reconnect me with my past in a way that soothes the pain, even as it brings back painful memories psychologically, spiritually, and somatically. what that means is that as i sat at my old desk in my grandmother's house at the end of august, i felt myself being dragged into old patterns of thinking, behavior, even sitting - in short, i felt the cells in my body as i used to feel them when i would sit at that desk as a 5th grader, hating the summer homework that i was doing at the time, feeling estranged from any community, swatting mosquitoes... it feels good to be drawing again. it's something i've done almost since i could hold a pencil, and it allows me to write and escape and even confront old mistakes and tragedies. i'm not good enough to tackle anything huge yet, but i want to get there.

i have many beautiful memories with bob marley's voice as my soundtrack: - 12 years old, sitting by a fake fireplace while my bro plays nintendo - 20 years old, singing with a truck full of american and malagasy students through the arid south to Faux-Cap - 23 years old, singing with KY in a deserted parking lot in Cleveland, OH and now, this: one night in Kochi, my dad and i went out to eat on my aunt's tab. we went to a fancy izakaya where i had the best seared bonito (katsuo no tataki) of my life. afterwards, just as i was getting sleepy, my aunt dragged us in a cab to the suburbs for a night of karaoke and whiskey. it was a one-room bar with 5-6 tables full of middle-aged men and women singing enka ballads as if they were on national television. i was probably the only person under 40. of course, everyone has to sing, so i pored through the tomes of songs for something i could possibly do justice to, which is when i found good old Bob. The problem is i can only really sing ...

- music is essential - the drawing arm gets tired quickly at first, but perseverance leads to the development of new muscles - the quality of light makes a huge difference in endurance - weight loss (loss of muscle mass?) is not uncommon - characters evolve constantly but it helps to have a real-life model in mind (for me at least) - it's actually a lot harder than it looks to create flashy action sequences without common tropes like magic, tournament fighting, rival youth gangs, etc.

it feels like i haven't had such a long vacation as this in 15 years, but of course that is a lie. there have been plenty of winter breaks, or summer breaks where i couldn't find a job. oh and of course in 2004 i peaced out and flew to mexico for 3 months. what have i done this month? have i learned to chill and let go of control? not really... will i ever learn? probably not... i don't feel guilty though. i started the vacation feeling mad guilty because it was right after a huge mobilization for the anti-gentrification campaign in chinatown and because i hadn't really done anything for the break the chains campaign. but why feel guilty? it doesn't solve anything and it gets in the way of really appreciating the time that i do have. once i got over my guilt, i ended up outlining 50 pages of my manga in one week. i only have one regret, which is that i was so intense about my manga that i didn't spend much one-on-one time with my grandmother. she is like me in t...

on august 29, there was a record-breaking storm in aichi prefecture, where my grandmother (momoe) lives in her pre-war row house. there are 2 rooms, not including the kitchen, the bathroom, and the room for the obutsudan . also there is a little hallway that is full of old stuff. the house used to just be one room, with a kitchen, until my grandmother created an annex for her knitting school. i think my grandmother's talent for design is a little extraordinary, but maybe that's because i like her a lot. but even my dad, who couldn't care less about these things, acknowledges her abilities. anyway, the house. after my mother left 36 years ago, the house has conformed to the shape of momoe's life. there are piles of things all over the place, but everything is exactly where it is supposed to be, and none of it gets in her way as she totters on her two unbending legs and her push-cart. she is, in a sense, completely alone. my mother left Japan right after her father passed...

My father just moved out of his rental and bought a house in Burke, VA. It's small. It is by a lake and the lake is very nice. I am excited about putting my new room together, but it is going very slowly and I have too many books. I want it to be a workspace for manga and story writing!!!! uh-oh my bro is home and i must get off his computer.

OMG i have to interrupt the adventures mini-blog to talk about omuraisu. I am so excited to make and eat it tonight that I just have to share: http://cookpad.com/recipe/514964 To find out what is omuraisu, go to wikipedia .

on saturday (9/13?) i met up with a friend from mexico city who i really get along with - she is bilingual like me and is the only person in the world who seems to personally understand all the identity crises i've had over the years. anyway we got pleasantly drunk over shochu - which i had orginally bought for A & Y, but A said "you realize after hosting i've become pretty selective about my alcohol," so i didnt feel bad about drinking half the bottle - and caught up on the 2 or 3 years worth of history since the last time we had seen each other in Yokohama. It's hard to explain how much I appreciate J-chan, who can understand my elementary Japanese and my gringo-Spanish and my English in a pinch. She is like the older sister or cousin I never had who not only understands my ridiculously specific and unique suffering as an estranged nisei living on the opposite side of the world from Japan, but she also has lots of valuable advice on relevant topics like sex ...

I went with my father to visit my uncle Toshiki, who is dying from alcoholism. He swears he is no longer drinking, but he looked like a purple version of a person who drinks non-alcoholic beverages when they wake up in the morning. In fact he is beginning to look more and more like his father. His son, Kunihiko (37), was in the office when we arrived. He directs the installation of water and gas pipes in new houses. He has three children - a girl, a boy, and another girl. He smokes and drinks. He said to my father, The last time I saw you there was a little baby - is this her? Later, he tried to ask me what I do for a living. It's hard to explain what I do on staff at Chinese Staff & Workers' Assoc., but I basically told him about press conferences, undocumented immigrant workers in Chinatown, etc. He said, There are a lot of different jobs out there, aren't there...

I'm not sure exactly what went down, but a couple of days before I was supposed to leave Tokyo for DC, I got an email from CSWA folks about some Chinese women who had been hired through a subcontracting firm to work for a medical laundry in Japan. They eventually came out in mid-September against their company, technoclean, for stealing their wages and for exposing them to long hours of hard labor with no protection against the toxic waste resulting from the laundry. My mission was to go out and meet the women, but all I had was a Chinese article and the name of the journalist who wrote it up. For those of you who can read Chinese, I think you can read about it here: http://blog.ifeng.com/article/1697213.html Nevertheless, it was exciting to hear about workers standing up in Japan. The people I stayed with in Tokyo both had some interesting stories about how they - white european men with work permits - had been blackmailed and exploited by their Japanese bosses/the Japanese immigr...

After a long hiatus during which deadlines, anti-gentrification campaigns, and a trip to Japan made blogging seem like a post-retirement activity, I am happy to say that I have caught the blug (blog-bug) again and have something new to write about. Please choose from the following (in no particular order): - my mission from cswa - meeting one of my cousins for the first time since 1985 - salsa dancing in Roppongi with J-chan until 6am - my grandma's pre-war house getting flooded - getting kicked out of AR's house the night before my flight - singing Bob Marley "One Love" to a room full of middle aged semi-professional enka singers in Shikoku