speach tree

My questions of the summer

2010-08-11T21:42:00.003-04:00

Here are some questions I have personally or I have come across and have been unable to answer very well:

Why am I having such a hard time identifying new people who are open to fighting for real change?

Why is it so hard for me to plan ahead? Why does it feel like I'm just living day by day?

And some BIG questions:

- How do we know that what we are doing is fundamentally changing the system or is it just reform?
- How do I know if I am going in the right direction?
- Why is it every time I find myself doing things by myself; how can I change this concretely?

Dinner conversation

2010-08-11T00:42:00.004-04:00

Had dinner tonight with a few people in Chinatown. A few things KB said made us kind of nod in recognition:

You're not organizing if at the end of it, you're burnt out.

If you don't have education, if you don't have a right hand, you can find people who do. They can fill that role. If you're too smart, it shuts everyone out.

There are two models: one is to "empower" people you think are stupid or incapable, play god. Give them "power." The other is to "unleash" people's true power. To organize the undocumented, women, un-educated. The ones everyone looks down on. Which is organizing?

Things to think about...

Small thoughts

2010-08-01T13:02:00.005-04:00

Two unexpected weekends in a row...

Last weekend, we went to the beach when SF got an unexpected day off from work. It was nice to spend a day together, after a long stretch of only seeing each other for a few sleepy hours a day.

But where is my life going?

This weekend, many poorly laid plans fell through and I am home feeling a little relieved and a little empty.

I did some gardening, which gave me a sense of both accomplishment and dread. Accomplishment from the beautiful little globes hanging where flowers used to be, dread because I don't know what to do with the dirt once we move in December.

Weekend with my bro

2010-06-01T16:25:00.002-04:00

My brother came to visit over the Memorial Day Weekend, and it was an action-packed weekend, now that I think back on it:

Lunch at Cha-An Tea House 230 E 9th St.

Shopping and browsing in Lower Manhattan.
No picture available :(

Coney Island,
where Y is being burried alive... slowly...

Dinner
niku-jaga, ohitashi.

Protest at Kawa Sushi Restaurant

It was a blast though!

On Practice 2

2010-03-31T01:30:00.003-04:00

Today, X said to me and V (and U and Z and C were also sitting around the table as usual), "So many young people try to do things one way and when it doesn't work, they get depressed." I thought about a lot of young people and I noticed a few things...

Like E, for example. If E would only zoom out for a second she would see how ridiculous she is. Everyone can see that E has been provided for and spoon-fed for most of her life. She has been given so much attention from her family that she has come to expect this even of others. Every time someone comes to me with a new story about E, I am reminded that what we do is not for the purpose of building an extended family of people who will buy us presents, call us when we are lonely, entertain us. It is to identify and develop fellow fighters in the struggle to win against the enemy.

Or like F, who thinks that his main problem is that he doesn't know how to deal with people who are different. Even before the "dealing" part, he doesn't admit that he doesn't even know anything about these people, how they think, what motivates them, etc. He looks down on them, thinks he has them figured out, and they (being sophisticated animals) do something unscripted. They deviate from the ideal, the ideal being progressive, open-minded and selfless. I too used to think l.....s were just blood-sucking parasites, but they're actually very good at what they do. And I realized that I have a lot to learn from them.

Finally G. She thinks she is only being used, but doesn't see how this is not pure. Of course people want to use you if you are useful, and of course it's no use to be useless, but in the middle of that desire to use you is there not some kernel of a desire to find truth in you as well? Being among the almost totally useless people myself, it's hard to relate to G sometimes. But I can imagine what she is going through, how overwhelming it might be, how hard it might be to quickly seize opportunities and be creative. But isn't that the whole point? Again, I've never been a very creative person, but I do like to be near those people who are always finding new things to try and new ways to solve old problems.

Today I am reminded that I need to zoom out, know that I don't know, and find people who have fresh ideas. And not get depressed when my ideas inevitably don't work out.

Social Security Will Dry Up in 2037

2010-03-26T02:17:00.002-04:00

According to NY Times I will be 53 years old when Social Security runs dry. EXcellent....

And yet it doesn't seem like people are working any less. In fact right now a lot of undocumented workers are being exploited to the point where miscarriages and stress-induced cancers are not uncommon. Many work two people's jobs and get paid half - some even pay to work. What if all these people got paid the legal minimum (or - gasp! - enough to survive) and what if they weren't criminalized so that they could actually pay income taxes (they already pay sales tax) and become citizens? Then there would be more than enough tax revenue for Social Security and more than enough jobs for workers born in the US... But then we wouldn't have slaves to wash our dishes anymore. Gosh, I just can't decide which is better!

coming to the end of my third month of unemployment

2010-03-24T11:45:00.004-04:00

Since returning to NYC in March, I've been accompanied by a strange cough that gets worse when I lie down. I was really sick at the top of the month, and had to fight it down in order to dance at the lunar new year celebration.

Because of the rest I forced onto myself, I got into the habit of staying home more, which is both a downer and also allows me to do a lot of historical and theoretical study on my own. I feel that this is where my main interest lies right now, to be honest.

Lately, whenever I try to work with TW especially I feel a lot of resentment on both sides and it's not great. I need to learn how to work in a team and solve problems. So why am I studying right now instead of going out into the work-force??

I want to take advantage of unemployment to work on my communication skills, and also to deepen my understanding of what we are building towards. In order to work as a teammate, I need to resolve my conscious and subconscious disagreements regarding the direction of our work. This is the most important issue, but of course it cannot be done in complete isolation. That's why I continue to stay involved, while I try to develop my self through self-analysis and self-criticism.

Nagoya 4: the ride continues

2010-02-26T06:30:00.000-05:00

The taxi driver told us that Toyota's recall scandal really demoralized workers in this area. Toyota is the leading job-provider in this prefecture although Nissan and I think Mazda are also headquartered here. I had heard from the neighbors that a lot of the factories use Brazilian immigrant labor which is why there are so many Braziltowns along the highway. There are also a lot of Brazilians around downtown. They have their own groceries and international call plans...

I know that the government used to allow the ones who are part Japanese to stay and work, but I had also read that this was a scam to exploit workers. I read a novel about this by a Peruvian writer. He described subcontracting companies that would ship impoverished Japanese Latin-Americans (mostly Peruvian and Brazilian) into Japan with promises of quick money. When they finally realized what was going on they found themselves in company housing with a dozen people to a shower, poor hygiene, 80+ hour work-weeks, and late or no pay. They were treated as a second class by Japanese people in town. The novel was based on the author's own experience during the 80s. I have to go back into my bookshelves to find the title and author.. It was really hard to find a copy even in Lima but I made photocopies if anyone wants to read.

Nagoya 3: 4:30am

2010-02-25T15:14:00.011-05:00

Last night we stayed at the funeral home and kept my grandmother company all night for the last time. (We had to greet visitors from the neighborhood who wanted to pay respects. About 40 people came to the wake.)

I got up at 4:00am as usual and went across the street to the convenience store. I had seen yakuza in Tokyo before on a few occasions, but this was the first time I've seen one in my grandmother's neighborhood. He was with his girlfriend and a chubby drag queen. There's not much to do around here and it looked like they had been out clubbing, maybe they were coming back from the city...

Here are some pictures of the neighborhood in daylight:

This is the playground where I hid from my mom whenever we got into a fight.

There are a lot of rich farmers like this one around here. They opened up a cafe in their old storage building next to their fields. A lot of them pave over their fields and live on the monthly parking fees they charge other residents.

This is the inside of the cafe.

These are signs inside the local subway station warning customers to watch out for muggers and rapists. I guess it's an issue because these signs keep increasing.

Nagoya 2: sticker shock

2010-02-25T04:12:00.000-05:00

Every time I come here I am once again reminded how expensive it is to survive.
See below for prices.

This is breakfast. Granted at a fancy place, but 900Y is ridiculous. (~$11) What I had for breakfast in the food court was comparable and only about 630Y which is still not cheap.

This tea pot alone was 630Y (I didn't pay for it)

Just getting to the city from the airport was 800Y per person (we took the super-express and paid for reserved seating, which was unnecessary but this should give you an idea of how expensive it is. Compare to the metrofare in NYC to get from JFK to Manhattan: $2.25, which is bad enough...)

Nagoya 1: Arrival

2010-02-24T03:51:00.005-05:00

I've been a passenger for a large part of the past 2 days:

After learning of my grandmother's death, SF drove me home from Chinatown to Queens (15min),
then back to Chinatown (15min),
where I got on a bus to DC (5hrs).
My father picked me up in DC's Chinatown and drove me to VA (30min), where I spent the night.
In the morning, my mother picked us up and drove us from VA back to DC (30min),
where we caught a plane to Detroit (1hr),
in order to catch a connecting flight to Nagoya (13hrs).
It didn't end once we got off the plane of course. To get to my grandmother we had to get on a train to downtown Nagoya, 890Y (30min)
and connect to the Higashiyama Line (subway) to my grandmother's stop 230Y, (10min).

The riding continues, but for now I will explain the following images of Nagoya's Central Airport...

Some toys at the convenience store

Some unfathomable beauty enhancement product for women on display across from abovementioned toys at same convenience store

Shopping arcade in airport (bathroom area)

Same shopping arcade, architecture is some kind of disney-fied throwback to rome or something

fooooooood... breakfast was 630Y (about $8 at today's exchange rate = ridunculous)

またどこかで会おうね

2010-02-22T01:40:00.000-05:00

My おばあちゃん passed away today, February 21 at around 5am. She was alone, and they say that no one noticed her go.

Project 1: coffee table II

2010-02-16T15:22:00.000-05:00

After a quick meal, we continued...

We used the stands to clamp down the studs that still needed cutting. Some Home Depots will do this for you but they were not very precise at the one we went to in Elmhurst.

Project 1: coffee table I

2010-02-15T13:33:00.000-05:00

We actually finished our table a couple of weeks ago, but I was waiting until we applied the finish to post the pictures. Doesn't look like I'll be doing that until spring, so I'll post the pictures one at a time and maybe by the time I'm done the finished product will be ready...

Part 1: Home Depot
Later we discovered that the HD in Flushing actually has a much better selection of wood and much better quality. At the time, though, we ended up buying a few studs. And so the table was destined to become a Stud Table...

On Practice 1

2010-02-14T23:13:00.000-05:00

A lot of people in my life are leaving. It’s not that I don’t understand why they are choosing to leave. Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I have traveled the world to find answers, so of course I understand. But the thing is, I disagree.

I don’t have a problem understanding A, who has bought a one-way ticket to Spain to learn organic gardening. When I was jobless after Brown, I thought about learning to grow my own vegetables in Japan. But when people asked me: for whom? I had to face the fact that I couldn’t eat all that stuff on my own. And moreover, that people have more important problems to solve right now, like confronting racism and fighting displacement. I found people who want to learn how to grow vegetables out of an apartment in NYC, and that was much more interesting in the final analysis.

I don’t have a problem understanding B, who thinks she can build a movement over email, pin down exploitative bosses on the internet, and investigate community problems by looking up books on amazon.com. I used to think that smattering my 200 page thesis with words like “panopticon” and “The Other” was going to challenge people. But when I turned off my computer and came out of my room, nobody knew what I was talking about. More importantly, nobody cared.

I don’t have a problem understanding C either, who has worked humbly and without complaint throughout his life to find a good job and stay close to his parents who are getting lonely in their old age. His parents also escaped what they thought were boring lives where they came from, only to find that even though America has different problems, you still have to deal with it. He thinks that by leaving, he will become a different person, a happier person. I became a different person. But then I realized that being different just isolates you, and then you stop growing and you die. Either that or you live a double life, splitting your heart between two places, until your heart gets very tired and thin. It’s very painful.

I don’t have any trouble understanding why you would leave. I just think that when you get to where you’re going, see everything with clear eyes. Test your original idea. And if it is wrong, find the truth and stop making excuses.

East Coast Snowstorm!

2010-02-13T13:15:00.000-05:00

Here is a video of last Wednesday's snowstorm. M was trapped inside her house in VA, apparently. DC seems to have been debilitated. She called me many times to pass the time. I on the other hand waded through the nyc snowbanks all the way to Chinatown...

Nothing like hot noodles with good people on a bad snow day....

art and the pursuit of control

2010-01-23T14:21:00.000-05:00

i'm beginning to realize that a big reason why i keep going back to art is because i feel like it's something i can control. i can create and adjust all the discreet elements and how they interact to create the right conditions for change. but life isn't such a small endeavor. i wonder what james cameron does when he's not inventing ecosystems and alien cultures? when i was younger, i thought that charlotte bronte was great, but of course she could create intricate social relationship dramas because she was shut up in a room all day. same goes for lady murasaki.

and when i try to live life instead of escaping into my art, i flounder.

Me the Pirate in 2010

2010-01-18T15:57:00.000-05:00

things to acquire by hook or by crook:

microwave $59 @ target
food processor-ness $100-150 @ macy's
george foreman grilleration $19.99 @ target (can it be!?)
macbook $1000 @ black friday sale 2010
final cutty (studio) $1000 @ apple.com
007 camera-pen (or sth similar from veho) $100 @ J&R
bathing suit $29 (-$20 w/coupon) @ old navy

as part of an effort to develop problem-solving skills (big problem: save money) and also become more conscious of how i am moving through life, i have decided to help SF build new furniture for the living room.

project
1 - coffee table
2 - bench
3 - kitchen island
4 - chairs
5 - bunk bed!?!?

On Protracted War... against roaches

2010-01-08T02:40:00.000-05:00

Team Roaches: 1
Team me: 0

Being the stupidhead that I am, I got home at like 11pm after bombing my apartment with 3 Raid Fumigators and FORGOT TO OPEN THE WINDOWS for about 3 hours. So I have been sitting here inhaling poison. Just wanted to share.

This is a video of Domokun inhaling toxic air.

obaachan

2009-11-28T10:03:00.000-05:00

something came over me just now, as i finished writing holiday cards to ppl in japan. my grandmother is in a private hospital, blowing all her decades of savings in the high-income ward where she was placed when she collapsed from diabetes complications. she cycles in an out of good health according to my mother, who flies back and forth between DC and nagoya in the final months of her 30-year employment at the world bank. my mom bikes back and forth from the hospital to the little wooden row-house (長屋) that survived air-raids during WWII, virtually untouched since that time.

back and forth
in and out
up and down

how to break free of this incessant cycle of death and rebirth?

only through struggle...

some stats and an analysis of the struggle against the filthy rich in NYC in this past mayoral election

2009-11-28T00:13:00.000-05:00

Dear friends,

Just wanted to share some personal reflections on the Nov 3 mayoral election....

Bloomberg thought he was going to win by a landlslide, but he squeaked by with the white and high-income vote. But the working people of Lower East Side and the Chinatowns throughout NYC were out on the streets tirelessly in the months and days leading up to this rigged election, up against $$$tens of millions worth of ads, robocalls, mailings and propaganda, speaking truth to power; and residents, small business owners, other workers heard. See results from press below!

Total: 1,100,649 votes (very low turnout, lowest in modern NYC history)
Bloomberg only won by 50,342 votes, lost BX and BK by wide margins.

Bloomberg’s votes mostly came from rich white voters:

According to NYT:

•Sunset Park voted to DUMP Bloomberg: 4645 for Thompson, 4497 for Bloomberg (we were out at the polls all day talking to folks in the neighborhood)

•Harlem, Jamaica (QNS), Washington Hts all voted to dump Bloomberg by a substantial margin
•2/3 of white voters voted for Bloomberg (mostly Jews, white Catholics)
•72% of Bloomberg voters make over $200,000/yr
•Black voters, making up 23% of the total, overwhelmingly voted against Bloomberg (73% of all black voters voted against him on Tues)

Bloomberg tried to buy the election:

•According to NY1 and Washington Post, Bloomberg spent $100 million on his campaign, ie: $200 per vote!
•CBS called it the most expensive self-financed campaign in US history
•Bloomberg is the city’s richest individual. Even his political advisor Joe Mercurio said he could not have won without spending his own money like he did. (Metro NY)
•Bloomberg spent 14 times more than Thompson (Washington Post), but only won by 4.6 points.
•Bloomberg bought the most expensive electioneers, and his Campaign Manager Bradley Tusk forced staff to work until 8pm every night over the summer, until they complained. He refused to listen to them. (NYT)

We had a big impact, but he's still in office. Just means more battles to come!

forward facing

2009-11-23T00:07:00.000-05:00

i recently learned that one of my colleagues, XK, was a farmer in F__ province in China, quit after elementary school was a favorite with his boss and hates to read. he has one of the most assertive and clear speech of anyone i've met, and he has also helped to clear the air of a lot of bad energy with his presence. i'm going to try being more like him, more 前向き and more daring in the coming months...

new growth

2009-11-22T21:26:00.000-05:00

it’s been a really long time… i might have to change to a different blog, especially since i haven’t updated this one in such a long time that it really has no following. good reason… but SF says that you don’t have to cut everything out to move forward. of course, I think that that has got some truth to it, but the way I’ve been living is to try to clear some space for new growth. i’m scared to death of being trapped in rooms that lock from the outside. i forgot to tell you this morning but i do like that 3rd spirit, FB – after the Russian Revolutionary Sweep and the American Efficiency: the New York Enterprise & Creativity.

nothing to say

2009-01-26T23:58:00.000-05:00

i read what you write and i have nothing to say. the problem is also, i have nothing to ask. i have become a stone.

the only thing i can do is cut and paste. cut and paste. cut and paste.

lunar new year

2009-01-26T23:44:00.000-05:00

it's been a month of celebration and hopefully some transformation.
i just updated a blog that hasn't been touched since may of 2008, which reminded me of other blogs...
many things to think about, many questions to ask, many problems to solve.
my fortune for the year is a shining sword.

i just got off the phone with my father, who tells me that my life will be difficult. also that one needs not just success but the will to do things. do i have the will to change?

Lupe Fiasco

2008-09-21T20:37:00.000-04:00

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...

things i've learned from drafting my manga 2

2008-09-21T13:36:00.000-04:00

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.

singing Bob Marley "One Love" to a room full of middle aged semi-professional enka singers in Shikoku

2008-09-19T10:50:00.002-04:00

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 Three Little Birds without breaking glass, and all there was was One Love and maybe No Woman No Cry.

So i picked One Love, forgetting that you have to have that wonderful roots reggae wail to be able to sing the hook. I also forgot that the hook is repeated about a hundred bajillion times. Other things I did not know: the version of Bob Marley on this particular system was not the same as the Legend CD that i own and that everyone i know in the US owns and listens to; the tempo is breakneck; japanese-supertechnology allows for the adjustment of pitch to match each singer's range and so if you start higher than your range because you are nervous (which is what i always do) then you have to stay there for the rest of the song; etc.

it's easy to overlook these things when everyone around you is semi-pro and sings karaoke more than once a week or at least more than once or twice a year, which is how often i get around to it. and no, singing along to the Bob Marley Legends CD while stoned does not count as practice.

things i've learned from drafting my manga

2008-09-19T10:50:00.001-04:00

- 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.

keeping busy

2008-09-18T14:43:00.001-04:00

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 that she keeps herself busy when she is lonely.

my grandma's pre-war house getting flooded

2008-09-18T14:43:00.000-04:00

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 away from throat cancer, and right after momoe's own mother passed away. as for the house, it is virtually the last structure of its kind left standing in the neighborhood - all the other houses in the row have been demolished and reconstructed as apartments or single family homes. nagoya (the third largest city in japan) is growing and people are moving to neighborhoods like momoe's, because of the convenient location and access to public transportation.

but climbing real estate values are just the newest threat to the survival of this house. during the air-raids of WW2, a faulty incendiary bomb fell on the roof and never detonated. for a long time, they left the hole in the roof as a reminder. more recently, my mother proposed tearing down the house to build a new, more modern structure with multiple floors so that more people could live there (ie: herself). the plan failed, it was too late.

the night of the storm, i lay awake on the floor of the room where my grandfather died, trying not to think about all the ghosts following people around in this neighborhood, trying to re-forget the young Androy man i met 3 years ago in Fort Dauphin, trying to suppress all the sadness of isolation. i was so busy trying to empty my mind that i never noticed the water seep through the entrance (like many japanese houses, my grandmother's house is raised about a foot and a half above the ground, which is where we leave our shoes when we enter the house.) The streets outside must have looked like a river. all i could hear was the rattling window panes, the gusts of wind, and the slapping raindrops against the roof and walls. i felt better, though, as if the world outside were throwing a tantrum on my behalf.

I'm tired of searching for the floor in my new room

2008-09-17T12:38:00.006-04:00

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.

OMURAISU

2008-09-17T12:38:00.005-04:00

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.

salsa dancing in Roppongi with J-chan until 6am

2008-09-17T12:38:00.004-04:00

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 and ... well, sex. When A told me I couldn't stay with him anymore even after I told him I had nowhere to go, she summed up my frustration in a single, brilliant sentence: Te corrieron porque no quisiste cojer. Plus she helped me to see the bright side of things: When shit happens like this, you can always count on using it as a good story later on. She has the best stories, too. But I digress.

We took the 11pm train to Roppongi, where all the host clubs, bars, and dance spots are. J-chan had found a place called Cafe Caribe online and so we went there, only to find it full of older Japanese men and women dancing as if they were in a bad musical. Of course there were random white people and other gaijin, and we ended up getting adopted by an older Argentinian man named Ruben who took us to another spot called Cafe Latino. There, they play a variety of "Spanish" music, like salsa, merengue, even reggaeton. It was pretty chill at first, but then people started streaming in, mostly Japanese, but with a few Latinos in the mix. The Japanese men were heartbreakingly in-character, dressed up to look like either Daddy Yankee or the leading male from a Bunuel movie. Then there were some awkward older dudes and some young dandies who just wanted to get with the Latinas in short, tight outfits.

I ended up dancing with one dude from Yokosuka who had spent 7 years in the DR for baseball, and somehow could speak English. That was pretty interesting. He was very impressed that I had come to Japan to visit the grave of my dead ancestors - he kept saying "That's very important that's very very important..." very probably because he was drunk. For the most part though, I was happy just watching people from a bar stool. I would go back to Cafe Latino, for sure. But if you want to go, just be prepared to stay out until 5:30am because that's the first train out of Roppongi.

meeting one of my cousins for the first time since 1985

2008-09-17T12:38:00.003-04:00

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...

my mission from cswa

2008-09-17T12:38:00.001-04:00

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 immigrant worker system. Apparently, A's boss wanted A to work for no pay and threatened to have A's friend Y fired if A did not comply. Fortunately, Y's Japanese boss did not listen to A's boss who tried to cast suspicion on Y by framing him as a sketchy foreigner ("gaijin"), but A never got paid in the end.
Another example of how bosses use immigration status and racism to screw over workers, even white male workers in a white supremacist system... A lot of people (like myself, who used to) think that being white in Japan excused you from a lot of the oppression and exploitation against people of color. This is of course true to a certain extent, but white folks are by no means exempt from exploitation - they are clearly tokenized and although they have access to different kinds of jobs than say a Latino worker or a black Brazilian worker, they are still underpaid, harassed by the cops and denied housing, etc etc.

Mika's Adventures in Japan (Aug 18 - Sep 15) - a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure mini-blog

2008-09-17T12:38:00.000-04:00

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

M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A

2008-05-18T00:16:00.000-04:00

Just finished reading A Van Jordan's MACNOLIA (2004). I thought this was a useful critique by Tim Morris. I agree with him that the more interesting poems were the dictionary-definition format poems "to", "with", and "from."

Though I am no formalist, I am warming up to using forms to teach poetry. I don't know if persona poetry is considered formal, but it usually gets people to write. But I digress. Below is a sestina that I want to use in a lesson, but I'll have to work out the lesson later - too tired at the moment.

NB:
1. Fanny Brice, the longtime star of the Ziegfield Follies, was known for her talents as a comedienne as well as a singer.
2. Princess Tam Tam was a film starring Josephine Baker, produced in 1935.
3. "My Man" was a popular song written by Maurice Yvain as "Mon Homme." Later, the English version was written by Channing Pollock for the Ziegfield Follies.
4. Pepito was Josephine Baker's fiance from 1935-1936. He died of cancer before she completed the run of the Ziegfield Follies.

"Time Reviews the Ziegfield Follies Featuring Josephine Baker, 1936"
from A. Van Jordan. M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A. New York: Norton, 2004.

TIME REVIEW:

Before, we pictured her without diamonds,
Without sequined gowns and a face of paint.
We could see that this show was not the time
For a lithe St. Louis girl of her race
To flaunt her flanks in front of New York men.
How could she expect to find applause,

When we had saved to throw coins of applause
To Fanny Brice, our star, a diamond
On a stage of lights? Besides, what these men
Wanted was a dream well drawn behind paint,
Not a life-size black doll flaunting her race
And wares as if this were her place and time.

Parisian and brown? This was not the time
For a poor Negro girl to find applause
When she had given up her one true race--
America-- for filthy France. Diamonds
Draped from her neck and ears, but even paint
Chips on the wrong surface. A street woman

Posing as a lady-- please. Petty men
Could appreciate her dance, which was timed
To a beat of rags and old iron. Paint
The picture true, and let's save the applause
For patriots-- Eve Arden, a diamond,
And Bob Hope, a charm-- not this girl with race

On her hips and tongue. The spice of race
Can be sweet or tart; the lips of the man
Who tastes will be surprised. To think diamonds
Will clear the palate is a waste of time.
Sure, we gave Princess Tam Tam an applause,
Even if she mumbled through her songs and paint,

Even when she would cry and run her paint,
We listened. This is not about her race
But her choice of song, her need for applause
That would outshine Fanny Brice. Any man
Would give her a break, but the place and time
Was not this night. Yes, Brice was our diamond.

JOSEPHINE BAKER RESPONDS:

They want bananas on hips, not diamonds
On my decolletage. I'm under the paint,
Sinews dancing through segregated time;
It's not all about jazz or even race.
Fanny Brice's bland version of "My Man,"
In smoke-filled bars couldn't steal an applause,

So how do they think she deserves applause
On Broadway under lights and with diamonds
Dangling from her dewlaps? I got a man,
He stays with me when I take off the paint,
And he doesn't care about this whole race
Hooplah; he loves Josephine for me. Time

Magazine just started taking the time
To acknowledge Negroes, and now applause
From them supposed to predict racial
Equality on stage? Talent? Diamonds
Determine my success. They can go paint
Broadway as white as they please, all the men

On the Champs will tell you I'm the woman
By which they measure others; only Time
Had a problem with my act, when the paint
Came off, that's all it comes down to: applause
From friends not foes. Just look at this diamond
On my hand from Pepito; does race

Refract in its eye, or light? You see race
Is not real, only light and love; no man,
Negro or white, can change that. The diamond
Holds so much truth because it endures time;
It struggles through nothingness for applause;
It holds its breath, dark, naked without paint

Or the benefit of believing paint
Will change things because she is the same race
As coal underneath it all. And applause
Is just some dream. At times, even my man
Who, after all, is white, doesn't see time
And again how I'm merely a diamond

Trying to catch some light under the paint. Man,
I'm telling you, race problems will change with time,
Long after applause and this diamond's light fades.

Ground Rules (and other lists from FMC 2007)

2008-05-17T13:26:00.000-04:00

In an effort to try to clean up the house - get rid of old papers etc - I came across a little pad of paper from Free Minds Collective days. We must have been brainstorming some ground-rules or something. Here is the list:

confidentiality
speak from personal experience, not from sweeping generalizations
step up, step back
respect
support
have an open mind: don't be thinking about a response while someone is still talking
reflect
keep the goals in mind
check your body language

Here are some other notes...

Interventions:
1. use positive reinforcement
2. make the student a leader
3. provide choices
4. deal with sickness, not symptoms
5. build trust but don't confuse building trust with being friends
6. find and encourage passion
7. know the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards
8. sometimes you have to be tough - a mommy (??)

[sometimes my own notes confuse me.]

Responding to different learning styles:
1. kinesthetic - with your hands
2. present the same concept in different ways

Some quotes:
This is something that one of the Lyrical Storm folks mentioned:
"What [the educator] says might fracture a student's reality. We have to be prepared for the consequences."
Brother Victorious:
"Teaching is not a profession it is a lifestyle."
Curtis Cunningham:
"Let the student(s) make new stories every day."

I chopped off the tip of my finger

2008-05-16T17:21:00.000-04:00

but luckily I have hard nails and it didn't hurt.

My father is moving out of his rental house in the suburbs of northern VA (into another house of equal size and shape in the same suburb of VA). I am frantically going through my reams of print-outs, books, notes, journals, field-notes, letters, pay-stubs, magazine articles, sketchbooks, receipts, thesis drafts, and mangas dating back to before the millennium. D, R, and I recently discussed our attachment to material objects that - in addition to taking up space - give us access to privilege. What do I mean? Well...
For example, my books. I have all these ridiculously articulate books about literary theory, poverty in America, Native cultures, immigration law and theory, and sewing machines, most of which I have not read, but which place me in the (over)educated class, one marker of which is that we have more than 100 books in a personal collection. For more on the educated class, read the liner notes for College Dropout by Kanye and "The Rise of the Educated Class" by David Brooks.
My books got me my honors degree, and if I keep them, my children (or anyone I'm connected to) will be able to read what's written in those books and get their degrees and so on. Well, maybe it's not that simple, but there's something about having all these books that cultivates a culture of prioritizing knowledge for the sake of having knowledge - a concept that may seem like a universal virtue but actually is not. (For more on why, I recommend Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children.)
In any case, I am trying to glean as much information about my past lives by skimming dusty pages of printer-paper as they fall into the recycling bin. Oh the agony. My problem is that I keep forgetting things - even tortured conclusions - almost as soon as I write them down. It makes waking up in the morning a little easier, I guess.

"This is a script with both sound and meaning"

2008-05-09T00:26:00.000-04:00

some words i have recently re-discovered and with which i have rekindled a romance:
hummingbird
morsels
porcupine
crave
skitter
pumps
rush
ponytail
stem
astringent
sinister
condensation
dominate
battle
mushroom
yum

words that have lost favor with me recently:
space
feel
syllable
tail
challenge
script
descent
race
class
press
guilt
like
futile
suicide
waterproof
sorry

I tried to explain the four writing systems in Japanese today with my middle school students. I guess the basic one would be hiragana - a script that indicates different sounds arranged in syllables, which can be rearranged to form words. Katakana, the other basic script is a counterpart sound-script that looks edgier and is used only for foreign words. The third script is kanji, Chinese characters that signal both a sound and a meaning - some kanji characters are associated with multiple sounds and multiple meanings. The final script is romaji, based on the alphabet, used for the transliteration of Japanese words as well as for spelling words from English and other Latin-based languages. I guess a fifth script would be so-called Arabic numerals.

It seemed so abstract to me as I was explaining this to my students, though. "This is a script that incorporates both sound and meaning." - what does that mean? I've found that it's useful to compare hiragana and katakana to lowercase and uppercase, respectively. Is it just me, or does upper case feel more edgy, more angular, than lowercase? Partly because of the history of the usage of katakana in religious and government texts, this script always has a very "masculine" feel to it. Well, to be specific, it is the historic and persistent male domination of religious and government spheres that genders the script. In any case, I often wonder why I persist in describing katakana to my students as "more angular"...

An exercise in simile

2008-05-07T17:00:00.000-04:00

a bad date is like trying to turn on a lamp that isn't plugged into the wall.

changing cities or houses is sometimes like a singer who has to keep the same name over the years despite how much she grows.

trying to learn inDesign, photoshop, and illustrator is like having a muscle ache that gives you a headache. you don't know how they could be related but anyway it's a pain in the ass.

unexpectedly getting the afternoon off from work is like having brownies for dinner. it's what you wanted, but not when you wanted it.

A few new thoughts on LE

2008-05-07T00:20:00.000-04:00

R and I were talking about Louise Erdrich, one of my literary heroes, and her character Fleur Pillager. R raised the issue of self-exotification, a problem I had been thinking about specifically with respect to Erdrich's work ever since I finished reading Four Souls and moved on to Tracks.

N and I had talked about the voyeuristic relationship of the reader to the text, something that is not necessarily exoticist but it's certainly a trope that encourages exoticism, I think. We also talked about how the stories Erdrich relates are not living stories - they are often of the past, and thus it is easy to remove one's responsibility and relation to the text.

In any case, I feel that the intimacy of the stories penned by Erdrich are a result of her own upbringing as a writer and as a person, and I don't want her to write differently, but I have to acknowledge this trap of self-exotification...

I guess my argument though with that assessment is that Erdrich doesn't just paint a glorified picture of an Ojibwe community, but she shows the weaknesses and failures as well. My other comment would be that Erdrich's audience might actually be other Native folks, future generations, etc. and maybe she isn't worrying so much about other people. The fact remains that she is immensely popular and I bet all her books flying off the shelves aren't all being read by Native folks...

Bookworm

2008-05-06T01:15:00.000-04:00

Last night ND called me out of the blue as he was walking to the Rock to finish a paper for a class I never took but always wanted to take while at Brown, mostly to watch how Prof. DK taught the class. Everyone I know who has taken that class has said that DK is a Good Teacher, and I am inclined to believe them. They say he gets a class talking to each other about what they got out of the books, without imposing a lot of his own agenda. It is said that he asks a lot of good questions and listens to what students say.
I had a lovely conversation about books, and I realized today that I love talking about books! Especially novels, I think. Maybe I should be a Lit teacher after all... But I like talking about what I like about books more than I like leading a discussion about books... and YT told me I should think about being an art teacher instead. In any case it was very nice to talk to ND about books we had read or wanted to read. If my spirit animal was not already a lion who is trying to be a whale, it might have been a bookworm.

Sakura Matsuri @ the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

2008-05-03T23:42:00.000-04:00

Today I had a wonderful time strolling the sneezy Brooklyn Botanic Garden with my Japanese students (mostly middle school), getting to know them while enjoying the beautiful plant-life. What I did not enjoy so thoroughly was the Sakura Matsuri (The Cherry Blossom Festival) itself. Here is what I am going to put up on my public blog:

Spending my childhood summers in Japan, some of my favorite memories come from the neighborhood festivals in Nagoya and Kochi. There were carts with middle-aged men and dumpy women yelling "Hai IRASSHAI!" ("Step right up!") which really fast always sounded like "HAIRASSHAI!!", hawking plastic festival masks, goldfish-scooping games, mitarashi dango, and takoyaki from hastily erected stalls lining the main walkways. There would be snotty children running around bumping into things and screaming, yukata-clad women looking coy for the men, and older men in belly-warmers and sandals traveling in clouds of smoke, a glowing cigarette-butt lighting their way. Even in the bustling downtown areas, the sidewalks would be packed with people craning necks to see the dancers stomping and jumping down the street, or else a small platform with a huge taiko drum and drummer to wake up the old spirits for a little beer and fireworks.
Nothing was refined or demure except for the pretty girls who were trying too hard to impress the pretty boys, and everyone knew that both sides were trying too hard to play the game, which made it both fun to watch and tedious at the same time. Nothing was intellectual. Nothing was philosophical except the dancing. Nothing was too expensive.

Going to events in the U.S. that showcase things "Japanese", I'm always disappointed by how pretentious everything is, how un-natural, how staged. Japan is not really as clean as the Japanese think everyone wants to believe it is. Festivals are loud and sweaty, not serene. They are stupid and fun, everything tastes good, and yes you can buy things, but you don't have to to have a good time.

In trying to present the best of Japan in the U.S., some of the best stuff has been lost, in exchange for flower arrangements, expensive dolls that you can't touch, and $14 noodles in plastic containers. The only thing for kids is a haiku workshop. That's just sad.

Here is what I actually feel:
Sakura Matsuri was so bourgeois as to be utterly depressing to me. Anything Japanese that gets translated and intstitutionalized in the U.S. undergoes a sterilization process that removes any fun and replaces it with cookie-cutter constructions of "Japanese culture" for idiot bourgeois consumption. Sushi pillows for $45? Come on!!
There were no picnicking families, no street vendors, no stupid games, no real spectacles (aside from classical Japanese and Okinawan dance) - no fun. Instead, everything was high art and high prices. High schoolers in Japanese costumes paraded around and felt vindicated. Men of all races sauntered with their Japanese trophy-girlfriends. There was nothing to fill the stomach.

the only time to write

2008-04-30T01:07:00.000-04:00

these days it's after i've had a shot of rum, after being out of the house from 10am to 11pm, after bouncing around a classroom feeding off the energy derived from a can of soda, instant coffee, bright-eyed young people fueled by their own youth.

today i explained japan's cultural obsession with cherry-blossoms, how a tree totally devoted to the production of beauty (the absence of even a single photosynthesizing leaf) can inspire so much poetry. how entire offices will take an afternoon to picnic and get drunk under the falling blossoms, how some people will go flower-viewing just for the food. it was a "Namiko Abe" moment. (see my earlier post dated april 23.)

i also succumb to these moments, although i do identify with the ones who show up just to get drunk and eat the rice cakes.

i am learning that my writing identity is becoming more and more estranged from my daytime identity. is this a problem?

random thoughts

2008-04-29T01:01:00.000-04:00

too crazy high-tension to sleep, even though i must. i must!

i got another offer to sit on a 2009 AWP panel, this time on the process of translation. i'm really interested in socialist women poets of the tokyo literary scene of the 1920's. want to get more into their stuff, but have no time. i feel kind of phony thinking about sitting on a translation panel when i haven't even finished any of my 3 translation projects, let alone new projects, however dreamy they may be.

reading louise erdrich is both inspiring and paralyzing for a writer who suffers from chronic loneliness. close to yet just outside of reach of mythical homeland, a.k.a. "The Community."

i am slowly getting to know my characters, during time stolen on train rides, between jobs, and long walks between here and there. sometimes it's their names that come to me first, other times, their histories. sometimes i recognize them through their faces, their scars, sometimes their speech patterns. i am trying to accept their weaknesses, even though they usually show me their strengths before they open up and let loose. often i am made to know how ignorant i really am about their lives.

some thoughts on hopelessness

2008-04-28T01:41:00.000-04:00

i just learned that someone i respect and look to for hope - someone i just met but feel so comfortable with and can already feel frustrated about and then appreciate all over again - is totally depressed. even as he puts himself out there day after day, arguing, pleading, demanding radical change, he speaks quietly (so that only a few people can hear) of how everything drains him.
then i learned that he isn't alone, that so many people who seem to be so fierce are on the verge of suicide.
how can i return even a little inspiration to the bottomless pool of despair? i think young people hold a lot of potential in their fresh, clear eyes, to see through the smoke and the clouds. wouldn't it be great to have a school for baby revolutionaries? wouldn't it be amazing to see the world through their eyes?

so tired

2008-04-28T00:41:00.000-04:00

there is so much to prepare and mobilize for may 1. and of course, there will be much more to do after may 1. in the meantime, i am trying to stay rested, fed, and productive. somehow i can't seem to focus on my day-jobs, though.

i did finish reading other people's children by lisa delpit, however. i am mentally patting myself. i'm going to write my thoughts on it as soon as i can get enough sleep to stay awake through the writing of it.

2 poems for april

2008-04-25T01:01:00.000-04:00

april:
this is the month when hate blooms staining my gut
but it is also the month of wisteria.

april (08):

I imagine the pink and white buds
bursting out of trees this month
as the knuckles on my flailing fists.
I am furious. I bleed longer and more.
I eat red things. I eat dark black and purple things.
the teeth in my mouth sharpen around
harsh words and hot thoughts that emerge as air.
I hurt us because I hate us.
this is the month I yearn to stab
a blossoming tree into a white shirt.
this abuse doesn’t hurt me more than it hurts you.
the ovaries churn. the entrails heave.
I am a rage that will leave me exhausted
and spent, repentant,
by may.

Namiko-san

2008-04-23T21:10:00.000-04:00

I keep landing on this woman's blog when I try to look something up related to Japan.

decided to check her out, and on first glance she seems to be another japanese woman performing (not insincerely) japanese femininity in a subtle and inoccuous way. i have nightmares of becoming like her, but i have to admit, her posts are quite poetic. part of me almost believes that there is a team of writers who are writing under the name "Namiko Abe" with a picture of a random japanese model on the header.

i should explain what i have just written, but this is my blog and i don't feel like it. just check out the other posts tagged "Fu Manchu" i guess...

Last day of spring break

2008-04-23T20:41:00.000-04:00

one really nice thing about being affiliated with the public school system is all the days off. today is the last of my little days off, and i have thoroughly enjoyed myself.

i went to a little lake and walked around it with my dad. We were viewing a house he wants to buy at Lake Braddock after a decade of renting his current place. There were many birds and turtles. it was strange walking around in someone else's house, inspecting the ceilings for water spots, walking into closets to check out the size, sniffing the air for dampness.

i went to DC to pick up an anthology for a writing workshop i was a part of last year. it's called Writers on the Green Line Vol 1 and i am on page 20.

my dad and i had coffee and green tea bing soo at our local korean parisian-style cafe. see above.

i then deposited my tax returns.

at home, i helped do a spanish translation for NMASS.

then i made anchovy pasta which i destroyed with too much salt.

I am a sandal

2008-04-22T21:33:00.000-04:00

mere hours after writing the below list of wonderful things i was going to do this summer, i spoke with MMH, who asked me to seriously consider working in maryland. she said that if i'm not making time to write and to translate and to draw right now, then will i really do it in my "free time"? she has a point.

thus i have been reduced to the proverbial flip-flop of 2004 notoriety. my goal then is to post something on at least one of my blogs every week-day from now until... august. because i am going to japan in august. sigh.

I've made up my mind

2008-04-22T10:35:00.000-04:00

I'm going to spend the summer writing and drawing my comic. I will have to dip into my savings but... that's what they're for, right!? Ahhh I feel so much better.

Here is a list of what I WANT to do this summer*:
- Work on translations of Jose Watanabe's un-translated poetry.
- Prepare a presentation of Watanabe's work, based on my undergrad thesis.
- Work on translations of Ryoko Sekiguchi's untranslated poetry.
- Finish enough pages of my web-comic to launch in the fall.
- Work on my speach tree poetry project.
- Prepare for living in Japan in 2009.
- Create a set of submissions from old poems - and actually submit them.
- Practice and perfect my presentation on the history of anime reception in the US.
- Prepare for the coming year so I don't have to scramble in the fall.
- Do more for the Break the Chains campaign to repeal Employer Sanctions, restore equal rights for all workers, etc.
- Do aikido on a regular basis and find a sparring partner.

*Note: what i want and what i get are two very different things...

New direction

2008-04-22T10:16:00.000-04:00

Wow! Creating those new blogs (I'm also working on a blog that's specifically for my students learning Japanese. It isn't ready yet so I won't announce it until it has more meat) really frees up speach tree to be more of a bloggy blog!

I've been in a funk lately, and not the good kind of funk. April is a fighting month for me, probably starting with the extravagant fights I used to have with my mother as a teenager. In Providence, a lot of the hate crimes, the police brutality, the street harassment happened to us students of color around this time of the year, when the weather started warming up and people stopped bundling up so much.

On my way home to VA on sunday, I got into a screaming match with the ladies who hawk tickets for the chinatown bus - 2000coach to be exact - after they forced me out of the bus and shut the door in my face. I'll spare you the gruesome details but I felt both ashamed for the ugly display and also strangely invigorated by the fight. I've got issues man!

I think that writing is helping to redirect my negative energy in a more constructive direction. I will put up an old poem here, plus a new one on the subject of violence in april.

Announcing my new blog on Anime and Manga culture

2008-04-22T00:32:00.000-04:00

http://kinosei.wordpress.com/

I decided to make a separate, more "edited" (ie: censored) blog for the nitty gritty stuff and the stuff I want to show to people who... don't know me that well...

The working title is "The Animator"

Please take a look around - please also forgive the haphazard and the absurd in it. Definitely a work-in-progress. I hope you find it useful to your work in any way, and that you will share with anyone else interested in education and this particular manifestation of contemporary pop-culture.

New York Comic Con: Day 3

2008-04-21T03:00:00.001-04:00

Day 3: Kids' Day Sunday April 20

The NYCC blog (MediumAtLarge.net) reports a preliminary count of more than 64,000 attendees for the weekend. Pretty huge.

I only made it to 2 panels today, but I met cool people and swiped a lot of SWAG so it was OK.

I went to Harold & Kumar, where Kal Penn (who played Kumar), Neil Patrick Harris (who played Neil Patrick Harris), and the writer/directors sat and talked about making the movie, laughing at racists, and shipping in a woman with "the biggest tits in the world." Very enlightening stuff.
Interestingly, the first movie did poorly in theaters but the DVD sales alone made it possible for them to make a sequel.

Then I went to the Show Floor, where I met an art teacher in the Bronx. I was initially drawn to his historical/historical-fiction comic Bronx Heroes, calling for accurate representation of the Bronx and also for resistance to gentrification. We talked about lesson plans for students learning the art of comics, where to find funding, and different strategies on how to promote student work. I have to get back to him.

Then I went to the Self-Publishing Your Work panel, which was interesting. All I wanted was some tactical/technical advice, which I got, but then they had all kinds of advice I didn't even ask for like:
- have finished work. "Finished work is something apart from yourself," said Harrold Buchholtz. Basically this means something that doesn't need you to explain anything but can stand on its own.
- market yourself. Develop a 3-second soundbyte that summarizes what your comic or project is about, so you can tell very self-important people with ADD and lots of money/power about your work in the hopes that they will buy.
- establish an audience by putting your comic on-line. update OFTEN.
- do short stories first. Don't try to do your best thing first, because you might regret it later when you are a better artist and want to re-do it, which you can't. Just do little projects that you know you can finish.
- use these on-line/on-demand printers: comixpress.com, ka-blam.com, acredalemedia.com, lulu.com

Thus ends my reportage. Analysis to come!

New York Comic Con: Day 2

2008-04-21T02:24:00.000-04:00

A relatively small crowd patiently waits for the appearance of a perfectly coiffed Japanese pop legend. T.M. Revolution's fame in the U.S. is owed largely to a certain red-haired anime swordsman...

11:30am

Arrive at Javits Center and meander to the events hall. I'm too late to get into whatever movie is being featured in the IGN.COM theater (the main stage) so I float around and eventually settle into Del Rey's panel. The Del Rey team announces its new releases for this year and the coming year. Some highlights: Fairy Tail by the creator of One Piece; a collaboration mystery/fantasy suspense by Dean Koontz and Queenie Chan; and Me and the Devil Blues about a (historical) legendary blues singer who is said to have been so good that he must have made a pact with the devil.

1:00 pm

I peek into the "Comics Writers Talk about Writing" panel but it's a bunch of people I don't know and don't care about so I head over to the Show Room on the upper level. The Show Room (other cons call it The Dealers' Room"), for those of you who are unfamiliar with comic/manga conventions, is where all the loot is. The big distributors and comics suppliers (or "dealers") set up stations or booths to hawk their wares. Those expensive entrance fees get you discounts on most merchandise in the Show Room, plus "SWAG" - "free" stuff that is usually just promotional material that weighs you down (short for Stuff We Always Get). At one booth, they were promoting the new movie, CatBlue Dynamite, which I saw in December. It was a well-done but stoopid male-fantasy movie starring an over-sexy kitten-woman. An Asian woman in cosplay was there to take pictures with adolescent boys and middle-aged men. In another part of the Show Floor is the Artists' Alley, where artists or teams of artists pay $800 for a space the size of a half-bath to display their work. This is the best place to go and meet cool (or wierd, scary) people. More on this later.

4:00 pm

Float in and out of Scott McCloud's ZOT! panel and Today's Voices in Graphic NOvels panel. Scott McCloud is a small hero of mine. His book Making Comics was pivotal in my decision to go back to manga after a hiatus of 5 years. (It is a bit nerdy, although he does his best to make it understandable.)
The Graphic Novel panel was a bunch of wierdos again who were talking about how graphic novels are either memoirs or fantasy. That's a problematic distinction but an interesting idea nevertheless... It's problematic because there are at least 2 or 3 problems with their argument:
1. They never said that graphic novels don't include manga - and manga is certainly more than just memoir and fantasy.
2. I have definitely read graphic novels that don't fall into either. For example, Adrian Tomine is neither fantastic nor memoir. Also, I wouldn't place The Ticking in either category, although it would fit uncomfortably into fantasy, maybe.
3. I forget. sorry.

6:00pm

I wandered in and out of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. The English dub was pretty good although not convincing in super-emotional scenes. The part of the boy, Chiaki, was excellently cast. In any case, the animation was OK but not WOAH, and the plot was cliche but well-done nonetheless. I would see it again but I wouldn't pay for it.

9:00pm

T.M.Revolution!!! He started on time, his set lasted over an hour, he spoke to the audience in more-or-less understandable English, AND he came back for 3 encores! That is a fan-service machine if I ever saw one. Very professional - he has been in the business for decades, after all. And he's an icon.

What is it called when an artist of color writes for White Liberals?

2008-04-19T00:12:00.000-04:00

I guess I'll call it the Dave Chappelle Effect for now. I don't think that Chappelle ever came out and said that he left Comedy Central because he was uncomfortable with performing a black caricature for his audience of (by that time) mostly white people. I think he was a little more tactful, choosing instead to highlight the discomfort he felt about how his fame was affecting his private time with his family.
But the effect I'm talking about is something best articulated in "YELLING AT THE SCREEN: An Open Letter From Dave Chappelle to His White Fans" (a parody by a blogger whose name I forget), and also in all the internet gossip about his conversation with Oprah after his return from South Africa...
In any case, it's not just Chappelle. More than a few critics say that Chinua Achebe, Amy Tan, Nawal El Saadawi and a few other well-known and well-critiqued writers write more for the benefit of white audiences than for non-whites. Of course, I am no exception. My college application essay was about calling upon my "heritage" in order to survive life in suburban America.

In teaching poetry, in teaching the art of comic-making, I often hear the concern that young people, and especially young people of color aren't writing characters, drawing people, creating scenarios, in short, expressing perspectives that reflect their own experiences. The ones who do, however, are praised endlessly. Part of this is the very real concern that comics - and manga in particular - are nothing more than escape vehicles for young people who want to create a world far removed from the negative self-images they face in their daily lives. Pop culture is full of escape hatches and flights of fancy. Is manga just low art? Is anime just fantasy and is fantasy just entertainment?

I'm really interested in thinking about these questions. Why do I have to draw people who look like me? I want to draw people who look like me, who have experienced what I've experienced. But I don't think that that alone will liberate me or anyone else.

I left manga many years ago because I thought it was escapist at its best and at worst pornographic. The effect it seemed to have on my peers was the stimulation of hormone-driven fantasies, especially the manga and anime that had the highest fan-service content. (Fan-service refers to images of beautiful male and female characters in various degrees of undress, usually adhering to some white-supremacist standard of beauty ie: big clear-colored eyes, fair skin, hourglass figures, and long limbs, to name only a few of the requisite ingredients.) I thought it was nothing but low art, the way I thought hip hop and rap were low art. I was taught to consider novels and poetry high art. No pictures. No rhythm.

I called out writers who wrote about experiences not their own, challenging them to be more "authentic" - more "real." I thought I was radical because I was going to write about me. I was going to expose my weaknesses and my pain for the world to take lessons. I still believe in this, but my thinking has been modified.

Now that I am coming back to manga and appreciating the many "literary" qualities of the medium, its history in radical Japanese politics, and its potential as an art form, I feel frustrated by the limitations in the types of questions people ask me. Yes it's important to ask why anime characters have big eyes, but there are other questions to be asked. There are other issues to explore.

Maybe there are other ways to approach the answers to these questions than simply by drawing characters that look like us. I'm not saying that we haven't internalized white supremacist beauty standards. But I'm also trying to say that I don't want to recreate the Chappelle Effect. I don't want to draw Asian caricatures so that a white or black or asian audience can lean back and enjoy the show. I don't want to add spice to the melting pot. I want to do what I want to do.

All About Love

2008-04-18T23:25:00.000-04:00

Reading bell hooks and Lisa Delpit back to back is like being slapped and hugged at the same time with two sets of arms and hands. But I'm the kind of buddhist that doesn't (theoretically) have a problem with being bashed with a stick in the pursuit of enlightenment (although I've never actually meditated with Rinzai folks.)
What I'm trying to say is that I am finding it so hard to align myself with the actively loving pedagogy that I adhere to intellectually and to some extent emotionally as well. In my classrooms I often resort to harsh words and stern faces, standard edited English, and "punishment". I am only able to negotiate with one of my groups right now, and sometimes I feel that I am doing them a disservice too by being over-indulgent and not expecting enough of them.
a tidbit from Lisa Delpit:
"Let there be no doubt: a 'skilled' minority person who is not also capable of critical analysis becomes the trainable, low-level functionary of the dominant society, simply the grease that keeps the institutions which orchestrate his or her oppression running smoothly. On the other hand, a critical thinker who lacks the 'skills' demanded by employers and institutions of higher learning can aspire to financial and social status only within the disenfranchised underworld. Yes, if minority people are to effect the change which will allow them to truly progress we must insist on 'skills' witihin the context of critical and creative thinking."
Reading All About Love and Other People's Children is really helping me to parse out the resistance I'm feeling to my own (disorganized, untrained, undisciplined) practice of teaching/guiding my students towards liberation and power.

New York Comic Con 2008 - Day 1

2008-04-18T22:04:00.000-04:00

The New York Comic Convention is a 3-day annual pop-culture event attended by 1000s of comic/cartoon/video-game/anime/manga/graphic novel fans from New York and beyond. This is my first time attending, and I'm also chaperoning a group of 5 high school students from my Anime and Japanese after-school clubs.

It's interesting to compare the Comic Con to last December's Anime Festival (both held at Jacob Javits Convention Center at 34th & 12th in Manhattan).

We arrived at 3pm, in time for General Programs. (The morning activities were only for professionals and industry folks.) I attended bits and pieces of the following panels:

America: Through the Eyes of the Graphic Novel
a panel of white men talking about America. I (and my students) left after hearing that they were working on a bunch of projects on the "sad events following 9-11," and other projects commissioned by the Department of Defense for the repatriation of Iraq War veterans. I had been excited about this panel because it was supposed to feature Howard Zinn, who worked on People's History of the American Empire - a new graphic novel. I should have stayed and given them a fair chance, but I figured I could just read the book when it comes out.

Comics Experience: Building Your Art Portfolio
a panel of white men (one guy from Brazil) talking about what to avoid when you go in for a portfolio review and how to impress editors at DC, Marvel, etc. Here are some highlights:
- It's an interview. Take notes and look "presentable." The moderator sheepishly recognized that "It shouldn't be this way but we really look at the way applicants carry themselves, the way they look..." Apparently, you have to look "confident" but not "cocky." If the editor gives you criticism, make him feel like he is god handing you new commandments. Yeah - if you want to get in, you have to play that game, just like in every industry.
- Bring 5-6 pages with "establishing shots" (frames that set the scene for the story, convey the setting, set the mood, etc.); "action shots"; and some "character moments" (I don't really know what this means but I assume that it refers to some scenes that show the reader a little something about the character.)
- Always place newest, most impressive work at the top of the portfolio. Have your illustrations "on the right paper." "I know it's a cliche but Make a Good First Impression."
- You can bring a second portfolio with more diverse work so that you can show them your range if they like you.
- Draw good backgrounds, scenes, and realistic movements and clothing.

Beyond Shounen and Shoujo
a panel presented by a white british fellow with a pretty young japanese woman translating and clicking the space button on the slideshow. Aside from the extremely annoying and shallow presentation by the British dude, the panel was pretty interesting for anyone who has any interest in the diversity of the manga industry - the dude was representing his company, Fanfare, which is an imprint that puts out alternative manga and gekiga from Japan. I'm still not sure what "gekiga" is because I missed the first part of the panel, but it seems to be a more realistic, more intellectual medium with roots in the manga medium. Common themes are the "ordinary" (this word was used about 86 times by the dude during the presentation.) The dude had no analysis and could not speak to whether or not gekiga and alternative manga was responding to anything in "mainstream", profit-driven manga. Instead he would drivel on about "It's a stereotype that Japanese are hard workers, but it's a true stereotype. That's why this manga is about a woman coming home late from work and feeling exhausted, blah blah blah," or "Again, this is a very ORDINARY story. It's not flashy and hyperactive like mainstream manga, which is great but I prefer ORDINARY stories..."

Women in Comics
a panel of 5 white women, including a librarian at Columbia, a blogger, a comics artist and the latest successor of Wonder Woman, another graphic novel writer/artist, and an illustrator for Marvel. The panelists' analysis of feminism or sexism was as shallow as a mud puddle. When asked "Is your work feminist?" by the moderator, most panelists distanced themselves from the "label" and called it "a dirty word" although they tried to argue that "if being a feminist means that women should have equal rights as men, then everyone in this room should be feminist." The panel began with them congratulating each other on their hair.
What I did find interesting was the parallell resistance to ghettoization that I have heard from many Asian American poets and literati. They claimed that the work of previous generations of freedom fighters made America so liberal that they were able to live untouched by the concerns of feminists. I understand the frustration of being marketed by industrial forces to occupy a niche, but instead of critiquing any of that, the panelists blamed "feminists." Like the Asian American poets who are so hung up on ghettoization, they failed to present anything insightful about conversations in the industry around marginalization and representation.

Here are some initial thoughts and observations:
-The comics industry appears to be thriving - or at least everyone I listened to on the panels I attended - were very enthusiastic and upbeat.
-Every panelist I listened to was so pro-industry that it was kind of creepy.
-I wish I had spoken up, to show my students that there is resistance and counter-narratives do exist, that not all resistance has been co-opted.

Maybe I will find some gems in the next two days!

Note to Self

2008-03-08T01:41:00.000-05:00

Must remember... I teach for critical thinking... critical thinking...

I've always known that this was what my teaching was supposed to be about, but I think it's taken me close to a year to come close to understanding what this means. What I'm trying to say is that so far, I have been nothing but an entertainer.

What Not To Do

2008-01-31T21:50:00.000-05:00

In the past five or six months since I started working with (& teaching & learning with) students, I have noticed a greater capacity in me to recognize the immaturities, weaknesses, and insecurities in myself, not just as a teacher, but as a person living in the floating world. Today I feel inspired to share some of these weaknesses with you, my dear readers, because (a) I had a bad day and I need to vent (b) I have been working on my anime curriculum so much that I haven't posted in many days, and more importantly: (c) I hope you will find my analyses useful.

What Not To Do When You Have a Class Full of High School Students After School:

1. Gripe to Them about How Little Your Agency Pays You & Make Them Feel Bad about It. Yes it sucks big butt that you don't get compensated for all the work that you do outside of the classroom and outside of the alotted time in your workweek and that your co-workers expect you to suck it up because "everyone else does" instead of organizing for better working conditions since workers in the non-profit industrial complex have or are about to get advanced degrees, which in their eyes sets us apart from Working People. But the students have nothing to do with that.
Today I let my frustration spill out into the classroom, instead of directing it constructively towards the people who can actually do something about our work conditions. When my students started fighting with each other I said something like "I don't get paid to watch you guys fight with each other." I was trying to make the point that I would be willing to help moderate a discussion, but not a fight, but this was Not Constructive and shut the class down.

2. Resent Them for Not Getting It. Today I tried to introduce an Asian American Woman poet to the class, for the sake of diversity, but I had not thought deeply enough about how the experience of being from an Asian American family divided by geography and generation would be foreign for some of the students. (Actually this was the ulterior reason for the Fight - see above. If I had been more on my feet and more perceptive, I would have realized this and turned it into a teachable moment.) Some of my students complained that they did not unsderstand and therefore hated the poem, especially since it did not rhyme. I got angry. Then I got angry at myself for getting angry. But the students could only be expected to sense my anger, especially since I didn't elucidate. I suck.

3. Make Some Kind of Lazy Excuse for Why You Are a Bad Discussion Leader like: "You don't like this poem huh? I guess I really like this poem because I'm Asian and I know what it's like to yearn for a family separated geographically by immigration." Wow. That's ridiculous. Obviously the discussion leader or teacher should help students to learn something new. Clearly the best way to do this is by meeting your students where they are at, instead of using abstract (and problematic) concepts to distance yourself from them.

4. Forget to Affirm What Is Great in Them. We are organizing a Photo-Essay Contest in which the students will take five or more photographs that tell a story, with no people as subjects. Many students took issue with the rule that they couldn't shoot random people on the streets in Chinatown, which started up a lively discussion about the ethics of photography. One of my students said that she wanted to document her travels in her neighborhood in the Bronx, but instead of supporting her brilliant ideas I criticized her plans to take pictures of train stations full of people. (In the end we decided that people who got in the way of the camera lens were OK.) I think part of me was distracted by my resentment of this project, which I accepted reluctantly after my supervisor encouraged me to try it with the students. I was thinking about how underqualified I was to be leading this project, instead of being present with my students and encouraging their creative process.

Yes, I managed to commit all four errors in a single class today, which is irksome to say the least. I did have fun though, because my students tell some amazing stories about their lives. I hope to be the kind of adviser/mentor/teacher/facilitator who will help them to realize how amazing they are, instead of being another teacher who just gets in the way.

Secret Message Writing Exercise (Epistolary Poem)

2008-01-08T00:09:00.000-05:00

This is a great writing activity that I learned from DW, but I’ve modified it a little bit so that it will be easier to use with my poetry students. (D, please feel free to post your own version or other versions you have heard of.)

materials:

lined paper
tracing paper

instructions:

at the top of the sheet of lined paper, write Dear ___________ (fill in the blank with whatever. this will be your reader, your audience, and you will write a letter as if to _______________.)
write a secret message to someone that you’ve been meaning to tell but never had the guts to do it. (1 – 2 sentences, but they don’t have to be full sentences). write it on the lined paper so that the message is scattered on the page but so that you can still read it top to bottom and left to right.
now forget your secret message
when the moderator begins to keep time, start writing and don’t stop. write anything you want but don’t stop, even if you get stuck. if you can’t think of anything, just write nonsense until something comes to mind.
whenever you get to a word in your secret message, use that word in the sentence you are writing at the time.
when you are finished writing, use the tracing paper to circle the words that spell out your secret message. this tracing paper is your decoder.
pass the letter to your left (you can choose to pass the decoder with it or not)

RESULTS:
We ended up doing this exercise, slightly modified (and we didn’t share any of the secrets) at our recent Kundiman Salon on Jan 2. There were about 10 of us in our apartment (including RL, DW, and myself.) We wrote for maybe 30-45 minutes, then shared the whole thing in the group. It was a pretty fruitful exercise for me, but for others it was frustrating. The most frustrating thing for me was that I resented my message every time I came upon a word in my “way.” But others appreciated this aspect of the exercise.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to do this with my students, since they keep coming and going. I thought it was a lot of fun to do though.

Happy New Year! 2008!

2008-01-08T00:07:00.000-05:00

It's been quite a while since I last posted, but trust me, the posts are coming...

New York Anime Festival (NYAF) 2007 : Highlights

2007-12-10T23:51:00.000-05:00

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, but apparently those have had limited space for anime/manga).
I worked as a volunteer this time, to get a refund on my entrance fee, whereas the first 2 times I went, it was as a full-price customer.
Otakon was held in a hotel, which was big, but not as big as Jacob Javits Convention Center in mid-town. The estimated attendance as of Day 1 was at 10-15,000.
I’m about 6 or 7 years older than I was then and mildly less spastic, and hopefully a little more analytical/observant.
My memories are fuzzy.

Now that that is over, let’s move on to the Highlights:

Attendance
The costumes ranged from very cute to horrific to exotifying. The extent of the halloweenification of Japanese-ness is overwhelming. I will include some pictures below to illustrate, as soon as I upload them:

My favorites: two versions of L
Maids at the Maid Café – a perfect excuse for pubescent girls to show off skin and wear lace. I wondered how anyone would ever volunteer to dress up as an exotic other and become someone’s servant for the day, until I remembered wearing that chinky outfit for Asia Nora Restaurant in Northwest DC. Clearly, the circumstances are different. Clearly.
Dancing at the concert, before the musicians actually get on stage. I don’t think most of the attendees had heard of Unicorn Table (I certainly hadn’t) but they seemed to be in high spirits as they rushed to get in on the “dancing” (more like moshing).
One thing about NYAF is that it seemed like more of the “cool kids” from school are starting to make an appearance, although the “geek”/”dork”/”loser” contingent maintains a strong presence.

I did line duty on Saturday morning, which was probably the highest-volume day for the weekend. I will have to CHECK this. I saw a fair number of families, a fair number of high-school and middle-schoolish kids in costumes, and a fair number of grown-ups (25-30+, totally arbitrary number), presumably there to relive oldies like Speed-Racer and Super Mario, but many were probably there to sell/speak/research. This wasn’t strikingly different from my memories of Otakon, but what was STRIKINGLY different was the…

Racial Diversity among Attendees
But even before we talk about that, let’s first make very clear that the women who were replacing smaller trash-cans, cleaning the toilets, clearing some of the trash on the floor of the convention center, etc were Latina and Black (and possibly Southeast Asian). And that the men hauling the heavier trash receptacles and policing the major events and retail spaces were Black (maybe some were Latino, and some of the cops may have been White). This has not changed since 2000. We volunteers were treated not as employees but as guests who could also do a little busy-work.

As for the Attendees…

I doubt that anyone will argue that Otakon was mostly attended by Whites and Asians, whereas NYAF had a significantly higher percentage of People of Color. I don’t know if that is due to the nature of NYC versus Baltimore (a chocolate city if ever there was one), but nevertheless, the diversity was pretty astounding. When I did line duty, I did a rough head count, and it seemed like White people made up around 1/3 to as little as ¼ of the line.

Furthermore, there were a significant number of Young Black Men walking around together in groups, as well as (of course) Young Asian Boys and Girls flocking together and also Young White Kids in groups. There were also a number of integrated groups, but these seemed more or less unique.

Racial Diversity among Panelists

Not surprisingly, mostly White and Asian. But the diversity among Asians was pretty cool to see. I was impressed, too, at how “Japanese” some of the White people behaved – there was one woman, a freelance translator, principally for Go! Comi (also my employer), who was in a gothic Lolita outfit and who giggled very charmingly and held her mic as elegantly as a Japanese B movie actress at a press conference about her up-coming Dekichatta Kekkon to a struggling baseball superstar boyfriend-turned-fiancée. (Note: A “Dekichatta Kekkon” is a marriage that is hastily arranged to beat the baby’s due-date.) Clarification: “I was impressed” because it is mad tiring to be like that on a full-time basis. Not because I think you have to be Japanese to “be” Japanese. Although you can obviously never be racialized as “Japanese” or “Asian” if you were not born that way. Even with all the different kinds of surgery out there, you just can’t turn White unless you’re MJ, who didn’t turn White anyway. He just turned into a freak.

One of the more interesting panels was the "Researching Manga and Anime" panel (which I'll talk about more later), in which someone from the audience asked about political messages in Anime. One of the panelists replied "Japanese people are on the whole a lot more apolitical than Americans" or some such ludicrous cow-poop statement. But rather than go on about why that is a problematic statement, I'm going to describe another kind of grown-up who attended NYAF: the concerned and interested teacher (like moi)! A white male teacher chaperoning a bunch of students from his high school in the BX immediately responded to the "apolitical" statement by arguing that Barbie Dolls might seem apolitical but they are clearly putting out messages about what girls should be thinking about, and "everything is a text that can be read." When he said this, I have to admit feeling guiltily happy that someone decided to bring out the theoretical big guns in this conversation. Ugh, this is another blog topic all by itself...

Personal Experience:

At Otakon in 2000, a Chinese boy from my high school asked me my name and having acquired this information, told me that “The Japanese deserved to be bombed for what they did to the Chinese.”
At NYAF in 2007, a Black kid with a 日本人彼女募集中 t-shirt asked my name and replied: “Like… Mika Nakashima????” (*** T-shirt reads: “Currently Recruiting Japanese Girlfriend.”)
Also, a 15 year-old girl (East Asian descent) gave me a starry-eyed look and said that she was so jealous of me for being Japanese.

Ohhhh the irony. I could and should write an entire essay on this experience alone. It would be titled: “The Commodification of My Racial Reception.”

I have to say it was a million times more fun to work as a volunteer than to go on my own and not know anyone or talk to anyone. I met a Brooklyn Tech student who showed me where to get some of the best doujinshi, what the difference was between Yaoi and Boys' Love (one is more hard-core than the other), etc.

Types of Panels offered
TBA - (to be added)

“Japanese Culture” Clash
TBA

When Straight People Draw Manga About Gay People

2007-12-06T19:47:00.000-05:00

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 the series but that's what we'll call it.

It's about three high school students:

MO, a glamorous high school senior with top-class grades and an athlete's body.
SN, a laid back boy who loves girls and has been friends with MO since they were 5.
HK, a ko-gal girl who is in love with SN.

They decide to all go out as a threesome because even though MO doesn't necessarily have feelings for SN, she can't stand to be outdone by anyone else, especially not a lower-classman. OK. Things get "funny" when MO starts grabbing HK's boobs and then other classmates get in on the menage a trois action by falling in love with the various components of the love-triangle.

Oh the trials and tribulations of high school life, you say. But HK is one of those girls whose goal in life is to be protected by men and uphold the female as the weaker half of the species, and she is especially vehement in her invectives against homosexual behavior.

On the other hand, MO is quite the sexual predator, since (DUH) all gay people love to prey on unsuspecting straight victims, and so you really can't blame HK for running into the arms of manly men or beating up people for being queer. I mean we should all do that whenever we see gay people don't you think?

OK, all sarcasm aside, I think that what is going on here is that the artist is trying to explore queer relationships in a "playful" way that is also "real" and "uncensored." (Since I've already discussed censorship in the manga industry, - see Oct 10, 2007 - I will save that discussion and move on to the fact that...) I have read the first 2 (out of 5) volumes in the series, and every chapter seems to include at least one instance of rejected homosexuality, coupled with an assertion of heteronormativity. What I mean is, for every scene in which gayness is put down, straightness is celebrated.

So, why the hell are you translating this series, you ask. And why am I interested in the industry anyway? The answer lies somewhere in the fuzzy area of pop-culture. I'm teaching Anime, and I'm teaching Poetry, but I'm teaching Poetry to kids who like Anime better than they like Poetry. And who says that Poetry is less wack than Anime anyway? Are poets inherently less racist and classist and homophobic? I think not.

As I translate 3-Ai, I realize that HK is slolwy starting to fall in love with the other girl in the threesome (MO), or at least to appreciate her queerness. This doesn't make me love the series by any means because HK still wants MO to be her man or fill the role opposite her in the hetero binary (this is apparently the only way in which straight people can feel OK about queerness.) Nevertheless, it's interesting to me. Ultimately, I don't believe that this trope is at all effective in breaking down fear and hate of homosexuality because it forces queer relationships to conform to a hetero value system.

But I have to wonder, would my intensely homophobic student in Anime Club feel any different after reading this series? Somehow, I don't believe so. Which brings us back to the question: so why am I translating it if I'm not even getting paid minimum wage for it?

Because translating is a process that brings me so close to the creation of manga that it's almost like drawing up original dialog.
Because it's already on bookshelves in Japan, and I can't deny the fact that it exists.
Because if I don't do it some other Japanophile will and get it all wrong.
Because I am learning so much Japanese from doing this.
Because it makes me want to do better and it helps me understand what is out there.

PS. OMG I almost forgot to mention that there are genres of Soft-to-Hardcore Gay Sex Manga drawn by straight people of the opposite sex! They are called Yuri (lesbian manga) and Yaoi - Boys' Love in Japanese (manga about young gay men). They are super popular among audiences of the opposite sex, ie: straight people! They bring in a ton of profits!

PPS. And I almost forgot to mention also some of the most famous gay boys manga drawn by a straight female artist ever ever ever! That is called The Poe Family and also Heart of Thomas both by Hagio Moto. She pioneered the Boys' Love movement.

The Second Opening Animation for Death Note

2007-12-06T19:23:00.000-05:00

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 languages
0:27 - 0:29, Huey Newton with aviator glasses
0:30 - 0:31, Matrix
0:32 - 0:34, Lolita Porn Star
1:15 - 1:16, Light loses it

Enjoy.

A List of Titles

2007-12-06T00:49:00.000-05:00

(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!

Thoughts on Death Note episodes 18 - end

2007-11-25T20:54:00.000-05:00

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 English: Pride). At the end, you definitely see that his pride (or arrogance) is what gives him away.

#2 The Japan/USA/Europe Universe - I'll call it JUSE.
The JUSE Universe doesn't bother to consider the impact of JUSE Universe's actions on the rest of the world, and doesn't consider the agency of the non-JUSE world to be relevant or meaningful.

If you look at the teams that are fighting Kira, you have:

the Japanese police team headed by L/Kira/Light Yagami,
the US-based SPK - CIA officials headed by N (Near), and
the Europe-based mafia team headed by M (Mello)

Obviously, in terms of where the infrastructures of power are located, it makes sense that the three teams are where/who they are. But just as they don't explain WHY it's evil to kill all criminals that appear on the nightly news, they don't explain why this three-pronged configuration might be problematic.

A blond, blue-eyed version of President Bush thanks Kira in one of the final episodes for ending all wars and major crimes. Speaking for the entire world (not just the U.S.) he publically states that he will not endorse any efforts to stop Kira. While this is clearly a jab at the incompetence of current "world leaders," it is also an affirmation of the fact that the U.S. is the most powerful nation on the earth. Also, I find it pretty childish to think that just by killing all criminals on the nightly news all wars will come to an end. There are many different kinds of wars, many of which are not recognized by the media. Duh.

#3 the Message

As usual, there is a pretty strong message about working together to defeat an opponent or pull off some unimagineably hard task (like capturing Kira).
The usual targets are also attacked: Mega-corporations and Big Media - the propagandistic and ratings-driven media are harshly criticized by Death Note, as is the totally cliche power-hungry corporate heads.
Incompetent, self-serving politicians are also criticized, as are bullies in schools.

These are all to be expected.
What is totally missing, however, is a critique of the military, of police forces, bosses who bully their workers, etc. unless you want to argue that Light Yagami and his father both represent the best and worst of the police, since it's their unshaken faith in the system that leads Light to world conquest. But I would argue that what is being criticized is less the police system and more their attitudes of inflexible straight-and-narrowness.

If you liked this series though, and want something a little more well thought out (but a little less wild-entertaining) I highly recommend Paranoia Agent by KON Satoshi, which I mentioned in my last post. This is another suspense-thriller anime series (SASUPENSU/MISTERI-) with social commentary. You get to watch more Japanese neurosis and wonder if it really is all that "Japanese" per se. At least he talks about workers' rights.

Thoughts on Death Note episodes 1-17

2007-11-11T23:20:00.000-05:00

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 off the internet, therefore people who are posting it as fans are doing so under non-obvious titles. These will eventually get caught and pulled off but until then you can watch as much as you want.)

This is a totally addicting series to me because:

it is fast-paced (so much so that if I need to wake up for my 9am shift at Beard Papa’s I just watch an episode of Death Note and I am instantly awake),
beautifully laid-out and animated, with amazingly dramatic sequences of images, the “camera”-angling is extremely dramatic (obviously there is no camera, but … the animation is framed in a way that catches some of the most extreme changes in emotions in the characters.)
it is extremely clever and somewhat self-conscious
the voice-actors are extremely skilled at delivering emotion-packed dialog (Japanese version only – can’t vouch for the dubbed versions out there)
the characters are amazingly well designed – I particularly think “L” and Yagami Light’s father are well-thought out ("L" sits in the same wierd posture as me when he needs to concentrate - which is all the time. He also has quircky habbits - like he never eats anything but sweets and coffee with a lot of sugar. The father is very flawed and very believable as a chief of police and family-man.)
the series poses some very interesting philosophical questions (as well as many stupid ones) and its interesting to watch which versions of “justice” are valued/de-valued.

This series is very frustrating, too. I often finish an episode thinking in my head – I should do a better job. Here are some major flaws that really bother me:

The concept is so Eurocentric as to be for the most part white supremacist. I have found very little evidence to the contrary, as of episode 17. For example: The whole premise of the series is that Light Yagami randomly picks up the Death Note, which fell to the ground outside the school and was able to read it because it was written in English – we later find out that its instructions were written in English because, as one of the gods of death says: “English is the most popular language.” This is a common fallacy in places where most international contact occurs through English as a medium, ie: tourist hotspots, big cities where the effects of American Globalization are most strong, etc. If you do a quick search on the internet, there are twice as many speakers of Mandarin as there are of English. I guess the Chinese Empire reached more people more effectively than has the American one …. so far.
There is so much Christian symbolism in this series. Light’s name, for example. But even beyond the symbolism of the characters’ names, there is a lot of Christian (mostly Catholic) imagery of Good vs. Evil. If you watch this series, keep an eye out for images of the mural on the Sistine Chapel, the Virgin Mary, the Pieta, and stained glass, crosses, etc. There is some attempt at cross-cultural reference, too of course: but all of these are very half-ass, for example, one of the gods of death from the underworld wears a Plains Indian feather head-dress.
Most “criminals” killed by Light Yagami so far (as of episode 17 of 35) seem to be 2-dimensional, stereotypical scums-of-society, with bad teeth and/or mild insanity and deserve to die. Since Light is the son of a police chief, it makes sense that he is on the side of the pigs in his philosophy, but there could be more perspective…
All the people who appear on the series are either white American or European, or light-skinned Japanese. Where is the diversity? The series is set in Tokyo, the impact of the Death Note is supposed to be global, and the manga on which this anime is based has been translated into English, German, Chinese, and Spanish.
Finally, the torture methods and rights-violations committed by the detectives (led by “L”) in this series are Guantanamo-level, though not Abu-Graib level. (it’s hard to say but I think that there is also a critique of the torture methodology towards the end of episode 16.)

On the other hand, there is a healthy criticism of for-profit television companies – in one episode, the chief executive of a major news channel instructs his team of news reporters and writers to construct a story in order to boost ratings. Still, the critique is frustratingly bereft of bias-analysis, ideology-analysis, etc.

At the end of episode 17, the series embarks on a new chapter in which the next target of societal commentary appears to be aimed at corporate leaders – Japanese businessmen.

A note on the pop-culture context of Death Note:
I’m starting to see a trend in popular and highly-acclaimed literature (including manga) coming out of Japan these days. It seems that many high-quality works of literature and anime are showing the impact of suspense/mysteries. Suspense (SASUPENSU) and mysteries (MISTERI-) are a genre of lit/TV programming that has been extremely popular in Japan since WWII (possibly even before). In any case, I’ve seen the influence of the mystery genre (which I characterize as featuring a. detectives, b. human drama, and c. some kind of social commentary or existential question) in works such as The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, Paranoia Agent, and now Death Note. It’s really amazing. These are only the most recent manifestations, and the most genre-bending. Previously we also had the Meitantei Conan series and Kindaichi Hajime series.
My final comment on the Death Note series is that the creator of the Death Note franchise is – and this is no surprise – so totally Japan-centric as to be almost painful sometimes. But isn’t that true of cultural products originating in the U.S.? Totally ethnocentric. Totally oblivious to the scope and depth of ignorance. What is interesting, though, is that this hugely successful and highly disseminated series – Death Note – is not coming from an American perspective… it’s coming from a Japanese team of writers and producers. Yet it is so white supremacist, with a Japanese twist. Which is why I keep saying to myself as I tune in for more… I can do better.

Check it out if you get a chance and let me know what you think.

Fu Manchu-ism / "Racism chic" in comics

2007-11-08T10:29:00.000-05:00

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.

Japanese Class Downtown Oct 30

2007-11-02T07:12:00.000-04:00

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 that I identify as and that others identify in me. John Lie talks about typological thinking - the kind of thinking that groups people according to types that have no basis in real research. For example, one of my students said "I heard that all Japanese boys are shy." Whoever told her this could not have possibly met every single "Japanese boy" in the world, much less in the US or Japan alone. I am afraid that I will become a type of Japanese: one of my students, N__, told me the other day: "Ms. Mika you're so lucky... You have long hair and you're skinny..."

A bunch of agency and foundation heads are coming to watch my class in a couple of weeks. I guess in the non-profit industrial complex (look out for another blog post that explains this particular industrial complex, a.k.a. the NPIC), it's important for higher-ups and funders to make sure that programs are being implemented according to proposed procedures and that they are meeting standards. But I thinkthat the NPIC is wack.

The structure of an un-structured "Japanese" classroom sets up an expectation that everything that occurs during this time is representative of "Japan." In my class I try to introduce concepts that are relevant not just to life in Japan, but life in the U.S. as well. For example, immigration, "majority"/"minority" dynamics, gender issues, etc. But this is not the way I was ever exposed to Japanese society/culture/history except in specialized college courses. I sometimes fear that Japanese people from Japan - if they ever observed my class - would write me off as too strong-willed (「強い性格」) or too Americanized (「日系」).

Japanese Class Downtown (Week of 10/23)

2007-10-28T00:55:00.000-04:00

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 historical figure, Ashitakahiko.
The Emishi were descdendants of the peoples who developed Jomon pottery. (I had already explained to my class that the first pottery developed in the world was developed by the people living in what is now known as Japan.)
Then I said that the depiction of Ashitaka (the main character) in the movie should not be taken to be an accurate depiction of what Emishi people looked like in the 1300s.
Then I passed around two books that I own on the Ainu, a different ethnic group of native peoples in Japan. I talked about the depiction (images) of the Ainu in the books as being drawn by the Japanese who had conquered their lands. Therefore, the images should be considered as drawn with extreme bias.

Student Response

The students responded with some answers that were pretty astute – they were also pretty engaged. I noticed though that it was the Asian kids and the Black kids in the front who were most engaged… I’ll have to deconstruct that later.* When I asked “What is assimilation?” a young Asian woman answered “Fitting in!” So we talked about whether fitting in was about minorities fitting into majorities or if it was possible for a minority with lots of power to force a majority to assimilate.
For “ethnic group,” I got 3 answers as to what makes a group of people a distinct ethnic group: culture, religion, and language. SO SMART! I thought I was going to get something like “they look different” or I thought that they were going to ask me what was the difference between race and ethnicity.
When we looked at the pictures of the Ainu drawn by 15th and 14th century Japanese, the students were like “Ewwwww they look so ugly!” and one of my students asked “So why do they have to draw them so ugly?” and so we talked about that…(This is where the “History is written by the victors” part comes in.)

My biggest frustration is that I had stood and talked in the front of the room the whole time. I should have tried to move around more… And I want to try to move THEM around more.

forbidden love

2007-10-25T01:52:00.000-04:00

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.

Geography and Culture:
Almost every little valley or coastline in Japan has a spot where tour-guides will stop and tell customers the following story: "Long ago, two lovers drowned themselves in this lake/pond/cliff/body of water when they found out that they were biological siblings." I haven't come across this phenomenon in other landscapes that I've visited, but of course, it may have to do with difference in context, access, etc. In any case, incest is apparently worth throwing oneself in a lake with your sister/brother.

Taboos:
In this movie, various people witness/find out/guess that the twins are making out with each other and try to tear them apart. One of those people trying to tear them apart is the brother himself. He feels so ashamed/guilty/abnormal for falling in love with someone he is not supposed to fall in love with that he sabotages his own relationship and constantly denies his right to express love for this person.
But incest is not the only taboo relationship in this movie!!!!!!!!!!
I don't want to spoil the plot but (I'm going to do it anyway) one of the male characters who seems to be in love with the sister... is actually in love with the brother.

Could this movie, while seeming to address the impossible love between twins, be making a broader commentary on societal taboos? Specifically societal taboos of a sexual/loving nature???? Hmmmmmm... Hmmmmm....

Finally, The Ending: no, they do not jump into a lake. It's a sad ending but not one that should leave the audience with the conclusion that sibling-love is impossible and can only happen if you decide to kill yourself in the end. But The Ending does emphasize the impossibility of societal acceptance.

Hmmmmm.... hmmmm... think about it.

Thinking about the Zapatista Women's Encuentro December 2007

2007-10-22T15:32:00.000-04:00

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?

MangaNEXT Day 2

2007-10-10T11:39:00.000-04:00

(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 sex. While this kind of anime/manga is very visible (because it sells really well), it is NOT representative of the complicated and deep history of manga/anime in Japan and the world.
First, to define terms:
Anime (Japanimation) is a controversial term, but I’m going to use it to refer to media originating in Japan as well as influenced by Japanese style animation media (like Korean, Chinese, and U.S.-produced works).
Manga is comic-book format anime-style literature. Basically: stylized comics originally from Japan or strongly influenced by Japanese anime style.
So … some people trace the origins of manga back to Hokusai Manga, a compilation of sketches (“random pictures” is the translation of “Manga”) by Hokusai the famous woodblock painter of 16th c. Japan. Many people also point to Walt Disney and other Euro/U.S.-American comics and cartoon artists as influences.
But fast-forwarding a bit, manga in the 60’s (a time when the Japanese left was a lot stronger than it is today) was a medium often used to depict stories of working-class and out-caste struggles in Japan. Manga was considered an element of working-class culture and the culture of resistance. John Lie, a Korean-Japanese-American scholar who wrote the book Multiethnic Japan (2001),* wrote that for many leftists, Shirato Sanpei’s manga and gekiga portrayed the ethnic and class diversity of Japan, as well as institutionalized discrimination. Many readers of the 60’s era would later say that through manga, they “learned about revolution.” (Lie, p.71)
Fast forwarding again to2004, a manga series about the Nanking Massacre was pulled out of a major weekly Japanese manga magazine after right-wing protestors and politicians made a fuss. The protestors claimed that there was no conclusive evidence to prove that the Japanese Imperial Army raped and massacred the people of Nanking when it invaded China during the Sino-Japanese War. (Thompson, p.278)** This and many other forces – like rampant consumerism – have shaped the current climate of Japanese manga production, which affects manga translation and sales in the U.S.
At first, I was feeling a little wishy-washy about what I’m going to describe next, but I’ve decided after talking more with JW (and others) that my project in teaching anime and manga after school should involve both Study and Production. (I capitalized those two words because:) Study is a concept that includes not just actual studying of past manga and anime, but also involves the idea that you can’t produce new/good stuff without knowing what’s already out there, what’s been done well and what’s been done badly. Production is the concept of not just making manga comics physically, but making an impact on manga culturally. We’ll see. These are my grandiose plans for now, at the beginning of the semester. I just wish I could do this more often.

* Lie, John. Multiethnic Japan (2001).
** Thompson, Jason. Manga, the Complete Guide (2007).

MangaNEXT Convention, Day 1

2007-10-05T23:30:00.000-04:00

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 the U.S.) This was my first day.

My first impression as I entered the air-conditioned faux-marble lobby of the Crowne Plaza Hotel was that I had somehow reverted to a stage of high-school awkwardness and angst. I was alone in a room full of elaborately dressed people who shared a similar language and culture - to which I somehow felt implicated and yet rejected at the same time. I definitely recognized characters from popular anime series. I also recognized sub-mainstream Japanese girl fashion trends...
But of course, first impressions are decieving. On second thought, I decided that I felt more like an ethnographer, entering a little-known and misunderstood society. This, if you know anything about me, is not a feeling I enjoy. I don't like studying people and places in a way that otherizes them or exploits their "inaccessibility" (this is a complicated subject that I have yet to write about.) But one of the reasons I was there was to research a book I want to write on racial representation and anime/manga culture.

My first workshop was led by Kensuke Okabayashi, a professional artist whose book Manga for Dummies is soon to come out (Feb 2008). I learned a few time-saving and stylistic strategies that I will be able to pass on to my students in the after school Anime Club. I'll also probably use some strategies on the manga I'm currently developing! Okabayashi is currently on hiatus as a Manga instructor for the agency that employs me, the Educational Alliance. We didn't get to talk much but I would be interested in hearing about his experiences teaching manga art to young people in an institutional setting (not that the convention is not institutional.)

As I walked away from the workshop and ate a tupperware dinner in the chaises by the staircase, I realized that in a sense I wasn't so out of place at the convention. I wasn't as desperate for escape-through-fantasy as I used to be as a high-schooler attending Otakon (a huge anime convention held annually in Baltimore) but I was - I am - deeply affected by anime/manga culture. It has affected me so much that the first job I got in NYC was through anime. It also happens to be the only job I've found so far that is super-exciting.

Okabayashi said that in many ways manga is intensely personal. I should bring that to my students - "Create your own characters from scratch. Make you yourself into a character." I would say that some of the best manga I've seen comes from real-life characters. Hopefully, we can make it happen in the Anime Club.

Japanese Class in NYC - first lesson!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007-09-26T01:11:00.000-04:00

(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 teacher to explain things clearly, for them to become fluent by the end of the year, for the other students to respect one another, for there to be no cursing, for us to get to know each other.

I summarized the expectations and asked them to elaborate on "respect" - what does this mean? What is "cursing"? They came up with words like bitch ("the b-word") and I added that I didn't want to hear "the n-word" etc. The students were clear about not supporting "sexist" or "racist" language, so I asked them about "homophobic language." One student who said he was bi-sexual said "You should be proud of what you are." Another student tried to make a joke and everyone lauhed - everyone definitely thinks that gay-ness is hilarious. So I called them out on that, and one student said that homophobia isn't as bad as racism. To that, many people had a strong reaction, and I asked them to elaborate on their reaction. The conversation definitely ended on a let's-not-hurt-anyone's-feelings note. Which I was ok with.

Then we discussed the consequences of breaking the rules or disrespecting one another. One student said "Expulsion!" but I pointed out that that was a bit harsh. Another student suggested that the offender apologize to the class. Another student suggested that the offender and the offendee "talk about it." I suggested that both strategies be used, and that expulsion would be a last resort.

I let the students leave whenever they wanted, but they were generally very respectful of when they decided to leave - they chose to leave after each major concept/activity.

Throughout this first couple weeks, I've been getting a lot of pressure from other teachers and from my supervisor to be strong/harsh with the students, but I just can't see the benefit of putting more top-down pressure on them in after-school, when they already get yelled at all day. Who would sit through 3 extra hours of screaming? Perhaps I am setting myself up for failure. I guess I'm not that worried.

open mic night at Artmosphere Cafe

2007-08-09T00:37:00.000-04:00

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 BODY NEEDS WATER SO
DRINK THAT SHIT!
(2X)
(chorus 2X)
RAISE YO' KIDS RAISE YO' KIDS
RAISE YO' GODDAMN KIDS!
(2X)
BRUSH YO' TEETH BRUSH YO' TEETH
BRUSH YO' GODDAMN TEETH!
(chorus 2X)

Bomani says that he ussually tries to write conscious raps but sometimes he just has to pay the bills.

poetic dialog b/w me and RMK: "August"

2007-08-09T00:34:00.000-04:00

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 water, thick with spirits.
back into the pull and pull of the tides,

into the flashing lights rising from
the cities, into the gentrifying
neighborhoods and the forested suburbs
back into the bogs that hatch
fireflies and blood-sucking insects,
where first Native blood rebelled and bled,
and later African blood rebelled and ran red
and eventually dried in the branches as the bodies
swung low, below the Mason-Dixon line.

so i say look! and let the heat sear out
your body through the cornea.
can i collect family the way
bones collect dust in a museum? if
i move, will you fall off? if i settle,
will the room get smaller?
will you be there? (as you say, the dead
will not) and if so, where
will i be? my need is for a land to reach up
from the hills and grab my ankles
tell me that i won't float away. say:
"i got you."

postcard poetry: ... 3

2007-07-31T00:33:00.001-04:00

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

postcard poetry: ... 2

2007-07-28T16:56:00.001-04:00

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.

postcard poetry: here are some of my favorite postcards that i've sent to people so far 1

2007-07-28T16:49:00.000-04:00

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.

Conversation with GM about Racial Profiling and Bike Theft in Prince George's County

2007-07-28T16:12:00.000-04:00

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 we also tried to start a cop-watch (where civilians document police encounters and make sure they don't abuse their powers), but in the end it was too much for such an inconsistent student body. how do you have a copwatch if people keep flying off to mexico or brazil for a semester?

GM: there has to be a way to talk about the ugly history. but in terms of tactics that make change with authorities, you have to acknowledge their agenda, that "bike theft is a problem" and frame racial profiling as bad law enforcement. racial profiling highlights the incompetence of the authorities who carry it out because it alienates the communities law-enforcers should be trying to protect. the discretion of whether or not to use force should not be left up to the individual law-enforcement official (the police), because in a hierarchy and esp. in hierarchies of violence, the discretion must be mandated from above.

msn: so we should talk to the heads of jurisdictions for support. (MMH suggested talking to the principal of the middle school that we work with before we talk to the Chiefs)

GM: you can talk to the Police Chief in Hyattsville (Chief Holland) who is pretty progressive. the other jurisdictions are going to be informed by city councils that are really against immigration [therefore they will not be receptive to stopping the practice of racial profiling since that is how they catch "illegal immigrants"). you could also talk to N. Brentwood, University Park, and Campus Police at UM College Park, in order to set up a registration and ID program.

msn: but the ID program might require state IDs and a lot of the students here don't have their papers.

GM: in that case you should also have your own institutionalized identification program.

msn: MMH and I had talked about putting ID stickers on all the bikes that the students earn through the program and giving them cards as proof of ownership.

GM: you should also go around and ask people - of all backgrounds - how many times they have been stopped by the police and asked to provide proof of ownership of their bicycles.

none of these tactics can or should be done in isolation and nobody should be doing these things on their own.

lesson outline: Racial Profiling aka "BWB, Biking While Black/Brown"

2007-07-27T01:05:00.000-04:00

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 and questioned because of specific characteristics, such as race, age, or gender ? How would you feel if you were stopped by police and questioned because of such characteristics? What evidence of a crime do police have when they detain and question a person based on profiling? What rights of profiled suspects are violated? What are some reasons people give to support profiling? What are some reasons people give against profiling? What are the benefits of profiling? What are the dangers of profiling?

4. know your rights!
from ACLU:
Your First Amendment rights-freedom of speech, association and assembly. Freedom of the press, and freedom of religion supported by the strict separation of church and state. Your right to equal protection under the law - equal treatment regardless of race, sex, religion or national origin. Your right to due process - fair treatment by the government whenever the loss of your liberty or property is at stake. Your right to privacy - freedom from unwarranted government intrusion into your personal and private affairs.

5. role play?

What can you do if you are stopped? (from http://www.ethnicmajority.com/racial_profiling.htm)

Civil rights attorneys advise the following:

1. Know your rights: you are not required to give permission to police officer to search your car. You can deny the request - but do so politely.
2. Don't argue: the police may try to intimidate you. Do not be confrontational and provoke an argument.
3. Get the names of the officers: be sure to get their badge numbers, squad car number, license plate number, and make a note of the location and time of day.
4. File a complaint if you feel you have been mis-treated: contact the ACLU or other civil rights organizations for legal advice.

What other things can you do? (Document the interaction with your phone if you have a camera on it, have witnesses or ask your friends to come with you, etc.)

Notes:
from ACLU April 29, 2007: “The [Department of Justice statistics] report found that blacks and Hispanics were roughly three times as likely to be searched during a traffic stop, blacks were twice as likely to be arrested and blacks were nearly four times as likely to experience the threat or use of force during interactions with the police.
“And while the Department of Justice says that the higher rate of searches of blacks and Hispanics is not necessarily the result of racial bias, it begs a critical question: why are blacks and Hispanics subject to searches disproportionately? It’s a question that needs to be answered.
Maryland (Prince Georges County) - The Washington Post reported that in May 2001 federal prosecutors charged a county police officer with releasing her police dog on an unarmed Mexican immigrant as part of a pattern of using and threatening the use of the dog on people of color. Despite being the subject of four lawsuits, twice being guilty of making false statements to a supervisor, and five prior instances of releasing the dog on suspects who weren't resisting, and being flagged by a departmental "early warning" system, the officer remained undisciplined in any substantive way. In 1999 the Post reported that thirteen police dog excessive force suits had been filed in Prince Georges circuit and federal courts, in addition to five others that ended in judgement for plaintiffs or settlement. Of the total, ten alleged repeated bites of suspects once under police control, or while cuffed or on the ground.

favorite new nicknames

2007-07-27T00:46:00.000-04:00

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

How to speak... 1

2007-07-19T18:30:00.000-04:00

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 our pride!
- … OK…
And meanwhile I’m thinking Pride?? What are you a lion? And then I think about the pictures of Bob Marley facing a lion and about the dignity of the Zapatistas that I met in Chiapas and about the egos of “solidarity activists” who think they’re revolutionaries and… It’s suddenly time to go for our afternoon ride on the trails.

And on Tuesday, the same student IJ got accused of sexual harassment by a student in the neighboring class (but not in so many words). They got taken to Brother V for a talk and when I spoke with the girl the following day, it sounded like the matter had been resolved, but it must have been a painful experience for both students involved. On the asphalt outside, my class was full of rumors about whether the girl was a ho or not or whether she had or had not called him a puto first.
Then M, another student in IJ’s crew leaned back and said:
- Why do girls have so many issues?!
But in this very rhetorical way, as if it were clear that girls by default have a lot of issues, while he as a boy had none. I was just like…
- And you want to tell me you don’t have any issues?
- NO. I’m just – I’m just, playing.
- Well, I do think that it’s hard for girls to get by in our societies that are so male-centric…
At which point I was thinking in my head: What?! Male-centric?? What the hell is that supposed to mean to them?
When I talked to DW about this she told me about something she calls “scaffolding” which she explained as setting up layers so that later down the line it’s easier to explain complicated concepts. How would this work in a class like bike-repair? In our ground-rules should we have talked about the systematic oppression of women and young people and people of color and people with disabilities? In our next class should we have a discussion on personal boundaries?

I think in classes that deal with concepts like history … it’s a little easier to introduce the “scaffolds” but I think it’s important to try to do this no matter what the subject matter is in the class.

One thing I would do differently is try to take my time a little more. I wasn’t exactly quick with my uhhh…s and well…s but it was a whirlwind in my head for sure. On the other hand, it isn't like you have their attention all day.

And what about the difference between preaching and teaching people to think for themselves? This is the subject of another post, I think.

why the name?

2007-07-16T20:45:00.000-04:00

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.

more exercises to move the brain & body

2007-07-12T20:34:00.000-04:00

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 circle who identifies with that statement has to find a new seat.
No one can sit in the seat directly next to their original seat.
The one left without a seat is It.

from TWTP:

Step-In Step-Out

Do I really need to explain this? I think it would be good to think of some really good statements.

from Estacion Libre, TWTP, and TWTP Remix:

Agree/Disagree

One version of this gives you no gray area. You either agree or disagree with the statement.
In another version you have 4 corners and in each corner there is either "Never" "Usually" "Sometimes" or "Always" - this is a totally different exercise though.
In some versions the facilitators ask people to explain their positions, in others, there is no discussion until the end of the exercise. But this has to be intentional.

Estacion Libre - Death... and REBIRTH!

2007-07-12T19:45:00.000-04:00

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, transcending limitations, transforming how we relate to each other, healing, art, love-making and celebrating our discontent, hope and resistance."

The Orange House was where many of my conflicting paths intersected and confronted each other. It was a powerful space for me, even if maybe I wasn't really ready for it. I regret the ways in which I have not been able to transcend my limitations, or fully bring the lessons I learned back to "my community." I hope to continue "bringing back" and I hope that this writing exercise will allow me to do it. One of the reasons I started this blog is that I have been walking around recently with Estacion Libre's impending Death in mind, and I needed to write about it. I needed to call back the me that experienced all the learning, growth, and paralysis that happened in Chiapas in the winter of 2005. This is my way of celebrating and mourning.

I am somewhat overwhelmed by the Death of Estacion Libre, so I won't be able to talk about Rebirth yet. I am hoping against hope that I will somehow find a way to attend either the Death/Rebirth meeting in Brooklyn on July 22 or one of the Final Delegations in August.

In either case, I hope that there will be something that moves you or something that you willl find useful.

with peace & respect,

Que Viva Estacion Libre!
Long Live Estacion Libre!

fun and powerful exercises to get the mind and body moving

2007-07-11T22:01:00.000-04:00

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 capoeira instructor, whose name i did not catch unfortunately.

All exercises were designed to apply to the practice of teaching in a middle school classroom.

make a human tableau of words like "surprise," "privilege," "democracy," etc (so fun)

role plays/skits of classroom dynamics - have group A sketch a successful intervention, group B sketch an unsuccessful intervention, and group C be the critical audience.

i'm not a huge fan of the power line (or i don't know what other ppl call it but it's that exercise where everyone starts off holding hands and then each person steps up or back depending on their privilege) because i feel like it sets up hierarchies of privilege although this can be visually powerful tooooo....

one person is the model, and everyone else receives a blurb with the model person's hobbies, personal history, height, weight, etc. then everyone has to write down their assumptions about the person's race, religious views, socio-economic status, gender identity, etc. based on the person's visual presentation and the blurb and nothing else.

similar exercise: cut up photos from washington post or nytimes or whatever and give ppl the pieces. ask them to guess what the story is behind the photo. then give them the photo and ask them to either revise the story or give more details. then tell them what the newspaper story is and have them compare the newspaper story and what they assumed. (this sometimes can be problematic if participants end up thinking that the newspaper story is unquestionably accurate)...

to get people energized and to encourage respect for youth culture: break up into groups according to the decade of birth. (eg: 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, etc) each group must answer the following questions: 1. what was the hottest music 2. what was the trendiest outfit 3. what was the most current slang ... when you were 13.

draw a picture of your ideal teacher and explain the drawing. (have the "worst artist" in the group draw the picture). name the teacher.

some exercises we did that were problematic:

have a person walk around with a paper cutout of the person's self esteem and a pair of scissors. have people in the room read statements that hurt the person's self-esteem. after each reading, cut off the person's arms, legs, etc. with the scissors. then have people in the room read statements of affirmation and tape the arms and legs back onto the self-esteem.

why this could be a good exercise: the dramatization of a diminishing self esteem is visually powerful. the scissors symbolize the power that the critic has, but also the power of the self to hand over or not hand over the scissors.

why i think this exercise is problematic: this exercise does not make any distinction between personal suffering and systemic oppression. there are so many kids who don't hand over the scissors but still don't succeed in school because of the systems that police their psychological, intellectual, and even physical freedom in the classroom.

on another note entirely, cutting off paper arms and legs when someone talks trash is somewhat absurd given that there are a fair number of students from countries where post-colonial civil wars produce thousands of casualties.

Free Minds Collective

2007-07-10T19:09:00.000-04:00

(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 than myself.

Kundiman testimonial (revised)

2007-07-09T23:19:00.000-04:00

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 experiences and inspirations that we each hold sacred: poetry for us, in our workshop at least, was in motion, happened in movement, and moved us.

As Toni Morrison says, there is a difference between being touched and being moved by writing. Kundiman was an experience that drastically moved me and moved my writing. Mixpe, one of my many mentors, said that an amazing education can be acquired by learning one thing from every being that we meet. Although I would love to and could easily write a statement about what I learned from each staff member and from all the Kundiman fellows, I will restrain myself to the faculty.

Prageeta Sharma showed me how to explode lines and stanzas from their moorings on the page, move them around.
Myung Mi Kim asked us to revisit what texts we hold sacred, what processes induce writing in us, what are we currently trying to work out through our poetry.
Regie Cabico mapped out the landscape of the poems that we wrote and performed: how to dance along the boundaries between inhabiting a poem and reliving the trauma of it, how to revisit the words and their impulse without losing oneself in the performance.
Patrick Rosal's words throughout the retreat and in the mentorship session connected disparate pieces for me: I learned never to let anyone make me feel ashamed of what I love. I learned that if something is calling me, in whatever language, I have to listen to that call and move towards it.

I really appreciated the absolute and unconditional care with which the staff made every decision, made every ritual into a loving tradition, and above all, I appreciated the love that they brought to every detail of the retreat.

msn

This is the only poem that I wrote during the actual retreat (aside from lunes and other little things). It's still in process:

“Language Sensitivity“

MEMESHII: my mother used to call me this
felt like the impulse to vomit,
like my outsides turning in for false comfort
like absolute contempt.
Memeshii, a word that marches to the same beat
as words like Mediocre, Weak, and Oversensitive.

She sent me to classrooms in northern Virginia
where the light particles and dust hang in the air,
like the arms of swamp willows or retired Southern Belles
like post-bellum battlefields
or shrapnel.

On each mote in the atmospheric
class structure
my teachers hung their own weapons.
They said:
Intolerable, Youbettershapeup, and Standardsofintellectualmerit.
They trained me to speak French, then Latin
until I growled three languages
incomprehensible to my family.

Outside the sharp, restricted light of my
“Humanistic” education, I
Found the shadowy foxtails of the word
That scrambled my intestines as a child:
女々しい
(also written: 女女しい)
radical translation: woman woman ish.

I stand in classrooms many years and
many miles later,
In southern Maryland,
Muraled by the faces of Malcolm X,
Frida Kahlo, and Che.
These are the heroes that the students picked
and painted –
students like the ones in my class,

like Te’Renée or Devon,
who calls out anything
that moves, for being “gay”
or Carl, who polices the darkness of his friends’
darker complexions.
Neither picked by them nor their hero,
I try to reach them by any means necessary.
And I wonder what convinced them that black
might not be radiantly beautiful
and what is so revolting (revolutionary) about loving
one another.

manifesto

2007-07-09T21:18:00.000-04:00

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.