Since I wasn’t present to watch the documentaries on Thursday, I’ve done a bit of research into the various animals. Tiger, Leopard, Crane, Snake, and Dragon. I don’t know what style I could fit, but I would be interested to find out.
Category Archives: paper
Mutiny in the Global Village
I had a very difficult time with the Friday reading. To me it seemed a bit too everywhere, and didn’t come to a solid point or conclusion. I thought it was cool to have a chapter with a major Seattle connection. Linking Chief Seattle’s speech and the WTO protests weren’t ever something I’ve heard of before. I thought that was interesting. Reading about the impact of various Seattle-ites on pop culture had been fun.
Shaolin Ulysses: Kung Fu Monks in America and Black Kung Fu
I enjoyed both documentaries. The Black Kung Fu experience pulled my attention more because it was great to be able to see the Chinese culture and history behind Kung Fu and have another culture (black) be inspired by it and take in the Kung Fu experience as well. The black experience with Kung Fu is unique in a sense of because of the history of our past. Looking backwards to the 60s and 70s time period and how this was a time period that was key for self awareness and a sense of pride for blacks…an inspiration for blacks to be able to fight back. Black Power!
The art of Kung Fu and the way its used as dance because the movements are so similar, for blacks especially was something that gives the black Kung Fu experience a lot of uniqueness. While also respecting the roots of where Kung Fu was created, the black Kung Fu leaders recognized that in order to practice Kung Fu, you are also living it as well. You know what’s funny though is the fact that the black Kung Fu figure was always the bad guy in every film produced…seems to be the case in a lot of scenarios.
Overall, Kung Fu has been an inspiration to many which we saw in both documentaries. It is very well known and used as a means for art and a way of life for many cultures, it is not just the practice of Kung Fu itself, it is what many live their lives by.
Friday’s Kato Readings!
Jimi Hendrix!!! One of my all time favorite musicians ever! On friday when we did the “Who, What, When, Where, Why” activity, it really help me to organize my thought process more and be able to actually talk about a specific thing a read about and make connections.
On page 84 of Kato, he discusses how Jimi recorded his own version of the “The Star Spangled Banner”. It was in reference to the Vietnam War but also “the daily war which was being fought on the streets of the USA.” This was all connected to Woodstock and out of that was creation of a countercultural utopia within Woodstock.
Here is the performance in Woodstock of 1969!!
Click here to view the embedded video.
And for your viewing pleasure..here is some more AWSHUM music from the one and only..
Click here to view the embedded video.
POPositions!
Hollywood has a desire for the kine-aesthetic and performative narrative in the forms of Samurai and Kung Fu films, which is the art born of reclamation of culture from post-colonialism.- POPosition, Kato, Group 5.
I think that Hollywood’s crave for these arts is comparable to wanting another child’s toy. There are these epic fight films that Japan and China had that showed battle and extreme physicality and the early Hollywood didn’t have that. These films could be foreign enough to entice viewers, but not enough to turn them away.
Yet, when viewed with the Western lens, there is a slight discrepancy between the stories being seen. With the Western gaze, you see something like the equivalent of a cowboy movie. However, in the originality, the story may play out much deeper with such deep rooted cultural meanings and history that may otherwise go over the knowledge of someone outside.
As an art of politics and liberation, the kinetic arts like kung fu are often disregarded. People often just take it at face value instead, enjoying it for the kicking and action. Therefore the political messages through kung fu are often lost.
here comes the new kings
APIs in the news &
From Kung Fu to Hip Hop pg. 71 – 112
Truthfully, I had some difficulty finding what I thought might have been the most relevant thing to this class about Asian Pacific Islanders in the news when I went digging. API stands for more than just Asian Pacific Islander, and more than one search attempt resulted in a few links to sites about Catholic masses. The sort of links that, after clicking them and attempting ctrl+f, you can no longer find the term you search for on the page as google told you it was. Then, after skimming a few articles, I found one of particular interest on kitsapsun.com.
Though dated to 2013 (with the article claiming to have been posted in October), it talked about how the Asian-American and Pacific Islander groups in a place called Kitsap county had come together for a summit meeting. The meeting dealt with education, health benefits, crime… a number of things, with their ideal being to come together and help immigrants.
The article was very much about good intentions. It was about a community coming together to try to help the people that otherwise weren’t being helped – it also said that at least seven different ethnic groups came together for it, despite it being mostly informal.
The thing that struck me as odd is that I have never heard of something like this happening. I’m from a primarily white area in a very white state, so that may be part of the issue, but is this different elsewhere? It’s sad to think that it might be normal that this doesn’t happen, that it might be abnormal that these people came together to try to make a difference for strangers who had it worse than they did.
It’s a pretty short article, but anyone interested can find it over here.
“Foundation of Subversion in the Making of Global Commodities.” (Kato, pg. 102)
Ghosts are a means of fighting back, and a way of honoring memories. Kato talks about how ghosts are a way of losing great amounts of work hours, of how people will refuse to work regardless of what it means for themselves if someone else has said that they have seen a ghost. The lengths to which people will go for the memories of someone else they barely know is amazing, but it also holds a deep, awful implication.
If there was a ghost, then there was a death. If there was a death, it was the death of someone that worked there once upon a time. It was someone that died under the same conditions that they did, and there is a very good reason that they’re haunting the place they’re in. I think that’s why the idea of ghosts is so frightening at times, especially to people who are treated horrifically.
Friday’s Kato Reading (2-14)
I enjoyed reading about Jimi Hendrix in today’s reading. It is refreshing to read about people like Jimi Hendrix because he was so inspiring and didn’t pay attention to stereotypes. He also contradicted colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. It is too bad that most of today’s music doesn’t have as much meaning to them as songs used to.
“Hendrix’s performance, nevertheless, was undoubtedly of historical significance, as revealed by the video that exclusively features his performance. It marked the beginning of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsy’s period, which broke free of the genre of Rock and the style defined by the psychedelic artistic paradigm of the 1960s. Dressed in a Native American fringed jacket, blue jeans, and moccasins, Hendrix led an unusual ensemble in which his conventional trio format was expanded with the addition of a rhythm guitarist and two bongo and conga players.” (Kato, P.83)
Non-Traditional
I come from a non-traditional family. It started out simple enough. A mom, a dad, an older brother and an older sister. I’m the baby. As Lilo from Lilo and Stitch would say though, we got kind of broken along the way. My parents divorced when I was six and my brother died when I was eight. My dad has since been remarried and my mom has been with the same woman for the past seven years. So now I have a mom, a dad, two step moms and all together, three step brothers. I come from a non-traditional family.
What I liked most about the Wedding Banquet was how normal they made the ‘not normal’. They didn’t have this stereotypical gay couple where one was the man and one was the woman. Or even more annoying, where they were both ridiculously flamboyant and feminine. They were just two average guys, one wasn’t ‘the man’ in the relationship and if there was then I couldn’t easily tell who. They behaved like a normal couple. They fought together, the slept together, they kissed, they cooked. That’s what its like when I’m at my mom’s house with her girlfriend and my step brother. They fight like any other couple. My step brother can annoy me like a full brother would. We’re technically non-traditional but if you hung out with us for a day, you’d see just how traditional we are. I was excited at the end o the movie, when all three of them decided to raise the child. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for the world. I have stories and experiences that I wouldn’t have if I grew up ‘normally’. I have perspectives and I think I’m a pretty open person because of the way I was raised.
As I’ve mentioned in a different post and briefly in this one, my brother died when I was eight. He was twelve. In The Motel Sam’s character talks about how he would wish to die at twelve when he was eight years old. I felt my throat close up when he said that, it was such a coincidence. He was saying that nothing good happens after you’re twelve, that it’s all downhill from there. I’ve always felt the complete opposite. I often thing about all the things that my brother didn’t get the chance to do. He never graduated from middle, never went to high school, never got his driver’s license. He never got to graduate from high school and then go to college. Or not go to college, he never had that choice. He never got to fall in love and move out and explore the world on his own. There is so much that he didn’t get to do. It was strange to me that anyone would see life being pointless after twelve. All the best and the worst things happen then.
Pop-Osition
The pop-osition that we came up with in my group that I will focus on is:”Martial Arts is very integral to culture. Starts in China, spreads to Japan. It spreads in a way that is iconic to the second group.”Kung Fu films became very popular in China, and Bruce Lee was the biggest actor at the time. The films compared to Samurai films in Japan. This was during the time where Japan and China had animosity after the Japanese Occupation.
“At one point in the film, he [Bruce Lee] said the Japanese toughs were telling the member of Chinese dojo [sic] the Chinese were the “Sick people of Asia”. Silence. You could hear the bus traffic on Nathan Road outside the theater…Brice- as the character Chen Chen- went to the Japanese headquarters to confront the murderous villains. He single handedly laid to waste to the entire orginization, sending the audience to hysteria…. following a dramatic pause he said “The Chinese are not the sick people of Asia.” Pandemonium! Everyone rose to his [sic] feet. Wave upon wave of earsplitting sound rolled up to the balcony. The seats were humming and the floor of the old balcony was shaking.” (Kato p.12)
Shoalin Monks and NASA Rockets
Monk Xing Hao walks along a boardwalk in Texas. He points excitedly at the tall prairie grass, shouting, “This gives you a great sense of the American West!”. The following scene positions Monk Xing Hao and Monk De Shan in front of the Houston Space Center. They practice Shaolin kung fu, wearing their traditional monks clothing while a rocketship looms in the distance. The narrator says, ”Like many pioneers of the Old West, Monks Xing Hao and De Shan have come to look for gold. They are Kung Fu brothers with a common goal of making a Kung Fu homestead in Texas”.
This sequence of images was fascinating to me. The immigrant journey of the two monks is told through the narrative of the Great Frontier, while being juxtaposed over the image of the rocket ship. Looking back at Orientals, one can see why invoking the Frontier narrative is particularly jarring, “God’s Free Soil did not have space for the Chinese, whose presence disrupted the mission into the wilderness” (Lee 50). The Chinese were seen as a pollutant, interrupting the Eden of the West and white man’s advancement into the “wilderness”. Shaolin Ulysses is recalling that same narrative, but putting the Chinese monks in the position of white frontiersmen. An initial reading suggests that the background image of the rocket speaks to the monks’ cultural displacement — their traditional martial arts are at odds with the technologically advanced American culture. It’s possible that this was the director’s intent, yet another reading lies beneath the surface. NASA often refers to outer space as the “New Frontier”, or “Last Frontier”, calling forth the same narratives the narrator uses to describe the monk’s experience. The rocket serves as a poignant symbol for American imperialism, where even the “Great Frontier” of space is not free from colonialism.