Music that is Asian influenced.
Manong/manang-first born son or older male relative-1st generation
Rachel Devitt-Lost in the Translation:Filipino Disapora(s) ,Postcolonial Hip-Hop,and the Problems of Keeping it Real for the “Contentless” Black Eyed Peas
resistance vernaculars-(Tony Mitchell) spectacular vernacular(Russell Potter)
Preserving a language/culture by using culture of birth
-What are guilty pleasures?
secret knowledge
race/sexuality
pleasure/discovery
white passing
knowing more than the chars.
Movie: The Wedding Banquet
Directed by Ang Lee,4 August 1993,US,106 min.
About a gay Taiwianese man who marries a Chinese woman to give her a green card to the US. With the resulting problems that entails.
First of Ang Lee’s 3 movies made with a gay theme;his most famous being Brokeback Mountain.
Nominated for an Oscar in 1994 for best foreign language film.
Boundary Crisis-divisions,borders,lines
American-ness
Anti-Chinese/economic/picket
-opportunitty
-family/generational
-identity
-tradition
-industries-film/TV/Actors
-interracial
Kato Readings-Martial was a very integral part to Asiatic culture. Starts in China and spreads to Japan. The martial arts spread in a way that is the 2nd group. Thus,identity based on martial arts culture goes global.
East Main Street Chap. 1-Goa and Electronic trance,they were using Buddhist/Hindu religious symbology. Took them from China and India;also,appropriated them into trance music.Which,also,becomes popular and spreads during the counter-culture movement of the 1960′s.
East Main Street Chap. 2-Hybrid music(English rock bands w/ Vietnamese folk music singing Vietnamese words to MTV videos. It’s the hybrid mi of music styles.
East Main Street Chap. 5-Globalization of language;specifically page 107 for reference. Which addresses the globalization of all cultures and languages not just one particular group due to the increasing use of tech in everyday life.
There are few things that symbolically represent America better than baseball. Pitchers & catchers reported last week marking the beginning of spring training for Major League Baseball (MLB) 2014 season.
Pop-culture icons the New York Yankees announced the $175M signing of the popular Japanese pitcher, Masahiro Tanaka. Since loosing Robinson Cano to our Seattle Mariners, the Yankees needed to secure Tanaka to not only improve their team, but also to keep him from possibly signing with the Dodgers.
Tanka is not the only Asian making baseball news in the US; Suk-min Yoon formerly with the Kia Tigers (S.Korea) signed with the Baltimore Orioles for $5.7M.
Of course these are not the only two Asian MLB players, but they are the ones making the headlines this week.
Also of interest to me in this weeks API news is the 2014 Winter Olympics. I LOVE hockey, and Olympic hockey is the best of the best in my book. As I write this, Team USA women’s hockey is smoking hot! They are dismantling their opponents like few teams have ever done. Ever. Tomorrow (Monday) they advance to the Semifinal against Sweden. How is this API news? Because forward, #13 Julie Chu is the first Asian/American woman to play for our Olympic team. And our women’s team is on track to score their first Olympic gold medal. 
Go Team USA!!
One of the ways in which I can relate the globalization that happens in Kato’s book and modern times is when Kato is talking about when the writing for karate changed.
“…the schools in Tokyo saw that name as inappropriate and altered it’s spelling to “karate” by applying the Japanese phonetic system (hiragana) instead of the Chinese ideogram.” (21 Kato)
The way I see the connection is for instance, in one of Sachi’s blog posts she compares and contrasts the American definition of ‘kawaii’ and the Japanese definition of ‘kawaii’. When you read the blog you notice immediately by looking at the photos of her google image search that there is clearly a different definition for each culture.
Or another example is whenever I meet exchange students from Japan, I like to bring them to places like Happy Teriyaki or Koibito and suggest to them they try the teriyaki. I ask because I know that the type of teriyaki that they are used to in Japan, is not the same flavor of teriyaki that we have in the states. So, while I think that globalization in some ways can be a great thing, by fusing two or more different cultures together, it’s something that one has to be careful of doing. To fuse something together, for me, means to understand both cultures and what they mean and the history behind it, otherwise, rather than globalization, I think it turns into something like stealing from another culture or appropriating another culture and that’s never a good thing.
Bruce Lee and Jimi Hendrix.
Two titans. Two legends. And never the two shall meet. Or so I thought.
The legacies of these two ground-breaking artists live within American culture like plump fruit born from a withering tree. Their names are immortal, their faces undeniable – these are people who “changed the game” so to speak. They challenged conventions of Hollywood and the music industry, and created defining works that people still look back to analyze, study and respect. Both Enter the Dragon and Electric Ladyland are considered staples or watershed moments, and those who understand still feel the weight of those respected works today. Throughout my life I never really thought to connect the two men, but after the reading I felt a very strong bond between the two. It’s an overstatement to say that these two artists were “gifted”, but I think what they represented meant so much more. Bruce and Jimi were both born on November 27th (two years apart) in America, and grew up through the 40s and 50s. As such, they lived through the defining moments of the 20th century, and being “non-white” meant dealing with the strong racist sentiment of the time. Both Bruce and Jimi are “mixed plates” in terms of heritage, as Bruce’s mother is half-Caucasian and Jimi is mixed Cherokee and African American.
What I find interesting about the journeys of these men is the fact that they had to go “outside the system” in order to achieve success. Bruce tried to make it Hollywood, but like George Takei, found himself confined to roles that weren’t fulfilling and were stereotypical. Instead, Bruce had to go to Asia in order to find that success and through the Hong Kong system helped cement the legacy he has today. Jimi also had to step outside America in order to find his success, as his early triumphs came from playing shows in the UK before releasing his first LP Are You Experienced?. I enjoyed reading about Bruce Lee’s attitude on set and how he always tried to be on the level with the “average people”. He ate with the crew, argued on their behalf and constantly butted heads with the director – Bruce Lee was truly a unique being. You could tell that this is a man who lives by his art and understood the world in a way most didn’t. Because of this and his films, I find that he has been elevated to an almost “folk hero”-like interpretation. The fact that these men died so young only helps to strengthen that legacy or myth, and the idea of what they could have accomplished had they lived on makes it all the more tragic but also further enhances the legend. Because of these similarities, Jimi Hendrix and Bruce Lee are tied together much more than I thought – hell, they’re both buried in Washington. Maybe I shouldn’t mistake fate for coincidence…
On February 16th 2014, this was the 72nd birthday of Kim Jong-Il.
http://www.euronews.com/2014/02/16/north-korea-celebrates-birthday-of-late-leader-kim-jong-ii/
Before I talk about him, I have a question. Since I came to America, I found that people here say “Korea” putting together North Korea and South Korea. They might say it without any care, but it is really strange for me with their current situation. This is because there are big differences between North Korea and South Korea, and they have big problems between them. I’m curious how much they know about North and South Korea.
Kim Jong-Il was the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, commonly referred to as North Korea, from 1994 to 2011. After he died on 17 December 2011, his son; Kim John-Un succeeded to his father. He has kept standing giant statues of his father Kim Jong-II and his grandfather Kim-Il Sung as soldiers saluted them. Some people say these statues are his power structures. However, in fact, the lives of people in North Korea are shrouded in themselves. Since Korea’s war from 1950 to 1953, Korea split in two and some people’s families were torn apart. Because of the war, there is now a tense atmosphere between the South and North. Every time when there were nuclear tests in North Korea, these tense atmosphere was also around Asian countries such as Japan and China. I want everyone to know there are different countries between North Korea and South Korea, even they used to be the same country and called “Korea.” So, if you don’t know the difference between them and you say “Korea” putting both of them together, I suggest you to know about them and recommend saying “North Korea” and “South Korea.” This is because sometimes we make Korean mad with thinking South Korean and North Korean are the same country.
In the first movie Shaolin Ulyssess, the movie displayed four different monks following the teachings and lifestyles of Shaolin in the United States. Most of them were traditional, but some were a little unorthodox. For example, the second featured monk, whose name escapes me, said he only got into Kung Fu to learn the martial art and that’s just about it, not much for the Buddhism part, although later his wife remarks that he is a Buddhist because of his family. I don’t know if they’re collaboratively trying to establish the a wave of Shaolin Kung Fu in the United States or are individually trying to spread their own take of Kung Fu throughout. They all wanted to spread the influence of Kung Fu and Buddhism, but they had different ways of coming to it. I find it strange that the last monk featured met a manlike that, who seemed to not really know what he was talking about regarding Kung Fu and acted all clever-like by saying Hooters was “his temple”. Sure it is a way of life, but to me the man didn’t seem like the guy who has the patience and discipline to learn Kung Fu, but that’s just my two cents.
When I saw The Black Kung Fu Experience, I was hoping for a segment that would, even for just a few seconds, mention Black Dynamite, an action and comedy film starring real life martial artist Michael Jai White.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Aside from that, I thought it was interesting how most of the people featured in this movie turned to martial arts as a way to combat the harsh oppressions of society. I found it fascinating how the Snake fight style possessed sub-categories such as Python, Viper, and more which have escape my mind at the moment. I used to think the five animal fighting styles were named that way based on the poses looking like the stances of animals, but it’s based on the quality of the animal too, for example ethe snake is precise, quick, and quite flexible.
The constant theme of viewing martial arts as not only as a means of self-defense, but also as a way of maintaining discipline is a connection seen through both movies. I can relate to this when I took Tae Kwon Do in my youth, where the first things we learned before any real martial arts was how to behave in a disciplined manner and to realize that the techniques we were being taught were for the sake of self-defense. What also seemed to inspire the take of martial arts was the popularity of Kung Fu movies done with Bruce Lee. It seems that Chinese martial arts are the most popular, according to the movies. This doesn’t surprise me though, since the boom of Kung Fu movies pushed Chinese martial arts up the popular culture ladder.
Of course I am not surprised that the government or media does not expose the real history of things, at least not when I was younger. I find it very interesting that Jimi Hendrix is native. When I went to school in California, our history teacher allowed us to take a trip to Alcatraz on Thanksgiving morning so we could learn more about the native history. I will say that it was one of the most eerie things I’ve done. I arrived on the island at 6:30am so it was still black outside. Eventually, we got to one of the “cliffs” of the prison and there was a ceremony taking place right at sunrise to honor all the natives who were forced onto the island and imprisoned.
Anyways, back to the reading, I am not surprised that I learned more disturbing things about American history that I did not know about before. When I went to Alcatraz, I wondered how long American school systems will keep up this act of “Thanksgiving” and how the Indians/Natives and pilgrims got along and had a wonderful feast together. I enjoy this book in a way that it is challenging the American tradition of covering up the dark things of American history.
Reading the oppression that goes on reminds me of Wedding Banquet and East Main Street “Apu’s voice.” The power of deceit. When we are children we are fed this idea of harmony and peace among each race and we are blinded by it that school systems sweep true history under the rug; at least, up until high school we learn that history was never really taught until that moment. In Wedding Banquet Wei Tung feeds his parents this absolute fake identity of a straight, successful, soon-to-be married man. While his parents just accept it because it’s what they want to hear and they never knew about him (at least his father did at some point). The makers of Simpson’s know that the voice of Apu is nowhere to being Indian, but still sells it to the audience, knowing it is not a true Indian.