Next Generation Nepal June 12, 2007
Next Generation Nepal I’m helping raise money for orphans in Nepal. You can help too by donating and/or attending the benefit we are throwing at Phebes in NYC Thursday, June 21st. Attend the benefit, bid at the silent auction, donate items for the auction, or just give what you can! Seriously, how can you resist helping these beautiful kids…
7pm Phebe’s is at 359 Bowery across from B Bar Please contact me if you want to give items to the auction or know of liquor sponsors who would like to donate. san.tong@gmail.com
Stuck between Geek and Gangster May 1, 2007
My friend Bao posted this in an
APIA listserve that we are on. I find it to be very thought-provoking…
a New York Sun commentary
-A Bad Week for Asian Americans Gets Worse
By GRADY HENDRIX
April 24, 2007It’s been a lousy 10 days for Asian Americans. Last Monday, 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui killed 32 of his fellow students at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the media were quick to try and link the shootings to Asian movies by directors Park Chan-Wook and John Woo. That same day, the Ed Lover radio show on Power 105 aired a comedy skit called “Are You Smarter than an Asian?” featuring questions like “How does an Asian pronounce ‘fried rice’?” On Sunday, “The Sopranos” featured a quiet Asian-American resident of Uncle Junior’s mental hospital who turned out to be a violent psychopath. And this coming Friday, you can watch “The Condemned,” a new action movie featuring a sadistic Japanese martial artist who burns a rival to death.At a time when a Stepin Fetchit descendant, Uncle Ben, is being remade as a corporate CEO, it seems incongruous that Christopher Walken will be donning “yellow face” to play a Fu Manchu clone named Feng in the forthcoming dire-looking comedy “Balls of Fury.” When Don Imus can get fired for saying “nappy headed hos,” how can Ed Lover stay on the air with “Are You Smarter than an Asian?”“We’re a convenient minority,” said Greg Chang, the manager of operations at the ImaginAsian theater, a Manhattan cinema that screens exclusively Asian fare. “A comedian can make fun of Asian Americans and seem edgy without running much risk. Or a school can point to their Asian students and say that they have a lot of minority students even if they don’t have any African-Americans enrolled.“Max Han, who runs the Korean news site NewYorkSeoul.com, points to the emphasis placed on Cho Seung-Hui’s nationality as an example of Asian Americans still being excluded from the mainstream. “Major media outlets labeled Cho as a Korean national. Even though he came to the U.S. at age eight, he was considered a foreigner. For the Virginia Tech shooting, we put an emphasis on his Asian ethnicity.”That may be because Asians are the bad guys again. Ken Leung, who played Carter, the psychopathic mental patient on “The Sopranos,” is a professional bad guy. He’s known for playing a sadistic mutant who grows quills in “X-Men: the Last Stand,” for playing the psycho killer, Sang, in “Rush Hour,” and for playing that most evil of all creatures, a high school guidance counselor, in “The Squid and the Whale.”Ever since women have been given the choice to be either virgins or whores, Asians have been given the choice: gangster or geek? On the one hand, in pop culture you have the lovable nerd Hiro on the NBC’s hit show “Heroes.” On the other, you have DC Comics‘ best-selling comic series of 2006, “52,” which features a sinister villain known as Chang Tsu, a revamped Wonder Woman Yellow Peril baddie from the 1960s previously known as Egg Fu, who assembled a cabal of evil scientists on the mysterious Oolong Island.“Four of
America’s last five wars have been fought on Asian soil against Asian armies and that’s become part of our collective unconscious,” Jeff Yang, an author and a consultant on Asian-American marketing for Iconoculture, said. “Four decades of hostility, on and off, have given us this image of a cunning, heartless, inhuman Asian invader.”But it goes back earlier than that. In 1914, Jack London wrote a breathless fantasy about the extermination of all Chinese people called “An Unparalleled Invasion”; Buck Rogers made his debut fighting “Mongol hordes;” and the names Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless have entered our vocabulary along with James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. And these stereotypes are getting rehabilitated fast.Americans are worried about their jobs being outsourced to India, magazine covers are proclaiming that China is the world’s next superpower, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il is not only ramping up his nation’s nuclear program, but he’s been named as part of the science-fiction sounding “Axis of Evil.” “There’s a sense of anxiety and it’s coming out in popular culture,” Mr. Yang said.“Any other ethnicity or race are very vigilant and vocal about this,” Mr. Yang said. “They know all too well that the first signs of cultural danger are when people embrace these media images because from there everything else flows.”But things are hardly looking better for the future. The Olympics are going to Beijing in 2008. America is bringing China up for trade violations in the WTO. India and America are at loggerheads over a nuclear deal. So it comes as no surprise that next summer’s big comic book movie is “Iron Man” starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. Its villain? He’s called “The Mandarin.”
Click here for more frightening news of an Asian-American Straight-A High School Student who got racially profiled for work he did for a creative writing class: http://www.tripmastermonkey.com/archives/news_views/april_26_2007_another_case_of_asian_profilin.php
As a self-proclaimed creative “writer” I find this atrociously disturbing.
~san
Earthday April 22, 2007
In New York the first day that feels like Spring cosmically aligned with the weekend of Earthday. What better way for mother-E, (a.k.a mother nature) to remind us of her bounty with her sprightly daffodils, magnolias, peonies, and pansies. Today was gorgeous. We just have to figure out a way to keep our planet going, instead of contaminating it with our wasteful ways.
I just saw this pod in Current TV about this fuel-cell powered motocycle that acts as a generator. The only thing it spews is water. No toxins, and it runs on well, intelligent energy…
Enjoy the beautiful weather! Do some deeds and plant some seeds…
Guns and Ammo April 18, 2007
Do we need to see 33 people die tragically to realize that there are ways to prevent these kinds of massacres? Will it splinter the “new dems” to have this on the agenda? It’s always seemed obvious to me, that the minute you introduce firearms into a high intensity situation, it can become, well EXPLOSIVE, literally and figuratively. How many people in Iraq die each day, each week.
San’s pleading words of the day…
Global Warming, I need you../Myspace, MyPrez March 18, 2007
Dear Summer and Spring,
Why have you forsaken me? Where are you? I thought you would have arrived by now. Are you mad at me for emitting too much Co2 into the atmosphere. Are you still sore about the time when I complained about humidity and the strange city liquids and smells that the city streets were oozing in June. I just need a break from all this flippin snow. I want tank tops and skirts and strappy shoes that don’t need to be rubberized/water-proof/ready-made for ice and hail. As I listened to “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” on NPR, and smirked as Peter Sagal scoffed at a caller who was calling less than 60 degree weather, “COLD,” I pondered on the relativity of the term “cold.”
I n other interesting Sunday news, the styles section of the NYT covers Myspace’s Impact Channel, devoted to politics and the 2008 presidential race. They quoted none-other than annoying Tom, the friend who you immediately want to move from your “top 8.”
“Tom Anderson, 31, a MySpace founder, said, “MySpace has a method of reaching people who are historically not interested in voting” and may not read newspapers or watch news on television. He added: “A MySpace profile could excite their interest in ways they are used to. In the same way they learn about their friends, they could learn about a candidate.”
So in other words, now you can STALK Barak, Hilary, and the numerous Johns via Myspace because the candidates are not already plastered on every other media outlet…especially if you’re a kid you don’t do anything but troll the internet.
sanster is done ranting
The Secret behind “The Secret” February 27, 2007
Sunday’s New York Times article distinguishes between the two versions of “The Secret” DVD, that’s been sweeping the new age-leaning populace…Apparently the key is the “laws of attraction,” but who’s got the authority over this matter: Rhonda Byrne or Esther Hicks?
Read “Shaking Riches out of the Cosmos” in NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/fashion/25attraction.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Walking along the Pacific Ocean at surf’s edge on a sunny day last week, Ms. Byrne said no one owns the law of attraction because it is universal, like another famous law. “I can’t go ‘law of gravity, that’s mine,’ ” she said.
What the Hickses say bothers them most about the second version of “The Secret” is that those who watch it are not receiving enough explanation of the law or being told that its discovery was made by “vibrationally accessing broader intelligence,” Ms. Hicks said.
24 hour party people…in the apple store June 5, 2006
fakecake in a glass cube
http://suicidegirls.com/news/geek/16706
You may ask yourself, what does this mean??? Such philosophical questions prompted by emails pop into my little head ALL the time…..
Yours truly, aka “Fakecake” to be doing a live realtime blog this week for the suicidegirls website starting tonight. Timing could change again, but I will keep you posted. (www.suicidegirls.com)
I have carte blanche in terms of content, except I cannot mention SPIN magazine. Not sure why, but I plan to find out. You may ask, is San a suicidegirl? The answer is no. I will be a “geek editor.” What does THAT mean? I suppose you’ll have to check out the blog to find out.
I’ll be in the new 24 hour the apple store.
Welcome to the world of MAC…
steve jobs invites you to ENTER:
It’s kind of a David Blaine thing that I’m doing…I’ll be a squatter in the new apple store uptown (nyc) and blogging real time for as long as I can last trapped in a glass store (like Blaine’s stunt, but cooler and without the water)… until I run out of food or they call security on me. Wish me luck…and I’m holding my breath the entire time!!!!
HOW??
WIKI….Guess you have to keep going…
I broke in while they were cleaning…well it is 24 hours, so anyone can go at anytime…but let’s not get to technical about it…-fakecake
first it was like my home office…
it got crowded…
and the video game freaks kept getting in my way…
then the computer leaked strange fluid resembling anti-freeze, like radioactive kryptonite in acid neon green dripped out of the computer and into my mouth..
and poof. it was like that scene in Heathers, that 80s flick.
I passed out from the gaseous green, and someone else had to take over the blog. to greener pastures. ce la vie.
Sanster, the fakecake-walk.
June 13, 2006 in Current Affairs |
Grammies and Chicks with Conscience February 15, 2007
Barbara Koppel’s new film is about the controversial Dixie Chicks. I’m going to see this today. Barbara Koppel is absolutely prolific. Look for my upcoming posts in which I review her film “Bearing Witness,” which debuted at Full Frame two years ago.
- San, the one and only–la unica
CASE STUDY: The Dixie Chicks: Still Singing – Shut Up and Sing!
Thursday Feb. 15, 2007
NYWIFT welcomes producer and director Barbara Kopple, a two-time Academy Award winning filmmaker, who, along with co-director Cecilia Peck, takes the audience on the road, behind the scenes, into recording studio and into the homes of the Dixie Chicks – the biggest-selling female group in history–in the acclaimed documentary, The Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing.
In 2003, as the U.S. readied for the Iraq invasion, an offhand remark at a London concert by a member of the Dixie Chicks sent the career of the biggest-selling female group in history into a downward spiral. The film chronicles their comeback amid death threats, political attacks and radio boycotts, ultimately showing their professional dedication and personal perseverance. It was picked up for worldwide distribution by The Weinstein Company and opened theatrically right before the November elections.
NYWIFT Muse Barbara Kopple is a two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker, with Harlan County USA, 1976, and American Dream, 1990, both taking home honors for Best Documentary Feature. In 1991, Harlan County USA was named to the National Film Registry by Congress and designated an American Film Classic. It was restored by the NYWIFT Women’s Preservation Fund and the Academy Film Archive in 2005.
Moderator Christina Kotlar has over 15 years experience in visual media as well as producing and writing credits. She wrote Aid Afghanistan which screened at the 2006 D.C. Film Festival. She founded and produces Film Festival reViews, a weekly podcast focusing on independent filmmaking and the film festival circuit worldwide.