Lap-POP!

This year is the 10^th annual APATURE, and I attended Lap-POP! on Sunday, September 21, 2008. It consisted of blog readings, story telling, and video clips from many artists, some of which were made famous from the internet.

We listened to a story told by Annie Koh, who was born in Chicago and now lives in Seoul. She said she loves telling other people’s stories more than her own. She told us about how life in Korea is different than life in America; most importantly, the nightlife. Many places in Seoul are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, while here in San Francisco, you will be lucky if you even find a 24/7 restaurant. I always wondered what it would be like to live somewhere with nightlife because it sounds great to not have to worry about a place closing.

We also had Hasan Minhaj, a stand-up comedian, grace our presence. He has performed at numerous places, including Punchline and is the next up-and-coming comic to watch. He joked about race, which we all need to do, because it is taken way too seriously. Even though he’s a comedian and is trying to make us laugh, a lot of the ideas he put out was true, like how Indian isn’t put on one of those forms that tell you to bubble in your ethnicity, but Alaskan Native, or some other obscure population is.

Eric Wu has a webpage, where people tell him to make faces depicting the emotions viewers send in, and he didn’t even know he was going to be on APAture, so he didn’t have anything planned. He made the performers compete against each other to try and show the emotion he says best. He cracked up the whole audience, and I would say this was the best part of Lap-POP!

Ernie Hsiung read two entries from his blog, and I really liked the way he wrote it because it’s informal and told like a campfire story, which makes it more interesting.

Min Jung Kim who told us a story about her experience as an Asian American blogger, and how it was like to be recognized in the real world because she used her real name in her blog.

Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, founders of the site Icanhascheezburger.com, explained how the LOLcats phenomenon came to be. It all started when Eric needed some cheering up because he had a bad day. Kari shows him a funny picture of a cat and Eric thought it was SO BRILLIANT, that he had to post some up with captions as a gag for Kari. What started out as a site just for the two of them because so big that they were begging for more web space all the time, since they were getting thousands of hits on the site per day.

APAture: Lap-POP!

Two Sundays ago (September 21st) I went to Lap-POP!, one of the events in APAture's 10-day lineup. Lap-POP! is a showcase of blogs—each authored by Asian-Americans—and other online media. The first presenter was Annie Koh, whose newly-created website features stories about Korean culture. She is currently working on a project about "taxi driver restaurant" culture (taxi drivers know where good, cheap food are served). Next up was Hasan Minhaj, who was named an "up-and-coming comic to watch" by NBC. His stand-up routine consisted of jokes about race, what he would if he was rich (he would wear a cape), race, Kanye West, and...race. After this hilarious performance, Eric Wu of Eric Conveys an Emotion hopped onstage and admitted that he had nothing prepared. After explaining the creation of his website, he invited all the presenters to the stage for an impromptu face-off contest. This type of thing is better viewed than read, so here a few of the shots I took:






(Watch Office Space if you don't know what that is.)
The next presenter (and face-off winner) was Ernie Hsiung, who read two entries from his blog. He asked the audience which they wanted to hear first—sad or funny? Sad was chosen, so he read "Word Association," which describes how he deals with his sister's schizophrenia. The funny post was "Change it to the Butterflies," detailing the frustrating process of helping his mother obtain access to the Internet to check her email.
After a ten-minute intermission the emcee, Min Jung Kim, talked about her blogging experience before presenting her and Dino Ignacio's film, BA-AME. It starts off with a melancholy voice-over full of metaphors about identity, and, after a couple images of processed Asian food and other Asian-y things, the audience realized that it's a parody, with lines like "I fight with the soul of a dragon with fists up in the air—if dragons had fists" and "So where am I in all of this? Where am I? Would God listen and answer me if I asked Him these questions? Probably doesn't care. He's probably white, anyway." I highly recommend this film; watch it and find out what "BA-AME" stands for!
Up next was Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, co-founders of the highly popular icanhascheezburger.com, which is a massive collection of LOLcats. The duo explained the creation of their website (started as a joke but later became a blog), the rise to popularity (which led to bandwidth issues and sleep deprivation), and the publication of their book.
Lap-POP! was much different from what I expected, in a good way. Before this event, I didn't know that there were Asian-American bloggers who attracted many readers—just by writing about their personal life and daily musings. Min Jung Kim mentioned that her brother discovered her blog through a colleague in Korea, making me realize how far a voice of one person can be heard on the Internet. I wonder if anyone besides people from our ETHS 210 class will read this blog...

APAture 2008 Lap-POP!

So i went to the Lap-POP! event with a couple of my group members and thought it was really cool and a funny show. Well i took a bunch of pictures of the different artists and made a little collage:



Also, my favorite part of the show was when comedian Hasan Minhaj did some stand up comedy. He was just hilarious, and if you like his stuff, go to http://www.hasanminhaj.com/ for more. well i took a little video of his piece, but i'm having some techinical difficulties getting it up ... so i'll try to get it up ASAP.

I'm glad to see that there are so many Asian Pacific American Artists out there and that people are actually loving their work. I had a lot of fun at this event and definitely think I'm going to try to see LapPOP! next year. :D

APAture 2008; Laugh On

On Tuesday Night, I went to Laugh On one of APAture’s 10 day events on Capp Street. I've never been to a comedy show, so honestly, I didn't know what to expect from it. The beginning of the night was a bit slow, after the first performance I wasn’t too impressed. The jokes the first performer made were not appealing to me. To be honest, they actually made me feel a bit uncomfortable for many of the jokes he made were sexual jokes. I was afraid the whole night was going to be like this, but the next performance was better than the first. The next performance was a group performance. They did an improv based on information they collected from an audience member. This performance caught my attention because Irene had told us that we were going to do an improv performance in class based on the information we read in our hyphen magazines and the whole time I was thinking… how on earth do they do it? There is no way I could ever pull something like that off. Performing in front of a class is hard enough, but to improv a performance… we’ll see how that goes. But seriously, I give them props for begin able to perform like that because it is something I definitely can not do. The next act was from a half Vietnamese half Jewish guy. This guy got the audience on the edge of their seats wanting to hear more. And the last performer, an Indian guy, just took the night away.

It’s sad but true, that most of the jokes that we find funny are stereotypical or racist jokes. It’s only funny because most of what we joke about is true. By laughing about it, it does not necessarily mean that we agree with it, but its reality and it is happening in our lives today. By making a joke about the issue doesn’t mean that we don’t care about it either, it just makes us realize that if we all understand the joke and understand the meaning behind the joke why don’t we do something about the issue?

I really enjoyed the last two performances; their jokes were incorporated into Asian American culture that we are well aware of. We laugh because we know it’s true.

APAture 2008; COMICS AND ZINE EXPO

For my Asian American Culture class we were required to attend at least one of the APAture events that were being held for 10 days in San Francisco. APAture celebrates and displays Asian Pacific American heritage to everyone in the form of art, music, performance, and more. I went to the closing event for APAture today and it offered a COMICS AND ZINE EXPO. It wasn’t as I expected because in my head I was picturing a big floor filled with all these animated pictures of heroes and villains, like a typical comic convention.. But this place was small, like a studio where you can take literally 30 steps and you’ve already seen the whole room. But within those 30 steps, I was able to enrich my eyes with the most individualistic pictures.


I’ll just walk you through what I experienced there and because art is left up to your imagination, I’ll let you guys into what I felt and thought when I saw these pictures. Okay, when you first walk up the stairs you come face to face with a tree. It was basically water-colored paint smudges on current news paper clippings forming this tree. Covering articles about death, rape, and the depression that is about to take forth, I think this tree symbolized how the world needs to be united and be a family to support each other through the hard times that are about to come through.

Walking into the actual expo room, the table full of comics was the first thing that caught my eye. I got to meet Hellen Jo who is the main artist of Jin and Jam comics. Although I didn’t get to talk to her personally about her comics because she was doing an interview for APAture, I got to read some of her work and let me just say, they’re really BLUNT. The main theme of her comic strips that I came across was sexuality. She approached the subject as a natural occurrence in life, and I’m thinking that’s what she would like to portray to the world. Jin & Jam 1, published by Sparkplug Comic Books will debut at the Alternative Press Expo this year, on November 1 & 2.

The next picture I enjoyed was this fingerprint made up of Japanese stamps. To me, this taught me that a person’s identity and culture never leaves a person; it is literally integrated in a person’s body. And this is what I’m coming to find. With this Asian American culture class I’m becoming more curious with not just my own, but different Asian cultures.


The next art work that intrigued me was the tanks that were made out of fuzzy material. They were lined up and leading to a giant explosion looking piece that was made up of these individual tanks. Along with this theme, there were shoes, spray painted camouflage and laid across fake grass. It brought me back to what I learned in class through the culture presentations and how each culture experienced some hardship along the way.


Lastly, my favorite artwork out of the entire gallery was a box you stick your head into. It was attached to the ceiling so you’d have to climb up there and when you look around inside that tiny box, it made me feel I was in a wheat field of some sort, the mirrors creating this vast image of never ending wonder of what the world can offer a person. I guess this is how people who dedicated their life to working in the fields felt.

I just wish they had a friendlier environment because everyone there was busy fixing things. I would have liked to be confronted with information about each artwork because I would’ve liked to have known what each artist was thinking and feeling when making their artwork. It’s okay because that’s what art galleries are all about, interpreting your own thoughts. This APAture event basically tied everything I learned so far in class. The whole gallery had themes about what Asian American culture is all about; family, sexuality, finding one’s identity, and past suffering. Although before I left, one person came up to me and started explaining APAture’s organization and how to get involved in it. And yes, I did join the mailing list (=

APAture 2008 Event: Speak Out! social commentary

Today on September 20, 2008, I attended the event Speak Out! at Manilatown Heritage Foundation near Chinatown. This event is part of Kearny Street Workshop’s APAture, celebrating and displaying Asian Pacific American heritage to everyone. This was one of the most interesting events that I have ever attended in my life. It was the very first poetry slam that I went to and I found that it was really amazing.

Basically this Speak Out! event featured selected participants of Youth Speaks and adult writers who gathered together at this event to share pieces of their writing. All the Youth Speaks participants who spoke at the event are all of different ethnicities of Asian American culture and grew up and lived in different environments around the Bay Area. They all submitted their pieces of poetry and all were chosen by APAture to have the special opportunity to share their own voice in poetry at this event. Each youth participant read out two poems. One poem was dedicated to where they lived or the environment that they grew up in and the other was dedicated to an abstract idea that they feel passionate about, including justice and racism. Each had their own special means of expressing their feelings and actions for their poetry, whether or not they sang or they danced.

The adult poets were just as talented as the youth were. They were more professional in expressing their poetry and getting their ideas across to everyone. They did not talk about much about themselves but more about the larger ideas that affect us today, including religion and education. Even so, their message got across to everyone who listened to them, which I know is an important aspect of poetry and writing.

Listening is not one of my best aspects, but today I was all ears for the poetry that these people astounded me with. I was thinking, “Oh wow, how do they come up with this stuff? I could never do that.” Well I could, but then it won’t turn out to be as good as the ones that I heard today. I mean, I am talking about youth that are about my age producing pieces of work that display important messages about society and culture today. I visualized scenes from East Oakland and Korea and felt like I saw moms being beaten by their husbands and children getting killed from a stray bullet. The words were that powerful. It was very personal for them because they were talking about their own experiences from their own lives. What they spoke was what they went through, and they wanted people like me who were in the audience to understand and appreciate what they put out there by their body language, emotions, and their voice. I had a great sense of pride for them for being advocates for what they believed in and represented. It takes lots of courage to go up to the microphone and show who they were. Even though they stumbled with their words and actions at times, it does not matter because the focus is not on what goes wrong in the performance, but rather what is being said and what message is being sent out there for everyone to know about.

What also made this event unique is the diversity represented by the people who went up to the microphone today and contributed a piece of themselves as literary artists. There were some presenters who are of mixed races and some who come from areas that are misrepresented in Asian American culture. All had something to say about their culture and had similar and different ideas that they strongly believed in. There are not many Asian Americans who take part of the literary movement, but what I saw and heard today convinced me to believe that the literary movement is going to soon have a very significant change. As I listened to these speakers, I could relate and agree to the many ideas that they put out there. What they said about many ideas, including racism, justice, and education was all very true. I understood what they were going through because the same things have happened to me and I had embraced the same, effected feelings that they had.

My first poetry slam was an awesome experience. It felt great for me to take some time out to listen to what others had to say about their own culture and society. Experiencing culture does not have to be just walking around and looking at aspects of culture but it can come in many forms, such as the form that I got to witness today: the language of speaking and poetry. You learn a lot about culture in so many different ways and you also learn when you least expect it.