Brett's A-Pop Blog

This past week has felt really productive in regards to my final project. I was sort of worried that my draft didn’t have much of my own personal voice in the narrative, but my peer review group said they didn’t find that to be the case. I also am feeling generally good with the direction that the paper is taking, although it’s a slight tweak of what I initially proposed. But, I think it’s a lot more centered on the APIA pop culture connections than my first idea for my topic would have been. I also think there is a lot of room to add in my own voice, which I’m trying to be more conscious about.

The layout is taking this form where it’s framed by my “home”–the midwest–but I’m including “sub-homes” in the things I used to do growing up to keep myself preoccupied. I’m operating on the idea of the midwest being a really boring, uninspiring place where it is absolutely necessary to be creative to come up with things to do, or to have some sort of hobby to fall into, or else you kind of just get stuck. Most people just turn to drugs out of boredom, at least where I’m from.

Going forward with my research, I have to look more into Tastu Aoki, who I mentioned in last week’s post, because I’m going to start writing about my involvement with music as a teenager next. His music is perfect for the topic of crosscurrents in APIA culture, but I guess the thing I have to think hard about is how that connected to the music I was playing at the time. I already started writing this section in the workshop we did last week on Wednesday, so I think I have a general idea of where I want to take it. From what I wrote that day, I think it’ll have more of my creative voice, whereas the first section of my paper had more of my academic voice (although I did sprinkle in humor).

All in all I’m feeling a lot better about this project after writing the draft and getting the feedback I’ve gotten so far, which is a huge relief because I had been worried about where this project was going to end up. I’m starting to feel better about my own splendid messiness.

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Welp.

We’re halfway done with the quarter now, which came really fast. I feel as if I have a bunch of threads in my mind from what we’ve studied so far that have been connecting with each lecture, book we read and film we watch. I’m really scatterbrained typically, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how I, but mostly everyone else, have been able to connect all of these different texts together. It’s felt like a really fulfilling experience so far, especially hearing other people’s perspectives and lived experiences which have greatly helped to inform my notes, and connections in this program.

For some reason these personal posts are always the most difficult for me to write, and I’m trying to figure that one out. Another thread. Maybe it’s because I don’t enjoy talking about myself that much? Or maybe I’m too tired? Hungry? I think that maybe I haven’t been actively thinking about my own connections to the films we’ve watched or the books we’ve read. I know I connected to Dark Blue Suit through the relationship between Buddy and his father, but, do I want to talk about that? I made the previous post about how I lived in suburbia and connected it to Better Luck Tomorrow, and I guess that’s the only time I’ve felt confident about discussing my personal connections. Maybe it’s just a fear of opening up even though I largely see this blog as talking into an abyss, even though it’s open for everyone to see. Regardless, I think it’s something I’ll pay attention to in the coming weeks, and I’ll try to churn out some more personal connections in these posts. I’ll try to rectify all these halfway thoughts.

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• Popular music: Three Things
  • Thing 1: The study of popular music is the study of popular culture
  • Thing 2: From Eric to Edward (Liu) – Ain’t nothing but a pop thing
    • “Hip hop ain’t just music. Hip hop ain’t contentless. Hip hop ain’t got a third ain’t” (nod to the three ain’t of the Blues)
  • Thing 3: “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps”
• Mikhail Bakhtin (1895 – 1975)
  • Dialogism/dialogies/the dialogic (to bring people/ideas/things together for a quarrel)
  • Implications of this for sampling text
  • Tupac – misogynistic lyrics over love song/ballad sample (love song to the lifestyle)
• Flip (term of endearment/derogatory)
• Rachel Devitt
  • “Lost in translation”
  • countering hegemonic structures in music
  • looking into music considered “contentless” (example of Black Eyed Peas)
• Resistance vernaculars (Tony Mitchell)
• Bilingualism/code-switching
• “The Great Pinoy Boxing Era”
  • Representation of marginalized peoples in sports – carrying/representing their communities
  • Stockton, CA and the Filipino community
  • The boxing ring being one of the few places Filipinos were allowed to participate in the United States
• The Debut (2001) 
  • Connections to Donald Duk (shunning of one’s culture, connection between Arnold, and Ben’s friends in their interest in their friend’s  respective cultures)
  • Gusto and Ben – similar in escaping Filipino culture to outside cultures
  • Intergenerational trauma (Ben’s grandfather, and his father)
  • Character growth/coming of age in ethnic films – ‘a coming of age’  not exclusive to younger people, Ben’s father has a coming of age by the end in seemingly beginning to respect Ben’s dream to be an artist
  • Contrast of house party/Ben’s sister’s birthday party
  • Connection to Better Luck Tomorrow – Gusto and Virgil and their adoption of outside cultures
  • Ben’s father’s want for him to go to UCLA tied to the way his father treats him for not going that route and being a mailman
  • Ben’s earlier work in his portfolio being comprised of mostly white women, by the end of the movie he adds a portrait of himself, his father and grandfather
  • Ben’s father was an artist/singer in his youth, his father’s suppression of this tied to how Ben’s father feels about his wanting to be an artist?
  • Crosscurrents of Hispanics/Filipinos -> linked to Spanish colonization
    • Tagalog and Spanish language’s shared words
    • Labor union connection – unity clap (coming across a language barrier)
  • Theme of gap between generations (the traditional Filipino dance, the line dance and the dance battle)

Some annotations from Dark Blue Suit:

• “Despite their poverty, most dressed well, wearing suits that Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan called “magnificent.” Their splendid clothes and, more impressively, the easy sense of elegance with which they wore them, stood out against the drab backdrop of cheap hotels, pool halls, card rooms, and the dull apparel of Chinatown’s year-round residents.” (pg.  5) – are the suits these men wore used to bend in more to American society at the time? is it indicative of achieving the American dream, but with the subtext that they are still marginalized to the spaces of the seedy parts of the cities they inhabited? The main character’s father compares his dark blue suit to Humphrey Bogart’s (pg. 5), do they dress like this to fulfill the dominant culture’s picture of style/fashion? Assimilationist?
• Connection between growing up in a poor community and then going on to boxing (pg. 29) – a lot of the greatest boxers have come from that background because they had experience with fighting as a means of survival within in their communities
• “He had enough torque in that right to launch his victim on a straight trajectory, like one of Henry Aaron’s line drives, to some southern point where Spanish was spoken.” (pg. 30) – many references to famous athletes of color. In this case a black baseball player, connecting to Rico’s affinity for black culture?
• “What amazes me still is how simple and practical it all was. Like the stance: no contortions and exotic poses, no rigid stances or imitations of legendary animals. Just hands up, with the right hand and leg forward, the latter covering the groin, body weight balanced. Simple.” (pg. 41) – this quote, like the previous quote, touching on the main character’s preconceived notions of what Chinese martial arts were and how they operated. this idea he had having something to do with the martial arts movies he’d seen? especially considering he was at Bruce Lee’s school. he goes on to compare it to something more familiar to his background – southpaw boxing. “Then there were the kicks—nothing above the belt, movie fights
• “His answer stressed simpler moves, functional in a crisis, aimed at addressing one question: Does it work? I’ve carried that hard question with me ever since. I applied it first to martial arts—training sessions, boxing rings, and street fights (short punches, uppercuts, and hooks work)—and eventually beyond to religion, marriages, and careers. Asking the question can be lonely. There are few models. In asking it, history matters less (so-and-so did it, and you can, too) than personal experience and a short supply of wisdom. but each choice I’ve made has always followed that question, that troubling inquiry first raised almost thirty years ago.” (pg. 43) – “Does it work?” – a meditation on one’s personal identity? could be an allusion to the crosscurrent of Japanese/Chinese/Filipino presence at the school, and how they all bring their own backgrounds and experiences into their fighting styles.
• “Unlike Aaron, who skillfully deceived fish, I preferred a less taxing approach: worms, or marshmallows and eggs. That way I could hook, drop it in the water, and forget about it until the bobber stopped or the pole twitched. While waiting on the bank, my attention would drift toward conversations, laughter, daydreams; an inevitable nap also filled each afternoon.” (pg. 59) – playing off the potential symbolism of the predator/prey connection of the fish to the city, does this represent Buddy’s aversion to conflict, being more inclined to indulge in escapism?
• Theme of death within the community, specifically the men in Buddy’s life (the Pinoys): “My father’s death surprised me. It shouldn’t have; he was eighty-seven years old. But I thought he’d live forever, as would his brothers, cousins, and buddies—my uncles—who came to this land long decades ago, when racism and violence, migrant poverty, tuberculosis, and despair should have killed them, but didn’t. Such forces, the afflictions of the poor, didn’t even wrinkle the creases of the foot suits they wore while standing on corners, from Seattle to LA, where they’d laugh and talk loud, welcoming the night.” (pg. 142)

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While gathering articles for my Annotated Bibliography, I think I accomplished some narrowing in regards to my own topic. I read a really great article about the Japanese-American population on the North Side of Chicago by Katherine Nagasawa entitled “What Happened to Chicago’s Japanese Neighborhood?”. This article discusses the short lived unofficial “Japantown” that the North Side had for years, before Japanese-Americans were assimilated into the dominant culture and flocked to the suburbs over time. I wanted to connect this back to the film I watched last week by Chicago native Renee Tajima-Péna, and how she brought up how invisible an Asian American person is in Chicago (and the greater Midwest, really). I also wanted to tie this information back into my personal account by talking about my trips to the North Side as a kid (a sense of escapism from where I lived in Indiana) and how I had gotten there right after the Japanese population largely disappeared.

I also did some research on the first Japanese player for the Chicago Cubs, Kosuke Fukudome, and how he was built up to be a huge deal in Chicago. I wanted to include this because I remember this time vividly from being a fan of the team then, which was and still is a big thing in my family. I found an interview where he stated that aside from wanting to be the first Japanese player to play for the Cubs (this was 2008 by the way), he wanted to come to Chicago because he believed it to have a great Japanese community. I thought this was an interesting perspective that I want to tie into the information given by Nagasawa’s article as well.

I also included an interview with a Japanese American musician from Chicago named Tatsu Aoki, who mixes together traditional Japanese music with Jazz. In this interview he discusses how the cross between these two genres express his identity as an Asian American. I thought I could tie this in if I wanted to talk about my involvement in playing music as a sub-home, or as a form of escapism for me that defined me at certain points of my life while living in the Midwest. All of the pop culture references I could find have to do with Chicago, where I didn’t live, but mostly because I could find little information about Asian Americans (especially tied into pop culture) with Indianapolis. I think that regardless this will still represent my home as the Midwest in general terms.

Posted in Rock | Comments Off on Research log: week 4

After our class on Tuesday, I’ve found myself fascinated in all the ways comedy is used, subtle or not. I liked Chico’s definition of satire as being something that destroys something else, hopefully in order to build something on top of it. I had never thought about it that way before. This week, and in the article on Black humor that we read, humor has been described as something that protects, attacks, heals and empowers people. Thinking about humor in all of these different contexts was actually sort of mind blowing to me, but I think that might be reflective of how little I’ve really thought about or valued humor in my own life.

For me personally, I always associated the word humor with “stand up comedy” exclusively. I don’t know if that speaks to the prevalence or popularity of stand up in America, but that’s always what I sort of conflated the idea of humor with. Obviously humor takes forms in different mediums like visual art, literature, performance art etc. But to me it says a lot that the first thing I associate (typically) when the word humor comes out is stand up. Maybe it is because it is the most visible in our culture? The most subversive? The most offensive? The most honest? I think it probably has something to do with the cult of personality (or celebrity) that America has, and once someone gains notoriety we’re more inclined to listen to them and flock to them. I also think that stand up is something that is close to universal, at least in our culture. There is seemingly a comic for anybody (for better or for worse). Regardless, it is a powerful platform to have.

Thinking about humor this week, it’s really dawned on me that it is a sort of universal language. I think that this can be an incredibly powerful tool, especially for marginalized people.

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“Black Humor”

• Gerald Early
  • Humor does not translate well among separate groups
  • The complex intergroup – relationships related to humor (member vs. non member)
  • Humor as a survival mechanism/weapon
  • Guarding culture, guarding humor
  • the evolution of the Black stand-up comic
  • the nature of “profane” language (i.e. the Blues)
• Glenda Carpio
  • The relationships among race/gender and humor/comedy
  • major theories of humor
    • the relief theory (a way to release pent up aggression)
    • the superiority theory (laughing at the misfortunes of others)
    • the incongruity theory (expectations vs. reality)
• Werner Sollors
  • the nature and function of satire
    • the primary function of satire is destruction (but best satire always reconstructs)

– All American Girl (94-95)

• “Korean American” family played by non Korean actors outside of Cho (seeing them as separate entities instead of a cohsive family unit)
• First Asian American family on television sitcom
  • Who is it catering to?
• Laughing at stereotypes because you know they are true (as inside group) vs. laughing at stereotypes because they’re stereotypes (outside group)

-Margaret Cho

• Use of deadpan/facial expressions/physicality etc.
• Self deprecating humor (prevalent in ethnic humor)
• use of subjects that aren’t funny to build up jokes

Some notes from Forgotten Country annotations:

• “Until now, he had not done much in the process of searching for Hannah, content to grill me instead on what progress I had made.” (pg. 19) – is this a play on the “model minority” stereotype in which Asian parents put heavy pressure on their children to do well in areas like school, but in this case to find her missing sister, for which they have given all responsibility of to her – she also addresses his pressure and influence on her school work as well (pg. 22)
• The main character’s skepticism towards herbalism when her father takes up the tea that could help, thinking he knew better. (pg. 40) – reminds me of how Donald Duk was skeptical of herbalism as well, that point being made that he shunned all things Eastern. Main character’s motivations in this situation seem more based on practicality, but could be a subtle reflection of her own identity
• The Principal telling the girl’s mother that they need American names (pg. 85-86): “He spoke loudly. In those days, everyone spoke more loudly at my parents than they seemed to speak to anyone else.” (pg. 85) – getting them to claim more “American names” not only erases their actual names and by extension their culture, but also only serves to benefit all of the teachers, and other students. More with the theme of things being forgotten: they are told to forget their own names
• Jeehyun’s identity as being the protector of her father as well as the one to achieve the dreams he never could (pg. 163) – martyrdom? – Her parents telling her “It is for you we work this hard. It is for you we do everything.” (pg. 165) – is she projecting that back?

Posted in Paper | Comments Off on Week 4: assorted notes

I watched the film My America… or Honk If You Love Buddha by director Renee Tajima-Peña. Tajima-Peña is a Japanese American woman who grew up in Chicago, before moving to San Francisco (just in time for the Summer of Love). She goes on a road trip across the US to interview different APIA groups, to try to get a feel of what their identity means to them. It was a really great movie, that provided a lot of intriguing insights on how different APIA people and groups perceive their own identities. I was hoping to get a better feel of one APIA group in the Midwest, and I’m thinking that I’ll more specifically focus on Japanese Americans in Chicago (especially if I can’t find anything closer to Indiana or a Midwestern suburban setting), due to the information that I gained from Tajima-Peña, and the fact that I have some family roots in Chicago/Illinois as well. She brings up how in the Midwest setting, her and her family had to become comfortable with feeling invisible. This was an idea I’ve been thinking about implementing into my project, and have even found an article or two that discusses this invisibility and isolation in the Midwest. I’m still trying to piece it all together at this point, especially how invisibility could fit into my narrative, when I haven’t shared that experience of invisibility or isolation on the same level as a marginalized group. I still also need to find one or two more forms of pop culture that deal with this topic. I’m still not entirely sure where I’ll end up, but I’m hoping that I can start to make sense of something more concrete by next week.

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Better Luck Tomorrow:

• Tone shift – got really dark unexpectedly, but was it unexpected due to the ethnicities of the main characters? was that an intentional call from the director? playing off the ‘model minority’ idea, how they could never possibly get involved in crime, murder, etc. (expecting passivity)
• More on tone shift: starts as a pretty standard high school movie of the era (even produced by MTV, which I thought was genius in presenting this movie initially as a standard goofy high school movie), gets really existential and approaches the idea of up keeping the “model minority” identity to the extent that it drives one to violence and other reckless behaviors
• The scene where Ben sees Deric with Stephanie after murdering Steve, who Deric turns into for a sec – playing off of the stereotype that all Asians look the same? Through Ben’s eyes, self stereotyping or struggle with identity? Loss of identity?
• The previous idea kind of comes up when Virgil promises that he saw Stephanie in a porno
• marginalized main cast who are typically less visible make themselves visible throughout the movie

A few annotations from Donald Duk: 

• “Fred Astaire. Everybody everywhere likes Fred Astaire in the old black-and-white movies.” (pg. 1) – This reminds me of Chico’s lecture where he brought up how APIA groups are the “mediators of American culture” or “between black and white”. Maybe Fred Astaire existing between black and white in the movies makes him more relatable to Donald? (That might be a stretch.) (but also plays off the idea of Donald seeing everything as black or white at this point of the story) 
• Recurring theme of performance, or the performative nature of being a minority in America to please others/acting like a caricature of one’s ethnicity- The twins narrating their lives as if it were a memoir (pg. 5), King Duk telling Donald to act like Donald Duck to placate his bullies (pg. 4), Donald actually performing for the bullies (pg. 5), Uncle Donald Duk being an opera performer (pg. 7)
• “Hey, everybody’s gotta give up the old and become American. If all these Chinese were more American, I wouldn’t have all my problems,” Donald Duk says” (pg. 42) “I think Donald Duk may be the very last American-born Chinese-American boy to believe that you have to give up being Chinese to be an American,” Dad say.” (pg. 42) “When China conquered the south, these people went further south, into Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand. They learned French. Now they’re learning English. They still speak their Cantonese, their Chinese, their Viet or Lao or Cambodian, and French. Instead of giving anything up, they add on. They’re including America in everything else they know.” (pg. 42) – I think this exchange goes back to
  “what does it mean to be Asian American?”, and I think Donald’s father explains it in a really empowering way. He presents all of these people that came to American as being incredibly multifaceted, and never strictly American first. If anything it is just a small part of a bigger picture.
• “Does Donald dare run away from home to another country, another language? Arnold can play Chinese, he can eat Chinese and go gah-gah over Chinese, but no matter what, he is white. He can’t leave Chinatown. He can leave the Chinese. He can go home to hear the spaces between the trees and never come back. All he has to do is cross the street.” (pg. 47) – explaining the idea that non-Chinese people can become “play Chinese” by going to Chinatown, eating the food, taking part in the celebration. But that’s where the line ends, if they want it to. They can shed that cultural skin whenever, whereas the Chinese people cannot. This can go further to the idea of cultural appropriation too, especially if someone who was non-Chinese was using the culture for their own benefit, wearing it like a costume. (i found out today that this my edition was printed differently than in the second edition were it replaces “Arnold” with “Dad”, which siginificantly changes the meaning of the passage)

Posted in Paper | Comments Off on week 3 assorted notes:

The movie Better Luck Tomorrow reminded me of my own adolescence growing up in the suburbs. Minus the crime syndicate and murder. Mostly. It reminded me of how much of a bubble it is to live in suburbia, especially as a satellite to a larger city. It’s too small to have its own distinct identity, but generally there’s one common thread between all of suburbia: boredom. I saw Better Luck Tomorrow as taking this idea of suburban boredom and ennui and showcasing how apathetic it can make some people, obviously to an exaggerated extent. The town I grew up created this same sense of apathy in a lot of people as well, leaving them to their own devices. Living in such a bubble, especially one that was voted the #1 safest place to live according to some in-flight magazine, makes it hard to truly consider the gravity of your decisions. It always felt as if this atmosphere invited people to behave in cruel ways simply for entertainment value. Since I’ve been four years removed from living in that suburb, it’s given me a lot of time to think about how a place like suburbia functions, and why it is that way. I still hold the opinion that suburbia is one of the strangest living communities to be in, just based on what’s on the surface vs. what bubbles underneath it. One girl I knew put it as living in a place that was “physically safe, but mentally and emotionally unsafe.” I thought the film played on the idea of apathetic boredom in a really great way, with the ending sort of creating this open ended scene where you don’t actually know if it has resonated with the main character that he has killed the boyfriend of the girl he is now seeing. It made me think of something that happened right before I moved away where two guys that lived in my town got into a fight over a girl, and one of them stabbed the other in the heart, which killed him. The ending of this movie made me think of that and wonder, “Because of this bubble that we lived in, did the gravity of that situation ever really dawn on him?” I think that’s a really terrifying thought.

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• “Culture” and “Nature” being the two most confusing terms (Raymond Williams)
• Culture being:
  • “intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development”
  • “a particular way of life, people/period/groups”
  • “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity”
• Clifford Geertz: “(Culture) is simply the ensemble of stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves”
• Williams and “popular”:
  • well liked by many people
  • inferior kinds of works (don’t know if I missed more of this..)
  • work deliberately setting out to win favor with the people”
  • “production and destruction”
  • made by people for themselves
• Storey (and various problematics) on popular culture:
  • culture that is well liked by many people
  • what is left after what is decided as “high culture”
  • the culture which originates from “the people”
  • Gramsci and hegemony – struggle between dominant and marginalized cultures
  • postmodernism – no distinction between “high” and “low” culture (relativism)
• Common denominator: “popular culture is a culture that only emerged following industrialization and ubranization”
• “Splendid Messiness”

History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashise: 

• one note in relation to Otsuka: the focus on water, especially represented in a dreamlike manner
• Further viewing: Emiko Omori – Rabbit in the Moon (the psychological phenomenon of looking at something and it appears to be something else)
• Further reading: Alison Landsberg – Prosthetic Memory (collective trauma)
• Collective trauma and Otsuka: “I want to be sick by myself”, said the girl. “That’s impossible,” said her mother.

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