Brett's A-Pop Blog

Welp. The paper’s due date is upon us, and I still am having some mixed feelings about my paper, mostly the second half. Also I guess I’m worried that the direction of my paper doesn’t feel seamless or cohesive, particularly in the balance of research and personal narrative. I’m worried of one overshadowing the other. But, it’s too late to worry about stuff like that, I’m just going to write the fucking thing. Hopefully I can power through it tonight and tomorrow, and end up with something that I feel more than at least 70% satisfied with. Maybe 75%.

During Wednesday’s workshop, I cut my paper up and sharpie’d out parts that I didn’t feel were necessary (including my entire opening paragraph). It was neat to physically edit my paper in that way, and gave me a little bit more clarity on where to move certain things, or where to put sentences I haven’t even written yet.

I still need a title too. I just realized that. Maybe I’ll just keep the placeholder one I hastily wrote on Wednesday: “The Midwest or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace My Home”. I could go minimalist and just say “The Midwest”, which kind of just sounds like a Ken Burns documentary. But, it also doesn’t hint towards any of the APIA connections I make in my paper, so that’s out.

I was never good with titles.

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I finished the second draft of my paper, and I’m having some mixed feelings about it. I tightened up the first half, and I’m feeling pretty solid on that for the most part. For the second draft I wrote the second half under the technique of writing the personal/creative narrative stuff first, and then seeing where the research/connection to APIA pop culture fit in. Unfortunately, it didn’t really click with where I thought my research could be implemented, so I just put a small placeholder paragraph with some important points on the musician I was wanting to make connections to. For the final draft, that’ll be the big challenge for me, as I’m having a hard time seeing how my personal narrative and the research I’ve done could fit together. I don’t think it’s a total lost cause, I’ll just have to be as *~creative~* as I possibly can be.

Other than that, I’ll have to spend some time tightening up how the paper flows so that my overall message isn’t murky. It’s one thing for it to make sense to me, but I want to be as clear as possible for whoever might read the final product (even if it’s just Kris). I’ve been kind of weary about the format I’ve chosen to define home, because it’s not as cut and dry as “it is this physical location”. Although, that’s ostensibly what my paper is supposed to be about. It’s more of the experiences I had there that are linked to finding things to do, which is pretty necessary if you live anywhere in the Midwest and don’t want to go nuts. So it’s more of sub-homes within this larger physical home. I don’t know. That’s the only way this assignment could have made sense to me, I guess.

Posted in Rock | Comments Off on Final project thoughts: Week 7

I just wanted to include this really great article by Katherine Nagasawa on Chicago’s unofficial Japantown, and how it all but vanished and why. (There’s also an audio version if you’re so inclined.)

Going forward with my paper, I’m going to implement this information into what I wrote on Kosuke Fukudome, who was quoted as saying that he thought Chicago had a great Japanese community, but by that time it had been pushed out into the suburbs of Chicago. I also want to tie it in to how I didn’t even know that community existed as a kid when I was around Wrigleyville (apparently the community mentioned in the article was about a half mile south of Wrigley).

I’m going to spend tomorrow writing and listening to Tatsu Aoki’s music so I can move forward with the music portion of my paper. Hopefully by the end all of this makes for a cohesive paper.

Posted in Rock | Comments Off on Research log: week 6

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.

Posted in Rock | Comments Off on Research log: week 5

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

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.

Posted in Rock | Comments Off on Research log – Week 3

I’m still in the process of narrowing the topic for my paper more, and hopefully the researching process helps me get more of a clear focus. I decided that along with focusing on my childhood I would also focus on the Midwest, where I spent the entirety of my childhood. I want to try not to homogenize Midwest culture because there are a lot of distinct and complex aspects to it as far as being a cultural location.

I’ve decided to focus more on one APIA group in a Midwest setting to narrow my topic more, which hopefully I will know by next week. I have a film to watch this weekend to help start my research called My America . . . or Honk If You Love Buddha by a documentarian named Renee Tajima-Peña (thanks, Chico). From what I’ve read of it so far it’s a documentary on Tajima-Peña driving around the country and examining what it means to be Asian-American in a racial landscape that has drastically changed since her childhood. It’s also inspired by On the Road by Jack Kerouac, which is a book I never read but have heard people talk about enough so that I think I have an okay understanding of the general plot. Maybe. We’ll see. I’ll talk about what I took away from the movie next week.

Posted in Rock | Comments Off on Project Thoughts pt. 2

I’m still in the process of working out what my idea of “home” truly is. So far I think the closest thing I can think of to what home is for me is my childhood and growing up. It seems like sort of a broad concept, but I’m thinking I can study different portrayals of adolescence through the lens of Asian American/Pacific Islanders via different media such as films, short stories and novels.

I think as far as the creative side of this project is concerned the concept of childhood could generate a lot of narrative possibilities. I’m just afraid that it is too broad that I’ll get sort of lost while trying to portray it, especially while trying to present it alongside through the lens of APIA pop culture. But, I would be interested in seeing if there are significant intersections between my experiences during adolescence and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, even though that is not a group that I belong to.

At the very least I’ll try to tighten this up with some specific examples of portrayals in pop culture of APIA adolescence and start drawing connections between my experiences and theirs, and maybe try to focus on one aspect or medium within pop culture.

Posted in Rock | Comments Off on Initial Project Thoughts