Author: Joshua Martin

In-class Writing: Dancing About Architecture

The lyrical contents of this song are not especially subtle, layered, or nuanced, but if anything I think that’s what appeals to me about this one so much. In the fraught political times we live in, there’s something unusually soothing about hearing a relaxed voice just talking through these issues from a perspective twenty-six years in the past and still getting it entirely right. So often when we revisit older media we talk about how things haven’t “aged well,” a graceful term used to say that social norms have progressed such that even the things we may have loved at the time in hindsight seem ugly by today’s standards. This piece suffers no such fate.  The subject matter being dealt with here is dark to be sure, but there’s something to the delivery of it all that just makes it feel like things are going to be alright. The intermittent addition of a reverb effect to the vocals and the habit of dragging out the end of these words creates an almost dreamlike impression, perhaps aiding that positive vibe by making it feel less “real” in a literal sense while still speaking truthfully about the matter at hand. The line I love the most in this is a clear mission statement:

I hate to sound macabre
But hey, isn’t it my job
To lay it on the masses and get them off their asses
To fight against these fascists

Having this direct intent is a part of what makes this song so reassuring. It’s confronting the reality that we’re faced with, but doing it in a way that doesn’t leave you with a feeling of dread the way so many other things these days do. The last repeating line, an echoing “Not me,” makes an effective closer, grasping at the core of inequality in America in two words.

In-class Writing: Album Art

The Beatles – Revolver

To put a single term to what this art produces, I think “contrast” would be it. Contrast both within the elements of the artwork itself, and from the albums this would have been competing for attention against, making it stand out visually at a time when the band’s sound was beginning to lean more experimental. While at first the flat white faces create a sense of low detail in the line drawings, there is in fact incredibly high detail, but all of it localized to the many tangled locks of hair and the various things hiding within them. The use of photographs in a collage itself contrasts from the style of the drawings, all of this saved from becoming cluttered by the merciful decision to render it all in black and white, adding some cohesion to the otherwise chaotic piece. At the same time as these elements cohere, they are also at times used to create an uncanny element, photographed eyes, lips, and ears standing in over the drawings, creating a sense of depth that feels deliberately out of place against the otherwise featureless faces.

Class Notes: Week 2

April 9
ABC – American-born Chinese
FOB – Fresh off the boat
UBC – University of a billion Chinese
UCLA – University of Caucasians living among Asians

PopCon: MoPOP, Seattle, April 11-14
Only You and Your Ghost Will Know: Music, Death, and the Afterlife

I write therefore I am

Fiction
Poetry
Drama
Creative non-fiction

“art is a lie that leads to the truth”

Creative non-fiction, balance between “eye and I”

sight – visual
smell – olfactory
sound – aural
taste – gustatory
touch – tactile

“writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

Intrinsic vs Extrinsic

Ben Yagoda, The Sound on the Page

April 10
pedagogy – theory, practice, and philosophy of teaching
peda – children
gogy – leading
Paidagogos – slave in Greece who taught children

seminarium – “seed plot”

April 12
My America (… or Honk if You Love Buddha), 1997, 87 mins, dir. Renee Tajima-Peña
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
Linh Dinh, Postcards from the End of America (2017)

Searching for “Asian America”
Victor Wong, Jack Kerouac, beatnik culture, Chinatown
New Orleans, Filipino matriarchs, Asian Americans considered as white
Bill and Yuri, WWII, Japanese internment, Civil Rights Movement
Duluth, MN, garment workers, Hmong family
Seattle, Seoul Brothers, “by any means necessary”

American Studies
“What is America?”
“What is an American?”

Jeff Chang, Who We Be

442nd Regimental Combat Team

Class Notes: Week 1

April 2
I’m focused on media studies and analysis. I’ve just come from a less than stellar experience in my last program and am eager to get back to a place not necessarily of comfort, but of at least reasonable confidence that I have a handle on what’s going on in the program. I came to this program because of my prior experience in Afrofuturism and to continue my work in better understanding media. I hope to gain new cultural knowledge regarding Asian/Pacific Islander American history and how that applies to and influences various media types, and in turn how that media affects the people who experience it.

Freedom and Growth

Talking Points: Alien Encounters

On page 16, what do you make of the paragraph on “what it might mean to be truly popular?” Do you notice similar discussions of “good” representation happening today?

On page 20, the “Asianization of America” is discussed. How do these issues brush up against the issue of cultural appropriation? Where does healthy cultural exchange end and exploitation begin?

Page 25 discusses the way that consumerism becomes a means of constructing identity for Asian Americans. Is this a practice you’ve taken notice of in your own experience? Do you think this is or can be a good way to develop an understanding of yourself?

Page 28 mentions the use of technology to “produce discourses and practices of identity and community, culture and capital.” Does the use of technology actually make these practices more accessible, or only differently accessible? What are the setbacks?