Asian-americans breaking through the entertainment barrier

America is a white-bread nation, at least culturally, and on television. Sure, cultural others are shown on television, but they are often parded out as cultural stereotypes - Indian grocer, Chinese over-achieving academic automatons, Japanese ninjas, black gang-members, gay-queens.

But over the years, certain groups have managed to detach themselves from being token stock characters, to becoming normalized - acceptable as real characters on television, where their experiences as people trumps their experience as a minority group. Think Bill Cosby and Will & Grace.

The next break-out group is the Asians. My question is then, where are the mainstream Asian-american acts?

Well, I think I found them - on NBC's show "American's Got Talent.", a variety talent show, a kind of uber-vaudeville where the judges include Brandy and David Hasselhoff (think Baywatch for you younger readers).

They are At Last, an asian boy band from LA. They sing great, have great charisma, and are poised to win a major American talent show. They are on the brink of stardom, and if they do, my bet is that they will finally normalize Asian americans on TV.

But best of all, they innovate: they sing accapella harmonies, barber-shop quartet style, fused with human beatbox, and crazy rythmic vocallings.

Can Americans finally embrace Asian-americans culturally?

From the June 26th semi-final (Aint No Sunshine):



Pay attention to the interview that captures their rupture from the old asian stereo-type, and embracing the american entertainment big-time:

"Our family and friends were really suportive of us, in the beginning they were a little hesitant because they wanted us to pursue profession careers ..in law, in medicine, and stuff like that.. but now they're our biggest fan club."

Bonus: watch Brandy's reaction when the boys start singing. Priceless.

The semifinal on July 20 (Let's Stay Together):

The Peace that Passeth Understanding

I swallow it
Without hesitation
It is a squat sausage
Mottled pink and brown so thick and juicy
You would want to suck it down In one desperate gulp

But it is not easy to swallow
It gets stuck somewhere between the stomach and the gut
Caught in the windings of the intestines
The body knows too well
To welcome such pleasure so easily

It has a sharp metallic aftertaste
Like the blood of the body of a child
Crumpled up beside a road made of asphalt
Melting in the noonday sun
The tarry sludge covers your tongue
Licking the staleness of a spent bullet

Though temptuous its tough fibres
Can only be digested strand by strand
Infiltrating the marrow the bone until
The body cannot be said to be a body anymore
But a frame to hold an idea

Mix n' match music

Here's two of music's most uncomprising uncomprimising female performers covering one of the great testosterone tracks of rock n' roll, the Stones' "Satisfaction" - a jarring meld of the avant-garde squeals of Bjork to the rumbling menace of PJ Harvey. Truly brilliant.

Infogami, hosting served just right

I've slowly been transferring my web-site from my academic research group's server (with the rather unweildy url of http://www.dillgroup.ucsf.edu/~bosco , which is now defunct) to my new infogami web-site (http://bosco.infogami.com).

And I've really enjoyed the transition. For what I want to do, infogami fits the bill. Perfectly.

I don't really want to build my own server, I just need somewhere free to store it.

I don't want to write fancy html/ajax/flash widgets, I just want to write text in an attractive template.

I don't want to register a domain name, I want someone to give me a sensible one for free.

Infogami fits all these requirements.

Yes it is a wiki, but you don't have to host it. Yes it is a wiki, but you don't have to register a domain name. Yes it is a wiki, but you won't have to write one single linux shell script. Yes it is a wiki, but you don't have figure out how to install it.

But unlike a wiki, infogami makes it very easy for you to change the template. To make it look good. It's really hard to change the look of some wikis - and boy are they sometimes ugly. This is because Aaron Swartz is a damn fine programmer who keeps it simple, who knows how to keep the templates in infogami simple and flexible.

To all those people who say infogami is just a glorified wiki, you've missed the point about infogami. Infogami aims to cut-out all the headaches involved in setting up the wiki on some computer.

But what I like most of all is the text editor in infogami - it's bare-bores functionality is precisely it's strength. The text editor always sizes to the window size. i like that. I never have that window within a window scrolling rat-race. I love the mark-down format - it's power wrapped in simplicity - it can handle clean text and embed complex html.

I use to be a total coding monkey - I'd spend hours writing code for recreation. Now I am more interested in writing prose - which is, contrary to popular geek wisdom, a much harder thing to do than programming. Very few writers can write to the level of a typical New Yorker article.

Now I just want a web-site where I can put essays and articles up with a minimum of fuss, and which allows me edit easily. The wiki format makes it so easy to edit a file. No more save and ftp on some random computer, requiring multiple clickety-click steps.

Like a good English butler, Infogami serves me when I need something and dissappears into the background when I don't.

Why AMBER sticks a finger in its users eyes.

I use molecular dynamics packages - complex computer software that simulate the action of very large molecules. There are many such packages, but the big ones are amber, charmm, xplor, gromacs and namd.

I have now used namd and amber, and based on that example, I have to say that amber's input files are a piece of shit.

My complaints are:

1. In the input files for AMBER, why do they use crappy variable names for the pre-historic days of FORTRAN naming conventions. No, I really don't what the variable ntxb. It's the 21st century, variables can be longer than 8 characters. They can even be meaningful. They shouldn't give you eye-sore and send you running to the manual everytime you read the input files 1 week later.

2. If you use input files to start a simulation, why do you also have to add up to 10 command line gcc style options? Why can't you have keywords in the input file to convey the same information to the program??? Everything is in one place, and stored? How friggin' hard is that?

3. Putting positional constraints on different atoms is a great idea. In NAMD, you submit a pdb file, and NAMD will read the constraints from the B-factor column. Great idea - simple to use, complete flexibility for the user. And AMBER? You must enter the positional constraints in the input file via a very special "restraintmask" string, and it's not even defined in the right place in the manual - because you have to run to the appendix where they give you an anemic language to describe what atoms you want constrain, using the very special amber numbering convention. Except that you really have to go back to the beginning of the manual to find that you only have 80 characters to describe constraints.

Poke my eyes out please.

Dance around the world

There's something transcendentally beautiful about this video. It's a little like the first time a cosmonaut looked upon the earth and saw that it was a beautiful globe with no boundaries.



more info: wherethehellismatt.com

migrations

Last weekend, I went to the ODC theater with Kim and friends to see some dance. Although there were only three pieces on offer, I saw one of the best, and one of the worst dance performances of my life.

First the good, Paco Gomes Dancers produced one absolutely breathtaking piece. Five dancers and four frames, of differing heights, this was a beautifully flowing piece where dancers would move frames, and frames would move dancers, in order to produce a walkway on stage for the dancer in the black flowing dress. This was a kinetic piece where points of movement would flow back and forh between dancers and across the stage. The choreography struck that perfect balance between the chaos of the dancers manipulating the frame, and the focus of the walker along the imaginary walkway.

The bad was a horribly stilted mixed media piece called the Red Shoes, which used projected video, pillows, and pebbles, lots of pebbles. There was surprisingly little dancing for a dance piece and lots of poetry. Bad poetry. It was this continuous babble of colourless words delivered in a monotonic drawl. Sometimes the movement on the stage seemed to almost connect with the dialogue. Almost. Not that the words made any sense. The beginning was promising, a pile of pillows, from which a dancer emerged. But throwing piles and piles of pebbles on stage, and then sweeping them around in vaguely geometric waves does not a conceptual art piece make. And random images of huts and rocks and beach become wearing after the 10 minute mark.

Forutunately for us, the evening ende dwith Paco Gomes, and we left the theater in high spirits.

butoh in the dark

The other night, I bumped into Paul who was going to Adobe Books to find a travel book for his road trip. Having nothing better to do, I joined him in the hope of passing some time browsing books. Instead, I was to stumble onto one of the most riveting performances I had ever seen in the Mission.

So we putter inside and I noticed a musician playing a clarinet at the counter. We struck up a conversation. "Oh," said Paul, "I used to play soprano sax, but I've always wanted to play the clarinet." The musician replied that he too, used to play the sax, but switched because the clarinet was a much more versatile and flexible instrument. "After all," the muscician said, "you can make a clarinet sound like a sax but you can't make a sax sound like a clarinet. But guys, you should stay hear to watch the butoh show coming up."

So Paul and I sat down and waited for the show to start, not that I had any idea what "butoh" was, except that it sounded vaguely Japanese. The musicien started playing the clarinet, a vaguely oriental sounding melody with any manner of shuffling changes in tempo. As the music trailed off into silence, the room was doused into darkeness.

From the platform that was raised above the entrance of the building, a figure crept out from behind a board, holding the candle in her hands. In the candle light, the face was hideous lit in an overdone chiaroscuro (full body makeup is one of the characteristics of butoh, which made the figure look ever so creepy). Her movements slow and ponderous. She first explored the top of the platform, using slow in careful movements, where every scrape of the floor, every rustle of clothing could be heard.

Very slowly she made her way down the ladder, with a reptilian grace. At one point, one of her headdresses caught on fire. She quickly pulled the piece of flaming clothing off and smacked it onto the ladder until it went out. Once she got to the ground, she made her way slowly down the shape of the bookshore. Adobe books is a small and disorganised space. It had a long narrow shape with pot-plants, sculptures and sofas scattered throughout the length of the shop.

It took a glacial age for her to make it to the end of the room. She would take slow, deliberate steps, sometimes pausing to explore all the objects in the room. She brushed past us, the audience sitting on the sofas as if we were ghosts. She would roll her frenzied eyes over objects in the room as if seeing for the first time.

Finally, she got towards the end of the room, and the clarinet came back to life. She disappeared behind a bookshelf, and I lost track of her. She then ran around the room, her quiet steps making her a moving target that was difficult to pinpoint. This was accompanied by improvised clarinet and some low-level lights. She ran through the room with a primal energy, like a coiled banshee, at times collapsing in the middle of the room, and the springing back up as if a puppet master pulled on a hidden spring. Screaming, crying, staring, I felt I had made contact with an elemental being.

Finally, after a round of traumatic collapsing and rising, the show ended. With barely a flourish, she snapped back into normalcy. The lights go back up.

What had I seen? I recall the chapter on Masks by Keith Johnstone and it seemed that "butoh" is a form Mask work, which encompases commedia dell'arte, voodoo possession, and classic clown work. In mask work, the wearing of the mask shocks the mind into more primitive states of being.

Heart work

My heart is ready to explode
Pumping hard against my ribcage
A rugby player kicking his way out of a sack
With every kick my sternum rattles
Wind rushes into my overworked lungs
Hungrily sucking in oxygen
Softly absorbed by the tendrils lining the surface of the lung
I feel collapse creeping over my limbs
Crimson-scented flow of blood flush my face
I must look like a tomato
I stop
Breathe
Breathe again