Notes on a paler shade of yellow

Ten years ago in the future is supposed to be a better tomorrow. But it somehow feels the same...

Like when Sifu was yellow but not green. And launched many an orb skyward, way over eighty-six inches tall. Or the time as a grasshopper who escaped, incognito, from past transgressions in violation of the laws of gravity. So that invisible nations licking their wounds rose up to avenge the myriad wrongs. Fists of fury that spoke Zarathustra flying in mid-air

Yet, those were halcyon times.

They looked up and saw a brave new world spinning crazily off its axis. Sooner than later, someone would rescue them. A hero, perhaps, who can transcend the ordinary to play against death in a winner-take-all game. The world then needed hope as it does now.

So head East, young masters and go far.

Notes on iced tea

Three stainless steel towers stored sideways in memory of sweeter times...

When a mountain brewed by the sun and naked of fructose refreshes nevertheless which explains the condensation underneath the plastic rim. And outside, green leafy vines intertwine the saggy vinyl clothesline hung to approximate a football field upside down. Your sunburnt back is peeling off fuzzy winter melons.

Yet jasmine and rock candy can be frozen into a compress to alleviate soiled linen napkins. Though simple syrup, a boiled concoction of water and refined sugar, on each of the other hands, always says hello in polite company. Good manners breed better taste especially in citric circles.

Or so the British but not the Chinese would like to believe.

Notes on ten years of mediocrity

To recount a decade fixated by the numbers in concert with fancies of time lost in space can be marked, if not often punctuated, by an affliction to that which is currently of sporting event. But sepia tones do brown around the edges as nostalgia weeps the weepy tear. And you ask why and receive a penance beyond reproach through a Congressional hearing under perjury...

So what, pray tell, is in a name?

Hurtus Maximus!
SonofaMiltonBradley!
Manny more to come!
ARoids Forever!
Kobe's Beefs
Que Syringe Syringe
¡Viva Canseco!
Sons of World B Free
Oh My Favrian Tears!
Human Growth Hormone
Anabolically Yours
Artificial Turfs
Dribbly
Knee High Tube Socks
Balco Incorporated
Up the Middle
Topical Ephredra Rub
Ephedra Injections
A little dribbly...
Klang! Klang! Klang!
MEN huddled together
Chico's Bail Bonds
considerably smaller
Dick Taters
Ghosts of 1969
Full of Cork
one brick at a time
Between the legs
Cloud of Dust
A Swift Boat
*fling* fling*
A Good Piece of Ash
Ephedra Cocktails
Golden Triangles
Really Tight Shorts
The Moving Pick
A Bag of Chips
Sonjas Heinie
Mister Bouncy Balls
Missus My Balls
a bag of chips
John Goldfarb Inc.
Tiananmen Squares
The Divine Wind
Men's Hair Club
United Hair Lines
H.O.V.A.
On Leong Association
The Would-Be Tacklers
Nation of Islam
Kuomintang

Such is pure conceit. Or at the very least, chic silk-screened tee shirts.

Memory Into Flesh: A Tribute to the Performance and Activism of Anida Yoeu Ali

Once upon a biased time, the intolerant world Anida Yoeu Ali lived in revolved around performance poetry. Or poetry performed by a young but powerful Asian American female voice. Of brash words, rightly so, that when spoken cajole, accuse, incite or inspire, revere, love, to say the least or rather the most really about a plethora of social and political woes. And there she was, a portrait of a Cambodian Muslim refugee as a spoken word artist if you will fighting a verbal war against the racist neoconservative times when paradoxically rap rhythms abounded and hip-hop attitudes held sway. Even her audience back then knew Anida under a collective identity, another surname.

Fast forward to now. And the many untold stories told by words that move and shape a body of work, literally her body from another time, displaced by not one, but often many tongues spoken in defense of an undying faith in community poetically remain.

Anida Yoeu Ali as performance artist and activist remembers. Carrying an onerous weight from which she cries out, her oppressed voice still flings words in outrage. To affect change, to right wrongs, to make the world itself an equitable and magnanimous place to live for all is what she believes as Khmer Rouge survivor who becomes a Woman Warrior.

This, of course, is her natural calling. To use so many words, that is. But deep down, she knew or rather came to realize how text whether spoken or written becomes fragile. It is after all internalized, a hermetic record that resides on paper as line, something two-dimensional or within time as sound faded.

So why does she then sacrifice these words? True to her artistic instincts, Anida sought another direction from or through action to reinvent another language of her physical self that gave body to text as static and moving image beyond calligraphic or ideographic form. She understood the contextual nature of how wielding words on stage related to time-based movement in terms of performance and sculpture as methodology.

Now Anida Yoeu Ali continues to speak not only in volume, but mass and space as well as time. For her, the three-dimensionality of her body gives her text another structure, a living surface that follows many varied and generalized functions, all of which reference specific issues concerning gender, sexuality and identity that also broadly reflect the politics of representation. Which then also allows her the conceptual framework to incorporate a larger history that connects who she is to specific memories associated with self and place healing her mind, body and soul. In a way her work transcends into a deeper body politic investigating surface (flesh), space (figure) and time (memory) as exterior and interior material in addition to performative object in response to the past, present and future that shapes her political and spiritual being.

In other words, Anida Yoeu Ali is willing to change the world beginning with herself. Such courage is always to be admired, applauded and cherished. Because to remember is not to forget.

Laura Kina: A Many-Splendored Thing

Glance quickly at a Laura Kina painting and what comes to mind at first is Hello Kitty goes to Bollywood in Pearl Harbor by a Coca Cola sign. Or surely Pop gone haywire as the resultant byproduct the artist creates deftly fuses these loaded icons into a NeoPop Orientalism or less ironical Post Japonisme of East morphing West and vice versa not just Americanized but transnationalized.

Yet to label her oeuvre strictly as such is an injustice because what you also see ostensibly hybridizes the anecdotal and historical, family and society, private and public conflated through collage of art imitating, or drawing from, life, particularly her life as a mixed Asian "hapa haole" alternately fascinated, bemused and obsessed with being in-between.

Which is why upon a closer look describing her artistic process akin to “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing” is so apt. Picture, if you recall, Jennifer Jones as a forlorn Eurasian doctor atop a hill overlooking Kowloon Bay in Hong Kong pining for her lover, a married journalist returned to America played by William Holden and come to understand why Kina’s version of her floating world so much resembles the movie itself. Indeed, both “colorfully” depict mixed race representations beyond accepted cultural norms except that Hollywood in this maudlin adaptation based on true events really does exoticize the subject matter as taboo whereas Kina selectively reinvents the nonfictional into the fictive Asian American mainstream. Not commercially slick as something pejorative but professionally crafted by her ability to wield a brush with facility, precision and grace to be part artifice, partly romantic. So not only is it dramatization but autobiography beyond pop culture in collision with Pop Art.

And that is her genius: Kina circumvents the so-called “multicultural” melodrama instead preferring a more straightforward approach celebrating the sameness of difference that in doing so resists the role of victim inherent to the book, movie or song with a good-natured smile, bright colors and an even sunnier disposition as it were. But this is not to say that her overall work is apolitical. Nothing could be further from the truth as she constantly confronts the status quo not in search of but to challenge identity as a given. In fact, her practice seems centered on the question about how such multiplicities that constitutes the Asian American Diaspora become seamlessly perceived if not understood as in her series of life-sized portraits dealing with the famous Loving vs. Virginia Supreme Court case.

By this then, “many” to Kina is not so much an adjective as it functions as a conceptual directive. Bringing many things together, occupying many places at once belies the generalization of how she combines and recontextualizes the multitude of bits and pieces into layered, oftentimes multiple paneled compositions full of the recognizably everyday versus the intimately arcane. A swatch of fabric belonging to her maternal grandmother, floral patterns from kimonos, a snippet from a favorite Brady Bunch episode, an old black and white family photograph, these very personal images never appear detached as if truncated or worse amputated but rather beautiful because Laura loves to share a glimpse of her past. So true to form, she bends time, dovetails related events and mixes mass media which, of course, compels the viewer to acknowledge and advocate "ikigai" or the Japanese belief of "a sense of life worth living."

The work on display covering almost the last fifteen years reflects this attitude of a world we are very much curious about and a vital part of. Just be happy to see the way Laura Kina lightens the gravity by which everyone walks through it nimbly and sprightly.

Notes on a floating world, or about sifu, space and sushi

Rudi Gernreich dressed completely in white tiptoes upside down in a tenuous circular fashion. One after another, former pupils in pristinely bleached retrofitted outfits follow his footsteps onto the empty horizon, each individually vocalizing the same tune that grows louder synchronously. Indeed (and contrary to scientific evidence), their collective voices do project well in far space, a plaintive gravity into the otherwise austere weightlessness of nothing. And just as suddenly, the modernist drama reaches a funereal crescendo.

Eight years after the fact, the floating worlds above offer a floating bento box of liquidified sushi off the menu.

Notes on the River Kwai

An hour passes by and the tree somewhere in Brooklyn grows older.

Such coincidence can only be divine wind, a perfect storm that swirls gusty orange cones in flashing orange lights. Nothing moves, everything freezes, only brazen thoughts discourteously converge. In but not on edge, the violatile fuse so out of context just fails to light. The telltale hiss of trailing sparks never materialize as if drowned by the existing moisture of the surrounding choppy waters. Yet the instructions on the yellow box says to pull the tab out to activate.

Where is William Holden and when will he save us?

Notes on white on rice

Over a billion served or twin humps, double arches and no flat feet that Ruth Asawa weaves endlessly. Besides, her milk cartons empty out pure unnutritious white rice.

So are tubers more starchy? she asks.

His bloated little stomach vomits out watermelon in reply.

Notes on the spring that skips by

The champagne backdrop shimmers a translucent grayness from which subtle washes build up imaginary mountains on either side. Huge accordioned screens separate the people from the stage before them as the lights, the thundering skies, flicker. A tin bird weaves the navigated course blindfolded. It is a one-dimensional trick but the audience claps anyway. Their village just elongated off the frame horizontally into a perpetual mist.

But where does the hermit sit? Beside, behind or in front of the metallic branches? Each a disfigured limb snakes throughout harmlessly in the foreground yet the old bearded man is oblivious, focused instead on his carton of thinly sliced chow fun. From a long distance, his tiny figure becomes one continuous noodle.

Pink blossoms bloom, its petals blown off from a gust of hot wind. On the ground, its pinkness fades immediately to a waxy white, swirling around like watery fibrous pulp until it becomes sheets of reborn paper.

Contained within an oddly flat bottle, nothing changes at all because time stands expectantly still.

"And away we go..."

"Blue skies... nothing but blue skies makes my brown eyes blue!"

So it goes somewhat uninterrupted, almost consecutive like Pete Rose chasing Joe DiMaggio. Except Dom and the other forgotten Marx brother thins the water weaker than hemoglobin. Abroad six weeks is after all more than the doctor ordered even if the boy fell sick enough to require Benadryl. Funny how an ear infection sedated the resultant nausea of turbulent air. But given the high winds off the Pacific maxing out at hurricane speeds, the slow descent lasting over an hour longer than was broadcast proved that luck be a lady tonight and every night.

So sticking with the fellows you came in with to the tropical peninsula some call a vacation paradise south of the border just before the yuletide cheer and what happens is pure pandemonium. Norman Rockwell no habla espanol where turkey and gimlets still remain the colonial tradition. Talk about Providence but divine intervention of the decidedly human kind interceded as an exchange rate twenty dollar cab ride to fetch provisions. Stockpiling for the next Armageddon because of unpreparedness does cost an arm and a steak bone or two. The desert can be very dry indeed because home away from home requires survivor ingenuity rather than know-how. But one glance at the vista with a temperate temperature warming your eyes first then skin next melted any residual thaw. Eighty degrees Fahrenheit tends to do exactly that. Archaeologically speaking though, the new eighth wonder of eating the local delicacy of what tasted like chicken pizza only salivated the glands for more all-you-can-eat buffet. Such sustenance was essential to combat the constant arm fatigue from the comedic musical chairs routine dislocating the ultra light weight stroller. If anything the experience functioned as a test run for the larger and longer travail because the smaller increments only whetted suspicions of whether distance or duration would claim ultimate victory.

Forgotten notes

A diagonal line circumnavigates the sphere and cuts through, ninja precise. No ordinary ginzu knife needed just clear plastic bags to contain the remnants.

A mission made impossible

Morning again, a double bargain as wheels touch land calmly. The beige odalisque so tightly bunned but redly aproned clasp their hands and bow in unison as pockets jangle loudly of pilfered cutlery dull to the touch. One of them cries accidently over spilt red wine that to her utter surprise fails to leave a blood stain. Magically it simply disappears as does the entire crew searching for the missing passengers.

Outside the atomic clock inside the peripatetic crocodile starts ticking uncharacteristically loudly and far too annoyingly. A stranger out of the blue fog intercedes to offer ground transportation as a means of improbable escape. Such timing is too fortuitous to dismiss despite its extravagance well beyond conventional exchange rates. But who is to complain? Not us, not yet anyway because that gasp for air will become necessary sooner than anticipated.

His vehicle like the drive in is somnambulant, its six cylinders preternaturally humming scary Broadway tunes. Finally time stands still long enough so that the Nehru jacket returns to vogue behind the marbled counter. Issey Miyake security speak into their sleeves opening Sesame Street to Ugly American tourism and Yellow journalism. Randolph Hearst conspires to outduel Charles Foster Kane but as usual Orson Wells is first to the table and last to leave.

Unbeknownst to anyone is the execution by firing squad that awaits in the form of a female Benedict Arnold.

REMAKE: The Sequel

As the weather warms up and thoughts turn green because of those magical words, "Pitchers and catchers", being spouted indiscriminately, the annual task that is the concomitant art exhibit for the upcoming Asian American Showcase (usually in April) invariably falls upon my lap with a flat thud. But the well from which fresh, new ideas-once so full, clear and crisp---now runs dry, and so it is only fitting that I find myself along with my cohort Chris Naka recycling the theme for this exhibit from a class I currently teach:

Henceforth the appropriately titled REMAKE: The Sequel of which, briefly and loosely, the description is as follows:

Can a copy of something be better than the original? Is it “just as good?” Nowadays Hollywood and mass media sanctions the remake by constantly churning out sequels. A case in point is the plethora of Asian cinema, animation and/or popular culture that is literally remade by Westerners and vice versa now inculcated into our collective consciousness so that each possesses its own life or identity. But critics and pundits often stigmatize that which is copied unfairly as “unoriginal”. To misquote the Iron Chef, "Which version reigns supreme?" This exhibit will ask selected artists to or who "remake" favorite pre-existing works or classics to spark new dialogue of what is authentic or real versus fake or bogus depends on the different facets of constant reinterpretation and redefinition.

Notes at ease

A paper napkin doodle dandy tapdances a jig around Jimmy Cagney atop a manila folder. Over there he unfolds a xeroxed blueprint in the sultry summer afternoon sun, his baseball cap melting. One by one, kinfolk follow his steps blindly, each touching a sequence of primary colored dots in procession. And so Master Po asks Grasshopper (the young Kwai Chang Caine) to ponder the true meaning of chinoiserie...but he hesitates. In ascending order of white, yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, red, brown and finally black, his harelipped mouth uncurls and money immediately exchanges hands furtively. The project is way behind schedule without clout. But somehow it works a quick sidestep, almost an electric slide powered by reverse current, to complete the job above budget.

Behind the golden section guarded by stanchions, her portrait hangs high in porcelain inside the pavillion. The performer hired to reenact the complicated moves nearly breaks his back from the constant contortion. His pain is captured digitally by an amateur shutterbug hired by the family soothsayer.

Notes after a full month

The numerology luckily divined equals twenty-five strokes, each lap a full length shy of two feet by three and a half inches. After nine centimeters of thirty hours and sixteen minutes, the mathematician recalculated and ultimately deferred the word problem to a handwriting expert to work out another solution. Instead he called long distance seeking spiritual validation.

Outside, an odd couple wheezes very loudly, sinuses simultaneously blaring a full retreat. The sportswriter of the two is looking for an outlet to plug in his portable electric Smith-Corona before midnight. His teams are in first place clinching divisional titles by wide margins. But first, ask the nurse for some Tylenol, his temperature is well past normal and a delicate constitution needs to be written.

Inside their antiseptic room, both agree after she relents and lets him be happy: in the middle before plum makes perfect sense despite his awkward attempts to anglicize. But the question still lingers as whether to hyphenate or not. Such trouble from a dash no one could anticipate.

Overnight proved restless as jaundice settled in, the result possibly of a viral infection. Another Oscar, a Goldman authorized as a precaution, a bionic tube that sticks out from the top of his head. Even inveterate gamblers refrain from betting against the house, making sure to wash their hands first with antibacterial soap. And so after three consecutive days, the newborn family goes home again a second time, just in time to become a miniature Mister T three days before Halloween.

Utopia toppled

Somewhere out west three consecutive dots followed by three rapid dashes followed again by three rhythmic dots dissipate over the Nebraskan sky, unheard.

Notes about last night

The four blue walls remain undisturbed as it were and all is still. Only in a momentary lapse of concentration did the olive velour cocktail loveseat greatly escape. Swiftly, the Gestapo called out the German shepherd to hunt down the lost stray and both concluded the matter over a barrel of homemade moonshine without even so much as a Yankee Doodle Dandy. Now it guards the unprotected corner where the Cooler King forever bounces his baseball, perpetrating an Orientalist way of life for the time being.

Underneath the Queen, sand pebbles collect and surround the crumbled red envelope. It, too, must stay in place. No one is permitted to move around.

In the other room, talk circulates of imminent relocation. Every night just before supper, the two principal heads gather their thoughts, each mapping out possible scenarios based on careful calculated measurements.

"How about simplicity?" Rob Lowe says.
"But the wood creaks," Demi Moore replies.

Both sit down and wait for night to come.

Songs from Chinatown whisper in the dark. The Hawaiian is banned from humming because his voice evokes nightmares. Yet a quarter past five as dawn breaks, she materializes out of the blue. Her stunned son, lost in conversation, stops in mid-sentence. He smiles, rises and hugs her, blurting repeatedly in joy, "You're back but where have you been?"

Her maternal face beams pure happiness.

Notes to go

An origami ziggurat lilts forward, its hollow spine a ribbed pagoda of trapezoid flaps as if built by Simon Rodia. Towers upon leaning towers of waxed two-ply cardboard bleached white darken the brown gravy within. Underneath, the thermal heating lamp stutters an order to go.

The mother of chef Ming Tsai breathes heavily, flipping spatula and ladle together in clattering harmony. Her dish, a lunch special of stir-fried steel noodles enough to build a thousand miles of railroad track is overcooked but she needs to feed a billion mouths. Beside the wok on the counter is a Tardis of a take-out carton that a whole emigre nation can fit into. She begins to scoop the subgummed melange of moo gai pai just the way the boys over there enjoy. Fragrant steam rises in a billowy cloud that hides Yan Can who is cooking up a tempest in a porcelain teapot while he wails a Cantonese opera about a plane running out of fuel and falling straight out of the sky over Staten Island.

Inside the party room, a network of Soviet nesting dolls disguised as industrial spies trade kulak artifacts for ancient Chinese culinary secrets over a friendly game of strip poker. Boris Badanoff ups the ante to a liter of Kikkoman soy sauce, hoping to bluff with a pair of deuces. Meat cleaver in hand, Hop Sing calls.

Notes on urban parking

Walk on a flying carpet of nails suspended thirty feet in the air gingerly.

Below stubby oak stumps whittled away span upward, a city of angels. Or tall, narrow columns interspersed. Fake wood grain, plastic veneer cover medium density fiberboard arranged in tribute to Tatlin. No leaning tower of Pisa or Babel instead atop each faux bamboo pole is perched athletic shoewear spray-painted gold or some metallic finish in enamel.

Every level is marked and color-coded for your convenience.

On projectile regurgitation

Three separate moments, a simultaneous jumble of far-flung joss sticks, about thirty seconds apart run parallel in marathon time. Who knew things could misalign so perfectly? Yet not surprisingly, the bizarro neighbors straight from an unfinished manuscript are aghast nonetheless.

She pauses and swallows, every meal a Poseidon adventure. Water rushes in, washing away the coral reef, turns and explodes in an upward stream-of-consciousness.

The technician deftly moves the mouse connected by antique plugs to a snowy black and white glass tube and the pixelated image glows, a checkered pattern of visualized Morse code causing eyes to wander. Chutzpah four inches long presages the next coming. On the tarmac each moniker is aflame, shot to pieces over the Pacific. In unison, ghosts shout, "Tora! Tora! Tora!"

Asleep, it crackles a spark and then goes black.

Therefore life is good, Charlie Brown.