Good sports

I guess any day you dodge all the bullets is a good day. Of course, some would point out a good day would be best described without the use of firearm metaphors.

The Berkeley Tournament did seem a bit spottier than previous years, but it finished by 10:30, which I figure is on par with the usual. I wasn't there the whole time, though, so I'm still catching up on all the details. There's always some grumbling after CMAT, but it does sound a bit more serious this time around. Heard of a little incident with some China coach that seemed to be handled well. I was there to help close things out at the end of the day judging intermediates. I felt a little rusty frankly -- a few decisions I might rethink, but I'm generally comfortable with the scores I awarded.

I didn't spend the whole day at the tournament, for a change.(1) I was pretty clear beforehand that I'd be out that afternoon catching my first ball game of the year. I was all set to go rain or shine, but in what might be considered an act of divine intervention, we got partly cloudy skies with a few good breaks of sunshine as we watched the Giants roll over the Braves 12-6. Even got a bit of a sunburn watching it all. Possibly the most satisfying game I've attended in years. ery special thanks to the Flower (aka Lumber's better half) for the freebie!

The tournament after party was hot, crowded, and not broken up by cops, which again is something we had been worried about that didn't come to pass. It ran its course like all parties should -- with the front yard smelling like puke and folks trickling out slowly into the wee hours of the morning. Remembered chatting with some neighbors who had dropped by to see what the fuss was about and pick up a beer. Gotta love Berkeley.


(1) I was there by 8 am to help out with the judging, only to find myself milling about all morning. I think I'm just going to sleep in from now on and show up for the swing shift.

It's still whoring

I was actually writing down my thoughts on Kieu at about the same time I wrote about Eve, but hadn't really sorted out what I really felt about the movie.

Oh it's crummy. Make no mistake. But to a degree I felt vaguely wrong slamming it because it felt something like criticizing the illustrative quality of a pre-schooler's finger painting. It's not so much mean as it is pointless.

As always, the movie doesn't feel so much like a narrative with an actual plot as it is a montage of establishing shots. Dialog runs not so much like an interaction between characters as they appear to be monologues of two or more characters spliced together through some daring and edgy editorial pizazz (they aren't, btw). Absolutely every shot, even those in broad daylight, look like they were shot overexposed under the fluorescent glow of a Safeway produce aisle. (Maybe this is to be praised for consistency -- critical, 'climactic' scenes feature characters picking produce and riding Muni buses.) Equipped yet again with merely two facial expressions (blank & upset) and speech lacking inflection and syncopation, the protagonists are left utterly uncharismatic. The effect is predictable -- you don't care very much about their angst and life history and wish they would go bother somebody else.

That all just had to be said. But again, pointless. Through the forces of democracy(1) and the market, Kieu as a film will likely see little circulation outside of SFIAAFF. Lacking the option to see this film, there is apparently not much point in me warning you not to.

This entry can salvage a few broader points, though:

1) As mentioned last entry I'm perpetually amazed at how Asian American film makers rail against the mainstream media's portrayals of Asians, go to film school, buy/rent expensive equipment, apply to and get some fabulous grants... and then turn around and make films that show pretty much the EXACT SAME THING. Kieu is another example of this -- if this film was made by a non-Asian, people would be horribly offended at the yet again exoticized, emasculated, emotionally-constipated portrayals of Asians.

2) If you think review whoring is an issue with major studio films, you have NO idea how bad it is on the ethno-indie film circuit. At the very least major-releases get enough exposure that dissenting opinions will emerge. (I'm reminded of the murmurs about Sideways being overrated that eventually surfaced back in 2005.) With the ethno-indies you have a cacophony of well-meaning, softballing professional reviewers, reviewers highly connected to the projects and festivals, reviewers having a political agenda, and reviewers that simply don't have the time to write about anything beyond their 'picks' for the fest. The end effect is that you'd only really hear one kind of view. For example:

Variety review
SF Chron festival picks

They mean well, but this is NOT what's going to help Asian Am cinema in the long run. People need to start making better films, not better-reviewed films.

(1) As someone who's been denied the facility to rate films at SFIAAFF twice now, I've got to wonder if disenfranchisement runs rampant at the fest. In one case we had fled the theater halfway through -- if that's not saying something that should go on record, I don't know what is. For this one we were so apprehensive that we essentially procrastinated about leaving for the film and got there too late to recieve the ballots. The snarky slacker demographic is being seriously under-counted.(*)

(*) Sorry about the footnote. Been reading some D.F. Wallace lately and I'm just pedantic enough to think this whole footnote thing might be a good idea.

Nobody does it better

My threshold on the issue is apparently a little higher than many, but I can agree that there continues to be issues with the way Asian Americans are portrayed in Hollywood. In spite of some encouraging developments, we still see Hollywood portrayals of Asian Americans as exotic, emasculated, and emotionally constipated. THANK GOODNESS, therefore, for Asian Am film making, where Asians FINALLY get the opportunity to make their own films that portray Asian Ams as exotic, emasculated, and emotionally constipated.

We stopped into the SFIAAFF last Monday for a double-feature of our own making, catching screenings of "Eve and the Fire Horse" and "Kieu" separated by about one bottle of Sake. (Sorry we didn't catch up after Eve, rancho! We didn't stick around for the Q & A.)

Given some of the things we've seen at the fest, I've become so very very appreciative of a film that elegantly and competently tells a simple story illustrating coherent themes with interesting events and likable characters. Such is Eve. It may not find itself counted among the all-time classics of motion picture, but put it up against similar kid-focused fare from Disney, or even 'serious' kid entries like "In America" and you'll find it'll hold its own and possibly a little more.

Very much like "In America", it portrays the experiences of an immigrant family as seen by two young sisters (in "In America", the family is Irish). Naturally, the immigrant sob story has been done to death, but the kid angle is fresh enough that Eve brings some new things to the table. I'll spare you the plot summary (because I hate writing them, they're boring to read, and they're laden with spoilers), but it manages to squeeze in a surprising amount of edginess in dealing with issues of race and religion while maintaining a whimsical attitude that's true to the subject.

That said, it still suffers from a few minor things that irk me in these kinds of films. The kids are emotive and animated, but the adults in Eve have the emotional range of a light switch, flipping mainly between blank and upset. And as always, ample screen time is spent showing folks bowing before ancestral altars, lighting incense, doing things for good luck, lacing dialog with natural symoblism (sometimes sarcastic, thank goodness), etc. Given the strong religious themes, some of this is naturally necessary, but there's a rote feeling to these kinds of scenes in these films that I'd sooner do without. Yes, they're foreign and have different customs. WE KNOW. Just move the story along, please. The way some films show this stuff, you'd think people spent half the day doing this kind of thing.

This entry's long enough. I'll hit Kieu next time, and BOY, will I hit it.

Eugene 911!

So it's been a week since the first 'part' and a good two weeks since the original event, but let's just wrap this up...

Miscalculated after-parties are becoming something of a tradition at Collegiates. Let us not speak of Stanford 2004, where at least one other guy and I got tossed out of a club. The Davis 2005 committee rented out a terrific space on campus only to be forced to host it DRY.

And now this year.

EPD gives more than 85 drinking citations this weekend -- Oregon Daily Emerald

Of course, making the news can be considered something of an accomplishment. Such things are not without fallout, though. If you were there or simply very sympathetic, do help.



At least until then, however, I'd say things were going swimmingly. It was kind of a slow start, probably because our very hospitable and unsuspecting hostess apparently had no idea what she had agreed to. When we got there, no alcohol was to be found and the residents by all appearances were ready to settle in for a mellow Saturday night of TV and Gamecube. Within what must have been minutes, the garage was a dance floor, tubs of punch were mixed, and the occupancy of the house went up by at least two orders of magnitude.



That all came to a screeching halt at around 11:30 when Eugene's "Party Patrol" unit hit. These guys wasted absolutely no time screening folks for age and alcohol and issuing 22 underage drinking citations. For those of us from the free republic of Berkeley, this was quite a shock.

Especially in our condition, there wasn't much that we could do, so we hopped the van back to the hotel. After lounging around at our hotel lobby for a bit, I turned in. At the very least I'd get a decent night's sleep for the drive home.

Back to School

In spite of it all, I've found that it's pretty unusual for me to regret checking out a Wushu tournament. I was really wishy-washy about heading up to check out/help out with Collegiates last weekend, but even with all the brushes with icy death on the I-5, police oppression, and sleep deprivation, I came back satisfied that I'd made good use of my precious, precious weekend.

The event was tiny in comparison to previous years, which is naturally a bummer, but I must admit it's nice to run through these things without intense time pressure. I barely worked a third of the time I was there, which allowed me to contribute to posterity by taking lots and lots of pictures, applying in a really half-assed way the various things I've learned in my photography workshop.


I'm not sure if the Oregon guys fully appreciate this, but they've got a really nice looking gym. It gets plenty of natural light and I love the wood paneling and scaffolding.

In the afternoon, rays of sunlight would hit various parts of the rings which made for some interesting lighting opportunities.


This is Kunyu from the Stanford team. I got my hand at doing some ringleading this time, which helps me recall people's names. Stanford went on to win the coveted team title.


Here's Caren from the Cal team. No idea what the results are from all these, but you know where to get 'em.


Filip from the Stanford team. The shot sort of works even if the exposure is probably about a stop too dark.


The Cal 'Happy Bears' team group set stood out dramatically from the rest of the field. There was a general sense talking to folks afterward that this whole trend of including LENGTHY sparring sets in group sets has got to stop. I'm slightly looser on this in that I think some is okay if people can positively NAIL it -- i.e., if it really looks like a fight. That sort of thing takes real time and skill to pull off. If not, I'd highly recommend ditching it.

The Cal team did have a lengthy sparring section, but it was very well choreographed and very convincing. But in the end, I generally side with the view that group sets are about perfect timing and coordination. Maybe folks have forgotten, but you'd be shocked how awesome people look when they're perfectly together across a complicated series of moves.

A small tournament meant a relatively early stop (after a pretty forgettable and impromptu 'Mad Tricks' competition), which left plenty of time for...


They never seem to print out enough of these things.

To be continued...

Freedom!

Happy Friday

You will feel SO much better about pictures of yourself after this:

http://www.fluideffect.com/

Look in the portfolio, particularly the before/after sections.

Re-upped

I renewed my KQED membership some weeks back, entitling me to a whole other year of snooty, self-righteous indignation for the low, low price of $11 a month. I waited for them to do the New Yorker DVD-ROM offer, which should contain everything that magazine has ever printed since its inception. New Yorker's been a tad spotty for me, but the beauty of a searchable DVD-ROM is that if any particular writer catches my attention off-line, I can look 'em up directly on that there disc. This was in addition to my choice of the standard gift, which ended up being that emergency crank radio again. I really don't need any more umbrellas or mugs, but I do find some appeal in having one of those crank radios on every single vehicle and at every location I spend my time in.

I also take it as an opportunity to bitch about KQED programming some more. There's isn't much to gripe about, actually. They've picked up two terrific shows right when I'm paying attention, during the 11pm-2am weekday slot. "Day to Day" targets the busy 20/30-somethings with slicker production and younger hosts. "News & Notes" brings the Black perspective to current events. (Yes, their show description says 'Black', not 'African-American'. Very refreshing.) It's pointed without coming off like some SNL skit spoofing cable-access 'Black Power' shows. While the uninitiated would mark the show as colloquial after hearing a few slang terms tossed around, the more astute would realize that similar terms are thrown around by your McLaughlins and Lehrers all the time. It's just that your 20/30-something years of experience with the American media have acclimated you to the latter and not the ones that perfectly intelligent people from different backgrounds use.

And then there's the third hour.

I had once tried setting an alarm on my radio to send me to bed at 1 am. But now simply keeping it tuned to KQED until that hour has the similar effect of making it the most loud and obnoxious thing in my room. That's when the breathy voice of pompous gasbag Christopher Lydon introduces us to "Open Source", a show which as a goal attempts to reproduce the level of discourse on Internet blogs. In many ways it meets its goal. Like most blogs, the show is inflated, recklessly opinionated, biased, and tragically uninformed, squandering the resources of a valuable medium through a crippling lack of craft.

I actually remember Lydon from a long drive back up the grapevine some years ago surfing Central Valley radio stations (furiousg was there). It was memorable for me because of some bit he was doing where he had some historian/actor on pretending to be (I kid you not) the ghost of Thomas Jefferson. Besides the hubris and sheer hokeyness of the concept, I just saw absolutely no need for it. It did nothing an informed interview on Jefferson wouldn't have accomplished, and only served to muddle things by speculating on issues that Jefferson couldn't have possibly imagined. This was apparently a different show that Lydon was doing, but as I heard a few weeks ago, he's brought the bit over to Open Source as well.

If you, like me, never really had any notion of the difference between good and bad interviewing and discussion moderation, you will after Open Source. Listen as Lydon astounds you with an impressive lack of understanding of both his guests and their arguments. He'll make spurious assumptions, ask disgracefully leading questions, interrupt guests, goad them into speculation, take quotations radically out of context, and phrase queries like pompous high school essay topics. At times I really wonder if he's actually listening to his guests all. Compare and contrast this tripe with the damned near symphonic orchestration of interviews, debates, and listener call-ins by the likes of 'local' talents like Michael Krasny (or even his many understudies), to say nothing of other NPR interview/call-ins like "Talk of the Nation".

The irony, of course, is that I'm writing this all in a blog entry as somebody who does not study media as a career. Which kind of is the point -- it's great that there's this resource for expression and talk-back, but unless proven otherwise, it's really no more than listener call-in. Shows like Open Source would have you thinking otherwise if you're not careful.

Turkey Free

Some thoughts on turkey:

• It's the form of meat that's closest to vegetable. So often it seems to serve as a kind of meat substitute, replacing beloved beef, chicken, or pork in recipes for chili, burgers, sausages, etc. Anecdotal evidence confirms that the bird itself lacks its own actual flavor, and like tofu, rice, or white bread, serves mainly as a base for items having actual flavor. In terms of sheer quantity after the fourth Thursday of November, it may as well be the staple of one's diet. Indeed, turkey becomes much more appetizing when one pictures two slices of it wrapped around steaming hot slices of pastrami and the sharpest of cheddars with crisp iceberg lettuce, tomato slices, and a dollop of mayo.
• If people really loved it so much, it'd be all over the place. We'd have it every single day. You'd be having it animal-style in your double-double from In-n-out. You'd be ordering it rare from the Black Angus. It'd be done asada-style in your super burrito. I'm not sure what the resource requirements are to farm/ranch/whatever turkey in mass, but science would find a way to do it, IF THE DEMAND WAS THERE.
• It's amazing the lengths people have gone to in recent years to make the bird more interesting to eat. Roasting no longer sufficient, people soak it in various briney concoctions for days before roasting it or plunge it into vats of hot oil at tremendous risk to life and property. All to make eating the damned thing that much more tolerable.

I got a bird this year, but decided to delay cooking it until after we come back from Brazil. Then, free from the trappings of holiday tradition, I'd like to try the deep fry in a ceremony that will be like something of a cross between an ICBM test launch and a holiday feast.

As for this Thanksgiving dinner, it was spent turkey-free with the family over at a cousin's place in the south bay. The cousin's wife had whipped up an odd cider of sorts from the tangerines in the backyard which went well with a shot of Johnny Walker Black.

There are many like it

... but this one's mine.


Um... the arrow's missing 'cause Starbuck took it.

So I like figure sculpting and all, but it was getting frustrating because I really didn't know WTF I was doing. Earlier in the fall I finally signed on for an instructional course that a friend of mine from work was teaching. Approaches vary, as always. He tended to be pretty technical and went in-depth into muscle groups and how they layer on top of each other. Free sculpting classes will be starting back up at work and we'll have a guy from the model shop running those. He's much less technical, but by all accounts is terrific.

My friend's class was open to the public, which produced an odd mix. You'd have your art students on the one hand. On the other you'd have your retirees and desperate housewives. Watching my friend deal with this latter group was damned entertaining. Oh God, the WHINING. "Well I DID what you SAID!!!" usually barked with a nasal shrill, was often heard.

Anyway, I got a lot out of it. I didn't really produce anything worth mentioning from that class because we were building up and tearing down a lot. But I finally finished off another studio session with all that knowledge fresh in mind, and I think my product isn't entirely disgraceful.

People are often curious how these studio sessions run. Well, typically you meet 3 hours once a week for 6-8 weeks. The first one we all agree on a pose, and that's what the model does for the whole session. Once that's settled, you just do your thing. Some people do what's there. Some stylize it. Usually you exaggerate the pose a lot for drama. I ended up bulking the guy up a lot and giving a higher angle to his aim. I actually did some archery back in high school, so I made a lot of adjustments to form and hand positions.

Yes, the model is stark nekkid the whole time. And no, it isn't awkward. After a while you're cracking jokes like you would with a co-worker. Quite often we end up having dinner with them after the session.

It was a great pose in general, but I think I had more affinity for it since it is more martial than the typical poses we pick. I actually had to do this particular one across 4 sessions. Work was too busy to make the earlier parts of this session.