undead astronauts

oh yeah baby. u just don’t know.

I was watching last night’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart where he interviewed Judd Apatow for his new film Funny People. Somewhere in the middle of the interview, the two made a joke about being Jewish, and I had one of those ‘Usual Suspects’ moments where your mind starts replaying clips of past memories and eventually makes sense of something you never realized.
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Thinking about this Asian 2.0 culture feels a bit like trying to design a Rube Goldberg machine.
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this is something that i decided to look up after a discussion w/ AL47. we wondered how nationalism differed from the east to the west and i realized i had seen the information somewhere before. it was probably on gnxp but i wanted to look the information up myself.

so here i’ve put the results of the world values survey up for selected nations from the east and west. i would’ve put all of them on one table, but our blog formatting cuts it off unfortunately. (more…)

After writing the first two posts on Asian 2.0 I’ve decided that listing and describing the myriad of Asian media influences in my life would prove both long-winded and inconclusive, as the exact sentiments I am wishing to express are unclear even to myself.

And so, let’s skip to the heart of the matter. Here is my proposal for the development of a new media culture that I think has potential synergy to it:
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The popular music being produced out of Taiwan and Hong Kong was an important part of my emotional life growing up. I remember my aunt brought me one CD of a successful pianist in Taiwan who released covers of popular Chinese hits. The CD included a small booklet with the sheet music to the songs on the CD, and I was so taken by the music that I brought this small booklet to my classical piano teacher – a red-headed lady who had once threatened to chop me up into little pieces after a poor practice session – so that I could learn one of the songs on it. The pianist was Eric Chen, and I can’t seem to find any solo performances of his, but here is an MV of him accompanying a singer on piano:
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The whole video is pretty funny, but the door block is at 4:05 and the trivia starts at 5:50.

1. new abdc trailer:

2. asians in asia derive less joy from gifts than from luck than ppl in the US. apparently getting gifts upsets the asian sense of control over the environment while luck doesn’t?

This is from the Japanese Horror/Comedy/Musical ‘Happiness of the Katakuris’, loosely based on the Korean film ‘The Quiet Family’, which wasn’t a musical.

there have been a slew of stories on this topic, and i gotta say it’s bugged me that american media has latched onto this. i can’t put it better than what this yw forum poster said:

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Not gonna bother to repost the content here, you can go and waste 5 minutes of your life reading them if you want. Basically a bunch of articles about how Japanese men are all weirdo virgins who go on dates with anime dolls. All these stories smell of Japanese public relations firms planting stories in the Japanese-language media to promote someone’s latest male-advice book about “草食系男子” (grass-eating men), and then the American press picking up the story in translation and running completely out of context with it because it serves their own agenda.

One blogger analysed the “2-D men” story below and found that the statistics Katayama used (like 25% of Japanese men being virgins) are in fact fraudulent:
http://www.mutantfrog.com/2009/07/27…me-fetishists/

Love in 2-D (about guys who allegedly “date” anime characters), by Lisa Katayama
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/ma…pagewanted=all

Huge numbers of examples of this genre …
Japan’s ‘herbivore’ men shun corporate life, sex, by Yumi Otagaki
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1833201

The Herbivore’s Dilemma: Japan panics about the rise of “grass-eating men,” who shun sex, don’t spend money, and like taking walks., by Tom Miller
http://www.slate.com/id/2220535/

In Japan, it’s the men who want to be skinny and cute, by Kaori Shoji
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/st…7017.html?_r=1

There’s even a Wikipedia article about this alleged “草食系男子” phenomenon, which conveniently lists a large number of books on the topic at the bottom.
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%8D%…94%B7%E5%AD%90

Again this closely resembles the whole “yellow cab” panic from two decades ago (about how all Japanese women working overseas were allegedly sleeping with every foreigner they met): a load of bullshit designed to be controversial in order to sell someone’s dumbass book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_…Japanese_media

As some of you know I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Asian American culture, and one of the things I’ve thought quite a bit about is on how to develop a new Asian American identity. Obviously there is something a bit inorganic and even superficial in trying to invent a cultural identity, as culture is something that is supposed to move and change on its own, some would say. I don’t think I really disagree either. Still, it’s something that I’ve just felt compelled to ponder on in recent years. A friend of mine used the term Asian 2.0 in describing this idea for a new identity, and it’s a label that I’ve grown comfortable using as well.
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I’ve been thinking recently about this new Arby’s commercial. It features an Asian in a supporting role, non-speaking of course, but at least he’s driving this car full of high schoolers who’ve just gotten out of school. I should just post it:
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so yeah, the chinese have created whole mice from skin cells of mice. for cloning enthusiasts, this is the holy grail. previous attempts at cloning have all involved taking cells from embryos. but the chinese team took skin cells and reprogrammed them to work as stem cells.

be sure to store some dead skin cells in a safe somewhere so u can clone yourself when u get old. the only thing left to do now is figure out how to download and upload memories. eternal life here we come.

who wants to bet the first group to do this for ppl are gonna be chinese too? no boundaries baby!

i gotta say i was hoping this wasn’t going to be completely and utterly awful. and hey… it actually looks pretty cool.