vote gangnam style--whatever that means

just how many phone calls did it take for this to happen? And did john lewis know what gangnam style is or did someone have to explain the phenomenon (and if so, who)? how is it relevant to voting? it's not like gangnam style was a thing that predated the song. And I don't know of an equivalent. At least the Macarena was a real dance. still, you gotta love john lewis, doing whatever it takes to draw attention to the importance of voting. 

I know yall have been dying to ask me about gangnam style but held back bc you were afraid of appearing...racially insensitive. Yeah, you were right to stop yourself. also, i learned all about kpop from the new yorker, so the joke would have been on you. in any case, when even the pres of the world bank (korean-american!) is asked about the phenomenon and he responds seriously about how psy is the manifestation of a deliberate, longterm economic and cultural strategy, you know this shit is bigger than all of us.

As I watch this gangnam style thing from the sidelines I wanna know:  how is psy affecting Asian men outside of asia? based on zero evidence except my own intuition, I thought one of the most important things Jeremy lin did was to elevate Asian masculinity. Now when kids get bullied for being Asian, maybe they won't be called long duk dong. Progress! Not unlike the time the lady at the Weiner circle called me Lucy Liu instead of Margaret cho. I look like neither, but the margaret cho thing really cuts deep, man.

Are Asian dudes now afraid of being mistaken for this pudgy--relatively inoffensive yet not entirely flattering--guy? I tried to look for other Asian dudes in present day pop culture, but in terms of sheer visibility, psy and jlin really have no parallels. Sure, there's john cho, that guy from lost/Hawaii 5-o, and, as I discovered recently, a fairly prominent character on walking dead. (Btw, I've never seen that show. Apparently his character dates a white girl, which I get is some ringing endorsement of Asian male sex appeal?).  or are asian guys still just assumed to be martial arts experts with broken english because of bruce lee and jackie chan?

anyway, in whatever style, vote!

Must Desi TV

Hey, everybody. There is a hot new blog on the scene. Thoughtful vivisection of television done by brianiac grad students, Tubatv is the half brainchild of devoted reader Thumbu Sammy, who this past week makes the rather astute observation that all four of the shows comprising NBC's comedy lineup last Thursday, The Office, Parks and Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock featured South Asian people. Yay for pop cultural presence! Boo for the fact that the South Asian people in question (pictured above)-- Aziz Ansari, Maulik Pancholy, and Mindy Kaling -- played characters named Tom, Jonathan, and Kelly respectively, just like that lady from Texas wants.

Aziz Ansari, who has been a personal favorite of mine since occasional reader Sweet Daddy Purns introduced me to him in the summer of 2005 at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater (right before his killer "Aziz Ansari Punched a Wall" show), has always eschewed the rather limiting ethno-centric style of lesser comedians, but Tom Haverford? Desi, please...Still, I hesitate to condemn after one episode; he struck gold with his "I'm what you call a redneck" line in the otherwise mediocre pilot of Parks and Rec, but gets several demerits for the following statement, which while funny and self-undermining, does nothing to explain really why the fuck he can't be of Muslim heritage on TV: The cold hard fact is that dark-skinned people with funny-sounding Muslim names just don’t make it very far in politics...Yes, OK, fine, Barack Obama, Why does everyone always bring up Barack Obama?

Bin Laden Didn't Blow Up the Projects, Tell the Truth, Ninja

Remember when Chris Rock made that joke about how weird it is that the best golfer in the world is black, and that the best rapper in the world is white? Yeah, me either. Anyway, he did. Then Tiger Woods decided to throw everyone's African American Studies 101 paper into a disrepute and point out that he identifies no more with black culture than with his Chinese or Thai roots, to say nothing of the splash of Native American and Dutch he has in him. And now the other shoe has dropped. Actually, it dropped when Eminem rapped the following Proustian cerebral outburst, Shady Records was 80 seconds away from the towers. Some cowards fucked with the wrong building, they meant to hit ours...But for real, sons, it has dropped: Above, Eminem attempts at pop cultural and zeitgeisty relevance with his new video (Sarah Palin is a sexy hypocrite!) and his Final Four celebration(?)/maudlin and simultaneously saccharine carnival of Detroitsplatation. (Dudes, why has no one, preferably some effete Europeans done a shocking photo expose of blight in Detroit that we can all post on our Facebook pages?!).

The point is, I was overdue for a blog post and Eminem is the worst. Also, he looks like Psycho T's slightly more cavernous-headed brother. Congratulations, UNC! When you're done celebrating your deserved win, can you remind your vicious fan base to post some more videos reminding me I and my ilk are a bunch of gay-ass homos. Just kidding. America's team! Obama! Change! Freedom Fries! Keep our troops in Iraq. 9-11. Never forget.

Lemon, out.

Cute-off

Seriously, if you could Madonna only one of these two children, which one would you choose? Trying to measure and compare the relative cuteness might burn your synapses.

On a less cute note -- and I'm just sayin' -- but is it possible, maybe, just maybe, that the Obamas, who've steadfastly refused to exploit their little girls through election season, who've emphasized that they want these kids to be kids, made a strategic choice to, umm, straighten out their hair in anticipation of the big stage? In other pictures, the little ones rock braids, curls, faux-dreads, and tied-back naturals (see here, here and here), but now they're hair's decidedly less, shall we say, ethnic.

I'm not prepared to actually do a timeline analysis of pictures of the girls through the last couple of years and trace their hairstyles, so maybe I'm way off base here, but given the fact that in her speech Michelle Obama announced her unqualified patriotism, defined herself as wife/mother/daughter/sister (not as lawyer and community leader), and made every effort to counter, if implicitly, all charges of militancy unfairly lobbed at her, I think it's fair to say that last night she was concerned primarily with stagecraft, with presenting herself as a First Lady and the girls as potential First Daughters. We the electorate are dumb, we are lazy, and we are subconsciously racist -- we don't think it's inappropriate for our President's blonde underage daughter to cavort drunkenly at Smith Point, but we will not allow human sunshine herself to play double dutch on the South Lawn if she does so with black people's hair.

Now, if the Obamas made a strategic decision to straighten the girls' hair, I don't fault them for it -- I think it's sad and I feel bad for them that they have to, but they're right to do it. You make moral compromises if you want to be President. This is just one of them. Michelle, Sasha, and Malia Obama will be iconic stereotype-defying black women one day, but they live in a country that won't let them go overboard with the blackness before getting there.

mo'lympics

i enjoy the olympics in a very unironic way. yeah, i'm pretty sure everyone is drugged up and the chinese have infants on their women's gymnastics team or whatever, but still.

anyway, i do feel conflicted every 4 years. where do my loyalties lie? (un?)fortunately, the canadian olympic team seems unable to win a medal in a single event, so i guess i'm going to go with korea. i am sure we will sit comfortably in third until all the track and field events begin. what happened to canada? we used to win a medal or two in the summer olympics. [update: korea is now behind germany in the medal count. boo...]

i find it somewhat amusing that all of my not very patriotic friends get seriously peeved when i don't cheer for the USA. there also was this ridiculous new york times article expressing incredulity over the fact that the chinese are (gasp!) uninterested in michael phelps. yeah, guess what? not everyone cares about america. deal with it.

btw, did anyone happen to read this david brooks op-ed? is he accusing americans of "whining" over katrina? why did he wait until the final sentence to state his thesis?

Hail to the Redskins

At the risk of alienating readers on this, the biggest day of Primary Season, the Fashion Week -- dare I say -- the Puppy Bowl of American electoral politics, I feel compelled to say a word about professional sports: I lived in New York City for several years, during the waning days of the Yankees empire and I don't recall for the life of me encountering anyone who cared about football. I taught in an elementary school in the Bronx for three years and never once had occasion to toss a football to a kid during recess; yet today the Giants are feted on the streets of Manhattan and their perpetually vexed quarterback has come to assume an unearned place in the mythos of the game. New York, I love you, but stop with the bullshit.

The Giants play in New Jersey. The entire team, with the exception of one player, lives in New Jersey (now that the vilified, contrarian Tiki Barber has retired). Of course, there are practical explanations for these two facts --ones having mainly to do with space -- but it stands to reason that in a city rife with handball and basketball courts, concrete and earth-formed baseball diamonds, football and football players have no place. Even the Jets, who make a far better case for being New York's team and whose cause won the backing of the skilled Mr. Bloomberg, couldn't wrangle a football stadium out of the chagrined local populace. New York, clearly, is not a football town.

And what about the quarterback, Eli Manning (pictured above)? Some say he has been vindicated and that his various doubters are now silenced, but what game were these people watching on Sunday? I saw a slight young man who put up decent statistics -- but hardly iconic ones -- get bailed out by a trio of gifted wide receivers and a defensive line hell-bent on destroying Tom Brady's mortal soul. On a day when a hero of my youth, Doug Williams, was chosen to present the Lombardi trophy, reminding us anew the raw deal black quarterbacks used to get, an insanely hyped white quarterback vaulted to glory -- surprise, surprise -- on the shoulders of black players.

In the pivotal offensive play of the game, Manning -- lucky as hell -- squirmed his way out of a sack and put up an ill-advised prayer to a well-covered David Tyree. Tyree managed to secure the ball away from his defender, trap it against his helmet, fall backwards, roll over, and somehow not lose possession. This was a spectacular play...for Tyree. Is there room for him in the pantheon? Maybe. Maybe not. One of the greatest plays in football history is The Catch in the 1982 NFC Championship game. Everyone knows Joe Montana threw it, but how many people remember it was Dwight Clark who caught it?

As for the game I was watching on Sunday, it was won on defense: the Patriots were held to 17 points, 140 yards fewer than usual, due in no small part to the Giants' unsung Justin Tuck, who had six tackles, two sacks and a forced fumble. For his services, he got one MVP vote out of 20. Eli Manning got 16 and a half. Justin Tuck won the game for the Giants. How many people will remember him?

The Dimunition of the American Dream

Today, a fiercely racially divided state, one where virulent Jim Crowe values thrive in the cloth of a fictional Christ, the site of a monumental natural disaster, a place that makes a habit of choosing megalomaniacs, incompetents, and hypocrites for its highest offices elected (by-all-accounts) an astonishingly brilliant and industrious South Asian man to be its governor. In many ways, Bobby Jindal's achievement--and his achievements to date--are staggering. At 24, seeking a post-Rhodes Scholarship challenge, he was appointed to be the Secretary of Lousisiana's Department of Health & Hospitals. At 32 he took Kathleen Blanco to task in a hard-fought gubernatorial contest, losing only because of the color of his skin. A few weeks later, he won David Vitter's congressional seat. And now at 36, he has burnished his conservative credentials, and has become the governor of a sinking swampland.

I guess I'm experiencing that same numb confusion that Mexican-Americans felt when they witnessed Alberto Gonzales morph into the President's torture lapdog, the same hollowness of stomach black Americans felt beholding an obviously paranoid Clarence Thomas dismiss institutional racism as the crutch of the lazy. But what does it say about the American dream when the first guy who looks like me to win state-wide office does so after changing his name from Piyush to Bobby, does so after abandoning his parents' Hindusim for a belief system that disallows for abortion even when a woman's life may be in danger, does so after lurching even further right after his 2003 defeat and ceding the black vote altogether, in favor of rural white approval?

Some will say today is a marvelous day for people of my color--the American Dream is reborn with Bobby Jindal. Others know the American Dream is entombed with Bobby Kennedy.

Sticky Wicket

Earlier, I had reported on the apparent murder of Pakistan's English cricket coach--within hours, mind you, of the team's humiliating defeat against Ireland. The weeks since the World Cup have been interesting. Despite the tremendous circumstantial evidence, most Pakistani fans have steadfastly resisted the initial account of what happened--that a mysterious poison was used to strangle Coach Woolmer. In fact, some have espoused what looks to me to be this view--and I'm speaking in the broadest of generalizations: "Come on, you know the Jamaican police is incompetent." That is, come on, you know black people are stupid and lazy. The Jamaican police, for their part, made no effort to rule out natural causes and hung their hat on a wild theory about non-manual strangulation at the hands (vials?) of angry odds-makers. That is, come on, you know brown Muslims are savage and wanton.

What I fear about colliding stereotypes like this is that in the wake of their collision one side is left more emboldened in its view. Despite the fact that Woolmer's death from natural causes has now been confirmed by an international team of pathologists, and despite calls for the Pakistan Cricket Board to sue the Jamaican Police for defamation--yeah, it's as dumb as it sounds--I hope my fear is misplaced.

Televising the Revolution

You will remember Ludacris and 50 Cent's dust-up with Oprah last year, but in case you forgot, here's a reminder: After appearing on her show to promote Crash, Luda told GQ, "What I got was that by having rappers on her show, she feels like she is empowering in them..I don't see why Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, who I am huge fans of, it's OK for them to go on Oprah. They speak the same language as I do, but they do it through comedy, so I guess that's acceptable to her." Now, Luda--whose lyrics, granted, are insanely misogynistic--did have a point: Why the free pass for the non-corn-rowed comedians? Why the total absence of any MC's on the Oprah show?

Well, that moment seemed to pass, but now comes word that Wynton Marsalis (pictured, err, depicted) also hates hip hop, except, unlike back-pedaling Oprah, he's not equivocating. This is the salient bit from his recent interview with the Guardian:

Old school minstrels used to say they were 'real darkies from the real plantation'. Hip-hop substitutes the plantation for the streets. Now you have to say that you're from the streets, you shot some brothers, you went to jail. Rappers have to display the correct pathology. Rap has become a safari for people who get their thrills from watching African-American people debase themselves, men dressing in gold, calling themselves stupid names like Ludacris or 50 Cent, spending money on expensive fluff, using language like 'bitch' and 'ho' and 'nigger.'

It's clear that there are generational and class divisions at work here, and far be it from me to opine about an issue that goes to the heart of contemporary black American society, being that, well, I'm not black, but still why is it that Marsalis, Oprah, Bill O'Reilly and others seem to think the paragons, the torch-bearers, of an entire genre of music--an entire aesthetic, an entire culture (not subculture, mind you)--are its worst offenders?

Okay, that's a rhetorical question. I can imagine what Nelly's album sales look like when compared to Jurassic 5's, but once, just once, I'd like to hear what universally renowned musical geniuses like Wynton Marsalis have to say about Mos Def's Black on Both Sides or Tribe's Low-End Theory or anything Viktor Vaughn's released. Hip hop may include all of the things that Marsalis hates it for--all of the things that I too hate about it--but, still, I know I'm not alone when I say, it's the greatest artistic invention of our lifetime.

In that spirit, and in honor of today's news that Scooter Libby is likely jail-bound, I give you Akon and Styles P's "Locked Up," which includes this gem, "Locked up, they won't let me out/ And I had a long day in court. Shit stressed me out."

Like the Driven Snow

Blogger E suggested in another forum that maybe I'm above blogging, that maybe I've lost my blogo-chops, but fear not loyal reader (I use the singular for obvious reasons), I have not abandoned you. I was out of town over the weekend and precious little has happened since--although, apparently, the grandson of a former Iranian minister told the sitting American President (to his face) that he's nothing more than Cheney's bitch and said president could only muster a chuckle and a graceless exit in response. I guess that's worth blogging about. But the United States' inevitable war with Iran is not what's on my mind today. Less pressing matters await. For instance, what is going on with the Daily Show?

I was watching the other day and Larry Wilmore, "Senior Black Correspondent," came on to talk about Obama's blackness or lack thereof, and it got me thinking, as I have before, what is up with this? How is that a show that butters its bread with the foibles, hypocrisies, and peccadilloes of others continues to be so unapologetically lily-white? And, moreover, instead of making an effort to address its lack of diversity the show just makes light of the issue by bringing in a Senior Black Correspondent to talk about things related to black people--that annoying, knowing, well we can't be racist if we make fun of ourselves this way attitude that I hate. Republished on ColbertNation, but originally posted somewhere else, a comedian recalls a Christmas party conversation with a Daily Show Writer who, when asked about the stunning lack of diversity on the show, said,"We tried a black guy once, but it didn't work out."

Of course, I am going to continue to watch the Daily Show, and continue to marvel at its spot-on mockery of the smug, the lame, and the evil. And of course, as a South Asian person, I was happy to see that Aasif Mandvi had even a bit role on the show, but Jesus Christ, Jon Stewart, you need to get your head out of your ass with this one. You subject us to John Oliver almost nightly--a man who has never told a joke that wasn't followed by the distant chirping of crickets--but you can't hire any real black or Hispanic correspondents for fear that it might not work out? I realize that comedy is an old-boys' network, but so is politics--and time and again the Daily Show has taken politics to task for exactly that reason. As Clarice Starling once said to Hannibal Lecter, "Why don't you turn that high-powered perception at yourself and tell us what you see, or, maybe you're afraid to."