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Not many realize that dancehall artist Sean Paul is part Chinese. That bit of information helps make the subject of this post not completely out of the blue for BPRLive. It’s still out of the blue, but just not 100 percent random.

Here is an excerpt from an article I happened upon this morning (the bold text is my own emphasis - read the whole thing here):

Gayle, a 25-year-old customer service employee at a bank in Alberta, Canada, was suffering as many as 10 grand mal seizures a day, despite being treated with medications designed to control them. The condition became so bad she eventually had to quit her job and leave the church choir where she sang.

Eighteen months ago, she began to suspect that music by reggae and hip-hop artist Sean Paul was triggering some of her seizures. She recalled being at a barbecue and collapsing when the Jamaican rapper’s music started playing, and then remembered having a previous seizure when she heard his music.

Her suspicions were confirmed on a visit to the Long Island medical center last February, when she played Paul’s hit “Temperature” on her iPod for doctors. Soon after, she suffered three seizures.

This poor woman. I almost feel like I can’t make a comment for fear it will be kind of tasteless. But I’ll just say that I never really understood what made Sean Paul stick here in the States. To me he’s relatively unremarkable compared to a lot of other dancehall artists, including Super Cat - whose pops was Indo-Caribbean. I know I’m doing a poor job making this relevant to BPRLive.

See, we’re all a little off our game after the long cold weekend.

Tags: News.

Shuffled! is a new feature on BPRLive, in which we ask some of our favorite people on the scene to set their mp3 player of choice to random, and tell us about the first few songs that they hear.

Today’s Shuffler: Nancy Yap

Nancy Yap began her career as an artist manager at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) in New York City. While working as bookstore manager at AAWW in 1999, she began marketing and booking an Asian American poetry collective named the feedBack poets, a group of ten performers that included the young versions of Beau Sia, Ishle Yi Park, Taiyo Na, F. Omar Telan, and others.

Since then she has worked on a variety of projects from organizing a monthly open mic for Asian American poets named (Re)collection to target marketing for the 2003 Tony Award-winning “Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam” on Broadway.

She continues to represent artists that enable her to work closely with the non-profit community while drawing the attention of mainstream America. She currently represents Suheir Hammad, Denizen Kane, Beau Sia, and the Visionaries. In conjunction with the Human Writes Project and the Latino Theater Company, she is developing a series of spoken word events and programs entitled ” L.A. Voz” at the newly renovated Los Angeles Theater Company in downtown Los Angeles.

For more information on Nancy’s management company, visit www.jeanniemanagement.com and to find out about her most recent project visit www.thenewlatc.com.

And now, on to the shuffle… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.

Welcome to the first East Meets Words Open Mic of the new year! Hope everyone had a great New Years and go through with your resolutions. This month’s open mic list was short but was interesting nonetheless. Eric opened the show and the year with a freestyle about a form of meditation. Vinh the Kid returned from New York and performed “Second Hand Roses.” The members of L.I.F.E. each performed their own piece, Joey B performed “Wake Up, Wake Up,” Febo mentioned the name of his piece “This is a poem” raising awareness to current issues and Masada Jones blew us away once again with “My X-Men Piece” bringing us back to the days when villians were cartoons on television. Then L.I.F.E performed together with “Roots,” impressing the audience of East Meets Words Open Mic.

The feature Cynthia Lin, a singer/songwriter from New York via New Jersey by way of Chicago, performed 9 songs with the help with her guitar. Her first song was “Blue and Borderline,” a beautiful song from her first album. Her next song was about falling in love in New York City named “Skipping in New York City.” Going from the East coast to the West coast, her next song was fittingly called “California.” Cynthia kept up with the singer/songwriters tradition of performing a song named “Home.” Ms. Lin then performed two songs with interesting names: “Water Torture” and “Doppelgänger.” Cynthia followed it with “Microscope” and her first single/video “I’m Shy.” But Ms. Lin blew everyone away with her rendition of “Time After Time” which I think most people who heard her version would say is better than the original. Well this conclude this month’s Open Mic, see all of you next month.

[Editor's Note: We have music from both of Cynthia's albums playing on our stream. Tune in to listen. Also, check out this video clip of Cynthia performing in the bookstore.]

Tags: Love, Open Mic, Video.

Recently a harvard student has gotten some press about Asian American pressures in school, where she mentioned sometimes it’s ‘cooler’ to ‘act white.’ The Washington Post reporter writes:

As Tsai put it, among the Asian American students she interviewed, “acting white” was a good thing.
I was surprised to read that Tsai’s subjects at Harvard often embraced that term. They thought of it more as a lifestyle than an academic strategy. To them, Tsai found, it translated loosely as being cool.
…Because ‘acting Asian’ is equated with acting foreign or like a nerd, ‘acting white’ among Asian people becomes a source of pride, and is valued as the ability to assimilate into American society.

I’m always slightly alarmed when one paper explains some aspect of Asian folks, as mysterious as we are, partly b/c it forces me to compare myself to its explanations. Do I “act white?” As opposed to acting Asian? What do I make of this seeming contradiction?

Sarah’s post touched on the duality of Asian folk, too: you either go ‘fobulous,’ or go ‘twinkie’. I suppose you could go ‘hip hop,’ or go ‘Jewish,’ too. All of this seems to imply a lack of authenticity.

I’m more interested in this question of cool. The Chinese, as unofficial representatives of Asia, have a bad rap with ‘cool’. What’s up with that? I started to think about all the people I’d grown up thinking were cool here in the U.S.—Is there some singular quality that joined them all? And is this missing in, er, China? Lets take a look. Read more

Bon bon kids. Welcome to another Appreciation post, it’s been a minute since I’ve done one. To catch past entries in this vein, click here.

Now that we got that out the way, let me bring you to Summer of 2000. I was less than two months removed from college graduation and working my very first real world job, which was pretty much nothing like the real world. I was a staffmember at the Organization of Chinese Americans, and was spending two weeks in Atlanta for the annual National Convention. It’s crazy that I was 21 and in charge of mad shit for real. But I can look back and appreciate that my experiences at my first job out of college - stressful though it was - really instilled me with a lot of confidence in my abilities to get stuff done. And that time in Atlanta was also interesting because 4 separate dudes I met there offered to set me up with women they knew. No wonder they call it HOTlanta.

Irregardless, that summer was also the first time I met the R&B group Kai. The name was short for kaibigan, the Tagalog word for “friendship,” and as you probably expect, they were 4 Filipino cats from the Bay plus - as you may not have expected - one Chinese dude who sang bass. They were signed to a major label, I think it was Geffen.

Although I had been taking performance poetry kinda serious for like a year or two by then, they were kinda next level for me because I had actually bought their CD single when I was in college. Maybe that seems like small-time nowadays because of the way that buying music has changed, but at the time, it was pretty big news that I could walk into Media Play in rural farmland Hadley, Massachusetts and buy a Kai CD. You young’ens might not get it, but Kai was as big API celebrities as we could imagine at that time, aside from maybe Margaret Cho. But she sucked anyway.

Read more

Tags: Appreciation, Commentary.

Shuffled! is a new feature on BPRLive, in which we ask some of our favorite people on the scene to set their mp3 player of choice to random, and tell us about the first few songs that they hear.

Today’s Shuffler: David Mura

David Mura is a sansei, a third generation Japanese American. He’s the author of two memoirs, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality & Identity. He’s also written three books of poetry, the last, Angels for the Burning. His novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire will be published by Coffee House Press in the fall 0f 2008.

He will be directing Juliana Pegues’ play, “Question & Answer,” for Theater Mu in the spring of 2008. He lives in Minneapolis.

Visit davidmura.com to find out more.

On to the shuffle… Read more

Tags: Shuffled!.

So dear readers, you may have noticed the creation of the new feature called “Shuffled!” that has been running each and every Thursday here at BPRLive. We ask API artists from all across the country to put their iPod or, uhh, Zune on shuffle and write a little about each of the first 5 or 6 songs that play. I’ve been really enjoying reading them because 1) even if we here have collective blogger’s block, there’s still new shit to read every week, and 2) music is one of the few topics that basically every single person you know has opinions about, and all opinions are equally legit.

But finding out what moves certain people has been really fascinating. For example, I had written off Mistah FAB without ever hearing his joints because…oh, I dunno, because I guess i didn’t like his name. But reading that Kiwi likes his work made me look into dude’s catalog because I’m a fan of Kiwi.

Or when Karla Margallo described “Forget Regret” by Roy Hargrove, I was thinking like, “damn I wish I could hear this song!” And so I trolled the Internets trying to find it.

So we here at BPRLive put in some hours and from now on, we’ll be including playlists of every episode of Shuffled! courtesy of imeem.com. So now when you read your favorite singer/emcee/dancer/actor/writer/photographer/painter/model describe the songs on his/her playlist, you can listen along.

We got so into the idea of listening along, that we’ve gone back to every Shuffled! entry from the past and retroactively added playlists as well. So please revisit them and do what it is you do.

One note about the playlists….imeem’s selection of songs is good, but far from comprehensive, so we can’t find every song from every playlist. We try to do the best we can.

Also, some songs only play as 30-second snippets, and you need to go through registration - which is free - to hear the whole thing. I’m not gonna tell you to register, I’m just saying.

Watch for this week’s Shuffled!, featuring poet/essayist/playwright David Mura. Seriously. David Mura.

Tags: Commentary, Shuffled!.

Miss Vintage, an all Asian American rock band from Philadelphia, PA, is doing a special show at T. T. the Bear’s Place (that is a funny name for a club) on January 23, 2008 at 8:30 pm. T. T.’s can be found at 10 Brookline Street in Cambridge, MA near Central Square. It’s right next to the Middle East. The show is for 18+ folks and has a cover of $7. They’re playing with Roland High Life, Red Red Rockit, and Beats & Sources.