Congratulations to Bambu (the rapper), Kid Heroes (the filmmakers), and Nick James (the beat maker) for winning The Freshmen! I guess I'll be seeing Bam's face all up in Ackerman Student Union when I get my flashcards and orange chicken!
"Congrats to Bambu for taking this week’s round of the Freshmen and being voted into on-air rotation. His outreach work is a value that should be admired and upheld. Let’s all use that as an example. Didn’t hear from many of you in the comments section this week even though your votes were strong. Please don’t hesitate to leave your thoughts and opinions. I always really love to see how you’re feeling about the music. Check back in next week where the Freshmen will be represented by our newest crop of Freshmen 5 artists. Truly, they’re all fine picks. Excited to bring them to all of you. Have a great weekend and as always don’t forget to follow me and mtvU on Twitter for updates."
One of my closest friends, Eric Tandoc (DJ ET), has finally been getting some well deserved recognition up in this arts and entertainment world. He was recently interviewed in ASIA PACIFIC ARTS MAGAZINE about his new film, SOUNDS OF THE NEW HOPE. Please check out the article below.
I can't tell you how much ET has influenced me as an artist and as person over the last decade. Back before the turn of the century (damn we're getting old), Eric and I met during my first year at UCLA. I think both of us were itchin' to scratch with other deejays, so as soon as I was able to move out of the dorms, we moved in together to build the ultimate turntablist set-up (or at least what we thought was the ultimate set-up). Between our seemingly endless scratch sessions, we actually got to chop it up a whole lot about life, politics, and all that jazz. Dude opened my mind to hella shit. As knuckle-headed as I still may be, ET educated the hell out of me. I think I learned more from him than I did from any of my professors at UCLA.
Eric has built a pretty impressive portfolio of films, mixtapes, and rhymes. I'd like to share some of it here with y'all...
810LOGY is a film Eric worked on when we were still living together. It will always be one of my favorite flicks:
As DJ ET, Eric has put out some damn good mixtapes. Here's one he made to celebrate his 25th birthday. Click the cover (art by Mark Canto) to download:
Eric Tandoc's short film Sounds of the New Hope draws connections between music and politics, the Philippines and Filipino America. APA talks to the director about striking the right balance to strike the most provocative chord.
Documentary filmmakers are the underdogs of cinema. They live in poverty, struggling between intermittent stretches of grant funding. They shoot their footage in completely wild and unforeseeable conditions, and are often prone to the most cruel and unhappy kinds of accidents. Yet, for all the hard-fought footage, the countless hours of tedious editing, and of course, the lack of funding, the documentarian must always ask himself, "What is the end result of this work?"
For Eric Tandoc, all of this work and labor in documentary has an eventual point -- the creation of community and of relations between people. It is the hope that documentary as an art will have the ability to share and empower viewers, and give a voice to the unheard. With his new film Sounds of the New Hope, Tandoc wants to put the microphone to the mouths of storytellers who have not been able to tell their story before. In the film, he follows the Filipino American MC, Kiwi, as the young rapper grows from his brash youth as a gangbanger on the streets of Koreatown to radical political activism promoted throughout the slum-dwellings of the Philippines. But what makes this film so fresh, exciting, and relevant is that Kiwi wants to translate the rough material of real politics and class struggle through the word and rhyme of hip-hop. Like an improvement on Aristotle's notion that what makes a human political is his ability for speech, Kiwi transforms the flow of his rap into a tool that constructs a unity and kinship. Kiwi uses rap as a bridge for the impoverished Filipino to communicate. Rapping, it seems, is a much more immediate mechanism for saying what's on your mind. And much like Kiwi, Tandoc wants to use the tools of documentary to create these same bridges and to tell stories that are much more than stories. For Tandoc, the end result of a documentary should be action: to turn back, reflect, and serve a community.
Asia Pacific Arts: Could you tell us a little about yourself and the short film that you have playing at this year's festival?
Eric Tandoc:My name is Eric Tandoc, and I'm a 29 year-old second-generation Filipino American who was born in San Diego and grew up in Long Beach. Aside from filmmaking, I'm a community organizer and member of a youth and student organization called AnakBayan and a progressive arts organization called Habi-Arts. Both of these organizations are part of a national alliance called Bayan USA, which consists of 14 organizations across the country that support the struggle for national liberation and genuine democracy in the Philippines, as well as the struggles of Filipinos living here in the United States. In addition to that, I'm a DJ in a hip-hop crew called Mass Movement and an emcee in a live hip-hop band called The Committee.
My latest documentary, Sounds of the New Hope,chronicles the life and music of Filipino American emcee and community organizer, Kiwi, as well as the growth of hip-hop as an organizing tool in the movement for genuine freedom and democracy in the Philippines. It was created as my thesis film for the UC Santa Cruz Social Documentation M.A. program.
The film documents Kiwi's life growing up around youth gangs in the Koreatown area of Los Angeles and how he later became involved in hip-hop and community organizing in the Filipino community. Then the film fast forwards to his current organizing work through hip-hop workshops with youth in San Francisco at the Filipino Community Center. The second half of the film follows him on his political exposure trip to the Philippines in 2007, where he is hosted by AnakBayan and integrates in urban shanty communities. There, he meets youth gangsters who rap and connects with their experiences through the common language of hip-hop.
APA: Do you have any good anecdotes of working on this documentary while following Kiwi around the Philippines?
ET:Although the film focuses on Kiwi's experiences rapping with urban youth in the shanty communities of Caloocan, we were also able to connect with some of hip-hop's elite in the Philippines -- Francis M and Gloc 9. Francis M is considered the "King of Philippine Rap," since he was the first Filipino to ever release a hip-hop album back in 1990. What's great is that his songs are also very nationalistic, rapping about positivity and believing in ourselves as Filipinos. When we first met him, he told Kiwi how he'd beenfollowing his music with Native Guns since 2005 and frequently played their songs on the radio show that he hosted. Kiwi got to build afriendship with him and when Francis suddenly passed away from leukemia earlier this year, he took it really hard. We are all saddened by the loss of a legendary figure in Philippine hip-hop.
Gloc 9 is one of his talented protégésand had several songs on the radio while we were there. He's known for super-fast rhyming and talking about the struggles of growing up poor. But the ironic thing is, even though he's well known and has songs on the radio, he recently enrolled into nursing school and has aspirations of going abroad to work. I remember him saying how if he were able to financially support himself and his family through nursing, then he could be free to fully pursue rapping. I think it's a reflection of the Philippines' semi-colonial and semi-feudal economy that even a big-name rapper like Gloc 9 isn't able to make a living off his art and is forced to follow the thousands of Filipinos who leave the country every day just to survive and support their families.
ET: Kiwi and I both identify as cultural workers, meaning we create our art for the purpose of educating our communities in order to raise people's political consciousness and hopefully inspire them to take action and work towards creating systemic change.
Music, and hip-hop in particular, is a powerful and direct way of conveying messages through personal expression. Often times, it's more effective than speeches or forums as a way of sparking interest in political or social issues. Music, like other forms of cultural work, connects with people's emotions in such a way that one can really feel the humanity and beauty found in the struggle for a better world.
Music can reflect the realities of people and society, but it also shapes reality. A song can be highly influential and infectious, as it can inspire you to memorize lyrics and even cause you to behave in ways that manifest the values in those lyrics.
APA: You studied documentary here at UCLA. How has that influenced your growth as a young filmmaker and documentarian?
ET: As an undergrad at UCLA, I was introduced to documentary filmmaking through the History of Documentary Film course taught by Marina Goldovskaya. Through her Documentary Production Workshop, I made my first visual life history documentary about my grandmother, called Nanay.
Subsequently, I took the year-long UCLA EthnoCommunications course taught by Robert Nakamura and John Esaki and became grounded in the principle of creating documentaries to give a voice to underrepresented communities. Through this course, I created 810LOGY, a short documentary about the history and growth of my multi-ethnic skateboard crew from Long Beach and our struggles with gangs, discrimination, and police harassment.
Through studying documentary at UCLA, in addition to having wonderful professors as mentors, I was exposed to amazing films such as Beats, Rhymes, & Resistance: Pilipinos and Hip Hop In Los Angeles by Dawn Mabalon, Lakandiwa de Leon, and Jonathan Ramos; Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke; Style Wars by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant; and A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution by Nettie Wild. All of these had profound influences on the style and approach of the documentary films that I make. Before then, I had only associated documentaries with boring history channel "Voice of God"-style films. But these films showed me the diverse creative possibilities of the documentary medium.
APA:What's next in store for you in terms of your documentary work in the Philippines and here in America, and also with regard to your musical interests?
ET: We plan on taking Sounds of the New Hope on a concert tour around the US later this year and intend to hold the LA community premiere at UCLA. As for future projects, this summer I plan to work with AnakBayan and Habi-Arts to conduct documentary workshops with youth and educate them on how to produce visual life history documentaries about their parents and their experiences as immigrants from the Philippines. I'm also working on an ongoing video documentary about my cousin Mark Canto, who is an artist and first-generation immigrant, called Mass Movement: Roots.
In the future, I hope to continue making films raising awareness about the people's struggle in the Philippines as well as the culture of Filipino Americans here in the United States. I'm interested in documenting the contributions of Filipino Americans to youth culture, music, and American society as a whole. One day, I also hope to be able to make a feature narrative about critical events in Philippine history.
Regarding music, I'll always continue to DJ, make mix tapes, make beats, and develop my skills as an emcee. Currently, an album is in the works and will hopefully be released by next year. All the while, I'm continuing to perform and create songs with my band, The Committee.
"Comedians are often ambitious egotists with poor boundaries who aren't hiding how intelligent they are. Ali Wong is all of that, plus she has the things that really matter: wit, timing, experience, and a unique hairdo. We're so proud of her! She delighted and embarrassed fellow comedian Bobby Lee when she interviewed him for Hyphen magazine a while back, saying she forgave her sister's dog for sniffing her crotch while she had her period: "I know he means well. He just wants beef, that's his world." Eeew! Love it. Wong's clarity of vision isn't limited to her menses; she also hilariously goes after racists, poets, her sexual partners, and American Apparel. All this has landed her on Jamie Foxx' Laffapalooza! and made her a busy and popular local comedian. " - SF WEEKLY
Watch out NY, pretty soon it'll be: ALI WONG = NY TIMES BEST COMEDIAN OF 2010
Congratulations Ali Wong.com!
And for everyone out in New York, go check Ali out June 22nd at the Gotham Comedy Club:
I've been wanting to post something about the homegirl Ali for a minute, but it's been hard to find words for this phenomenal woman, phenomenally. So, I was ecstatic to find an article in the San Francisco Chronicle in her own words. Ali, if you are reading this, I want to let you know that we're all hella of proud of you! Keep doing your thing and knock 'em dead when you move to the Big Apple!
11 Things: Ali Wong Sarah Han Thursday, January 15, 2009
You may not want to take your easily offended grandma to see San Francisco comedian Ali Wong, but those who are tickled by wickedly raunchy gross-out humor will get major laughs at her stand-up shows. This week, Wong headlines the Naked Comedy Showcase at the Clubhouse, and we asked her to share 11 Things that make her laugh.
1. Ed Hardy clothes Mr. Hardy is the official sponsor of people-you-should-never-date. Who cares if his clothing looks just like tattoos? You know what else look like tattoos? TATTOOS.
2. People who cry on their cell phones in public Why can't some women just wait until they get home to tell their husbands that they've cheated on them? They just love saving the confrontation for Gap Kids.
3. The white alligator at the California Academy of Sciences At first, I thought it was a huge piece of raw chicken. There's no warning to prepare you for the fact that you're about to see the "Powder" of alligators.
4. Baker Beach There's nothing like seeing a family unknowingly stroll into the nude section of Baker Beach. All of the men there look like cartoon characters from the Far Side and some like to wear fanny packs. I've seen others just do head stands.
5. Manorexia Men aren't very experienced at anorexia because most of them don't get fat until they're 26 years old. Switching to Bud Light isn't going to change much, so they get frustrated, angry and constantly look at their inflating bellies in the mirror. Welcome to our world.
6. Gift baskets Nobody in my family wants a can of salmon, a jar of random jam, cheddar cheese and wine. We call that fart fuel. I'd prefer a bag of shrimp candy and coupons.
7. Names for wireless networks My favorites: "IloveDavid," "2PacisAlive," "Crazin."
8. Dolores Park On a sunny day, it's a hipster factory. You would think that Vice magazine threw up there. And every day, it's a field of dog poop.
9. Self-evaluations Nobody would ever write a negative review of themselves. Only an idiot would tell their employer that they spend 80 percent of their workday stealing office supplies and stalking ex-boyfriends on Facebook.
10. Facebook breakups This occurs when one person in the couple can't wait to put the Bat signal out that they're now available and potentially desperate for a hot rebound.
11. The 38-Geary What I also like to call the Trans-Siberian railroad express to Lenin's tomb.
