Monthly Archives: June 2007

It’s a good thing, but…

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We spent some time at the Sakura Matsuri, or Cherry Blossom Festival, in downtown Denver’s Sakura Square this past weekend. It was a good chance to catch up with old friends and we ended up filling a long table with extended family members.

I was there to do a booksigning for a vendor, Heritage Source, a family-run business based out of LA, which sells books online and at events like Sakura Matsuri. Carolyn Sanwo brought her husband and two daughters along to help run the booth all weekend, and I sat there for a few hours on Saturday and chatted with folks and signed copies of “Being Japanese American.” Erin spent the time volunteering inside the Tri-State Buddhist Temple’s gym, selling manju pastries to the hungry throngs.

It was hot but crowded. And, among the crowd were a surprising number of non-Asian kids, dressed in shabby faux-kimonos, looking as if they were homeless urchins. What was I to make of this new trend? Continue reading →

OK, so I’m late, but it was a good APA Heritage Month

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Way back in May, I didn’t write about it, but I should have. In one week during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the character played by Masi Oka in the terrific series “Heroes” helped save the world, Olympic skater Apolo Anton Ohno won the coveted prize in “Dancing with the Stars” and a lovely Chinese American hapa woman, Tessa Horst, was chosen to wed the Navy captain on “The Bachelor.”

Yeah, yeah, this is shallow, mass-entertainment pabulum. But you know what? It’s so seldom to see Asians on the boob tube, that to have them hogging the spotlight was just a plain thrill.

Watching that much TV on consecutive nights for so many weeks may have turned my brain into mush, however….

Echoes of FM Radio in the Summer of Love

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Interesting exercise in nostalgia with irony:

KCUV-FM in Denver is celebrating the official kickoff of summer by recreating the sound of Denver’s FM radio from 1967, complete with news items, radio commercials from back then, and typical playlsists, all presented by the airstaff of progressive radio from the time, including guys like Bill Clarke (who’s on Channel 7 now but came to Denver in the ’60s as an early Top 40 and progrock radio jock), and Thom Trunnell (wow, that’s a name I hadn’t heard in 25 years, from KFML days).

It’s very strange hearing Clarke, who’s on now through 10 am, talking as if the news is happening now, and griping about the cold rainy weather for July 21, 1967 (it’s hot in reality today, and reporting about the Monterey Pop festival as if it just ended the previous week.

It’s going on all day. Kinda weird, but interesting. I’ll tune in all day just to hear strangeness they pull out of the hat.

http://kcuv.com

Tune in, turn on and drop out.