NIKKEI VIEW: The Asian American Blog

I just got a surprising amount of respect for Hilton, who responded this week with this spoof to an ad by John McCain’s campaign criticizing Barack Obama for being too popular, and comparing him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton:

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

And this one is just a wonderful acknowledgement of [...]

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Erin, Jared and I ate at a Benihana restaurant recently, and then learned just a couple of days later that Rocky Aoki, the founder of the Benihana chain, had died.
I wrote about my experience growing up eating at Benihana for special family occasions, and how in recent years, the restaurant only has one connection [...]

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I know some of my friends think of me as a gadget freak, but I only get crazed about a new toy every once in a while. iPods, for instance. Or digital cameras before that. Walkmans (Walkmen?) in the ’80s.
Here’s my newest gadget recommendation: We recently bought two Flip video cameras and we’re [...]

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Leave it to a former rockcrit — and a McClatchy employee (the company just cut 10% of its workforce nationally) — to come up with an eloquent essay on the decline of the newspaper industry and the ascension of the Internet.
Online people, myself included, have been saying for years that the Web should be [...]

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I know exactly where I was the night of June 5, 1983: I was freezing my butt off, soaked to the bone but ignoring my discomfort because I was in musical heaven, surrounded by huge sandstone rocks on both sides, a stormy sky above and a hungry young band called U2 just hitting its stride [...]

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We had dinner last night at the venerable Denver Press Club with Jennifer 8.Lee and learned about Chinese food. The dinner was Chinese takeout, of course, from a DU-area eatery called “Hong Kong Cafe.” It was pretty good. The dinner was organized by John Ensslin, president of the Colorado chapter of the Society of Professional [...]

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I’m a born-again Asian American. Most of my life, I was oblivious to my rich roots and Japanese heritage. I was a banana — yellow on the outside, white on the inside. So probably more than some Asian Americans, I like the idea that May is officially “Asian Pacific American Heritage Month” in the U.S.
There’s [...]

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“Time-shifting” is a new media term for the ability of technology to allow us to consume media — whether it’s video or music or text — at any time. The most obvious example is people recording TV shows on the DVRs to watch later, at their leisure.
You can hear a teleseminar via podcast any [...]

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As a card-carrying baby boomer (I guess officially, with my AARP membership!), I was 10 when most of 1968 happened. It was a pivotal year, no doubt — though in my consciousness, ‘69 left a deeper impact.
AARP magazine does a fine job of using the Web as a story-telling device to revisit the year. [...]

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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 [...]

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I dunno about you, but I find it fascinating that Prince played the Super Bowl halftime show tonight. It’s good to see him again, and damn, he looks good and he’s hot, ripping up the guitar like a diminutive, modern-day Hendrix.
It’s sort of weird to see him playing music so centered around his “Purple [...]

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Although a small label had unsuccessfully released some singles in 1963, most American rock and roll fans were introduced to a new band from England via Capitol Records’ 1964 album, “Meet the Beatles.”
That album, and the subsequent visits by the mop-topped Liverpudlians to the U.S., sparked by appearances on TV including historic performances on [...]

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One of the cool things about traveling to LA is getting to watch KDOC, a local station that unearths old TV shows and airs them. For some reason, whenever I’m in town I get to tune in to old episodes of “Hawaii Five-O.”
The show is fascinating to me for several reasons. It fit my early [...]

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James Brown died on Christmas day, a typically dramatic move for the 73-year-old, self-described “Godfather of Soul,” who was known for dramatic endings in concert.
The news of his death caught me off guard, because I hadn’t heard much about the performer in years. Although Brown’s music career was in its sunset years, he was still [...]

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Note: The blog I just posted got me to thinking about a column I wrote way back in the day, before blogs were a twinkle in some developer’s eye, about Asians on TV. It’s posted in the archives of my Nikkeiview site, but I thought I’d re-post it here. I wrote this after seeing the [...]

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It took the urging of Cirque du Soleil, the acrobatic dance performance group, to bring the music of the Beatles – the most iconic of 1960s baby boomer musical catalogs — into the 21st century.
The bulk of the project is a mashup, the digital-era, technology-enabled ability of taking two different kinds of data and “mashing” [...]

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Audrey Hepburn, one of the great, classic actresses of Hollywood of the ’50s and ’60s, may have died in 1993, but she’s alive and well in American pop culture. Her name, and the 1961 film with which her face is most associated, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago, and [...]

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Pitchfork has published a rambling list of the “200 Greatest Songs of the 1960s,” beginning with the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon” at 200 and ands with the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” at #1 (presumably — the final 20 aren’t numbered). It’s an interesting list because it’s in a British publication, and these songs were chosen [...]

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I grew up – like all baby boomers – during an era of radio when the Top 40 format was perfected during the first two decade of rock and roll, and genres didn’t divide up into separate formats. An entire generation of pop music fans pretty much grew up listening to a wild mix of [...]

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One of my ongoing passions is pondering the passing of pop culture references. Baby boomers have lived through decades of new hip phrases — for instance, the hip word for “good” has evolved every few years, from “cool” to “groovy” to “far out” (thanks to John Denver for killing that one off by using it [...]

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