Black-Asian Unity: BlAsian Love in the New Media
December 7, 2009
By Sam Cacas
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. And for a writer, I might add that absence also makes the words go stronger. Since this column’s appearance in the summer, a number of new media developments have taken the BlAsian world by storm and made my BlAsian writer mission ever more motivated. Probably the most impressive development is the July 23 debut of a mobisode preview called “Audre and Dre” which was produced by Los Angeles-based Kelley Company Productions. Co-starring New Jersey-born actress (see vid of her recent appearance on the T.V. show House) Audrey D. Kelley and Andrew Chen, the film highlights their fictional marriage’s ups and downs ending in a hedonistic sensually fulfilling ending.
The 2:35-minute vid has drawn raves in various BlAsian discussion boards including the PowerCouples_AMBW which I co-moderate (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PowerCouples_AMBW/). In its short YouTube life, this vid has garnered 1720 views on YouTube as of November 29. Co-star Audrey Kelley, who is also CEO of The Kelley Company Productions (see their YouTube channel at (http://www.youtube.com/user/KelleyCoProductions), told yours truly: “The video wasn’t written to be race specific but the leads were cast as an Asian male and African-American woman. I wasn’t aware that there was such a desire out there to see a couple such as this.” She added that her company will continue to produce films in the BlAsian genre.
In case you didn’t know, a mobisode is a short video designed specifically for showing on a cellphone. Thus, the shots are usually closeup and the storyline happens at a faster pace than a regular video or film. Also, mobisodes are usually a mere two to five minutes in length. They are usually designed for cellphone users as well as internet users and are most popular Asian countries such as Korea, China, Japan, and Singapore. Not surprisingly, “Audrey and Dre” will initially be distributed in the above countries.
Kudos to Barry Jenkins for his vid “Tall Enough” featuring a BlAsian couple from Brooklyn, New York whose rapture is featured by Bloomingdale’s.
Kudos also go to Akira’s Hip Hop Shop producer Joseph Doughrity whose award-winning BlAsian film was featured BET’s Special Eyes on talent on November 22. The showing was headlined by actress Sanaa Lathan of the BlAsian flick, “Sushi and Watermelon.”
This columnist highly recommends as your next read the recently self-published BlAsian memoir titled “Black Passenger Yellow Cabs” by Jamaican native and long-time California resident Stefhen Bryant. The Jamaican native’s memoir narrates a sexual sojourn to Japan which Bryant took between 2001 and 2008 in which he set out to fulfill his dream of. Bryant’s dream was launched by his attraction for Asian women in his hometown of East Kingston. While I question a number of his claims (e.g., “As sex, like most things in Japan, is for the satisfaction of men, Japanese men, uncomfortable with the intimacy aspect of sex, cannot fathom the concept of sex with the objective of pleasing women and the art of pleasuring women, sexually or otherwise is alien to them. They are oblivious to the power of furnishing women with multiple orgasms.”), his outright honesty about his sexual addiction issue and stated decision to curtail such exploits and get married made me curious enough to keep reading beyond the back cover copy.
At press time, a new BlAsian board has emerged on the ning.com site. Aptly called Black women Asian men United the new site seeks “to support, encourage, and promote interaction between Black women and Asian men. Yours truly has accepted the invitation to be co-Administrator. See my thoughts about this new site at my blog.
And last but not least, look for my seminal fiction work “BlAsian Exchanges, a novel” to be launched as an e-book in January 2010 or sooner. Yours truly has made the decision to go indie and will sell the e-book version of his tome on clickbank.com and other virtual venues.
Sam Cacas, author “BlAsian Exchanges, a novel” blogs at http://blackwomanasianman.wordpress.com
LGBT Perspective: For 2009: Tolerance Not Violence
December 29, 2008
A woman was beaten and raped by four men. They terrorized her for close to an hour and, when they were done, left her naked in the street. Throughout the attack, they taunted her with the reason she was chosen: She is a lesbian. Read more
Christmas and Its Malcontents
December 16, 2008
Much to my annoyance, some of the Christmas zealots in my neighborhood put up their lights as early as Halloween this year. And I distinctly remember hearing the first hints of Christmas music over the speakers in a pharmacy two weeks before Thanksgiving, as if to remind everyone to think of their local drugstore first when desperately seeking those oh-so-one-of-a-kind Santa hats. Read more
Blasian Perspective: Discovering My African Roots
December 9, 2008
Are Asians descended from the African continent? While many side with historians who believe that civilization started in Europe or China, I have believed the answer to the above question to be an emphatic yes since reading The Destruction of African Civilization by Chancellor Williams and The African Presence in Early Asia by Runoko Rashidie and Ivan Van Sertima. Read more
LGBT Perspective: The Success Of A Loss
December 3, 2008
California now has a constitution with an amendment that discriminates against a minority.
California now has two groups of people: one can marry, the other cannot. Read more
Faith Perspective: Praying for a Future President
November 24, 2008
Congratulations, Asian America, on the new president! You worked hard, listened and voted. But is Obama the answer to your prayers?
For African Americans, Obama is an answer to decades of prayers, not cheap please-don’t-let-the-Republicans -win-again kind of prayers, but prayers borne of the Civil Rights movement — prayers that asked for a glimpse of what King saw from the mountaintop. Read more
Blasian Perspective: Yes, We Did!
November 16, 2008
Remember my August 7 column where I boldly predicted that Barack Obama would be the first BlAsian president of the United States? (BlAsian in the combined biological-family-cultural sense: His father is Kenyan and his stepfather, who helped raise him, is Indonesian. And Barack was born in Hawai‘i and lived there as well as in Indonesia during his formative years.) Read more
LGBT Perspective: After Proposition 8
November 6, 2008
The Path Forward
By the time you read this, California’s Proposition 8, which would define marriage as only between a man and woman, will have been either rejected or passed. Either way, much work needs to be done to heal the fissures rendered by this divisive issue. Read more
Young Asian Americans Sound Off on Plunging Economy
October 23, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO — For some young Asian Americans, the country’s tanking economy hasn’t resulted in any major immediate changes to their pocket books. But the market’s topsy-turvy rise and fall has definitely impacted their mentality.
“Even if I have tremendously good credit, it will be harder for me to get a loan,” said UC Davis student Lily Read more
Faith Perspective: One Apology
October 16, 2008
“The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Na-ze oreo kirai nahn dah is Japanese for “Why do you hate me?”
I learned the phrase as a college sophomore when my older Korean roommate was desperately seeking a way to earn attention from an attractive Japanese ESL student. Perhaps he thought playfulness in the native Read more
BlAsian Musician Explores Both Sides of His Roots
October 9, 2008
The release of the CD Ten in September continued drummer/ percussionist/educator/musicologist/Asian American Orchestra director Anthony Brown’s long career of combining music that reflects his BlAsian roots.
Born in the Presidio neighborhood of San Francisco to —who met in Isuzo, Japan, during World War II and are both featured on the CD cover—Brown has been a seminal figure in Read more
LGBT Perspective: Why Would APIs Favor Discrimination?
October 2, 2008
At a meeting to defeat Proposition 8—the one that “eliminates the right of same sex couples to marry”—we learned that APIs are slightly more in favor of the proposition than against it. We are surprised.
APIs, with a long history of fighting against unequal rights, are now actually in favor of unequal rights? That doesn’t make a lot of sense. Have we forgotten all those exclusion acts enacted to deny us rights other people take for granted? Have we forgotten what discrimination feels like? Read more
