Shoot Promos on Race, Class, Gender, Etc

"Despite everything, no one can dictate who you are to other people." - Prince Wait, I thought you concluded your blog last week . I did. But I did have one portrait left from my photoshoot with Zachary, so I decided to tack on this "stinger", a post-credit scene, you see with most Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. Okay, what's up. Am I going to share any insights or lessons I gained from going through this journey? Am I going to announce my plans for another blog series or some other creative endeavor? Do I have some joke I wanted to get off my chest? Am I going to attach a scene of enjoying shawarma with my best friends like the stinger in The Avengers ?  As far as writing goes, I'm going to take a much needed break. The self-imposed commitment to write every week was very cathartic but I poured everything I had into this project. I'm spent and need to take some time to recharge and feel inspired again. I need to find my creative source now that I...

"All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like... I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don't challenge ourselves to actually practice." - Bell Hooks Continuing from my blog last week about the fallout and trauma response from the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident at the Oscars ( and that my friends is what we in the business refer to as a callback; no I am not in the business ), I was left with the feeling that I had no place in a world that perpetuates and indirectly rewards such broken masculinity. I felt isolated. I felt disconnected. I felt defeated. Because the truth of the matter was, I was broken too. Maybe not in the same way that caused Will Smith to lose his sh*t, but I identified with that hurt even while recognizing how toxic it was. It's why I had such an intense reaction and why it elicited a ...

"Maybe he's found the answer to all the April snow" - Prince, Sometimes it Snows in April The following portrait was inspired by album covers from two of my favorite artists, Prince's 1986 album Parade and David Bowie's 1977 album Heroes . They were two prolific genre defying singer-songwriters who constantly reinvented themselves and pushed the boundaries of gender image and sexuality. As a music nerd, I like to create debate topics like: if you measure the body of work in both quantity and quality, which artist had the greatest decade of music? Some of my qualifications: do they have 3 or 4 widely considered classic albums and several songs from that era that have stood the test of time? While Michael Jackson is synonymous with the 1980's like no other pop star, he technically only released 2 solo albums ( Thriller in 1982 and Bad in 1987). Is that enough quantity to stack that up against every other artist and decade? For me, David Bowie in the 1970'...

"A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is." - Jiddu Krishnamurti Music is such a time capsule so we will romanticize the music from our formative years as the "golden age". I will resist the urge to be old man yelling at cloud and say that the music of the 80's and 90's is far superior to the music of Gen-Z, signaling that I'm officially washed. One of the formative songs of my adolescence was 1995's "I Wish" by Skee-Lo, the very definition of a one-hit wonder. While rap music can often characterized by braggadocios hyper-masculinity, this track was a humorous, self-deprecating lament on personal shortcomings. "I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her...". Even though Skee-Lo was a black man from Los Angeles via Chicago, "I Wish" was for me the quintessential Korean American male anthem, as a 5'9" Korean male...

  "Having grown up so familiar with creating a pleasing facade, I now end up compelled to reveal things inside and say, 'Okay, now you really see me. Do you still love me?' And then it's never enough; it always has to be total self-revelation." - Kathryn Harrison One of my earliest coping mechanisms were to create facades, not because I'm a sociopath who lacks empathy. Quite the opposite; I created facades because I have empathy and inherited the people pleasing trait from my parents. I became whatever version of myself that I felt people wanted, in order for them to feel safe and valued. While I may have used a different toolbox than a sociopath, my facades were still a form of manipulation to get people to like me more.  Why do we create facades? If you're a person of color, woman, LGBTQ+, or non-Protestant, something we're all familiar with is  code switching,  a survival tool we adopt to assimilate in predominantly WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Prote...

Kumon math. Taekwondo. Piano Lessons. Cello Lessons. Flute Lessons. Noonnoopi. SAT Prep. I was one of many second generation AAPI who's parents insisted take up an extracurricular activity. Not only would it help it in the college application process (yes my tiger parents thought of this while I was still in elementary school) but it was a necessary diversion from me spending every afternoon watching television and playing video games.  None of those hobbies stuck for long. The one day I forgot to wear a cup to Taekwondo, I participated in a sparring activity and was promptly kicked in the groin. Seeing as that I was never going to become the next Bruce Lee, I quit shortly with a brown belt and ZERO ability to defend myself in a fight. As much as I loved music, I didn't have any talent to play it. I never learned how to read sheet music fluently so in between piano lessons, I wrote the letters of keys in my music book so I knew which keys to play. My parents invested in a small...