All of This - The Naked and Famous.
Her brother(or cuz?) Aroon Xayalith seems to be a musician as well. Check out his Myspace page.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Alisa Xayalith from The Naked and Famous
All of This - The Naked and Famous.
Her brother(or cuz?) Aroon Xayalith seems to be a musician as well. Check out his Myspace page.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Sean Yoshiura becomes first Japanese born player to be drafted into AFL
Born in Japan to a Japanese father and a white Australian mother, Sean Yoshiura and his family moved to Australia when he was seven. The 184cm, 68kg wingman started playing when he was nine, after watching a Brisbane Lions match on TV. He was signed by the Brisbane Lions as a rookie late last year using their Queensland priority pick. He will be using number 45.
Sean is also an elite endurance runner who is ranked #33 in the world (in his age group) in cross-country and has represented Australia at a world title in the 5km race. He was school Captain at Ipswich Grammar School in 2008, graduating with a string of academic and sporting distinctions and earning a scholarship to study Sports Science at Bond University on the Gold Coast.
Sean is the second Asian born player to play in the AFL. Peter Bell was the first Asian born player to play in the AFL.
This will be an exciting year!
Thumbs up to Sean's dad for AMWF
Player Profile
Player questionnaire
Brisbane Lions look east for Sean Yoshiura
Lions snap up local, Yoshiura
THOSE who have watched former Ipswich Grammar School captain Sean Yoshiura play sport know he’s something special.
With athleticism, stamina and leadership qualities, Yoshiura has excelled in sport and academically.
So it was hardly surprising that the Brisbane Lions snapped up the first-year Bond University student in yesterday’s AFL Rookie Draft.
“He’s an exceptional, good all-round sportsman,” IGS deputy headmaster Mike Connors said, sharing the buzz of excitement surrounding the teenage talent.
Connors said the former GPS champion and Australian cross country representative was a standout during five years at IGS.
“It’s always been his passion. He always wanted to try and make it at AFL level,” Connors said of the year 12 school captain.
Yoshiura played Aussie rules for IGS in a non-GPS competition before the athletics season.
“It’s no surprise what he’s achieved,” Connors said.
“The thing about the young man is that he’s got his head screwed on well. He was a good role model for all the boys at the school.”
Yoshiura, 18, was unavailable yesterday while finishing exams at the Gold Coast.
However, the Lions were celebrating signing the first Japanese-born player to an AFL list.
Yoshiura, Pick number 74, was born in Japan and moved to Australia when he was seven.
In a historic day for Ipswich Grammar, the Lions and the AFL, Yoshiura was one of the Brisbane club’s six selections yesterday.
The Lions also drafted Gippsland Power midfielder Mitchell Golby (Pick No.16), Eastern Ranges midfielder/ forward Josh Dyson (Pick No.32), Irish international rookie Niall McKeever (Pick No.67), Labrador product Claye Beams (Pick No.76) and Southport ruckman Broc McCauley (Pick No.78).
Yoshiura, Beams and McCauley were taken with the club’s Queensland Priority selections.
Lions National Recruiting Manager Graeme Hadley was pleased with the club’s choices.
“We have drafted a combination of inside midfielders and outside midfielders with a blend of pace and toughness,” Hadley said.
Yoshiura, 184cm tall and weighing 68kg, was a member of Mt Gravatt’s 2009 QAFL Grand Final side.
Lions recruiters were also impressed with Yoshiura’s athletic record. He represented Australia in the 2008 World Schoolboys Championships in the Czech Republic.
“Sean is a lean and developing midfielder who can also play at either half-back or half-forward,” Hadley said.
“He played a game with the Brisbane Lions Reserves earlier this year and performed very well.
“He’s also an outstanding endurance athlete with a very good athletics pedigree.”
Tomorrow's Children Today
I've finally found some photos of this mural on the web! I love looking at this everytime I drive past. If you're in Perth, it's on Wellington St (Freeway underpass). Awwww so much diversity. I stole these from http://www.flickr.com/photos/15594928@N03/ who's also the blogger for paper planes.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
An article on Japanese Story
Apparently it's on tonight on Channel 7 so I'm going to watch it.
The general plot from Wikipedia:
I just remembered an article by Jane Park from USysd that I have in my collection that I had been wanting to post but had forgotten about, so here it is.
From FlowTV (there are comments on the page as well)
Orientalised Masculinities in Contemporary Australian Cinema / Jane Park USyd
On my final night in the U.S. before moving to Sydney last year, I finally got around to watching Romper Stomper. While Geoffrey Wright’s film about Aussie skinheads didn’t provide the most cheerful picture of my soon-to-be new country, I was struck by its viscerally engaging style and its representation of Asian characters. As many critics noted upon its release in 1992, Romper Stomper sucks viewers in with its active camera and pumping soundtrack, positioning us, albeit ambivalently, alongside the skinhead youth whose story is clearly foregrounded. Unsurprisingly, few critics had much to say about the role of the peripheral Asian figures that frame the movie: the Vietnamese immigrants in the opening who are beaten up by the white supremacist gang and soon avenged by angry members of their own community and the impersonal Japanese tourists in the end who snap pictures of the gang leader as he is being murdered on the beach by his best mate.
These framing scenes provide iconic images of two forms of Asian presence in contemporary Australian cinema. The first is that of the Asian tourist (usually Japanese) who is welcome as long as she or he ultimately returns home. As Asian Australian film scholar Olivia Khoo convincingly argues, this figure must die if she or he stays in Oz, functioning ideologically as a necessary sacrifice used to further the inner development of the white protagonists.1 The second image is that of the Asian immigrant (usually Vietnamese, Chinese or Lebanese) who, depending on the context, embodies either an economic and cultural threat to the (implicitly white) Australian nation or reaffirms its tolerant multiculturalism. Much like the dialectical binary of the model minority/gook articulated by Asian American historian Robert Lee, both positions render the racialized immigrant a conditionally white citizen who is expelled or otherwise punished as a foreign contagion as soon as she or he threatens to usurp the privilege of those in power.2
What really surprised me is the central role that these iconic figures play as love interests to Anglo-Australian women in two fairly recent commercially successful and critically acclaimed Australian films. In Sue Brook’s Japanese Story (2003) Hiromitsu, a Japanese businessman enthralled by the outback has a (literally) short-lived affair with Sandy, an urban professional forced to be his chauffeur who herself is out of place in the harsh and stunning landscape. And in Rowan Wood’s Little Fish (2005) Vietnamese Australian drug dealer Johnny returns to Australia, ostensibly gone straight after a few years in Canada, hoping to resume his relationship with ex-junkie Tracy, who is trying unsuccessfully to start her own business in Cabramatta, the “Little Saigon” of Sydney.
As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Asian men rarely appear as romantic partners for anyone, and especially white women, in Hollywood cinema due to still prevalent stereotypes of the feminized, desexualized or otherwise emasculated Asian male in the U.S.–stereotypes rooted in the history of Chinese male immigrants who were systematically ghettoized, forced to take feminized domestic jobs, and prevented from forming families thanks to anti-Asian exclusion laws.3 For this reason, I was interested to see how a romantic relationship between an Asian man and a white woman would play out on the big screen in Australia, a Western nation in the Pacific that draws culturally on Britain and the U.S. and economically on its Asian neighbors.
Sadly, both films fell short of my perhaps unrealistically high hopes. Outside the radical acknowledgment that Asian men might actually be desirable to white women, Japanese Story and Little Fish use the same tired tropes and techniques to represent sympathetic Asian characters as selfless “caregivers of color” to borrow Cynthia Sau-ling Wong’s phrase and thus unwittingly reveal the power hierarchies that continue to structure white fantasies of the exoticized and eroticized Asian “other.”4
The new twist on an old formula is the clever way in which these films successfully masquerade as anti-racist, colorblind narratives. Japanese Story appeals to white liberal audiences by showcasing the development of a taboo interracial relationship between a white woman and an Asian man, which can only happen in the liminal space of the road and the indigenous wilderness. While the film is beautifully shot and there are some funny and poignant moments of connection between the characters, it is difficult, as a Korean American female viewer, not to notice the blatant ways in which Hiro is orientalized, functioning as the compliant male Lotus Blossom for the ambiguously butchy Sandy, who seems to see in his smooth skin, lean physique, and poor English an alternative, more manageable masculinity to that of the big, loud, and dismissive Australian men who ignore her throughout the film. No surprise then that she dominates her submissive Asian lover in bed, literally putting on his pants before she mounts him in their first sexual encounter. Hiro takes the traditional position of the woman in the scene: he remains absolutely still as the camera follows her gaze to look down at him. Tellingly, when he finally takes sexual initiative, kissing her rather than being kissed, he unexpectedly and inexplicably dies after following her playful instructions to jump into a lake.
In contrast Little Fish plays down Johnny’s racial difference even as it consistently plays up his cultural difference as a hybridized Vietnamese Australian. None of the Australian reviews I read of the film discuss the interracial aspect of the romance between Tracy and Johnny, and while most comment on its “authentic” setting, the implicit connections between the Vietnamese immigrant community and its association with drugs and gang violence is not discussed because, as my Australian colleagues informed me, this is already a given for the target audience of the film–most of whom would never venture into Cabramatta except for the occasional food tour. Likewise, the racial and cultural difference that Johnny embodies and that constitute the backdrop of Tracy’s working life is coded implicitly as a contagion, much like the drugs that form the central motif of the film. Tracy is still, it seems, addicted to the dangerous drug that is Johnny. Her family warns her to stay away from him yet she compulsively calls him (and he always comes running) only to flee from him for no discernible reason. On a more positive note, Johnny unlike Hiro, takes a more equal role in lovemaking and amazingly lives to see the end of the movie. I suppose that is something to celebrate. Yet I can’t help but feel a bit sad and perplexed that at a time when so many Asian countries have entered First World status, a mixed-race man is president of the United States, and the Australian prime minister speaks Mandarin, this is what we can claim as progress for representations of Asian people on the big screen.
NOTES
The general plot from Wikipedia:
Sandy Edwards (played by Toni Collette) is a director in a company designing geological software in Perth, Western Australia. Her business partner manipulates her into acting as a guide for a Japanese businessman visiting mines in the Pilbara desert, in the hope that he will purchase her product.
I just remembered an article by Jane Park from USysd that I have in my collection that I had been wanting to post but had forgotten about, so here it is.
From FlowTV (there are comments on the page as well)
Orientalised Masculinities in Contemporary Australian Cinema / Jane Park USyd
Lovers Sandy and Hiromitsu in Japanese Story.
On my final night in the U.S. before moving to Sydney last year, I finally got around to watching Romper Stomper. While Geoffrey Wright’s film about Aussie skinheads didn’t provide the most cheerful picture of my soon-to-be new country, I was struck by its viscerally engaging style and its representation of Asian characters. As many critics noted upon its release in 1992, Romper Stomper sucks viewers in with its active camera and pumping soundtrack, positioning us, albeit ambivalently, alongside the skinhead youth whose story is clearly foregrounded. Unsurprisingly, few critics had much to say about the role of the peripheral Asian figures that frame the movie: the Vietnamese immigrants in the opening who are beaten up by the white supremacist gang and soon avenged by angry members of their own community and the impersonal Japanese tourists in the end who snap pictures of the gang leader as he is being murdered on the beach by his best mate.
These framing scenes provide iconic images of two forms of Asian presence in contemporary Australian cinema. The first is that of the Asian tourist (usually Japanese) who is welcome as long as she or he ultimately returns home. As Asian Australian film scholar Olivia Khoo convincingly argues, this figure must die if she or he stays in Oz, functioning ideologically as a necessary sacrifice used to further the inner development of the white protagonists.1 The second image is that of the Asian immigrant (usually Vietnamese, Chinese or Lebanese) who, depending on the context, embodies either an economic and cultural threat to the (implicitly white) Australian nation or reaffirms its tolerant multiculturalism. Much like the dialectical binary of the model minority/gook articulated by Asian American historian Robert Lee, both positions render the racialized immigrant a conditionally white citizen who is expelled or otherwise punished as a foreign contagion as soon as she or he threatens to usurp the privilege of those in power.2
How do Australian screens represent the masculinity of the Asian male?
What really surprised me is the central role that these iconic figures play as love interests to Anglo-Australian women in two fairly recent commercially successful and critically acclaimed Australian films. In Sue Brook’s Japanese Story (2003) Hiromitsu, a Japanese businessman enthralled by the outback has a (literally) short-lived affair with Sandy, an urban professional forced to be his chauffeur who herself is out of place in the harsh and stunning landscape. And in Rowan Wood’s Little Fish (2005) Vietnamese Australian drug dealer Johnny returns to Australia, ostensibly gone straight after a few years in Canada, hoping to resume his relationship with ex-junkie Tracy, who is trying unsuccessfully to start her own business in Cabramatta, the “Little Saigon” of Sydney.
Tracy in Cabramatta
As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Asian men rarely appear as romantic partners for anyone, and especially white women, in Hollywood cinema due to still prevalent stereotypes of the feminized, desexualized or otherwise emasculated Asian male in the U.S.–stereotypes rooted in the history of Chinese male immigrants who were systematically ghettoized, forced to take feminized domestic jobs, and prevented from forming families thanks to anti-Asian exclusion laws.3 For this reason, I was interested to see how a romantic relationship between an Asian man and a white woman would play out on the big screen in Australia, a Western nation in the Pacific that draws culturally on Britain and the U.S. and economically on its Asian neighbors.
Sadly, both films fell short of my perhaps unrealistically high hopes. Outside the radical acknowledgment that Asian men might actually be desirable to white women, Japanese Story and Little Fish use the same tired tropes and techniques to represent sympathetic Asian characters as selfless “caregivers of color” to borrow Cynthia Sau-ling Wong’s phrase and thus unwittingly reveal the power hierarchies that continue to structure white fantasies of the exoticized and eroticized Asian “other.”4
The new twist on an old formula is the clever way in which these films successfully masquerade as anti-racist, colorblind narratives. Japanese Story appeals to white liberal audiences by showcasing the development of a taboo interracial relationship between a white woman and an Asian man, which can only happen in the liminal space of the road and the indigenous wilderness. While the film is beautifully shot and there are some funny and poignant moments of connection between the characters, it is difficult, as a Korean American female viewer, not to notice the blatant ways in which Hiro is orientalized, functioning as the compliant male Lotus Blossom for the ambiguously butchy Sandy, who seems to see in his smooth skin, lean physique, and poor English an alternative, more manageable masculinity to that of the big, loud, and dismissive Australian men who ignore her throughout the film. No surprise then that she dominates her submissive Asian lover in bed, literally putting on his pants before she mounts him in their first sexual encounter. Hiro takes the traditional position of the woman in the scene: he remains absolutely still as the camera follows her gaze to look down at him. Tellingly, when he finally takes sexual initiative, kissing her rather than being kissed, he unexpectedly and inexplicably dies after following her playful instructions to jump into a lake.
Addictions and contagions.
In contrast Little Fish plays down Johnny’s racial difference even as it consistently plays up his cultural difference as a hybridized Vietnamese Australian. None of the Australian reviews I read of the film discuss the interracial aspect of the romance between Tracy and Johnny, and while most comment on its “authentic” setting, the implicit connections between the Vietnamese immigrant community and its association with drugs and gang violence is not discussed because, as my Australian colleagues informed me, this is already a given for the target audience of the film–most of whom would never venture into Cabramatta except for the occasional food tour. Likewise, the racial and cultural difference that Johnny embodies and that constitute the backdrop of Tracy’s working life is coded implicitly as a contagion, much like the drugs that form the central motif of the film. Tracy is still, it seems, addicted to the dangerous drug that is Johnny. Her family warns her to stay away from him yet she compulsively calls him (and he always comes running) only to flee from him for no discernible reason. On a more positive note, Johnny unlike Hiro, takes a more equal role in lovemaking and amazingly lives to see the end of the movie. I suppose that is something to celebrate. Yet I can’t help but feel a bit sad and perplexed that at a time when so many Asian countries have entered First World status, a mixed-race man is president of the United States, and the Australian prime minister speaks Mandarin, this is what we can claim as progress for representations of Asian people on the big screen.
NOTES
- Khoo, Olivia. “Telling Stories: The Sacrificial Asian in Australian Cinema.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 27 (1-2): 45-63. [↩]
- Lee, Robert. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. 180-204. [↩]
- Yellow Future: Oriental Style in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2010. [↩]
- Wong, Cynthia Sau-ling. “Diverted Mothering: Representations of Caregivers of Color in the Age of ‘Multiculturalism” in Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, Grace Chang and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds. Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency. New York: Routledge, 1994. 70. [↩]
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