RESURFACING

that's not pork
1) As more astute people may have noted, Pop Life is now a two-some affair. Junichi was my guest blogger - now he's a permanent part of the site and the two of us might relaunch our mutual blogs into one single one, with a new name. I'm taking feedback on "Pop Your Pnuts."

Just be sure to read the byline, please? Us Asian folk might look the same but that doesn't mean we are the same. Hell, even my dad thought one of Junichi's posts was written by me. Ok, maybe we are all the same.

2) Though I've been newly deputized as a father, I won't be writing long, insipid posts about parenthood here. I'm actually daddy-blogging elsewhere at the moment, but I'll leave it to the more intrepid to figure out where. All I will say is this: my daughter is pretty goddamn cute. I know every new dad says that, but she is.

3) As some folks know, I teach a class in Asian American Film and Video at UC Berkeley. Last week, I had Curtis Choy (Fall of the I-Hotel, What's Wrong With Frank Chin? and Alice Wu (Saving Face) in class since both were in town for the 23rd S.F. Int'l Asian American Film Festival (aka the best damn social event of the year). It was a great contrast in filmmaking history and perspective. It's not that Choy and Wu are opposite, but they followed very different paths into filmmaking, in very different times. I won't wax too long about this except to say that I love that API filmmaking is expansive enough to include these two people (amongst hundreds more) in its scope. At some point, I need to write a book about it (I'm serious). In the meantime, go rent (if you can find it), Fall of the I-HoteL and go see Saving Face when it opens in June.

4) Speaking of the festival, I caught Fruit Chan's new movie, Dumplings. Patently disturbing dark comedy about a woman (Bai Ling - who was ridiculously hot) who makes special youth-giving dumplings made from...aborted fetuses. That's not a spoiler - this is made clear from jump. Believe me, this is not a film for the faint of heart - rather than allude to the secret ingredient, it gets a lot of screen time, in full graphic splendor. In the words of Chan, this film will offend EVERYONE.

Oddly, it still managed to make me hungry for dumplings though.