Bolsavik.com

You leave a band alone for a few years, and next thing you know, they’ve released not one, not two, but three full-length albums.

That’s what happened with Thomas’ Apartment, the rock band that won the 2007 Vietnamese talent search show on SBTN in 2007 and the $10,000 prize that came with it.

So after completing two albums, they’ve just released a third one, named Tuesday Night Lights, according to a press release here.

The album has twelve tracks, 5 of which can be downloaded free and legally on their web site here. Apparently the intent is entice the customer with 5 tracks and then hoping they would buy the whole album.

(The Bolsavik has also heard another song on this album - Michiko’s Song, named from band member Billy Vu Lam’s wife - at their wedding. So the Bolsavik has heard exactly 50% of the songs on this album.)

Three of the group, A. Thomas Tran, Lam and Nam Tran (first, second, and fifth from left in photo), were friends from college at UCLA. The band’s name came from the fact that they were jamming at, yep, Thomas’ apartment.

Two current members of the band are new: Drummer Krystal Sae Eua (fourth) and lead vocal Pete Nguyen (third). Pete is the composer for the film “Owl and the Sparrow” (in Vietnamese: Cú và Chim Se Sẻ) the low budget independent film by director Stephane Gauger that made a killing in Vietnam and had a moderately successful release in Vietnamese communities in the U.S.

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Every year for 7 years now, the Vietnamese-American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA) has been holding a Mid-Autumn Festival Painting Contest for kids.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, probably originally a harvest festival, has evolved in tradition to become the Vietnamese day for kids.

Since 2003, VAALA (web site here) has been holding the annual painting competition for kids. As a measure of how strong the tradition has been going: Some kids who participated in the first competition are now in college; and some babies born in the year of the first competition are now participating in it.

This year’s competition took place on Saturday October 3, with the award ceremony the day after.

Enjoy the photos of people enjoying themselves.

Photos from the day of the contest are by Nguoi Viet reporter Ngoc Lan, used with permission.

The floor is as good a space as any to create art.

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We’re given fingers for a reason…

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Vietnam’s national film awards, called the Golden Kite Awards, were given out Sunday night, and Vietnamese-American filmmakers walked off with a sizable chunk of the prizes. The Vietnamese-language Thanh Niên has a list of winners here.

Dustin Nguyen, of 21 Jump Street fame (pictured right, from the movie The Rebel), captured the best actor award for his role in The Legend is Alive (Vietnamese title: Huyền thoại bất tử), helmed by Vietnamese-American director Luu Huynh.

Luu also won the best director award for the film.

Kathy Uyen, an OC resident, walked off with the best supporting actress award for her role in Passport to Love (Vietnamese: Chuyện tình xa xứ), directed by L.A.-born and OC-based Victor Vu (see this entry).

There was no award for best film, instead the organizers gave two co-runner-up awards (the “Silver Kites”) to two films, and The Legend is Alive won one of them.

If the organizers could not decide on a best film, others were not so undecisive. The media panel awarded a Golden Kite for best film to Owl and the Sparrow, a feature film shot entirely on a handheld steadycam, by first-time Vietnamese-American director Stéphane Gauger. Owl also won in the strangely named category “best film in coproduction with a foreign country” - a madeup category first used in 2004 to give an award to The Buffalo Boy (Vietnamese: Mùa Len Trâu), directed by UCLA grad Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo.

The audience voted for another Golden Kite best film award for Passport to Love.

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The OC Register added to the mix its thoughts about the shut down of FOB II: Art Speaks in a column by Richard Chang on the paper’s Arts Blog, here.

Excerpts:

The protesters, mainly older Vietnamese residents of Orange County and Southern California, chanted slogans and denounced the curators and organizers of the exhibit at a news conference today. They said the image was pro-communist and threatened a larger protest over the weekend. “F.O.B. II” was due to close on Sunday.

The protesters brought pictures of a girl in a bikini with the yellow star on her butt and a Ho Chi Minh bust in the toilet. They called that “real art.”

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While I’ve written some stories about Vietnamese protests in the past, I don’t know the whole history behind the protesters and their concerns. Yet, it seems like they have a lot of power if they can shut down an art exhibit that featured a lot of different kinds of work, much of it non-political, plus get two editors at a local paper fired.

I thought the United States was a place where freedom of speech and expression are protected by the Constitution. But apparently, those rights are not fully protected or respected in certain communities here.

The Bolsavik is curious: Whoever made that “real art” - where the heck did he get the bust of Ho Chi Minh and the red flag bikini bottom?

VAALA’s F.O.B.II: Art Speaks, after an eventful seven-day run, closed its visual display on Thursday, three days ahead of schedule. Its performance portion has been moved to another location (at 209 N. Broadway — see more below). VAALA’s press release follows the jump, but first, some thoughts.

Something said by UCI Professor and Department Chair Linda Vo in the L.A. Times fanned some anger because of the word “test” which was translated into Vietnamese as something like “throwing down the gauntlet.” The Times story here attributed this statement to Vo, without quotation marks:

“The exhibit will test the Vietnamese American community, said Linda Vo, chair of UC Irvine’s Asian American Studies department.”

Anyway, leaving aside the no-doubt-intentional mistranslation, if indeed the exhibit was a test, then the self-proclaimed community, let’s say, did not pass.

How did the community not pass? It failed to respect the freedom for which it claimed to seek when leaving Vietnam.

In the words of Nguoi Viet’s Ky-Phong Tran here, “Freedom of speech is not just being able to say what you want and speaking your mind. That dear friends, is the easy part. TRUE Freedom of speech is that AND more so: listening to someone yap about something you disagree with, something you might morally or politically abhor, and grinning and bearing it.”

Now protesting is fine. Protests are forms of expression too.

The Bolsavik, for one, has a very expanded definition of freedom of expression. At FOB II, someone spit on one of the photos on display. An L.A.-based reporter asked the Bolsavik if he thought that was free speech too and the Bolsavik said yes, to the extent that the damage is not permanent then not only it is speech but it should also be protected speech. Spitting on something you despise is an age-old form of expression that the law and morality should respect — short of allowing destruction of property.

The problem is not with protesting. No. The problem is with the way the protests are organized and called. The Bolsavik’s mailbox, which monitors the right-wing listservs, lit up with something like 200 emails a day over this exhibit, and a fair guesstimate is that 90% are vulgar and maybe 5 or 6 are threats of physical violence including murder and arson.

But even that is not the whole problem. The whole problem is, instead of having a protest to express an opposing viewpoint, the protests are intended to - and called for as a means toward - shutting down ideas and expressions they don’t like.

Which is, of course, legal and all. But it proves that the protesters are not lovers of freedom or democracy or human rights or whatever else they claim they are in favor of.

And that, dear readers, is what’s wrong with this picture.

So, as mentioned above, the self-proclaimed community failed. But, hey, not badly.

Here and there in the whole saga are nuggets of instances where people who disagreed with the organizers wanted to carry out a dialogue.

Even at the meeting of the protest organizers, there were isolated words from some men who once held guns to fight for freedom to allow the exhibit curators to address the body. Those few men were outnumbered and the group refused to talk to the curators, but those men did speak up in favor of dialogue.

Hints, therefore, that, kicking and screaming though it may be, this community is slowly dragging its way out of the dictatorial ways of its country of origin.

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Dana Parsons (pictured) put in his two cents in an L.A. Times column today entitled “Vietnamese Americans’ hatred of communism shouldn’t inhibit free speech.” Click here.

Excerpts:

Street protests are about as American as you can get, but the scent of political repression too often has hung over these “anti-communist” confrontations. Sporadically in Little Saigon over the years, political and media figures, shop owners and average citizens have been subjected to fearsome threats if they’re perceived to be pro-communist.

The problem is that it often hasn’t taken more than depicting the flag of Vietnam to incite angry protests. The Vietnamese American artists told The Times that they didn’t set out to offend but felt that they shouldn’t censor themselves in creating art.

They are on the right side of this argument.

It is a hard pill to swallow for some in Little Saigon. I’ve even argued in the past that we should cut some slack for the people especially pained by the war years. Yes, they have over-the-top reactions to all things communist — reactions that don’t conform to American traditions of political freedom of expression — but it’s too glib to tell them to forget the past and get on with things.

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VAALA’s “F.O.B. II: Art Speaks” exhibit in Santa Ana was featured in the L.A. Times here, and the Times story prompted a call for (what else?) more protests of art.

And don’t say the Bolsavik didn’t warn you.

The Bolsavik did predict here that the exhibit would be this year’s hottest event.

Calling the exhibit “extraordinary in this historically anti-communist community,” the Times’ My-Thuan Tran quoted some of the organizers of the show like so:

“We felt this prevailing fear around the Vietnamese community after the foot bath incident,” said Tram Le, one of the curators. “I felt the community was on this slippery slope, that we were not progressing toward having open dialogue and being more tolerant of different political viewpoints.”

The group hopes to change the mood in Little Saigon through art.

“I think that we were trying to confront that fear head on,” said Mariam Lam, a UC Riverside assistant professor of literature and cultural studies, and board member of the art group. “We are trying to say that the community should be a safe space for people, even protesters.”

The idea of free speech apparently didn’t sit well with some people, and they were particular ticked at this art work by Long Beach City College professor Brian Doan, as shown on the L.A. Times’ web site:

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The hottest event of the new year is actually an art show, coming up in a little more than a week. It will promise to be highly controversial, enmeshed in the biggest current events of both the Vietnamese-American community and of Vietnam. Yes, that includes all the protests and such.

The exhibit is entitled “F.O.B. II: Art Speaks” and is produced by VAALA - the Vietnamese-American Arts and Letters Association.

Dubbed a “multi-art show (at) the crossroads of art + politics + community,” the show F.O.B.II is slated to be open from January 9 through January 18, at VAALA Center, 1600 N. Broadway, Santa Ana, CA 92706.

Click on the image for the PDF of a large, two-sided postcard with all the information.

Some of the names include prominent artists in Vietnam who are so outspoken they’re routinely tailed by agents of the security forces. (And whenever they meet with the Bolsavik the two groups of tails can merge, heh heh.)

Following the jump is the press release from VAALA.

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