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.

The band is still trying to make it big, and working hard at it. Most of the time, they perform for free. They would play festivals, and colleges, and high schools. (Except for this Saturday when they’ll be at the 4NOLA.org Benefit Concert in the Viper Room in West Hollywood. Tickets are $12 presale/ $15 door.) One of these days when Thomas’ Apartment makes it big, it won’t be said that they were lucky; a lot of sweat was put into it, and they sure have paid their dues.

Something about this band is that all members have jobs – and not starving musicians’ jobs. They got good jobs. And then they devoted their time to rock and roll.

A. Thomas Tran, the Thomas who had that apartment, is CEO of his own game development company, and he’s got a cushy contract with EA to port their products to various devices. The Tetris game on mobile phones? His company ported it there. His company also did Sims, Madden, NBA Live, and Simpsons, to name some others.

Billy Vu Lam is the only one with an art degree. He’s working as a 3D animation artist and brags on his Facebook that he did the zombies in the Will Smith vehicle “I am Legend.”

Below is a video of the band the OC Fair, playing the title track of their latest album, “Tuesday Night Lights.”

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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The day after the competition, VAALA held the award ceremony.

The jury, by the way, consists of Audrey Yamagata Noji, Santa Ana Unified School Board Member; Don Cribb, chairman of the Santa Ana Arts Council; and three Vietnamese-American painters: Lệ Chi; Nguyễn Ðình Thuần; and Nguyễn Việt Hùng.

Entertainment at the award ceremony included everything from mid-Autumn tunes played on traditional Vietnamese musical instruments; to a hip-hop number.

Every kid that showed up was given a lighted lantern, which they then used to follow the Lion Dance troupe around, in a Mid-Autumn tradition known in Vietnamese as “rước đèn.”

The following photos are by the Bolsavik.

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This is Kevin Phan, frequently seen on Thế Hệ Trẻ music videos. He does his homework while waiting for his turn to perform.

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And this shy but justly proud kid is Steven Phan, who won second place in the 5-to-7 age group.

These kids are from the Lac Hong traditional music group, probably the organization most dedicated to propagating traditional Vietnamese music in the United States.

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These kids actually all come from the same music school, the Spotlight School in Garden Grove.

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VAALA is, of course, the same organization that put together the biennual Vietnamese International Film Festival (web site here; see Bolsavik collected entries here) as well as the FOB II: Art Speaks exhibit (see Bolsavik collected entries 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.

The Golden Kites are awarded annually by the Vietnamese Motion Pictures Association. First given out in 2003, this award is new to the scene and has gone through a number of ad hoc changes over its short existence.

Vietnam has another set of national film awards known as the Golden Lotus awards, given out by the Ministry of Culture and Information at the national film festival, which is organized at haphazard times – not at set intervals. The last few festivals, for example, took place in 1999, 2001, 2005 and 2007.

The winner of this year’s Golden Kite for best director, Luu Huynh, used to live in OC but now makes his home in Saigon. In 2003, his short film Passage of Life (Vietnamese: Đường trần) won the audience choice award at the inaugural Vietnamese International Film Festival (ViFF) in Irvine. His feature film The White Silk Dress (Vietnamese: Áo lụa Hà Đông) was one of Vietnam’s most critically successful films, winning audience choice awards at the Pusan International Film Festival and also at ViFF. It also won best foreign film award at China’s Golden Rooster Awards, beating out eventual Oscar winner Pan’s Labyrinth.

Before that, Luu was famous for something else. In 1997, Luu was hired to work on a music video for the variety show Paris by Night, by Thuy Nga, for a Mother’s Day special issue (pictured right). On a song about the sufferings of Vietnamese women during the war, Luu played news footages of helicopters and a rice field that turned red. Thuy Nga was promptly accused of being commie; the ever-present Viet Dzung organized a burning of the video – but eventually Thuy Nga rode off all that to remain the top Vietnamese variety show.

The Bolsavik took the picture above at a party in 2007. From left: Kieu Chinh, one of Vietnam’s best known movie stars, most famous outside the Viet community for her role as Suyan in The Joy Luck Club; Tran Anh Hung, Vietnamese-French director of Cyclo, Vertical Ray of the Sun, and the Oscar-nominated Scent of Green Papaya; and the above-mentioned Dustin Nguyen; Stéphane Gauger; and Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo.

A Viet installation artist’s tribute to refugees, now showing at Arizona State University, features the artist running at locations throughout the world with a cumulative length equal to the Earth’s diameter.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, whose previous works of underwater video installations have been exhibited at Bienniales and museums around the world, is working on the latest project, called “Breathing Is Free: 12,756.3.”

The number in the project title refers to the diameter of the Earth, and that’s part of the project. As described in Art Daily here, “the artist plans to run 12,756.36 kilometers, or, the diameter of the earth, in different international cities at different times.”

Nguyen-Hatsushiba is a Viet born in Japan, raised in the U.S., and currently living and working in Vietnam. Why is he exhibiting at Arizona State University? Because that’s the home institution of Nora Taylor, one of the world’s top authorities on Vietnamese art.

In a Facebook message to the Bolsavik, Professor Taylor, a co-curator of Breathing Is Free: 12,756.3 expresses her thoughts on the installation:

“Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s work encompasses the globe, literally, as he aims to run the diameter of the earth over the course of 10 years. Although he lives in Ho Chi Minh City and is of part-Vietnamese descent, he challenges notions of place and cultural identity, issues that are so central to many Vietnamese artists work. With this exhibition, Nguyen-Hatsushiba shows that a ‘Vietnamese’ artist can be truly global and transcend notions of national heritage and ‘home.’”

In a publication by Museum of Art Lucerne and Manchester Art Gallery, Nguyen-Hatsushiba explains the concept of his installation:

“The running is really about breathing. Drawing breath becomes more difficult as one runs further as one’s entire body begins to wear out….But what counts here is to record my ‘running struggle’ to discuss the refugee topic through distance and location via GPS watch. It’s conceptual and physical; it’s a real struggle, not a performance.”

His installation in ASU Art Museum began January 24, 2009, with the artist’s exhibition run in Phoenix scheduled for Spring 2009.

Previously, Nguyen-Hatsushiba is celebrated for his video of human struggles made more intense by doing it underwater. At right is a photo from his 2001 video installation “Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex—For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards.”

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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.

And that, dear readers, is the silver lining in this picture.

Here’s the text of VAALA’s press release:

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.

So, I wouldn’t tell them anything glibly. Nor would I tell them they can’t protest an art exhibit.

In fact, I wouldn’t tell them a thing if they would tell me that they respect American protections of speech. And that artistic expression is a large part of that.

If they’re saying that, I’m not hearing it. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why the Westminster council would even come close to siding with people who want to take down art exhibits.

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:

In the photo on the wall, that woman’s shirt is the current flag of Vietnam. That bust on the credenza is the bust of Ho Chi Minh, the communist leader who’s been dead for 40 years but whose images are still taboo in Little Saigon.

So a group calling itself the “Thanh Nien Co Vang” (Yellow Flag Youth) is taking to the telephones and email, and calling for people to come out for a protest.

The Thanh Niên Cờ Vàng is no neophyte in the protest business. They have been one of the most ardent and regular people coming to demonstrate outside China’s consulate in Los Angeles over the Chinese occupation of the Spratlys and the Paracels, two archipelagos claimed by many countries including Vietnam.

*** UPDATE *** UPDATE *** UPDATE ***

Click here for the Thanh Niên Cờ Vàng‘s call-out for protest (in Vietnamese). The call-out is in a Word document email attachment with a name intended to convey some sort of urgency: “SOS.doc.“

It says, and the Bolsavik quotes in translation, “Knowing that this is a Free country, the organizers can show what they want, but that does not mean they can do what they want.”