Eddie Huang is our Richard Pryor: “Fresh off the Boat” and TV history in the making - Salon.com: "“Fresh off the Boat” is based on, of all things, a nonfiction book, celebrity chef memoir–a celebrity chef memoir that covers very little about cooking, written by a guy who’s the ultimate Hollywood outsider...
For Asian-American guys like me he’s the hero we don’t deserve but the one we’ve always needed, the guy who took a sharp left turn off the straight and narrow, smashed right through the guardrail and has been only picking up speed since.
He’s the Asian guy who got laid off from his Big Law associate position and rebounded by selling drugs, doing stand-up and eventually opening a restaurant. He’s the guy who, even after achieving “respectability” with Baohaus being featured in the New York Times, got back in the news with his second venture, Xiao Ye, shutting down after being busted by the cops for selling Four Loko.
He’s the guy who wrote a memoir that drops F-bombs left and right, describes the emotional shock of hooking up with a white girl and seeing “pink nipples” for the first time, quotes hip-hop lyrics at length, frankly reveals his parents as a woman who “got knocked up at a house party” by a man who came to America for “sports fucking,” and boldly grabs onto the third rail of racial politics with both hands. (Asians, the model minority, are “the dude who can cross the union line”; the book is about Huang’s refusal to do so.)
...Eddie Huang is our Richard Pryor, coming along a good 40 years after Pryor exploded onto the scene of African-American entertainers and shattered the expectations of black respectability politics. And Pryor, with his uncompromisingly subversive ethos, was famously unable to keep a TV show on the air for more than four episodes. Huang has done the next best thing to refusing to compromise and thus getting his show pulled: compromising, but then using the medium of the Internet to loudly announce the fact that he has compromised and call attention to where specifically in the show those compromises are. Where else–on ABC, on HBO, or anywhere on TV–do you have the originator of a property openly talking shit about the TV adaptation of that property while still performing voice-over and doing press for the show?
...And really, by emphasizing how much had to be diluted and whittled down to pass network muster, Huang ends up highlighting just how subversive “Fresh off the Boat” manages to be for a prime-time ABC show. For God’s sake, the title of the show is a reclaimed racial slur, the equivalent of a show about African-Americans titled “Ghetto.”"
'Fresh Off the Boat' Eddie Huang Interview - The Hollywood Reporter: "The comedy, based on Huang's memoir of the same name, details young Eddie (played by Hudson Yang) moving with his family from Brooklyn to Hollywood. It's the first Asian-American series on the broadcast networks in 20 years (since Margaret Cho's All American Girl). And to hear the outspoken Huang tell it, ABC and producers 20th Century Fox Television get it "85 percent" right.
...Season one is very mechanical; it's a very sitcomy show. I didn't come out to L.A. to make a sitcom. I see this all as art. I came here because I wanted to do it; it's a challenge. I meet with the guys everyday, we talk about the show and it's a bunch of film nerds hanging out. It's a different experience to come to 20th and ABC, and a lot of it is based on demographics, numbers, tests and Nielsen boxes and these people turning dials. It's very unnatural to me. In my life so far when I'm honest and tell the truth and put out something I believe in, people have responded to it. I still maintain faith in that. I think people are smarter than we give them credit for, and we should stop talking down to them...
In the pilot, you address the word "chink" right off the bat. Why was that important to include in the first episode? That's one of my favorite things that [showunner] Nahnatchka Khan did. She read the book and highlighted that package and was like, "This is the story we're going to go with for the pilot." It's the one decision I never fought. I fully agree with it. This is powerful; we make a statement. It's a historic show, and if we are going to market it as historic, let's do something historic. I think it's great that we deal with that word because I have never seen it dealt with in the media. … Let's understand why that word matters. In real life, a black kid said it to me, and when it happened, I fought the kid. I felt bad because I understood the frustration: "You're black, I'm Chinese and we are in a private Christian school — we are at the bottom of American's totem pole, and we are left here to fight over the last spot in the microwave.""
Eddie Huang on Seeing His Memoir Become a Sitcom -- Vulture: "I used to try to understand my existence underneath the Bamboo Ceiling, 8 but with no way out through the master’s house, I laced up my Timb boots, initiated Chinkstronaut mode, and escaped the gravitational pull of society. Since 2009, I’ve opened Baohaus, produced and hosted Huang’s World for Vice, and, in January 2013, Spiegel and Grau published my memoir, Fresh Off the Boat. It told my life story as a Taiwanese-Chinese-American creating his own America replete with bound feet, bowl cuts, sports sex, and soup dumps. I even got love in the Times. Dwight Garner said it was “a surprisingly sophisticated memoir about race and assimilation in America. It’s an angry book, as much James Baldwin and Jay-Z as Amy Tan. That it’s also bawdy and frequently hilarious nearly, if not entirely, seals the deal.” Life was good...
Bank customers watches cornstarch television and eats at Panda Express because that’s all they’re being offered. I didn’t need the show to be Baohaus or Din Tai Fung; I would have settled for Chipotle. Yet, for some reason, no one wants to improve the quality of offerings until someone forces them to. A Jedi has to say, “I want to be incrementally better than the Seth MacFarlanes and McDonald’s of the world!” for anything to change. Isn’t that the genius of Shake Shack, South Park, and In-N-Out Burger? What happened to being an incrementally aspirational society? Wasn’t America the City on the Hill? In Hollywood, it felt like, we were the town in a valley run by western Michigan. “Listen, buddy, the show is never going to be the book. What you are hoping is that people watch the show, buy the book, then say, ‘You know, that show is funny, but the book is better,’” said Melvin. “But it doesn’t have to be that way! Game of Thrones is based on books, and it’s fucking heat rocks.” “I hate to break this up, but the books are better,” whispered my manager Rafael. “You get what I’m saying. It’s still a good show.”
...Throughout the process, I kept speaking to Melvin and Natch about context and perspective so that viewers truly understood how diverse Asian America is. My father loved America. He wanted to come, listen to rock ’n’ roll, grow long hair, and cop dome from Jewish women at Penn State. My mom had no choice. She was brought to the country, never really fit in, but never felt less for it. She’s a strong, confident woman who many times felt that America made no sense. What the hell are chicken tenders? Why did people waste napkins at the restaurant? Why do their kids bruise fruit at the store? Frankly, she thought she was better than America because she came from a culture with 5,000 years of experience. I needed that contrast in the show supported by the specific musings and perspectives of Asian-Americans who actually lived this life. We couldn’t represent everyone who lived this life, but for the individuals we did represent, I felt a duty to be accurate."
...But for all the bullshit I heard at studios about universal stories and the cultural pus it perpetuates, I felt some truth in it for those three minutes. It takes a lot of chutzpah to launch a network comedy with a pilot addressing the word chink, yet it works because it’s the safest bet the studio could have made. The feeling of being different is universal because difference makes us universally human in our individual relationships with society. We’re all fucking weirdos. The social contract is here because we have a collective desire to be individuals and preserve our rights to pursue singular happiness with or without cilantro. But we’ve been fixated way too long on universality and the matrix’s pursuit of monoculture. It’s time to embrace difference and speak about it with singularity, idiosyncracy, and infinite density. No more drone strikes, no more Nielsen boxes, no more "we are the world" … if it’s walkin' dead with a red dot, take the shot. Chinkstronauts, ride out ... "
ABC sitcom 'Fresh Off the Boat' is a satire that works - LA Times: "Huang, who wears his anger proudly, has also been publicly enacting what might be called a journey to acceptance of a show that converts his sharp-edged, elbows-out family into a moderately argumentative, heartwarming television unit with parents who show their love, as the script has it, "through criticism and micro-management," and kids who represent the usual variety pack of attitudes. Eddie will not be kicked out of as many schools or get into the sort of trouble Huang did; and we won't see his father beating him with a rubber alligator, as in Huang's book.
"You get some old Chinese and old Japanese together people in a room and they'll hate on each other for hours. Like Dominicans and Puerto Ricans." "Like blacks and blacks."
An Open Letter to Moderate Muslims | Ali A. Rizvi: "What are non-Muslims supposed to think when even moderate Muslims like yourselves defend the very same words and book that these fundamentalists effortlessly quote as justification for killing them -- as perfect and infallible? Like other moderates, Reza Aslan frequently bemoans those who read the Quran "literally." Interestingly enough, we sort of agree on this: the thought of the Quran being read "literally" -- or exactly as Allah wrote it -- unsettles me as much as it unsettles Reza. This is telling, and Reza isn't alone. Many of you insist on alternative interpretations, some kind of metaphorical reading -- anything to avoid reading the holy book the way it's actually written....
In a way, you're telling the listener to value your explanations of these words over the sacred words themselves. Obviously, this doesn't make a great case for divine authorship. Combined with the claims that the book is widely misunderstood, it makes the writer appear either inarticulate or incompetent. I know that's not the message you mean to send -- I've been where you are. But it is important to understand why it comes across that way to many non-Muslims. If any kind of literature is to be interpreted "metaphorically," it has to at least represent the original idea. Metaphors are meant to illustrate and clarify ideas, not twist and obscure them. When the literal words speak of blatant violence but are claimed to really mean peace and unity, we're not in interpretation/metaphor zone anymore; we're heading into distortion/misrepresentation territory...
Neither male nor female circumcision (M/FGM) are found in the Quran. Again, however, both are mentioned in the hadith. When Aslan discussed FGM, he neglected to mention that of the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence, the Shafi'i school makes FGM mandatory based on these hadith, and the other three schools recommend it. This is why Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, mostly Shafi'i, where Aslan said women were "absolutely 100% equal" to men, has an FGM prevalence of at least 86%, with over 90% of families supporting the practice. And the world's largest Arab Muslim country, Egypt, has an FGM prevalence of over 90%. So yes, both male and female genital cutting pre-date Islam. But it is inaccurate to say that they have no connection whatever to the religion....
That is the kind of information I could never reliably access growing up. But with the Internet came exposure. Suddenly, every 12-year-old kid could search multiple translations of the Quran by topic, in dozens of languages. Nothing was hidden. It was all right there to see. When Lee Rigby's murderer cited Surah At-Tawbah to justify his actions, we could go online and see exactly what he was talking about. When ISIS claims divine sanction for its actions by citing verse 33 from Surah Al-Maaidah or verse 4 from Surah Muhammad, we can look it up for ourselves and connect the dots. Needless to say, this is a pretty serious problem, one that you must address. When people see moderates insisting that Islam is peaceful while also defending these verses and claiming they're misunderstood, it appears inconsistent. When they read these passages and see fundamentalists carrying out exactly what they say, it appears consistent. That's scary. You should try to understand it. Loudly shouting "Racist!" over the voices of critics, as Ben Affleck did over Maher and Sam Harris last week, isn't going to make it go away. (Also, if you think criticizing Islam is racist, you're saying that all of Islam is one particular race. There's a word for that.)
...You may be shaking your head at this point. I know your explanations are very convincing to fellow believers. That's expected. When people don't want to abandon their faith or their conscience, they'll jump on anything they can find to reconcile the two. But believe me, outside the echo chamber, all of this is very confusing. I've argued with Western liberals who admit they don't find these arguments convincing, but hold back their opinions for fear of being seen as Islamophobic, or in the interest of supporting moderates within the Muslim community who share their goals of fighting jihad and fundamentalism. Many of your liberal allies are sincere, but you'd be surprised how many won't tell you what they really think because of fear or political correctness. The only difference between them and Bill Maher is that Maher actually says it. Unfortunately, this is what's eating away at your credibility. This is what makes otherwise rational moderate Muslims look remarkably inconsistent. Despite your best intentions, you also embolden anti-Muslim bigots -- albeit unknowingly -- by effectively narrowing the differences between yourselves and the fundamentalists. You condemn all kinds of terrible things being done in the name of your religion, but when the same things appear as verses in your book, you use all your faculties to defend them. This comes across as either denial or disingenuousness, both of which make an honest conversation impossible.
...it might help to read not only the Quran, but the other Abrahamic texts. When you do, you'll see that the Old Testament has just as much violence, if not more, than the Quran. Stoning blasphemers, stoning fornicators, killing homosexuals -- it's all in there. When you get about ten verses deep into Deuteronomy 20, you may even swear you're reading a rulebook for ISIS. You may find yourself asking, how is this possible? The book of the Jews is not much different from my book. How, then, are the majority of them secular? How is it that most don't take too seriously the words of the Torah/Old Testament -- originally believed to be the actual word of God revealed to Moses much like the Quran to Muhammad -- yet still retain strong Jewish identities? Can this happen with Islam and Muslims?
Finding consensus on ideology is impossible. The sectarian violence that continues to plague the Muslim world, and has killed more Muslims than any foreign army, is blatant evidence for this. But coming together on a sense of community is what moves any society forward. Look at other Abrahamic religions that underwent reformations. You know well that Judaism and Christianity had their own violence-ridden dark ages; you mention it every chance you get nowadays, and you're right. But how did they get past that? Well, as much as the Pope opposes birth control, abortion and premarital sex, most Catholics today are openly pro-choice, practice birth control, and fornicate to their hearts' content. Most Jews are secular, and many even identify as atheists or agnostics while retaining the Jewish label. The dissidents and the heretics in these communities may get some flak here and there, but they aren't getting killed for dissenting. This is in stark contrast to the Muslim world where, according to a worldwide 2013 Pew Research Study, a majority of people in large Muslim-majority countries like Egypt and Pakistan believe that those who leave the faith must die. They constantly obsess over who is a "real" Muslim and who is not."
Is it Better to be Smart or Beautiful? | Scott Adams Blog: "I’ll go first. I’m smart, as far as I can tell, but no one would mistake me for attractive. So I know what it feels like to be smart and unattractive. I don’t have a sense of what it feels like to be attractive while having average intelligence, but frankly it looks like a better deal. Science tells us that attractive people have a full range of benefits throughout life. They get better jobs, higher pay, more invitations, better sex partners, and a higher quality of life in general. Studies even say we judge attractive people to be smarter and more competent. And to the extent that beauty is a marker for good health, even the kids of attractive people have advantages...
Civilization is designed for people of average intelligence because they are the majority. Entertainment is focused on average people and so they have more opportunities for fun. User interfaces are designed so average people can use them, and so on. Average intelligence is a perfect fit for modern life because modern life is designed that way...
In the past two years I got a whiff of the value of attractiveness. I had a personal shopper pick my clothes so I didn’t look so much like a victim of a fashion crime. I also transformed my body from an average-American body to a toned six-pack situation. I experienced (and this is anecdotal of course) a huge difference in how people treat me in person. I’m still short, bald, old and bespectacled, so there is a limit to how much I can improve. But even so, the benefits of perhaps 20% more attractiveness were substantial to my daily happiness even if it was all in my mind.
I also hear a lot of stories from spouse-free people now that I am one of them. The attractive spouse-free people have insanely interesting lives because they get amazing offers on a regular basis. When I was married I never heard any of their stories. Now that I am one of them, the spouse-frees open up to me. If you think attractive single people in 2015 are living the same lives as the rest of us, you are very, very, very, very wrong. That’s all I can tell you, and I had to leave out several “verys” for brevity...
Schools are organized to support the notion that brains are more important than looks. Most of the classes feed your brain and one or two are about fitness and health. I think science is awkwardly poised to suggest we should change the balance and focus a bit more on what I will call learned attractiveness. You can influence your attractiveness by exercise, nutrition, skin care, hair care, fashion, makeup, and more. And getting that stuff right is frankly more useful than getting an A+ in trigonometry, unless you plan on a technical career.
Personality is another factor you can tweak to improve your perceived attractiveness. Schools teach kids the rules of society but they don’t teach how to fix a broken personality. Adults end up in therapy to figure out how to deal with others. I didn’t know how to have a proper personal conversation until I was in my twenties and took the Dale Carnegie course. Personality is only partially genetic. A big part of it is technique, and technique can be taught."
When Liberals Ignore Science - Reason.com: "...if you walk around believing that pesticides are killing your children or that fracking will ignite your drinking water or if you hyperventilate about the threat of the ocean's consuming your city, you have a viewpoint that not only conflicts with science but undermines progress. So how do we approach matters that have been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by liberals? Take vaccines...
You'll notice that laws with easier loophole exemptions from vaccination are most often found in blue states, where we also find the most outbreaks. You may also notice that leading anti-vaxxers, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are writing in the mainstream Rolling Stone, not National Review. As The New York Times itself already reported, half the children attending schools in Marin County, California, go unvaccinated by their enlightened parents. Unvaccinated children are clustered all over liberal counties in California. None of this is particularly surprising. Modern environmentalism perpetuates myths about the inorganic world and the evils of big pharma. Its adherents are just as likely to be in conflict with settled science as anyone else....
The perception that one political group is less science-savvy than another is predominately driven by the unwillingness of many conservatives to accept alarmism about global warming and the policies purportedly meant to mitigate it. But when it comes to climate change, volumes could be written about the ill-conceived, unscientific, over-the-top predictions made by activists and politicians. We could start with our own Malthusian science czar, John Holdren, who once predicted that climate change would cause the deaths of a billion people by 2020 and that sea levels would rise by 13 feet. In 2009, James Hansen, one of the nation's most respected climate scientists, told President Barack Obama that we have "only four years left to save the earth." In 1988, he predicted parts of Manhattan would be underwater by 2008. If you don't like high-speed rail, California Gov. Jerry Brown will let you know that Los Angeles International Airport is going to be underwater. And so on and on and on."
Randall Carlson, Joe Schilling, Ali Rizvi & Tom Papa.
The Gays 'n' Guns Coalition - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Sen. Paul Schumacher (R), who argued that we should not allow gay love to get in the way of one's gun rights. Joe Duggan, a reporter with the Omaha World-Herald, has the killer quote from the hearing: "Is not the Second Amendment sex blind? Color blind?" Schumacher said. "What great evil would come from saying a partner of somebody in the military...is entitled to exercise their Second Amendment rights to carry a concealed weapon in this state?" Schumacher proposed an amendment that would extend the bill's privileges to gay spouses, speeding up the process of obtaining a concealed carry permit....The amendment passed 38 to 0, and the bill passed the first round of voting 37 to 4. After the amendment passed, a legislator who abstained from the vote said, "I think we just recognized gay marriage." Libertarian activists, take heed: If you live in a red state, you should figure out a way to reframe all your gay-rights causes as gun-rights causes. And if you live in a blue state, try to do the reverse."
Nationalism is a Poison - Reason.com: "It attacks the mind, short-circuits thinking, and makes self-destruction look appealing. Nationalism sows the seeds of hate and war...
We see naked ugly nationalism in many defenses of Kyle. Defenders appear to have but one operating principle: If Kyle was an American military man and the people he killed were not American, then he was a hero. Full stop. No other facts are relevant. It matters not that Kyle was a cog in an imperial military machine that waged a war of aggression on behalf of the ruling elite's geopolitical and economic interests, that he did his killing on foreign soil, and that no Iraqi had come to the United States seeking to harm him or other Americans. (Contrary to what Kyle defenders seem to believe, not one Iraqi was among the 19 hijackers on 9/11, although had that been otherwise, the murder of millions of other Iraqis and the displacement of millions more would not have been justified.) All that apparently matters to many Kyle fans is that this man was born in America, joined the American military, and faithfully obeyed orders to kill people he called savages. That is what nationalism does to a human being...
Nationalism, to judge by how nationalists conduct themselves, is an unswerving religious-like devotion to the nation, construed as a quasi-mystical entity — "America" — that cannot be wrong and so has the authority to command reverence and obedience. The nation transcends particular political officeholders, but the government, or state, is integral to the entity. The nation (country) cannot be imagined without the state. It would not be the same thing. When an American nationalist thinks of his country, he thinks not merely of a land mass with distinctive features, the people (a diverse group indeed), and its history (a mixed bag) because that list does not fully capture what they mean by America. Government represents and expresses the will and sentiment of the nation. (To be sure, a nationalist can think that the people have erred in picking their "leaders," in which case the nation is misrepresented and has to be "taken back.") The power of compartmentalization allows some people who think of themselves as individualists while seeing the nation in these corporate terms...
The ugliness of nationalism is often perceptible even by those who harbor it and commit terrible acts as a result. So they rationalize. They don't openly cheer the killing of Iraqis because they are Iraqis (or Arabs or Muslims); rather they plead self-defense: if we don't kill them, they will kill us..."
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