How say I lacist? Hmmm, ret me latiocinate...
Hey fam, the summer continues and so does the blogging at PBS. Today's entry is Part 1 of an interview with John Jay, the creative director of advertising giant Wieden + Kennedy.
If you didn't know, W+K is the famous firm responsible for the Spike Lee + Michael Jordan ads that changed representations of race forever, and has been a pioneer in the globalization of hip-hop.
We're continuing the thread about race images in the hip-hop era. Despite what you might think, John is a second-generation Chinese American of late baby boomer age, and he has a lot to say about hip-hop and images of Asian Americans. I think you'll find this one fascinating.
On a related tip, our man Mosi Reeves sends us this link wherein Dave Kehr waxes on, but mostly off, about Charlie Chan:
In a medium founded on action, Charlie Chan remains one of the few heroic figures in American film to function proudly as an intellectual. Chan's adventures in ratiocination were first recounted by Earl Derr Biggers in a series of six successful novels and eventually in 47 films made from 1926 to 1949 (as well as in a few parodies and semi-parodies that came after).
This courtly detective — an employee of the Honolulu Police Department on seemingly permanent leave — stands as one of the best-loved characters in American movies, a tribute above all to the warmth and gentle humor that the Swedish-born actor Warner Oland brought to the role during his 1931-to-1938 tenure as Chan...
Are the Chan films racist? Not, I think, by the standards of their time. Mr. Biggers is said to have created Chan (based on a real detective, Chang Apana, who worked for the Honolulu police) to counter the negative images of Asians being fueled by the Hearst papers' "yellow peril" campaigns and embodied most repellently by Sax Rohmer's sadistic "Oriental" villain, Dr. Fu Manchu.
Oh yes, we so happy to have "best-loved character" once again. We love him long time!
(Actually, we'd be dancing in the streets if it weren't for these rickshaws. To think our clients only used to have Dr. Fu. How did they ever trust us?)
As Billy Bragg once said, still waiting for the Great Leap Forward.
By the way, if you haven't seen Oliver's take on F&F: Tokyo Drift, it's worth the time.
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