in this episode we sit down with dr. anthony ocampo to discuss his book "the latinos of asia: how filipino americans break the rules of race". anthony is a filipino-american sociologist, author and educator whose work focuses on race, immigration and lgbtq issues. we discuss a wide range of relevant topics pertaining to the politics of race in the united states through the filipino-american experience.
Read More“I'm a creative pouring all of my energy into a project called ‘The Mixd Project’. It's a collection of photographs and narratives of black folks of mixed race. I'm currently travelling across North America interviewing folks and hope to head to Europe in 2020. We talk about the good, the bad and even the ugly of our experiences being black and mixed. The project has no agenda and the subjects can speak freely.”
Read Morein this episode we sit down with mixed-media artist and educator camille hoffman. her work has been featured in museums and galleries across NYC and she's currently teaching at both cooper union and bennington college. our conversation centers on her art, and in the process we discuss topics from the eurocentric legacy of painting, to manifest destiny, to environmental ethics, to the complexity of living in the context of 21st century capitalism.
Read More“I’m a producer in the commercial world, working primarily in fashion & beauty. I’m trying to dedicate more of my time into directing personal projects. Two short films I want to make speak directly into my personal identity. One focuses on a bisexual girl, who gets into comprosing position with a couple who wants to have a threesome ha. The other is about a Filipino girl, who refuses to pray the rosary after her mother has been deported.”
Read More“i'm a story artist and i work primarily in animation for kid's tv but i also do illustrative work and comics! most of my art is rooted in chinese-canadian and caribbean-canadian experiences. currently, i have self-published an autobiographical comic called tension which talks about my personal curly hair insecurities, and a graphic novel that's a work in progress called lost in translation.”
Read More“i’m a writer/actor/director. i wrote and directed a feature film on amazon prime and itunes called living with the dead: a love story. the main character is a young woman whose mother is an immigrant and the film touches on the pressure parents put on their children to succeed and get into the best schools.”
Read Morein this episode, we sit down with caroline mariko stucky, who is a swiss-japanese cinematographer and director from switzerland. she currently lives in new york. we had a conversation with her about growing up mixed in switzerland, the difficulties with being gay in japan, and how these experiences are expressed in her films– “color/blind” and “us”.
Read Morecaroline mariko stucky is a swiss-japanese cinematographer and director from switzerland. she currently lives in new york. we had a conversation with her about growing up mixed in switzerland, the difficulties with being gay in japan, and how these experiences are expressed in her films– “color/blind” and “us”.
Read Morecaroline’s personal work explores the various shifts and stages that constitute the movement towards empathy. as with any concept imbued with moral cachet, the temptation is to define empathy and then reflexively judge one’s personal experiences relative to this definition… like love, there’s something ineffably unconscious to the experience of empathy, that logic and language fail to capture, and eludes definition. as expressed in her work, caroline doesn’t seek to define concepts such as love or empathy; rather, through her exploration of complex relationships, her films challenge and complicate our understanding of what it means to empathize, and love.
Read Morein this episode we sit down with sandra manzanares who is an afro-latina writer and director born in boston, massachusetts, to immigrants from honduras. her short film, like fine silk, has completed its festival circuit and will be online soon. we sat down with sandra to discuss her film as well as her feelings about being afro-latina in the u.s.
our conversation touches upon topics from the politics of black hair, to the african diaspora, afro-latinx representation in the media, the immigrant experience, and radical empathy.
Read Morein this episode we continue our conversation with @darthmitsuru who runs an english-school/coffee-roaster assemblage in west tokyo (@tokyocoffeejp). we talk about how identity in japanese society is centered around the concept of the 'wa', and how it leads to unintended and terrible consequences– like karoshi– which we discussed in the previous episode. following from our discussion on identity, davy shares what it was like growing up mixed in japan.
Read Morein this episode we have a conversation with davy millard who runs an english-school/coffee-roaster assemblage in west tokyo (@tokyocoffeejp). we discuss a problem deeply rooted within japanese society, and talk about new classifications for death that stem from japanese work culture. we also discuss how roguture is providing a response to the cycle of violence embedded within japanese work culture.
Read Moresandra manzanares is an afro-latina writer and director born in boston, massachusetts, to immigrants from honduras. our conversation touches upon topics from the politics of black hair, to the african diaspora, afro-latinx representation in the media, the immigrant experience, and radical empathy.
Read MoreSandra Manzanares is a filmmaker from the Greater Boston area and just recently completed her Master’s at New York University. Her short film, Like Fine Silk, has completed its festival circuit and is now available online. Sandra’s film “centers on the point of view of a young Afro-Latina as she’s confronted with culture clashes in the intimate setting of a black hair care store. It illuminates experiences that are not widely familiar to the mainstream population and gives voice to often unspoken, uncomfortable misunderstandings in order to promote empathy and dialogue”. We sat down with Sandra to discuss her film as well as her mixed feelings about being Afro-Latina in the U.S.
Read Morethe destruction of architecture, the desolation of a population’s connection with its native space is a tactic that both physically and psychologically seeks to crush a people's spirit. to see one’s cultural symbols defaced or destroyed is accompanied, not only with a loss, but with an offense against one's cultural identity. but this severance between identity and a symbol that functions to territorialize one's identity need not be negative. what the horror of the loss does not expose is the nihilistic meaning associated with such symbols. one mourns for what is destroyed but melancholically searches for what was repressed in the original acceptance of these now defunct symbols. we may mourn for the object of the loss, but we actually mourn for ourselves, that we deified such objects in the first place. if memory is tied to place, the destruction of place doesn't necessarily imply the destruction of memory, but worse– what is destroyed is one's connection to memory. instead of losing the memory altogether, one is haunted by a memory that cannot be placed.
Read Moreon the face of it, roguture is ‘just’ a humble business venture that happens to teach english and roast coffee. but as i see it, roguture is so much more, and provides an example of what living free, mixed, and non-binary is like– free in spite of the pressures to conform that come from identity politics, mixed in understanding that who they are is a composite of multiple influences, and non-binary in that their actions are ethical and fluid, not moral and determined. roguture is an expression of life that thrives in spite of the negative affects of binary forces.
Read Moreif one disrupts, or is unable to incorporate oneself into the wa, it is tantamount to death. among the many things that are distorted by the wa, people’s concept of death seems the most affected. within a context where karoshi and kodukoshi are part of everyday reality, suicide seems almost trivial. but that’s the dark irony– death has become banal. and as a direct consequence of this, so has life. we’ve now ventured even further into the black hole.
Read More“there’s a japanese word called ‘wa’. no one wants to disrupt this wa regardless of if it’s in the family, in a community, at work, or anywhere else in japan. it means harmony, not status quo…wa technically is good thing, it has a positive connotation, but the way that it works is so bad. this concept of wa is inherent to japanese people because they’re raised in this culture. and they can’t function without it. it’s so against their nature to break that wa. if you break the wa then you’re probably worse than a foreigner, you become something other than japanese.”
Read Morethis post attempts to explain how we understand ‘binary’. through the course of this explanation we complexify and challenge preconceived notions of concepts like language and identity.
when we refer to ‘binary’ here on mxdflz, we use it pejoratively. it’s a concept we lament and resist. we lament the binary because it induces– and is simultaneously amplified by– identity politics, which expresses the default state of human relations today. binary influence is found wherever there exists territorial divisions– oppositions and competition– based on dominant identity categories. these have their origin in the fundamentally structural distinction between self and other, which is a consequence of man’s disjunction from and displacement within nature.
beware, this post gets a bit academic, and is very much philosophical and psychoanalytic.
Read More"To describe my background, I choose to use a word that is traditionally associated with mutt breeds, sterile mules, hybrid plants, or the unnatural. Mixed. I choose to use this word because it flies in the face of what I consider to be a celebration of inbreeding, religious homogeneity, and the hive-mind. Honestly though, being ‘mixed’ only has a negative connotation if you think certain things should remain separate."
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