Category Archives: performance

building design performance software

More Paperphone beta: fixed presets & key controls added!

Jonathan and I did some development work based on the feedback we got from you the last couple of days. We are releasing a second beta version of Paperphone. [Read about design ideas and background related to Paperphone.] In this version, we improved the user interface, added key controls and fixed presets, and resolved a Windows Runtime issue.

The new interface should be a little more intuitive than the previous one. I took some time to study the GUI (graphic user interface) of Ableton Live and came up with a new wireframe. We moved the master controls to the right edge of the frame, and rotated the volume indicators and controls to be vertical. We also color-coded the presets areas to be purple.

Paperhone: GUI beta2a
Paperhone: GUI beta2a

With the preset functions,  you can now experiment with effect presets that we have designed. These fixed presets include: megaphone, robot, archive, spacey, artifact, intercom. If you have suggestions for effect presets, please send us a screenshot of your settings along with a name suggestion for the preset. We would love to hear about your effect design in terms of sound, concept, and even implementation!

Per our tester Gabriel’s (@SanNuvola) suggestion, we added a feedback feature so that the user can take a live signal from the microphone, and then feed that back into the system to create a loop of “cumulative noises & silence.” Please use with cautions.

Lastly, we added a series of key controls so that the user can control the settings by hitting keys on their computer’s keyboard. For instance, you can click on the first letter of the effect name to turn on/off effect 1 (e.g. click “r” to activate reverb). You can also navigate through the preset menu via the arrow keys on the keyboard. Specific instructions are included in the patch.

Off you go, it’s play time!

Download Paperphone beta2 (.mxf 14mb)

System Requirement: Max, or Max Runtime. [If you don’t already have Max on your machine, please download Max Runtime to run the Paperphone patch.]

We value your feedback. If you have time, please respond to the following:

  • Which of the effects and effect combination are effective, fun, and useful? If you can, please share screenshots of your effect settings (and potential names of your preset configuration).
  • If you have time, please also help us develop its user experience by describing scenarios in which you would use Paperphone: thinking through the kind of prose + effect combination (which configuration of buttons to activate, how would you configure your presets, how would you navigate the controls throughout a paper, etc).
  • Does the interface seem intuitive to you? What can we do to improve it?

 

community arts design performance

Movable Party: Redirecting the Flow of Power

I recently started a community arts project working with a group of students and student volunteers at Occidental alongside community artists and technologists to build a bike-powered interactive generator. My role within the project is to manage and help conceptualize all the moving parts, from materials to individuals. I began blogging at MovableParts.org and my first post, also a cross-post here, is about the social implications of the project.

How many times have you gone to a charge station at an airport only to find that all the plugs are being used? Have many conversations not mediated by a cell phone or other mobile computing devices have you witnessed in public spaces lately? It’s true that people don’t engage with one another in an embodied, face-to-face anymore. But sometimes people come into physical proximity when they need something – electricity. They crowd around charge stations or sit awkwardly in spaces around electrical outlets in order to gain access to electricity.

Charging station in waiting lounge, image CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by ariffjamili

A group of students – Judy Toretti, Jacob Brancasi, Maria Lamadrid, and Cory Bloor – at Art Center College of Design recognized this social pattern and took it to heart in their design of an interactive media system for a homeless youth organization called Jovenes in east LA. Working with the youth participants, the student designers came up with Conversation Space, an interactive cellphone charging booth that requires at least two individuals to step on a foot pedal in order to activate electrical current. The design calls for a coordinated effort on the part of the users. To achieve the common goal of charging cell phones (and other handheld devices critical to the lifeline of homeless youth), users must engage in a face-to-face social interaction. It could be as much as a conversation, as little as a nod, an eye contact, or a chin-up.

Conversation Space @ Jovenes , design by Judy Toretti & Jacob Brancasi
Conversation Space @ Jovenes

The design of Movable Party is meant to accomplish something similar. Like the foot pedal charging booth, our system attempts to transform people’s interactions by redirecting the flow of electricity. We don’t mean this in a strictly physical sense [don’t ask me explain the physics behind the flow of electrons, ask Joe.] What I’m referring to is a design that yields particular desirable social sequences. This design challenges power consumption, a behavioral norm in most public and urban spaces in this country, and shifts our normative relationship to electrical power from consumptive to generative.

Our efforts aim at creating opportunities to generate, instead of compulsively consuming, power. Pedaling is an exciting, eco-friendly, and embodied practice. At an advocacy event like Ciclavia, collective cycling can instantiate the power of human-scale transportation. Moreoever, pedaling comes with a direct consequence of powering a musical performance within our system. This is a participatory event that involves lots of agents including the cyclists on the generator, DJs who will be spinning records, and bystanders and passersby who may be dancing to the music. The embedded sensors and Arduino microcontrollers will interface the system to fine-tune the interactivity among all the participants.

Through a system that re-routes the flow of energy, we hope to articulate the generative impact of pedaling, a goal that involves the translation of the significance of electricity from the physical into the social and symbolic domain. We want people to congregate in a public space. We want them to realize that the outcome of the event – a musical performance – is contingent upon a collaborative process of generating power.

We can’t take electricity for granted. Electricity is not just a physical resource; it is also a kind of social resource that can be harnessed to bring people together. Electricity can be used to power communication that happens in mediated platforms. But we know that already. We hope on at the Ciclavia event on April 21, we will start to see how electrical power plays a critical role in igniting positive and communal social interactions.

* * *

Incidentally, at the airport before my flight took off from LAX, I went looking for an electrical outlet to charge my laptop.

I shared an electrical outlet in the airport terminal with a lady who struck up a friendly conversation with me. “Is that plug available?”

I said, “of course!”

She and I exchanged stories about the overwhelming presence of mediated communication in our society today. She told me that she just saw a mother and her young son of eight or nine years of age dining somewhere. The mother was on the phone the entire time. The son was left to entertain himself.

“Isn’t that ridiculous that we are so dependent on these devices? What did people use to do before cell phones? I guess they talked to people around them,” she remarked.

I said, “It’s funny that we’re talking about this. I’m working on a project that involves the building of a bike generator to power a music event.” I told her the rest of the project.

A few minutes later, with my laptop charged at 84 percent, I disengaged from the electrical outlet and packed up my gear.

Before I scurried off to board my flight, she smiled and said, “good luck with your project!”

Thank you, lady, whoever you are, for your kind reinforcement of the meaning of our project.

performance research

The Sound of Racial Melancholia: Listening to and Performing Indie Rock in Asian America

[I presented this paper at the Inter-Asia Pop Music Studies Conference, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-Asia) chapter meeting, at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei on July 15, 2012.]

Early in my explorations of Asian American experiences of rock music, I encountered a peculiar song. “Oriental American” is a hidden track on the 1998 album Two Cents Plus Tax, by indie rock band Versus. Unlike the other hidden tracks of this era, the song only surfaces when the listener manually rewinds from the beginning position of track one on the CD for 4 minutes and 36 seconds. This song’s physical position on the album makes it almost impossible to listen to it. It’s like a ghost that hovers between the front edge of the plastic Compact Disc and its programmed tracks. It lives behind the digital codes that store sounds. I kept it as a secret, until I confronted with “racial melancholia”—both as an intellectual concept and a lived experience—a few years later.

I read an article co-written by David Eng, a Chinese-American literary scholar, and Shinhee Han, a Korean-American clinical psychoanalyst. In this article, Eng and Han offer a productive reading of their clinical observations of the patterns of depression among significant and growing number of Asian American college students. The authors deploy the logic of “melancholia,” first defined by Freud, and apply it to understand the racial dynamics in the United States from the minority perspective [slide: concept]. They posit that “racial melancholia” occurs when a racial minority individual, while holding on to the democratic ideal of equality, experiences an interminable grief over the loss of being and feeling fully integrated into the society. These feelings, in the case of Asian Americans, are rooted in a perpetual loss of the sense of “social comfort and familiarity, national belonging, language, family, social connections” (Eng and Han 2003: 349)[1]. These feelings can be both experienced broadly in their social lives, and more specifically inherited from their immigrant parents, in the case of the second- or 1.5-generation Asian Americans [slide: concept]. To put it simply, we can’t seem to ever “get over” the conflicts, ambivalences, and other feelings of loss associated the difficulties of immigration and assimilation (Eng and Han 2003:345).

Following from Eng and Han’s activist scholarship, in this paper, I intend to make audible the sound of racial melancholia—projecting the under-heard voices of Asian American minority individuals who withstand societal pressures of conformity and self-erasure. This paper stems from my personal empathy and struggle with the social state of melancholia. Today, I will animate the sounds of racial melancholia from two distinct angles. First, I will offer an extended close reading of the song “Oriental American.” I argue that this song articulates the ghostly presence of the Asian American melancholic subject position in the U.S.-based indie rock music canon. In the second part of the paper, I will move into a reflexive rhetorical position to explore the psychosocial processes of the performing agent. I ask: How I, as an Asian and Taiwanese American artist, have engaged with the personal and social condition of melancholia through performing vintage Taiwanese pop music.

Unleashing the Ghost in the Machine

The indie rock band Versus formed in New York City in 1990. The ethnic membership of Versus has been predominately Filipino-American. The Wikipedia entry on the band describes it as a “prominent example of American indie bands emerging in the 1990s which featured Asian American members.”[2] Despite their visibly Asian American identity, members of the band rarely mention their Asian or Filipino heritage in their songs, with the exception of their song “Oriental American.”

In the studio version of the song, guest vocalist Asako Fujimoto (of Japanese descent) repeatedly speaks the line “I am Oriental-American.” She notably swallows while obscuring the word “American.” Her vocal delivery sounds like a stutter. A looped tape-delayed sample foreshadows Fujimoto’s stuttering vocalization, sandwiched between a guitar riff in the foreground and a programmed drum beat in the background. With an addition of reverb, Fujimoto’s vocals carry an ethereal quality as they drift in and out of the sonic texture.

[audio:http://beingwendyhsu.info/dissertation/OrientalAmerican_1.mp3]

The song ends with these lines spoken by Fujimoto: “Did they tell you what kind of thing just this is / Just say the word what kind of you wanted anything / Something that’s funny / Cute / Something dark / Something serious.” Now placed in the foreground of the mix, these lines are delivered with even more reverberation than previously. Further obscured by the effect of tape delay, the first line of this section ends with an audio overlay of two words “just” and “this is,” resulting in the stuttering of a word that sounds like “justice.” Similarly, the delay effect obscures the words “you wanted” resulting in a synthesized voice stammering “nuance.”

[audio:http://beingwendyhsu.info/dissertation/OrientalAmerican_2.mp3]

I refuse to read the studio effect of stuttering as a literal reflection of the loss of language that immigrants experience after arriving in a new country. Instead, I’m interested in reading the stuttering a cultural product of racial melancholia. This opaque utterance resonates with the ghostly subject position as occupied by Asian Americans in rock music discourse. New York Times writer Neil Strauss comments in a 1995 review of The Ear of the Dragon tour, a series of performances that feature bands with Asian American members, including Versus. Strauss commends the bands for reclaiming their ethnic identity within the hegemonic mainstream rock music scenes. He notes, “It’s a brave move for groups that want their music to be considered on its own terms within the broader context of rock instead of as outsider rock made from an Asian-American perspective” (1995: 17).

Strauss’s remark not only points to the risk of race-based ghettoization in labeling oneself as “Asian American.” It also indirectly brings into relief a double standard within the ostensibly liberal colorblindness that is embedded in the ways in which people act and talk about rock music in the U.S.. Within this ideological structure of colorblind liberalism, Asian Americans, as well as other minority artists, are made to feel included, in spite of the unspoken norms within the scenes that rule out or stigmatize their experiences. I argue that this covert, racially determined double standard manifests as an instance of “American exceptionalism and democratic myths of liberty, individualism, and inclusion” (Eng and Han 2003: 347). Dominant discourses “force(s) a misremembering of these exclusions, an enforced psychic amnesia that can return only as a type of repetitive national haunting—a type of negative or absent presence” (Eng and Han 2003: 347; my emphasis). Rock music discourse in the United States can be repressive of minority voices. But these voices can return ghosts.

I let the uncanny stuttering ring in my head and infuse this writing. I work while insisting on hearing the ghostly and distorted utterance by Asian American music-making individuals, in spite of the erasure of these voices. Inspired by the song, I work throughout my dissertation research while insisting on hearing the ghostly and distorted utterance by Asian American music-making individuals. I became interested in unearthing the marginal voices of Asian American artists working on the fringes of American rock music. I began digging through CD bins, music blogs, mp3 download sites, and online social media hubs while looking for friendly ghosts of my kind. A few years of research on this topic inspired me to begin to engage with this sonic haunting in personal and performative ways.

A Performance Engagement: Dzian!

Near the end of my fieldwork, I started a band (if you saw our performance at the Underworld on Friday, then you got a taste of the full band, a six-piece band). I consider my band a post-fieldwork project of public scholarship: a playground to experiment critically with concepts of race, ethnicity, and postcolonialism formulated in my research. The band is my performative response to the persistent questioning regarding my research by academic and non-academic outsiders: “Is there rock music in Asia?” “Who are the rock musicians of Asian descent?” “Which bands are you talking about?” Alongside my band-mates, I perform to inscribe Asia and Asian America into rock music discourses. And our performance, as a form of cultural work, is aimed to resolve the feelings of loss of a sense of heritage and social comfort for Asian American individuals.

We call ourselves “Dzian!” – borrowing the Taiwanese idiom of “supercool” to evoke our solidarity with Taiwan. The band officially got together for a benefit concert in the wake of Typhoon Morakot (88水災). I was moved by this surge of support for Taiwan generated by the Taiwanese American community. Using D.I.Y. social media and event organizing, these Taiwanese American artists reached their audiences across the U.S. and in Taiwan spreading their support for Taiwan. I decided to organize a similar event to join the efforts of many in the community across the U.S.. To bring the Charlottesville and the University of Virginia (UVa) communities together for Taiwan, I envisioned a live enactment of “Nakashi”, sometimes spelled as “Naaski” (那卡西) , an iconic itinerant music performance style that emerged in Taiwan in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation era. I gathered a number of musician friends from the UVa music department to learn a hand-picked selection of some of my grandparents’ favorite Taiwanese enka songs, as well as surf and garage rock songs from 1960s and 1970s Taiwan and its neighboring countries such as Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Cambodia . I also enlisted a number of dancer-friends who choreographed specifically for the performance to complete the theatrical aspects of the Nakashi performance. Joining efforts with the Taiwanese Student Association at UVa and a local Taiwanese café, we raised almost $1000 from the evening’s festivities.

Dzian! has imprinted itself in heritage communities locally and regionally in the Unite States. The band has performed at several heritage celebration events organized by various Taiwanese and Chinese American organizations in Los Angeles, New York, and Virginia. After performing at the Passport to Taiwan Festival, we were invited to perform at the Hello! Taiwan Rocks concert at the Taiwan Center.

“We don’t care if it’s uncool to be F.O.B., “fresh off the boat.” We have unleashed all of our foreignness, defying the social norms of assimilating. We are back on the boat! No shame, no ambivalence!”

At a more personal level, my performances with Dzian! have mediated my own struggle with racial melancholia. In particular, these performances have offered a fruitful ground to ameliorate a fraught relationship with my mother. Eng and Han note that immigrants themselves experience grief over the “losses of cultural comfort and familiarity, national belonging, language, family, social connections” in the process of immigration and over time. And these feelings of unresolved feelings of loss can be inherited by the children of these immigrants (2003: 352). My mother, for a while, held onto the notion of having a physician daughter, long after I confronted her with my desire to pursue a degree as not as a medical doctor, but as a musicological doctor. During my fieldwork, I discovered that this particular parental expectation is, in fact, is a recurring trope among many of my musician-colleagues. We have commiserated over how we have struggled with the inter-generational melancholic manifestation in the sense of guilt, usually articulated as the following in their parents’ voices: “We’ve lost everything to come here to start afresh just so that you will have a better future.” Choosing a career path (in the arts) against a stable profession would seem like an act of denial and could sometimes cause relationship severance.

With my new interest in songs from 1960s and 1970s Taiwan, I began to approach my mom as a source of knowledge regarding the music of “her era.” We have had a number of exchanges about the lyrical content of the songs, while sharing Youtube performances to discuss our stylistic preferences. Since the very first performance of Dzian!, my mom has been a frequent guest performer in the band. In particular, I have asked my mom to perform a Taiwanese A-Go-Go song entitled “Mama Give Me A Guitar” (媽媽送我一個吉他) with me. During the performance of this song, my mom and I exchange lines in a call and response, enacting the story depicted in the song lyrics about a young girl pleading her mother to buy her a guitar. The song describes the girl’s desire to sing and dance alongside her mother. In performance, we enact our aspiration for keeping each other company. I put a boa feather around her and we sing arm in arm. Through the power of musical performance, we convince not only the audience but also ourselves of our close relationship. The crowd cheers on. We hug each other, both feather boa-clad , forging a musical harmony that seeps into our relationship offstage. And I know, to an extent, I have fulfilled the rock star dream that my mother probably has always had.

Conclusion: A Post-Fieldwork Cultural Work

My goal in this paper was to address, perhaps ambitiously, the practice of public scholarship as a scholar-performer, and to add to the theoretical conversation about critical positionality in ethnography (Kisliuk 1998; Wong 2008). I have offered a set of narratives that illustrate my involvement as a scholar-performer in rock music performance. I have explained how my music analysis and performance can act as a kind of post-fieldwork cultural work.

This is beginning of my effort to depathologize racial melancholia, recontexualizing its association with the personal to consider it as a collective, social phenomenon. Racial melancholia is a structure of feeling and cultural impediments that have loomed over our existence. If the cycle of performing, ethnographic writing, and then back to performing can relieve us from this matrix, let us continue to do so.


[1] For more on Eng and Han’s conception of racial melancholia, read “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.” Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian. Berkeley and Los Angeles, C.A.: University of California Press.

[2] The most complete biography of the band Versus is found on Wikipedia. More, read: Wikipedia contributors, “Versus (band),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Versus_(band)&oldid=418761492 (accessed March 22, 2011).

 

performance research

Off-SEM2011 Video – How to Rock Asian America

This 3-part video addresses the issues of (in)visibility, Asian American identities, and reflexive performance as public scholarship. This video is based on a paper that would have been given at the Society of Ethnomusicology meeting in Philadelphia in 2011. In lieu of my physical presence at the conference, I have made a video to share my work in a form of a mass video.

Direct link to this video playlist on Youtube

performance research video

A Preview: My Off-SEM Video

I’m making a video in lieu of my physical presence at the Society of Ethnomusicology meeting in Philadelphia this weekend. My intention is to insert this video — on performance = public scholarship — into the (virtual) mix at the conference. I plan to release this video on Youtube and on this blog by the time of my scheduled presentation at SEM tomorrow morning at 10AM EST. I’m bummed that I will not be able to join you in person. But my sound and body will be with you in a virtual and hopefully meaningful way this weekend. Here I’m leaking a couple of pictures from the making of this video:

performance research

Shivers. Glows. Bows.: Reflexive Performance as Public Scholarship

[Disclaimer: I wrote a paper abstract for a panel on “Theorizing the Personal in Musical Ethnography” for the SEM (Society of Ethnomusicology) annual meeting in November 2011. I see this paper as the beginning of my #alt-ac or #indie-ac career as a scholar-performer and performer-scholar. Feedback is welcome!]

What is the relationship between scholarship and performance? What is the difference between scholar-performer and performer-scholar? This paper explores my experiences with practicing—in performance—intellectual ideas developed in my dissertation about Asian American participation in independent rock music. Compelled by the sounds and stories shared by the musician-colleagues during my 24-month close ethnographic engagement with members of two dozen bands of partial or whole Asian American membership, I started my band Dzian!. In this band, I work alongside my band mates to adapt and perform rock music from 1960s and 1970s Asia. With a mission to challenge the Anglo-American hegemony of rock music, and to inscribe Asia and Asian America into the rock music discourses, we introduce and make visible this obscure body of music to the local and regional popular music scenes.

I consider Dzian! a post-fieldwork, post-academic project of public scholarship. The band is a playground for me to experiment with the critical concepts related to race, ethnicity, and the postcolonial conditions that I formulated in my dissertation. In my presentation, I will offer a set of narratives that highlight my performative engagement with my dynamic and ambivalent (dis)identification as one-point-five-generation Taiwanese American. In a deeply reflexive manner, I will reflect on how I perform music to negotiate my struggle with orientalism and racial melancholia, as a constant minority outsider in the scene. I will describe how performing music has generated personal and collective reparations for the Asian American loss of cultural heritage and national belonging. Privileging the act of performing and music-making in the public, I argue for a fruitful manifesto for the role a scholar-performer, rather than a performer-scholar, enacting the ethics of scholarship as a social practice.

Is this scholarship?
event performance

Astounding Success @ Love 4 Haiti

Love 4 Haiti was event that I organized with UVa students and Charlottesville community artists to raise funds and awareness for Haitians in need. The planning committee came together over social media. In 6 days, we organized a large-scale event that comprised of a silent art auction and live performance lineup of 15 acts representing Charlottesville’s kaleidoscopic music and dance talent. The first graders at Burnley Moran presented their artworks related to Haiti and sold them for $5 apiece. 6 speakers, ranging from UVa student with Haitian families to university faculty with special relations with Haiti, and representatives from non-profit organizations begin quake-relief efforts, contributed to the educational component of the event. We also sold food donated by local food vendors.

We raised $8,500 for 4 organizations behind quake-relief efforts. Families, friends, students, and artists across social boundaries all came together showing their love, concerns, and support for those affected by the earthquake in Haiti. It was beautiful night in Charlottesville.

Here Peter Traub, my partner-in-crime, and I give a recap of the event. This is part 1 of a 3-part, 30-minute video documentary shot and produced by David Eklund. [parts 2 + 3 also on youtube] This documentary is also aired on Charlottesville Comcast Channel 13 on Friday 8:30pm and Saturday 11pm for the entire month.

The rebuilding and recovery processes will take years and decades. We hope that the event set off a local awareness and commitment to Haiti.

event performance

A New Taiwanese American Music Concept? My Nakashi Band Dzian!

HoChie Tsai of TaiwaneseAmerican.org posted about my new band Dzian! (贊!, “super-cool!” in Taiwanese) yesterday. It’s exciting to see that Dzian! is now recognized by the Taiwanese American community.

This band emerged from s few strands of inspiration. One is the discovery of the tremendous amount of exhilarating surf and garage music from in the non-UK-and-US parts of the world in 1960s-70s (pre-cassette age). Many bloggers and music lovers have digitized these old LPs and posted them as free downloads. In particular, we have been drawn to the excellent posts by Radiodiffusion.

The other strand of inspiration comes from my personal quest for Nakashi, a Taiwanese burlesque-like performance practice circa 1960s-1980s employed for social functions (weddings, new years parties, company parties, temple celebration, strip tease…). Over time Nakashi morphed into a semi-participatory karaoke format. Because it was always a local practice, not much of it has been documented. There are a few representations in Taiwanese films (mostly about rural life driven by nostalgia). Other than, I’m reconstructing this fascinating performance practice in part as an ethnomusiologist by talking to friends and family from Taiwan and internet research, in part as a musician who’s driven by the energy and performative efficacy of this practice. And I’m recreating a performance based on some of my childhood memories of Nakashi at company parties that my parents took me to.

The band Dzian! is my pet project right now. A few musician friends, most of whom I met through improvised experimental music, came together to play these great tunes. Our formation as a band solidified at the typhoon relief benefit show that I organized for last week. My intention was to recreate Nakashi performance in Virginia (perhaps the first maybe?) and to enliven Taiwanese local culture to an audience mixed between Taiwanese American students from UVa, local restaurant owners, friends, family, and the local music and Taiwanese-food lovers. With our friends The Nakashi Dancers, Dzian! played a selection selection of your favorite 1960s surf and garage rock songs from Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, and US.

Here is a Taiwanese “A Go-Go” pop song “I Love You A Go-Go” originally by Wu Jin Lan, here sung by yours truly:

“Moon Over Ruined Castle” 荒城の月 – a Japanese pop classic arranged and performed by Dzian! [I heard and learned this song mostly from my Ah-Ma (grandma) my parents’ karaoke parties:

A Khmer folk pop medley consisting of “Blue Basket” and “Look at the Owl” [from the Cambodian Cassette Archive]:

Here’s a great video recap of the entire event by David Eklund:

Dzian! is Charlottesville/Virginia’s new, one and only Nakashi band. Following the tradition of Nakashi, we have now made ourselves available for fundraiser events, weddings, holiday parties, birthdays, graduations, frat parties, TV commercials, NASA launching ceremonies, etc.

Dzian! (贊!) – Please say our name with your thumbs up!!

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This entry was originally posted on November 6, 2009 on Yellowbuzz.