"All the messages from pop culture present Asian American as an apolitical thing.  It was really shocking and liberating to find out that actually, Asian American politics was rooted in radical organizing and rooted in grassroots arts movements."  -- Ryan Wong

This episode of Audio Interference focuses on Basement Workshop (active 1970-1986), an arts and political organization based in New York City's Chinatown that served as a hub for the developing Asian American movement.  Elena Levi speaks to curator and writer Ryan Wong, whose exhibition, Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York was presented at Interference Archive in 2013-2014.  The episode also includes portions of Ryan's talk at an event celebrating the release of the latest issue of Signal (http://s1gnal.org/), a journal of international political graphics and culture.

Ryan's article on Hyperallergic includes more information on Basement Workshop and other Chinatown arts organizations:
https://hyperallergic.com/330442/a-brief-history-of-the-art-collectives-of-nycs-chinatown/

More on Serve the People:
http://interferencearchive.org/serve-the-people-the-asian-american-movement-in-new-york/

Issue #6 of Signal:
https://justseeds.org/product/signal06/

This episode features the song "Yellow Pearl" by Chris Kando Iijima, Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto, "Charlie" Chin from the recording entitled A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America, PAR01020, courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.  (p) (c) 1973.  Used by permission.

Link:  https://folkways.si.edu/chris-kando-iijima-joanne-nobuko-miyamoto-charlie-chin/a-grain-of-sand-music-for-the-struggle-by-asians-in-america/american-folk-protest/music/album/smithsonian

Other music used includes "Artifical Intelligence" and "One and Only" by Ryan Andersen, courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Produced by Interference Archive.

Audio Interference 49: Ryan Wong and Basement Workshop

In Episode 14 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg notes the national
protest wave that brought down president Park Geun-Hye in South Korea last
December, and asks why Americans can't similarly rise to the occasion and
launch a mass militant movement to remove Donald Trump.  Given this extreme emergency—the detention gulag now coming into place, with undocumented migrants the "test population" for domestic fascism—we should be mobilizing in our millions. Apart from the broad masses being simply too distracted by gizmos and consumerism to see the walls closing in (a problem to be discussed elsewhere), Weinberg identifies two significant obstacles to unity: 1. The fundamental split in the left over the whole question of Russia and its electoral meddling; and 2. The phenomenon of party parasitism, with both the Democrats and sectarian-left factions seeking to exploit popular movements to advance their own power. He concludes by asking whether social media, which is partially responsible for getting us into this mess through its totalizing propaganda environment, can help get us out—whether it can empower us to sidestep the Dems and the alphabet-soup factions alike and work rapidly and efficiently to build a leaderless, broad-based, intransigent movement around the aim of removing Trump. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

The text of this rant is also on Bill Weinberg's Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/bill-weinberg/what-will-it-take-to-stop-trump/1839750179401741/

Music: "General Strike" by D.O.A.
http://www.suddendeath.com/bands/d-o-a

Production by Chris Rywalt

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