Cultural Comfort Food Fusion

A recent Facebook conversation with my favorite former Minnesotan, Bryan Thao Worra, centered around cultural comfort foods and culinary fusion.  As more and more Southeast Asians (and other immigrants) locate in Minnesota, they will bring their comfort foods with them--laab meat, papaya salad, sticky rice, etc.  Here in the midwest, we've already got plenty of our own comfort foods, such as shepherd's pie, the infamous hot dish, and various jello and fruit conglomerations.

So we began to ask ourselves, what would happen if some of these Scandinavian and Southeast Asian foods were to be combined in some unholy culinary syncretism?  What would some of our choices even be?

I ruled out chicken noodle pho right off the bat.  But laab meat had some potential...

"Demonstra" Book Release Comes to North Minneapolis!

Bottom photo from the Twin Cities Daily Planet.

The end of the year is almost here and Bryan Thao Worra is back in town!  And while that's reason enough to celebrate, the launch party for his new book is coming to north Minneapolis tomorrow night.  The collection of Speculative Poetry, DEMONSTRA will be released on Monday, December 30th at the Lao Cultural Center at  2648 West Broadway Avenue in Minneapolis from 4:30 to 6:30 PM.  He'll be sharing the spotlight with debut children's book author Nor Sanavongsay and Saymoukda Vongsay of "Kung Fu Zombies vs. Cannibals" fame.

It's free and open to the public and a great chance to see what the inside of the Lao Advancement Organization looks like.  And it will be a rare opportunity to celebrate a book release on the northside.

Like his previous collections BARROW and On the Other Side of the Eye, his new book is heavily influenced by his experiences in Minnesota, particularly North Minneapolis. Obviously I'm partial to "Iku Turso Came to NoMi," which combines Thao Worra's unique perspective with some Finnish sea monster mythos and bits and pieces of Hawthorne Hawkman trivia. 

But you'll also catch poems that give nods to many of Minnesota's popular science fiction, fantasy and horror writers such as Catherine Lundoff, David J. Schwartz, and the Lady Poetesses from Hell. DEMONSTRA also includes great illustrations by Vongduane Manivong including all-new takes on legendary Lao monsters.  I've been privy to some of those illustrations, through the book's Kickstarter campaign, and they are quite impressive.

He's thrown in entities such as the Hodag, Cthulhu, and cannibal grandmother, and another highlight is the Lao weretigers roaming a fabled Laotown of the future. (Hodags, and Weretigers, and Cthulhu, oh my!)  Bryan's Laotown is a bustling corner of North Minneapolis where the Lao set up the world's largest fermented fish factory to make their notoriously stinky padaek, only to get taken over by a benevolent Artificial Intelligence prone to playing elevator jazz. It could happen.

Lao American author Nor Sanavongsay is debuting his very first children's book from Sahtu Press, "A Sticky Mess." He has created a beautifully illustrated adaptation of a traditional Lao legend that has been popular for almost six centuries involving a trickster. Nor Sanavongsay last presented a preview of this book in 2010 during the National Lao American Writer's Summit at the Loft Literary Center, and now, 3 years later, here it is.

Copies of DEMONSTRA will be on sale for $10 and there will be additional entertainment and refreshment. Catch it if you can!

Demonstra: Lao American Art and Poetry

Post by the Hawthorne Hawkman, image from the "Demonstra" Kickstarter page.

Earlier this year, my good friend, fellow blogger, and north Minneapolis transplant Bryan Thao Worra put out a Facebook request for names of sea gods he could use in writing his new book of speculative Lao poetry.  And Aquaman was already disqualified.  Immediately I fired off a suggestion of Iku Turso, a Finnish sea monster sometimes called the Ox of Death, or "thousand-horned," but who is more often depicted as part man and either part octopus or walrus, and bears a striking resemblance to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu.  Iku Turso has been called the father of disease and the Finnish god of war and pestilence. 

"And lutefisk?"  I was asked.

"No.  Lutefisk is Norwegian, and even a god of war, pestilence and disease has his limits."

Out of that exchange, the following poem was born...

Saving "Fat City" - Comparing Preservation in San Diego and Minneapolis

Post and above photo by the Hawthorne Hawkman.  Other photos/images from www.dsoderblog.com, used with permission.


Part 4 of 4 housing policy/wonkish posts.  Click on the links for part 1, part 2, part 3.

I spent a week this summer helping Bryan Thao Worra become a former Hawthornite.  He moved out to the LA area, and we drove across country in a moving van, sampling ghost peppers along the way.  Once we hit the ocean, we bombed around Los Angeles, San Diego, and whatever other cities there are along the sprawling coastal metropolis area.  In San Diego, I came across this sign and snapped a photo to remind me to go back and research what they were doing to save a potential historic site from demolition.  What could Minneapolis learn from other areas?

It almost seemed I was destined to look into this more.  "Fat City" is a nightclub located along the historic Pacific Highway, with Hawthorn Street as the nearest intersection.  Like Fuji-Ya here in Minneapolis, Fat City was the beneficiary of a pioneering Asian-American businessperson, Tom Fat.

The nightclub was originally called Top's Nightclub, and was owned by a Russian immigrant, Yale Khan.  Top's became a central point for the San Diego nightlife, drawing star performers such as Nat King Cole, Shelley Winters, Nelson Eddy, Van Johnson, Don Ameche, Susan Hayward, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin.  In 1977, Tom Fat took over the property, restoring and improving the site.  The crown jewel of his addition was...

5 Scene Challenge: Star Wars IV-VI

Post by the Hawthorne Hawkman, image from Bryan Thao Worra, videos from varying sites.

I try to keep topics on this blog specific to north Minneapolis, but this is one exception.  My good friend and former Hawthornite Bryan Thao Worra was back in town recently, and we as die-hard Star Wars fans lamented the nonstop tweaks that George Lucas makes each time he releases the Star Wars classics in a new format.  (Today is a dark day for us as it marks the release of all six movies on Blu-Ray.)  This round of changes includes Darth Vader yelling "Nooooo!" as he kills The Emperor in Return of the Jedi, reminding viewers of Vader's cringe-worthy close to Revenge of the Sith.  Oh, and R2-D2 hides behind even more rocks.  Really?  That's what kept George Lucas up at night, thinking "You know what Tatooine needs?  I've got it!  More rocks."

So BTW and I agreed to do our own dueling blog posts about what five things we would add to improve the original trilogy.  The prequels weren't worth mentioning, as fans have pretty much edited those movies already.  The Other Side of the Eye has its top five here.

And now for Star Wars:  The Hawkman Edit...

Feats (and Feasts) of Strength with the Ghost Pepper

I have come to dub this the Demonwing.

Post and photos by the Hawthorne Hawkman, photos of Jeff Skrenes/Hawkman contributed.

We all have our little quirks.  For instance, Ed Kohler over at the Deets has his obsession with the presentation of hotel toilet paper at various locales.  In a way that's more connected than one might initially think, my fixation happens to be with the hottest pepper on the planet, the ghost pepper.  (Although I've heard that the Trinidad scorpion pepper is both hotter and has a more badass name, I've yet to encounter one available for consumption.)

In the top photo, fellow former NoMi resident, poet, and blogger Bryan Thao Worra and I shared several orders of ghost pepper wings at the Lowry Cafe as part of his going away party.  For the first time, I actually SENT THE WINGS BACK because even though they were spiced with these peppers, they simply weren't hot enough for a Laotian, a Latino dude, and a white boy with taste buds of steel.  That may not have been the wisest move, because later...

Refugee Nation and the Laotian Secret War

Post and photos by the Hawthorne Hawkman, bottom photo contributed.

I've been close friends with Bryan Thao Worra ever since we worked together at Hawthorne over three years ago.  By the end of my first day on the job, we were cirbbing Star Wars lines to each other; it was "buddy-ness" at first sight.  You could say we grokked each other, and we would know exactly what that meant.  And yet we haven't discussed much in the way of his Laotian heritage, opting instead for intricate arguments such as whether Hellboy 2 remained faithful to the source material.  Who needs to be burdened with personal details when you can both agree on the irony that Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight might very well be the defining portrayal of the Joker, in spite of the fact that the story never appeared in comic/graphic novel form?

That's what friendship is all about, right?

So when one of my closest friends started getting accolades for his involvement in the Legacies of War exhibit (Strib, City Pages, TC Daily Planet, Southwest Journal, and Asian-American Press, just to name a few), I took him up on an offer to see an exclusive preview of the "Refugee Nation" performance.  The play, interspersed with video clips of the carpet bombing of Laos, is both meaningful to those with direct experience with the subject matter, and accessible to newbies such as myself.  It begins with the traditional Laotian greeting of "Sabai dee," which means...