Rest in power, the Minority Militant, a.k.a. Keon Enoy Munedouang

Keon Enoy Munedouang (1980-2016)

NOTE: A few more remembrances of the Minority Militant have surfaced online, in addition to the remembrances I linked to in my post below. One of his three sisters says goodbye to him and writes that "You lived your life through your convictions and didn't care what anyone thought of you. I had no idea, the extent in which your writing impacted the Asian American community." Slant Eye for the Round Eye's Adam Chau, who once made a guest appearance on this blog, has posted substantial excerpts from the best of the Minority Militant's cordoned-off Blogspot blog. Over at Reappropriate, Jenn Fang points out that though "TMM occupied a corner of the Asian American blogosphere that had little overlap with my own" and "we may not know one another offline," the Asian American blogosphere is close-knit, and his passing affects everyone in our community.

If you regularly read several blogs written by Asian American authors or you're active in the Asian American blogosphere, you're going to be hearing a lot in the next few days about a reclusive political blogger who wrote under the alias of the Minority Militant. From 2008 to 2010, the Chicago-based Keon Enoy Munedouang, a Laotian American military vet who was found dead last week in Montrose Harbor at the way-too-young age of 35, was one of my favorite Asian American bloggers, whether he was criticizing self-hating Asians who stupidly undergo plastic surgery to look more white, describing right-wing moron Michelle Malkin as a pundit who is "so far right she fell off the edge of a stoop and landed in a pile of jizz after a conservative gangbang convention" or mocking old Vietnamese American Republicans who supported the presidential campaign of Arizona senator John McCain, who had no qualms about continuing to refer to the Vietnamese in public as "gooks" due to the torture he experienced as a Vietnam War P.O.W.

While Phil Yu over at the much more popular blog Angry Asian Man was trying to make "That's racist!" a thing, Keon's favorite catchphrase over at TMM had him consigning the likes of Malkin, or as I like to call her, Uncle Ruckus, and extremely corny Iron Chef America host Mark Dacascos to "the chicken coop." Ken Jeong and former Entourage regular Rex Lee would have wanted to put a foot in Keon's ass for the negative things he wrote on his blog about the comedic (and sometimes controversial in Asian American circles) characters they've played. Jo Koy, a favorite stand-up of Keon's who agreed to a selfie with Keon after one of his shows, clearly didn't know what to make of Keon and ran as far the fuck away from Keon as he could when he requested to do an interview with him for his blog. Keon's drunken appearance at a panel for a 2009 Asian American blogger conference known as BANANA, an embryonic version of the annual L.A. digital media conference that's known today as V3con, alienated some of the other panelists and people in the USC campus audience who weren't familiar with his blog.

Keon's writing wasn't for everybody. It was highly opinionated and outspoken writing (he once wrote, "I am relentless about racism. I cuss like a foul-mouthed sailor"), and he was much more outspoken than Phil, who--while there's no disputing that Phil's a legend in the Asian American blogosphere who has done a lot of good in terms of Asian American representation, speaking out against Asian-bashing and promoting the work of other Asian American authors--has never really been as enjoyably scathing or as in-depth a writer as Keon (or someone like Emily Yoshida over at The Verge or my current favorite Asian American blogger, playwright Philip W. Chung over at YOMYOMF).

I never got to meet Keon face-to-face. All of our brief conversations took place only in comments sections and via e-mail. But I was a regular part of Keon's blog. I drew and designed the header that appeared every day at the top of his posts, back when I was in the middle of an ultimately unsuccessful phase in which I attempted to become a cartoonist and graphic designer. Keon was my only graphic design client.

The logo Keon commissioned me to draw for his blog

Keon was a fan of the webcomic I drew and posted for a couple of years over on this blog. In fact, he was the only fan of the webcomic. Not even I'm a fan of my own webcomic. In fact, I've been considering deleting almost all of the webcomic's installments from my blog. They're that embarrassing. But Keon was the only person--other than my parents and an online friend of mine, current DC Comics letterer Janice Chiang--who believed in my artwork at the time, and I'll always be grateful for that. While some asshole from the discontinued Asian American Movement blog was bashing some of my Minority Militant artwork over in some now-forgotten comments section somewhere, Keon always stood by my artwork.

I never agreed with Keon's choice for his blog header though. He wanted me to draw him wearing a hoodie emblazoned with "TMM," and out of all the header options I designed for him, he liked the one with him in a hoodie the most, but I never really cared for that one. I made Keon look too much like a Jules Feiffer cartoon. A header he rejected, in which I inserted a photo of a bruised and beaten Uncle Sam, was, to me, much more effective at reflecting the pugnaciousness and candidness of Keon's writing than the header he picked.

An unused header for Keon's blog

If you want to try coding a blog post on Tumblr, you'd have a much easier time opening an umbrella up your own ass

AFOS has a Tumblr--an infrequently updated one, to be more accurate. I joined Tumblr in 2012 mostly to see if I could attract Tumblr users to either AFOS or the AFOS blog.

Since 2012, I've discovered that I don't care much for Tumblr as a platform or a place to compose original content (also after 2012, it was bought by Yahoo). If you want to write a long-form post on Tumblr or get that post to look exactly like how you want it to look, you can't rely on Tumblr for any of that. Any attempt to code on Tumblr a piece of writing of any size ought to be accompanied by nothing but Price Is Right failure horns.

How the fuck did Dan Harmon manage to accomplish paragraph breaks in the long-form posts he used to write on Tumblr? Over on that platform, a simple, normal-looking paragraph break is damn near impossible to code into existence. Tumblr makes it so impossible for you to create paragraph breaks because they want to make your writing look like that of a rambling and mentally unstable 14-year-old who doesn't know what a paragraph break is.

I like my paragraph breaks, Tumblr. Fuck you. I like being able to pause between ideas while reading through something and mentally catch a breath. If you can't give me that, Tumblr, catch a fade.



I looked around the Internet to see if I was alone in finding Tumblr to be the shittiest platform for composing long-form writing, and I stumbled into a 2014 listicle by a blogger named Liz Galvao. Yes, I know I've said I despise the listicle format so much that if I ever run into any hed that begins with a numeral, I refuse to read anything below that hed. But it was a critique of Tumblr's many fails as a platform, which became so frustrating for Galvao that she switched from Tumblr to WordPress for composing posts ("Most of the templates don't even let you pick your own font! This is supposed to be MY space on the Internet as a writer, and I can't even pick the font? That's fucked"), and I couldn't resist reading through her rant.

"In-post editing is SUPER limited on Tumblr. I can't italicize a word in the title of a post, for example, which drove me crazy every time I wrote about a TV show. I can't change the size or color of a word in the body of a text post, something that should be incredibly easy to do with basic HTML," wrote Galvao.

Meanwhile, all those things can be achieved on either WordPress, the service Word Is Bond contributors like myself and Hardeep Aujla use for composing Word Is Bond posts, or Blogger, which is why I've stuck to Blogger for composing long-form writing. All Tumblr is good for is reblogging .GIFs. Tumblr, you're as reliable as a Yahoo content editor who can't tell Damon Wayans Sr. and Damon Wayans Jr. apart. Tumblr and Yahoo, you deserve each other.

The late James Horner was the master of suspenseful '90s hacking scene music during Sneakers and Clear and Present Danger

"There were so many Horners," said Matt Zoller Seitz to fellow journalist S.I. Rosenbaum during a RogerEbert.com conversation about the work of legendary film composer James Horner, who died at 61 in a single-engine plane crash earlier this week. "There was the shoot 'em up, macho, urban Horner of 48 HRS and Commando and Red Heat, the grand adventure Horner of the Trek films and Aliens and Titanic and Avatar, the caper Horner of Sneakers... He really did have range."

Anyone who's a film music fan has a favorite Horner. Film music heads who are into Horner deep cuts--and are of the opinion that Horner tended to repeat himself, especially in the middle part of his career--will likely say the Horner of Battle Beyond the Stars is their favorite, while more casual film music heads will likely pick the Horner who made teenage girls cry with his score to Titanic. For me, it's either the Horner who made nerds cry with his scores to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock or the Horner who gave the third best performance, right below Denzel Washington and Andre Braugher, in Glory and crafted, with the help of the Boys Choir of Harlem, a powerful and operatic score for that 1989 white-savior-movie-that's-somehow-better-than-the-average-white-savior-movie.

The eerily prescient Sneakers is one of many movies I just never got around to seeing until more than 20 years after its release. On New Year's Eve 2014, it was one of several titles Netflix streaming was getting rid of from its library after that night, so I couldn't pass up the chance to stream before its expiration this caper movie I--a fan of caper movies--bizarrely overlooked for too long. I instantly fell in love with the score Horner wrote for Sneakers. It's now one of my favorite Horner scores. Like Gimme the Loot composer Nicholas Britell said about the Sneakers score, it's music you wouldn't expect to hear in a hacker movie. "It features unlikely elements--choirs, folk themes, minimalist piano, the saxophone of Branford Marsalis--that lend the film an unusual emotional richness and depth," wrote Britell.

Dig the score cue Horner created for the scene where Robert Redford's crew discovers the codebreaker to end all codebreakers, and Redford and Sidney Poitier both realize it's too much power for anyone to have. I'm not a musicologist--I'd be unable to tell you the difference between an arpeggio and an ostinato--so I have no idea what Horner was doing with the piano during this scene. It sounds like he grabbed a cat that was wandering around the recording studio and let it walk all over the keys. It turned out to be an inventive and effective way to build tension for that scene.



So now I have a new favorite Horner: the Horner who, through his music, could take something as mundane-looking and boring on the screen as typing things into a PC and make it exciting. Horner's work in Sneakers reminds me of Clear and Present Danger, where Horner also worked his magic on a similar moment of computer-related tension. The nerve-wracking Bogota ambush sequence is what everyone remembers about Clear and Present Danger, but an equally memorable sequence--and one that's handled with a bit more humor, especially when Harrison Ford discovers there's no paper in his printer--is Ford's attempt to salvage all evidence of the government conspiracy Henry Czerny helped orchestrate right when Czerny deletes it from what we now call "the cloud." It's the second best action sequence in the movie, even though nobody fires a gun or a missile and nobody dies. Horner had a lot to do with that.

There's an old featurette TCM used to frequently air between movies about how crucial Elmer Bernstein's score was in enhancing The Magnificent Seven. The featurette took a clip where Bernstein's rousing main theme accompanied shots of Yul Brynner and his crew riding on horseback rather lethargically and posited that without Bernstein's theme, the scene was dead. Without Horner's "Deleting the Evidence" cue, which is part of the playlist for the AFOS espionage genre music block "AFOS Incognito," the computer showdown sequence would have been dead too.



Throughout Clear and Present Danger, Horner made use of a shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, to heighten tension. It's kind of an unconventional choice, just like the clumsy kitty cat stepping on the piano keys during Sneakers, because it makes you think, "Did one of those Peruvian pan flute bands that invaded South Park also invade the orchestra?," but it works for the hacking sequence. Horner would get pilloried a lot by film music critics for recycling his own previous motifs when he was alive, but that's not the case here: his score to Clear and Present Danger, a blockbuster that came out two years after Sneakers, sounds much different from his score to Redford's movie, and it echoes the differences in tone between the serious-minded Clear and Present Danger and the much more light-hearted Sneakers.

Today, hacking scenes are such a cliché that I can't watch another hacking scene without thinking of Jimmy Kimmel Live's transformation of Scandal into a telenovela. In one of those Kimmel Live sketches, Scandal star Guillermo Diaz made fun of the ways actors pretend to type on laptops by basically channeling the piano-playing sight gags in Tom and Jerry's "The Cat Concerto" and Bugs Bunny's "Rhapsody Rabbit" while he was typing. So from now on, every time I sit through a dramatic hacking scene, I can't get out of my head the funny image of Guillermo Diaz typing like Bugs Bunny on the piano. But back when these scenes hadn't yet crossed the line into unintentional silliness and very '90s Fisher Stevens entrances, Horner was the master of scoring these scenes, and his skills with those scenes were honed while working on the franchise that made his career: Star Trek. Again, it all goes back to Star Trek. Hell, everything goes back to Star Trek. What David Strathairn and Harrison Ford are doing at their terminals is basically what Kirk and Spock did to trick Khan into lowering his starship's shields in Star Trek II and what Kirk and Scotty similarly pulled off to steal back the Enterprise from Starfleet in Star Trek III. Horner's brilliance with musical texture and enlivening action that has the potential to look as dull as office work was also key to why those moments of starship bridge console trickery are such highlights of those Trek films.

I haven't been interested in a Horner score in ages, but now that his score to the upcoming Chilean miner survival drama The 33 has ended up being one of the last things he composed before his death, I'm curious about his work in The 33 (and in this summer's Antoine Fuqua-directed boxing drama Southpaw). I wouldn't be surprised if Horner was able to take another potentially static-looking scenario like a bunch of miners trapped for more than two weeks under a collapsed mine and help make that compelling as well. Which Horner are we getting for his last couple of scores?

Selections from Horner's scores to Star Trek II and The Rocketeer can be heard during both "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS, while selections from his score to Clear and Present Danger (and hopefully someday, selections from his score to Sneakers) can be heard during "AFOS Incognito."

Raiders of the Lost Ark turns 30 years old this week, while George Lucas makes plans to digitally tweak the Indy/Marion foreplay scene so that it's now nothing more than an Eskimo kiss

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a movie I've loved since I was a kid in the '80s and have considered the best of the Indiana Jones series, partly because, as blogger Odienator once noted, "Raiders reveals a lot about its characters by showing rather than telling."

Everyone who was involved in Raiders did incredible work in this film, including Steven Spielberg, John Williams, editor Michael Kahn, cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, stars Harrison Ford and Karen Allen, truck chase stunt double Vic Armstrong and even Alfred Molina, in a bit part that was his first role in a feature film (Molina was last seen revisiting the sci-fi/fantasy genre when he played an assistant D.A. who quit prosecuting and was somehow able to get back his never-before-mentioned old job as a cop on Law & Order: L.A.).

Because it's celebrating its 30th anniversary this week (Paramount premiered it on June 12, 1981), here's a clever tribute to Raiders that I first posted in 2009. Ivan Guerrero is a videographer who's a whiz at crafting alternate-reality trailers for contemporary movies out of footage from much older movies. He recently put together a "pre-make" of Joss Whedon's currently-being-filmed Avengers adaptation that showed what the movie would have looked like in a parallel universe where it was made in 1952. One of Guerrero's earlier videos was a similar pre-make of Raiders that used tons of clips from Charlton Heston's Secret of the Incas, a 1954 Paramount B-movie that's been cited as an influence on Raiders.



In the parallel universe that's established by Guerrero's pre-make, their Indy sounds more like Moses than a regular guy who turns into Don Knotts whenever he's around snakes.

Paramount has never released Secret of the Incas on DVD, so Guerrero's fake trailer is one of the few places where we can get glimpses of this proto-Raiders. I enjoyed the fake trailer so much back in 2009 that I even played around in Photoshop and created a snapshot of an old-timey-sounding blurb about the alternate-universe Raiders that would have fit right in with the pre-make.

WHAT IF... Raiders of the Lost Ark were made in the '50s?

YouTube user "whoiseyevan" has been creating what he calls "pre-makes," fake trailers in which '80s and '90s hits like Ghostbusters and Forrest Gump are reimagined as old-timey movies, with the help of footage from other works.

For his latest and funniest "pre-make," "whoiseyevan" speculated what Raiders of the Lost Ark would have been like if it were released in 1951 instead of 1981 (hey, at 1:30, it's the "Attack" theme from Patton, which, in our reality's 1951, won't be written for another 19 years). I'd rather watch this alternate-reality Indiana Jones than the fifth official Indy installment that Harrison Ford recently confirmed is in development (oh God, no). I feel like Sean Connery while the temple collapses around him and Ford at the end of Last Crusade. Lucasfilm and Ford Indiana, let it go. Let the faded franchise go.



[Via Electronic Cerebrectomy]