Last week, I serendipitously ended up at the opening of Sorry at the (totally hot) Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco and was happily surprised to find the works of my old friend Christine Wong-Yap (who is also in a show at Kearny Street Workshop) and Jennifer Wofford  (whom Claire Light profiles in our upcoming Spaces Issue, which will hit the stands next month!).

Floater Nurse by Jennifer Wofford        

"Point of Departure" and "Nurse" by Wofford and text-based works and "Inventions" by Wong Yap will line the gallery's walls and Wong Yap's "Presents" will populate the center of the gallery. Both series of Wofford's work explore and re-interpret an imaginative comic-like narrative centered on Filipina nurses and immigration histories. Wong Yap takes wry aim at blind spots in printed language, conveying optimism and pessimism, using distorted typography and the failures and half truths of illegible words, as well as sculptural stacks of "empty" gifts.

Otherwise, the gallery has a great collection of artists in their stable and focus especially on contemporary art from the San Francisco Bay Area and classic surrealism, especially women artists. Check out their artists here. And, get off your couch, go see the show!

Sesame Street has a new neighbor running the laundromat: Leela, or Indian American actor Nitya Vidyasagar.

"When the producers of Sesame Street were looking for a new actor to run the local laundromat, they were not looking for an Indian or any particular ethnicity -- they just wanted someone who was charming and not patronizing to a young audience. According to the newspaper India-West, the fact that this character is a Hindu and Indian American is purely coincidental. In fact, the character was recreated for this actress since they were smitten by her theatrical abilities."

Mike Meyers is coming to multiplexes near you this summer with his first original character since Austin Powers in "The Love Guru." This time he is Guru Pitka, “an American who was left at the gates of an ashram in India as a child and raised by gurus.” The rest of the story is refreshingly strange, involving a black hockey player, sports curses, Justin Timberlake and Jessica Alba. Your usual summer movie froth. But of course, the majority of the jokes seem to revolve around Pitka’s spiritual sayings and his Austin Powers-esque libido – this time curtailed by an elaborate chastity belt of sorts.

Okay, so last year I threw a little tantrum at the end of the festival about the lack of interesting South Asian programming. I called out (the newly-named) Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) for marginalizing good South Asian film, especially when it came to the International selections.

So, I am happy to see that this year, along with the requisite Bollywood film at the Castro – which really does look awesomely over the top – viewers can also check out The Voyeurs by Bengali director Buddhadeb Dashgupta. I haven’t seen this yet, but I highly recommend this to anyone who thinks South Asian films are all about flimsy plots and dance numbers – this should change your mind.

So, it's that time of year again when we get to finally see ourselves reflected back from the big screen: the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival.

Are you tired of the same old tired literature about the Asian American community? Well, then Hyphen invites you to the literary event of the year:

I read about Wesley Yang’s essay The Face of Seung-Hui Cho on the NY Times book blog Paper Cuts. You can only read an excerpt from Yang’s essay on the n+1 site, but just these few graphs made me order the journal ASAP.

Writer Andrew Lam (my colleague at New America Media) has written a series of commentaries talking about Asian Americans blowing up in “New Media.”

So, I finally got around to seeing Juno this weekend. It was great, even if the whole Diablo Cody-stripper-hype was getting on my nerves. I got over it, stopped drinking haterade, and give her mad props.

SFGate is currently leading with a big, fat pic of Yul Kwon, the subject of CW Nevius's column about Kwon and his buddies trying to open a Red Mango yogurt shop in North Beach.

I found this article on Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s ACLU lawyer daughter, Amrit Singh (who co-authored this recent report Administration of Torture:
 A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond ) to be an interesting take on South Asians who end up living in America (or the West in general) -- especially with Benazir Bhutto’s son so prominently in the news.

With the New Year comes a bevy of calendars dedicated to Asian Americans showing off their assets.

David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face opened this week at New York City’s Public Theater and reviews are in – saying the play is provocative and smart.

Mill Valley resident Veronica "Nikki" Ruiz has been missing since last Monday, but even after police called off their search, family, friends and volunteers continue to hit the trails of Mount Tamalpais.

The news of girls kicking ass and taking names at the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology was all over the news last week.

Isha Jain (right) and her research partner, Professor Kathy Iovine.

When my parents first immigrated to this country from India, they ended up on the cold streets of Chicago. All their “coming to America” stories revolve around adjusting to the cold and there are these amazing picture of my parents next to a frozen Lake Michigan, smiling in the snow.

Just a quick heads up to be sure to check out the upcoming three-day Third-i San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival this weekend (November 16th to 18th).

There have been some interesting studies/conversations about which young people are using what social networking site, basically what it means about you and your background if you are on MySpace all day versus Facebook.

I just got a press release about the book Mythix I: Revelation by 12-year-old Justin Tse.

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Zine and Comic Expo at APAture, which is always a treasure trove of finds.

The Houston Chronicle reports about the flourishing of Indian American newspapers in Houston, which has a huge South Asian population.