Politics & Prose @ The Wharf -- Simon Tam ("Slanted") w/Robert Barnes and Joe X. Jiang:
Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
Description of Pictures: Simon Tam - Slanted: How an Asian American Troublemaker Took on the Supreme Court — in conversation with Robert Barnes — at Politics and Prose at The Wharf
Tam founded his Asian-American dance rock band, The Slants, in 2006. Known for their community activism, the band dedicated itself to overturning stereotypes—a mission that started with the name, which refers not only to individual perspectives and guitar chords, but to Asian ethnic identity. Seeking to reclaim this derogatory term as a badge of pride, Tam applied to register “Slant” as a trademark. When the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected his application, Tam pursued his case to the Supreme Court—where he won a unanimous victory in 2017. In this spirited and inspiring memoir of his fight for free speech, Tam reflects on questions of identity as he moves from anime conventions and cultural festivals all the way through the U.S. legal system.
Tam will be in conversation with Robert Barnes, reporter for The Washington Post covering the U.S. Supreme Court.
Before the event, Simon was joined by Joe X. Jiang playing several songs from their most recent EP for the audience.
Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider. IP Address: 3.143.218.146 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
TAM1_190528_010.JPG: Joe X. Jiang
TAM1_190528_011.JPG: Slanted Eyes, Slanted Hearts
TAM1_190528_020.JPG: The Slants
Chinatown Dance Rock
TAM1_190528_023.JPG: The Band Who Must Not be Named
TAM1_190528_025.JPG: The Slants
TAM1_190528_111.JPG: Simon Tam
TAM1_190528_221.JPG: Robert Barnes
TAM1_190528_330.JPG: Robert Barnes, Simon Tam, Joe X. Jiang
TAM2_190528_661.JPG: Robert Barnes, Simon Tam
TAM2_190528_681.JPG: Simon Tam, Joe X. Jiang
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Featured Folk: Some of the people here can also be seen on other pages on this site.
Slants (musical group) appears on:
2017_DC_Slants_170416 Newseum -- Inside Media w/the Slants ("The First Amendment and Rock 'n' Roll")
Tam, Simon appears on:
2019_DC_WP_F2S_P1_190617 Washington Post -- Free To State 2019 (1) -- Artistic Expression and The First Amendment (Michael "Killer Mike" Render, Simon Tam, John Elwood, Wesley Lowery)
2017_DC_Slants_170416 Newseum -- Inside Media w/the Slants ("The First Amendment and Rock 'n' Roll")
Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!