Hello, I’m Jim. I write The Avocado’s Couch Avocados TV column, which drops every Thursday, and my Linktree is linktr.ee/jjohnaquino. Because Stars (they come & go) is Asian British instead of Asian American (while I’m the latter), they asked me to take over Color Outside the Lines, a discussion place for BIPOC, today as part of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

I have mixed feelings about commemorative months.

I’ve occasionally learned from PSAs or Filipino American History Month-related articles about things I had no knowledge of, like the fascinating work of Pinoy artist Leo Valledor (1936-1989), a pioneer of “geometric abstraction” in San Francisco’s Fillmore District.

But I also hate how corporations handle commemorative months. (For instance, Target landed in hot water for selling Black History Month magnets from Bendon Publishing that misidentified Carter G. Woodson, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. Du Bois. On WGBH, syndicated religion columnist Rev. Irene Monroe slammed how these men were repackaged as a product and called it “just absolutely repugnant.”) My favorite Phil LaMarr sketch from his run on MADtv, a fake “Black History Minute” PSA about train coupling, perfectly mocked the way that commemorative month PSAs are designed to soothe white folks.

Being Filipino American means that my heritage receives recognition in California twice: in May, which is AANHPI Heritage Month (a.k.a. Asian Pacific American Heritage Month or APAHM), and again in October, which is Filipino American History Month (the Filipino American National Historical Society, which created FAHM, prefers to use “history” in the month’s name instead of “heritage”).

El Santo, another Pinoy Avocado commenter, said in the COTL thread’s comments section last May that it’s “kinda weird that they’re lumping Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders into a single group because I suspect the reason is because ‘they all look the same.’ ”

That’s kind of why I prefer FAHM over APAHM. Also, APAHM doesn’t take place during Halloween season.

Despite APAHM’s awkwardness as a commemorative month due to the silliness of lumping multiple ethnicities that have very little in common with each other into a single group, I jumped at the opportunity Stars (they come & go) gave me to chime in on APAHM. In my eyes, history isn’t just coupling trains in the 1920s. It’s also the arts. It’s also modern-day music.

I wish piNoisepop, which was founded by brothers Jesse and Ogie Gonzales in 1998, still existed as a San Francisco festival for Fil Am indie bands. Even though I never went to piNoisepop, I wear every winter a dark hoodie from the ninth (and what ended up being the final) edition of the festival. From my personal archives, here now is an inaccessible 2005 San Jose Mercury News article about piNoisepop 9. The Merc, a paper I wrote film reviews for when I was a teen, sucks at archiving old articles online. I preserved a lot of stuff from the Merc, including many of my own articles, that can’t be found online for free.

I saw only one of the bands—a piNoisepop staple—that were listed in the article, but that show wasn’t at piNoisepop. A few months before the final piNoisepop, my older brother—who was dating at the time a woman who was involved in theater productions at Bindlestiff Studio, a Fil Am performing arts space that still exists in San Francisco’s SoMa district—was in charge of capturing on DV an all-ages Bindlestiff charity night of Asian American indie bands supporting the tsunami victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. He invited me to help him film the show.

I hopped on an evening train from San Jose to join my brother mostly because the show would give me an opportunity to watch the Skyflakes, a Milpitas garage band whose songs he introduced me to. I loved “Bad Thoughts,” a song that sounded deceptively adorable because of singer Tricia Saria Ramos’s childlike (but not at all childish) voice—but it was actually from the seething point of view of a victim of a mean girl at either a gym or an office, and this victim was preparing to either throw hands at her tormentor or stab her with a bolo.

My brother first knew Ramos and Ron Ramos, her husband and one of the band’s guitarists, when he and the Ramoses were students at UC Santa Cruz, a university I attended after they graduated. This was years before the couple, Tricia Ramos’s two brothers, and the same Jesse Gonzales who co-founded piNoisepop formed the band and named themselves after the SkyFlakes brand of crackers from the Philippines. I can’t remember at all the moment when my brother introduced me to the Ramoses backstage at Bindlestiff.

In fact, I can’t remember any of the other bands that performed that night or almost all of the Skyflakes’ set list. All I can remember are the chicken katsu I devoured backstage and the moments when my arms got tired from operating my brother’s DV camcorder, but I didn’t give a shit about the tired arms because I got to see the Skyflakes play “Bad Thoughts” live.

“Talk About Today,” a 2001 song that wasn’t at all romantic and was about an uncomfortable reunion with an overachieving classmate who never outgrew high school, exposed the Skyflakes to Asian American teens and college kids outside the Bay when Justin Lin strangely featured the track during a romantic montage in Better Luck Tomorrow.

In 2002, Better Luck was at the center of a nonsensical debate over the nonsense that is respectability politics. I was lucky (no pun intended) to watch Lin’s energetic and controversial crime flick before Paramount’s MTV Films division acquired it and Lin changed its perfectly callous final voiceover to a less callous one.

Despite my opposition to Lin’s softening of his original ending, I still love Better Luck, which is now best known as the movie that introduced Sung Kang as laconic Orange County criminal Han Lue, who later left behind his sordid beginnings in the O.C. to become an international thief and a legendary Tokyo street racer in the Fast & Furious sequels Lin directed. I didn’t realize until the late ’00s that the song during the montage where the lead character teaches basketball shooting to a cheerleader he wants to date (even though she’s in a serious relationship with John Cho’s wealthy character) was a Skyflakes joint.

The Skyflakes’ discography isn’t exactly large, but it’s full of a few other gems like 2011’s “sci-fi as lit.,” a tune that referred to the events of the beloved Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Tapestry,” and 2002’s “Dear Kawashima,” a jangly love letter to a city.

Neither Picard’s name nor Cadet Maria Batanides’s name was uttered in “sci-fi as lit.,” but the song was about them. Ron Ramos is an even bigger Star Trek fan than I am: The title of the band’s 2011 album is Five Year Mission, and Ramos even said in 2010 to an SFGate interviewer that “if I’m ever in a situation where I’m unsure what to do, I often think to myself, ‘What would Capt. Picard do?’ ”

In the It’s a Wonderful Life-esque “Tapestry,” Q gave Picard the opportunity to go back in time and undo his biggest mistake. But the alternate timeline that forms from Picard’s changes to that mistake turns out to suck hard.

I always wonder about the alternate timeline where the Skyflakes released a few more albums and crossed over into the mainstream. I also think about another alternate timeline where the Skyflakes became the Fil Am equivalent of the indestructible and still-alive Los Lobos, as in they experienced two or three chart hits 14 years into their existence and then awesomely turned around and said, “Nah, we wanna make the records we wanna make, and we wanna stick to artistic integrity. We stick to underground, keep the crossover.”

Meanwhile, Elbert Chang—a member of the Clarendon Hills, a now-defunct punk band that frequently toured with the Skyflakes and even released a 7-inch EP that packaged together Skyflakes and Clarendon Hills tracks—pointed out last year in a Substack post about his friends from the Skyflakes (and what all of them are up to now) that it never mattered to him whether or not the Skyflakes became a juggernaut.

“If there is something to learn and enjoy from the Skyflakes experience, besides excellent music, I think it’s their proximity to the ideal of autotelism,” wrote Chang. “To put it another way, interesting people will continue to do interesting things.”

One of those interesting things is Ron Ramos’s YouTube channel, which he runs under the name of “Mattelica,” his alias as a solo electronica act. He plays really solid synth covers of film scores, TV themes, post-punk songs I frequently played on my iPod in the ’00s, the occasional Dirty South club track, and a lot of Depeche Mode tracks (but he keeps his face off-screen). Because I’m a film score nerd and I was a kid who grew up around a brother who was obsessed with Depeche, I like Ramos’s channel. And once in a while, the Skyflakes re-emerge on stage in the Bay.

“I suppose it is possible to disown relatives, but as they have stated, the Skyflakes can never break up–they are family,” wrote Chang.

Even though I never got to experience piNoisepop, the Gonzales brothers’ creation deserved to continue past 2005. It would have led to a lot more Bay Area Fil Am teens pursuing punk or noise pop (instead of meaningless desk-bound shit that bores them) and a lot more great Fil Am bands like the Skyflakes. (Again, I go back to alternate timelines. In the alternate timeline where piNoisepop still exists, would the festival have led to the ascent of Bruno Mars, H.E.R., Saweetie, and Olivia Rodrigo as half-Filipino musicians in America never happening at all? Maybe their ascent would have still taken place.)

Today’s prompt: Is there an unsung POC band or musician whose music you dig?