May 28, 2024
In Part 2, Mike, Paolo, and
Rachel share the story of how TNT Traysikel came to
be.
We begin with Paolo, who
describes the Mission art opening where he and Mike met. Besides
having similar "falling in love with San Francisco" moments, they
soon learned that back in the Philippines, their brothers had been
friends. They hit it off pretty much right away.
Mike learned that Paolo worked
on films, including his Handsome Asians Motorcycle Club series
on YouTube. In 2017, the year after SOMA Pilipinas came into existence, Mike was invited
to join the nonprofits' arts and cultural group. They were looking
to do a placemaking project and wanted to connect with artists to
do so.
At that time, Mike was already
a professor at SF State. He ran the sculpture and expanded practice
program there. He had done public art on his own before, and
remembered Paolo and his motorcycle riding. Mike started thinking
about jeepneys and the Philippines, which were relics left on the
islands after years of war. These thoughts sparked the idea for a
tricycle jeepney. And so Mike and Paolo applied for a grant.
Originally, they planned to build it from scratch.
Before Paolo's web series, he
had made some documentaries. His first thought about TNT was that
it, too, would make a cool web series. He didn't think of it as
political in the beginning. But these were the years of the
previous presidential administration (just before COVID), and
in hindsight, he now sees a clearer picture of what it meant from
Day One.
They got the grant on the idea
that that the traysikel signaled the presence of Filipinos. They
wanted to take older Filipinos (manongs and
manangs) to buy groceries in SOMA. And they somehow wanted
to make the vehicle a roving sculpture.
A friend of Mike's told them
about a traysikel for sale in Modesto. They bought it, picked it
up, and right away, realized that it needed a lot of work. Mike and
Paolo took the whole thing apart, rewelded it, and added support.
By the time the 2019 Parol Lantern Festival came around, it was ready to
roll.
They showed up, just Paolo and
Mike, and started playing Tagalog music from Paolo's iPhone around
the traysikel. People came over and sang along, which gave them the
idea for karaoke. Michelle Nguyen, a vintage scooterist friend of
Paolo's, designed the look of and painted the TNT Traysikel for
them.
Also at Parol 2019, Rachel
learned about the project. As the karaoke was coming into being,
Paolo and Michael thought, Rachel's an amazing singer—maybe she
could be the karaoke host? She was in. And so they applied for a
second grant, this time through the SF Arts Commission, to make a
movie about the traysikel with a musical component. The three of
them would become equal collaborators.
Mobile karaoke came to be in
the early days of COVID, when people really wanted to release, to
be out and free and with other people. They say that to them, TNT
encapsulates joy, grief (the grief of what you leave behind when
you emigrate), and storytelling. Their Sidenotes project focuses on
one or two people sitting in the sidecar telling stories. The TNT
crew collects and archives those stories. Through this work and
everything else, they recently were rewarded with a Rainin Arts
Fellowship to do another film. In summer 2025, they're taking TNT
Traysikel on the road.
We end the podcast going around
the room to hear Paolo, Mike, and Rachel's responses to this year's
theme on the podcast—We're all in it.
Photography by Jeff
Hunt