I, GIANT ROBOT

Palisades High graduate Eric Nakamura has built an empire on the back of his postmodern magazine

It began with some folded pages, a few staples, and a lot of imagination, which spawned a magazine, a chain of pop culture stores, a restaurant, an art gallery, and, nearly, a way of life including movies, music, books, comics, toys, food, and fine art. In the process, one Palisades High graduate helped transform a nondescript section of Sawtelle Boulevard into one of the liveliest sections on the Westside. Five words come to mind: Rick Caruso, watch your back! The magazine is Giant Robot, and the PaliHi grad is Eric Nakamura, who, once upon a time, worked for the Palisadian-Post. But Giant Robot is not your ordinary pop culture publication. ‘It’s a lifestyle magazine,’ says Nakamura, 38. As president and publisher of the Asian-American-flavored periodical, Nakamura created a niche on the back of an American failure: the lack of Asian-American inclusion in mainstream American entertainment. Clearly, in the last five years, more Asian-American faces appear on television (‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ ‘Lost,’ and ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ on which no less than judge Carrie Ann Inaba, choreographer Cheryl Burke and champion Kristi Yamaguchi appeared last season). In 1994, before the Hong Kong explosion in feature film, when Asian-Americans were an ‘All-American Girl’ away from being invisible on network TV, Nakamura didn’t sit around crying over the lack of representation. Instead, he created a magazine that not only became the core of a commercial empire but broke some ground. A walk through the Winter 2001 issue (# 23) typifies this atypical publication’s attitude. Articles read like Web logs a few proverbial minutes before blogs mushroomed online. You can join Nakamura as he and Beastie Boys keyboardist ‘Money’ Mark Nishita visit the Korean Friendship Bell in San Pedro, or enjoy a Q & A with Hong Kong’s ‘King of Trash Cinema’ Wong Jing. You can learn about Lou Griffin (‘the Jane Goodall of Japanese Snow Monkeys’), or hear from the editor of a magazine covering Tokyo’s crazy-quilt, candy-colored Harajuku district. There’s a shopping tour of Saigon, reviews of everything from James Sturm’s Jewish baseball team graphic novel “The Mighty Golem’s Swing” to Death Cab for Cutie’s latest album, and facetious articles about the “Red Skull Theory.’ Eccentric and eclectic, GR might throw in an article on hitman caper film auteur Seijun Suzuki or a Q & A with cartoonist Kazuo Umezu alongside music reviews of the Cure or Electric Aborigines. It’s an ‘anything goes’ kind of mag. From 1984-2006, Eric Nakamura’s parents lived on the edge of the Palisades border by Brentwood’s Country Mart. As a result, Nakamura, who should have attended Uni High, went to Pali, where he played varsity tennis and was surprised to learn that ‘there were actually poor kids living in the Palisades.’ Scott Stokdyk, Academy Award-winning special effects man (the ‘Spider-Man’ movies), attended PaliHi at the time, as did Dom DeLuise’s sons. PCH’s Jack in the Box and the late Village Pizza were prime PaliHi hangouts. ‘We’d go where the girls go,’ Nakamura smiles, remembering the notorious weekend house parties where ‘200 kids would come. It would spill into the streets and a police helicopter would shine a light to disperse them.’ At Pali Hi, Nakamura learned to use ‘a wet dark room’ under ‘a really great teacher,’ photography teacher Robert Doucette. ‘A little hippie, a little punk rock.’ While at Santa Monica College, Nakamura worked on the school paper and for a neighborhood photo lab. A relentless shutterbug, he captured such bands as The Inclined playing PaliHi’s lunchtime concerts. He was among some friends who hung out with Michelle Friedlander, the subject of the Inclined’s ‘She Won’t Go,’ the night before she was killed in a car accident. ‘She had drove down from Santa Barbara [where she attended UCSB] to see U2,’ Nakamura recalls. ‘We hung out in a small group. The next day, on the drive back up, she died.’ A relentless shutterbug, Nakamura freelanced for the Village View, shooting Sonic Youth, Public Enemy, The Bangles, The Sparks, and Leaving Trains, fronted by then-Post writer James Moreland. In 1991, Nakamura joined the Post as staff photographer. ‘To me, it was for all the marbles,’ he says. ‘It was my first professional experience.’ Many staffers have fond memories of Nakamura’s year at the Post, such as when Nakamura contributed a piece of high-grade raw meat from his parents’ restaurant to the Secret Santa gift exchange’which was won by restaurant critic Grace Hiney. Nakamura’s camera-work caught the eye of the Pasadena Star, which tried to lure him, but Nakamura instead attended college, heading to UC San Francisco, then UCLA to earn his East Asian Studies degree. ‘The Post prints the papers up [on site],’ Nakamura marvels. ‘That’s insane. The people here probably take it for granted. I actually had to know how the press worked. That experience, you can’t beat that.’ Giant Robot may benefit from a small army of writers, artists and cartoonists, but the magazine’s voice is the singular composite of co-editors Nakamura and Martin Wong. Post-college, a camera-strapped Nakamura hit the L.A. club scene. Enter Wong, an Anaheim Hills native of Chinese descent. Via mutual friends, the two UCLA grads met and clicked. ‘We would see each other at a lot of places like Jabberjaw,’ Wong, 39, says of the now-defunct Pico Boulevard club. ‘I’d go three to four times a week. I’d see him at the various shows. Soundgarden, Mudhoney, the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers were hot. We were two Asians with really long hair. ‘On the one hand we were into this music, which was largely not Asian, but we also bonded on old Japanese toys. Hong Kong movies were really hot. You could go to the San Gabriel Valley and, for $5, see a double feature, eat shrimp chips, drink tea with dried mango, and go get vegetarian Chinese food in the area afterwards. Eventually, you can see our taste grow in the magazine”food, art, architecture. It wasn’t just total fan boys obsessing over one thing. It was a whole cultural landscape.’ For a magazine named after a hi-tech Japanese anime character, Giant Robot has decidedly low-tech origins. The first two issues were crudely-produced ‘zines. With issue # 3, Wong came aboard as co-editor, and GR gathered steam with a glossy magazine format, even as its staff welcomed donated computer equipment. Nakamura’s infatuation with Japanese flicks and cartoons had begun during his West L.A. childhood, which he spent soaking up monster and samurai movies on the UHF channels. ‘Nobody was into that at the time,’ he says of GR’s beginnings. Wong adds that they were writing about pop culture trends that ‘even Asians weren’t into it yet.’ For Nakamura, Wong became the perfect professional partner because ‘he’s amenable to many ideas. He’s good at English. That fits my shortcomings. He’s less of a business person, but he knows how to write a magazine. And he loves film.’ Soon, Nakamura and Wong realized that when it came to their taste in pop culture, they were not alone. ‘There was nothing else like it,’ Nakamura says of GR. ‘People were like, ‘Oh, my God! Where’s this been? This is so obvious!” One must remember L.A.’s youth culture tempo in the pre-Internet days of 1994. As a city, Los Angeles was just emerging from the racial divisions of the Rodney King and O.J. Simpson trials, and entering a postmodern, multi-ethnic era. Quentin Tarantino was riding high in Hollywood, fusing noir, ghetto and pop culture with story and style elements he borrowed from Asian films. Alternative music had become a mainstay atop Billboard’s charts, and greatly influencing L.A.’s alternative scene was a convergence of trends. The Beastie Boys had entered their Atwater Village phase, segueing from a frat boy mentality into their good-citizens-of-the-world shtick. As they musically embraced different cultures and politically launched a crusade to free Tibet, the Beasties influenced L.A.’s hipster contingent with a now-defunct magazine and record label (both dubbed Grand Royal) and hip Los Feliz clothing outlets X-Large and X-Girl. All of this coincided with the cresting Silver Lake music explosion, led by another experimental musician Beck, while publications such as Ben is Dead led L.A.’s burgeoning ‘zine scene of homemade publications. Meanwhile, the influence of manga and anime had begun consuming American comic book and animation industries. In 1994, Asian pop culture enjoyed only a cult following in America. Miramax had yet to import an influx of Asian superstars (Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li) to the multiplexes. John Woo was still an art-house phenomenon, while Ang Lee had yet to break the ice in Hollywood with ‘The Ice Storm,’ and Sofia Coppola was a decade away from watching ‘In The Mood for Love,’ which informed her ‘Lost in Translation.’ Enter Giant Robot. ‘Eric and Martin only write about the subjects that they are passionate about,’ says former GR cartoonist Lisa Strouss. ‘It is never something just to please a crowd. And a lot of things they’ve covered in early issues are huge now, like Uglydolls and Wong Kar Wai.’ Tower Records was an early GR booster. After much rejection, chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble agreed to carry the magazine. ‘As we gained more and more momentum, companies came to us,’ Nakamura says. That included top advertisers and toy vendors with product geared toward GR’s perceived hip demographic. ‘We grew incrementally,’ Nakamura continues. ‘I was not willing to let it disappear. Other people joined up.’ For six years, Bill ‘the Bear’ Poon worked for GR as, among other things, their de facto mascot. Poon came aboard in 2000 as a copy editor. ‘Then,’ Poon says, ‘I started writing anime reviews and graduated to writing real articles, including receiving a colonic and staying at the Chung King mansion in Hong Kong.’ Poon also shipped merchandise for mail order and later worked at the retail store. ‘When Eric first suggested I write the interview with the man who grew enormous melons,’ Poon says, ‘I was pretty stoked since I really did not have any writing background. He looked at my first draft and said, ‘Whoa, that’s a very dude way of writing it,’ which really wasn’t my intention, but people seemed to like it.’ One day, Poon recalls, ‘I had walked into the room when Eric says, ‘Hey, Bill, wanna try this bear suit on?’ He started taking random pictures. He placed the images throughout the next GR issue and readers got a kick out of it. So then I started wearing it at trade shows.’ ‘Before I moved to Los Angeles,’ Strouss recalls, ‘I used to work at a magazine stand on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Giant Robot seemed to be the most unique’the design was really fun, and the writing was fresh without being elitist. People would ask for it a lot.’ Upon moving to L.A. from Seattle, Strouss cartooned for GR’s short-lived ‘zine-within-the-magazine insert, Robot Power. ‘At that time, ‘zine culture was still thriving,’ Strouss explains, ‘and I think Eric and Martin felt that Robot Power would be a vehicle to fit content that didn’t make it into the regular magazine.’ Strouss initially came on board as an intern, ‘which, at that time, meant folding heaps and heaps of t-shirts. This was in 2000 and they were in transition from having an office downtown to back at Eric’s family’s house. Giant Robot had taken over a good portion of the place, and there were mountains of t-shirts all over the living room, as well as a Superman pinball machine. I was on t-shirts for a while until I ate 30 packs of ramen in one day for an article. After that, I got to do a lot more fun stuff, like writing music reviews and editorial brainstorming.’ ‘Eric and Martin use to always get a chuckle at the article submissions coming in,’ Poon recalls. ‘I always heard, ‘People seem to think that adding swear words make their articles cool.” ‘My favorite part of that experience was interviewing [cartoonists] Dan Clowes and Chris Ware at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel [for Robot Power],’ Strouss says. ‘Dan was working on the ‘Ghost World’ movie and Chris had just finished publishing his ‘Jimmy Corrigan’ book. It was kind of a stretch to fit them under the umbrella of ‘Asian American Pop Culture’, but Eric and Martin are huge indie comics supporters.’ Nakamura and Wong downplay the major movie stars who have granted GR interviews. Being Asian or Asian-American, Wong notes, does not get a celebrity a free pass in the magazine if the GR staff are not feeling it. So if projects such as ‘Code Name: The Cleaner’ and ‘Lucky Number Slevin’ outnumber the ‘Kill Bill’ movies on her resume, Lucy Lui may not appear much in these pages. ‘We don’t want to look back and say we promoted this [lousy] movie,’ Wong says. Even then, a Tarantino might not get as much ink as the Shaw Brothers flicks that he liberally ‘pays homage’ to in ‘Kill Bill.’ ‘After a month of making plans, sanding wood-paneled walls, removing ink-spotted carpet, and renovating an old neon sign, a new chapter in the Giant Robot dream is ready to unfold” So began the Winter 2001 issue’s editorial about GR’s first brick-and-mortar location, an extension of GR’s successful online store. Hit the Japanese-centric Sawtelle District on a Saturday night, and you’ll find one of the most social, affordable, and walkable neighborhood pockets. Front and center, between La Grange and Mississippi, stands GR’s retail empire. Today, Sawtelle Boulevard is a thriving amalgam of hip Japanese eateries, sushi bars, ramen houses, and boba shops, with a neighboring Starbucks. But when Nakamura opened his first store”which sells tees, books, and cutesy plastic critters with catchy names such as Little Bony and Bossy Bear”there was next to nothing there. ‘I don’t think people give us credit, but it’s okay,’ Nakamura says of revitalizing the neighborhood of his youth. ‘I know we’ve helped a lot. The realtors know we exist. It’s a marketing point.’ Since its opening, Nakamura has opened GR stores in San Francisco, New York’s Lower East Side, and Silver Lake. Across Sawtelle from the original location stands GR2, which has art gallery space showcasing Asian and non-Asian artists alike, while Nakamura’s restaurant, gr/eats, offers American/Asian cuisine (‘udon and hamburgers,’ as Nakamura short-hands it). The restaurant may seem a leap until one learns that Nakamura’s parents started Hakata in Santa Monica. (GR even started a staff softball team, which won first place in the Los Angeles Parks and Recreation league one year). ‘When the store first opened,’ Poon says, ‘people would pop their head in and ask what we sold. The store is like a 200-square-foot rectangle. I’m thinking, ‘It takes a minute to walk through, why don’t you just look?” Celebrities began to drop by the Sawtelle store. ‘Normally I don’t get star struck,’ Poon adds, ‘but when Asian pop superstar Jay Chou was shopping, I was [excited].’ Whereas Little Tokyo may harbor an Issei first-generation atmosphere, the Sawtelle District, thanks in large part to the GR conglomerate, has become decidedly Nisei with its vibrant, youthful nightlife and energy. Even Huell Howser took note of the GR phenomenon in a 2002 episode of his PBS show devoted to the neighborhood, in which he chatted up Nakamura while holding up a plush toy character of a canine shaped like a pup tent. “A hut dog?!’ Howser asked, incredulously, turning to his cameraman. ‘Louie, can you get a shot of that?” Nakamura says that he learned a lot about how to run a retail business during a high school stint working at Benton’s Sport Shop, where he experienced ‘stocking and accountability issues’ first-hand. ‘He probably runs a cleaner ship than I do,’ he continues of his ex-employer. ‘He’s got to worry about everything. As a boss, I realize why.’ Last year, Giant Robot celebrated a milestone with a Japanese American National Museum exhibition in Little Tokyo. In a stroke of serendipitous synergy, “Giant Robot Biennale: 50 Issues’ ran concurrently with the much-hyped Takashi Murakami show at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary only blocks away. ‘It broke all attendance levels,’ Nakamura says ‘Biennale,’ which attracted 2,700 people to its opening and about 20,000 to the exhibit overall. Despite rapidly approaching GR’s 15th anniversary next year, Nakamura and Wong insist that they have nothing specific planned beyond another National Musuem show in November 2009. ‘I think GR was way ahead of its time when it started,’ says one of independent comics’ brightest stars, Adrian Tomine. ‘I guess nowadays its much easier for people to go online and learn about, say, Chow Yun Fat, but when I first started seeing GR, each issue was like a dense packet of new cultural information. ‘Unfortunately,’ continues the ‘Optic Nerve’ cartoonist, ‘I think the kind of impact that Martin and Eric have had on mainstream American culture is the kind of thing that’s impossible to definitively measure or attribute, so in some ways, they don’t get the credit they deserve.’ In fact, GR has since influenced other successful publications and stores, Asian-American or otherwise. It’s safe to say that such ethnic-endeavors-with-attitude as the New York-based Heeb magazine have benefited from the pan-Asian magazine’s journey. While GR was toasting its 10th anniversary and expanding its empire in 2004, Mark Nagata and Brian Flynn”the guys who launched the Japanese action figure-obsessed Super7 magazine in 2003”opened a Super7 store in San Francisco, while Paul Budnitz launched his like-minded KidRobot chain nationwide. There’s also a Robot Love in Minneapolis and a Big Brobot in Germany. While it may not have invented such toy stores (the Emeryville, CA shop Kimono My House has been selling anime and sci-fi toys since 1980), GR no doubt paved the way for a hipper kind of pop culture shop. Originally a black-and-white quarterly, GR, now on issue 54, is bi-monthly and full color. Wong credits Nakamura as the ambitious engine behind GR’s constant expansion. ‘I worked for McGraw-Hill for 10 years,’ Wong says. ‘Giant Robot is the hardest job of them all. I don’t have to wear a tie, but when you’re working with a guy like Eric, he’s on the clock 24 hours. If I’m working late, he’s working later.’ Wong, who is married to GR graphic designer Wendy Lau, posed with their four-month-old daughter, Eloise, in last issue’s GR. So what does Nakamura think of the progress of Asians in America, via the recent flurry of Asian-American faces hitting the airwaves: the aforementioned ABC shows, ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ and Tila Tequila? ‘It’s just a start, it could be better,’ Nakamura says, observing how ‘disproportionate’ it is compared to African-American representation on TV. But he notes the difference: black culture is ‘adopted universally’ by mainstream America. ‘That’s the next step. More non-action stars’ and Asian-Americans being a normalized part of the mainstream American fabric, not cast as awkward outsiders. ‘Why ‘Harold & Kumar,’ why not ‘Harold & Fred,” he asks, bemused. Yet despite a lopsided playing field, Nakamura and Wong are content to have helped open the door a crack wider for Asian culture in America, even as it was simply a by-product of two persnickety guys following their muses and geeking out. ‘People still don’t understand Giant Robot,’ Wong says. ‘There’s a lot of people who shop at the stores and they think it’s a catalogue and something that they should get for free and it’s like, ‘no.” Today, Nakamura’s parents”whom Nakamura says survived a ‘post-apocalyptic’ World War II experience following the bombing of Japan and U.S. internment camps”are proud of their son’s accomplishments. Nakamura and Wong are content to have helped open the door a crack wider for Asian culture in America, even if it was a by-product of two persnickety guys following their muse. ‘The same two guys write 85 percent that doesn’t happen anywhere. Does Hugh Heffner [do that]?,’ Wong says with a chuckle. ‘We don’t pretend that we are the voice of Asian-America. If you meet us, you know what movies we saw, what restaurants we dig, what toys Eric bought if you read the magazine regularly. It’s our lives. It’s kind of cool. It’s open to ridicule, but there’s a core following that enjoys it and that’s satisfying.’ ‘Despite all their success,’ Tomine says, ‘Martin and Eric have managed to stay extremely friendly, involved, accessible, and most incredibly, as enthusiastic as ever about the things they love.’ For information on Giant Robot magazine, stores and restaurant, visit www.giantrobot.com.