At first glance it might seem that Scooby-Doo, George Foreman grills, stuffed-animal toys, scooters with automatic transmissions, gory video games, fuzzy melons, cockfighting, the pop artist Takashi Murakami and the band Sleater-Kinney have very little in common.
But over the years all have been found -- celebrated or mocked but always relentlessly scrutinized -- in the pages of a small quarterly Los Angeles magazine with sometimes strange editorial tastes and an even stranger name: Giant Robot.
The magazine's first issue, with a picture of a sleeping sumo wrestler on the cover and a drawing of a rib roast on the back, was photocopied and stapled together atop the family dining room table of one of its founders, Eric Nakamura. Even now, glossy and full color, less a zine than a real magazine, its circulation is a modest 40,000.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
But as the magazine celebrates its 10th anniversary this month it exerts a powerful influence that belies its tiny budget. It is one of the chief arbiters of what is cool (and by extension what is not) in Asian-American pop culture, a tricky job that other, better-financed magazines like Yolk tried and did not survive.
high sub-culture
Nakamura, 34, and Giant Robot's other founder, Martin Wong, 35, have spoken at Harvard and Stanford and are sought after by journalists and advertisers for their views on matters as varied as racism, comic books and Asian pornography. Their magazine has become required reading in several college classes and recently helped start the fad for Uglydolls, a set of homely stuffed toys sold at Barneys and the Design Museum of London. Los Angeles Magazine, in some ways a competitor, has called Giant Robot "probably the best publication to come out of LA in the last decade."
Probably more exciting for its founders, however, is that they are now successful enough to make the leap that it seems everyone in pop culture dreams about: They are opening their own restaurant, in West Los Angeles.
"I know, it's a big cliche," Nakamura said sheepishly in a recent telephone interview, adding: "We don't know what kind of place it will be yet. But it sure won't be burgers and grilled cheese."
Nakamura's self-image in publishing, and even as a Japanese-American, has always been that of an outsider. His Japanese is not good. Wong, whose grandparents were born in China, speaks no Mandarin or Cantonese. They met while writing about punk bands for various zines, and when they started their own -- named after a 1960s Japanese television series about a boy who controls a giant robot with his wristwatch -- they were seeking to please nobody but themselves.
They wrote about Hong Kong movies and celebrities like Chow Yun-Fat (周潤發), John Woo (吳宇森) and Jet Li (李連杰) years before they became popular in the US, but they once declined an offer to interview Jackie Chan (成龍) because he had become too mainstream. And they often angered Asian-American promoters who saw them as allies.
"Usually it was these really terrible PR companies saying, `If you really cared about Asians, you'd write about this Asian actress,'" Wong explained. "But we're just not interested in mediocre Asian actors in mainstream movies."
Nakamura described the magazine as "the punk-rock kids in the corner who didn't get invited to the parties," but more often it has seemed that the magazine is the one not inviting people to its party.
With their reflexive self-deprecation and finely tuned cultural antennas, both men are aware of the danger that the underground culture they write about is becoming more mainstream, in part because of their efforts. And they are wary of their own success: of being seen, God forbid, as somehow grown-up and too serious.
They own an art gallery and two stores, one in Los Angeles and another in San Francisco, that sell the kinds of Asian comic books, toys, books and clothing they often write about. (The actress Lucy Liu (劉玉玲) has been spotted in the Los Angeles store.) The men are also scouting sites for a third store in New York.
"I think we'll be fine," Nakamura said of the magazine's continued existence on the cutting edge. "But I'm not sure. We'll see."
Small, yet big too
Of course, judged by the standards of most magazines, Wong and Nakamura are so far from the establishment as to be laughable. They have only three full-time editorial employees: themselves and a designer. Their office is a garage next to Nakamura's house, and it is furnished with cheap furniture bought at Internet company bankruptcy auctions.
They speak proudly of having health insurance now and of Wong's having been able to quit his job recently as a textbook editor. (Before starting the magazine, Nakamura worked briefly at a video game magazine owned by Larry Flynt. "Hustler and all the exciting stuff, it wasn't even in the same building," he complained.)
Their magazine has matured somewhat in its tastes over the years. It no longer runs articles quite as silly as one in an early issue about urinating while standing on a hill or a particularly memorable one in which the underground filmmaker Jon Moritsugu explained how he once disposed of over 300kg of rotting meat (hence the drawing of the rib roast).
"We were more like Jackass than anything else back then," Nakamura said, referring to MTV's stupid-stunt show.
But that's not to say the magazine will be interviewing the Rock or reviewing Nobu anytime soon. ("Actually if Nobu gave us a bunch of food for free maybe we'd do it," Nakamura said.)
Recent issues have featured articles on the surprisingly tasty results of frying mochi, Japanese rice pastry, in a George Foreman grill; on motorized scooter mania in Taiwan and Japan; on the Asian fuzzy melons called chit gua that grow to the size of small dolphins; on cockfighting in Bali; and on the critically acclaimed Chinese director Wong Kar Wai (王家衛). ("So much style you'll puke," read the typically frank subtitle on the table-of-contents page.)
Jeff Yang, who founded another successful Asian-American culture magazine called aMagazine in Brooklyn in 1989, did not always agree with Giant Robot 's irreverent stance, but he said he always respected the magazine's pluck. (He watched his own magazine, a kind of Asian-American Vanity Fair, grow to a circulation of 200,000 before it folded in 2001 after what he called a "Faustian bargain" with the Internet world.)
"Frankly, if you're publishing on guts and a shoestring and talent like those guys you can hang on as long as they have," Yang said.
Giant Robot draws serious advertisers like Adidas, Sony and Universal Studios, but Wong said the magazine had not conducted a reader survey to identify its subscribers, although he said he believed about half are not Asian-Americans.
"Maybe it would ruin it for us if we actually knew who was reading it," he said, laughing.
With a decade under their belts, he and Nakamura say they have not come across any formula for putting out a good magazine. Nakamura once explained their editorial process to an interviewer this way: They agree on what's bad (he used a more colorful description) and leave that out, and they agree on what's good and leave that in.
"That's still pretty much it," Wong said, adding that besides health insurance and a salary, he feels fortunate to have a job that serves as the perfect cover for his obsessions.
"It turns me from being a fan boy into being a journalist," he said. "If it weren't for this, I'd be a stalker. Or a creep. Or something."
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