The Melting Blog

The Giant Robots Themselves

Following the heels of their appearance on Elvis Mitchell's show I cited last week, the creative geniuses behind Giant Robot, aka Martin Wong and Eric Nakamura, now have a feature profile in Elvis' old employer, the venerated Gray Lady herself. Not only are these trendsetting purveyors of Asian American hipness hawking bizarre art, yellow fashion, and pop culture minutae -- impressive by itself -- they're getting it on as restauranteurs too:

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.

Mr. 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 L.A. 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 cliché," Mr. 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."

There's no accounting for taste, and the one significant thing that has distinguished Wong and Nakamura's publication from their Asian American counterparts is their own finely-honed sense for both identifying and discovering the next hip thing on the street before it becomes commodified hipness, and more importantly, saying no to other things that don't fit into those sensibilities -- even if they are Asian American too (this is something I believe hurt their predecessors like aMagazine and Yolk who tried to be everything-Asian-American-under-the-sun):

They wrote about Hong Kong movies and celebrities like Chow Yun-Fat, John Woo and Jet Li years before they became popular in the United States, but they once declined an offer to interview Jackie Chan because he had become too mainstream. And they often angered Asian-American promoters who saw them as allies.

"Usually it was these really terrible P.R. companies saying, `If you really cared about Asians, you'd write about this Asian actress,' " Mr. Wong explained. "But we're just not interested in mediocre Asian actors in mainstream movies."

Mr. 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.
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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," Mr. Yang said.

I think it was probaby more than a Faustian bargain that drove aMagazine out of business. But that's another blog entry for another time. To Mr. Yang's point, special interest-based publications like Giant Robot survive on their creators' passions and thrive based on their vision. Wong and Nakamura have demonstrated ample amounts of both.

The evidence of their success is palpable: 10 years in business running, a growing roster of corporate advertisers, readers across the color spectrum, and I'm sure a whole lot of fun in the process.

Read the whole thing people.

Posted by thomas at July 5, 2004 06:26 AM | TrackBack