martin wong Tag

Editorial

Apr 29, 2014

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Last Thursday, I drove over to Space 15 Twenty in Hollywood to attend the release party for my friend Justin "Scrappers" Morrison's new magazine. It's pretty bold for anyone to start a print publication these days, but that's how Scrappers approaches his life, art, and work. He just goes for it. And Scrappers has had...

Editorial

Apr 15, 2014

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Last week, I attended the final meeting of the Programming Committee for this year's Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Next month's screenings will be the thirtieth annual showcase of movies, shorts, and other cinematic endeavors presented by the Little Tokyo-based collective of activists and entertainment insiders. I belong to neither camp but am flattered...

Editorial

Apr 08, 2014

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Sometime around 2000, I met Greg Girard the old-fashioned way: I sent a letter to the publisher of City of Darkness, a brick of a photo book about Kowloon Walled City that Greg made with his friend Ian Lambot. Through a series of letters, faxes, and phone calls, I eventually interviewed the then-Shanghai resident about...

Editorial

Mar 25, 2014

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On Sunday, Eric Nakamura and I gave a 20th anniversary presentation about Giant Robot magazine at GR2. As co-founders of the publication, we gave plenty of talks about it at colleges, companies, museums, and juvenile halls from 1994-2010. They were always fun, equal parts (1) behind-the-scenes stories about starting a stapled-and-folded zine about Asian, underground,...

Editorial

Mar 04, 2014

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[caption id="attachment_9785" align="alignnone" width="790"] Lindsey Ingram Photography[/caption] If you watched last weekend's Academy Awards, hopefully you noticed that Rithy Panh's The Missing Picture was nominated for Best Foreign Language Picture. The Cambodian/French co-production is an artful and ingenious retelling of the filmmaker's surviving the Khmer Rouge and its consideration was a milestone for Cambodians around the...

Editorial

Feb 25, 2014

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With most record labels struggling to scrape by, a generation of eardrums expecting songs to come free, and a shrinking middle class in music in general, it just keeps getting harder for an independent band to pay the bills through its songs. And so one of my favorite groups, the Cambodian psychedelic rock-inspired Dengue Fever,...

Editorial

Feb 18, 2014

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On Saturday I went to the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA, for the first time in more than a decade. It's a classy, understated tribute to the giant of comic strips and popular culture in general, with landscaping that includes a labyrinth shaped like the World Famous Super Beagle in front and...

Editorial

Jan 28, 2014

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I've been lucky enough to have not one but two dream jobs. Helping to start Giant Robot and edit the magazine for 16 years was a great run. How many writers get to work with their best friend and cover pretty much whatever he or she wants every single issue? And being a part of...

Editorial

Jan 21, 2014

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I couldn't make it to the Nick Zinner and Malia James photo exhibit in Pomona the other week, but when I saw that the latter was selling a Photographs From The Road zine I immediately hit her up. I love art zines because they're imperfect, fragile, and cheap but made with love. I don't fool...