Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

The menswear designer talks to us about her line, working at a co-op, and what a well-dressed Mr. Hyphen would wear.

To the male college graduates still shuffling to work in cargo shorts and polo shirts: Estrella Tadeo feels for you.

"There's a huge gap from skater boy to professional," says Tadeo. "When [skater boy] grows up, he can't afford the YSL, but still wants to look cool."

The menswear designer and co-founder of The Mission Statement, a co-op boutique, laments the lack of options available for guys. While she loves designing for both men and women, she sees a higher need for more menswear options, since women typically have more to choose from in a department store. For guys, there aren't too many different looks to work with between Frat Boy and Wall Street.

"You don't necessarily want to look stuffy but you want to look polished and hip," she says. "Especially with younger men becoming professionals at a younger age, there's a middle market there."

If I'm interpreting this ad correctly, Bisazza's tiles will:

1) Make you want to find and abduct a geisha to match your pretty new tiles.
2) Tie up said geisha and throw her on the floor.
3) Expose her thigh in a violently sexualized way.
and 4) Take a photo to show how awesome your new tiles look.

Seriously, what is wrong with creative director/advertising firm behind this ad? According to the BBC, the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK banned the magazine ad for its implications for sexual violence, following half a dozen consumer complaints.

Last week Jezebel posted a vintage ad for Jade East aftershave from the '50s or '60s, featuring an exoticized Asian girl and the attractive tagline, "If she doesn't give it to you, get it yourself!" Apparently, not much has changed since then. 

So it's official: C-pop mega star Jay Chou is slated to play Kato in the new adaptation of The Green Hornet, because America has apparently run out of Asian American actors.

Seth Rogen will star in this Hornet,  directed by Michel Gondry, no doubt putting a new comedic spin on the 1960s TV iteration (the 2010 film is written by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, of Superbad and Pineapple Express fame). Taking on the role that propelled Bruce Lee into mainstream consciousness, Chou has nimble shoes to fill. His "chemistry" with Rogen supposedly shone through during auditions, but it's not difficult to wonder if his appeal to the international market shone through more.

Listen, I like Jay Chou as much as the next Chinese American girl who came of age around the millennium; I will defend his emo hair and his slurred sing-songy rap 'til the end. But I refuse to believe that this casting choice is the result of finding the best man for the job. While he seems to have refined his martial arts skills over the years -- he acknowledges that he is no Bruce Lee and will bring his own "interpretation" to Kato -- his English proficiency is still a big question mark, given the sparse smattering of evidence. In this TV commercial, he utters a heavily-accented "Try it" at the end. Maybe he's gotten a tutor since then, but is someone with a limited grip on the language really going to be able to hold his own in verbal sparring matches with Seth Rogen?

Gamers, rejoice! Masi Oka is taking gaming mainstream. The Heroes star, a gamer himself, has come up with a movie project, The Defenders, which was just given the go-ahead by DreamWorks. The story follows a group of gamer teens who must surface from their online avatars to save the world, which is basically the daydream of many a MMORPG player. (That's massively multiplayer online role-playing games, for those of you not in the know.)

"You can be whoever you want to be," Oka said about gaming to the The Hollywood Reporter. " The question came to me: What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?"

The project was picked up by DreamWorks after Oka pitched it to Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). Gary Whitta, a fellow World of Warcraft gamer and screenwriter of 2010 Denzel Washington action thriller Book of Eli, is attached to write the script.

The Honorable Sandra Otaka, the first Asian American appointed to the bench by the Illinois Supreme Court, and a longtime advocate for the community, passed away on June 6 of natural causes. The third-generation Japanese American helped draft the Cook County Human Rights Ordinance, and served as the Vice-Chairperson for the Cook County Commission on Human Rights.

It was only a matter of time. The Kogi KBBQ taco truck, Southern California's latest food fad, has found itself some flattering attention from other budding restaurateurs -- and imitation, as we all know, is the sincerest form of flattery.

On an evening stroll through Westwood a few Fridays ago, I discerned from afar a familiar white taco truck with its signature flaming orange and red sign, and NO LINE.

"The Kogi truck!" my boyfriend exclaimed, and went running down the street after it. The Kogi truck? With no line? But how? Did they plan an un-Twittered stop by UCLA, or were we just lucky enough to beat the two hour rush for a few delicious kalbi tacos? Impossible.

Well, not impossible, if the Kogi truck is in fact the Calbi truck, which looks remarkably -- and probably not coincidentally -- similar to the original. Calbi BBQ, which started its two taco trucks rolling on April 30, features a logo that bears not only a similar color scheme, but a similar flame icon and cursive font as Kogi BBQ (for a side-by-side comparison, check out Eating L.A.'s blog).
 

After hearing so much about L.A.'s latest food fad, the elusive Kogi KBBQ taco truck, I decided to hunt down some mobile kalbi and see what all the hype was about. Taco trucks, I've seen, KBBQ restaurants, I've seen. But a taco truck that sells kimchi quesadillas and spicy pork burritos that even caught the eye of the New York Times? This was worth investigating.

I checked their website yesterday evening, only to find out that Verde, one of Kogi's two mobile KBBQ machines, was over at Santa Monica College. That's only a handful of miles away from me! I could bike over there in 20 minutes and catch them before they left. And, according to their blog, there was no line. Sweet.

But wait! In some serendipitous aligning of the food gods, they were going to be even closer in a matter of hours, with a planned pit stop at UCLA before calling it a night. Forget cooking dinner, I was gonna go get me some KBBQ! So after checking their Twitter for updates, like some sort of desperate kalbi addict, I decided to head over around 7:45 pm. Verde was scheduled to be there at 7:30 pm, but I figured, hey, how many other people could be on Kalbi Watch like I am? The answer is: many.

By now you've probably all heard about the photo of Miley Cyrus pulling a "goofy face," as she called it, better known to the rest of us as chinky eyes. The community reacted with all sorts of outrage, with the OCA issuing a statement that asserts the photo "legitimize[s] the taunting and mocking of people of Asian descent."

But a week ago, one woman went so far as to sue the Disney pop star for $4 billion. Southern California native Lucie J. Kim is taking Cyrus to court on behalf of the million or so Asian Americans in the Los Angeles area, according to a MSNBC report.

Granted, Cyrus' non-apology apology was pretty lame ("I was simply making a goofy face. When did that become newsworthy? It seems someone is trying to make something out of nothing to me."), claiming the gesture was taken "out of context." And you'd think someone who influences a huge number of teens and pre-teens would be encouraged (at very least by Disney, her employer) to respond with a little more sensitivity, but is suing the pop princess for approximately $4,000 a head going to make much impact?