From the land of cool spring waters

Last week I got a phone call from my friend Kento, who had finally moved from Seattle to L.A. He's been threatening to do that since I met him about 10 years ago when I happened to catch one of his band IQU's earliest shows in the Emerald City. I was blown away by the trio's combination of indie rock and electronic music, and made Kento's acquaintance in Olympia the next day (introduced by our mutual friend Tae Won Yu) and the group crashed at my place when they made their first tours of California. After that, we'd see each other pretty much every tour.


So when Kento mentioned that keyboard player/sometimes singer Michiko was going to be in town with her mom and that they wanted to eat Chinese vegetarian food, I was all over it. I gathered up nearly a dozen people, told everyone to meet at Vegetarian Wok at 7:30, and we had an impromptu banquet!


Usually we order mock shrimp with snow pea leaves and the fake beef, but this time we went with a set menu of 13 dishes. Every dish was a suprise, since the menu was written in Chinese and none of us could read it. It was amazing, tasty, and deluxe--as you can gather by the flowers carved out of vegetables held by Michiko and her mom. We hung out in the hallway outside the restaurant forever and then hung out some more in the parking lot, kind of like an Asian-American version of the You're Gonna Get Yours 12" single cover.

You've got to love the week between Christmas and New Year's in L.A., when people are in town and in a festive mood, and traffic is practically nonexistant. Even the rain cooperated by falling late into the evening... The scoop on IQU? The new album is almost done, and will be released by a Japanese label. Kento says it will be more electronic, but I expect healthy doses of rock.