Giant Robot Store and GR2 News

Throw crap onto 75 year old Chung Kim patio over a period of time and sh*t happens. Chung Kim killed two neighbors who continuously washed feces from their upstairs balcony onto his. The man allegedly shot the upstairs neighbor from below and then blacked out, went to the second floor and killed the man’s wife. Chung Kim is claiming self defense and says that the male brandished a weapon. Senseless. (Huffpo – Dog Feces)
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The Line hotel will be the first of it’s kind. A hipster hotel in K-Town with a Korean American theme by the group who brought you Ace NY and NoMad will be behind the location at 3515 Wilshire Blvd. Hipsters in K-Town? Sure, that’s where people are moving thanks to the lower rent rates, lively living and plenty of food. Yes, Roy Choi will be involved in the food. (Hotelchatter.com – The Line)
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 What was once a normal Korean American girl named Jennifer Lee was transformed by a primordial soup of  an upper-middle-class Torrance, Calif. upbringing, classical piano, R&B, hip-hop and Japanese anime into TokiMonsta, a wildly eclectic contemporary composer with a growing global following. Tapped by Ryuichi Sakamoto a couple of weeks ago to collaborate on his “Odakias” anti-nuclear project earlier this month along with Japanese avant-garde musician Otomo Yoshihide and rapper Shing02, Tokimonsta is blowin’ up!   [youtube]zCnmmrYIXrw[/youtube]   Yeah, “eclectic:” a truly overused term. But TokiMonsta owns it. Her sound has been described as “vast textural soundscapes by utilizing live instruments, percussion, digital manipulation, and dusty vinyl. ” Okay   [youtube]-i5jP5DwrRw[/youtube]   “I just like everything. I get bored easily, so having options, like, I can’t make this beat. You know what? On my Google Readers– on the bookmarks– I have pop culture blogs, I have fashion blogs, I have art blogs, I have advertising blogs because I think advertising is also really captivating– the mentality–’Wow! How did they think of that? That’s really clever.’” Get a taste of TokiMonsta’s Sa Mo Jung (2011) To this point in the arc of TokiMonsta, Christine Kakaire’s “monsta” 2,000-word essay-interview with Jennifer Lee is perhaps the mos in-depth verbiage on Tokimonsta evar inked. Or, maybe, the best inside look into  Tokimonsta was the Dumbfounded-DJ Zo TokiMonsta podcast of September 2011 on knocksteady.com. Too bad: only a few telltale traces of it remain.   [youtube]sn4kVtuEmMU[/youtube]      
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An amazing photo. The background of the guys on the roof says a lot. Here’s a thoughful essay by Elaine Woo about her own article two decades ago. If you lived in LA, you can sympathize and understand. “Other non-Korean Asian Americans I spoke to back then felt the same confusion. Solidarity? Not when people who looked like us were getting shot or doing the shooting, we thought, with more than a little shame. “Asian American — who generated this term?” a Japanese American friend mused the other day. “We have nothing in common but appearance.”” (LA Times – Elaine Woo)
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Update on school shooting. According to ibitimes: 3. The school is geared toward Korean Americans: Though Oikos is an equal-opportunity institution of higher learning, students there are predominantly of Korean descent. The Korean American community has a strong vein of Christianity running through it, and Oikos is one of the proud outgrowths of the large Korean American Christian base in the Bay Area.
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