I had an epiphany about color vs. black and white while watch­ing Burn Notice. If you don’t know about the show, you should check it out. It’s like this decades A-Team/Remington Steele. A spy dis­avowed by his agency helps a new needy “client” each week. It’s mind­less TV fun at its best. Action and explo­sions with nary an indi­vid­ual get­ting hurt. But I digress. I’ve read all of these books about how some peo­ple pre­fer black and white over color because black and white has more inter­est­ing con­trast, shad­ing, and grayscale gra­di­ents. These books talked about how film­mak­ers of the past would use red lights and yel­low lights to cre­ate dif­fer­ent shades of gray on film. If you saw the scene lit in real life, it would look like a bad acid trip. But because all those col­ored lights turned to shades of gray on film, it just cre­ated an inter­est­ing play of con­trast and grayscale. As a film­maker that grew up in a world of color tv, where I Love Lucy reruns were annoy­ing because they didn’t have color, I’ve always felt too young to really appre­ci­ate black and white. And if I had the choice, I would have always cho­sen color. I mean, why would you choose mono audio over stereo? Strangely, I’ve always appre­ci­ated black and white pho­tog­ra­phy but hav­ing never seen the same pho­to­graph in color and B&W side by side, I’ve never had a true under­stand­ing of the differences.

But then while watch­ing the sea­son 4 episode of Burn Notice “Made Men”, a fade from color to B&W hit me like a ton of bricks and I finally get what peo­ple say about B&W. See, all the read­ing that I had done was too cere­bral. They were all just wordy expla­na­tions using high falutin art words. But what I saw on TV just got to me on an intu­itive level.

Burn Notice — Sea­son 4 Made Men — Color

Burn Notice — Sea­son 4 Made Men — B&W

To me, the color pic­ture has so much detail that your eye doesn’t pick out shapes. Your eye is draw more to col­ors and indi­vid­ual items as opposed to see­ing the com­po­si­tion as a whole. The best exam­ple of this is the big red siren on the cop car in the fore­ground. In the color pic­ture, you have white and red against a brown­ish gray street. The red pops out and draws your focus to the car. In the B&W ver­sion, the gray of the siren almost matches the street and it draws less atten­tion. Your eye is able to focus on the true sub­ject which are the four char­ac­ters in sil­hou­ette. In the B&W pic­ture, the car at the bot­tom, the white water at the top, and the dark under exposed side of the street on the right of the pic­ture cre­ate a frame for our sub­jects. All of these work together to draw your eye to the sil­hou­ettes and make a much more inter­est­ing com­po­si­tion. Even the sil­hou­ettes pop out more in B&W because they are a pure black against at lighter background. In the color ver­sion, the legs of the woman and the white shirt of the guy to the right of her get a lit­tle lost against the brown­ish gray street. This is prob­a­bly what all the experts mean when they talk about bet­ter con­trast in B&W. Overall, B&W made for a stronger and more dis­tinct com­po­si­tion. And there in a nut­shell is my epiphany on B&W.

There’s a debate rag­ing through­out the Los Ange­les food crowd. No not which Kogi truck is the best but who makes the best Red Vel­vet cup­cake? The trendy choice is Sprin­kles in Bev­erly Hills. But that’s so unin­spired. True cup­cake afi­ciona­dos say that the over rated Sprin­kles is for the unin­formed masses who just like to fol­low trends. They wait hours in line like lem­mings for a $4 cup­cake com­pletely unaware there are other places in LA that make Red Vel­vet so much bet­ter. …really now? I’m not a lem­ming and I’m going to have to decide for myself. So this past week­end, I decided do an in depth taste test and try all three cup­cakes back to back to back. Still on a sugar high, I’m writ­ing to report back to you all that Sprin­kles indeed does not make the best Red Vel­vet cupcake.

Red Vel­vet became pop­u­lar dur­ing World War II when there was a sugar short­age. Sugar was being reserved for our troops and inven­tive bak­ers look­ing for an alter­na­tive sweet­ener for their choco­late cakes stum­bled upon an old south­ern recipe called The Choco­late Cake of the South that used beets for sweet­en­ing. An unin­ten­tional side effect was that the cakes turned red. Nowa­days, the beets have been removed and replaced with red food col­or­ing. Also, the sugar and cocoa pow­der has returned for a more tra­di­tional choco­late cake.  Renamed Red Vel­vet, the south­ern recipe has become so pop­u­lar that even Jes­sica Simp­son had it as her wed­ding cake. But we all know how that mar­riage turned out.

Bas­tard stepchild of real cake and cousin to the muf­fin, cup­cakes in my opin­ion are the ideal size. When done right, you get the right ratio of moist cake mid­dle, firm cupcake-top, and frost­ing in each bite. And there in a nut­shell was my judg­ing cri­te­rion. In addi­tion to look­ing for a great cream cheese frost­ing, I had every­thing I needed to get all Iron Chef on the fol­low­ing three bak­eries: Sprin­kles, Dots, and Aun­tie Em’s Kitchen.

Sprin­kles $3.25

Sprin­kles Red Velvet

Now, I’ve never actu­ally been to Sprin­kles. Two hours seems like a long wait for a cup­cake. For­tu­nately, I have a friend that works there. She brings over dozens of cup­cakes for free when­ever I have a house party. But in an attempt to get the whole expe­ri­ence, I decided to go and brave the line just like every­one else. The wait was about 45 min­utes and every­one in line was friendly. There was a good mix of reg­u­lars and tourists tak­ing pic­tures, “Look Ma! I went to Sprin­kle!” Now even though I didn’t think Sprin­kles had the best cup­cake, what they did get right was their frost­ing to cake ratio. The other two cup­cake pur­vey­ors either had way too much frost­ing or way too lit­tle. But although they had just the right amount of frost­ing, it was by far the sweet­est of the three and in my opin­ion way too sweet. Sprin­kles also uses a lot of pow­dered sugar which ends up giv­ing the frost­ing a gran­u­lar mouth feel. But my biggest quib­ble is that their frost­ing doesn’t have the nice tang that I look for in a cream cheese frost­ing. I also had a minor gripe about the cake itself because it was a lit­tle doughy. But this wasn’t that notice­able when eaten with the frosting.

Dots $2.75

Dots Red Velvet

Dots runs their busi­ness out of a small lit­tle store in Pasadena and had almost sold out for the day. Although still damn good, Dots was unfor­tu­nately the worst of the three. The cake was way too doughy and their ane­mic amount of frost­ing was not able to hide it. As for their frost­ing, it was too sweet and not cream cheesy enough for my taste.  But even though not my favorite, they can’t be doing that bad because they opened up a new loca­tion in Old Town Pasadena.

And the win­ner is:

Aun­tie Em’s Kitchen $3.50

Aun­tie Em’s Red Velvet

Although Aun­tie Em’s had way too much frost­ing on their cake, the tart­ness was refresh­ing. The cake was moist and sup­ple and by far the best. It had a nice springy tex­ture that popped back up after tak­ing a bite. And if you didn’t force your­self to fin­ish all the frost­ing, you had the per­fect Red Vel­vet cup­cake. They were also the only one to get inven­tive by adding a touch of coconut sprin­kles around the edge. Aun­tie Em’s has the feel of a casual neigh­bor­hood restau­rant and I ended up eat­ing brunch there. They have free help your­self, all-you-can-drink cof­fee and a great selec­tion of omelets. You can’t go wrong with this place and of the three, this is prob­a­bly the only place that I will go back to.

So there you go. Try them for your­selves and let me know what you think.

Kogi BBQ

Yes you read my title right, Kogi BBQ stole their Korean taco idea from me. Really! It was a cold Fri­day night and I had just fin­ished K-clubbing at Vel­vet Room. My party found its way over to El Tau­rino on the south­ern bor­der of Kore­atown. The late night line was extra long with the usual mix­ture of drunk Kore­ans and Mex­i­can cow­boys, and I found myself talk­ing to the guy behind me. He intro­duced him­self as Mark and we started talk­ing about the menu. “No, I’ve never had the brain taco”, I told him. Then in a moment of bril­liance, I pro­claimed, “But what I could REALLY go for is a Kalbi taco …with like Kim Chi.” BAM and there you have it.

No, not really. Mark Manguera founder of Kogi BBQ didn’t steal the idea from me, but I’m pretty sure a scene like this has played out hun­dreds of times over at El Tau­rino. You get a bunch of drunk Kore­ans eat­ing tacos on a nightly basis and it was inevitable for one entre­pre­neur­ial chef to put 2 and 2 together. In fact, this seems to be the story that Kogi alludes to on their web­site:

…Kogi may never have become more than a ran­dom idea after a late night out on the town.

El Tau­rino or Kogi? Can you tell the difference?

After all, the Los Ange­les Kore­atown has the largest pop­u­la­tion of Kore­ans out­side of Seoul. Seoul! That’s more Kore­ans than any other city in Korea except Seoul. So as Kore­atown expands, it was inevitable for Kore­ans to start infring­ing on other eth­nic neigh­bor­hoods. There’s cur­rently some increased ten­sion in Lit­tle Tokyo where the num­ber of Korean owned busi­nesses and res­i­dents are start­ing to rival the num­ber of Japan­ese. For­tu­nately, Kore­ans and their His­panic neigh­bors to the south of K-town have found a way to har­mo­niously coex­ist.  On any given night, it is pos­si­ble to find a 50/50 mix of Kore­ans and Mex­i­cans stand­ing in line at El Tau­rino and a hand­ful of Mex­i­cans shop­ping at Korean gro­cery stores. Kogi BBQ is the inevitable child of this  cul­tural inter­min­gling. But inevitabil­ity aside, the inter­est­ing cul­tural mash-up that is the Korean taco is not wholly orig­i­nal. After all, Nobu Mat­suhisa made his name by mix­ing Japan­ese tech­niques with South Amer­i­can ingre­di­ents. But lets not take any­thing away from Mark. It took a true entre­pre­neur to do what he’s done because even a great idea is noth­ing with­out the right vehi­cle; and his vehi­cle of choice was a taco truck.

The Lord of the Rings loves Kogi

On another note, Kogi BBQ is the next in a line of food crazes fol­low­ing Pinkberry and Sprin­kles to hit Los Ange­les. Remem­ber them? Two hour waits for a $4 cup­cake? It’s as if LA has an addic­tion to wait­ing inor­di­nate amounts of time in line for good, but not great, food. As if track­ing down a taco truck and wait­ing an hour in a park­ing lot before the truck even arrives cements their sta­tus as true food­ies and ver­i­fies their devo­tion to great cui­sine. As if such an act was on par with trav­el­ing halfway around the world for the per­fect cup of joe or going to Paris for a baguette. I think the Kogi craze just proves  LA’s lemming-like devo­tion to trends. Hell, if movie stars are going then it must be good. I mean, THEY really CAN go to Paris for bread. Add on top of our desire for foodie sta­tus our obses­sion with star stalk­ing and how can Kogi not be a win­ner. We order over-priced drinks at the bars of celebrity restau­rants we can’t afford to eat at on a weekly basis hop­ing to be there on the same night that Paris Hilton shows up drunk. Why? So that we can say we’re liv­ing the Hol­ly­wood dream. “What did you do last night?” “Oh, I went to the same restau­rant as Paris Hilton.” Well with $2 tacos, Kogi makes that din­ing expe­ri­ence acces­si­ble to the masses. I have to admit, I got caught up in the hype. I was curi­ous what I was miss­ing out on. I mean seri­ously, a 600 per­son line for tacos? It can’t be that good.

My Kogi cherry got popped when I spot­ted the truck in Sil­ver Lake. Just by luck, I was dri­ving when I spot­ted a hip­ster crowd con­gre­gat­ing in a park­ing lot. Notic­ing a yet to be opened taco truck, I knew what I had for­tu­itously stum­bled upon. With only about 20 hip­sters in line, I knew I couldn’t pass this up. Skinny jeans, fedo­ras, scarves, and Amer­i­can Apparel were all in atten­dance. The talk of the line was micro-blogging and it seemed like every­one had their cam­eras out, myself included. I ended up wait­ing in line for roughly 30 mins, which now after try­ing them is the max that I’d be will­ing to wait.  But before I had left, the line had dou­bled. As I got to the front of the line, I looked up into the truck to see if I could rec­og­nize any of the taco magi­cians from their press blitz. Roy? Roy? There were four peo­ple cramped into the rolling sar­dine can. The guy tak­ing the orders was Korean but not Roy. The rest were …Mexican?

Some things stay the same.

I guess some things stay the same. Either way, I was not deterred. I ordered 1 Tofu, 1 Kalbi, and 1 Spicy Pork taco. After hav­ing my name called, I found a spot behind the truck to gob­ble down my treats. I put on my Iron Chef face and took my first bite. To my dis­ap­point­ment, my kalbi and spicy pork meat were over­cooked. After fin­ish­ing my order, I came to this sad con­clu­sion …they all tasted the same. If I took a blind taste test, the only one I could pick out would be the tofu because of the tex­ture. Over­all, on a scale of 1–5, I would give it a 3. If I had a taco crav­ing, this wouldn’t sat­isfy it. If I had a kalbi crav­ing, this wouldn’t sat­isfy it either. It’s some­thing all its own. I guess the real judg­ment is that, yes, I would eat it again. I wouldn’t drive across Los Ange­les for it like Father’s Office, but if I was drunk and they were parked out­side a club, it’d be worth wait­ing in line for 30 minutes.

So if the tacos weren’t that great, then who are the real stars? I’d have to say Twit­ter, the inter­net, blog­ging, and those damn Asians with their damn cam­eras.  That’s an even more annoy­ing trend that I’ve noticed hap­pen­ing around Los Ange­les — Asians show­ing up at five star restau­rants and whip­ping their cam­eras out to take pic­tures of their food. Talk about rein­forc­ing a stereo­type. Sadly, I’m one of these Asians. I was at the Gor­don Ram­say restau­rant last month and was unabashedly orga­niz­ing a pho­to­shoot with my salt and pep­per shaker when i noticed I wasn’t the only one. There were three other tables doing the same thing! Flash. Flash. Flash. The reg­u­lars must think we’re crazy …or never get out. “These Asians. They’re not used to see­ing food with­out dog in it.” Any­way, this whole Kogi craze wouldn’t be pos­si­ble with­out our obses­sion with cam­era phones, an addic­tion to post­ing all of our pho­tos on Face­book, and the on-demand updates that Twit­ter makes possible.

I can’t say that I was dis­ap­pointed. Over­all, I got what I expected. Pinkberry was good but not 2 hours in line good.  It’s the same with Kogi. If you’re up for some­thing unique and if the line is not too long or you don’t have to drive around like you’re look­ing for a secret rave, Kogi is worth the $2. I guess I went look­ing for an epiphany and I shouldn’t have. A new way to expe­ri­ence Korean food, a rab­bit hole through which I once entered, I would never return. But what I got instead was a slightly salty per­spec­tive on the chang­ing cul­tural demo­graph­ics of Los Ange­les. But take this from me, if you don’t want to brave the lines, give it some time. I’m sure it’s just a mat­ter of time before the idea is copied across Kore­atown and you’ll be able to order kalbi tacos every­where. Because after all, that’s what we Asians do best, copy a good idea. But if you want to do what Los Ange­leans do best, suf­fer through a line so that you can say you were one of the orig­i­nal devo­tees, go here.

There’s a new trend: Broad­cast my life! I am so interesting!

Now that every­one has the abil­ity to, every­one feels the need  …no, the oblig­a­tion to tell the world about every lit­tle thought they have and every bowel move­ment they make. No seri­ously, search for poo or bath­room on twit­ter, you’d be sur­prised. As I was telling my online neme­sis @violetmae (who by the way doesn’t know is my neme­sis yet), I don’t think there is enough inter­est­ing content/people to sup­port a site like Twit­ter for much longer. And now, with the main­stream­ing of Twit­ter, it will be over­loaded with com­plete drib­ble. Every­one from McCain, who doesn’t know how to email, to your mom (…lit­er­ally, your mom. I’m not try­ing to insult you) will be tweet­ing. It’s going to be a com­plete clusterf##k. Imag­ine if you got everybody’s Face­book sta­tus update in your news­feed. That’s going to be Twit­ter. It’d be the same as Youtube tak­ing over DirecTV …but worse! It’s 24/7 lol­cats, old man rants, and fat peo­ple dancing!

Then the next step in the Twit­ter move­ment would have to be a Hulu equiv­a­lent, a more focused site that only has qual­ity con­tent on it. But we already got that; that’s fmylife. But now fmylife has got­ten so pop­u­lar, it has con­se­quently gone to crap. Every­one with a key­board thinks they’re funny and they’ve started gam­ing fmylife with fake posts, fake posts that aren’t even good! I tried to show my friend fmylife the other day and told him how funny it was. We went through two pages before we found some­thing even mildly amus­ing. I was embar­rased. Worse thing was, the post was obvi­ously a fake. You’d need a whole cot­tage indus­try just to shift through the mess and aggre­gate what was worth­while. And the sad truth would be, most of it wouldn’t be worth my pre­cious time. Money, friends, online accounts …my time is the only thing I can’t make more of.

Here’s an even sad­der truth: If you’re bor­ing in real life, you’re prob­a­bly more so on Twit­ter. If you’re an idiot in real life and have idi­otic thoughts, Face­book sta­tus and Twit­ter just makes it eas­ier for the rest of the world to real­ize this …which I guess in it of itself isn’t a bad thing. Then I can weed the idiots out of my life a lot faster. It use to take a while to fig­ure out if a girl was a snotty clingy psy­cho. Now I can just look at her sta­tus his­tory and I’ll know in moments she’s psy­cho when she has post like, “What is love? Will I ever know it? Why are all the guys I date 8554o735?” or “I was out­side his apart­ment again last­night. He says she’s his sis­ter but I know he’s lying.”

But despite hav­ing it’s upshots, like the exam­ple men­tioned above, as well as hav­ing a few inno­v­a­tive and pro­duc­tive ways to use Twit­ter, most won’t know how to use it prop­erly and they will unfor­tu­nately over­whelm those who do. The mes­sages of busi­nesses like Dell and Kogi BBQ will only be a whis­per on the Twit­ter­scape drowned out by the noise of the illit­er­ate masses vying for our atten­tion. In fact, it would serve a busi­ness like Kogi bet­ter to have an API on their web­site that updated their cur­rent loca­tion than risk get­ting lost in #Kogi hell on Twit­ter with a bunch of crap reviews and unin­tended com­ments. Actu­ally, they should already be doing that right now. For proof, just search #sxsw and you’ll get more  “No, I’m not wear­ing green and no, you may not pinch me” than any sub­stan­tial news. And these are sup­pose to be the pros!

To me, the only ray of hope is Face­book. The new Face­book UI is meant to be more like Twit­ter, and that’s smart. Because a site ded­i­cated to tweet­ing alone isn’t inter­est­ing enough to keep my atten­tion. Look at Friend­ster, it was about degrees of seper­a­tion. If it just stayed as that, no one would go there any­more. It had to evolve and that’s what Face­book is doing with its new fron­tend.  And as soon as Face­book offers the best fea­tures of Twit­ter, there will be no real use to tweet. Not only does Face­book offers so much more fun­tion­al­ity than Twit­ter, Face­book has way too big a lead on users for Twit­ter to make a dent. I already intro­duced peo­ple to Twit­ter by telling them it was like a stream of Face­book sta­tuses, it just makes sense for Face­book to take over the Twit­ter world. Do I sense another buy out attempt? Prob­a­bly not, Twit­ter should have seen this com­ing when Face­book tried to buy them out the first time. Either way, it is Facebook’s will­ing­ness to evolve and it’s abil­ity to stay on the fore­front of trends that will keep Face­book at the top of our browser history. A rev­o­lu­tion is at hand, one that started with the Guten­berg Press and that is now cul­mi­nat­ing with sites like Twitter.  Mass pub­lish­ing has been brought to the masses and just like any war, there will be col­lat­eral dam­age. It might serve us all to find a safe place to take cover until the whole thing blows over …oh who am I kid­ding, look to the right of your screen at the blue box and click the icon that says “Follow”.

Gat­taca

Would you genet­i­cally engi­neer your baby? Now you can.

A Los Ange­les fer­til­ity clinic is offer­ing a new ser­vice that would allow cou­ples to choose their baby’s phys­i­cal traits, includ­ing eye and hair color.

This is straight out of Gat­taca and I really believe it’s the future. We have the tech­nol­ogy. We know how. We just need to get over the moral hur­dles we have placed in front of ourselves.

In a recent U.S. sur­vey of 999 peo­ple who sought genetic coun­sel­ing, a major­ity said they sup­ported pre­na­tal genetic tests for the elim­i­na­tion of cer­tain seri­ous dis­eases. The sur­vey found that 56% sup­ported using them to counter blind­ness and 75% for men­tal retardation.

First genetic engi­neer­ing will be used to weed out dis­eases. Then it won’t be long before genetic engi­neer­ing bleeds over to con­trol­ling phys­i­cal traits like eye color and more com­pli­cated things like height. And with just the right com­bi­na­tion I’ll be able to make my son Hapa.