The Prince (cool bar in K-town) & Soot Bul Jeep (Korean BBQ)

The Prince
3198 W Seventh Street
Los Angeles, CA 90005
A former British hotel/bar in Korea Town now with Korean owners but never remodeled (thank goodness!). It has the eerie charm of a once posh downtown bar now rundown with all the old furnishings, paintings, and general decor in place.

And if that's not enough to motivate you to drive out to K-town, maybe this will - the Korean bar food (an entire menu of items!). Authentic down to the $20 dried squid, that goes oh so well with drinks. It's hell to pull apart and doesn't look very lady like, lucky for me my husband did the honors while I chomped away, but oh so delicious!

The bar's patrons included hipsters and alcoholics alike. Bottles of Remy Martin line one side of the bar.

The prices are on the high end (a dirty martini is $12), but there's the old/cool factor without being too divey that's enticing, and I have to say again the authentic Korean bar food is da bomb. I'll be back and I'm taking friends with me for bragging rights to having found & experienced a cool, unique bar.

Soot Bul Jeep
3136 W 8th Street
Los Angeles, CA, 90005
We went here after our cocktails, just because it's within walking distance (a block away) from The Prince, but then we realized we had been here before. As soon as we sat down, we remembered why we never came back.

They use real wood for charcoal which can be very nice, but here it's extremely hot and dangerous as a result of cheap grills and poor protection. The whole trying to avoid 3rd degree burns while grilling your chicken isn't any fun. The grill is so hot in fact that if you leave your meat on one side for a tad too long it turns black. I couldn't help thinking of all the carcinogens we were eating. Another downside is they skimp on the number and variety of the side dishes.

After dinner, you come out feeling barbequed yourself and in need of a shower to get the smell out of your hair.

The food was cheap (our bar tab was more than our dinner), but the food just isn't that good and the experience is terrible.

When I declared it was the last time I'd eat here my husband responded, "Honey, last time was our last time. We just didn't realize it was the same place."

Hedwig and the Angry Inch in Korea

I've always loved Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the music video-esque movie about a transsexual punk/glam rock girl from East Berlin who tours the US with her rock band as she tells her life story and follows the ex-boyfriend/bandmate who stole her songs. Great songs & makeup & costumes, endearing German accent, East Berlin setting, boy who loves boy who meets girl...you get the gist.

But I think I love it even more now that I saw this post on Margaret Cho's blog with a photo of her good friend John Cameron Mitchell, who went to Korea and performed for thousands of Hedwig fans wearing a traditional Korean braided wig and Hambok (traditional Korean dress)! What a sweet gesture to connect with the audience!
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Which reminds me - back on July 15th I went to KCRW's World Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. I went to see Groove Armada, but the headliner was Café Tacuba. I'd never heard a single song of theirs, but I knew they were an eclectic band from Mexico obviously endorsed by Nic Harcourt, the host of KCRW - so they couldn't be all that bad right?

I stuck around even after the crazy knitted half mask/half skull caps came out that looked like a cross between a Mexican wrestler mask and a rooster (with the crest on top). Hey I didn't get it but seeing the father of 3 wearing it made me smile and I went with it, hoping that I'd experience something new and interesting that night that I'd never been exposed to before.

Then the lead singer took the mike and started speaking to the audience. He said a lot before and after each song but it was all in Spanish. Someone behind us shouted, "We need subtitles!" After a few songs and realizing that the guy was not going to even attempt a single English phrase - there was a mass exodus of people.

Really a shame since there were so many people in the audience being exposed to the band for the first time, and if he had at least said something like "Hello Los Angeles!" (come on how hard can that be?) many people would have felt like it was a nice gesture to connect with those who didn't speak Spanish. But he continued to only connect with the Spanish speakers and alienated all others.
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I'll never go and see Cafe Tacuba again, but seeing a photo of Hedwig in Korea wearing a traditional Korean getup makes me wish that I was there in the audience watching the musical live. It's a small gesture but it goes a long way.

Margaret Cho speaks out about the Virginia Tech tragedy

So much is being made of the "race" factor in the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech University on April 16, 2007, where a Korean American shooter killed 32 people and injured 29 more before committing suicide, making it the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Since I am of Korean origin, (my mother is Korean and my father is American/Caucasian) it's even been the topic of conversation in my own home. The day of the shootings I came home and had a conversation with my husband that started out like this:

Husband: Did you hear the shooter is Korean?
Me: Yes, I know.
Husband: What did you think when you found out?
Me: It surprised me to hear that he was Korean. Usually when someone goes postal it's turns out to be a white guy.

I found myself getting a bit defensive, but then I thought this is ridiculous that I'm somehow associated or linked to this guy (who clearly had psychological problems) just because we're of the same race. I'm white too, but no one asks how I feel when someone who's Caucasian does something crazy. It made me uncomfortable to be put in the position that I somehow had to defend the entire Korean race because of one bad apple.

In discussing this further we realized that regardless of race, when we're talking about the shootings at VT, or Columbine, or people showing up at work with a gun and going postal, we're missing the point when we try to narrow it down to race, because the shooters were Americans.

Margaret Cho is a Korean American stand up comedian, who I've loved since she did the University circuit back in 1991, (before she got famous and got her HBO special and sitcom) and did a free show at my school (University of California, Irvine). The whole audience was with her and understood her unique style humor, and afterwards my face hurt from laughing so hard.

Margaret Cho spoke out on her blog about the race issue, in a post titled, "Our Humanity." (See below.)

"Whenever anything really bad happens around Korean people, that is when I would like to hide, go to Hawaii and eat spam sushi until it blows over. I don’t want to comment on it because I don't want to escalate the situation and I don't want to implicate myself in it. I don't want to 'come out' as Asian because therein lies a tremendous responsibility that I never volunteered for, that I don't have any real control over, and that is as mysterious to me as it is to someone who isn't Asian.

So here is the whole terrible mess of the shootings at Virginia Tech. I look at the shooter's expressionless face on the news and he looks so familiar, like he could be in my family. Just another one of us. But how can he be us when what he has done is so terrible? Here is where I can really envy white people because when white people do something that is inexplicably awful, so brutally and horribly wrong, nobody says – “do you think it is because he is white?” There are no headlines calling him the “White shooter." There is no mention of race because there is no thought in anyone's mind that his race had anything to do with his crime.

So much attention is focused on the Asian-ness of the shooter, how the Korean community is reacting to it, South Korea's careful condolences and cautiously expressed fear that it will somehow impact the South Korean population at large.

What is lost here is the grief. What is lost is the great, looming sadness that we should all feel over this. We lose our humanity to racism, time and time again.

I extend my deepest sympathies to all those who lost their loved ones, their children, their friends and family, in this unimaginable tragedy. I send them all the love I have in me, and I encourage everyone to do the same."

Very well said.

To view Margaret Cho's blog go to:
http://www.margaretcho.com/blog