Daniel Kim

It’s been a tough few weeks personally and as I wrestled with how to get myself up and running again I fell back to that which has always comforted me: cars.

I saw that local BMW specialist Garagistic was having a meet at their shop where they’d be displaying two of Rome Charpentier’s Formula Drift cars and have him available for a meet and greet for his fans.

It was a decent turnout with about 20-30 BMWs, mostly E30s which Garagistic specializes in. Perfect weather on a clear Southern California afternoon graced all the BMW enthusiasts in the cul-de-sac of an industrial street in the city of Westminster – home of the Vietnamese coffee shop and the best pho in America.

I started in the shop, took note of its cleanliness, and had a random conversation with a nice kid over a gutted, caged and 700+hp LS1-motor swapped and supercharged E30 sitting beneath a green and gold Mercedes E190 on a lift. The nuts and bolts of the convo was – modding cars is an expensive hobby. Yup.

Next I went outside the shop to find Rome talking about his FD car with some dudes outside. He explained that in a drift-spec car you don’t want a really stiff strut tower brace because in case of a big dust up the opposite sides of the chassis might get skewed in equal amounts. I’m not sure if that would mean the chassis is headed for the junkyard or if it just makes it harder to twist and yank back into place, but either way, no bueno.

He was also talking about absolutely needing to rock a cooling suit during certain events on the Formula Drift calendar as the cabin temps can get ridiculous during the summer. I kinda just wanted to wear one to look cool – no pun intended.

After that I just kinda wandered around trying to find some nicely composed shots but don’t think I got any money shots today. I was playing around shooting with a high f-stop, like F16, but I learned later that although you get more of the shot in focus, you can lose sharpness if you go to high. So lotta the images didn’t turn out crispy.

Big ups to Garagistic for inviting a buncha car nuts over to the crib on a weekend morning and for Rome Charpentier and his team for letting us get up close and personal with his Formula Drift E36 cars.

This post was originally just going to be me blabbering about how I practiced low-light photography at the OriginKazoku grand opening meet this past Saturday. But I felt like a poser covering this event without even actually knowing anything about Origins and OriginKazoku, so I did what any badass journalist does and started Googling some shit. I still don’t actually know what the difference is between Origins and OriginKazoku; their Instagram announced a few weeks ago that a podcast will be out soon that explains some of the history behind the team and their events. Check that out if you wanna learn more, for now my best guess is that OriginKazoku is the brand name used for anything related to car meets as ‘kazoku’ means family. Unless your parents were divorced and your sister shut you out of her life for a decade, then ‘kazoku’ might not bring up images of fun social gatherings in your mind’s eye. 

I think that’s a good place to start actually, me feeling like a poser. Well, that’s just business as usual you might say, carcrazydan. You’d be right, but allow me to make my point here first. There’s something very cool, kind of exclusive feeling about attending an OriginKazoku meet, which threatens my inner poser’s safe haven, deep within my core, probably around my pancreas. I learned that Origins meets started as pop-up gatherings around 2015, with the location remaining a secret until just hours before the actual ‘meet’ itself began. So it’s this not-quite-underground, but sort-of-underground type vibe that surrounds the meets of the Origins ‘family’ that makes you feel like you’re in the middle of the original The Fast and Furious movie, and sets the uncool parts of myself on high alert. My brain: “Hey bro, there are cool dudes and hot chicks here, let’s GTFO! Let’s stay home and watch Jersey Shore reruns in the safety of our room.”

And the man who started it is Chris Calderon, that is if the article I read is correct. A lot of other stuff in this post is based on that article as well so let’s hope the writer wasn’t as lazy as I am and checked his facts. Basically, Chris wanted to start a new car meet in SoCal that was well-organized and didn’t have all the excessive noise and attention that gets meets shut down. And he did a pretty good job.

I’m not sure how big the crowds were when OriginKazoku, just, uh, originated (yea, I planned that joke even before I started the article), but for the past few years they have been drawing lots of pretty cars, and lots of pretty people at their functions. Yes, that means you too. At least one meet that was shut down in Loma Linda in October 2020 got a pretty big write-up in The Sun, which covers San Bernardino County. The article stated that up to 3,000 people were at the event.

Looks like a frog’s eye is looking at you. Italian Ferrari frog says “buon giorno a tutti!”

Besides the article from DTLA Weekly that I linked to earlier, it’s hard to find any interviews or mainstream media coverage of Origins and OriginKazoku, at least through a quick Google search. They promote themselves mostly through social media with Instagram and TikTok but otherwise seem to keep a low profile — like a 30 sidewall tire (Man, that was a really bad car analogy joke). And I assume word of mouth as well because that’s how I learned about them.

I accidentally stumbled upon the Toyo Tires Shutter Space car meet at South Coast Plaza in August of last year after having dinner with my family. At the time I had no idea who was hosting the event. I just saw that there were a lot of people, and overall a very high caliber of exotic and modified imports, with the best examples sitting inside a large garage under professional lighting. I wanted to know who the organizer was so I asked some spectators who simply said “OriginKazoku.” Now to clarify this wasn’t an OriginKazoku meet, but they helped promote it. So I started following OriginKazoku on Instagram knowing that would lead to info on future meets, which hopefully would lead to better stories for my blog, which hopefully would lead to no longer living in my mom’s basement, living off cheesy poofs, and wearing sweatpants the entire day.

Oh yea, low light photography. It’s hard and requires much more patience and effort than shooting hand-held during the daytime. 3 or 4 seconds doesn’t sound like a long time but when you’re trying a shot over and over to get it right those seconds add up. As does constantly readjusting the tripod and having to squat, bend over, or kneel to check the viewfinder and the LCD screen. Hey, no one said building a $100k a month passive income blog was going to be easy, right? Or don’t they all say that it’s going to be easy?

Cue Pavarotti, bust out the primo gabagool, and wind up your favorite re-runs of Jersey Shore cuz the Italian Bike & Car Show at OC Motorcycle in Costa Mesa is going down. Well, I guess it’d be more accurate to say it went down because it was on Saturday (I’m not quite sure how I would throw in those token Italian pop culture references while making that opening sentence past tense).


They promised bikes, cars, music and pizza. Three out of four were delivered on – maybe the DJ was hungover. All jokes aside mad props to OC Motorcycle for hosting the event and keeping everyone fueled up on greasy carbs, soda, and cookies.

Sexy Italian machinery flowed in steadily to the parking lot on this beautiful spring day in South Orange County. The meatballs were well represented with good turnouts from local owners of Aprilia, MV Agusta, Moto Guzzi, and Ducati motorcycles. Some cute scooters showed up as well.

As I was making the early rounds I spotted a girl sitting on a BMW S1000RR, casually munching on a slice of sausage pizza. I found out she is an up-and-coming social media content creator, whose accounts really capture the passion she has for her bike and for doing all things two wheels.

Later I did a quick interview with Jose Gallina who rolled up on a MV Agusta Brutale 1000RS. I picked him randomly but he turned out to be the marketing coordinator for MV Agusta North America. Who better qualified then than him to give me the official scoop on the Brutale 1000RS?

“I’ve ridden pretty much every MV Agusta from ’99 to now,” said Jose. He explained that the Brutale RS was developed after the Brutale RR, one of the main differences being that the RS offers a “true upright riding position.” “And it’s just the best bike,” Jose continued. “It’s better than the old original naked Brutales were.” After snapping some shots of Jose’s ride I continued to make my rounds, doing my best to capture the essence of the meet to share with my handsome, beautiful, dashing readers.

The pizza was now gone but cookies were available. That was a thoughtful touch by OC Motorcycle to follow-up their free lunch with dessert. By the time the little round wheels of guilt and remorse make their way out to the folding table the event begins to die down and I decide to call it a day as well. I’ve made a promise to myself not to buy a bike because I know I won’t ride it enough to justify the payments, but after being surrounded by voluptuous Italian hot mammas all afternoon I can’t help but daydream about how sexy I would look on a Brutale Dragster. Yea, dude.

This idea of our first love is so often romanticized in Western culture. There is something supposedly innocent and pure about our initial encounter with the deep emotions that we feel when falling for someone — emotions that cannot be explained in words but that we must experience for ourselves.

Some may laugh or scoff when I say that I have felt these emotions not for a human being but a hunk of metal, manufactured on an assembly line somewhere in Japan. I’m sure many of you reading this know exactly what I mean if you were a youth in the 90s. It was a particular type of car that I first gave my heart — and paychecks — to. It was import cars.

In recent years, without a car to modify, I had largely fallen out of touch with the tuning scene. I had forgotten about my crush, my sweetheart, my “great White Buffalo,” but that love was rekindled during my background research for a recent article I did on the famed Porsche shop, RWB.

Ken Saito of Jalopnik/Automobile and the team over at Speedhunters provide such excellent coverage of car culture in Japan, I realized how much I missed it all as I poured through their work. Their passion, evident in every article, reminded me of my own obsession with Hot Version videos, Option magazines, and the Honda-Tech forums in my teens and twenties.

As I relived the honeymoon of my life as a car nerd, I knew that I needed to reconnect with that part of myself that had sat dormant for too long. And so I eagerly awaited my first major event of 2020: Import-Face Off at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, where I could get back to my roots as a chubby, 2nd-generation Korean-American boy who loved titanium exhausts, Kaila Yu, and salmon sushi.

I’m happy to report that attending brought back lots of the care-free, contended, and feel-good moments of decades past, and provided new avenues for future adventures within the car community.

I’m someone who believes in competition more than just pure show, so I was glad that the event was centered around drag racing. It’s always nice to get outside on a weekend and check out cool cars, but what’s even better is when you get to see them being run, and run hard.

There’s something about being at a track or drag strip, having left all the stresses of home and work behind, and hearing the soundtrack of cars at wide open throttle throughout the day that just makes me feel good. It sounds different when you’re out in an open area with no buildings or other sounds to interfere with that of the exhaust notes carrying cleanly through the air, you hear everything. I guess it’s like being in car heaven for car enthusiasts.

Honda Civics made up a disproportionately large portion of the total competitors, but there were so many other cars on the strip as well that it was hard to get bored. I saw twin-turbo Lamborghini Huracans, an old Toyota Corolla running in the 7s or 8s, and even a Top Fuel dragster that made a 6 second pass. One car that stood out in particular was a lifted Toyota 4Runner. If I recall correctly, he ran somewhere in the high 10s.

I made an effort to take more photos of people, not just cars, at this event. This sort of “slice-of-life” style not only gave me a much more interesting variety of images for this post, but also showed me that this hobby is about more than just “hunks of metal.” Through my lens I saw so many smiling faces, happy families, and old friends reunited. The awards and bragging rights are always nice, but it’s the environment that, in turn, produces the camaraderie that makes these events worth going to.