Dirty Hands

Ten years ago, I was working as an editorial assistant at a magazine in New York City. One day, my phone rang and it was a guy saying I had a delivery waiting for me at the messenger service. This was unusual, as I was still so low on the rung that nobody ever sent me anything. So I walked down the hall and just as I approached their counter, I saw this Asian guy with spiky, bleached-blonde hair in a worn Mickey Mouse ringer-tee, cut-off pants with a chain wallet and a pair of gnarly black Converses. I knew he couldn't be standing there for anybody else in that office except me. So when he asked me if I was who I was and told me, "I'm Dave, Eric from Giant Robot sent me," I knew it would still be awhile before I'd receive my first official messenger-service package. Dave and I were natural friends. It was summer and we hung out all night getting mosquito bites in Central Park, blabbing about Van Gogh, Dawson's Creek and The Outsiders. At the time, I was in my pre-Lost In Translation "every girl goes through a photography phase" phase and was always taking pictures of my best friends. We only knew each other for a few hours at this point, but this one here is the first photo I ever shot of Dave, somewhere near a diner on the Upper East Side.

Harry Kim started filming the Dirty Hands: The Art and Life of David Choe documentary a couple years after we met, and has created a cinematic collage of the crazy situations that Dave's gotten himself into since then -- from his first art exhibition at the Double Rainbow on Melrose, to dinosaur hunting in the Congo and selling out a $2.5 million gallery show in London a few months ago. As genius of a raconteur as he is, a lot of Dave's stories are hard to believe (i.e. jungle pygmies), but when you see them actualized on screen in this movie, it makes them that much more awesome. The movie is still at the L.A. Film Fest, but will soon go to Munich. If you can't catch either, definitely check out the trailer or Harry's short Whales and Orgies.


Here we are at the premiere over the weekend, all grown up: from right, Eric, Dave, me, and artist James Jean, whom I just met and does that line of Prada bags.