manos sucios

Dirty Hands: the art & crimes of david choe. Many years in the waiting.

Maybe you don't know Dave. It's cool, it's not a hipster thing. I've been staring at his drawings, his paintings, his spray can shenanigans, his gta:sa photos, his toys, his t-shirts, his comix, his pervy pics, his Thumbs Up!, his cooler-than-thou snapshots, his corny haircuts, his video escapades, his unnervingly shoulder-shrugging family, his excellent blog and his food for about 10 years.

My grandmother is cooler than your grandmother, and my uncle has always used a great expression to describe her: "she's an institution." I can't think of higher praise for Dave, or a more phitting frase. The motherfucker is a force of nature. Emotional, high-strung, powerfully talented, bullshitless, sand-line-drawer extraordinaire, self-deprecating (self-defecating), perverted saint brainfucker and at a loss for testicular storage. Motherfucker is running out of space and will probably be renting a garage in LA somewhere to store the better part of his left nut and the fucker's a growing boy.

Maybe you don't know Dave. I didn't think I knew him. Slow Jams remains a truly mesmerizing text that no one gets to read (you ain't gettin my copy motherfucker), lovely and chaotic and grotesque, the kind of comic that doesn't come around too often. If you're crafty you'll catch his other sequential art bits and scraps, here & there, in books only nerds know about but that'll fetch a premium on Amazon for his errant pages. The guy can write and I've always said this. That asshole bouncer that works extra hours in your brain and stops you from writing & saying your most honest & ignorant shit has always been on his take and is not to be trusted. Pure id meringue, baked fresh, deposited in serial-killer lettering, accompanying scrawled vaginas and darkly poignant facial features. Porno for pyromaniacs. His pages want the city the burn.

I don't know Dave. I've met him a few times and all I can do to describe him is say that this perpetual high-school stairwell-dweller is genuinely charming, generous, lovely and grateful. He's a bonafide drug addict except his tangled inner cables never led him to intoxicants like the rest of us suckers; rather than fill himself with chemicals he excretes them boldly, covering the world in evocative dream-imagery, machine gunning cum blasts til the krylon's cashed...then coming back the next day to fill in missed details or draw stick figure orgies in the blank spaces between sneaker treads. I think his output is some of the most rewarding artwork of the past two decades, it draws me in and insults me and inspires.

The film Dirty Hands is done in the dirty style, the Choe style, the whole thing is completely uneven, cut with dull scissors and chock full of tidbits for the fans. I've been waiting for this DVD for years and I will admit right off the bat that I knew it was going to fail my expectations. I don't even know what I wanted from it. Coming off a recent read-through of the hardcover art book he released I found quite a bit of crossover but, on that note, you kinda wish there was more of a scoop in here.

It completely disregards a lot of documentary rules, although it does do its best to stick to some kind of timeline. You get about 10 years of Dave with startlingly enormous holes of time that are never interrogated, a few talking heads (including Dave's dad which is one of the more surprising inclusions), a lot of talk about his girlfriend (is she even still around?), some miniscule lip-service from his contemporaries (I actually love hearing his buddies weigh in on him and would've loved even more of it), but best of all you get an assload of Dave just shooting the EVERLOVIN shit. Dave talks the camera's mic to death and there's nothing to complain about there, Harry just lets him fire off and the attentive fan will find something in there worth the price of admission. If you're anything like me, you've been training your inner voice to sound like him and push you towards your dreams, so it's good to add more audio to the database.

Overall I don't think the movie's great. I can't help it. I set it up for failure years ago when it still didn't come out, and I have no idea what the film could've delivered to conquer that. If you're a fan you'll have seen quite a bit of this footage already but there were definitely snackables that were new to me. I can't for the life of me imagine someone going into this cold, they'd probably come out with a very different experience than I had. I can't watch it that way cuz I know who these krazy korean kids are.

Telling those who know Choe to watch this is like telling a cokehead to cut a fatter line - have faith that they'll take all they can get away with. That being said, Harry DOES deliver the goods, they're past the expiration date but remain just as nutritious.

I know Dave: he's that arty truant who couldn't get laid and collects action figures, right?

now go read Slow Jams already. And if you have Son of Slow Jams I fucking hate you.