Coney Island Baby

So if anyone knows anything about the artist Dain, please comment. That's another of his pieces. I just read that he is a graffiti artist from Coney Island, who was apparently making the scene more in the '80s. I suppose using images of Bruce Lee is somewhat generic, but I'm more into the fact that he's from Coney Island, home turf of the Warriors, the World Championship Hot Dog eating contest, and that fake palm tree shower.

Blackberry photography

A street artist named Dain has been pasting up doctored pictures of dead Hollywood actresses around New York City. I caught this image in Soho a few nights ago, right after I walked passed a trucker-hat-wearing Benicio del Toro chilling in front of the Mercer Hotel. Anyway, I don't know much about Dain, aside from that he showed at Espeis Outside in Williamsburg recently and that he seems to have a slight Andy Warhol complex, but I like that he's down with Anna May Wong.



Here's some 3-D art I saw while biking around Red Hook the other day. (I used to despise going to Ikea, but now that they have the free water taxi, it's up there in my top 10. Sorta like how I used to hate the idea of owning a Blackberry.)

And here are a couple more cool things I've seen over the summer, one just near my house, the other in SF, respectively.

Some people think they've seen birds before...



...while others think they've seen hairy dogs.

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.

Bicycle Film Fest 2008

The BFF starts tonight in NYC. Seems like they've added a bunch of cities this year, plus tomorrow is their first annual Bicycle Beauty Pageant, which will run during the street party, 1-7 pm on 2nd street and 2nd Ave.

Cornholio aka the Almighty Bungholio

Last year, when I was in a more scientific state of mind, I blogged about fighting global warming and the importance of being an earnest biker. These days -- months upon months really, I've been smeared by a sh#t-storm of work, and haven't had the time to contemplate, much less post coherent sentences about what's currently at stake in the world. But speaking of inclement weather, how about these gaddam rising food prices, and what United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon describes as the impending "widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale"?



I am fully aware that my grasp of global economic/socio-political affairs is weak at best, but hasn't the scientific community already firmly established that corn-based ethanol is, quite frankly, BS? (Apparently in early studies, somebody did the math wrong, and the correct numbers say that corn ethanol not only fails to produce less carbon emissions than regular old fuel, but actually doubles it over the course of 30 years. And on top of that, the giant amounts of corn we're now producing (by government mandate) offsets land for other foodstuffs, like soy, resulting in the jacked up prices, the catastrophic success suggested by Mr. Moon, and clearing of the Amazon rainforest as well.

Anyway, the whole changing legislation stuff is also a bit over my head, so I'll leave that to those who do have their act together. For me, it all goes back to riding our bikes. It's fun. It's spring. And maybe cook yourself a nice dinner tonight with fare purchased from your local farmer's market. Or walk somewhere, like the library. Simple stuff.

You can view more info graphics here at the BBC. The NY Times recently did a big series on rising food costs as well. And if you're really motivated, check out David Tilman's research on cellulosic ethanol and prairie grass.

4:20

It's 4:20 on 4/20.

So Yong Kim

I also like this woman. We met a couple months ago for an interview that just came out in Paper Mag's "Beautiful People" issue. At the time, So was working 14-15 hour days, editing a rough cut of her latest feature, and still managed to take the time to talk. I was asking her about her instinct for benevolence, and she explained her capacity to give as possibly more a function of Asian mother-inspired efficiency. We're talking about a person who produced a feature film over the course of two years for 40 or 50 grand. In Iceland. All-inclusive. On some level, she should really be running for office:

"Maybe (it was) the way my grandma raised us. She just knew how to stretch a bowl of rice to feed, like, 20 people. Also, my mother was very, very frugal when we were growing up. And in art school, you learn how to make things out of nothing. I went to the post office; they have those overnight packages. If you flip it inside out, it’s made out of this special material, it’s half cloth. I collected those for six months so I could use it for the performance piece I was doing because I didn’t have money to buy fabric. It made perfect sense to me: it’s free, our tax money pays for that stuff. There are ways to stretch things if you have little."

If you're interested, I also profiled Riley Keough, aka Elvis' granddaughter, and Julia Rothman, a cool girl who designs patterns in Brooklyn, in the same issue.