Claudine Ko

2046: A world without blemishes?

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:55:00 +0000

Way, way back in high school, I sat next to a kid in science class who prophesied that there would be no more ugly people. Natural selection, he announced, would have it so that the weak, stupid and unattractive would be weeded out of the gene pool. And launched today is Modelinia, a website all about, what else, but models -- here to prove that even though there are plenty of non superficially-beautiful people still evolving in the human race, the end for us might be near! ...You think I'm only kidding.

Wherever the truth lies, I, a self-proclaimed intellectual freak with a penchant for despising all things materialistically impractical and low-calorie, thoroughly enjoyed my viewing experience of Modelinia. My prediction? Bye-bye cable TV.

Palais du Tokyo

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:18:00 +0000

Je vien d'arriver en Paris. C'est une ville tres vieux avec beaucoup des choses nouveux a regarder. Comme toujours, je prend des photos.

And we're up

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:17:00 +0000

Three months of "me time" in the Bay Area, and I'm proud to say I have at least one thing to show for: my very first official website. This photo almost made it as the title image, but then an artist friend told me: "No one cares about aesthetics as much as they care about just getting the information." He also said people usually pay for that kind of creative advice, so I figured I should take it while it was free. Plus, he's right.

In the "stories" section, you should be able to read some select pieces from my archives, including classic GR stuff. The problem is, throughout my career, whenever I'd write a story, I was so over it by the time the pages shipped, I never bothered saving a text file for myself. So most of the stuff I've reprinted, I've actually sourced from sites where people actually took the time to transcribe and post them. Got to hand it to the Sam Rockwell and Korean plastic surgery fans. Please check out www.claudineko.com.

The Hills are Alive

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:12:00 +0000

Look closely.

Liu Wei (b. 1972, Beijing)
It Looks Like a Landscape, 2004
Digital black-and-white photograph, 120 in. x 20 ft.

There were two major contemporary Chinese art exhibit openings in the Bay Area this fall: one at the SF MOMA, the other at the Berkeley Art Museum. The latter is much better, and ongoing. You're just gonna have to get on BART and schlep to the East Bay.

Potato Have Toes

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:16:00 +0000

Yesterday, I was walking through the craft fair at the college formerly known as CCAC in Oakland, CA when I saw the familiar drawings of Deth P. Sun. So I introduced myself and asked the guy in glasses if he was Deth P. Sun. He was. And then he introduced the girl next to me as Evah. It took me a minute until I realized what I had in front of me: artist Evah Fan, one of the many people I've interviewed in my life over the phone, but never met in person. One down, lots to go.

My shopping day was a coup. From Evah:

From Deth:

Ponyboy

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:12:00 +0000

The last time I saw Dave, he was dressed up with appropriately slicked back greaser hair and posing in front of a giant canvas he'd painted for the Outsiders NY show on the Bowery. I think I asked him what his deal with horses was. Unfortunately, I can't remember his actual answer. But S.E. Hinton seems like a good place to start.

RIP Fast Eddie

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:32:00 +0000

Last night, I stumbled upon a pool table in a hotel lobby on the Lower East Side.
Somehow, I managed to run the table, taking four opponents down before scratching in a final game of 9-ball. It'd been at least a year since the last time I chalked up a cue stick, but there are some things in life you never stop loving, even after a long absence. Paul Newman was the same for me. I remember standing in front of the kitchen TV one night when I was maybe 17, mesmerized by his performance in The Hustler. I couldn't get over it, or him, and I imagine I never will.

Coney Island Baby

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:22:00 +0000

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

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:47:00 +0000

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

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:16:00 +0000

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

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:25:00 +0000

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

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:01:00 +0000

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

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:21:00 +0000

It's 4:20 on 4/20.

So Yong Kim

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:09:00 +0000

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.

Thao Nguyen

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:39:00 +0000

I like this girl. And not just because she's Asian. She has a band called Thao with the Get Down Stay Down, which she's on tour with currently.

Click here so you can listen to her meanderings and music (sorta like a morph of Blonde Redhead/Cat Power on uppers with Jolie Holland/Belly/Tanya Donnelly undertones. Sorry, my days as a short-form music-album reviewer are long gone, thankfully).

I also appreciated the time-lapsed ice cream-cone melt.

Murakami in Brooklyn

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 16:24:00 +0000

The first thing you see when you enter the Murakami exhibit, which opens today at the Brooklyn Museum, are these. Please reflect. More later.

Surfer Girls

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:44:00 +0000

The best time to visit the North Shore is probably starting about now through April, after the Triple Crown crowds have vacated, the swell's holding and the weather is fine. Of course, I couldn't say this for sure, because I've never been to Hawaii in the spring. But I did go at the end of '07 for about a month to profile a couple of my favorite surfer girls, Kassia Meador and Jen Smith. The story is now out in the April/May '08 issue of Bust Magazine.This photo, taken by photographer Jacqueline Di Milia, is from an early version of the layout. The final spread they ended up using is cool, too, but there was something about this as the opening image that really did it for me.

What I do know for sure: the best poke (poke-ee, a Hawaiian dish of raw fish marinated in sesame oil, scallions, peppers, onions, sea salt, etc) can be found at the Kahuku Superette, along Kamehameha Hwy, past Turtle Bay if you're heading east. They have several different types, including ahi and octopus, and are laid out in stainless steel trays in the back. After a surf, order samples of them all with a couple sides of hot rice, chow down on the outdoor deck of your friends' waterfront digs, and life will be the most awesome.

Brand new

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:39:00 +0000

Adrian Tomine's first official personal Web site, live. Finally.

In other non-Tomine-related news -- well, actually, no, that's it for now.

More Tomine in the Times

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:03:00 +0000

For a story on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. How appropriate.

One Cold Hand?

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:07:00 +0000

Lobster claws are the best kind of gloves for winter biking. They hold your fingers together in pairs to retain more warmth, rather than sequestering them alone, and in the perfect position to wrap around your handlebars and brake levers. This is a photo of the left hand of my most recent pair. The right hand is gone. (Moment of silence.) If only I lived in Pittsburgh, where Jen Gooch runs One Cold Hand?, a Web site where found gloves are pictured and categorized by fabric (chenille, fleece, leather, etc), hand (left, right), and neighborhood found. I was there this weekend where I hung out with Gooch and got to partake in the goodwill.This project should be a part of every cold-weather community.

Jen says the site "creates a method for dealing with the conundrum of finding these lost articles. Do you leave it and hope the owner comes back to find it? Do you pick it up? Throw it away? With onecoldhand.com, the abandoned object now becomes a symbol of benevolence and hope."

Speaking of, I lost that lobster claw glove in Jamaica Plain, Boston one night last winter, in the vicinity of El Oriental de Cuba (corner of Paul Gore St. and Centre Street). Please email me if you may possibly be a vehicle of benevolence and hope.

Adrian Tomine in your Sunday paper

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 16:25:00 +0000

This morning, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature story on morality and its biological basis, "The Moral Instinct." It is a somewhat intimidatingly lengthy piece for the brain to process, especially this early on a Sunday. And that's why there is no shame in just looking at the pictures.

Muji NYC grand opening

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 00:42:00 +0000

If you've ever had the luxury of shopping at Muji, you'll understand why there was a huge line out the door for its downtown Manhattan grand opening earlier today. Basic, cleanly-designed, eco-friendly products, from stationery, kitchenware and containers to socks, pillows and luggage. I walked over at about 3 pm and came upon a space just like all the ones I've been to in London. The line was also gone by then. Inside, the flow was good -- an organized, streamlined, and pleasing atmosphere filled with things you think you need to make your life just as organized, streamlined and pleasing. But when it comes right down to it, the key to that kind of lifestyle is to just stop buying things. At least that was my rationale when I left empty-handed (after putting back the blank, pocket-sized $2 notepad, of which I must have dozens just like it at home, stacked in the darkness of various "organizing" boxes.) I know, I'm becoming such a consumer's killjoy.

Of course, if you own nothing and really do need stuff, I would highly recommend their roller suitcases, stripey-socks, utilitarian handbags, and photo frames.

And the bed frames, duvet covers, umbrellas, mechanical pencils, shirts, pillows...

Free Tattoos...

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:21:00 +0000

...after you fork out the eight bucks for the new November/December 07 issue of the Believer Magazine, of course. Artists like Marcel Dzama, Steve Powers and Ai Weiwei contribute to the selection. Inside, there's a pretty great feature by Leanne Shapton, who looks at other artists' takes on the loves in their lives. My favorite: a series of scribbled notes by the wife of Keith Arnatt. She passed away in 1996, and afterwards, he photographed 18 of the scrawls she'd left for him over the years. A highlight: "YOU BASTARD! YOU ATE THE LAST OF MY CRACKERS." Reminds me of "This is Just to Say," a poem I love, by William Carlos Williams.

Anyway, if you look carefully at the cover, there's a self-portrait tattoo of the artist Ai Weiwei. Underneath the flap, a swarm of flies are heading straight for his beard. And if you are interested, I interviewed him on page 72.

Morimoto and Me

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:12:00 +0000

"Whiskey, eh?"
"Suntory," I said, nodding.
"Yamazaki," he responded, correctly noting the distillery of the 12-year-old single malt I'd been nursing.

And that is how my conversation with Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto began the other night when we shared a table at the Japanese Culinary Forum reception (ironically held at the French Culinary Institute). Indeed, David Bouley and Yoshiki Tsuji, who are planning to open a Japanese restaurant downtown, were mingling in the crowd, as were a fleet of extraordinary Kyoto- and Tokyo-based chefs who'd flown in for the event. Morimoto told me a lot of things that evening, most of which he insisted I wasn't allowed to repeat after finding out I'm a journalist. However, I will share his opinion on serving overfished species at his restaurants. "I'm a chef, not a politician, and my number one priority is feeding my guests." Basically, barring legislative mandates, he's not gonna be removing Chilean Sea Bass from his menus anytime soon. I'm a bit torn on his environmental laissez-faire -- because that is some amazing sea bass. I was, however, very impressed by his stubby fingers and large head.

cko@claudineko.com (Claudine Ko) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 22:03:00 +0000

Finally saw Ang Lee's latest, Lust, Caution, last night in NYC, so you can add me to the list now. But I hear the NC-17 flick starring Tony Leung and new girl Tang Wei is opening in So Cal on October 12, playing at the South Coast Village theater in OC. My feeling these days is the less you know about a movie, the better off you are when you go see it. So I won't comment except that 1) you should go see it and 2), maybe, if you go with someone you're hot for, go to SCV, where they are now featuring "new high-hack love seats."