Photo+Journalism
Just last week, I took a walk through the muggy Los Angeles air. It was the kind of air that hangs thickly about you, and doesn’t quite suffocate more than it makes you forget to breathe.
That’s how I realized, I forgot how it feels to be alive.
Not that I am dead (“Are we the dining dead?”), just that I’ve forgotten how to live.
There’s that mechanical cycle. Work. Sleep. Eat. Bathe. Play. Sleep. Work. Write. Read. Simon says.
That all gets to you too. You forget so easily how to breathe. It gets to you. Los Angeles, the city, it wears down on you. And before you realize, you’re old. Your lungs are black. You’re tired, and on the verge of discovering nothing new except more ugly truths about how cruel and shallow people are.
The City of Angels, though, is not entirely bleak. There’s inspiration in that ugliness. It is cliche to say, but there is always beauty in violence. Beauty in death, art in crime.
Director Harry Kim followed L.A. local artist David Choe around for 7 years with a camera, documenting the ups and downs, the ins and outs of his artistic and personal experiences. Why David Choe? Why not. Choe struggles-and so openly, and candidly- with much of what we are usually too ashamed to speak of.
Choe’s art is not limited to his canvas, it is his very life. From a search for a dinosaur in the Congo to three months in a Japanese prison, Choe creates and experiences art, pain, love, sexual addiction, loneliness, insanity, depression, redemption, and God. The ups and downs, the falling away, the coming back, and the realization that maybe all of this is just because we don’t want to grow up.
Because when we were kids, we knew how to feel alive.
Never growing up is dangerous (Michael Jackson?), but there is that constant thrill, the irrelevance of time, the liberation, the discovery, and the lack of inhibition. The laughter.
“Dirty Hands” isn’t about crime, or art really. It’s not about the spray paint, the urine, and soy sauce that Choe uses on his canvases. It’s not about having sticky kleptomaniac hands.
“Dirty Hands” is about being a kid, fully capable of feeling pain, often subject to faulty logic, prone to injury and disillusionment, believing in the incredible. It is a film about growing old, but somehow through all the growing pains, staying young, and simply living.