Ben Cho has passed away

RIP Ben Cho: Chloë Sevigny, Cat Power and More Remember the Designer and Downtown Darling - W Magazine

A lot of Morrissey fans in NYC and beyond might know or remember Ben Cho, especially if you ever went to the Morrissey nights at Sway, where he used to dj. Sadly Ben passed away over the weekend.

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very sad for someone so young.thoughts n prayers to his family.
 
The New York Times article is very good and paints a touching, three-dimensional portrait of Ben Cho. Here are excerpts and a photo that reference the importance of "Smith's Night" in his circle of friends:

"All the while that Mr. Cho was designing, he was also going out, and in 2003, he helped create a Sunday night party, Smiths Night, that would become legendary in New York circles.

The idea for Smiths Night was Paul Sevigny’s, Ms. Sevigny’s brother, and when he was programming Sway, a small, Moroccan-themed club on Spring Street in the far west hinterlands of SoHo, he allowed Mr. Cho and his friend Brian DeGraw, a member of the band Gang Gang Dance, to play only music by and influenced by the Smiths, the moony, moody 1980s British misery specialists.

“I treated it at first almost like a conceptual art project,” Mr. DeGraw said. “Obviously, I was a huge fan, but there was no way anyone was going to come out and only want to listen to these records.”

Photo
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The invitation Mr. Cho drew for Chloë Sevigny's 30th birthday party in 2004, playing on a line from a Morrissey song.CreditBenjamin Cho, via Rizzoli
At first, they didn’t, and Smiths Night existed as a friends-and-family affair. In the last days before omnipresent cellphones, Mr. Cho and his friends had haunted a small number of local bars and clubs that reliably delineated their social life in New York: Max Fish, then on Ludlow Street; Cherry Tavern on Sixth Street near Avenue A; the Hole, now defunct, on Second Avenue. Smiths Night at Sway quickly joined the rotation.

“That was the party that defined my youth in New York,” said Carol Lim, Mr. Leon’s partner at Opening Ceremony. “You would come a little bit early, get a beer at Ear Inn across the way and slowly walk over. If you had a crush on someone, you’d know that they would probably be there later.”

As time went on, it began to draw crowds, first of downtown scene-making types, later of celebrities — Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan. In 2006, New York magazine named it the best Sunday night party in New York.

“At some point, I couldn’t even get in, it was so crowded,” said Mr. Fitzpatrick, who was for years so close to Mr. Cho that people assumed they were a couple.
...

Mr. Cho began to withdraw from many of the friends with whom he had spent so many years. He was hired to be the D.J. for fashion events — he played the Met Gala in 2007 and Lauren Santo Domingo’s engagement party later that year — but in 2008, he staged his last fashion show. (Mr. Hundley recalled it as “a bit of a disaster.”) Smiths Night at Sway continued until 2015; Mr. Cho briefly moved with it to another bar. (Mr. Sevigny has since bought the original Sway and reopened it as Paul’s Casablanca, where Smiths songs once again play on Sunday nights.) But Mr. Cho was seen less and less.

...

That community was gathering last week — in person and in calls, emails and texts — to remember him, unnerved by his absence. “The difficult part to his passing is everyone I know I know through him,” Mr. Hundley said.

They don’t go out as often as they once did. Ms. Sevigny said she couldn’t remember the last time she had been dancing, and Mr. Fitzpatrick could come to the phone one night only after putting his son to bed. But they have been dredging up drawings he made, pieces he gave them. Ms. Lyonne spoke fondly of a blazer by Mr. Cho, with “too many buttons on the lapel to make sense.”

“Twenty years later, it’s still my favorite blazer,” she added.

The soundtrack, naturally, is the Smiths. In many of the remembrances, one song in particular stands out: the customary evening-ending (morning-ending?) song at Sway. Mr. McGinley called it Mr. Cho’s anthem: “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

 
I'm just wondering what the hell this has to do with Morrissey?

The next thing someone will do is post: So and so owned a Smiths record and they died--thought you'd like to know.
You have some motherf***ing nerve! If you were "wondering", then you should have f***ing kept that "wondering" to your f***ing SELF. Your comment was a DICK comment, and was not useful to ANYONE, in any way, or in any capacity whatsoever.

As I'm already wasting my time typing to you, and being that you seemingly couldn't be bothered to even read the excerpts from an article that someone took the TIME to ALREADY put into CLIFFS NOTES for you, let me break it down for you like this:

Ben was an ENORMOUS Morrissey and Smiths fan. He did ENORMOUS things for the Smiths and Morrissey fan + art community in NYC. He kept the torch burning for YEARS, even during and esp during the so-called "wilderness years". He was a VERY loved, and very well known person, who equally loved Morrissey about 1000x as much in return.

The fact that I am even typing any of this to you tells me that your comprehension as about on the level of oh, say, NONEXISTENCE

And to add insult to f***ing injury, did it ever even occur to you that MAYBE the news and the article was posted here also as part tribute? To someone who JUST passed away, in the most sad and horrific circumstances possible?

Did it ever occur to you that the person in question used to come here? Did it ever occur to you that his friends also come here? His family?

Did anything ever even occur to you at all, before you let your dirty fingers do the talking for you?

So yeah. You should have kept right on scrolling, right on f***ing by. If you considered this news piece had nothing to do with you. And you should have definitely kept your miserable and whiny, inconsiderate and disrespectful shit to yourself.

It's always so much better, don't you think, when people just STFU, when they have nothing useful at all to say? Oh, your not sure, you say? Well, let me just clarify that for you: YES. YES IT IS BETTER TO JUST STFU, in your case.

Your inane comment and YOUR own lack of relevancy, in even typing that comment, is absolutely BEYOND revolting to bear witness to right now.

Step the f*** AWAY
 
I'm just wondering what the hell this has to do with Morrissey?

The next thing someone will do is post: So and so owned a Smiths record and they died--thought you'd like to know.

Although that sort of happens already, I think you shouldn't have stated that. Now people without any ideas or imagination at all, will post even more of this "thought you like to know stuff".

No, I don't like to know.
Boring, distracting, time-consuming, the off-topic character doesn't bother me. :rolleyes:
 
You have some motherf***ing nerve! If you were "wondering", then you should have f***ing kept that "wondering" to your f***ing SELF. Your comment was a DICK comment, and was not useful to ANYONE, in any way, or in any capacity whatsoever.

As I'm already wasting my time typing to you, and being that you seemingly couldn't be bothered to even read the excerpts from an article that someone took the TIME to ALREADY put into CLIFFS NOTES for you, let me break it down for you like this:

Ben was an ENORMOUS Morrissey and Smiths fan. He did ENORMOUS things for the Smiths and Morrissey fan + art community in NYC. He kept the torch burning for YEARS, even during and esp during the so-called "wilderness years". He was a VERY loved, and very well known person, who equally loved Morrissey about 1000x as much in return.

The fact that I am even typing any of this to you tells me that your comprehension as about on the level of oh, say, NONEXISTENCE

And to add insult to f***ing injury, did it ever even occur to you that MAYBE the news and the article was posted here also as part tribute? To someone who JUST passed away, in the most sad and horrific circumstances possible?

Did it ever occur to you that the person in question used to come here? Did it ever occur to you that his friends also come here? His family?

Did anything ever even occur to you at all, before you let your dirty fingers do the talking for you?

So yeah. You should have kept right on scrolling, right on f***ing by. If you considered this news piece had nothing to do with you. And you should have definitely kept your miserable and whiny, inconsiderate and disrespectful shit to yourself.

It's always so much better, don't you think, when people just STFU, when they have nothing useful at all to say? Oh, your not sure, you say? Well, let me just clarify that for you: YES. YES IT IS BETTER TO JUST STFU, in your case.

Your inane comment and YOUR own lack of relevancy, in even typing that comment, is absolutely BEYOND revolting to bear witness to right now.

Step the f*** AWAY

Maybe you should create www.bencho-solo.com ? Get over yourself, bitch. Ben Cho and New York, again, are not the world. Morrissey carried himself during the "wilderness years", all credit goes to HIM, not you or Ben Cho or anyone else for that matter.

There are a lot of enormous fans. Stop making it seem like Ben was exceptional when he probably wasn't. Don't hate me just because I'm the one to tell you.

I wasn't aware you and he were SOOOOO relevant. *eyeroll* Lol.

Your grief has made you stupid. You're the one who should step away.
 
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