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BASQUIAT

                                             January 11, 2014

I didn't know about Basquiat
when he was alive.

My introduction to him was the
film "Basquiat" (1996), which I                 That film seems like
probably saw because it had                     a product of a radically
David Bowie playing Andy Warhol.                different era than "Downtown
                                                81" (which stars Basquiat)...
  This is a great movie about the               but it's only a 15 year gap
  boho art world of New York of                 between them.
  the early 80s.

  The characters seem dead on,
  and what I would call The New York
  Attitude is definitely on display,
  apparently it was well established
  even in those days:

  They were outsiders, but outsiders
  playing toward the inside.
                                         WARHOL
  They all apparently had an eye
  on Warhol's circle.                        That's a feature of the
                                             Patti Smith story also.
  There's this drive to succeed,
  a touch of careerism about                              JUST_KIDS
  almost everything.
                                             Every freak on the street
        "How long do you think               knew that if Warhol's outfit
        it'd take to make it as              gave you it's blessing then
        an artist?"                          you had made it.

        *shrug*  "Ten years to get
        famous.  Twenty to get rich."


   So overall, this is
   a peculiarly New York
   image of the boho artist.      In many ways it's
                                  a pernicious image:

                                           The romantic early death,
                                           The drug martyr...

Eventually, I saw the *real*
Basquiat movie, "Downtown 81",
which had Basquiat playing himself.
                                          "I could see the
    I came to this one by one             writing on the wall.
    of those strange                      It was my handwriting."
    circuitous routes by
    which I navigate, tracing
    a thread through the maze:

    For some years, I was working
    on "The Beat Generation" page
    at wikipedia.  An oddity (and
    perhaps not much of a virtue)
    of wikipedia writing is that
    you need impressive looking,
    authoritative references for      You get challenged on these things by
    the most obvious things.          people who have no knowledge of the
                                      subject but feel that their knack for
    Much has been written about       sniffing out bias doesn't require it.
    the Beats, much of it cranked
    out by what amounts to a Beat
    Generation literary industry,
    but nevertheless, there are
    many introductory level things
    that I wanted to say that were      BEAT
    a little difficult to find a
    place where someone else had
    said them first.

Now: this was a period where Dangerbaby had moved
the warehouse space of her importing business, and
briefly she was sharing some studio space with a
local artist.  This artist, as artists will, had a
shelf full of art books...

And on her shelves I happened to see and old
yellowed book published as a tie-in to a Beat
Generation exhibition at the Whitney museum in
New York.  This was quite a find: a rare work and
a very impressive-looking cite with some
introductory level essays that did a nice job
of establishing cultural context.

In particular, there was an article
by a Glenn O'Brien that discussed
the influence that the image of           You really need to get Krebs
Maynard G. Krebs had on his life.         to understand the beat-beatnik
                                          trajectory in my opinion, but
When using that reference, rather than    it's something that the Cool
explaining who Glenn O'Brien was in       People don't like to talk about:
the text, I created a wikipedia page
about him-- it was then immediately         KREBS
challenged for "notability" (speaking
of wikipedia annoyances).  I filled in
this page as well as I could with some    SCENESTER
simple research on what the fellow
did... most of it seemed resoundly
uninteresting (a fashion column for
GQ?), but there was one thing that was
really impressive: he made the movie
"Downtown 81", working with Basquiat
himself.

     Let us review:                        Beats
                                            /
                                        wikipedia
                                          /
                                    a stranger's art books
                                        /
                                    Whitney Museum
              David                   /
              Bowie                 Krebs
                  \                 /
                   \             Glenn O'Brien
                  Andy            /
                  Warhol      Downtown 81
                      \         /
                       \       /
                        \     /
                        Basquiat


              I turned up a rather degraded copy of
              "Downtown 81" on youtube, split into
              fragments, but I watched them with
              Dangerbaby one night-- she commented
              that the crappy image quality seemed
              appropriate for the subject: the run
              down character of post-70s New York,
              where Basquiat comments on the lower
              east side "It looked like we had dropped
              a bomb on ourselves."

                There's a slightly better copy
                out on the net these days:

                  http://www.videobash.com/video_show/downtown-1981-589323


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