Jean Michel Basquiat

imdb wrote:
From 1978 to 1982 Glenn O’Brien hosted an insane punk rock New York City cable TV show called TV Party. Co-hosted by Chris Stein, from Blondie, and directed by filmmaker Amos Poe, the hour long show took television where it had never gone before: to the edge of civility and “sub-realism” as Glenn would put it. Walter Stedin and his band provided a musical accompaniment to the madness at hand, and many artists and musicians, from Jean-Michael Basquiat to David Byrne to Arto Lindsay were regular guests. It was the cocktail party that could be a political party.Read More »

Quote:
Jean-Michel Basquiat shot to fame in the early ‘80s as a painter with bright strong flashes of color, streaks of black, jagged, oddly angled heads and crossed-out words, then died of a heroin overdose at age 27. His story has been told many times before—in Glenn O’Brien’s loosely crafted 1981 fiction film Downtown 81 (aka New York Beat) about a Village artist struggling to pay the bills; in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, with Jeffrey Wright’s alternately shambling and alert performance in the lead; and in at least seven books, including Phoebe Hoban’s journalistic 1998 biography Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art. Now he is the subject of friend Tamra Davis’s documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, which announces its intentions to uphold its subject’s legacy from the title onward.Read More »

Quote:
The film is a day in the life of a young artist, Jean Michel Basquiat, who needs to raise money to reclaim the apartment from which he has been evicted. He wanders the downtown streets carrying a painting he hopes to sell, encountering friends, whose lives (and performances) we peek into. He finally manages to sell his painting to a wealthy female admirer, but he’s paid by check. Low on cash, he spends the evening wandering from club to club, looking for a beautiful girl he had met earlier, so he’ll have a place to spend the night. Downtown 81 not only captures one of the most interesting and lively artists of the twentieth century as he is poised for fame, but it is a slice of life from one of the most exciting periods in American culture, with the emergence of new wave music, new painting, hip hop and graffiti. — Sujit R. VarmaRead More »