Glenn O'Brien

Inscribed by early Basquiat champion & historic downtown art scene critic and curator, Glenn O’Brien, New York Beat brilliantly documents the production of Downtown 81, director Edo Bertoglio's seminal take of New York's Downtown scene, featuring a turn, 19 year old Jean-Michel Basquiat as semi-biographical protagonist.

• Glenn O'Brien (American).
• Photographs by Bertoglio and Maripol.
• Tokyo: Petit Grand Publishing, Inc., 2001.
• 112 pages.
• Hardcover book with dust wrapper. 
• Reverse of interior jacket forms a striking vertical poster featuring Basquiat's portrait.
• Text in English and Japanese.

"Shot as New York Beat in 1980-1981 but completed for release only last year, Downtown 81 emerges as a nostalgic portrait of pre-Giuliani Manhattan, an unruly place full of garbage, graffiti, rubble-strewn lots, unlicensed after-hours clubs and highly idealistic kids eager to make their mark as avant-garde artists and musicians.

The film's central figure is Jean, a young Bohemian engagingly played by a not yet famous Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Jean survives mainly by relying on the worldwide network of hip: there will always be another bar to go to, another gig to Crash, another wealthy European to write a check, another gorgeous model in a Cadillac convertible to give him a ride home.

The script, by the rock critic Glenn O'Brien, also the film's co-producer, follows the basic day-in-the-life format, beginning with Jean's release from a hospital.

Jean returns to his Alphabet City tenement to find an angry landlord demanding his back rent, and departs with a painting he hopes to sell. The day brings many disappointments but also many fortuitous encounters. He meets assorted new-wave musicians (Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Tuxedomoon, James White and the Blacks, DNA, the Plastics, and Walter Steding, most of whom perform); go-go dancers; and street people, among them Deborah Harry, who plays a bag lady with magical powers.

It's as a documentary that Downtown 81 is most successful, particularly at those moments when the somewhat unfocused filmmaking allows us to look past the foreground characters and catch glimpses of a vanished cityscape: the pornography shops and grind houses of West 42nd Street, the greasy spoons and outlet stores of East 14th Street, the labyrinthine interior of the Mudd Club in what was then the largely uncharted territory south of Canal Street." (New York Times, 7/13/01)

Glenn O'Brien, an American writer and art/fashion critic, was a close friend, confidante and early champion of Jean-Michel Basquiat.