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Downtown 81
''Downtown 81'' is a 2000 American film that was shot in 1980-1981. The film was directed by Edo Bertoglio and written and produced by Glenn O'Brien and Patrick Montgomery, with post-production in 1999-2000 by Glenn O'Brien and Maripol. It is a rare real-life snapshot of an ultra-hip subculture of post-punk era Manhattan. Starring renowned artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and featuring such East Village artists as James Chance, Amos Poe, Walter Steding, Tav Falco and Elliott Murphy, the film is a bizarre elliptical urban fairy tale. In 1999, Michael Zilkha, founder of ZE Records (the label of several of the film's artists), became the film's executive producer. Synopsis The film opens with Jean (Basquiat) in the hospital with an undisclosed ailment. After checking out, he happens upon an enigmatic woman, Beatrice (Anna Schroeder), who drives around in a convertible. He arrives at his apartment only to discover that his landlord, played by former Yardbirds manager Giorgio Gomelsky, ...
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Edo Bertoglio
Edo Bertoglio (born 1951 in Lugano) is a Swiss photographer and film director. He is the director of ''Downtown 81''. Life and work Edo Bertoglio received his degree in film directing and editing at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinema Francais in Paris in 1975. He moved to New York City in 1976, where he found work as a photographer for ''Italian Vogue'', and Andy Warhol's ''Interview'', and other magazines. He became involved in the downtown art and music scenes of the late 70s and early 80s. During this time he was married to fashion designer Maripol, whom he has since divorced. He also took his photography experience and familiarity to rock music to do photographic work for the covers of LPs, completing many assignments for Atlantic, Arista, Chrysalis Records and Warner Brothers Records. He photographed The Bongos for RCA Records and for GQ Magazine. He also worked on Glenn O'Brien's late night countercultural talk show ''TV Party''. In 1980, Bertoglio and Maripol secured backin ...
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Elliott Murphy
Elliott James Murphy (born March 16, 1949) is an American rock singer-songwriter, novelist, record producer and journalist living in Paris. Biography Elliott Murphy was born in Rockville Centre, New York, grew up in Garden City, Long Island and began playing the guitar at age twelve. His band The Rapscallions won the 1966 New York State Battle of the Bands. In 1971 he travelled to Europe and appeared in the Federico Fellini film Roma Returning to New York, in 1973 he secured a record contract with Polydor Records after being noticed by rock critic Paul Nelson. In 1988, he returned to college studies he had given up in the 1960s, and completed his bachelor's degree at Empire State College. His debut album ''Aquashow'' (1973) was critically acclaimed and favorably reviewed in ''Rolling Stone'', Newsweek and ''The New Yorker''. Follow up albums included ''Lost Generation'' (1975) produced by Doors Producer Paul A. Rothchild, '' Night Lights'' (1976) and ''Just a Story from Am ...
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Interview (magazine)
''Interview'' is an American magazine founded in late 1969 by artist Andy Warhol and British journalist John Wilcock. The magazine, nicknamed "The Crystal Ball of Pop", features interviews with celebrities, artists, musicians, and creative thinkers. Interviews were usually unedited or edited in the eccentric fashion of Warhol's books and ''The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again''. History Andy Warhol period Bob Colacello was a film student at Columbia University in 1970 when he got a call from someone at ''Interview'' while he was having dinner at his parents’ house in suburban Long Island. Warhol had read a film review Colacello had written for ''The Village Voice'' and wanted to meet him. Colacello subsequently began writing film reviews and essays for ''Interview''. After about six months, Colacello was promoted to editor of the magazine, at a salary of $50 a week. (He also received course credits, as he was still working on his master’s degree at Colum ...
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Debbie Harry
Deborah Ann Harry (born Angela Trimble; July 1, 1945) is an American singer, songwriter and actress, best known as the lead vocalist of the band Blondie. Four of her songs with the band reached on the US charts between 1979 and 1981. Born in Miami, Florida, Harry was adopted as an infant and raised in Hawthorne, New Jersey. After attending college, she worked various jobs—as a dancer, a Playboy Bunny and a secretary (including at the BBC in New York)—before her breakthrough in the music industry. Harry co-formed Blondie in 1974 in New York City. The band released its eponymous debut album in 1976, and released a further three albums between then and 1979, including ''Parallel Lines'', which spawned six singles, including " Heart of Glass". Their fifth album, ''Autoamerican'' (1980), afforded Harry and the band further attention, spawning such hits as a cover of "The Tide Is High", and " Rapture", the latter of which is considered the first rap song to chart at number one i ...
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James White And The Blacks
James Chance, also known as James White (born James Siegfried, April 20, 1953), is an American saxophonist, keyboard player, and singer. A key figure in no wave, Chance has been playing a combination of improvisational jazz-like music and punk in the New York music scene since the late 1970s, in such bands as Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance and the Contortions, James White and the Blacks (as he appeared in the film ''Downtown 81''), The Flaming Demonics, James Chance & the Sardonic Symphonics, James Chance and Terminal City, and James Chance and Les Contortions. Biography Born and raised in Milwaukee and Brookfield, Wisconsin, Chance attended Michigan State University, then the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music in Milwaukee. There, Chance joined a band named Death, which performed covers of the Stooges and the Velvet Underground before moving toward original songs. At the end of 1975, Chance dropped out and moved to New York City after the dissolution of the band an ...
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Kid Creole And The Coconuts
Kid Creole and the Coconuts is an American musical group created by August Darnell with Andy Hernandez and Adriana Kaegi. Its music incorporates a variety of styles and influences, in particular a mix of disco and Latin American, Caribbean, and Calloway styles conceptually inspired by the big band era. The Coconuts are a trio of female backing vocalists/dancers, founded and originally choreographed and costumed by Kaegi. Career Thomas August Darnell Browder was born in The Bronx, New York City on August 12, 1950. His mother was from South Carolina with Caribbean and Italian parents and his father from Savannah, Georgia. As an adult, Browder began going by his two middle names as August Darnell. Growing up in the Bronx, Darnell was exposed early on to all kinds of music. Darnell began his musical career in a band named The In-Laws with his brother, Stony Browder, in 1965. The band disbanded so Darnell could pursue a career as an English teacher. Darnell obtained a master's deg ...
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New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the List of United States cities by population density, most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York (state), New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban area, urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous Megacity, megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global city, global Culture of New ...
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Fab Five Freddy
Fred Brathwaite (born August 31, 1959), more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and hip hop pioneer. He is considered one of the architects of the street art movement. Freddy emerged in New York's downtown underground creative scene in the late 1970s as a graffiti artist. He was the bridge between the burgeoning uptown rap scene and the downtown No Wave art scene. He was immortalized in 1981 when Debbie Harry rapped on the Blondie song "Rapture" that "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly." In the late 1980s, Freddy became the first host of the groundbreaking hip-hop music video show ''Yo! MTV Raps''. Career In the late 1970s, Freddy became a member of the Brooklyn-based graffiti group the Fabulous 5, known for painting the entire side of New York City Subway cars. Along with other Fabulous 5 member Lee Quiñones, under his direction they began to shift from street graffiti to transition into the art world and in 1979 they both exhibited i ...
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Lee Quiñones
George Lee Quiñones (born 1960) is a Puerto Rican artist and actor. Quiñones rose to prominence by creating massive New York City subway car graffiti that carried his moniker "LEE". His style is rooted in popular culture and often with political messages. Life and career Quiñones was born at Ponce, Puerto Rico, and raised in the Lower East Side section of Manhattan. Also started drawing at the age of five, and started doing subway graffiti in 1974. By 1976, Lee was creating huge murals of graffiti art across the subway system. As a subway graffiti artist, Lee almost exclusively painted whole cars, all together about 125 cars. He was the major contributor to one of the first-ever whole-trains, along with DOC, MONO and SLAVE, the core members of The Fabulous Five crew, which also included DIRTY SLUG. It was the first ever whole-train to run in traffic. In November 1976, ten subway cars were painted with a range of colorful murals and set a new benchmark for the scale of graffit ...
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McDermott & McGough
McDermott & McGough consists of visual artists David McDermott and Peter McGough (born 1952 and 1958 in Hollywood, CA and Syracuse, NY respectively). McDermott & McGough are contemporary artists known for their work in painting, photography, sculpture and film. They currently split their time between Dublin and New York City.Art Knowledge News
McDermott & McGough: An Experience of Amusing Chemistry], Irish Museum of Modern Art.


Early life

David McDermott was born in 1952 in . He studied at

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DNA (American Band)
Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of all known organisms and many viruses. DNA and ribonucleic acid (RNA) are nucleic acids. Alongside proteins, lipids and complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides), nucleic acids are one of the four major types of macromolecules that are essential for all known forms of life. The two DNA strands are known as polynucleotides as they are composed of simpler monomeric units called nucleotides. Each nucleotide is composed of one of four nitrogen-containing nucleobases (cytosine guanine adenine or thymine , a sugar called deoxyribose, and a phosphate group. The nucleotides are joined to one another in a chain by covalent bonds (known as the phosphodiester linkage) between the sugar of one nucleotide and the phosphate of the next, resulting in an ...
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Arto Lindsay
Arthur Morgan "Arto" Lindsay (born May 28, 1953) is an American guitarist, singer, record producer and experimental composer. He was a member of the pioneering 1970s no wave group DNA, which featured on the 1978 compilation ''No New York''. In the 1980s, he formed the group Ambitious Lovers. He also performed with The Golden Palominos and The Lounge Lizards. He has a distinctive soft voice and an often noisy, self-taught guitar style consisting almost entirely of unconventional extended techniques, described by Brian Olewnick as "studiedly naïve ... sounding like the bastard child of Derek Bailey". Music Although Lindsay was born in the United States, he grew up in Brazil. In the late 1970s, he helped form the no wave band DNA with Ikue Mori and Robin Crutchfield, although Tim Wright of Pere Ubu soon replaced Crutchfield. In 1978, DNA was featured on the four-band sampler ''No New York'' (produced by Brian Eno) In the early 1980s, Lindsay performed on early albums ...
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