The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean Page A

large face of Jodie Foster framed the back of Freddy’s head. “Yo,” he said to me after a moment. “Doing something with Jonathan is excellent. I’m
extra
happy I got asked to do this video.”
    MANY THINGS MAKE FREDDY extra happy. Working with someone well established and successful, like Jonathan Demme, is one of his extra-happiest experiences. He is unabashed about it. In fact, he aspires to it. He started his movie career, in 1980, by telephoning Charlie Ahearn, whose movie
The Deadly Art of Survival
was then being celebrated on the underground film circuit, and asking Ahearn to include him in whatever he was doing next. When he got interested in painting, he cultivated friendships with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. When he did graffiti, he did it alongside the graffiti star Lee Quinones. He scored a movie, when movie scoring caught his attention, with Chris Stein, of the band Blondie. People like Freddy; almost everyone he has sought to attach himself to has said yes. The trade-off is that Freddy has a gift for getting himself and his undertakings, and therefore his collaborators, noticed. He manages, seemingly without effort, to create an aura of noteworthiness. His philosophy of career advancement is not a matter of being a successful hanger-on. It’s a philosophy that appreciates mastery and technical proficiency but prizes the knack for courting accomplished, proficient people, the knack for noticing which direction popular culture is heading, the knack for grafting one art form or pop form onto another, the knack for attracting a lot of attention to whatever you do, and the knack for understanding that attracting attention is, ultimately, the real art form of this era. Freddy has all these knacks. There are times when I am of the opinion that Fab Five Freddy is the hip-hop Andy Warhol. And, in fact, Freddy’s extra-happiest professional association was with Warhol, whom he refers to as his hero.
    This is the path from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Andy Warhol: “My mother is a nurse, and my dad is an accountant. There was always a very heavy music thing in our house. Max Roach is my godfather, and Max and my dad are like brothers. They were beboppers together—black intellectuals. My dad lived in Brooklyn, and he had a posse of musicians like Bud Powell, Cecil Payne, Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown. They’d hang at his house—everybody called it the Chess Club. My dad’s not a musician, but he’d always hang with all these dudes. Bed-Stuy is cool—it’s anchored by all these churches in the community. My parents just got cable about a month ago. Before that, I’d send them tapes of
Yo!
so they could see it. I grew up about three blocks from where Spike made
Do the Right Thing.
I kind of slipped out of high school and finished up in this program called City as School, which is for people who are smart but don’t want to listen to other people. I was going to Medgar Evers College and I got the idea to be a painter. I’d been tagging my name up, doing graffiti, when I was an adolescent, so that I could start getting known, to popularize myself in the city. That was when all these dudes would tag up their names. My tags were Bull 99 and Showdown 177 and Fred Fab Five. I’d play hooky a lot and go to the Met to look at armor, look at paintings, look at jewelry, and I would think, Yo,
I
want to do this. I didn’t want to be a folk artist, I wanted to be a fine artist. I wanted to be a
famous
artist. Somewhere in there, I started reading about Pop art. I was reading a lot of books about art—and some of them were really hard to read and boring and didn’t say anything to me, and others sounded cool, and they were about Pop art. I started reading
Interview
and making my plans. I knew you had to have some kind of plan to move into the media.”
    Freddy’s plans to be a famous artist coincided with the Pop art movement’s championing of enlightened amateurism in every field. It was then the