The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup by Susan Orlean Page B

mid-seventies. By Pop standards, anyone was eligible to make art. Anyone could have a punk band. Anyone could silk-screen Campbell’s soup cans. Anything anyone declared to be sculpture was sculpture. Anyone could have his own cable television show and invite his friends to appear on it and just
act like themselves,
and the show would be conceptually complete. This did indeed happen. Glenn O’Brien, a writer and Warhol acolyte, produced a television show on Manhattan’s public-access channel which was called
Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party;
it entailed nothing much more than his inviting his friends to hold a cocktail hour on the air. His friends-among them Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, David Byrne, and Arto Lindsay—were members of the social set that Freddy usually describes as “groovy downtown hipsters.” Freddy, who was a fan of Glenn’s column in
Interview,
arranged to have Glenn as a guest on a college radio show he was emceeing. Not long afterward, Freddy was seized with the desire to become a cameraman for
Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party.
For two years, he was a cameraman for the show, and also, soon after starting, one of its on-camera personnel, and also, in time, a regular member of the groovy downtown hipsters and a Warhol devotee. He saw, firsthand, the power of being a smart spectator and a collector, and the satisfaction of making yourself and your tastes well known. “Andy was the biggest influence on me,” Freddy now says. “I hung around with him as much as I could. For me and Jean-Michel, coming from where we were coming from, being young black males in this happening downtown scene, we were just operating on another planet, and Andy was it.”
    Uptown, and in Brooklyn and the Bronx, the notion of populist street art was nothing new, but the forms it was taking—rapping, break dancing, and graffiti painting—were. Freddy would often ride the subway to the city parks in the South Bronx where rappers and break-dancers set up and performed. He was, he says now, just a fan, but a fan with interesting connections. “I was, like, this person who understood the fine-art thing,” Freddy says. “I was hip enough to hang downtown at places like Danceteria with all these art people, gallery owners, all the groovy people, but I had the pure hip-hop roots as well. So this was my synthesis. I was credited with bringing rap downtown. I went onstage and rapped at the Mudd Club, which was a new wave hangout. I knew I wasn’t much of a rapper, but I wanted to fuse the two worlds, and I figured the audience downtown wouldn’t know the difference if I was or wasn’t much of a rapper. I knew whatever I did down there would look interesting. I wanted people to see this whole hip-hop street-culture thing bubbling up under their noses.”
    Freddy’s next big synthesis was proposing that graffiti and break dancing and rapping were related forms of street art which, taken as a whole, defined the new aesthetic of black hip-hop culture. This might seem obvious now, but at the time the three were considered separate, transitory impulses at best and discrete forms of public nuisance at worst. Freddy, being Freddy, came up with the idea, and then followed it with this proposal: “Damn, put this all in a
movie,
it would be
dope.
” Charlie Ahearn, after being approached by Freddy, agreed that it would be very dope to make a movie about hip-hop. Freddy’s relationship with the resulting project,
Wild Style,
is a Freddy classic. As Ahearn now recalls it, Freddy initially planned to co-write the screenplay with him but didn’t have the patience to niggle over the fine points of screenwriting, and initially planned to co-direct it but didn’t have the patience to labor over the details of film direction. In the end, Freddy helped Chris Stein produce the soundtrack. He also wound up with a major role, even though acting happened to be one of the few job positions in the film he had not been interested in filling.
    Ahearn is