Jean-Michel Basquiat

And it said, many young kings get their heads cut off.

And it had this Basquiat crown in the middle of it.

And before I got up on the stage, I had a coat on.

I took the coat off right before I went up there.

We also got to spend some time in this film with the great Sam Rockwell.

Prior to this film, he was in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1990, Strictly Business in 91, Basquiat in 96, another film Scott likes that I've never seen, Safe Men in 1998, and The Green Mile in 1999.

He was a real piece of shit in that movie, wasn't he? Menacing.

Yeah, he was, what was his, was he Buffalo, not Buffalo, Billy the Kid, right? Wasn't that what he called himself?

H-H-How did those come to be an example you wanted to include in the book?

Well, this chapter is called, um, Chromatic Dispatches: Télémaque/Basquiat, and it's a chapter that moves between the very well-known artist of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and an artist who's not as well-known, whose career moved from New York to Paris, and his career was mostly in France.

His name is Hervé Télémaque, and he's the creator of this painting that, that you just mentioned, that, that, that references the Erwitt photograph of segregated water fountains.

The chapter, I found, works in the sense that I was really, really interested in how both of these artists think about their use of paint and pigment as almost a kind of writing and as poetry at the same time.

Yeah.

You know, that's how you get a Basquiat or, you know, Fat Five Freddy or anybody.

You know what I mean? So I think the thing is, is that he just has a natural punk ear.

He could hear what I was going for, you know? Yeah.

Like, before, like, way before my time.

Like, in the 80s, like, when Basquiat lived around here and Andy Warhol and all these artists, it was a whole different type of living.

yeah

and but the energy's still there so it's just so alive it's so electric and everything is so close like meeting people is just more genuine so i was coming here a lot and i was like i like the way i feel about myself here i feel like i'm gonna find like love i'm gonna find like myself.

... yeah.

But even in, like, relatively brief roles, like in Julian Schnabel's movie Basquiat, that he's in that movie very briefly, but he's memorable in it.

And then-

But you were talking about Green Goblin specifically as being evidence for your choice, though.

Like, show me your tricks and I'll draw some stuff like you will both be busy.

Like, you know, and I was explaining them like, do like Jackson, like, like there's Jackson Pollock, right? His paintings, Basquiat.

I'm personally not a fan of Basquiat at all.

But if I were to take Basquiat's paintings that sold for $250 million and paint exactly like them, they'd be fucking worthless.

Like, they're worth money because it's him.

It's like his original.

You know it.

You look at it, you go, Basquiat did that.