Downtown 81

Glenn O'Brien's film Downtown 81 feels like that holy grail of junk food, the green chip, that rare perfect accident that curiously leaves you unsure about consuming it while simultaneously serving as a reminder that you shouldn't be eating any junk food to begin with.


There has been a glut of unnecessary documentaries coming out these days that survey rock's growth, (or perhaps its devolution) out of the late 60's into the post-punk of the late 70's and early 80's. Everyone that lived through that period, while in the cultural limelight, seems overly anxious to stake his or her claim as to who was in fact at the forefront of the movement. But they're all the same cookie cutter interviews that quickly become hard to stomach after a while.

Downtown 81 is not a documentary, but a fiction-as-document, embodying its own period and place. The film follows the wanderings of an, at the time, up-and-coming Jean-Michel Basquiat, and it shows artists and musicians of all kinds surviving together off the urban corpse that was Alphabet City of 1980-81. The film is not so much about anything as much as a fragment of what was.

Unfortunately, the positive of the film had been lost, along with most of the original sound elements, so the negative had to be dug out of a lab's archives and the sound re-recorded. The result is a weird contrast between dull images and bright sound, as though a hazy memory had been plugged into a life support system where hearing a reconstructed version of its own voice keeps itself from disintegrating. Basquiat's own narration had to be replaced by the voice of Saul Williams, the New York-based slam poet. The sound never quite synchs, yet the feel this creates when watching matches with the incongruity of Basquiat's impulsive graffiti, as when he draws all over images of Man Ray in a book while impatiently sitting in a well-to-do European woman's apartment hoping to sell her one of his paintings.

Kill Your Idols and Punk: Attitude are just bland repetitions of talking heads, especially compared to something like O'Brien's film. I happened to have just been squeezed out of my mom at the time everything talked about in these documentaries was going on. So what is someone like me supposed to get out of watching these documentaries? Nothing I've learned from them has changed how much I like the music, so what's the point? It's fine to learn about one band's connection to another, how Malcolm McLaren didn't really manage the Dolls, how Richard Hell supposedly lit the fuse for punk fashion, or how Mike Watt still carts around in a beat up van. I just don't see how any of this is as illuminating as watching DNA rock out in a studio like what was captured in Downtown 81. Is all the rest just junk food?

Thurston Moore and Byron Coley have their book out, No Wave: Post-Punk Underground: New York 1976-1980, which I haven't peeked at, but I'm guessing the book will be interesting, but no better at connecting those of us to that past as watching Downtown 81 is. Still, isn't the music itself enough? Maybe so. But take one look at the October 2007 issue of Spin and you can see that we still want more. As crappy as Spin is, Anthony Bourdain's incisively frank Hidden Track piece Eat to the Beat in that issue at least aims to convey a genuine context, but you'll have to take Bourdain at his word.

Originally written February 05, 2008 in a different version for FavoriteMedia.