God Hatchie I wish I'd been supporting someone like David Wojnarowicz at the time. Thank you for the poignant tale of his making a mountain of gorge trash in swank digs. Me I was ensconced uptown with the Luddite classicist, painter Duncan Hannah who loathed the whole downtown scene and would go into rages over grafitti art. My easy-earned dominatrix dollars ("she's lording it over a hot slave tonight" Rene Ricard used to croak) went to fuelling this fantasy of a 'New Romantic' revolution. Ho-hum! I escaped and started publishing my stuff in East Village Eye, Bomb, and other experimental rags.
I spent one memorable evening running in and out of every bar in Soho and the EV with Rene as he worked on his famous review of Jean-Michel's first show ever. As we got drunker and drunker, we fought over every period, comma and hyphen like maniacs, and were finally thrown out of someplace on Seventh Avenue South, only to get mugged by two Spanish guys with knives... you know the drill.
When you get to the show, buy or steal the catalogue, for one thing there's an adorable shot of Mommy and Daddy in it, lookin' like babies just outa the crib! The blow-by-blow of the year-by-year development in the neighborhood is so overwhelming, the curator has truly done a great job.
So far I haven't come across ANY heroin tales in the catalogue, and I concur with you in re J.M. Basquiat, though I could name a few more heroin heroines who made good, despite the fashionable addiction... It is hard to believe that at one point I realized every single friend I had was a junkie. And though I wasn't, what was I, a hifaluten "authoress" who had written a book about something no-one had even heard of, some kind of weird godawful "dominatrix" world, that was maybe something even worse than junk!
That's an idea as an addendum to the entire subject: the subculture of girls working in
the sex-industry to support their artist boyfriends or their own art-habits. You see the depressing side of it in Sue Coe's paintings. But it was certainly the golden day of the go-go girl!