Lorette C. Luzajic ~ A Crown for Jean-Michel Basquiat

 

  1. Haunt

I paint ghosts, Basquiat told at least one col­lec­tor who remem­bered it after. The client thought he was smart, dri­ven, cre­ative, and so what if he was moody. To Repel Ghosts, the artist scrib­bled once in oil stick, and young Black poet Kevin Young wrote about it lat­er, the title of his book of poems. Basquiat did paint ghosts, just the extra­or­di­nary, for­got­ten, every­day dead: Black men he couldn’t bury. Athletes, writ­ers, jazz.

  1. Graffiti

The 80s are being born, in boom­box beats and bill­boards boast­ing spray paint tags. Hip hop and Happy Meals. Guyliner.  Acid wash and tie dye and glam rock and safe­ty pins. Jean-Michel and Diaz are twen­ty and angry at the world. Black boys falling like flies in the New York heat.

  1. Asbestos

CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON CARBON. TEETH. DIAGRAM OFHEART PUMPING BLOOD. ORNITHOLOGY. KNEE/STOMACH/ LIVER. DEXTROSE. LARYNX. HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS – 1940. POPCORN SUGAR CANE TOBACCO. FIVE CENTS. DIZZY GIL. CROWN OF THORNSASBESTOS.

  1. Black

Paint it black. Everything he had giv­en her and asked her to return. Madonna tells her sto­ry lat­er, the one of her his­toric brief romance with the it artist of the third mil­len­ni­um. “When I broke up with him, he made me give the paint­ings he gave me back to him. And then he paint­ed over them.” She knew he was an epic star, “an amaz­ing man and deeply tal­ent­ed.” She didn’t want to leave him but she did. “He wouldn’t stop doing heroin.”

  1. Caviar

Suzanne Mallouk, the wid­ow Basquiat: We went from steal­ing bread on our way home from the Mudd Club, to Cristal cham­pagne and a fridge full of caviar. And the par­ties, oh the par­ties. Once upon a time, oh the par­ties, oh, you would not believe. Oh, you would not believe, the music. You could see in voodoo, you were still up to see the sun­rise, flood­ing the world with light. And you were still up to see it go down. Basquiat, he bought arm­loads of Armani to paint in. His par­ties had hills of cocaine.

  1. Crash

 DON’T WANT TO SIT AROUND HERE AND WATCH YOU DIE, Kevin Bray scrawled on a scrap of paper at his friend’s loft stu­dio. Up and down, back and forth, to and fro. It was no way to live and no way to die. Up, up, up, Jean-Michel would fly, turn­ing tight and clenched when the stim­u­lants turned into pan­ic. Down, down, down, the anti­dote could always bring you home.

  1. Crown

By reg­u­lar­ly using the crown motif, the artist rec­og­nizes the majesty of his influ­encers and heroes, some­one wrote much lat­er. A friend, artist Keith Haring, paint­ed some­thing like that, for him, A Pile of Crowns. For Basquiat. Whose first crown in ‘81 was his self-por­trait.  He must have known. His own ghost story.

~

Lorette C. Luzajic is the edi­tor of The Ekphrastic Review. She writes small sto­ries and prose poems, usu­al­ly inspired by art. They have recent­ly appeared in Trampset, Ghost Parachute, Axon, Unbroken Journal, and more.