The Man Nobody Killed Quotes

“The shoot for the “Everybody” video was a few days later. Given the minuscule budget, it was left to Madonna’s friend Debi Mazar to do makeup, while East Village club kids, including Levin and Michael, were brought in to populate the floor in front of the stage. The twentysomethings received little direction, as the focus was predominantly trained on Madonna and her dancers. Just once, the camera operator descended to the dance floor, giving the club kids visions of stardom. Michael was filmed for just a moment, his arms waving slowly, face set in deep concentration. Fleeting, but impossible to miss.”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“by Madonna, found herself in a limousine with the singer, Martin Burgoyne, and, by chance, Michael Stewart. As Levin wrote in 2019: A limo—she had a limo! She dropped us off at the Pyramid around 3am—we were too hyped to go home. We danced to Dollar Bill Y’all, the bass throbbing through the roll in our hips and our smoky, giddy brains, swimming in the dark—the Pyramid was so black, an inky pool whose blackness made it seem bigger than it was. The song thrummed in our veins “dollar bill y’all, dollar bill y’all, dollar dollar dollar dollar dollar bill y’all.” Which we didn’t have but so what? We had the song. We’d been to the show, ridden”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“Basquiat to a lion and Haring to a panther—they were, he thought, “different beasts, but in the same jungle.” There was, too, a shared work ethic. As one curator put it, these were “manic draughtsmen who drew constantly, whether in the studio, on trips or at the homes of friends and acquaintances.” They became good friends. It was, therefore, not a surprise when Basquiat, that fall day in 1983, left a finished painting on Haring’s drywall: a silhouetted Black figure bookended by pink-faced, club-wielding police in blue uniforms. Then he left the city, off to Europe for a couple of weeks with Andy Warhol. According to Warhol, while they were”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“When Michael died, Basquiat went to Haring’s Houston Street studio. The two had known each other since meeting years earlier at the School of Visual Arts. Haring, a student there, helped Basquiat get past a troublesome security guard. Later that day, Haring saw SAMO tags all over the SVA walls and realized he’d hung out with the elusive artist. At the time, the two ran in different circles. Haring, skinny and ebullient, was drawn to graffiti, a form from which Basquiat, a more pensive personality, was starting to distance himself. All the same, there were vital commonalities. Patrick Fox, who knew both men, likened Basquiat”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“The gallerist Nosei could see that, while only twenty, Basquiat already had a fully formed social conscience, so she wasn’t surprised by the unapologetically critical interpretation of law enforcement. The work wasn’t just about color or design, she marveled decades later; it was about ideas. Basquiat heard about Michael’s hospitalization during a night out at the Roxy. In the middle of the dance floor, a man approached him and whispered the news in his ear. The artist, who once estimated that his work was “about 80% anger,” reacted with passionate intensity. Later, he drew black skulls in crayon on paper on the floor of a girlfriend’s apartment.”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“Burroughs—“a coalition of punks,” as one critic put it—Basquiat convinced gallerist Annina Nosei to let him participate in a show she was planning. In advance of the exhibit, Nosei gave the artist use of the two-thousand-square-foot studio space in the basement of her Prince Street gallery. (The implications of a white woman installing a Black man in her “underground lair,” as Fab 5 Freddy described the arrangement, didn’t sit well with some of Basquiat’s friends.) Working in Nosei’s studio, Basquiat completed La Hara, a depiction of a red-eyed white policeman, and Irony of a Negro Policeman, an acrylic and oil stick work depicting a Black lawman in uniform. The latter was displayed in Nosei’s”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“Basquiat had depicted the armed agents of the city before. Coming off the New York/New Wave, a February 1981 group exhibition at P.S. 1 that put the painter in the company of, among others, Warhol, Maripol, and William Burroughs—”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“seemed reluctant to believe that “Madonna” was the singer’s real name. The eponymous debut album was released several months later, introducing listeners to “Lucky Star” and the Lucas-penned “Borderline.” Madonna marched slowly up the charts, cracking the Top 200 in Billboard early that September, just a couple weeks before Michael Stewart was brought to Bellevue without a heartbeat. Over the next year, the album would sell nearly three million copies in the United States alone.”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“with the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Madonna didn’t seem particularly avant-garde.” When they met to discuss the album, he noticed that, despite the successful singles, Madonna was not yet living a life of luxury. She was staying in Basquiat’s painting-cluttered apartment. (She’d dumped the artist several months earlier after finding him at Larry Gagosian’s house with an immoderate number of women and cocaine.) Madonna recorded eight tracks.”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“his bed at Lenox Hill Hospital, where he was recovering from chest pains. The song was rerecorded in a Manhattan studio, released on October 6, 1982, and sprinted up the dance charts. This set the stage for two pivotal events in the young life of Madonna: the first was an appearance shortly thereafter at No Entiendes, Haoui Montaug’s popular cabaret; the second was the filming of her debut music video. The label had allocated $1,500 for the production—an amount that was, even then, a pittance. The shoot was at Paradise Garage, a sprawling West Village discotheque, where Madonna had recently performed. After the show, Jordan Levin, a Mudd Club and Pyramid celebutante who’d been invited”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“The afternoon of September 26 was chilly and overcast. On the cusp of sunset, several hundred people, most of them white, were milling around the limestone pavilion on the park’s north side. Montaug, that legendary doorman with the soul of an activist, had indeed drawn a crowd. Many had come because of David Wojnarowicz’s eye-catching flyer, which had been plastered on lampposts in the East Village: it depicted skeleton policemen beating a handcuffed Black man. Even Madonna showed up. “Everyone from the neighborhood was there,” recalled Kenny Scharf, who attended the protest with Keith Haring.”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“You could call Howard “Haoui” Montaug, then thirty-one years old, a doorman. But that wouldn’t really describe who he was, or what he was. Not exactly. Montaug had been raised on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue, the son of a stay-at-home mother and a union man who marched against the Vietnam War. At the age of thirteen or so, he was caught trying on his mother’s nightgowns. She was devastated, while her husband wondered if the child’s presumed homosexuality was the result of something he’d done. Montaug was taken to therapy.”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York

“The city’s “war on graffiti,” as Mayor John Lindsay called it, began in the summer of 1972, when the spitting-mad Lindsay demanded that the City Council pass a bill to make it illegal to carry an open can of spray paint in public. Lindsay’s successor, Beame, took up the cause, spending millions”
― Elon Green, The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death, and Art in Michael Stewart's New York