20 The New York Review
The Sweet Smell of Hipness
Luc Sante
Intelligence for Dummies :
Essays and Other Collected Writings
by Glenn O’Brien.
ZE Books, 336 pp., $35.
Glenn O’Brien was the leading bou-
levardier of my particular subgenera-
tional pocket, the one that thrived in
lower Manhattan from the last days of
the hippie era until sometime around
the end of the 1990s. He was an ex-
emplary if atypical citizen of its cul-
ture, and something of a figurehead
as it evolved from local, fringe, and
“underground” to international high
fashion. He lived and worked on the
leading edge of style at all times, and
was invariably at the right club at the
right hour on the right night, but his
résumé suggests someone from an ear-
lier era. As if he had flourished dur-
ing the Regency or the fin de siècle,
he was a dandy and a wit, an aphorist
and a tastemaker. Although his point
of entry was Andy Warhol’s Factory
(he was born in Cleveland, attended
Georgetown, and was a graduate stu-
dent in film at Columbia before get-
ting there), he worked primarily with
words, as magazine editor, book editor,
columnist, and publicist. He exuded
cool, sangfroid, and—unusually for the
time and place—quiet competence.
But those jobs, for all the money,
prestige, and mobility they gave him,
were not his primary claims to fame.
In that era careerism was regarded
with suspicion, and in that much more
physical time he made his mark by
his sheer presence on the scene: his
role as both a throwback (some part
of him always inhabited the world of
The Sweet Smell of Success) and as
the very image of hipness. His cultural
footprint was broad and significant, if
not always noticeable to the average
cultural consumer. He was putatively
most visible as the underwear model
on the Warhol-designed inner sleeve
of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers
(1971)—although the jury is still out
on whether his picture was the one ac-
tually used.
O’Brien, who died in 2017, was the
host from 1978 to 1982 of TV Party,
an antic talk/variety show with an au-
dience that was restricted to people,
largely in lower Manhattan, who could
tune in to the public-access cable chan-
nel on which it ran (a set of DV Ds has
since been issued). In 1981 he wrote
and produced a feature film starring
Jean-Michel Basquiat, a youthsploita-
tion picaresque originally titled New
York Bea t, but financial woes kept it
from being released until 2000, when it
was retitled Downtown 81 and took on
an entirely different significance—his-
torical and elegiac, in view of Basquiat’s
early death.
And he edited Interview (1971–
1974); worked at magazines ranging
from Rolling Stone to High Times to
Allure, Spin, Maxim, Mirabella, Pur-
ple, and Arena Homme Plus; cowrote
and edited Madonna’s Sex; edited
some other touchstones of the period
(Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High
School, Terence Sellers’s The Correct
Sadist); wrote a column on advertising
for Artforum (“Like Art,” 1984–1990)
and one on men’s fashion for GQ (“The
Style Guy,” 1999–2015); and briefly
toured a conceptual standup comedy
act in which he covered, as a musician
would a song, a routine by the legend-
ary B. S. Pully, who played Big Jule
in Guys and Dolls and was known for
working blue.
He was also involved in the adver-
tising business himself, starting as a
copywriter for the late Barneys New
York chain in 1986 and becoming
its creative director two years later.
After that, he worked for Calvin
Klein. “I did the ‘Marky Mark’ un-
derwear campaign with Kate Moss,
and the jeans campaign that President
Clinton demanded be investigated bythe Justice Department,” he wrote in
“The Story of My (Work) Life [Long,
Stalker Version],” a bio on his web-
site. (In that 1995 campaign, young
models, male and female, are interro-
gated by an offscreen voice. Nothing
untoward occurs, but the innuendo is
laid on thick, from the cheap carpet-
ing and fake-wood paneling of the set
to the light leaks and bits of leader
in the film to the questioner’s voice
and affect—fiftyish, gruff, insinuating.
Everything suggests a screen test for
porn, at best, and probably something
worse.) He represented perfume, hotel
chains, bottled water, and U2, and
“named and positioned the interiors
company...Royal Hut.”If this was problematic for some,
no one mentioned it. After all, in the
1980s art and commerce became fully
acknowledged bedfellows. Artists were
photographed wearing banker suits
and smoking Montecristos, strove to
be featured in ads for Absolut Vodka,
caroused with real estate magnates
and deep-pocketed promoters with
unplaceable accents. Once-ragged
lofts were given makeovers; the potato
fields of the Hamptons were plowed
under for new constructions of ever-
increasing size; VIP rooms made it
possible to go clubbing without risk of
contamination by the unwashed; and
anybody who was anybody ate in the
kitchen at Mr. Chow’s, because it only
held one table—reservations not ac-
cepted. It was all as Warhol had fore-
told, with additional glitter from the
wand of supply-side economics.O’Brien was quite sanguine about
all this. “Advertising was like art, and
more and more art was like advertis-
ing,” he wrote near the end of his life.
“Ideally, the only difference would be
the logo. Advertising could take up
the former causes of art—philosophy,
beauty, mystery, empire.” He felt that
Barbara Kruger’s work, in which she
employed advertising techniques to
highlight social and cultural contra-
dictions, was merely inferior advertis-
ing: “There are no ethics in fashion.
There are no ethics in magazines. There
are no ethics in advertising.” Naturally,
he was a liberal; he despised Trump, theNRA, Israeli apartheid, the sanctioning
of Cuba—he also despised burqas, on
which he took the French government’s
view.
He was, more precisely, a Kennedy
White House liberal, who believed in
honor, truth, justice, a few laughs, and
a good pour. The Chinese silk ban-
ners of Marx and Engels that hung on
the TV Party set were merely a pun on
the word “party,” although he had at
least sampled Marx. He just thought it
was time for Marx to chill. He was an
achiever, a print-world architect with a
wide range of social and practical skills,
who charmingly pretended to be a gen-
tleman of leisure but would never go
hungry in his lifetime. He was educated
by the Jesuits, which means that he
wore Irony in scarlet on his breastplate.
No wonder he cut such an odd—and
oddly beguiling—figure in the New
York low bohemia of his youth. It must
have been a great day at the Factory
when he first walked in, sometime in
1970: here was a potential future mem-
ber of the ruling class, somehow hand-
some and intelligent at the same time,
who had internalized the principles of
cool so deeply that he always pitched
his voice as if he were selling you reefer
in the men’s room at Minton’s in 1946.
And he was keen on hanging out with
people who were not like him, which
was pretty much everybody at the
Factory. (He was, for one thing, het-
erosexual.) Despite circumstantial dif-
ferences, he instinctively grasped and
absorbed Warhol’s view of the world.
He understood the transience of fame,
the power of the image, the somatic
effect of repetition, the allure of em-phatic understatement, and the contra-
puntal sympathy between the ordinary
and the transgressive. Some other peo-
ple did, too, but like Warhol and unlike
most of them O’Brien possessed an in-
nate executive ability that would allow
him to make hay from those insights.Intelligence for Dummies is subtitled
“A Portrait” on its cover, which sug-
gests that it is not so much a Selected
or a Best-of as an attempt at an ideal
representation of someone whose
virtues did not all lie on the page. It is
magazine- like in its layout, with dif-
ferent fonts and sizes of type, sliding
margins, occasional bursts of double
columns, and many artful photographs
unobtrusively illustrating the pieces.
It mixes together essays, columns,
and tweets under six broad catego-
ries (“Being Glenn O’Brien,” “Art,”
“Politics,” “Music,” “Advertising,” and
“Fame, Fashion and Living”). These
make for a complex, multifaceted pre-
sentation that exemplifies O’Brien’s
many contradictions. He was a gifted
writer, although his most formally re-
alized works largely appeared in art
monographs and exhibition catalogs,
which were, as always, read by few.
His major impact as a scribe came
from his columns, which were many,
some of long duration. In that function
he shone. He was a brilliant maker of
remarks, and his remarks on the page
are of a piece with his remarks in the
field. The trouble with remarks is that
they seldom survive their context,
meaning their time. When he wrote
his column “Glenn O’Brien’s Beat” for
Interview in the 1970s and 1980s, for
example, each installment was like a
phone call from its author, relating news,
gossip, gags, passing observations, and
sharp judgments delivered offhand. It
possessed urgency and resonance. But
phone calls dissolve into the ether along
with the strings of information that
bind them to the world. And no one
writes a column sub specie aeternitatis.
You can footnote all the proper nouns,
but not the wind blowing through the
streets at the time of writing.
Think of columns as much longer
tweets; the years will turn their gossip,
trends, forecasts, and recaps to mud.
It’s impossible to quote one of that era
without accidentally including a Dan
Quayle joke. Fortunately, O’Brien had
several other modes. He was at his best
with the subjects that engaged him most
directly, such as fashion advertising:Why don’t [many] publications
allow criticism of fashion? Because
fashion brings home the proverbial
bacon, Osbert. That’s why we are
so blasé that it’s nothing getting
the New Yorker with a two page
Versace ad that features two five
figure hookers on a bed on drugs,
one passed out in a garter belt
showing her complete ass and the
other making goofball eye contact
with the reader, as it were, and this
is a normal thing, because fashion
brings home the bacon.(He did keep his eye on the bottom
line: “Andy [Warhol] must have re-
alized then that even if film was hisGlenn O’Brien, Cannes, 2000Gina^ Nanni