Neon Flashback

My friend Linlee was dazzled by the donuts piled high on a table at Saturday night's Kenny Scharf opening at Honor Fraser Gallery, but I was most wowed by the way Scharf's giddy, dayglo cartoon vision has come full circle since his days on the downtown art scene in late '70s-early '80s New York. His glitter-dipped space mobiles and punked out "Flinstones" stills are perfectly in sync with the current moment, and they're equally evocative of those long lost days of artistic freedom, when Madonna and Basquiat were coming into their own, living in downtown Manhattan was somewhat affordable, and dance clubs were actually FUN.

One woman, who goes by the name Maripol, captured it all with her Polaroid camera. The French-born Maripol was a stylist and scenester who helped create Madonna's "Lucky Star" look, and like a good stylist, she always had a camera at the ready to capture her friends in their youth and vintage-clad beauty. Many of her subjects would become very famous, and some of them would die young; all of them are in her beautiful book, Maripolarama, published in 2005. I interviewed Maripol for Variety's VLife back then, and she dished about her romance with a 16-year-old Vincent Gallo ("We had a nice love affair...I was such a bitch," she said), and laughed about the time Andy Warhol was egging her on to drag Tom Cruise into their limo (he ran off, terrified). Unfortunately I was just a few years too young to fully experience the electric excitement of Downtown 81 (a film starring Basquiat that Maripol produced), but you know I was rocking the rubber-and-rhinestone look that Maripol, via Madonna, introduced to the masses.

Pictured above is Debi Mazar, Keith Haring, Jaqueline Schnabel, and Tereza Scharf, Kenny's gorgeous ex-wife. Both she and Mazar were at Honor Fraser Saturday night, but, unlike another ex-downtown diva, Ann Magnuson, I didn't see either of them anywhere near the donuts.