I received an electronic uncorrected proof of this for review from the publisher through Edelweiss. The photos in my copy were all gray-scale; I don't know if they will be in color in the published edition (I hope so...much of the art is lost without color.) The subtitle, The Art Scene and Downtown New York in the 1980s is what grabbed my attention. The title was pretty catchy as well.

Thanks to some self-education and a fractional exposure, I have more than a casual awareness of my contemporary art world, and, again thanks to that self-education, a much more than fractional awareness that my awareness is... fractional. So I admit never having heard of McGough (or McDermott), despite his apparent prominence in that subtitle scene. The names he drops! Warhol, Madonna (before she hit big), Michael Kors, Lagerfeld...

Some observations...

About McDermott, who he refers to both as Davis and McD:

He also told me, "Peter, you know I'm a genius." I'd never heard anyone say that, except for Truman Capote on some TV show.

Maybe when he was writing this, McGough really had never heard the Stable Jeenyus proclaim it.

On David,

David was generous but often lacked normal people skills. He would say whatever popped into his head with no filter: "You look so fat," or "You got old."

Throughout the entire memoir, that Davis was "on the spectrum" was obvious, but they didn't know it until the next to last page ("a few years back")

Another book, another jumping off point, McGough talks about a 1928 book titled "The Game of Life and How to Play it" by Florence Scovel-Shinn and the role some of it played in helping him keep McD on a keel of some evenness. His description sounds interesting and I can check it out from Open Library and as I typed this I went from next on the waitlist to it being available.

There's a lot of screaming. McGough says it - "I screamed" at someone, McD, people - a lot. He's open about his emotions. There is introspection: "Perhaps like most artists I was a mixture of absolute narcissism and crippling self-doubt, but I was eager to learn." Light bulb moments: "At the time I knew nothing about the art world and its intricate workings of collectors, agents, private dealers, art advisors, art critics, and the fine art of schmoozing." Oh, that last part!

When AIDS and untime (I took a liberty with "untimely") took some of their friend:

These three great friends and artists - Andy [Warhol], Jean-Michel [Basquiat], and Keith [Haring] - who were considered yesterday's news before they died, would all once again become best-selling artists, with Andy and Jean-Michel achieving auction records.

McDermott imposed an austere lifestyle of only wearing 19th century clothing, living without electricity, vegan diets, raw food diets, Christian Science (which would prove, as one would expect, nearly fatal).

Most of the people McGough talks about are described in terms of their attractiveness. "He was a beautiful boy" or "gorgeous" or "beautiful youth", "A rude Lauren Bacall came with a lovely Angelica Huston..." I don't know if it is deliberate crafted, affectation because of expectation, or a genuine component of his personality. It's a sad superficiality regardless of its source.

A lot of time in the past and given that subtitle, I should have expected that. The end compressed a quarter of his life into a handful of pages.

Despite the openness of his naivete, and vulnerable exposure of his many ups and down, I thought he was the most personal when he spoke of AIDS:

It's almost impossible to convey to a young person today what it was like then, when so little was known about AIDS.

I am happy for the person I never knew before reading his book that he finally saw reason and received the benefits of modern medication (McDermott was still screaming Christian Science.) He is alive with AIDS and still working. ( )