heroin
GRITtv: Tamra Davis: Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
In the 80s, before she directed Hollywood comedies like Half Baked and Billy Madison, Tamra Davis shot hours of footage of her friend Jean-Michel Basquiat. The young artist went on to international stardom before dying of a heroin overdose at age 27, and Davis went on to Hollywood.Years later, she has revisited that footage and put together a documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child about Basquiat, the world he lived in, and, she says, "how we treat our celebrities." Basquiat, of course, achieved stratospheric fame, and his life and tragic death, Davis notes, contain lessons for artists and celebrities today. She joins us in studio to discuss.
Email this pageGRITtv: The F Word: Real News Pales Next to Palin
Palin Palin all the time, and never a peep of complaint. That's the long and short of the news cycle these past few days, but there are just a few stories on which I'd like to see some follow up. Take the one about Peter W. Galbraith, a former UN ambassador who advocated tirelessly for Kurdish independence through scores of op-ed pieces for the New York Times and other outlets, while never disclosing to readers -- or apparently, to editors -- that he stood to benefit, financially, from Kurdish independence. Now it turns out he had ties to a Norwegian oil company that scored an enormous stake in at least one of Kurdistan's oil fields -- a stake made possible by independence -- and worth something like $100 million to Galbraith. Or how about the story about Afghanistan, heroin and the CIA. Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president, apparently gets regular payments from the CIA and has for much of the past eight years. The story that hung around for a day or two, then poof. It's disappeared. We participated ourselves, so no one's innocent, but think you can leave reporting to fend for itself? You can't.
