[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the 80s. I am Meg.

[00:18] Jessica: And I'm Jessica. And Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together here in New York City, where we still live and where we

[00:27] Meg: podcast about New York city in the 80s. I do ripped from the headlines.

[00:31] Jessica: And I do pop culture.

[00:33] Meg: Welcome back.

[00:35] Jessica: Welcome back.

[00:36] Meg: It's like back to school.

[00:37] Jessica: It is. We are completely in. Where's your pencil case? Where's your lunchbox? Do you have your new saddle shoes?

[00:44] Meg: Totally. And we have so much to catch up on because we haven't seen each other for, like, a lot of the summer.

[00:50] Jessica: Yay. We're gonna catch up.

[00:51] Meg: We have to catch up. But we're gonna catch up in person on Sunday.

[00:55] Jessica: Yes, we are.

[00:56] Meg: Because, you know, we. We have valuable information to share today. Yes. On our 200th episode.

[01:07] Jessica: Yay. Can you believe it? We have made 200 episodes. That's insane.

[01:15] Meg: I love it.

[01:16] Jessica: It's incredible. It's such an accomplishment. It's nice if others compliment us, but I'm like.

[01:22] Meg: And when they don't, we compliment each other.

[01:24] Jessica: Exactly as it should be.

[01:27] Meg: And we had, like, a record number of downloads today.

[01:31] Jessica: You're kidding.

[01:32] Meg: I mean, not, like, the most we've ever had ever. But, like, all that. I'm like, what? I guess people.

[01:38] Jessica: Maybe it's because people are back. Like, they're thinking, like, now is okay.

[01:43] Meg: It's time. I'm walking down the street, and I usually listen to Megan, Jessica, what's going on? And a few people have reached out, which has been really nice. Like, I know you guys really need to take a break, but when are you coming back? I'm like, we'll be back soon. We will be back soon. Aw.

[01:59] Jessica: Don't have abandonment issues. We are not abandoned.

[02:03] Meg: But I thought you would appreciate this. Oh, dear.

[02:07] Jessica: I know. I have a funny feeling about this. Yes.

[02:10] Meg: As you should remember how we have a YouTube channel.

[02:14] Jessica: Oh, yeah, that.

[02:16] Meg: Sure. And I put up a clip. I need to put up more. I know I always say that, but

[02:21] Jessica: it's like, look, there's a clip. Congratulations on doing that.

[02:25] Meg: And so I put the clip up, and it got a lot of views, which is really nice. It was the clip of us talking about the Robin Bird documentary, which I've just been espousing. I think that's the right word all summer long to anyone who will hear me.

[02:40] Jessica: Yes.

[02:41] Meg: And also to people who clearly didn't listen to the podcast. But anyway, I'm like, you should listen to the podcast, but in the meantime, I will tell you, you must see this documentary. Michael Hicks, for example, our dear Michael, he listened to the pod. This is. This is what a true fan does.

[02:58] Jessica: Okay. I love. Like, you're getting very fierce. I'm excited.

[03:01] Meg: He listened to the podcast. He went, that sounds like a really good thing for my watch party that he does regularly with his friends who happen to be gay. He, like, gathered a bunch of his friends and they watched that documentary and they had the love fest that we promised them.

[03:22] Jessica: Oh, that's nice.

[03:23] Meg: And these were a bunch of people who didn't grow up necessarily in the vicinity and had not necessarily heard of Robin Bird. So we are spreading the bird word. Yes.

[03:34] Jessica: Doing her marketing. Yay.

[03:36] Meg: Now we had somebody else reach out

[03:38] Jessica: on the YouTube channel who I'm feeling is not a fan. I'm feeling this is going to be very bad.

[03:45] Meg: This person. And I will not name them, although they named themselves. I mean, it's a public comment.

[03:51] Jessica: Is it someone we know?

[03:52] Meg: No.

[03:52] Jessica: Oh.

[03:53] Meg: Oh, no. This is a random person. Random person. About a month ago, listened to our episode called the King of Queens and Dinner Theater, which I remember being very good and wrote, I'm trying to listen to this, but there's too much goofing off.

[04:11] Jessica: Get serious. It's a podcast. Give me the information and then shut up.

[04:17] Meg: And at first I was like, well, I feel like, okay. And then I looked to see what their profile was like, dude, you don't. I. I don't need you. You don't need me.

[04:28] Jessica: We're not for you.

[04:29] Meg: We're not for you, and you're not for us. And that's why.

[04:32] Jessica: What was the profile like? You don't have to give hyper specific info.

[04:37] Meg: It's a boomer guy. I think we're Gen X guy material, but we're not boomer guy material.

[04:44] Jessica: No.

[04:45] Meg: You know what I mean?

[04:46] Jessica: I do.

[04:46] Meg: Gen X guy gets us more open to the ladies. The joke. And boomer guys, they don't like ladies talking so much.

[04:54] Jessica: No.

[04:54] Meg: Some of them. Well, he really certainly don't like them. Goofing off.

[04:58] Jessica: I love goofing off. Like, I know how much you love making swag. I want a DS 80s T shirt that says goofing off.

[05:08] Meg: All the goofing you can handle.

[05:09] Jessica: Exactly. All goofing all the time. 100% goofing.

[05:26] Meg: On a more serious note,

[05:31] Jessica: it is,

[05:31] Meg: in fact, September 11th.

[05:34] Jessica: It is. And I. I regret my sad trombone because I didn't know that that's what you were about to talk about. So I retract the noise. But yes, it is September 11th.

[05:44] Meg: And I'll tell you, I had a lot of things I had to do this morning, and I had to be uptown. I was on a bus at 8:46, which is the time when the first plane hit, which, by the way, on September 11th I had jury duty. And I was waiting to get my assignment at 8:46am Just a few blocks away when the first plane hit. Anyway, so I'm on a bus.

[06:13] Jessica: You're like, fuck civic duty.

[06:17] Meg: Yeah, basically. So I'm on a bus this morning at 8:46, and the bus pulled to the corner and had a moment of silence. And not one person on that bus was on their phone. Everybody just politely was contemplative and took that moment. And it was absolutely beautiful, very affecting. And I knew that we were recording on September 11th, and so my story is somewhat adjacent.

[06:50] Jessica: How thoughtful.

[06:51] Meg: Well, the difference also, I think, will become clear between the 80s and 2001 and obviously 2026. I mean, some things stay the same and some things feel very different.

[07:07] Jessica: All right, well, I'm sorry.

[07:08] Meg: I'm very interested to hear your response to this story.

[07:13] Jessica: All righty.

[07:14] Meg: All right. My sources are the New Yorker. There were a couple of long articles in the New Yorker that were just incredible. And Frontline did a documentary that I watched, and I started to watch a dramatization of this event. And then I felt like, actually, I'm just going to stick to the primary sources. And I get why on Friday, December 23, 1988, in the TV room at my home on East 92nd Street, I was talking on the phone with my friend Chris from Brown. It was my sophomore year and everyone was home for winter break. And Chris and I were talking about the disaster that was breaking news, the explosion. A pan AM Flight 103 two days earlier. The 747 took off from Heathrow Airport in London at 6:25pm on the 21st, headed for New York's JFK. At 7:02, a bomb planted by terrorists in the baggage on board blew a hole in the cargo hold. It took less than a minute for the wreckage to fall six miles to earth.

[08:34] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[08:35] Meg: Probably most of the people were alive during that fall.

[08:40] Jessica: Actually, during a fall like that, I think you lose consciousness.

[08:43] Meg: Okay, that's great.

[08:44] Jessica: So that's a blessing.

[08:46] Meg: And the wreckage fell into the middle of the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland. 259 passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground were killed. Now, my friend Chris from Brown told me he knew the brother of someone who was on that flight. Ken Dorstein was also a sophomore at Brown, but, yeah, he was in my class. I didn't know him, but my friend Chris knew him. And his brother David, who'd also gone to Brown three years. He had graduated from Brown three years earlier, wasn't even supposed to be on that flight. He had spent the last six months in Israel and was scheduled to come home the next week, but got on an earlier flight to surprise his family.

[09:36] Jessica: Hideous.

[09:37] Meg: Ken and his parents had read about the disaster in the paper, but had no idea it would end up affecting them so profoundly. The airline called them the day after the explosion. That's how they found out that David was on that flight. There were 190Americans on that flight, including a group of 35 students from Syracuse University who had been traveling abroad. So these are just people who are exactly our age, Right?

[10:05] Jessica: Right.

[10:06] Meg: It was the holidays, so almost everyone was traveling to be with family. The debris and bodies were spread all over the fields and backyards and streets of Lockerbie. A fireball destroyed a whole row of houses. The entire village became a crime scene. And the citizens of Lockerbie were saddled with the huge emotional and investigative responsibility of being the site of an international mass murder. Officials from the FBI and Scotland Yard joined the local police to examine the evidence. Over 5,000 responders cataloged 319 tons of wreckage. And 19 year old Ken, who idolized his brother David, began his lifelong search for answers that week as well. Many families of the victims traveled to Lockerbie in the wake of the disaster, but the Dornsteins stayed home. David's father rarely mentioned his son's name again. The grief was too much. But Ken began the search to find out everything he could about what had caused the explosion and who was behind it. So again, he's our age. He's exactly our age. From the wreckage, it was determined that the bomb had been placed in a Toshiba mini boombox. Like I remember Vivian, okay? Covered with a shirt and placed in a checked bag. The bag had been checked onto a flight in Malta and transferred in Frankfurt to a flight headed to London, where it was loaded onto the Pan Am flight without a passenger, which now we know you can't do anymore. You can't just put a bag on a flight. You gotta have it associated with a passenger. It was detonated by a timer, which they were able to trace to a manufacturer in Switzerland.

[12:10] Jessica: Ugh.

[12:11] Meg: That's a whole other rabbit hole to go down. This guy in Switzerland who manufactured the timer. He manufactured the timers for a lot of people who were trying to buy timers for bombs. So he was like their supplier. And his whole thing is like, oh, I'm neutral. I'm neutral. It's like, no, we're not. Fuck the fuck off.

[12:36] Jessica: My God.

[12:37] Meg: I know. It's truly disgusting. There are lots of awful people in this story, but he's definitely one of them. Eventually, two Libyan men, Abde Basset Ali Al Maghrahi and Laman Khalifa Fima, who were both officers who served under Muammar Gaddafi, were tried in Scotland. Now, you will attest, in the 1970s and 1980s, terrorist attacks were not uncommon.

[13:11] Jessica: Correct.

[13:12] Meg: But the perpetrators almost always claimed responsibility. That was kinda the point. The Palestinian terrorists who seized the Israeli athletes at the Munich Games, radical Islamists who held American hostages in Iran, and the homegrown Weather Underground. And we've discussed them. Everyone's like, hey, that was us. Because the whole point is to get your message across.

[13:37] Jessica: Precisely.

[13:38] Meg: But no one ever claimed responsibility for the Pan Am flight. The trial in Scotland resulted in one man being sent to prison. Megrahi. FEMA was acquitted. Not enough evidence. Megrahi, who was convicted of 270 counts of murder, only spent eight years behind bars. This is the timeline. He was indicted again in Scotland. And this is the whole, you know, it's an international event. Where are you going to try them? And everyone, I guess, agreed or didn't agree. But regardless, Scotland was the place that they decided would be where they would be indicted. They have a completely different system there. It's so different from how American courts work that it's very frustrating for all the Americans who are affected by this tragedy to feel like they got any kind of justice because it just didn't look like justice. Again, the timeline. Megrahi was indicted in 1991, but he was in Libya. Gaddafi didn't extradite him until 1999. Finally, Gaddafi's like, okay, you can have him. And he was found guilty in 2001. Then in 2009, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and given only three months to live. And the Scottish government released him on compassionate grounds because he was close to death, Right? And he returned to Libya to a hero's welcome. When he is put on the plane, he's like, you know, is this guy going to survive the flight?

[15:31] Jessica: How long did he live after he got to Libya?

[15:33] Meg: Three years.

[15:34] Jessica: Piece of shit.

[15:35] Meg: When he gets off the flight, he's strong as can be, strong as can be, no problems whatsoever. He is strutting down that flight of stairs and everyone's cheering for him and hugging him and kissing him. There is footage of Megrahi, like I just said, descending from the private plane to cheers and being hugged and kissed and whisked away by a group known to be part of Gaddafi's inner circle. So that just. We know we got the right guy, right? And like I said, Megrahi lived for three more years, dying in 2012. While Gaddafi swore he never personally ordered the bombing, he acknowledged that Megrahi was a government employee and therefore Gaddafi agreed to pay $2 million to the families of the victims. In response to that, the UN lifted sanctions against Libya. So it was what?

[16:38] Jessica: Yeah, they just lifted sanctions?

[16:41] Meg: They made a negotiation. It was a negotiation.

[16:45] Jessica: Well, a pretty fucking bad one, I agree.

[16:50] Meg: Now, during the Libyan civil war in 2011, when Gaddafi was overthrown, his former Minister of Justice admitted that Gaddafi had ordered the bombing personally. Not a shocker. Gaddafi was assassinated in an actually very brutal, brutal way.

[17:09] Jessica: Oh, how?

[17:10] Meg: He was, like, pulled out of a hidey hole and beaten to death.

[17:17] Jessica: Good.

[17:18] Meg: So that happens during the civil war, but no person other than Megrahi has ever been convicted of the bombing. Now, what was the supposed motive, you may ask?

[17:29] Jessica: I do.

[17:30] Meg: In the 80s, the US Navy was involved in a number of confrontations with Libya over the Gulf of Sidra, including bombing Tripoli, which humiliated Gaddafi and led to a number of retaliations. And this was one of those.

[17:49] Jessica: What year did Back to the Future come out?

[17:52] Meg: Early 80s.

[17:53] Jessica: 84. Right.

[17:54] Meg: I. I can't.

[17:55] Jessica: Why? I was just sort of chuckling to myself. That doc is like, it's the Libyans.

[18:00] Meg: Yeah. No, I mean, it's true. All the 80s movies were like, that's the bad guys.

[18:07] Jessica: Those are the bad guys over there.

[18:10] Meg: For real. Now, Susan, David and Ken's sister, doesn't really care about any of this. The perpetrators of her brother's murder and their motives don't interest her. David was at the wrong place at the wrong time, so she doesn't connect him to those people who killed him. But Ken had a different response to his brother's death. He started by examining all the detritus that David left behind.

[18:41] Jessica: Oh. Because it was returned to him by the.

[18:43] Meg: All those lovely Scottish people. That is a lovely rabbit hole to go down. The care that they took with the bodies, with the people, with the things. There's a story about this Scottish man who found a dead body in his yard and it was too late to resuscitate. Not resuscitate, but remove oh, remove.

[19:09] Jessica: It was too late to have it removed. You mean, like, late at night?

[19:12] Meg: Yeah.

[19:13] Jessica: Oh, okay.

[19:14] Meg: And so he just stayed all night with that body so it would not be left alone. So there's an enormous human story here. And heart just broke. They did gather all. I mean, you know, everybody's luggage was everywhere, so they. They associated the luggage with the people and. And returned whatever was still intact in any kind of. But they cleaned mud off of stuff before they returned it. But Ken talks about getting some Scottish mud, and he thought that was so interesting, you know, that became part of the story. So he weeded through the stuff that his brother had been traveling with. Crushed package of Dunhill menthol cigarettes and used up tube of Crest Tartar Control toothpaste found at the crash site. And then he started going through all of the stuff he had in storage at home. I mean, he'd graduated from school, but he was still traveling. He hadn't really planted himself yet. And he was a writer, so he read his poems and letters and notebooks. David wrote down everything. He was once on a train going back to school when he sat next to a girl his age, and they started talking. And this was. It just hit me so hard, because how many times was I on that same exact train through the northeast corridor, headed to school after a break? And how many times did I sit next to someone who was my age who didn't necessarily go to Brown, but might have gone to, you know, one of the half dozen schools that are along that corridor? So he sat next to a girl his age, and they started talking, and then he wrote about her in his notebook. Quote, I never board a train or walk down the street without hoping that I will fall in love with someone or something. Emily Dexter, I hope your life goes well. I hope that you have children whom you want to have and love. I hope that your husband to be, because she was engaged, continues to be the good man he now seems to be. I hope you will tell me how you, Emily Dexter, are fairing. Inform me of your state of mind.

[21:40] Jessica: Oh, God.

[21:42] Meg: When Ken tracked down Emily Dexter, oh, my goodness. Years later, she vaguely remembered the train ride. Said she thought David was a bit

[21:52] Jessica: overbearing,

[21:54] Meg: but nice enough. She did have two kids now. And another crazy thing, when he was at Brown, David was in a writing class in which he wrote a draft of a fictional autobiography of an unknown young writer who dies in a plane crash.

[22:13] Jessica: Stop it.

[22:14] Meg: Swear to God.

[22:15] Jessica: Freakish.

[22:16] Meg: Ken became a writer and a documentarian, and he wrote a memoir about David called the Boy who Fell out of the Sky. So you can read all of these wonderful David stories in that book. And he produced a documentary because he's like hard hitting news documentarian guy. And he produced a documentary for Frontline about the Lockerbie disaster called My Brother's Bomber.

[22:45] Jessica: Oof.

[22:45] Meg: He goes to Libya and tries to meet.

[22:49] Jessica: Really?

[22:49] Meg: Oh, yeah. And tries to meet with all the people who supposedly had something to do with the creation and planting of the bomb. Now this is going to blow your mind. Prepare yourself.

[23:00] Jessica: Ready to be blown.

[23:01] Meg: Through his tireless investigative work, Ken broke open the case in 2020. And he is responsible for Abu Agila Mohammad Masoud Kir al Marimi for being tried for his participation in the bombing. Everyone was always talking about the technical expert, that was his title, who was known to have traveled with Megrahi, but nobody could figure out who this guy was. Ken figured it out.

[23:38] Jessica: That's amazing.

[23:39] Meg: He traced a passport number used by that expert to Masoud. Then he found a Libyan operative who named Masood as a master bomb maker. Then he tracked down Massoud to a Libyan prison where he was being held on other charges. The US has now currently indicted Massoud for making the bomb. And his federal trial, which was supposed to start this month, has been postponed. It will begin in January 2027, and it will be the first time a suspect in the bombing of Pan Am 103 has been tried in a US courtroom.

[24:22] Jessica: That is the most uncanny story. That's amazing. And, you know, you've told a bunch of stories about friends or family who won't give up. And those people are extraordinary and probably tortured because that is what would motivate you, I would imagine.

[24:46] Meg: But I thought he was. Sorry, you finished?

[24:48] Jessica: No, no. I'm just saying. So, you know, it's. It's theme that is fascinating. The. The average person who becomes a brilliant investigator.

[25:00] Meg: I mean, he was a teenager when this happened, so it shaped his entire life, brain, career, everything. And then for him to actually be the person who broke open the gates when everybody else, clearly all these different international governments were like, that's the best we can do. And he's like, let's try a little harder, shall we?

[25:25] Jessica: Well, and being a journalist, I'm sure was, you know, his ace up his sleeve. That he had the ability, he knew how to get to whoever it was that he needed to talk to. That's a skill.

[25:39] Meg: I also think about the father of David and Ken who couldn't speak about his son anymore because the grief was so big and apparently they were not estranged, but they were having a bumpy time when the tragedy happened. And so they never got a chance to really reconcile. So that just must have compounded the grief. And I also think about Susan, the sister who's like, whatever my grief is, it has nothing to do with Libya, is nothing to do with those individuals. They didn't target my brother, so why do I give a fuck about them? It was just wrong place, wrong time. I just think it's very interesting how it affected the two siblings so differently, this sort of relationship with the individuals. Not even the country, not even the, you know, international issues that caused it in the first place, but the individuals who did it, who made the thing.

[26:42] Jessica: Well, you've got three family members with three very different ways of expressing grief.

[26:47] Meg: Yeah.

[26:47] Jessica: And that's the. I mean, you and I have both experienced loss. That's the thing about grief is, like, you never know how you're supposed to feel. You know, there's a death in a family and you feel that you're supposed to have maybe a performative, you know, outward show of grief and weepiness, and that doesn't happen, and people feel guilty. Or there's a person in my family who never spoke of her child again after the child was killed in an accident, but never again. Never spoke, not once. And what would have been that child's younger siblings didn't know that that child existed until much later in life. Because that's the power of grief, to shut shit down. A mention will make it all happen again and how terrifying that is.

[27:42] Meg: And I won't draw too many parallels to our current political situation and what caused this retaliation by Libya on a day like today. I don't have to. We are citizens of the world, and we need to be responsible citizens in the world.

[28:03] Jessica: It's very hard to argue that point.

[28:15] Meg: Do you have an upbeat story for us?

[28:17] Jessica: No. No, I don't. Oh, no.

[28:19] Meg: Our 200th episode is so.

[28:22] Jessica: But it's interesting.

[28:23] Meg: Okay, great.

[28:24] Jessica: I think it's interesting.

[28:25] Meg: Everything about this city is interesting to me.

[28:29] Jessica: There you go. So there have been several episodes on this podcast in our. In our 200 or 199 prior, where we've talked about street art.

[28:43] Meg: Yes.

[28:43] Jessica: And that includes subway graffiti, Keith Haring, Adam Purple with the purple footsteps. In the 80s, early 80s, street art was booming. And the people who are really associated with that, like, if you're even remotely in the know, it's Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. But there was a third person in that group, and his name was Richard Hambleton.

[29:18] Meg: Yes, I know of him.

[29:20] Jessica: Oh, good.

[29:22] Meg: I don't.

[29:22] Jessica: Oh, my God. You didn't do an episode on him. Am I repeating it? Am I?

[29:26] Meg: No, but I was planning to. So I'm really happy that you are taking this on. The reason why it's been on my list for ages is because my cousin Taylor, who grew up in the city, who was born in the 80s, he grew up in the city, was asking if I knew anything about Richard, what

[29:46] Jessica: we're about to talk about.

[29:48] Meg: He didn't know the artist, he just knew the street art, the thing. And he described it and I was like, no, I don't know what you're talking about. And then I dug a little bit deeper and I was like, I gotta do a story on that guy. And now you are.

[30:01] Jessica: Well, I love that you're informed because we can sort of have a conversation about him. Isn't that lovely? So here's some of the backstory about Richard Hambleton. Richard Hambleton came to notoriety and fame in New York City thanks to his artwork. Very much like Banksy, he was anonymous, unlike Keith Haring, unlike Jean Michel Basquiat, who used street art as promotion. Richard Hambleton was a really different kind of artist. And his claim to fame was he painted black silhouettes of men in different poses, usually somewhat threatening, like lurking in a corner. And they were life size, lurking in a corner, jumping up, looking like it could be out of the wall right on you. And he was so prolific, the paintings became known. They became known as the Shadow Man.

[31:10] Meg: Yes.

[31:11] Jessica: And Richard Hambleton, I'm going to tell you a little bit about him and why the Shadow man is so very much a product of who he was. So he is from. Was from Vancouver originally and went to art school in Vancouver. And his first street art he was doing in Vancouver. And he would walk around with. What do you call, like a. Like a ketchup squeeze bottle, you know, like with the nozzle. One of white paint and one of red paint. And he would go around the city and using the white bottle, draw an outline of a person like it was a murder scene, and then used the red as the blood. And he did it all over the city. And people, some people thought it was a murder scene.

[32:04] Meg: So it was on the ground.

[32:05] Jessica: On the ground. He then took it a step further. He made himself into the private investigator. Like he took on a Persona as the artist of being the investigator and the murderer, you know, and this is part of the. Now the graffiti he was putting up on the walls trying to find the murderer. Mr. Re.

[32:31] Meg: Spell that.

[32:32] Jessica: Mr. Yeah. M r Period. R E E E. Okay, so.

[32:36] Meg: Ooh, I love this. Oh, I get a mystery.

[32:39] Jessica: Mystery. And his, his name was a takeoff of Dick Tracy. He was a provocateur. So unlike Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, who were very much self promoting and also not provocateurs, but particularly Haring using his street art as protest and as just a method of communicating, this was all about performance. He then moves to New York City and is part of that downtown scene that we've talked about so many times on this podcast. And he started drawing these eerie, blacked out, featureless silhouettes all over the city. And here's a quote from Richard. I painted the town black. They could represent watchmen or danger or the shadows of a human body after a nuclear holocaust, or even my own shadow. Very creepy, very interesting. I'm going to give you the images of the mass murders. So Richard was a beleaguered artist. Beleaguered by what you ask? Heroine.

[33:59] Meg: Oh, no.

[34:00] Jessica: And so he had an enormous splash.

[34:04] Meg: That makes me so sad.

[34:06] Jessica: In the early 80s and his street art started to be represented by gallerists, galleries around the city, the same ones who were scooping up all of the downtown artists. And he even did something really amazing. He started to do portraits of himself on paper, but I think it was on like a kind of architect's blueprint paper so that with time, within the course of a couple of weeks, his image would fade to a shadow.

[34:34] Meg: Oh, wild.

[34:36] Jessica: And that series was called I Only have Eyes for your. And he would stare in these, these self portraits ominously. So the idea of having, you know, is it someone who's looking over you to protect you? Is it someone who's going to do you harm or is it you? Was absolutely his whole shtick. So that went on. He was doing very well. And then he had a really interesting stroke of luck because one of the people who loved him was Malcolm McLaren.

[35:10] Meg: Okay.

[35:10] Jessica: And Malcolm McLaren still had, I think the shop was Seditionaries with Vivienne Westwood. And they were doing a series of clothes called the Witches Collection. And they had Keith Haring creating artwork that they were painting or stamping onto these black long robes and skirts. And. And so he got in on that too. And the images are incredible because it's black on black, but you can still see the shadow, the outline. But Malcolm McLaren was absolutely taken with him. And Bob Gruen, the famous rock photographer, had his studio, I think it was on Broome. And there was a shadow man right there, which is how Malcolm McLaren got to know about Richard Hambleton. So Richard continued in the gallery scene. And this is an interesting thing about that scene. At the time, you know, there were certain gallerists who would basically become the protectors and patrons of artists who were so fucked up they couldn't look after themselves. He fell into that category, you know, with drugs. And his only interest was to paint. He didn't care about being homeless. He didn't care about money. He didn't care about anything. It was a monomania for getting the materials to paint, which also says a lot about why street art was his thing. And then he disappears. The shadow man disappears for 25 years, like.

[36:52] Meg: And he actually disappeared. Or just.

[36:54] Jessica: No one. He was just off the scene.

[36:56] Meg: Gone. Like Richard Hambleton was gone missing or just not producing.

[37:02] Jessica: But not in the city, like. You know how it is back then. Oh, that's true. If you weren't in the city, you

[37:07] Meg: could just leave and no one would know what happened.

[37:10] Jessica: Yeah, absolutely.

[37:12] Meg: If you don't have your home phone number and your parents still live. We have talked about that.

[37:17] Jessica: Exactly. When he reappeared 25 years later, still on smac, he started painting something called the beautiful paintings. And they're sort of quasi landscapes, but genuinely beautiful, single color, lots of different washes of the color on these canvases. And he was rediscovered, but now by the fashion world. And of all people, the person who got very interested in promoting him was Giorgio Armani.

[37:50] Meg: So what year are we now?

[37:52] Jessica: We're now in the 2000s.

[37:53] Meg: Got it. That makes sense. Giorgio Armani is very sleek and primary colored.

[38:00] Jessica: Yes, indeed. And I don't remember the exact amount, but around this time, two of his paintings, and I don't think he owned them, so that is a tragedy. But two of his paintings sold Sotheby's for almost a million dollars.

[38:16] Meg: Oh.

[38:16] Jessica: So it was 900 and change.

[38:18] Meg: But maybe he doesn't want money. Cause then he'll just buy too much heroin.

[38:23] Jessica: Well. Or food.

[38:26] Meg: Or food. Food's good.

[38:27] Jessica: And the other thing that happened was that he had skin cancer. And the skin cancer was on his face and was eating it away.

[38:35] Meg: Stop.

[38:36] Jessica: So he. He had problems. And by the way, he came back in 2007. That's the exact date. So Armani puts together a showing of the new paintings and a retrospective of the shadow man. And he becomes a darling of that whole scene and gets coverage in Vogue magazine. So he's now rising, rising, rising. And he gets named as the Godfather of street art. He gets the honorific of being recognized as the first to do it. They threw a party at a gallery. He arrived and was so uncomfortable. He sat in the corner and then left. He kept going, barely keeping it together, not really seeing any money being celebrated, but no money. And one of his gallerists who had helped him in the past came back and looked after him, and he died of skin cancer in 2017.

[39:42] Meg: Okay, not that long ago.

[39:44] Jessica: No, not that long ago. So I was just fascinated by this guy. And here's what it is. Like, clearly he's mentally ill. Like, let's just begin with that. And a smack addict. The idea that he was getting anything done is shocking to begin with.

[40:00] Meg: It's kind of impressive, I have to say, when I see these movies or even the documentaries about Basquiat, and I'm just like, how did you guys do? How were you so prolific when you were so messed up? So much young youth.

[40:16] Jessica: The energy of youth, maybe. But one of the things that Richard Hambleton talked about when he was interviewed was that he was the last survivor of the trio and how difficult that was for him. And whatever sense of belonging he had was always tenuous. And their deaths certainly, you know, much early. I mean, in the 80s, it seems to have been part of what promoted his departure. That's my opinion. A tragic figure, I think. A visionary. I think the Shadow man, you have to see it to understand it, because they're so simple. But there's something so ominous, you can tell that it's done with a brush. It's not spray paint, and it's done in a crazed, fast style. You can tell from the brushstrokes that he's maniacally getting these people who are clearly representatives of him all over the city.

[41:19] Meg: It's interesting that the energy that you're putting behind them, I've never seen one in person. Do we know if there's one that still exists?

[41:29] Jessica: That's a great question. I think that's a good. Hello, Reddit. Who knows?

[41:35] Meg: Is there still a Shadow man somewhere? I have. I kind of feel like, well, you know, he did.

[41:40] Jessica: He did do Shadow man on Canvas.

[41:42] Meg: Oh, he did.

[41:43] Jessica: Okay.

[41:44] Meg: I mean, so I've seen pictures, is the point. I've never seen them in person. And the. Certainly the photographs, I didn't get an ominous feeling from them. I just was attracted to the starkness of it. To me, I felt like that was kind of pleasing and simple and not like crazed and energetic. So I don't know, it's interesting.

[42:08] Jessica: No, it's. And I think that's part of the point of that artwork is it's a shadow. What are you going to project onto?

[42:16] Meg: Onto a shadow. Right.

[42:17] Jessica: And terrifyingly, is it yours? That's what really got me. I thought that was very interesting. I felt that they were ominous because they would. They would rise up out of nowhere. You'd turn a corner.

[42:30] Meg: No, I. When you talk about it, I hear what you're saying. If you see it in person and you're not expecting to see it, then I can see how it'd be like, ah, you know.

[42:40] Jessica: Yeah. And. And it's not even the ones that are looking like they're leaping. It's the ones that are tucked in the corner that are slyly.

[42:48] Meg: There's one under a bridge. There's a. There's a picture of one that's under a bridge. I mean, yeah, I hear you, but, yeah, to me, it felt like, serene, but again, I didn't see it in person, so I don't know. I can't.

[43:02] Jessica: But I think that's. I think that's the beauty of. Of. Of his work, that what you're saying is as legit as whatever I see. That's an artist who managed to speak to people in the starkest way. And that, to your point, like, it's almost nothing but riveting. And I think it's ominous also, just because of his love of the murder mystery thing, that there's. There's a violence.

[43:29] Meg: You know, I. I mean, yeah. When you started talking about the chalk outlines, I mean, guy after my own heart.

[43:36] Jessica: Well, I. Again, I saw that and I was like, that's for me, yay. But, yeah, really fascinating. And I'm sure that I'll get around to talking about this on another podcast at some point, but the gallerists who decided to take these people on, that's very interesting. Like, that's an interesting thing. Like, it's a culture within the culture. And why did they do it?

[44:00] Meg: I mean, what was it that they

[44:02] Jessica: saw in the art?

[44:03] Meg: You're making money off of it, for one thing. Well, not to be cynical, yes.

[44:08] Jessica: But there's nothing. I mean, managing a junkie is not easy.

[44:14] Meg: I. And so can't imagine.

[44:16] Jessica: Right. So the question is, were they managing junkies? Because those were really the artists who were wandering around at that time and getting noticed or truly, anything for a buck, I'll take anyone on.

[44:29] Meg: Both things can be true. The art world is not known for its huge heart, but I'M sure there are a few people out there who. Angels in the wings.

[44:41] Jessica: A tragic figure, but a figure who left his mark. And I talked, just as a postscript, I talked to my friend Michael, who was around for all of that at the time and was very good friends with Jean Michel. I asked him, did you know Richard Hamilton? And he said, no, but he was a genius. I met him, but I never got to know him. And his work, to this day, still resonates with someone who is on the scene. And his reaction. It was his reaction that got me. It was so fast. He got right back to me and was like, oh, that's so great. You're going to talk about him like he's. He was the real deal.

[45:24] Meg: That's awesome. Well, thank you. And now I'll send this episode to my cousin Taylor, who, as a little boy, saw a shadow man, and it stuck with him for his whole life.

[45:38] Jessica: Very interesting.

[45:49] Meg: So what's our tie in our word for today? Yes.

[45:56] Jessica: Is doggedness. And I think that your friend Ken showed an extreme level of doggedness in his not only attempts, but eventual success in getting his brother's murderer prosecuted.

[46:14] Meg: Can you believe it? This is happening right now.

[46:17] Jessica: No, it's amazing.

[46:18] Meg: It's crazy.

[46:19] Jessica: And I think that Richard Hambleton's doggedness to just keep making art and even going so far as to come up with an entirely new look, an entirely new method, he really meant what he was doing, and he didn't stop. He. He could have died a thousand times and yet he persisted.

[46:46] Meg: I love that. Oh, well. Welcome back.

[46:51] Jessica: Welcome back. Do we sing the welcome Back Cotter theme song now?

[46:56] Meg: That is sort of the first day of school.

[46:58] Jessica: What is it?

[46:59] Meg: Welcome back.

[46:59] Jessica: John Sebastian wrote that song and sang it.

[47:03] Meg: Did he?

[47:03] Jessica: He did.

[47:04] Meg: Dreams are your ticket out Dreams are

[47:06] Jessica: your ticket out that back to that

[47:10] Meg: same old place that you laughed about.

[47:12] Jessica: Okay, there. There have been people who have asked us not to sing on the podcast anymore. Really? No, you know, like, because of the

[47:20] Meg: Yuck, yuck, yuck, yum, yum, yum.

[47:21] Jessica: Exactly.

[47:21] Meg: Oh, pooey.

[47:22] Jessica: Okay, good. I'm just saying. All right, so welcome back.

[47:26] Meg: Welcome back, Sam.