Intelligence for Dummies - (ZE) by Glenn O'Brien (Paperback)

About the Book

A portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last 50 years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of O'Brien's own writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America.

Book Synopsis

"Enclosed in this beautiful package, please find: an agile mind, a perfect style, a canny and undeceivable heart, and a welcome, enduring presence in the reader's life." --Michael Chabon

The definitive collection of Glenn O'Brien--first editor of Andy Warhol's Interview, host of the public-access landmark TV Party, and GQ's beloved Style Guy--gathering fifty years of writing on art, music, fashion and the political temperature of America in a full-color hardcover introduced by Jonathan Lethem.

Glenn O'Brien's public-access show TV Party had Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie as its house band and Jean-Michel Basquiat working alongside them. He had already been the first editor of Andy Warhol's Interview, the magazine he credited with inspiring People. He would go on to write the serial Chanel commercials that starred Scarlett Johansson, Brad Pitt and Matthew McConaughey, to run creative for Barneys, and to answer readers' questions about shirt cuffs and manners as GQ's Style Guy, syndicated in GQ editions around the world. It is an unlikely single career, and Intelligence for Dummies is the first book to show it whole.

Assembled after O'Brien's death in 2017, it is a portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last fifty years of cultural life. The selection runs from music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, to the political temperature of America: criticism, profiles and essays alongside aphorisms, poems, freeform meditations, diatribes, fiction and tweets. He wrote some of the first important features on Basquiat, Christopher Wool and Richard Prince; the most moving pages here are his evocations of friends--Warhol, Basquiat, Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, James Nares--built by accretion out of chatter, circumstance and location.

A full-color hardcover, the book sets O'Brien's writing alongside artwork and photographs from the collaborators he wrote about, and opens with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, who places him "in a neighborhood with figures like Marshall McLuhan and Andre Breton, who seem to stand both enmeshed in and to one side of their cultural moment."

Intelligence for Dummies is ZE Series 001, the volume that set the pattern for the series: a writer in conversation with visual culture, given the full-color treatment usually reserved for the artists. It is a deeply personal look into Patti Smith and Jean-Michel Basquiat's New York, and into the culture of money and celebrity politics that followed.

Review Quotes

Praise for Intelligence for Dummies:

"Enclosed in this beautiful package, please find: an agile mind, a perfect style, a canny and undeceivable heart, and a welcome, enduring presence in the reader's life."

--Michael Chabon

"Glenn O'Brien was, depending on how you look at it, either the first or the last real man: sensitive, cultured, astute, funny as f***, gentle, with style to die for. Whether you think he inspired the best or is the end of a certain lineage, you still know he was rare. I was lucky to know him and feel luckier still to have his writing to remind me what a blessing his voice was."

--Lena Dunham

"Glenn O'Brien delivered irony and grace with every gesture, thought, and sentence. He was acid-edged knowledge with a flounce of camp, a deeply intelligent person, and the voice you want on Warhol's factory and the absurdities, generally, of life in the later twentieth century. If you're a critic, read this book and weep that you'll never be him, nor write like him."

--Rachel Kushner

"It is a gorgeous volume, one that most writers can only dream about."

--Tom Teicholz, Forbes

"The best book I've read in the past year is Intelligence for Dummies, a collection of essays and writing by the late American journalist and editor Glenn O'Brien. He was a friend. He wrote the text for one of my exhibition catalogues, and reading this is like hearing his voice again."

--Stefan Brüggemann, Financial Times

"The smartly designed book features critical reviews, profiles, and essays alongside poems, freeform meditations, diatribes, tweets, and works of fiction . . . the rounded selection pointedly reflects his virtuosity with form and the imaginative fluency he had within the medium of words."

--Eugenie Dalland, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The real keepers in this volume are precisely detailed and often moving evocations of his friends: Warhol, Basquiat, Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, James Nares. He conveys them in ways that are strangely difficult to quote, since they are contingent on chatter, circumstance, anecdote, and location, and evoke by accretion."

--Lucy Sante, New York Review of Books

"All of the great writing in this beautiful book . . . summed up so much of what the world lost when O'Brien went to the great after-hours party in the sky. That blend of wit and irreverence, a middle finger and a sly smile, always cool and smart."

--Jason Diamond, InsideHook

"O'Brien has certainly given us a means to feel the vibes where he once held court and to contemplate the era's mysterious machinations, subtle codes of conduct, and modes of style . . . O'Brien's writing is admirably alive."

--Jeremy Sigler, BOMB Magazine

About the Author

Glenn O'Brien (1947-2017) was one of the most widely read and influential magazine writer-editors of the last fifty years and was a hall-of-fame copy - writer and creative director whose ads are ingrained in popular culture. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, O'Brien studied at Georgetown University and Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts. After college, he joined Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine, which he helped shape over his 20-year association. He wrote regular columns in publications including Artforum, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Paper, Purple, and Spin, and was widely read on the subjects of art, fashion, and music. Beloved as GQ's "Style Guy", his witty advice column was syndicated in GQ editions around the world. O'Brien's wrote dozens of books, including 2011's best-selling How to Be A Man, published in six countries.