Pittsburgh Dish

McFeeleyphilia

New film delivers the mail

by Christopher Arnott

McFeely? The mail carrier McFeely? I met him on his rounds one day, a decade or so ago. He was not in uniform, but he had the mustache. And he had some bits of paper to deliver. Spoke very well of his friend Fred Rogers. Liked kids, if I recall. The consummate postman.

I wasn’t living around Pittsburgh. McFeely’s speedy delivery route took him to New Haven, Connecticut, where he was visiting a friend associated with the Yale Divinity School. While in town, he appeared on a local radio program which presented live recreations of golden age radio dramas. McFeely was typecast as a mailman, but the missive he carried was more sinister and suspenseful than anything he ever had to bring to puppet royalty on the Mister Rogers show. The radio script was reworked so McFeely could be identified by his opening watchcry of “Speedy delivery!”

When he trudged through rain, sleet, snow, or whatever to our New Haven Advocate newspaper offices that day, McFeely stopped to chat. Not many mailmen bother (and the USPS frowns on extensive fraternizing), but he has a mission: to pass on not just old-fashioned pre-email-era envelope-bound correspondence, but the messages and quaint quasi-urban beatitudes of Fred Rogers.

Our chat took many turns. A biography of Anthony Perkins, the Psycho actor in more ways than one, had just been released, with mention of how Perkins and Rogers had known each other as undergraduates at Rollins College in Florida. This is unremarkable trivia unless you note their strong physical resemblance and deem MisteRogers and Norman Bates to be light and dark sides of the same skinny-framed aw- shucks soul. McFeely knew of that bond, and he talked openly of some of the viler parodies of Fred Rogers that scattered the radio drivetime airwaves in the wake of some sketches on National Lampoon’s “That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick” LP, and how the show dealt with them—as politely as possible. He explained the gestation of the McFeely monicker: it was Fred Roger’s middle name, and his mother’s surname. Mr. McFeely revealed that Fred Rogers went tribute-name happy at the outset of his kids’ show. He apparently named several characters after the show’s commercial sponsors until he advised that this probably wasn’t such a good idea.

At the end of our talk, Mr. McFeeley presented me with a signed photo of himself, one of stacks of official photos printed by Family Communications, the company he and Rogers worked for when not lounging around Rogers’ living room. He also signed a photo for my nephew Simon, 6 years old at the time, and promised us a tour of the MisteRogers studio the next time I was in Pittsburgh. I visited the city just a few months later, but Simon was appalled by the suggestion that he would have any interest in a little-kid’s show like MisteRogers’ Neighborhood. He wouldn’t be caught dead in its studio. I felt for McFeely—his fans could be so fickle.

Yet he endures. McFeely’s still pounding the pavement, five years after Rogers’ death, traveling hither and yon spreading the good word. He no longer works for the MisteRogers Neighborhood branch of the U.S. postal service (one imagines the benefits there to be lousy; an extra cookie for ten years service, perhaps. Under another name, David Newell (presumably his own father’s surname this time), Mr. McFeely spreads the Rogers gospel of kindness, charity and puppet government throughout the world. He’s taking some time away from
this awesome ambassadorship to host the premiere of a new documentary by Paul Germain. Titled Speedy Delivery, it is dedicated to McFeely and his singular speedy duties—a rare portrait of a TV sidekick, a supporting character with his own tales to tell and mail-truckload of troubles to bear.

Germain’s movie has not been made available for Pittsburgh Dish—a stunning rebuke of Mr. McFeely’s policy of open communication and speedy delivery—but we have discerned this much: it follows David Newell on his Rogers rounds, delves into the continuing MisteRogers mystique, and shows how Pittsburgh was as warm an environment for the show as the Land of Make Believe. The timing of the film’s release is apt; last fall, after years of rerunning old MisteRogers episodes, many PBS stations finally let the show go, “outgrowing” it in
favor of faster, slicker offerings. MisteRogers will be less of a tangible TV totem, now just a fading youthful memory of simpler times.

I remember the similar fall of Captain Kangaroo, when his Treasure House (I still called it that, though modern times had redubbed it “The Captain’s Place”) closed its doors for good in 1984; Big Brother may have been watching that year, but the Magic Drawing Board was not. In my slothful 20s, I roused myself at dawn to watch the last week of the Captain’s decades-long stint on CBS, and wept.

Nobody thought to make a movie about Mr. Green Jeans. Whatever your feelings about real-time, leisurely-to-the-point-of-boredom televised child’s play, or about button-down sweaters or overly familiar houseguests, MisteRogers was a Pittsburgh institution that gave sanity and calm to the country in times of crisis. Which is not
something you can say about another Pittsburgh institution, Night of the Living Dead.

No midnight zombie flick, Speedy Delivery screens at 7:30 p.m. April 10 in Regent Square Theater (1035 S. Braddock Ave., Pittsburgh). Special delivery details available here.

Pretentious wanker dies

Tries to swipe Cope's thunder

While Pittsburgh columnists celebrate the life of Myron Cope, two newspaper writers (and Dish contributors) in New Haven, Conn., ship William F. Buckley to Potter's Field.

From Christopher Arnott of the New Haven Advocate :

William F. Buckley has gone to meet his maker, unless you consider that his maker was really Yale, which figured in the title of the book with which he made his name, God and Man at Yale, and many of whose alumni provided staunch support for Buckley's egregious rebranding of conservativism.

Without Buckley, right-wing humbuggery might have become a fading fringe of old-world bigotry a half-century ago, but he was able to revive the robber-baron attitude, dress it up in Ivy League trappings and turn it into one of the enlightened movements of the 1960s, giving it a veneer of articulate, literary respectability. Bastard.

Rowan & Martin's "Laugh-In" booked Buckley for an indulgent and unjudgmental segment, joking that they'd fly him in on a plane with only a right wing. But his own humor was always of the smug, self-centered, dismissive type. When faced with an argument he couldn't match, or an opponent more well-spoken or worldly than himself (Gore Vidal comes to mind), he lost his intellectual reserve and got insulting and threatening.

Even his mystery novels sucked--as shallow and archaic and anachronistic as his rhetoric. As student overseer of the Yale Daily News, Buckley was arguing that the university was impossibly liberal two decades before it allowed women to attend (a decision he abhorred) and while it still had a quota on how many Jews could be admitted. He was pro-segregation during the Civil Rights revolution. The only blessing we can take from Buckley's long life was that he never held public office.

For more bile, see esteemed former Advocate staffer (and Yalie) Paul Bass' laudable burst of venom, and community comments, here.

Photo below by Frank Kownacki

Of course this means Warhol

Andy and Norman, Together Again

by Christopher Arnott

If there’s a ‘60s icon heaven, I’m sure they’ll have a hell of a coffee table book collection. Norman Mailer died last week. It’s become my mission in this column to connect every known person, place and thing throughout history to Pittsburgh’s pasty pop art deity Andy Warhol. Mailer’s an easy one, and not just because of the handy celeb-unifying dance floor at Studio 54.

In fact, John Homans, in his online memorial for New York Magazine here has beaten me to it:

"It in fact, as an artist, Mailer's accomplishment has as much to do with that of Andy Warhol as with his fellow novelists, in the sense that a large part of his artwork was his existence in the world.

But where Warhol emptied his persona of any human agency, achieving a kind of shimmering weightlessness, Mailer always revealed the human mechanics that drove him. They were co-inventors of modern fame, two sides of a coin."

Go, Homan! Andy and Norman’s personalities were worlds apart—Pennsylvania vs. New Jersey, Factory vs. desk, mumbling effeminate fly-on-wall versus blustering brawler—but they both ruled cultural corners of New York, and they both hit their creative peaks during the ‘60s. Despite their differences, they both were so well suited to that era that you could easily imagine them co-starring in one of the biggest hit plays of that time, The Odd Couple:

Norman: There! I’ve thrown the plate of spaghetti against the wall!
What do you think of that?!
Andy: I like the lines and colors. Now could you smash the bottle of tomato sauce so the label sticks up there? Mmmmmm.

The real-life exchanges between the two were stranger than fiction. A blogger named Palladian, responding to a Mailer obit post at althouse.blogspot.com, writes:

Mailer always makes me think of this passage from Andy Warhol's POPism:

"One Monday afternoon at the Factory, [Mark Lancaster] told me that Mailer had walked over to him at a party over the weekend and punched him in the gut.

I was impressed. "Norman Mailer actually punched you?" I said. "How great.

Why?"

"That's what I asked him. He said it was for wearing a pink jacket."

Norman Mailer was one of the few intellectuals that I really enjoyed."

We may in fact have Warhol to blame for such outlandish self-aggrandizing Mailer films as Maidstone. That act of cinematic abuse not only followed Warhol’s anyone-can-act ethic, it was made in the wake of Valerie Solanas’ attempt on Warhol’s life, not to mention the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, and is those kneejerk artworks about inhumanity and its discontents.

The invaluable website www.warholstars.com features this Mailer commentary on Warhol’s kitchen-sink drama Kitchen, as related in George Plimpton’s oral history Edie:

Norman Mailer: "I think Warhol's films are historical documents. One hundred years from now they will look at Kitchen and see that incredibly cramped little set, which was indeed a kitchen; maybe it was eight feet wide, maybe it was six feet wide. It was photographed from a middle distance in a long, low medium shot, so it looked even narrower than that. You can see nothing but the kitchen table, the refrigerator, the stove, and the actors. The refrigerator hummed and droned on the sound track. Edie had the sniffles. She had a dreadful cold. She had one of those colds you get spending the long winter in a cold-water flat. The dialogue was dull and bounced off the enamel and plastic surfaces. It was a horror to watch. It captured the essence of every boring, dead day one's ever had in a city, a time when everything is imbued with the odor of damp washcloths and old drains. I suspect that a hundred years from now people will look at Kitchen and say, 'Yes, that is the way it was in the late Fifties, early Sixties in America. That's why they had the war in Vietnam. That's why the rivers were getting polluted. That's why there was typological glut. That's why the horror came down. That's why the plague was on its way.' Kitchen shows that better than any other work of that time."

Troy Patterson, at www.normanmailersociety.org, mentions these two kindred cinematic spirits in the same breath, as a way to explain a (vastly superior, I’d say) third:

What's your take on Cassavetes? Here's mine: The filmmaker is one of three avant-gardists who readied America for reality television and the cult of pop personality, and his highly wrought psychodramas are an essential template for every loosely scripted, boozily delivered Real World screaming match. You will surely agree that one of his co-forefathers is Andy Warhol, whose Screen Tests made one giant leap for voyeurism and whose Sleep perfected the art of nothing happening. Do you need convincing that the other is Norman Mailer?

The grandest connection, however, is when Mailer wrote his own self- mocking obituary, in 1979 at the request of Boston Magazine (dug up and posted here), he quoted Warhol in it:

“I always thought Norman kept a low profile. That’s what I liked about him so much.”

Of course this means Warhol

Andy's music

by Christopher Arnott

For the past 30 years or so, the namedropping standard for celebrity biographies and autobiographies—be they by rock stars, movie stars or those peoples’ gardeners—has been Elvis Presley. It’s doubtful you could even get your life story published without an Elvis interaction. Recent examples include the autobios of Peggy Lipton and Don Rickles.

But second place in the “my meeting with” sweepstakes easily goes to Andy Warhol. It helps that he (or his double?) appears to have been at every party ever thrown in New York City, but the literary anecdotes actually run the gamut from art openings to TV shows to booksignings.

Here are three new music-related ones, from books published in the past few months:

“In the 1960s, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan rubbed shoulders in the back room at Max’s Kansas City ....”
—from Punk 365, a photographic survey of punk music published by Abrams, with text by Holly George-Warren. Considering how much more time he spent in the discos than the punk clubs, it’s remarkable that this punk has eight separate references to Warhol, only a few of them of the obvious Velvet Underground variety. There are photos of Warhol with William Burroughs and (at the Factory) with Richard Hell and Punk Magazine editor Legs McNeil, plus references to him alongside photos of his protégés Walter Steding (the only music act besides VU for whom Warhol was credited as a “producer”) and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“Andy was a media gourmet and I was on the cover of every single magazine, which meant he had to have Polaroids of us together. That was his addiction. I bought his “Electric Chair in Red” painting at the Factory in 1973 or 1974, for $2,000. That painting seemed to be appropriate, because in my stage show I was electrocuted in an electric chair every night. I still own that painting.”
--Alice Cooper, in Alice Cooper, Golf Monster (Crown). Alice had several other art-god relationships, not least with Salvador Dali.

“One heady night, Peter [Zaremba] briefly sat talking with Warhol about music and the Fleshtones. The bleached Warhol approved of Peter’s plans, and then urged him to chat further with Truman [Capote], and to dance with Bianca [Jagger], which Peter did, his head spinning as the evening lengthened.”
--from Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, by Joe Bonomo (Continuum). Warhol’s listed in the index eight times, including a recap of the time Zaremba and his fellow Fleshtones backed Ian McKellen reading a Shakespeare sonnet on one of Warhol’s TV shows.

Welcome to Pitts(hic!)burgh

The Pittsburgh Whiskey Festival takes place this Friday at Heinz Field (tickets are steep). Pair that with the art of Mitch O'Connell (pictured) at Zombo Gallery in Lawrenceville on Saturday (free). 

Of course this means Warhol

Worth the trip

by Christopher Arnott

While Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum continues to display Andy’s small-screen ventures, the city where those shows were produced, New York, is hosting a series of Andy’s much better known, and much better period, short films. “Warhol’s World” runs Oct. 20 through Nov. 11 at the Museum of the Moving Image. The program includes all the early hits, in all their 16mm glory:

Oct. 27: 46 minutes of the eight-hour Empire, Vinyl, Kitchen, Beauty #2, Camp, the 1965 Velvet Underground and Nico live footage from the Factory, Paul Swan and Hedy.

Oct. 28: Poor Little Rich Girl (just the first reel) and I, A Man.

Nov. 3: Outer and Inner Space (a Dual Projection experiment starring Edie Sedgwick as a girl struck by the screen presence of Edie Sedgwick), plus Lupe and More Milk Yvette. Then the classic Chelsea Girls.

Nov. 4: My Hustler, Loves of Ondine, Bufferin, Ari and Mario, Nude Restaurant.

Nov. 10: Since, Salvador Dali, Bike Boy and screenings of new documentaries about Warhol hangers-on Danny Williams and Candy Loving.

Nov. 11: Lonesome Cowboys. Mrs. Warhol (starring Andy’s mother) and Sunset (soundtracked by Nico’s voice reciting her own poetry).

I’ve been stunned lately by the exquisite DVD collections of Kenneth Anger’s films (released by Fantoma; volume two just came out, with a 48-page booklet). Anger vs. Warhol is grist for another column, but just on a packaging and scholarship level the Anger sets are so amazing that I went looking to see if Warhol’s gotten a similar treatment by anyone. Amazingly, there seem to be no domestic DVD of Warhol’s cinematic works, just a few European imports.Theater-bound festivals like these are your only hope. Strangely, I think Kenneth Anger works better on a big screen, with a live audience (the main reason to get the DVDs is his bored-sounding commentary about the horrible deaths and suffering many of his collaborators faced), while Warhol’s stuff loses very little on the small screen, and the multi-hour Empire and Sleep might even benefit from being left on the screen like that yule log at Christmastime. Until someone rises to the challenge, you have to don your NYC cineaste garb and sit in a filmic museum to get your Blow Job fix.

Pictured: Viva in Nude Restaurant.

Look Back on Angry

Twelve Angry Men come to Heinz Hall

by Christopher Arnott

I saw the tour of Twelve Angry Men, coming Oct. 23-28 to Heinz Hall, last year in Connecticut when the guy who played Norm on Cheers was sharing star billing with Richard Thomas (the only “name” left in the cast). In a smallish role, George Wendt nearly crowded everyone else off the stage. The cast might actually be better balanced with his absence.

Richard Thomas was a hardy theater actor long before and after The Waltons, a real risk-taker. He starred in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at Hartford Stage, where he also did such challenging, typecast-busting roles as Richard II and Brother Julian in Albee’s Tiny Alice. He was a member of outré director Peter Sellars’ American National Theatre company in Washington D.C. in the mid-’80s, starring in The Count of Monte Cristo. Now he’s exercising another acting muscle—the one that makes him a Henry Fonda for our time. He’s not doing John-Boy here, but he is playing upstanding and earnest and straightfaced, and he’s darn good at it. Hell, before he was doing The Waltons, he was doing Butterflies Are Free in summer stock, and Barefoot in the Park besides. All the sensitive, supportive parts.

A guy has died in Twelve Angry Men, but the tour won’t. It’s the remnant of a powerful and carefully cast Roundabout Theatre production that starred Boyd Gaines and featured one of my favorite- ever character actors, Tom Aldredge (Carmela’s dad on The Sopranos). The touring version I saw, and which has apparently changed a bit since then, wasn’t as canny in its casting, but still came off as a credible, snappily paced revival of a play that’s been beat into a sluggish pulp by too many overwrought community theater productions.

It’s a thrill to see a seemingly irredeemably dated drama like this one done up right. Not reinterpreted, not modernized, not reimagined, just neatly staged with a consistent tone and rhythm.

Twelve Angry Men began as a TV drama, and you can still see how its key physical moments were designed for camera close-ups. It certainly isn’t the ensemble piece it could be. But it’s an American equivalent
of a good Sherlock Holmes story: a mystery solved patiently through sober deduction, despite the yammering distraction of well-meaning naysayers. There are personal breakthroughs galore (“I’m a bigot!” “I’m a bad dad!”) to make this a “modern,” psychiatric potboiler. But the pleasure’s in the old-fashioned dramatic storytelling—and seeing Richard Thomas in a part he’s now had a year or more to make his own.

$19.50-$45.50. Tue.-Thu. At 7: 30 p.m., Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 & 8 p.m., Sun. at 1 & 6:30 p.m.
(412) 392-4900.

The World on a String

by Christopher Arnott

As titles go, the Black Sheep Puppet Festival is pretty redundant. Puppetry is the bastard performance artform, presumed by most casual partakers to be a haven for rank juvenilia, created by craftspersons so socially backward that they have to hide behind dolls. Black Sheep indeed.

I’ve endured the egregrious misunderstandings about this endlessly innovative artform myself. My father was a world-class puppeteer, author of a key work on the subject (Plays Without People, published
in 1962 and dedicated to a baby-sized me). On more than one occasion I’d be at one of his shows where 2- or 3-year-old children were being turned away, to the bitter complaints of parents who were appalled that the tots would be denied entry to a “puppet show.” It didn’t deter them that the performances in question were of Oedipus Rex, a classical Greek tragedy during which a monarch tears out his own eyes. My father, a classical scholar using his own translations and research, found marionettes a perfect medium to perform plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and others, since the size of the wooden performers in a standard auditorium was similar to what an audience might see if sitting in a Greek amphitheater looking at human-sized actors.

Puppetry’s an amazing medium for political theater, social satire, Latin American-style literary fantasies, horror, burlesque and melodrama. Such range and power is epitomized by the Black Sheep
Puppet Festival, whose ninth annual edition begins with a party at the Brew House (2100 Mary St.,412-381-7767, thebrewhouse@gmail.com) Friday Oct. 19.

Another artform which, like puppetry, gets short shrift because it seems to be merely a shrunken-down form of a supposedly higher art will also be regularly on view during the Black Sheep fest. That
unfairly maligned instrument of entertainment is the divine, misunderstood ukulele, equally capable of quaint savage-breast soothing and punk vigor. Liz Hammond strums original “ukulady” tunes at Friday’s opening, and Buddy Nutt (an eclectic singer- songwriter who moved to Pittsburgh’s shores just recently and is as adept on kazoo and didgeridoo as on uke) performs Pickleville, his “tragicomic opera for pickle puppets” among the featured festival performances on Oct. 26 & 27.

Other performers in the more-than-week-long fest include Indicator Species (“Dinner’s Ready”), Skin and Bone Theater (“The Errorist”), Major Arcana (“The Monkey’s Heart”), Body Invisible (“On TV”), Udienetta (“Secnarf Pool”), Joann Kielar (“Worlds for a Better World”) and The Ubuists, who present their inflatable adaptation of one of the landmark works of outré puppetry, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. All of the above can be found on the main performance program Oct. 26 & 27.

In its base form, Ubu Roi is as harrowing as anything in Oedipus Rex (or Macbeth, on which it’s loosely based). Bring young children to see it and face the glare of my imperious father looking down from
heaven with puppeteerial scorn.

There are all-ages programs for the kiddies, after all, on selected afternoons. The Black Sheep Puppet Festival also features lectures, demonstrations, special events at Tom Sarver’s Tom Museum, workshops with Sarah C. of Toronto’s Stranger Theatre, Pittsburgh puppetry icon Gregory Knipling showing off puppets from his collection, and an assorted of other diminutive yet grandiose delights. For a full schedule, stick your hand up http://www.blacksheeppuppet.com.

Photo: Buddy Nutt

Of course this means Warhol

Andy's bands

by Christopher Arnott

The Grizzly Bear show at the Warhol Museum was sold out. Those modern art lovers sure love their Brooklyn-based indie bands! But what would Andy like?

I’m pretty sure he’d be proud to have his namesake institution host Yo La Tengo, as the AWM did. That’s a band Andy (whose musical tastes were generally as pop as his art) could understand—rough and modern yet sweet, gritty and urban yet melodic and lush. I suspect Grizzly Bear might seem a bit precious to a guy who, in the days leading up to his death 20 years ago, was hanging out with Dolly Parton and Miles Davis, and who did more to establish the term “superstar” than anyone besides Jesus Christ. And God only knows what Warhol would make of Matthew Shipp, the brilliant out-jazz pianist who played the AWM. Shipp’s hip, a constant experimenter whose latest CD is rare solo piano trip, but he exists in a separate realm from consumerist pop art and Happening-enhanced cinema verite.

Some of the future live music gigs at the Warhol:

Nov. 2: Funky Rhode Island noise-rockers The Chinese Stars (pictured above).
Nov. 14: Wistful classically attuned indie sprite My Brightest Diamond (pictured right).
Nov. 16: Velocity Ramblers, featuring members of the legendary folk-rock outfit The Holy Modal Rounders, at a screening of a documentary about the band, Bound to Lose. Guess who’s sitting in? Playwright/
actor/lyricist Sam Shepard, whose music cred includes writing a play with Patti Smith and writing a song with Bob Dylan.

Are there any direct connections between Warhol and Shepard? You’d assume so, but the ones I’ve found are pretty tenuous: they had some friends in common, and the Chelsea Hotel—Shepard once lived there, and Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls there.

A Mitch in Time

Pink elephents and poodles at the new Zombo Gallery

by Christopher Arnott

Poster art shows are perfect for Pittsburgh, which still has a street-flier mentality and a lot of abandoned warehouse walls to paste paper on. Starting with a reception Nov. 3 at 5:30 p.m., Lawrenceville will get a dose of what a truly great poster can do, when the new Zombo Gallery at 4900 Hatfield St. hosts “Never Forget to Get Drunk: The Art of Mitch O’Connell” through Dec. 1.

As poster propaganda goes, that title slogan only scratches the surface of O’Connell’s oeuvre, which ranges from the demonic to the kittenish, rendered in a kitschy cool style that’s retro-seeming but actually is richer and raunchier than the ‘50s/’60s tone it exudes. His celebrity caricatures, monsters, big-eyed children and
overexcited businessmen have the shading and colors and thick black lines of an era when average color printing was more basic and illustrators knew what to emphasize. But the Chicago-based delineator’s stuff is also distinctively his, a generation beyond the Rat Fink, Hannah-Barbera, Hot Stuff, Liddle Kiddles and Famous
Monsters and Barbie doll imagery it evokes (to name a hip few).

One of the more amusing things about O’Connell’s art is that you could hold an exhibit of his work yourself, picking from thousands of images, and not even have to pay him or tell him. That’s because for most of his career, while he creating hipster-demimonde masterpieces with one hand, he was churning out clip art (those freebie illustrations used to brighten up cheap newspapers and Tag Sale ads), much of it easily recognizable as his work.

So it’s nice to see Mitch O’Connell getting his name out there, and showing the young turks what it’s like to be able to create the sort of sex-kitten and swinger’s-circus imagery that most of us have to rip out of old magazines.

The Zombo exhibit will apparently include O’Connell’s drawings as well as his poster art. At the opening, the artist will also be signing copies of his new book, which collects hundreds of examples of yet another accessible art form he’s mastered: tattoo designs.

He really gets around, this guy, and doesn’t even need a stretched canvas. Unless tattooed beer bellies count.

Of course this means Warhol: The Boob Tube

Warhol on MTV, SNL

by Christopher Arnott

[Of Course You Realize This Means Warhol is a regular column I did for about 15 minutes in the early days of Pittsburgh. Andymania hasn’t subsided, so I’m bringing it back.]

The Warhol Museum’s greeting the new fall TV season with a special screening of the artist’s ultra-casual late-night and cable programs of the 1980s. Hard to believe, but in 1981 Saturday Night Live gave Warhol a regular slot for his idle musings (which were even lamer than David Spade’s a couple of decades later). So did MTV (independently of that Cars video featuring the Warhol superstars). So did early New York cable networks like Madison Square Garden Cable. My memory of the SNL bits is that it was just Andy’s old frightwigged head babbling on about nothing (and not in a prescient Seinfeldian way either), while the cable bits were like a low-rent Playboy After Dark, annoyingly nudging reluctant partying celebrities into performing.

What some enterprising cable producer should have done—or still could do—is create a Warhol channel, so that the master’s longer-form films could get an uninterrupted airing. I’m sure Campbell’s Soup and Brillo Pads would be happy to advertise on such a network.

If you thought some of Warhol’s film projects of the 1960s seemed low-budget and slapdash, the TV stuff is even less prepared, and less innately experimental. The Warhol Museum promises “unedited camera footage” as a bonus. Wow, that must really be something. If you go, remember the media truism that the TV version of something is never ever the most worthwhile version, be it a sporting match, My Big Fat Greek Wedding or a self-portrait of a pop artist.

The TV screenings are now through Oct. 4. http://www.warhol.org/calendar/ has the details.

Photo: Warhol's MTV show, Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes, featured Debbie Harry

Toons; See ‘em

Cartoon art exhibit debuts at Children's Museum

by Christopher Arnott

Museums and drawings have gone together since the dawn of chalk. But some sorts of drawings have taken a bit longer to get institutional support. Cave scrawlings are cool, but more modern cartoons tend not to get their own exhibitions. In Pittsburgh particularly, a city which had a major stake in the comics-driven pop art craze of the 1960s, this is a shame.

The shame subsides with the opening this month of the Toonseum, a new gallery at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum. It’s curated by Joe Wos, whose prior museum-friendly cartoon gigs include a stint as resident cartoonist at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in California.

The Toonseum’s first exhibit is a moving tribute, “From Illustration to Animation: Picture Books Come Alive Through Animation.” That’s some long-winded title, but that’s what legitimacy gets ya. Wos’ own work, seen at www.onceuponatoon.com, is decidedly lowbrow and fantasy-filled, and he’s done cartoon demos at the Children’s Museum for years, but his gallery’s clearly going to be touching on some mature topics in upcoming shows like “Drawn in Black and White: The Portrayal of Minorities in Cartoons,” announced in a press release but not yet on the official schedule. Local color will be provided January 2 through March 31 with “Plot Threads: Storylines by Great Lakes Cartoonists.”

Also planned is an exhibit where kids can see how kids are portrayed in comics, which may cause an uprising if today’s youth takes offense with the age-old stereotype that all youngsters must wear striped shirts, short pants and beanies. It’s unlikely that the Toonseum will ever reach the sociopolitical level of the exhibit American Caricature: An exhibit of political cartoons, which runs through Oct. 20 at Three Rivers Arts Festival Gallery on Liberty Ave. and includes and Andy Singer image of Disney characters in army duds invading a small country in the name of capitalism, but it’s a start.

What local talent could the Toonseum conceivably draw from? Well, the Great Lakes chapter of the National Cartoonist Society includes everyone from Topps Kids baseball card illustrator David Coulson to Archie comics writer Craig Boldman to underground cartoonist Wayno to legendary “Wordless Workshop” and “Laugh-In” comic strip artist Roy Doty.

The grand opening of the Toonseum is Oct. 13 at Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, 10 Childrens Way; details at www.toonseum.com.

We’ll see how long this latest stab at museum-approved cartooning lasts. The Toonseum’s only scheduled to be part of the Children’s Museum through October 2008, after which the project hopes to become its own non-profit in its own location.

Of course this means Warhol...

Green Soup.

by Christopher Arnott

The first major exhibition of Andy Warhol's works in Ireland apparently wasn't until 1998, when a hundred or so pieces (most of them from Pittsburgh's Warhol Museum, natch) were shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Dubliners saturated with James Joyce imagery ("Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...") were no doubt delighted to see Warhol's Cow Wallpaper.

But Warhol had entered Irish culture long before that--in 1997, for example, when U2 started its Pop-Mart tour, which projected gigantic pop-art images behind the band while they did a cover of the Monkees' "Daydream Believer." When the tour hit Three Rivers Stadium, U2 visited the Warhol Museum, where (according to CarnegieMuseums.com) politely invited museum staffers to sniff his shoes.

Warholstars describes a Warhol assistant named Philip Fagan, whom Factory screenwriter Ronald Tavel called "an incredibly good-looking Irish boy-Black Irish-who hung around him all the time. The site has a photo of Fagan, Gerard Malanga and Warhol all suggestively eating bananas.

Warholstars also gives credit to Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick for pop art images of Che Guevera which are often mistakenly attributed to Warhol. Warhol did his own Che paintings which, unusually for him, aren't the most iconic images of that subject.

Finally, there's this interview with superstar Brigid Berlin from the Nov. 2001 issue of the Warhol-founded Interview magazine. Berlin describes her duties at the Factory in its heyday: "I would transcribe interviews, and then for many years I didn't do anything. I used to knit and needlepoint under the desk. It wasn't like a job, so that's why I stayed there for so long. I was the first one there in the morning, but as soon as I got there I would watch the clock all day till I could leave. And every year I left five minutes earlier, and Andy used to look down at his watch and say, "Where are you going?" I'd say, "I'm going home." "Well, the fun's just beginning," he'd say. And then he'd give me a hundred dollars and tell me to go to the liquor store and get some Irish whiskey and I'd come back and make Irish coffee, get smashed, tell Andy he was a slob and that I hated him."

Of course this means Warhol...

Violet begets Violet.

by Arts Editor Christopher Arnott

“In the near future,” begins the trailer for Ultraviolet, and some of us are expecting to hear Andy Warhol’s voice cut in that “everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” After all, Ultra Violet (aka Isabelle Collin Dufresne) was one of Andy’s first superstars. They met in 1963, through her chum Salvador Dali. Originally considered publicity-seeking eye candy, a self-proclaimed collector of art and sex, Ultra Violet still maintains a career as a “post-Pop” visual artist whose recent works include “Is Christ Politically….. Prophetically….. Correct?” She wrote the best firsthand chronicle of the Factory years, Famous for Fifteen Minutes, and still carries the Factory flag; Warhol Stars reports that she’ll be part of the documentary Factory People, scheduled for release in 2006.

This other Ultra Violet film splashes some red liquid around and destroys a few buildings in the name of art, but doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with the subdued wig-wearing Warhol and his entourage. Still, some of the dialogue from the trailer sounds like stuff from Warhol’s famous interview sessions:

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I hate humans.”

“My name is Violet. I was born into a world you many not understand.”

The film’s official site features a “graphic novel game” which would appeal to the comics-loving pop art crowd. The panels light up in sequence while you read them—not in ultraviolet light, but a neat trick nonetheless.

Ultraviolet has another Warhol connotation. In the 1960s, the artist produced several paintings using ultraviolet light. The most famous of these was Double Torso, a 5-foot-by-3-foot double image of a bosom, commissioned by Playboy magazine for a feature called “The Playmate as Fine Art.”

None of this has anything to do, alas, with the seminal Peanuts character Violet, famous for her “Nyaahs.” Violet also predated Lucy as Charlie Brown’s recalcitrant football-holder.

Honey, why the long face?

Arts Editor Christopher Arnott barks about an upcoming production of A.R. Gurney's Sylvia.

It's a fun if gimmicky play, which I've seen several times. It's by A.R. Gurney, an ultra-WASP who writes mostly about New York state elitists and well-living New York City apartment dwellers: His hits include The Dinner Party, The Snow Ball and Scenes from American Life. The show's about a man and his dog Sylvia, who is played by a comely young woman.

In the first New York production, it starred Sarah Jessica Parker. The man is getting up in years, as is his wife, so there's a creepy undercurrent to the fact that he's leading a snuggly female around on a leash, and letting her pee on the floor. But apparently cultured folk don't think like that. The show was a big mainstream hit and comes up often in community theater. The ending, in which the dog dies (of old age, not Old Yeller-style), is truly throat-lumping. Weirdest production I saw starred a family of four actors: the mom and dad played the couple, the daughter played Sylvia, and the son took the all-purpose "all other characters" role, which includes a shrink and a jittery woman.

Performed at
Western PA Humane Society
(in the Learning Center)
1101 Western Avenue- North Side

February 9, 10, 11, 17, 18, 24, 25 @ 8pm
Special Matinee on Sunday, February 19 @ 2pm
Tickets $19
(Members of the Western PA Humane Society, WYEP and students
receive a discount on tickets with member cards or student ID.)
For tickets and more information: 412.321.4625 ext. 501 or go to: http://www.wpahumane.com/events.html#play
http://www.thankyoufelix.com/

During intermission meet some of the wonderful animals eagerly awaiting
new homes at the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society—
where your new best-friend is waiting

.

Of Course this means Warhol...

Reviewing the Super Bowl halftime show; U2's lemon aid.

by Christopher Arnott, arts editor

I've written about the Rolling Stones/Warhol connection in this column before, and I won't bother to recap. (You can't always get what you want.) But if the Super Bowl wanted to deliberately impose a Warhol image on the proceedings, they could scarcely have done better. After all, a Velvet Underground reunion wasn't in the cards, let alone the Mumps. Other Warhol-approved candidates might have included Bowie, Patti Smith or Dolly Parton. But the Stones are easily the most popular act the Bowl folk could have booked that had a direct Andy association. Did Detroit balance the bill with a Seattle-friendly grunge band? No. Ha!

I caught just the last few minutes of the Rolling Stones halftime show at the Super Bowl. All the commentary I've read on the concert concerned the censoring of the word "cock" in some lyrics (shades of having to change "let's spend the night together" to "let's spend some time together" on the Ed Sullivan show some 40 years ago). What I saw was a spare sextet (of which only the band's key members got any close-ups) working hard to look like giants. When the overblown pyrotechnics went off at the end of the set, the cameras had to back up so far to capture them that they looked flashlight beams, not the Olympus-like showers of spark and heat that they must have been for those at the stadium.

I've seen plenty of good bands seem dwarfed and out of their element on big club or theater stages. Considering this was the biggest stage in the world, a crossfire hurricane indeed, Mick and Keith and Charlie and Ron and those other two did all right. It was a neat reminder of the Stones' long-ago club roots. They didn't try to get all jingoistic like Sir Paul McCartney did last year, and they didn't opt for outrageous spectacle. They also didn't attempt a fake intimacy, as I remember Jon Bon Jovi ludicrously attempting with a small crowd of fans grabbing at his legs while he played a few years back.

I was reminded of the Stones' blues-based bar band origins by an interview in the Fall 2005 issue Roctober magazine (issue #41) between the squeaky-geek Canadian rock encyclopedia "Nardwuar the Human Serviette" and Tommy Chong. The entire dialogue concerns Chong's pre-Cheech career as an R&B musician in Vancouver. Chong recalls an after-hours club he ran called the Elegant Parlour:

"Whenever the Motown acts would stay in Vancouver they would come down to my club, 'cause it was like a black after-hours booze bar, and it was hip. . One night this other promoter had a club upstairs trying to go psychedelic-this was at the height of the Motown era, and he booked all these groups that later went on to become mega-superstars, like Janis Joplin and the Rolling Stones--and he had this club upstairs and he couldn't make any money with it. It was called the Red Nose Circus and my club Elegant Parlour was right below that in the basement, and our club would be packed and his club would be empty. With the Rolling Stones, they never drew anybody, it was amazing. One night all the James Brown band was playing onstage and I look in the back and I can see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards trying to get in the club and they couldn't get in 'cause it was too crowded."

The Stones got rather more attention from the Motown crowd this year, to be sure. Next time: Get Tommy Chong.

...........................................................................................................................................
U2's victory at the Grammys seemed to cement their pop immortality. Remember after Radiohead's heady OK Computer surge in the mid-'90s, U2 made a few commercial missteps, then righted themselves almost miraculously, leading Bono to exclaim at the Grammys that U2 was ready to reapply for the position of Most Important Rock Band, a title which many critics had transferred to Thom Yorke and co.

One of those missteps had been U2's Pop album and subsequent tour. That era of the band is now considered its most overdone, least humble, least accessible, with a genuine Spinal Tap moment: the band was transported to the main stage in a gigantic lemon-shaped capsule, which apparently had trouble opening at one show. It's the only U2 tour I've personally attended, so I can't compare it to the earlier and later go-rounds. But I always thought that the band got a bad rap for that tour. This was the opposite of the Stones stripping down and holding a stage as human beings, but it wasn't a bad decision. And the images on the stadium-sized screen behind the band weren't undistinguished lightshow fodder; they were iconic images from the heyday of Pop Art, adapted from paintings by Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, and yes, Warhol.I often wish U2 hadn't gone back to basic black garb and dark, moody album covers. I miss the flashy colors, the silliness and giddiness and self-aware commercialization of the poippiest pop art. But then, one of my favorite bands of all time really is the Archies.

Of course this means Warhol...

Souper Bowls.

by Christopher Arnott

SOUP’S ON (STAGE)

The People Next Door, a new play about social tensions in Great Britain post-9/11, is currently having its American premiere at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Conn. The play, by Henry Adam, has a fun running gag. In his opening speech, a young slacker named Nigel (who’d rather be called “Salif” and is prone to street slang words like “bwa” for “brother”) is hungry.

From the script:

“Salif is gonna make his self some…

[He digs in Tesco bag and pulls out a tin of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup. He looks quizzically at the soup.]

…soup? Soup? Yeah bwa, soup. Why not? This be famous soup, bwa. This soup ‘as ‘ad its picture painted. This ain’t no Nigel soup, bwa. This be Salif soup. Soup that’s fit for a king.”

There’s another reference or two to the famous fluid foodstuff, and the play ends with Nigel/Salif in a police interrogation following a murder:

“Soup. Yeah, Campbell’s cream of tomato. You know it’s ‘ad its picture painted? I am telling you. …”

"The People Next Door" plays through Feb. 5 (Souper Bowl Sunday) at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Call 432-1234 for details, or see yalerep.org. Go see it, even if there is in fact no such thing as Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup. It’s just called Tomato soup on the can, though you can certainly add cream (or milk) to it if you like, at which point it becomes Cream of Tomato.

Go here to find a simple recipe for “Campbell’s Cream of Tomato Soup for Five,” generously posted by someone who thinks we’re so stupid that we can’t figure out how to add milk to condensed soup without explicit directions. This kind homemaker also offers such ingenious “serving ideas” as “crackers.”

......................................................................................................................

Andy Warhol’s very first exhibit in a commercial art gallery was 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, at the Ferus Art Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. Besides Tomato, he painted pictures of Campbell’s Pepper Pot, Black Bean, Bean with Bacon, Green Pea, Beef, Vegetable, Consomme, Beef Noodle, Chicken Noodle, Onion, Cream of Celery and (my personal favorite) Cream of Mushroom, among others, but those have all been overshadowed by Tomato. A reassessment of the 31 lesser soups is seriously overdue. At the very least, they deserve to be referenced reverentially in new British plays.

Before Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum turns its institutional resources to restoring the image of poor old Pepper Pot, however, it opens two special exhibitions Feb. 5 (Souper Bowl Sunday). Both of these could be said to relate in odd ways to those iconic soup cans. One is devoted to folk artist Henry Darger, and may help you think of those Campbell’s portraits as folk art too, of a space age consumerist variety. Like Warhol, Darger was also an illustrator, diary keeper and pack rat.

The other new AWM exhibit is a bunch of “classically shaped vases” by British ceramics artist Grayson Perry. Which are, you know, good for keeping soup in.

Of course this means Warhol...

Andy Warhol wasn’t the only filmmaker named Warhola to come from Pittsburgh. 

by Christopher Arnott

Check out the wondrously straightforward, non-ironic, user-friendly site for Warhola Productions, a mainstream video productions facility which makes no attempt to connect itself to the auteur of "Flesh," "The Chelsea Girls," "Blow Job," and "Naomi Kisses Rufus." The current Warhola film empire, “conveniently located between downtown Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh International Airport,” won a Communicator Award for a 30-second commercial for the Pennsylvania Air National Guard. The WP site boasts that “our clients appreciate the variety of services we offer, from videotaping to post-production,” which is more than some of Andy’s superstars could say about his old Factory experiments.

All due respect to the Warhol(a)s, but Pittsburgh’s most famous filmmaker is probably George Romero. Besides their hometown and a penchant for red fluids (George: blood; Andy: soup), is there anything that connects Romero and Warhol? Who else?—Dennis Hopper, who a better conduit between celebrities than Kevin Bacon could ever dream of being. Hopper is a well-known art collector and was on the advisory board of the 1990 documentary "Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol." Last year he appeared as “Kaufman” in the fourth part of George Romero’s Living Dead tetralogy, "Land of the Dead."

........................................................................................................................

SOUP NUTSY!

What’s Andy Warhol’s favorite superhero?

Souperman.

Who’s his favorite rapper?

Soup Doggy Dog.

His favorite dance?

The can-can.

Favorite Beach Boys song?

Soup John B.

Magical expression?

Soupercalifragilisiticexpialidocious.

And, finally, what was his preferred way of making short films in the 1960s?

Souper-8.

Souperman image found here.

Of course this means Warhol

Fifteen going on 16.

by Christopher Arnott

Last week, Mark Parisi’s Off the Mark comic strip did a “15 minutes of fame” gag. The very next day, the daily Amazing Spider-Man comic strip featured the hotel room suicide of a man who’d found, and donned, Spidey’s superhero suit:

“This is one time that Ted Chambers will get…,” the jumper pauses, “…his 15 minutes of fame!”

I just Googled “15 minutes of fame” and got 614,000 exact matches. “Famous for fifteen minutes,” a more precise condensation of Andy Warhol’s 1968 edict that “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” brings 19,700 such matches (which took the search engine 0.15 seconds to assemble. Spooky!) . Warhol himself revised his most notorious statement in 1979 to read “in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” (World be damned.) That exact ten-word phrase brings 721 Google hits.

So I Googled “15 minutes of Fame comics” and found that there’s been an actual comic book entitled “15 Minutes,” published in 2004 by Slave Labor Graphics’ AmazeInk imprint. It’s a superhero comic, not a superstar comic.

Then there’s Zoom Suit, an animated superhero cartoon which was accepted into the 15 Minutes of Fame Film Festival last week in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The one night, New Year’s Eve fest only accepts entries that are less than 15 minutes long. ...

__________________________________________________________________________________

I have a young friend, Rachel, who recently discovered the Velvet Underground. She was interning at the Yale Cabaret in New Haven, Conn., where they were producing an adaptation of Brecht’s Baal set in Warhol’s Factory (this was the show mentioned in my very first Of Course You Realize… column for Pittsburgh Dish). At first, the managing director of the theater troupe told Rachel that she was too young to work on this show, despite her already having arranged the internship. Then, when she and her parents complained, she was reinstated and asked to round up some Velvet Underground recordings for the show’s soundtrack. So she came to me, and I lent her my VU box set and a couple of books. Her parents, bless them, gave Rachel her own copy of the box set for Christmas.

So for my gift, I got her a copy of Nico’s solo album Chelsea Girl, an extension of sorts of the first VU album, featuring the whole band on several cuts. The cashier at Cutler’s CDs & Tapes in New Haven congratulated me on my purchase, and she praised me further when she learned it was a gift for a 16-year-old girl.

Until I was moved to buy this CD for that specific person, it had not occurred to me that the Velvet Underground could be seen as empowering figures for young women. Sure, there’s a female drummer who hits harder than most of her male counterparts of the era, and sings unapologetically off-key, in a stunning disavowal of all stereotyped torchsong divas and female doowoppers.

But when you add in the female singer on that first album… and the number of songs about women… and the number of those songs which are about touchy subjects like sexual issues, social anxieties, depression and self-esteem... and the fact that the songwriter was electro-shocked for exploring his feminine and homosexual sides as a suburban teen…

Well, gosh. Who needs Patti Smith?

I’m not sure how far you can extend the idolatry here. Are there other role models among the Factory Crowd? Certainly not Edie. Candy Darling, perhaps?—a perky member of movie star fan clubs, for starters. For some, Valerie Solanis is a saint, I guess. Ultraviolet turned out pretty well. Pat Hackett may be the most admirable, for her patience and diligence in compiling the Warhol Diaries.

There’s more musing to be done on this subject. But suddenly that word “velvet” has new meaning for me.

Of course you realize this means Warhol

Happy Warholidays to All Our Readers!

We wish you a Merry Christmas

We wish you a Mary Woronov

We wish you a Penny Arcade

Andy happy new year!

by Christopher Arnott

A common reaction from people who’ve read Andy Warhol’s published diaries is “I didn’t know he was so religious.” That’s probably because he assiduously avoided the subject in his other published works and most of his art. Take The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), which is as guarded an openly confessional book as has ever been devised. While he freely acknowledges his Czechoslavakian heritage in an early chapter, he doesn’t mention the concurrent Catholicism. And while the final chapter, “Underwear Power,” is subtitled “What I Do on Saturday When My Philosophy Runs Out,” there’s nothing in the whole book about what Warhol does on Sunday. He touches on “My First Television,” “Learning the Facts of Life at Forty,” “Frigidity,” “My Aura,” “Why I Love Leftovers,” “Continental Intermarriage” and more, but amid all the talk of superstars there is no appearance by Jesus Christ Superstar. The chapter on Death consists of two short paragraphs:

“A: I’m so sorry to hear about it. I just thought that things were magic and that it would never happen.”

and

“I don’t believe in it, because you’re not around to know that it’s happened. I can’t say anything about it because I’m not prepared for it.”

Nope, Warhol’s not exactly bursting with missionary zeal.

Some spiritual insights into Warhol, by James Romaine, can be found at the Godspy (“Faith at the Edge”) site, http://www.godspy.com/culture/Andy-Warhol-Transubstantiating-the-Culture.cfm. Romaine reports that Warhol kept a prayer book and altar by his bedside, that he helped out regularly at a soup kitchen, that he attended St. Vincent Ferrer’s Church in NYC almost daily, and that his nephew became a priest through Andy’s financial assistance.

I’m not aware of any Warholiana involving the baby Jesus or the virgin mother (unless you count the “Virgin” T-shirt a late-in-life Andy wore on the cover of Penthouse Forum), but he certainly found artistic inspiration in the last supper, with series of silkscreens and sketches. You could almost argue, though, that this work seems inspired more by Leonardo DaVinci, whose work Andy’s purposefully copying, than by the subject matter.

In any case, we probably owe Andy Warhol a lot for not proselytizing through his art. What would be the result: a 24-hour film of the comings and goings at a confessional booth? Paintings of a mass-market box of communion wafers? Bright silkscreen portraits of the pope? We’re better off with Andy’s observations of pop culture as the new religion. The old-time religion, he seemed happy to keep to himself.

Of course this means Warhol...

Food for thought.

by Christopher Arnott

In his review of the Mayflower Inn, in Washington, Conn., last month, Hartford Courant food columnist Greg Morago was overcome by the Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe Warhol silkscreens which adorned the restaurant’s walls. The portraits, Morago notes, are originals, not reprints or forgeries, and were loaned to the Mayflower by art collector friends of the proprietors. Morago digests this “merger of classic fare and contemporary art,” iteming the ways that “Warhol looms large over the pop culture landscape this season”:

“How does Warhol’s unmistakable urgency and in-your-face directness work with the quiet serenity of Mayflower’s creamy dining room? … The menu made no attempt to tie the food to the work or life of art’s most fascinating mop top, whose many Factory denizens and celebrity friends always made for great gossip. Why not Nico nachos? Joe Dallesandro pulled pork sandwich? Chocolate cake sprinkled with Ultra Violets? Or even just some kind of knock-out Edie Sedgwick martini that will leave you sprawled on the ground?”

Great writing, Greg Morago, but the answer to your questions is that Warhol’s gang never ate very much, preferring to subsist on other substances. Even the famous Warhol banana on the cover of the first Velvet Underground album was probably smoked rather than swallowed.

As Morago points out, the American Society of Magazine Editors recently included a 1969 Esquire cover of Warhol drowning in a giant can of soup as one of the memorable covers in modern magazine history. Fine, but Warhol didn’t paint soup. He painted cans. He painted bottles, not people sipping from them. He was as likely to immortalize the packaging of a steel wool pad or a laundry soap as he was a foodstuff. No Cezanne still-lifer he. Nor was he Gaugin with tropical islanders surrounded by fruit trees. Warhol’s work simply doesn’t make you hungry. As the Jefferson Airplane put it, “feed your head.”

Photo: The very frilly Mayflower (zzzzzzz) Inn.

Of course this means Warhol...

The ad for the National Stonewall Democrats’ upcoming Pittsburgh convention (June 2-6) uses Warhol iconography—the silkscreen portrait style, the soup can—to push a party. Which begs the question, would Warhol have approved?

by Christopher Arnott, Warhol correspondent

I dunno, he just seemed so…apolitical. A quick skim through one of the best coffee-table overviews of Warhol’s career, 365 Takes—The Andy Warhol Museum Collection, shows that Andy was as quick to access and accessorize democracy as he did consumerism. Among the political imagery found amid the 365:

The Statue of Liberty, explored in 1962 and again in 1986

A violent photo image from the 1964 Birmingham Race Riot

A shot of a real hammer snuggled up next to a real sickle, from a trip to Italy in 1970

Some Nazi-themed stuff inspired by a trip to Berlin

Nancy Reagan, interviewed for Interview.

Countless portraits of Jackie O…

..plus a darker project from when she was still Jackie Kennedy. 365 Takes reports that Warhol watched the JFK assassination with poet John Giorno, who wrote: “We started hugging each other, pressing bodies together and trembling. I started crying and Andy started crying. We wept big, fat tears. It was the symbol of the catastrophe of our own lives”

Warhol staged his own reenactment of JFK’s killing, entitled Since. I was reminisced about Since recently when visiting a retrospective exhibit at the Yale School of Art & Architecture about the San Francisco art collective Ant Farm. That group’s assassination recreation, which ended up as both a film and a multi-page spread in National Lampoon magazine, has the irony and satire which Warhol’s attempt lacked. Of course, Warhol one-upped any other pretenders to his throne by nearly getting assassinated himself.

Foremost among Warhol’s political art is—no, it’s not hobnobbing with Roy Cohn at Studio 54. It’s a 1972 screen print of a clownish Richard Nixon, with a green forehead and blue jowls, wearing a pink suit jacket. Underneath this “sock it to me?” portrait are two words: “Vote McGovern.” In his diaries, Warhol claims that this work brought about a pesky tax audit by the IRS.

All this talk of war and Warhol reminds me that Dolly Parton’s got a new album, of peace-loving folk and pop songs from the hippie ‘60s and laid-back ‘70s. What was Dolly doing in the ‘80s, you wonder? Hanging out with Andy Warhol. In 1985 she commissioned him to do a portrait of her, which is much more dour and dowdy than the cartoon caricature of Dolly with sky-high hair, out-thrust bosom and a gay pink background on the cover of Andy’s Interview magazine. When overcome by war and political turmoil, just ask yourself: What would Dollywood do?

Of course this means Warhol...

Arts columnist Christopher Arnott cooks, quotes and stews over last week's puppet show review by the City Paper.

“Andy Warhol did more than conquer contemporary art; he largely redefined it in his own terms. No wonder Pittsburgh, from whence young Mr. Warhola split roughly as soon as he could purchase train fare, still eagerly claims him as a native son.”

That’s how the City Paper begins its review of "Warhol TM," Gretchen Van Lente’s contribution to the Black Sheep Puppet Festival.

Insert “studied commercial art and received a degree in pictorial design from Carnegie Institute of Technology” into that sentence somewhere and you might have something.

You could convincingly argue that Rock Hudson’s Winnetka, Illinois birthplace had minimal impact on the Hollywood screen career of Rock Hudson, or that West End, New Jersey was not of pivotal importance in the writing life of Dorothy Parker, but to imply that Pittsburgh had no role in the creation of Andy Warhol…!!! Pittsburgh simply allowed a construction worker’s son to pursue a creative career path (before CIT, he was encouraged by the Carnegie Museum of Art school), honing talents which he could then, at a tender age, bring to New York.

According to the City Paper story, by Bill O’Driscoll, the puppet piece had virtually no Pittsburgh content. That’s perhaps because Van Lente is a New Yorker herself, and built her script around snippets she learned from Warhol’s published diaries. Still, some reported elements of the show dispute the turned-his-back-on-his-hometown thesis. Like, he stayed close to family. Visited a lot. Is buried in Pittsburgh.

Perhaps the City Paper would have something pithily inaccurate to say about all the press the Andy Warhol Museum is getting for its touring “Warhol Legacy” exhibition. So what if the museum’s amassed the largest collection of Warhol relics in Christendom? To get reviews in the international press, it had to go out of town and hold a show in Washington DC.

The Washington Post review of “Warhol Legacy: Selections from the Andy Warhol Museum” at the Corcoran Gallery was picked up by Britain’s Guardian Weekly. The Post’s Blake Gopnik finds the retrospective “depressing” and “profoundly grim,” asserting that “almost all of the more thatn 150 works in the exhibit seem to point to a culture of consumption that, in one way or another, has broken down.”

Gary Tischler, who writes for The Downtowner, a free Washington DC weekly, had the best take on the Corcoran show. In the paper’s Oct. 5 ish Tischler notes: “How appropriate that … it would be a banker who would ‘get’ Warhol’s life and art better than most.” Tischler quotes Michael Harreld, president of PNC Bank of the Greater Washington Area on Warhol: “He was a genius, he was cutting edge, he knew how to create a buzz. He unders