Pittsburgh Dish

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

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.

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.

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

Way to sell it, buddy

Warhol honcho equates Pittsburgh with teeming pool of bacteria.

The usually pro-Pittsburgh director of the Andy Warhol Museum popped an artery in yesterday's P-G. Speaking on the decline of museum attendance, Tom Sokolowski sounded like a recent grad of the Dawn Keezer School of Public Relations:

Pittsburgh is "like a walled petri dish in that we don't have people swarming in from all over," said Tom Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum.

"If you have something in a big city -- Philadelphia, New York, Chicago -- they have a huge population, lots of tourism, and if it's marketed well, you have people from all over flying in to see it. What do we have here? We have two hours from Cleveland and five hours from Charleston."

Choke that down Cleveland. Chew on that Charleston.

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.

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...

From Hartford, Conn. to the Velvet Underground.

by Christopher Arnott, Warhol guy

Hartford Stage, a major regional theater in Connecticut, just held their annual Brand:NEW Festival of New Works, and one of the highlights was a new script about our Warhol called My Andy, penned by former thirtysomething actress Patricia Wettig. I didn’t attend the reading, but Holly Woodlawn did, of course, as the guest of honor at a post-reading party entitled DRAMA! (What level of the celebrity netherworld have you entered when you are reduced to being seen at parties which are theatrical recreations of parties you were at over 35 years earlier?) The Sept. 17 bash attempted to combine aspects of Warhol’s Factory life with his later, sparklier Studio 54 side; it was held in what was once the landmark Hartford department store G. Fox (in photo), and an actual Studio 54 DJ, Nicky Siano, manned the turntables.

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

Haven’t seen Martin Scorsese’s Dylan doc yet, but was reflecting happily that Lou Reed made it onto PBS’ American Masters series years before Mr. Zimmerman. Then I remembered what a Dylan dilettante Lou was on those demo recordings which fleshed out the Velvet Underground box set. And then I heard iconic Greenwich Village ‘60s folkie Eric Andersen’s cover of Reed’s “Pale Blue Eyes” on Andersen’s new all-covers CD Waves: Great American Song Series Vol. 2. And I thought to myself, who do we thank for stripping all those annoying folk pretensions out of Lou Reed?

Reed lived in New York City in the early ‘60s, played acoustic guitar, wore denim, aped not just Dylan’s shades-and-jeans couture but his nasal voice and even his bleating harmonica style. And though it’s clear that Reed’s refreshingly rude awakening was largely his own doing (or a result of his collaborations/corruptions with established avant-gardist John Cale, or an electroshock side effect), Warhol may have been the guy who pushed his and the Velvets’ city-dwelling, street-dealing experimental pop-rock over the edge.

For a former farmboy who cut his artistic teeth in a city surrounded by hills and Amish folk, Warhol oozed urbanity. I’m beginning to believe that he had more influence over the Velvets than he’s given credit for. His favorite songs of theirs was “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and his sponsorship of the band came when they were establishing themselves not as popsmiths but as social hooligans whose elongated feedback jams would clear clubs. Warhol was a commercially inclined climber who designed department store windows and applied lessons from the industrial revolution to modern art. He was not a coffeehouse denizen; he trained his camera on skyscrapers and fallen high-society waifs. When he sucked the Velvet Underground into his world to soundtrack it, Maureen Tucker’s drum sound no longer seemed tribal; it was mechanical. And the band’s rough edges weren’t folky but edgy and spit-on-the-sidewalk confrontational.

However it happened that Lou Reed slithered from Village bohemian poses to leather and sneers, Eric Andersen’s pale, bluesy and utterly empty rendition of “Pale Blue Eyes” (and, lest we forget, Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Sweet Jane”) show how much better off we are thanks to this abrupt transformation.

Patricia Wettig’s play My Andy apparently finds its own Warhol dichotomy: According to a Hartford Stage press release, “examines the complex relationship between the pop culture icon and his deeply religious, Old World mother.” You know, folk pop.

Of course this means Warhol...

Words that rhyme with “Andy”: Handy, sandy, gandy (as in gandy dancer), bandy (as in bandy about), shandy (a British mix of soda and beer) candy and Hollywoodland.

Landy sakes! The Dandy Warhols have a new album out! The band has about as much to do with the artist for whom they are named as the Rolling Stones have to do with the poetry of Robert W. Service, but there are a few slight connections worth mentioning. First, the band’s debt to the Velvet Underground resonates in long jams like “Love is the New Awful” and “Everyone is Totally Insane.”

Then there’s the Dandy’s boas-and-nudity fashion sense, very Factory. Third, there’s the heroin chic and the laissez-faire attitude. Warhol’s a much greater muse to other rockers: Reed and Cale, obviously, who did a concept album about him, but also bands as diverse as the Cars, Super 8 and all those disco divas who got cover stories in Interview magazine.The Dandy Warhols, like the Mr. T Experience and even their Dig! rivals The Brian Jonestown Massacre, have a name which is ultimately distracting and misdirected. Sonically, they might as well be the Ddavid Hockneys, the Droy Lichtensteins or the Dleroy Neimans.

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

Last month I had the pleasure of talking with Peter Zaremba, lead singer and head hip-swiveler for New York’s power rock vindicators The Fleshtones. In the course of our discussion (portions of which appear in the Sept. 10 issue of the New Haven Advocate), guess who came up? “We knew Warhol to the degree that we played on this TV show he had, 15 Minutes. We were on the last show. A guy like him, who feigned not to know what was going on around him—so that he could function in the world—really knew what was going on.” The Fleshtones’ memorable collaboration with Ian McKellan, who reads a Shakespearean sonnet to their impromptu musical accompaniment—was an outtake from that broadcast.

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

Here’s the real stuff all those fashion journos should have been planting in their features about the Warhol Foundation licensing Andy’s name and designs for a new line of Levi’s Jeans:

“I believe in bluejeans too.”

“The ones made by Levi Strauss are the best-cut, best-looking pair of pants that have ever been designed by anybody. Nobody will ever top the original bluejeans. They can’t be bought old, they have to be bought new and they have to be worn by the person. To get that look. And they can’t be phoney [sic] bleached or phoney anything. You know that little pocket? It’s so crazy to have that little pocket, like for a twenty-dollar gold piece.”

“French bluejeans?”

“No, American are the best. Levi Strauss. With the little copper buttons. Studded for evening wear.”

“How do you keep them clean, B?”

“You wash them.”

“Do you iron them?”

“No, I put fabric softener. The only person who irons them is Geraldo Rivera.” The talk of bluejeans was making me very jealous. Of Levi and Strauss. I wish I could invent something like bluejeans. Something to be remembered for. Something mass."

“I want to die with my bluejeans,” I heard myself say.

--from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Band 1: How Andy Puts His Warhol On

(Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1975)

Alas, Warhol did not die with his jeans on, nor his boots. Perhaps some enterprising medical-outfit designer will be inspired to silkscreen a soup can onto surgery patients’ gowns.

Of Course This Means Warhol...

Andy's pants: A tight fit.

by Christopher Arnott

Best description of the artist, from “Can Andy Warhol lend Levi’s the right kind of cool?,” Cristina Rouvalis’ article in the Post-Gazette Aug. 30:

“He was always young," Sokolowski said of the artist who had a nose job and predicted the plastic surgery craze.

Here’s how other publications, covering the same distressed, faded and bangled story, about a Warholized line of Levi’s jeans set to debut next spring, tried to cleverly connect Andy to pants.

"It's a very natural fit and it's very much in line with what he did in his lifetime," said Hermann, who pointed to Warhol's interest in commercialism as seen in his paintings of Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. (Pia Sarkar, San Francisco Chronicle)

Levi Strauss & Co., whose jeans were worn by Andy Warhol and appeared in his works… (Toronto Globe & Mail)

The Pop artist remains part of the fashion scene -- thanks to his nonprofit foundation, which licenses his artwork on clothes, china, luggage and even rugs. (Detroit News)

Warhol wore Levi's. (worldofwonder.net)

"This is the pairing of two great American icons to bring trend-right product to consumers looking for something truly original and authentic." (Business Wire)

Levi’s relationship with the artist dates to 1984, when it commissioned him to create art for its “501 Blues” ad campaign. “He wore Levi’s most of his life,” said Amy Gemellaro, a spokeswoman for the jeans maker. (LA Times)

Back to Rouvalis:

“Others aren't so sure Andy Warhol's eternal hipness is going to rub off on denim.”

Photo: LA Times

Of course this means Warhol...

Pucker up.

Each new Rolling Stones tour invariably renews the myth that Andy Warhol designed the band’s lips-and-tongue logo. He didn’t. According to Mick Jagger, John Pasch did, and it appears to be Mr. Pasch’s sole lasting contribution to pop culture. Perhaps because it’s such an obvious rip-off of R. Crumb and other underground aesthetes (though Keith Richards mused that the inspiration was the Indian goddess Khali). An academic paper entitled “Not Just Another Mouth: Mick Jagger and the Big Red Lips” was presented in April at the 2005 Experience Music Project Pop Conference; a synopsis of the lecture at the conference’s website furthers the Warhol myth.

Warhol’s actual work for the Stones included the LP covers for Sticky Fingers and Love You Live.  Sticky Fingers, which routinely gets cited as one of the greatest record covers ever, was actually designed by Craig Braun, based on Warhol’s concept and photography. The “package” in this immortal packaging is rumored to belong not to Mick Jagger (known more for face than crotch) but to the Factory’s own Joe Dallesandro. Love You Live, both cover and album, are much less memorable, and represent the last attempt by any artist to present Jagger’s mouth as anything remotely sexual or alluring. ...

In other pop (not pop art) news, I had the honor to interview Beach Boys buddah Brian Wilson last month when his Smile tour visited Connecticut. Velvet Underground junkie that I am, I asked him why we always read about how Smile was born out of a jealousy of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album. Did Wilson have any inkling of the revolutions being wrought on the other coast of his own country? Had he not heard the Velvet Underground, whose debut album was released at the outset of the so-called Summer of Love? “No,” he told me flatly in his trademark understatement, “I didn’t know about them.” This obliviousness was seconded by Wilson’s more articulate collaborator Van Dyke Parks, who suggested that Wilson was too busy making his own music to be influenced by anyone else’s. But still….!

Column debut: Of course this means Warhol...

Dish welcomes an old newspaper pal to our humble fold this week.

Introducing the haberdashed humor of Mr. Christopher Arnott.

New Haven Advocate Arts Editor Christopher Arnott wears many hats at the Elm City rag, both of tome and dome. His signature bowler can be seen bobbing amid throngs of fans at music venues, theaters and art galleries. His chapeau is spotted at libraries, dollar stores, record shops and resting atop piles of CD review copies balancing on his desk. Arnott developed a fondness for the 'Burgh having spent time visiting his sister (and, of course, "The Cage") in Squirrel Hill. To wit, the intrepid Arnott will grace Dish with his waggish writings in his new column titled "Of Course You Know This Means Warhol…" (Pssst: Hopefully Dish might procure a few Pittsburgh-bound theater reviews.)

The Yale Cabaret in New Haven, Ct., ended its 2005 season with a production of Bertolt Brecht’s 1920s epic-theater eccentricity Baal, set in the Warhol Factory. Baal was a Lou Reed type (crooning “Femme Fatale” and other Velvet Underground classics instead of the play’s original songs), and other cast members aped Edie Sedgwick, Joe Dallesandro, Candy Darling and others. As Warhol, fright-wigged actor Eric Gilde pivoted a movie camera and mumbled fey intros to the 15 separate scenes of the play. In revealing interviews shown on TV monitors at the outset of the show, some of the young cast described Warhol and his work as “boring” and “stupid.”

____________________________________________________________________________________

Roy Weinstein, a photographer in Westport Ct., advertises that he can create a “Warhol-Style Pop Art Portrait of Your Child…silkscreened and hand painted on canvas.” Good thing they’re not Warhol-style MOVIES of your child; then he might be arrested. The portraits are most convincing if your child happens to be Marilyn Monroe, Jackie O or Mickey Mouse. www.CustomPop.ArtPortraits.com

____________________________________________________________________________________

Campbell’s Soup “Tomato Tees” available in pink, sunray bronze and “retro-ringer” styles, www.campbellshop.com.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Oct. 12, 2005: Twentieth anniversary of the original broadcast of “Love Boat” episode #200, featuring a giggly Andy Warhol, plus Tom Bosley and Marion Ross.