DO ABOUT WHAT?

andy warhol

 

What are we going to do about gun violence? A question I hear repeated again and again, every time we have another public attack by somebody frustrated unto suicide, so mad he wants to take everybody/anybody with him. Reading or hearing the question, I answer in a comment box of the mind, Nothing. Nothing at all, according to pattern, tradition. Every time the question pops up, What are we gonna to do about it?, what gets done consistently amounts to nothing. A run of articles, anti-gun people use the moment to advertise their agenda, make a lot of noise. It's like the question of capital punishment that surfaces from time to time is never resolved. The question, whether or not guns, is only answered with blame. Black people in church killed. A white boy done it, blame the whiteman flag. Easy target. This new one, black man killing white woman and white man on tv in Roanoke, looks more like he went postal from the frustration of being let go from a job. They say he had a bad attitude and deserved to be fired. Maybe so. But it's not how he saw it, like the post office employees who "went postal" out of frustration over losing their jobs in a time of republican downsizing post office staff to set USPO up for corporate takeover.

 

andy warhol

 

I tell self it doesn't matter to me, what I think about it is of no relevance to anyone but myself. It is other people's karma someplace far from where I am. The only part that matters to me is hearing the same old question every year of my life, What are we going to do about it? The only thing I've ever seen happen is the next crisis to come along replaces last week's old crisis. The question about guns is forgotten until next made-for-tv slaying by gun. It's talked about by talking heads with renewed urgency for a week, replaced by a smokescreen politician who said something notably stupid. What are we going to do about it? Nothing. What are we going to do about racism? Blame the South. Nothing. Blaming American rednecks and banning a flag increased sales of the flag by double, affirmed the white American working class identity with the flag and recruited for the Klan. Nearly everybody guided by propaganda through television, the tv renders everyday life insignificant, dysfunctional, a waste of time to notice. Homeland terrorist slayings are television. Racism is television. Police brutality is television. Let television settle it with guns and explosions. Television doesn't worry over logic or good sense in settling issues. Guns settle things on tv, the real world in America/Oceania. It naturally follows, guns solve problems in the unreal world of everyday life.

andy warhol

 

"Click and Share if you care." Thus concluded a brief video I saw not knowing what it would be. A white guy in plaid shirt and ball cap on backwards, I felt like it might be at least funny. The occasional redneck rant that appears on facebook is indeed funny. I don't share the politics, but I do understand their point of view and believe it valid. This guy was funny and not. He ranted about guns saying he was being practical about them by teaching his children, a boy and two girls, how to shoot a gun. He had the boy shoot a replica of a movie pistol, an air gun. He was being practical in a gun culture. I felt he was sensible. In the working class, everybody has guns, and I'm with them that it is important to teach the kids about guns before they find one and do something stupid with it. He talked about gun control as teaching the kids to control a gun. I, as myself, think it's nuts, yet I understand we live in a gun culture. When daddy has guns in the house, it is better for the kids to be taught to respect them than it is to label them taboo. I appreciated that he taught the kids with an air gun, comparatively harmless. Though he was a bit much of a Fake news enthusiast for my appreciation, I respected his point of view. I live in a world of people like him and know them to be good people. I could see in him if he lived in my community, he is what I'd call a good man. In the way I call Frank Dillard a good man, Randy Hampton a good man, Joe Willey a good man, three of many, only the first ones to come to mind. He ended his rant, "if you care, click and share." I didn't care enough to share, though I obviously cared enough to think about it after it was over and share my thoughts with you.

andy warhol

Thought about sending it to a friend for its comic value, but it felt too much like demeaning its purpose. The man had something to say, something he had reasoned out for himself, and I felt very well. I could not demean him so. He was doing something about gun violence. He was teaching his kids to be responsible by way of the gun for example. He was doing his part concerning an important issue that can only be dealt with one individual at a time. To see on television one side make noise and the other side make noise, it amounts to no more than a racket. I do my part by not having a gun and not intending to have one. I think they're cool for somebody else, but not for me. I don't like that I like the feel of one in my hand. They fit the hand like a glove, made for the hand. I feel like guns attract guns. They also get stolen. It would not do for somebody, whose aim is to live as close to the heart as can be done, to have at hand an object with only one purpose, to kill. I am not about killing. I don't even want a rabbit running under my tire. My path is love, not fear. I can't deny a gun's necessity to somebody else, anybody else. For myself, I see a gun illegitimate power, power I do not want. As a conscientious human being, I do not allow myself the right to kill, not even the dog that killed my cat.

andy warhol

 

 

*

 

 

 



A GRAIN OF SAND FROM THE BEACH

andy warhol

Yesterday I had lunch with a dozen friends for our monthly BROC meeting. We put on the Hillbilly Show once a year and use ticket sales to help people in the county needing assistance. Every month we pay several electric and fuel bills for people who need a hand to avoid cut-off. None of the money is skimmed off for any reason. We pay for our own lunches. In one way of looking at us, we're people who believe in doing our part to assist people around us who need an assist. It's another form of volunteer Rescue Squad and volunteer firemen. They take care of immediate needs physically, we take care of immediate needs of the mind and spirit, preventing physical need. People living on the edge have to humble themselves way down to go to an office and ask for help. In every case they're grateful for the help that eases worries immensely. Some pass it on later, which seems to be a natural impulse in us humans. 

andy warhol

I had a time so down and out I had to call upon humility to go to the Food Closet and ask for groceries. No questions, sign here. I drove home with enough food for a week, all I needed. Back in motion, a little bit ahead, I gave them a donation to cover the value of the food four times. I had to do it, not even a consideration to question the need. I feel like what we do in our group is further generous behavior by setting it in motion. As one gesture inspires another, and those gestures inspire others, it spreads over time. Maybe very little, maybe a lot, maybe everything in between. It doesn't matter how many, or if one gesture is the end. The gesture itself is what matters. If it inspires others, all to the good. If it does not inspire others, all to the good. I believe it from having seen it so much in self and others that one gesture of generosity creates another. It's the same the other way. Beat down a kid without recourse and the kid will go and, for example, beat down a dog without recourse. Both motivations go on everywhere all the time. I prefer for myself to spread generosity rather than anger. The people in our group are similarly minded without thinking of it in these words, each with his/her own thoughts and motivations. 

andy warhol

I was sitting at the table facing Jack and Linda Joines, two people it warms my heart to think about. The same can be said of everyone at the two tables we occupied at The Pines. Our meetings consist of ordering our meals, having our meeting while the kitchen prepares the food, eating and talking when the meeting is over. While we were eating, I spoke to Jack, asked him if he had yet entered the zone in life where everything is weird. We're the same age. He came to life, animated. It took him home. Lord, yes. He said everything is so weird he doesn't know what to make of it. Linda said a lot of people are talking about how weird things are now. She, too, was seeing it. I ran it by Jack to see if it was something I was feeling or if somebody else had noticed. I felt about Jack that he might feel it. He did. We talked about it a bit, not a whole lot, there isn't much to say. It's so complex and so inter-woven, it would take hours to make a list of the weirdness we see. We make a list, then what? It's so overwhelming that to fix any one item would be the same as picking up a grain of sand from the beach. It doesn't change the beach at all. 

andy warhol

I'm not quite sure what I mean by weird, except what makes sense fails to apply anymore. I see it in an attitude among the people I see. I don't see many, but the ones I see are representative of the ones I don't see, a pie slice. All are tapped into the same source for input. I don't have the fear generated by propaganda through the tv and a headful of misinformation, which I have plenty of, even without getting it directly from tv. I've a feeling the misinformation the CIA has fed us through television at least the last half century has brought us to a place "when everything the American people believe is false." This quote of CIA's stated goal, spoken verbally by then CIA director, Wm Casey, appointed Reaganista, who said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." Thus Fake News and corporate media. My sense of what I feel is weird about this time we're in is we're approaching the completion of the disinformation program, if not already there. Our corporate government is about deceiving us, from Fed to State to County. It has come out this week that Exxon is on record knowing about man-made global warming since 1981, and funded political denial ever since. It's so believable, it feels like I knew it without knowing it. I have to live, without recourse, in the reality corporate government has created by way of deception. I'll stay home and let the Highway Patrol meet their quotas giving tickets to other people. Another grain of sand on the beach.
   

andy warhol himself

*

OLD MAN RIVER

Talking with my neighbor Gary this afternoon, we were connecting a battery charger to the battery in my car, trying to figure out how to read the needle. He suggested something and said, "Wouldn't you think?" All I could say was, "I don't know what to think, ever, about anything." Everything in this world is a confusion to me anymore. I've spent my life trying to understand it and have failed. I know less now than when I started wondering. I've come to the Socrates place of saying the only thing I know is that I know nothing. Jesus affirmed Socrates by quoting him when he said, "Know thyself." In one way of looking at it, what else can we know, but ourselves? Our experience is our own, even shared experience. Self is about the most enigmatic subject there is to study. Self-awareness is the beginning of the spiritual path, the path of know thyself. Shedding false selves periodically, moving forward, moving in on the reality of the soul is how I have to characterize the path. No matter how far along the path one is, the goal continues infinitely far ahead, like Ralph Stanley's Great High Mountain. Therein lies the allure for me, even mystique. It's the road that goes ever on. I'm drawn to moving with my own flow. When I get there, when I ride the rhythm of my flow, contact with the world "out there," like bank, grocery store, gas station, can rattle my flow such that I fall down on the bed returning home and don't move for an hour. I lost touch with my flow, going with traffic, driving in parking lots looking all the way around for somebody backing up or no telling what, anything, paranoia about highway patrol--quotas have gone up appreciably in the last couple years. I see scatter-brained behavior everywhere, people with more to do than they can handle trying to keep up, multi-tasking, tweeting, stopping whatever they're doing to answer the cell phone. Conversation in America amounts to interrupting anecdotes with anecdotes. Interruption is the nature of conversation now. Cell phones interrupt with urgency. I've become so weary of interruption as expected conversational etiquette, I'd rather not talk. Now, when interrupted, I let go of everything that went before, intentionally forget it, knowing we're not coming back to it, let it go from mind because it is over. Superficially is the only way I can talk comfortably with anybody in this time. It's an unspoken code in America that when you see two people talking, you are duty bound to interrupt them. It's inescapable.  

 

 

I can't defeat a social trend so pervasive it has become the nature of the American character. And I cannot say this shortening of collective attention span down to nothing is necessarily a bad thing, because I don't know. I don't want to live in another country, so I adjust to the social context of the moment. Americans have become collectively addicted to distraction. The attention span that thirty years ago was about that of a cat is now nonexistent. There is little to no attention span left. Television has been sacred from the beginning. By now it is the holy of holies. I have not paid attention to television since 1961, but for brief spells for a car race and at other people's houses. I call it MBC, Mammon's Broadcasting Corporations. Mammon is a false god, and not a benevolent one, the ultimate trickster. The continuous broadside of sound demanding attention and flashing visuals equally demanding attention makes me crazy after a few hours. Beyond a few hours my head goes numb and I fall into a grumpy mood. I want to be home and hear the birds. A nation of people obsessed with money, where money is the only value, has its foundation in the shifting, whispering sand. Andy Warhol suggested attaching the amount of money somebody paid for one of his paintings to the wall instead of buying the painting. Anyone who sees the painting sees how much it cost. Ah, you have a Warhol!, more impressed by its dollar value than the image. The only thing the painting means on the wall is I-can-afford-it. This has a great deal to do with why I feel it refreshing when I see art on somebody's wall that is an image put there in appreciation, whatever it is. I have friends with a stunning waterfall painting on the wall, a print that came with the frame for maybe ten dollars. It has a waterfall in it that is painted in such a way it pulls the eye closer and closer. The closer you look, the more the waterfall looks like water. It's a gorgeous waterfall painting that looks almost like it's in motion. The image is loved in the home for its subjective aesthetic value instead of its dollar value. They appreciate that they got so much for so little.

Earlier, when I realized the car's battery was dead from trying to start it, I opened the door, turned in the seat with feet on the ground, looking at the bank of wildflowers across the road, thinking: dying really is a solution. One more reason to rejoice when I see it coming. I recall my fear of death falling away some years ago. I've had to watch it ever since, it's so easy to relax into accidents by any of two hundred thousand ways. Before, I had an automatic pilot that took care of self-preservation. Now I have to pay attention to self-preservation and remind self not to be frivolous with this life. It is important to be in the body until this journey is completed and the time is right to move on to what's next. I do it consciously by understanding this lifetime needs to come to its own balance before going on. I don't know when that time is. It's important not to know. It has to be important; nobody knows their time but on death row. I catch myself drifting into thinking not much matters because I don't have a lot of time left. Another mind tells me it matters right up to the last second. I even look for ways to perk myself up, give self incentive, legitimate reason, not fake reason. I think I can distinguish the fake reason as ego, thoughts about legacy. Twice I have been asked by peers what I will leave for my legacy. I answer, Nothing, not even a tombstone. But you have to leave some kind of legacy. Why? The only thing important to me in this lifetime has been my own spiritual path. I take the path for a human path, not a tightrope with hellfire for a net, but a path through a loving universe where the only problem is the human mind, the driver's seat of illusion.

I've characterized the spiritual path in my own vision something like water from a mountain spring flowing on its way to the ocean. I'd call the spring the time of self-awareness, committing to the path. It makes a fast-moving stream that rushes down waterfalls, splashes over rocks, races through rapids, churning, dramatic. The self predominant before, changing fast. Changes happen first on the inside and manifest on the outside in sometimes chaotic, seemingly out of control ways occurring so fast, simultaneously and in succession, it makes the head spin and question one's own authenticity. As a result of understandings and insights, we change first on the inside. Some of the ways of thinking that went before are not practical any longer. They don't work, don't satisfy. People we know and are close to drift away, one at a time, and we wonder what is going wrong. I thought I was becoming a better person and my friends are abandoning me. It's a lonesome period of time until waking one morning and realizing you're in a world of new friends, friends more compatible with the new self than the ones that fell away. The waterfall changes to fast moving creek into fast moving river, and slows its pace at lower elevations, widens with smooth surface, flows into the delta, twists back and forth like a serpent sunning on a rock, turning in on itself, taking its time in slow motion. Closer to the sea it stops and backs up at high tide and flows again with the lowering tide. I feel like I've been through the waterfalls, rapids period and the fast-moving river period that lasted at least 20 years. My path has characterized the second half of this lifetime. I feel like I've gone through the slow-moving river and now am flowing in the delta, slowly, slowly, twisting this way and that, direction changing continually. Meandering is the word. I feel like I've been meandering within over the last few years. I feel honored in this lifetime to have the chance to complete this cycle in the Way from a mountain spring to the sea. I don't believe this is the path of my enlightenment in one lifetime. I see it a  cycle through this lifetime in self-awareness, saying in signs I've done well not to get side-tracked, passing through opportunities for distraction, indulging some and letting them go, returning to the flow, allowing the flow, trusting the flow that just keeps rolling along.       

caterpillar

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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GETTING WEIRD

barnett newman

Something really odd is going on in our collective American experiment with democracy, or maybe it is a wave in the flow of the American continuum. I'd guess looking at what the outer planets are doing now, like Uranus the huge ball of gas, and Neptune, would give some insight into how their influences work on us collectively. It feels to me like a time of gestation, something pushing to come through, held back by resistance. The force is a living thing. The resistance, a false belief system that doesn't work anymore, won't be able to hold it back much longer. It is a time in social evolution to make some major adjustments in distribution of resources. The population is growing and the rich are taking everything to themselves, looking to the day when USA has a peasant class and a royalty class, when all work will be without minimum wage a consideration, corporate work like fast-food joints, robots and computers taking care of all but "services." Since the corporate takeover of government, We the People are being legislated against. This has been going on for a very long time, longer than I have lived. Every day is something in the news about the NC government and the Texas government dipping to the bottom of the swill bucket legislating against women with a passion like they're conducting important business. The sick part is that these men want to dominate women by legislation, since they can't dominate women by intelligence. They are showing me what I've seen all along in my life, that too many men really don't like women, and I don't mean gay men. And I'm sure it's the other way around, women who don't like men living with men. It's very complex psychologically. It's too complex.

barnett newman

 

Talking with Joe in Becca's coffee shop the other day, he brought up how weird things are now. We have people in our government the equivalent of Burger King employees, do what you're told people. We have people in government I can only believe were elected because they're brain-dead. Two-thirds of a century into brain-dead nation, America is sinking quickly to the bottom of all the charts, except CEO salaries and benefits. The republican party has become the magnet for the lower intelligence half of our population. Republican politicians have become missionaries of ignorance. No more education, because educated people vote democrat. Shut women down because women vote democrat. I don't think it's that we Americans are any dumber than ever, though statistics say we are, but we're being so subtly manipulated by the entire corporate world around us, it's hard to find a direction to turn. I found my OFF switch years ago. From the start, I refused to live the suburban American lifestyle. I jumped in when I was young, went in way up over my head, came struggling back up for air and turned OFF any motivation or ambition in myself to fall into the groove of making money the only value in my life. I never ever wanted anyone to say of me, Oh, he is money. I've heard that said of a few people, and when I heard it I kind of retched inside. Like, who would want to be money? I would hate it if everybody looking at me saw money and sucked up to me because I was money.

barnett newman

 

Clever Andy Warhol made huge canvases of money, made silkscreens of money. One of the many quips he's famous for saying has to do with art in relationship with money. He said when somebody buys one of his canvases for two hundred thousand, when they look at it and when they show it to their peers, they see two hundred thousand dollars. Warhol suggested putting the money itself on the wall. Warhol was a satirist who ironically made a major fortune satirizing American culture. Quick-draw Elvis. He even made a portrait of Barbie. And Marilyn Monroe as Barbie. Some years ago, I was someplace out of my usual, an early Marilyn movie was on the tv, Don't Bother To Knock. I was probably laughing inside at how bad it was in so many ways, and Marilyn struck a pose for several seconds. It was the pose Warhol used for his Marilyn image. Looking at it long enough to study it, I felt I saw Warhol's attraction to the image. It was a classic Marilyn image like Jackie O in the black veil is a classic Jackie O image. His portraits of the rich and famous are like fashion magazine images. It was his style, like comic book images were Roy Lichtenstein's style and vertical lines were Barnett Newman's style. Warhol was something of an idiot-savant. Somebody destined to be a hairdresser took an art class and something clicked. Intellect he was not. I've read a couple biographies of him, found his life story an interesting tale of somebody who, as he describes himself, is the same as a two-dimensional movie screen. You project onto him what you want him to be.

barnett newman

I've an idea the craziness of making a silkscreen canvas for a hundred thousand dollars seemed so ridiculous to him he could not take art seriously. It was in that zone of not taking art seriously that he became an artist who represented his time like few others. Warhol loved the fame, the glamor, the wealth, the jet set, because he was, by his own assessment, shallow as a movie screen. He was way shallow on the one hand and way deep on the other hand. An enigmatic character in that way. I tend to see USA much like Warhol. Two-dimensionally shallow on the one hand and infinite depth on the other hand. Everything in between. We are the rainbow of the world when it comes to the American people. None of our "humanity" matters to our corporate government that no longer represents our interests, but works against our interest. It was a series of coups that have come to completion by now. First step: divide and conquer. Herein, I suspect, is the beginnings of finding the answer to why this is such a weird, odd, crazy time. A nation that has been about money and money only from the first ship that left Europe unto present cannot develop into much. We had a moment of flash soon after WW2, but it's energy is long expended by now. Something like the way Chinese will light a long string of firecrackers on the ground or hanging in the air, run with fingers in ears and watch in fascination hundreds of firecrackers going off.  

barnett newman

The greatest part of what I suspect is making everything crazy now is we're 33 years advanced along the divide and conquer strategy of our corporate government to set us at odds with each other and make us more manageable by propaganda. The funny part about this time in our history is the fiction of propaganda has become American reality. Our disinformation campaign will be complete when everything the American people believe is false, saith William Casey, Reaganista CIA director, 1981. The word going around among both the left and the right for different reasons is we're screwed. I saw a cartoon a few days ago of a man with a great big screw running through his chest and sticking out his back. His eyes had the look of a man waking up from heart surgery seeing the bill. One of our two political forces is in lockstep set on eliminating democracy. The other political force is in agreement pretending not to be. Democracy is not only in crisis, it's over. Big changes. Not changes we'll like. We'll wake up one morning, individually, and recognize we're in submission mode. We have no choice. Downsize to a cheaper house, used vehicles, sell some land, forget kids going to college, only sweatshop factory jobs and military available with minimum wage made a thing of the past by legislation or supreme court. They want to put black people back to the way they lived in the late nineteenth century, in Third World poverty, shining rich men's shoes and saying, Yowsuh, boss man. Maybe they'll put Amos & Andy back on tv and Disney's Song of the South. A herd of sheep tend to go where they're driven. I'm grateful to God I unplugged from ambition to get mixed up in the money and status game.

barnett newman

 

 

*

 

LIKE A ROLLING STONE

     edie factory girl by nat finkelstein

Bob Dylan's song Like a Rolling Stone stays in my mind today. Once upon a time you dressed so fine, you threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you. People call, say Beware doll you're bound to fall, you thought they were all kidding you. You used to laugh about everybody that was hanging out. Now you don't talk so loud, now you don't feel so proud about having to be scrounging for your next meal. The arrogance of youth and wealth brought down by junk. The song is an appeal to Dylan's then girlfriend-interest, Edie Sedgwick, a rich California babe who arrived in NY with a splash, a spread of photographs in Vogue as the hottest new item in NY society. From there her descent was a straight line downward. She hung with Andy Warhol's Factory bunch of hangers-on junkies. They kept her high. She was also Bob Dylan's sometimes girlfriend who would go with him for awhile, then she'd drift back to the Factory and the drug euphoria there. He struggled with her trying to get her away from that crowd and the junk, but she was on the downbound train and reversing her direction was not a consideration. She'd been her daddy's sex partner since she was a child. She didn't have a chance in this world. Even her daddy's wealth couldn't save her.

Edie Sedgwick's story is told in a page-turning biography, EDIE: AMERICAN GIRL, by Jean Stein. Edie's story is almost a parable. But there are so many junkies over the years who have taken the downbound train straight down, and one generation doesn't learn from the generation before. Nothing is learned from generation to generation, because the people who start using don't know anything about its history of destroying everyone who takes to it. They've heard legends and know the dangers, but believe they're immune. It rendered the Clash's drummer incapable after a certain number of years and the band died on account of the drummer going under. Many a band went under as a result of discovering junk, the ultimate temptress. The punk scene in both London and New York went under soon after junk was introduced into the scene. Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had a John & Yoko type love affair with fellow dingbat junkie Nancy Spungeon of the film SID & NANCY. They went through the bottom together and he ended up stabbing her to death with a Bowie knife on a NY hotel bed. He went to prison a short time, got out on bail and OD'd right away. With no direction home. Like a complete unknown. Like a rolling stone.  

According to Edie's biography, Dylan had serious antipathy for the Warhol crowd for the fools that the lot of them were and for their hold on Edie. Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse, when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. The biographer tells of a visit to the Factory by Dylan, evidently cajoled into it by Edie's influence, to sit before a Warhol movie camera for a given amount of time. Dylan was boiling inside. He saw a stack of Marilyn silkscreens leaning vertically against a wall. Dylan pulled a pistol out of his pocket and shot a hole through all of them, a half dozen or so, before he left. Warhol raised the price on them and called them Marilyn with bullet hole by Bob Dylan, probably dated on the back. For about a year Warhol's glamorous Super Stars, junkies with several drag queens among them, played pretend fashion publicly, poseurs of the absurd anti-strutting about, being seen. They were fun. The films were stupid and fun. Chelsea Girls. Lonesome Cowboys. So terrible they were NEW. They were Art. The Super Stars created a sensation in the art world of New York, showing up at openings and the right bars, being seen. They, themselves, were Art, junkies playing pretend they were on the way up when they were on the way down. Like the Bob Marley song, you think you're in heaven when you're really in hell. Then Warhol was shot; his castle of pixels fell to the floor with him. When he came out of the hospital, all that illusion of the Factory junkie scene went away as fast as a breath on the wind.

It was the time of Pop Art in New York, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselman, Robert Indiana, Marisol, Warhol and others, at the same time that Minimalism, too, was branching off from Abstract Expressionism of the Fifties. The public responded to Pop shows at NY museums like to Star Wars movies. The spirit was festive among the people milling about in the museums. It was new, it was art, and it was something people who wanted to feel they understood art could get their minds around without having to be an Art History major to get it. Viewers feel like they get it when they see a Claes Oldenburg large soft sculpture of a pie slice or a hamburger. Oldenburg is a wildly imaginative artist. You had the Warhol entourage weaving in and out of these art scenes at gallery openings, affecting spectacularly bizarre, getting their kicks from a stoned confidence they're shocking the people seeing them, when the only thing anyone who saw them thought was: you see everything in New York. Edie Sedgwick, little miss Like a Rolling Stone, wove in and out of the New York society scene with famous Andy Warhol at her side, Andy adoring his vacant new Super Star who'd been featured in Vogue and came from big California money, was glamorous and played pretend well. Aint it hard when you discover that he really wasn't where it's at, after he's taken from you everything he could steal. Just like a rolling stone.

* 

NAT FINKELSTEIN AND ANDY WARHOL: THE FACTORY YEARS

andy, the double tambourine picture by nat finkelstein

Sitting here looking through a book of photographs by Nat Finkelstein called ANDY WARHOL: The Factory Years, 1964-1967. Finkelstein was a photographer in New York when the Warhol Factory was happening. He saw right away this was something that needed recording. He was thinking of some of the photographers of the day making picture books from New Guinea and other remote places. Finkelstein saw that the Warhol bunch of "superstars" were as remote as someplace uncharted. He said he felt like a spy photographer. He was not one of them, but he moved about among them freely. His text is as good as the photographs, full of insightful humor about the people involved. They were largely upper middle class drug addict runaways. People with absolutely no inner resources posing for cameras and being in the scene. What they amounted to, simply, was junkies. Warhol was not a junkie. He was a manipulator who used everyone around him.


Finkelstein said of Edie Sedgwick of big California money, a vacant twit who lifted into the air for a moment of stardom when Vogue photographed her, but there was nothing to follow it up. For a moment, she was the next new thing in New York. "She was a representative of something so selfish and so superficial that the only thing she was able to destroy or change was herself. Her life is a pop tragedy, a manufactured, superficial tragedy. American society produces disposables, Edie was not Bionic woman, but Disposable woman." Edie had a period of time as Bob Dylan's lover, who hated that she hung with the Warhol crowd. He wrote LIKE A ROLLING STONE about her. Once upon a time you dressed so fine, you threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you. People call, say, beware doll, you're bound to fall, you thought they were all kiddin you. You used to laugh about everybody that was hangin out....


Several years ago I found a paperback biography in the grocery store, EDIE, the story of Edie Sedgwick. Expecting it to be boring, I started in the middle when she got up with the Warhol crowd. It turned out to be so good that I went from the last page to the first page and read up to where I began. Pathetic individual, the kind you're glad other people know. A film turned up called CIAO MANHATTAN, showing Edie after she fell through the bottom in New York when she was living in the deep end of the swimming pool at home in California with a tarp over it to keep the rain out. It was her room. The drain took care of the rain water that came in at the shallow end. It was a totally cheezy film, but it was interesting as a companion to the biography. Her story paralleled Janis Joplin's in that both were junkies who fell through the bottom and died. Only Edie had no talent, no mind, nothing at all but looks and money. They bought her a place near the top when she appeared in New York, but she didn't have what it took to sustain it. She was a definition of a shooting star. She didn't even give off much light, just fizzled.


Finkelstein goes on about Warhol, "Andy was a hunter-gatherer. Edie was one of the things that he collected. He toyed with her, played with her, just like a child plays with a watch, destroys it and throws it aside. Everything became Andy's material. All the casualties that came around him...none of these people were really important to him. They each were searching for self-importance, but never realized that they were only raw material, that's what destroyed them." I've had this book for several years, c1989, have looked through it several times, looking at the black and white photographs that are awfully good photographs. This is the first time I looked at the text. I tend not to read text in art books or photography books, because it's not what I want. I want the image. I'd rather look at Robert Motherwell's Ode To The Spanish Republic than read about it. I don't care about the private life of an artist. It's the work I prefer. Though a good biography of an artist is good reading, like Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Whistler.


I've read I think three biographies of Warhol, saw a couple of documentary films about him, saw some of his films when they were current, have a book of his works, a book of his photographs called AMERICA, a book of black and white photos by Billy Name in the Factory. I regard him an artist of tremendous influence when it comes to his place in the art world. He thought his name and art would fade away like Dale Evans, but I don't believe it's going to be like that. Freak that he was, and he really was a freak, he made American art all the way. He illustrated American glitter. The glitter was his subject. Funny thing is, he got it right. America is glitter. We're not aware that in quality of life we figure way down the list in countries of the world, because it's glossed over with glitter, television glitter. Warhol, who, himself, was nothing more than a shell of an individual, like nobody home, surrounded himself with people who, themselves, were vacancies. They kept him going with ideas, distraction, labor, "actors" in films. They were his volunteer staff.


Then one day, a shit happens moment occurred when this man-hating victim of a son-of-a-bitch daddy, Valerie Solanis, shot Andy Warhol because he would not make a film of her screenplay. She had a lesbian society called SCUM, Society for Cutting Up Men. She was the only member. Saw a fairly good film made of her life, I Shot Andy Warhol. Well made film of the life of somebody from the bottom. They have valid stories, too. When Andy hit the floor, the Factory, the way of life, the friends, the distractions all came fluttering down like falling pixels to the floor around him. It was all over. He survived, but only slightly. He didn't trust people so much anymore. He started aspiring to the upper class New York jet set where he would be taken in as the token artist at the cocktail parties. I still have the clipping from the NY Times of the Warhol shooting. As they would say in his crowd, he was a sick bitch. Gauguin was too. Dali was too. Who isn't in the world of art? You have to be a sick bitch to have an artist eye. It's about inability to do anything else but make art, whatever the form. As an artist, himself, Finkelstein had the good fortune to recognize something was going with Warhol early on, and filled the need for a photographer to make reality of the ongoing party.

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IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS

julian schnabel's portrait of andy warhol, 1982

I hear on the news a "stolen smart-phone is very serious." As serious as killing children in their beds in Afghanistan? More. A "smart-phone" costs a lot and it has all your phone numbers in it, very serious. Serious in that undoing damage done if your phone is stolen can be relentless and not work. When they were telling about the people killed in their beds in the middle of the night by an American, I don't think it was ever introduced on the news as "very serious." Alas, not serious at all; towel-heads, black hair, foreign language, poor. Killing poor children has been on the news since Vietnam. It didn't end there. Makes me wonder if the people killing kids have been doing it for the news. I can't forget that I heard somebody say after the Afghanistan massacre of a family that it seems odd for something like this to be happening in a war. It has become a part of the American character to mow down a roomful of unsuspecting and defenseless people. How American is that? It's our foreign policy. Where will it happen next? Anywhere. Night after night on the news we see bombs go off in Baghdad blowing up apartment buildings, American soldiers in desert cammies armed with amazing weapons, shooting towel-heads. It's what we see every day as "reality" on the news.


At present I see tv about once a week watching the races with Justin on Sunday afternoons. I don't see much besides the race, but for some golf and some basketball. A lot of commercials. The aggression in the commercials I find notable. It seems they get louder, have more flash, instant information that is not informative, and many of them more clever every year unto comedy. I can't help but make the connection between television and the vanishing American attention span. The American disdain for knowledge, intelligence, paying attention, is really showing in our representatives, our politicians. In this time a politician commits to no knowledge at the beginning. Vote for me, I don't know anything and am committed to never learning anything. Alice's Tea Party politicians represent that mind, a perhaps majority of white man mind, the party of willful ignorance, ignorance with intent to be stupid. It cannot be testosterone. It is culture. My grandfather once said to me, If ignorance was bliss, boy, you'd go to heaven for sure. I suppose that's where I learned ignorance is not bliss. A woman I once knew, who lived by her belief that ignorance was bliss, grew old bent over, in continuous agony living with her tormentor, self-esteem beaten down into the ground, because she can't stand up for herself, because she's been so willfully stupid since childhood she never learned anything. When I see her pushing a cart in the grocery store parking lot, bent over behind it, I look away. She's so incredibly depressed I don't dare say, how are you?


Today's movie was Factory Girl, the Edie Sedgwick story re-enacted. Edie was a case of self-destructive willful ignorance, a junkie without regard for consequences. She represented for me willful ignorance set on self-destruct, something about like Janis Joplin or Sid Vicious, a junkie lacking foresight who falls through the bottom and self-destructs. I've an idea "junk" was the subject of Chuck Berry's early song, Downbound Train. I've seen Ciao Manhattan, an "independent" film made when Edie Sedgwick was back in California after her self-embarrassment in New York, living in the empty swimming pool at her parents' house with a tarp over the top of the deep-end. The drugs had blown her circuits by then. She was no more the Vogue glamor girl of the month. I found it interesting the Bob Dylan character in her life was called Quinn in the film. Evidently Dylan denied permission to use his name or music. He was always represented in the movie by songs having heady themes, but not reminiscent of Dylan at all. The actor playing him did, indeed, play Dylan, showing very well his contempt for Warhol and the junkies hanging at the Factory.


I've read two biographies of Warhol, seen about 4 documentary films concerning his art. Warhol has stressed over and over that he does not know anything; he cannot be a genius because he's hardly a person. Everybody takes it for affectation. But it's the affectation of the truth. In the time, the dress-up Sixties, Warhol repeated that he had the same depth as a movie screen; none, merely reflective surface. He was right. He had no depth. His irresponsible behavior showed it. I have to say that just about all the people I know are people I'd prefer to know over Andy Warhol. I find him an intensely interesting artist. Artists are not necessarily charming talk show hosts. Warhol as an artist is awfully much a poet too. His visuals are a visual kind of poetry. Not a poetry of words, but a poetry of associations perhaps. I find it most interesting that his images are shallow, his films boring, he uses the news for historical context. He correctly read our time an era of shallow people. He depicts his own shallow character and connects with everyone else's. But there is no rule book anywhere that says an artist must be intelligent. Ideally, art is not of the mind. When someone like Warhol has mind out of the way, it doesn't interfere with his senses so much. Very odd individual. And one of the great artists of our time.        

ANDY WARHOL AMERICAN MASTER

     andy warhol campbell soup cans, 1962

Watched twice the PBS series American Masters documentary of Andy Warhol. Four hours and not one dull second. Warhol's world didn't have a dull second in it either. I've heard four hours of art critic talk about Warhol, in-the-present, in-your-face. I heard one critic say the first half of the 20th century was Picasso's, the 2nd half Warhol's. When he was happening, it was like he was the greatest thing since Matisse, dismissed by some of the art world, praised by some of it. I and several of my friends watched Warhol like a gossip columnist follows a movie star. He was the star he set out to be. His works of art had profound and complex meaning. He, himself, claimed to have none. And I think he was right. He was a sponge. He gathered people around him to give him ideas. He had a circle going of people giving him ideas and him giving them ideas. He kept a fertility going in his work, always new, always powerful meaning, always the claim there's no more to it, and himself, than a silver screen. 

In his time, my belief was that he was doing incredible work that made powerful social statements. I felt the same about Bob Dylan. In both cases, I was happy they occurred in my lifetime. I've been able to watch Bob Dylan's music grow from 1963, when I first heard him, until now. He's one year older than me. He was a driven genius. Andy Warhol was a driven genius. These are the people of my time I've been happy to have for contemporaries. I feel like Dylan and Harold Pinter are the Shakespeares of our time. Dylan even the Mozart, as he's both writer and composer. He is the original poet who sang his poems. Chinese poems in the old days were written to traditional tunes and sung. This is the time for the anti-traditional, which Dylan is all the way, Pinter too, and Warhol. They are so against the tradition, they are the foundational beginnings of a new tradition.

Up to WW1 we looked back to the Classical Age in Greece and Rome as the foundation of the tradition; afterward, the 20th century carved out the new tradition that will be the Classical Age for the future. The renascence in Greece and Rome, and the Renaissance in Italy, which went into London and Paris and all around as well, we looked back to as the authority until the 20th Century, when it happened again. These times are times of high energy energizing humanity to new heights in all fields of human endeavor. We're now in the reformation following the most recent renascence, the greatest the world has seen, because it had more to work with. Andy Warhol, himself, saw his fame fade out and away, depicted in his 8'x8' silkscreen, Myths, 1981. He saw himself a temporary pop sensation like Howdy Doody and Mickey Mouse. I never knew how to assess the scope of his fame. I was seeing his work when it was almost new and hearing reactions of all varieties, from the totally uninformed, "it's not art," to the greatest ever. I don't know the art world and don't want to know it, but Warhol got a very great deal said in pictures important to our society and civilization as a whole, in beautiful images. 

In the late 60s the Warhol hangers-on made headlines that defined cool for the time. They showed up at the same club every night, a big gang of them, junkies, drag queens, nut cases, all of them wannabes, American jabberers on amphetymenes, too deep into every kind of drug to be anything but stupid. Warhol's persona without a personality was a cool pose for the time. In the time of corporate cool, cocaine, he acted like he was high on it all the time, and never was. The people that drifted into his circle were high all the time, and he just copied their far away gaze. They dressed in exaggerated clothes of other times from thrift stores and strutted about New York like children playing dressup, going out in public to show their creations. He catches criticism now for allowing several of the people to destroy themselves as he watched. That's nonsense. He was in self-destruct mode too. Warhol was a great enigma for artists of the time, too. I think many got what he was doing, some sympathetically, some not, and found him hard to be influenced by, his style being so much his own. It would be like painting like vanGogh or Georgia OKeefe. It's already been done. 

Art history goes through Warhol, not around him. In the film, early on when talking about the abstract expressionists of the 1950s like they believed they'd found the pinnacle of pure art, at an early Warhol show, some man spoke with self-important authority that this is "anti-art." Duh. Anti-art has been the nature of avant-garde art since the impressionists. Anti-art is the only tradition of the 20th century. The man told more about himself than he told about Warhol. The soup cans do it for me. One time in New York, I went into the Leo Castelli gallery and saw some Warhols I'd guestimate 6'x3' of soup cans in dayglo colors, 4 of them, each one different. It was stunning. That would have been late 60s. I saw what he was doing, what Pop was doing, taking abstraction the next step, from soft-edged unfamiliar to hard-edged familiar. While the people whose careers were invested in abstract expressionism made a lot of noise about Pop not being art, an artist I knew at the time called Robert Indiana's canvases "propaganda." I thought that was stretching it quite a bit looking for objection. 

Since I saw it, standing before those Warhols in Castelli's, I've seen minimalism that came on with Pop as abstract as abstract expressionism too. Minimalism and Pop took out the painterliness, which for the abstractionists was a kind of anti-industrial statement. Minimalists and Popists accepted the industrial, the manufactured, made smooth lines and colors without brush strokes. They took the action out of action painting. Warhol went for the mass produced. He painted every one of the cans pictured at the top by hand, one at a time, all the same, except the name of the soup in each can. He later made repeating images with silk screen, but in his first years made repeating images by hand, like a page of postage stamps, dollar bills, S&H green stamps. Until the soup cans, nothing he did caught much attention, but the soup cans put him on the international art map over night. At the same time, post-abstract expressionism exploded into several directions. Frank Stella's straight lines, Richard Serra's steel panels, Roy Lichtenstein's comic book images, Jasper Johns' flags and targets, Robert Rauschenberg's "combines," abstractions using paint and found objects. It sort of exploded into post-modernism.  

At the time, I thought Warhol was the apex of contemporary art. The junkies and drag queens and "underground superstars," were childishly glamorous for a few years. The drugs started taking their toll, stranger and stranger people came into the circle, which became something of a free-for-all party scene for people falling through their own bottom. Andy was using these people for ideas, watching them, imitating them, seeing them the self-image he wanted to project onto the world. It worked for him. And they all did it for nothing, for the fun of being an Andy Warhol Superstar, in the scene of the day. Everything seemed to be going great until he was shot. He had to re-invent himself, do what's next. First thing he did was change the people he kept around him. One of the guys from the office in the time of the magazine Interview, Bob Colacello, told of a time Andy said in the office, You guys are boring. Colacello said, You don't have to worry about us shooting you. Colacello later wrote, Holy Terror, Andy Warhol Close Up. It was an inside look at Warhol in the time after the shooting. Warhol fell into doing portraits of the rich and famous all the same size, 40"x40". He told dealer Irving Blum he envisioned in the future a show of all of them. He wanted them to hang touching side by side on the walls around the museum like in his montage images.

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ANDY

cat eyes


I have reaped what I have sown. The chemical warfare attack killed all the mice. Last night was silence. All the mice were dead. It felt creepy. A friend had suggested a movie called 10,000 lights, I forget the rest. I wrote it in the search box at netflix and it wasn't in their inventory. As always, a list of titles, one of them, House of 1,000 Corpses. I cracked up. That's my house. Mouse corpses in the walls. And today I pay for my sin of poisoning all the mice. They stink and I can't do anything about it. They're in the walls and there are several. Doors and windows are closed with heat on. I tell myself it surely doesn't smell worse than Mumbai or Calcutta, learn to live with and I won't notice it, then it will be gone. What else? Pot pouri? (however it's spelled) I feel a bit of sorrow for Caterpillar too. She liked watching them. She looks and waits and they never appear. They were her 3-D television. She has nothing else to occupy her attention. She just lazes about on her cushion.



Have just finished seeing A Walk Into The Sea, a documentary made by a Massachusetts woman who had been searching for anything to lead to her brother's disappearance several years before. He'd been one of the hangers on at Andy Warhol's Factory in the 60s. It was interesting history, a brief review of that Warhol period in New York, the intensely boring films that were cool because they were boring, and the silkscreens of Marilyn, Elvis, Campbell's soup cans, Brillo boxes, coca cola bottles, and his hangers on were the essence of cool in that time, in that place. They affected boredom brought on by everything and everybody around them. On coke, of course. On heroin, uppers, downers, acid, every kind of drug they could get in any form. Making films of each other shooting up and arguing and being stupid.



They got immense attention in the art world and in the press. They were a sensation. Edie Sedgwick, the rich California junkie who flashed like the shooting star that she was, fizzled out, crashed and died. It was a dark atmosphere, and I don't mean poorly lit. It looks like Warhol drew his creative energy from the people around him. He manipulated and used them. They all wanted to please Andy. Andy was famous and making them famous for being famous. A bunch of junkies of artistic leanings hanging out, staying high, playing artist, actually making some very interesting art. Like Gerard Malanga evidently did an awful lot of the silk screens. Andy made the design and Malanga put them on canvas. Andy was after making art like in a factory. He conceived the image, got other people to put it all together into multiple silk screens.



Warhol became one of those nutcase New York people like Truman Capote who, like Warhol, sucked up to the rich and partied with NY high society, got their pictures in People magazine, had expensive eccentricities and not so gracious deaths. I saw as many Warhol films as I could, which isn't very many, interested by what he was doing in art, feeling like I got it to some extent, and fascinated by that crazy bunch of people around him. Now, many years later, after reading half a dozen books on them, by some of them, seeing documentary films about them, looking at Warhol artistically, I see a bunch of people I'd couldn't be comfortable among for 5 minutes. He might have been a nutcase, but he was foremost an artist who made for himself a respectable place in American/international art of his time. He's the source of the saying every American has known for several decades, 'in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes.'


Part of what I liked so much about this film was the absence of Warhol adoration. They looked at him with a cold eye. The director was searching for why her brother, who had been with the Factory bunch for quite a while as electrician for Velvet Underground concerts, disappeared. She went around to different living people from the Factory, almost 40 years later, and talked with them. They were some strange looking people. They looked pretty bad then, but in their own 60s they weren't quite as cool as they believed they were back in The Sixties.



I noticed nearly all the men that talked had permanent dark circles around their eyes. It was like they had brown donuts tattooed around their eyes. Bad hair, phew. What I was seeing was from the TS Eliot poem, we are the hollow men. I saw emptiness vast as looking into a black hole. I laughed at myself, thinking these were the people I thought were too cool for school at one time. Seeing these people, I felt glad again that I jumped off that track into the kind of emptiness that inhabits them. I'd have become like them, dark circles around the eyes, who I am locked up in a box and put in a safe place where it's forgotten. Living inside a self-created identity of what I want other people to believe about me. I can't live like that. It was in that time that God picked me up like a mama cat picking up a kitten by the back of the neck and carrying it from here over to there. I didn't do so well living in the world. I felt like a balloon with a slow leak. Then, like the song says, love lifted me. I've thought no more of the Warhol mystique since that time, but to enjoy his images from time to time. I'll always appreciate Andy's art.



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