NAMING THE DONKEY MISS ED

miss ed third day

 

How fast a baby donkey is walking independently has been catching my attention day after day. Each day the baby donkey is bigger, more stable on its feet, more in line with mama's movements and more in tune to mama's teaching. First couple of days when baby stepped inside mama's forbidden zone while she was having her grain, Jenny popped baby with a hoof. They were not power kicks, not even kicks, but a firm nudge saying go no further. Today, Friday, baby's fourth day, Jenny merely lifts her back hoof off the ground, just a gesture, and baby backs out of range. I've seen that baby stands midway between Jenny and Jack, just out of range of their back legs, while they are grazing. Baby's first learning as a young donkey was that donkeys kick, it's what donkeys do. And donkeys need to learn to take a kick before they are able to kick. Jenny's instruction these first few days I am looking at as "mother's milk," instruction so early in development it shapes us into who we are unconsciously, pre rational thinking.

 

this was inside jenny

 

A few months before baby was born, I asked the three year old child of my friend Meredith, who is living in the greater San Francisco area of several cities grown into one, to name Jenny's baby when it arrives. I've known Meredith all her life as the daughter of my friends Lucas and Judy. Teddy, her three year old, was kind of struck dumb being asked out of the blue to name a donkey. I realized then it was a tall order, conceptually, for a three year old. Hadn't considered that. I thought it might have been presumptuous to ask a three year old to stretch his mind that far. He said, "I'll have to think about it." I thought it remarkable for a three year old to say he'll have to think about it. Maybe I did pick the right kid to ask. I wanted to ask the youngest person I know. Teddy. I wanted a name I would never think of on my own, a name separate from my mind. A couple days later, Teddy spoke. He said, "Mr Ed if it's a boy. Miss Ed if it's a girl." I wondered how a three year old in San Francisco knew about Mr Ed the talking horse. Montessori pre-school maybe?

 

miss ed's natural born camouflage

 

Of course, my editing mind went to work over-riding original intent, thinking I wanted a girl's name, a variation of Ed. Didn't care for Edna or Edith, but liked Edie. Thought I'd change from Miss Ed to Edie. Edie sounded good in my mind. But out in the meadow with the baby, I could not call it Edie. The name did not fit. Miss Ed fit. I found my mind automatically thought of the baby as Miss Ed. I'd look at her and Miss Ed was how I'd think of her. Then by association, Edie Sedgwick came to mind and would not leave. She was a rich California air-head who went to NY in the time of Andy Warhol's Factory, was given a big spread in Vogue as the latest new thing in New York. She fell in with the Factory bunch, upper middle-class junkie runaways, became a junkie right away and the subject of Bob Dylan's song, Like a Rolling Stone. She fell through the bottom and went back home to California, unable to take care of herself, and lived in an empty swimming pool. She symbolizes for me the ultimate loser. I did not feel right naming my baby donkey after a psycho air-head junkie. It didn't feel right to name Jenny's baby after a child who had been raped by her daddy throughout her childhood. When I thought of the baby donkey as Edie, Edie Sedgwick popped up in my mind's eye. I did not resonate with the association.  

 

miss ed's ears

 

All the time my mind was chewing on the name Edie, Miss Ed was there as the baby's name all along. The original intent behind asking a three year old to name the  baby donkey was to bypass my own mind. While the baby was being born, she was Miss Ed. She was Miss Ed before she was born. Every time I looked at the baby, I automatically thought, Miss Ed. I asked a baby to name a baby in order to bypass my own ego. Naturally, ego had to jump in to assert itself, take over, say Mine, spray paint my initials on it gangsta style. Once I made the decision to go with Edie, Edie Sedgwick grew and grew in my mind's eye. I went to YouTube to see videos of her in the Warhol time. Her image grew in my mind until I wanted mind free of images of a psychological plane crash, someone whose surface was privileged, and below the thin surface the heart of darkness. I can't burden my baby donkey with those associations in my head. By the end of the third day I realized my error of editing original purpose. I sighed relief and inhaled understanding that Miss Ed really is the donkey's name. I only think of her as Miss Ed. By now, after thinking about it all day yesterday, I am repelled by the thought of naming the donkey Edie. Miss Ed she is. She is so much Miss Ed I wonder if Teddy had intuitional access to Jenny's baby.

 

mama jen

 

 

photos by tj worthington

 

 

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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.

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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.