Saturday, July 17, 2004

Porn is research. How many people make this claim? Andy did, as it was part of his tax records, a.k.a his diary.

I web-surfed trying to find The fairy-shirt with Andy's name on it but I had no luck. If there was a good example of what postmodernism could be as defined by consumer culture, it would be that shirt--that's the kitchy, watered-down version of the term, of course; the one academics might hate, and everyday people adore, like all of Andy's pop-paintings: simply loveable, digestable and easy to remember. Having the names of Thoreau, Halston and Alexander the Great, together with Andy on the same shirt sounds surreal.

I also surfed for the "landscapes" but did not find anything on the web. Maybe Andy ended up calling them something else, after taking pictures of one of the scapes all night. Maybe this will do, or this.

Ah, yes. Nothing like hearing a personal account of a well publicized break-up. I wonder why Bianca kept Mick's last name? Her maiden name is Bianca Perez Morena de Macias. Here is when she became Mrs. Jagger.

The following quote is from one of the oddest reviews I've read: "[...]after September 11th, facing the threat of radical Muslim fundamentalism, we have realized that however cynical we may feel about our consumer and celebrity culture - it's superficiality, it's amorality, it's faithlessness, - it is a belief system, and one that we believe in with renewed faith. Warhol, more than any other artist, articulated this radical material fundamentalism not just in the paintings that made him famous but in his films, his writings, and in almost every other aspect of his obsessively productive life." I am not sure how there can be anything great about our consumer culture, especially in relation with "amorality." What kind of values does a statement like this imply American culture has? A renewed faith in faithlessness? To top it off, Andy is then compared to a terrorist: "Understandable, perhaps, because when Warhol first burst upon the scene in the early Sixties he himself was a kind of terrorist."

Well, here is a more straight forward review of the work. Here we have a comparison to the Water Lillies. Ah, yes! Jameson is the contextualizing avatar on this one!

I am not sure which Rolling Stones cover Andy may be referrring to, but I have two vinyl copies of the Sticky Fingers album. In my previous apartment I had nothing on the walls except for one of the albums. I bought it at Aron's Records, in Los Angeles for .99 cents. I left the price on it and hung it on the wall. The red-colored sticker made the zipped jeans more interesting to look at.

Celebrity fans do the oddest things. This guy posed for a photograph in the bed Belushi supposedly died in at the Chateau Marmont. It seems kind of tame compared with the type of stuff that's on TV these days, but it's the subtle morbosity of his candid pose that gets under my skin. Laying in someone's death bed is just creepy, especially when the person believes it's the actual death bed, but most likely because the death happened a few years ago, chances are it's not the same bed, not to mention the same sheets...

A negro Diahnne Abbott is. That's what Andy says, so she must be. She only made four films. I wonder what she is up to now. Nothing on her recent activities is available on the web. She worked in New York, New York with De Niro and Minelli. Talk about night and day, De Niro moved on from that early role while Liza is still mainly remembered for her New York, New York performance. At least in the mainstream... and is that not where actors like them are defined?

Roger Moore is my James Bond. Some people prefer Sean Connery, but Moore is my man! He was, actually. I don't dig the films anymore. Brosnan was the latest Bond. I hear they are looking for a new Bond. 007 movies are actually odd reinterpretations of the angst at play in global politics. Interesting to see the British government mythologized as an empire running around saving the "people" from Cold Wars and Terrorist attacks, fighting anything from evil governments to greedy corporations, moving from the West to the East, all to keep the Bond gadgets from rusting. I love Moore in his latest film, Boat Trip. Bond's aura is still with him, and he uses it quite well to play a gay man. Bond never looked better. Unfortunately, the movie is horrible.

So now there is a Studio 54 in Las Vegas. There is also a Beatlemania Magazine and the Ten Commandments have been appropriated by html, Baseball, Computers, and client presentations.

I could never get into the Beatles. The music is really great--revolutionary for sure. And culturally they cannot be denied, but I don't get them. I mean, I understand why people love them, I just can't love them. I want to but I can't, although I can imagine loving them. Not to mention Aerosmith, although I always liked Steven Tyler's mouth. When singing, he looks like he is going to eat the mike along with his hand. You got to like that. He is ugly and cool. One often wonders what kind of offsprings people with big lips (like Steven's) produce, and then you get Liv. Steven's lips look good on her. We'll see how they look on her baby.

A woman asking Andy for another Franc-note because he had signed the one he gave her is reminiscent of a gossip or, well, unreliable story I heard about Picasso--I may have read it in his bio, I can't remember, but here is the myth I am about to promote: that Picasso would pay with checks for his dinners at restaurants. Aside from his signature he would also add a few scribbles that looked like some type of drawing, and the managers or restaurant-owners would not cash the check, instead they would frame it and keep it as an art piece. Myth or not, Andy's story is quite similar. Ahh, celebrities! But it's JSG Boggs who's made a career with money as art. A few years ago he performed in one of the galleries at Bergamot station in Santa Monica while claiming that he was being investigated for money fraud. That also sounded like gossip, yet the LA Weekly ran a front page feature on him at the time... Boggs is still around.

Sometimes one has to read about politics in a different language to get a better sense of their complexity. I actually read Le Monde from time to time, and can say that due to the extra attention I need to place on the French language I understood a bit more the politics between Palestinians and Israelites. The quarrel is about deep religious beliefs being displaced onto the right to land and vis a versa. This quarrel has a long history; complex stuff, when it comes to belonging to long standing traditions whose differences have become part of their respective cultures. In part the dispute to whom the land belongs is a displacement of the essentialism performed by both parties. But who am I to talk, I am only an outsider. In the end it's about the compromise. This is the front page snippet to the Saturday 19 edition: Voyage chez les Israéliens, au coeur d'une société en fusion

Andy's philosophy is full of quirky comments. On Beauty he states, "Some people think it's easier for beauties, but actually it can work out a lot of different ways. If you're beautiful you might have a pea-brain. if you're not beautiful you might not have a pea-brain, so it depends on the pea-brain and the beauty. The size of the beauty. And the pea-brain." [p. 61]

It sounds more like Andy is really talking about... art.