Saturday, June 25, 2005

Well, there's no reason why Andy should be jealous of Roy Lichtenstein, especially if he considered his "star" power success in the art market based on commercial sales and number of exhibitions, which add up to Andy being in second place (Picasso is in first place), while Lichtenstein is in fifteenth place:

Artists
Ranking
Points

2003
Trend
2004
Difference

Ranked #1
Pablo Picasso
Chart Auctions
1881-1973
ES

29493.08
+ 7931.00

Ranked #2
Andy Warhol
Chart | Auctions
1928-1987
US

27505.04
+ 7331.66

[...]

15
Roy Lichtenstein
Chart | Auctions
1923-1997
US
Ranked #15

10181.30
+ 4179.39

Warren Beatty has been involved with a "Playgirl" (beyond the magazine) for one thing or another since the eighties: In his Playboy profile, "Playgirl of the Western World," Michael Kelly describes Madonna's crotch grabbing as "an eloquent visual put-down of male phallic pride." He points out that she worked with choreographer Vince Paterson to perfect the gesture. Even though Kelly tells readers that Madonna was consciously imitating Michael Jackson, he does not contextualize his interpretation of the gesture to include this act of appropriation from black male culture.(enter Beatty) Eager to see the documentary Truth ar Dare because it promised to focus on Madonna's transgressive sexual persona, which I find interesting, I was angered by her visual representations of her domination over not white men (certainly not over Warren Beatty or Alek Keshishian), but people of color and white working-class women. I was too angered by this to appreciate other aspects of the film I might have enjoyed. Let Hooks speak the truth. Word.

Here's more on Beatty linking him to politics: A lot of the Hollywood players questioned so far in connection with the FBI investigation of Pellicano have big political ties. There is Bert Fields, who counts among his clients some of the most influential Democrats and Republicans in the media and entertainment business (David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Ron Meyer, Rupert Murdoch); Warren Beatty, who considered a 2000 presidential run; and Brad Grey, who had one of the first daughters, Barbara Bush, working as a summer intern in his Hollywood office in 2001. Enter the Playgirl (model): Barresi says he came to P.I. work in a roundabout way: from a career as an adult-film star, to a Playgirl model, to a tabloid stealth talker, to a 10-year stint as Pellicano’s go-to guy. The connection here is complex in relation to an FBI investigation.

Funny that Andy was done "like Ronald Reagan" because Andy did Ronald Reagan: "The New Revolutionary Collar on Van Heusen Century shirts won't wrinkle ever..." That's a quote from a 1985 portrait. I couldn't find much on Andy's modeling career until now. Here is some stuff: Harald Fricke took a look at the history of elective affinities under the sign of chic, which has encompassed everything from Andy Warhol's modeling career to Erwin Wurm's sweater sculptures, which inspired the video clips of Red Hot Chili Peppers. That of course does not give us details on his modeling career... Let the politics of culture expose the subtexts of Warhol's modeling career: For all his talk about faces, Flatley forgets to mention Warhol's modeling career for Zoli, his headshots for Christopher Makos (in which he appears as a monster), or Interview's fascination with models, white and black, men and women. He bemoans Warhol's "failure to address AIDS," a failure that "surely stemmed in part from his phobic and shame-filled relation to illness." For Flatley, the only Warhol painting that treats the theme is the one that does so explicitly in its title, AIDS/Jeep/Bicycle, ca. 1985. But Warhol's camouflage self-portraits, and his gelatin-silver prints stitched together with thread (especially the untitled one of 1976-86 that shows haunting chandeliers), to name only a few contemporaneous works, can all be read as responses to AIDS. The article is not about fashion, but queer theory, it's actually a review of a book on Andy: The reasons queer theory resists academization are similar to the reasons much of Andy Warhol's most interesting, elusive, and conceptual work (collecting, Interview magazine, television, time capsules, modeling, parfumerie, party-going, Polaroids, porn-buying, tape-recording, telephoning, writing, fandom) thwarts museumification. That work - his queerest, much of it from the '70s - fucks with any limiting definitions of what may be called art, and Pop Out has almost nothing to say about it. So thorough is the ignorance of the book's editors that their book isn't even about Warhol, it's just pages and pages of drivel, supposedly essays that, "disturbing the usually desexualized spaces of the academy ...

If top fashion hairdressers charged $1,000 a day in the eighties today the price has sky-rocketed: What exactly do you get for a $3000 haircut? Well, if you believe what comes out of the mouths of the world's top hairdressers, you should be looking like you just stepped out of a mental institution - not a salon. On Saturday night a British hairdresser, Lee Stafford, who reportedly charges $3000 a haircut, took centre stage at Hair Expo with a show "inspired" by the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Organisers said Stafford presented "a group of nutters with hair to match". Not very PC in these enlightened times but who are we to get in the way of fashion? If Andy were alive today he probably would consider hiring someone at the current rate, because even when dead, his estate earned 8 million dollars in the year 2000.

Here is one framing of "Girls on Film": Girls on Film: A Night of Shorts by Jewish Women. presented in association with
the 14th Street Y. Thur Jun 30 7pm. Here is a critical feminist position: The past century has witnessed a sea change in American films seeking to document prostitution. That change occurred with respect both to the notion of documentation and to the subject of that documentation, and it has been reflected in genre and tone. In fact, the filmic documentation of prostitution by those sympathetic to the plight of prostitutes and seeking reform has moved from a Victorian view that saw prostitution in melodramatic terms of innocence and victimization, that treated the problem with high seriousness yet invaded its dimensions as work, to a postmodern view that allows for overt fictionalization of its subject and sees prostitution in far more ironic and comic terms as alienated labor by women who, nevertheless, seek to be agents of their own fate and to control their work environment.

Duran Duran's lyrics have a certain subtext (perhaps):

See them walking hand in hand across the bridge at midnight
Heads turning as the lights flashing out it's so bright
Then walk right out to the fourline track
There's a camera rolling on her back, on her back
And I sense the rhythm humming in a frenzy all the way down her spine

Girls on film, girls on film, girls on film, girls on film

Lipstick cherry all over the lens as she's falling
In miles of sharp blue water coming in where she lies
The diving man's coming up for air cause the crowd all love pulling dolly by the hair, by the hair
And she wonders how she ever got here as she goes under again

Girls on film (two minutes later), girls on film
Girls on film (got your picture), girls on film

Wider baby smiling you just made a million
Fuses pumping live heat twisting out on a wire
Take one last glimpse into the night I'm touching close I'm holding bright, holding tight
Give me shudders in a whisper take me up till I'm shooting a star

Girls on film (she's more than a lady), girls on film
Girls on film (two minutes later), girls on film
Girls on film (see you together), girls on film
Girls on film (see you later), girls on film
Girls on film (what ya doing), girls on film

Saturday Night Live has defined comedy and humor for many decades now in the United States. For the show to be funny, though, one has to be assimilated into American Culture--and be familiar with the "vocabulary" of the program. The show is funnier if one "lives" in the culture in which it functions. If there is one thing about comedy that intrigued me was this.

And in relation to this, I think of a comedy imported to the United States: Benny Hill. I remember seeing it for the first time in my early teens and I did not find it funny for two reasons. One, that I did not understand American culture that well, and two, that the show was a British import which offered an aesthetic specific to English taste. I realized it would be very hard to find it funny. But then, I started to find the show funny as it actually functioned on codes that one came to understand if one viewed the program regularly and somewhat I related to how I started to understand its relation to American Culture; but the real challenge was when I was having dinner in Merida, Yucatan two years ago (2003). While eating with some friends, I looked up to one of the TVs in the restaurant and noticed that Benny Hill was showing in Spanish! At that moment I thought, huh... It can never be funny...

Andy in Saturday Night Live hung out with the big time:

CAST AND CREW:

DONALD PLEASENCE (Guest Host)
FEAR (Musical Guest)
JOHN BELUSHI (Special Guest Star)
ANDY WARHOL (Special Guest Star)
MICHAEL DAVIS (Special Guest Comedian/Juggler)


What the main man did:
Andy Warhol (himself) makes a few phone calls for Halloween costume suggestions.

Check an image of Aykroyd a la Andy.

Andy always had an acne problem. He struggled with skin problems as a teenager. Here's a short account of meeting where Andy's skin is noticed: Warhol came in and we were introduced, not that I had any trouble recognising him. there was a slight shock at first when I realised how old he was - I had always thought of Warhol as permanently 30. At first sight he is unearthly. His skin is like nothing I've ever seen on a human being. His face, beneath the dyed silver hair, is so pale that it seems to have been modeled out of putty, ridged with little crevices that are, in fact, nothing more sinister than adolescent acne scars. He speaks very softly, and with a shy boyish charm that immediately begins to take effect.

The power of the media star kicks in: Many famous and successful people such as Andy Warhol and Richard Burton also had to deal with acne, and it is worth knowing that dealing with any problem makes you a stronger and more worthwhile person.
Feel better already.

A model Andy was--Googling on this subject brought me zip, however. The best I got was a hit on Edie Sedgwick: CAREER IN THE '60s: She hit New York City in '64 and was an instant sensation, quickly getting modeling jobs and recognition from Vogue magazine as a '65 "youthquaker." Drawn to Andy Warhol's hip art crowd, she became one of his "superstars" and a vibrant attraction at the celebrity-filled parties he threw in the Factory, his silver-painted studio.

Scratch modeling as something he was not successfull at doing.

Andy's obsession with age extends to his fans... well, critics: For those intimate with his work, speculating about how Warhol at age 75 might have reacted to his place in art history -- and how he might have liked life in the 21st century -- is a bit tempting.

A steer is neither a cow or a bull: A steer is a bull that has some of its sex organs surgically removed. Ouch! That sounds rough, but cattle-raisers do it for two reasons. First, bulls are dangerous when they grow up. They can hurt people. Making them into steers makes them gentler, less dangerous. Second, steers make better meat. Remember those hamburgers you like to eat? It's good to know that not all steers get automatically fucked by a bull. Although they apparently get eaten. In any case, the steer Andy mentions is definitely "special."

Andy's steer makes a great liminal (postcolonial) subject. There is no direct connection, but definitely one can be made if the term is kept in mind in relation to something like this: Liminality: is the state of being neither-this-nor-that, betwixt and between. neither me nor not me, like the mythic Cynocephalus (dog-headed human).