Andy Warhol Self-Portrait
One of my daughter’s favorite books is an Andy Warhol children’s book called Andyland: The Art and Wisdom of Andy Warhol. It was one of her favorite books as a little baby and now that she’s a year older she still loves it. You turn the pages for one of Andy Warhol’s silk screen paintings and a word—“Flowers,” “Boat,” “Heart,” “Beauty,” “People,” “Banana,” “Art”—and you can flip up the word to reveal one of Warhol’s koan-like musings. (Banana: “You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.”) The last opening is of the word “You” across from a version of one of Andy Warhol’s 1986 self-portraits but rendered as a mirrored silhouette against a black background. My daughter’s favorite part of the book is this page, as she can look at her reflection. I have several photos on my phone of her baby face looking through the Andy Warhol self-portrait. Although my daughter doesn’t really understand yet what “you” means or what “I” means or what “me” means. This week we’re trying to teach her her own name. It’s still wavy, concepts of boundaries and identity for her. Every time lately we get to that last page—which is at least once a day—and there’s that moment of my daughter merging with the blank reflection of Andy Warhol, I think about how strange it is, to have in a children’s book a mirrored silhouette of one of Andy Warhol’s 1986 self-portraits that were playing with the plasticity of his fright wig. How haunting and empty those self-portraits are, like a death mask. How Andy Warhol was never the same after Valerie Solanas shot him. Billy Name has said afterwards he was like “Cardboard Andy.” My daughter also loves listening to David Bowie’s song “Andy Warhol,” which makes me think of how years later David Bowie played Warhol all wig and emptiness in Julian Schnabel’s biopic of Basquiat. How uncanny that performance is. Sometimes when I think about Andy Warhol, I’m really thinking about David Bowie playing Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol by the time period of this late self-portrait was also playing Andy Warhol. In an interview with Billy Name, now seventy-two, at The New Yorker, in answer to his favorite memory from his time with Warhol, he answers that it was when Andy was shot. It is such a strange answer. It’s almost like he needs to talk about it. He came out of the darkroom and Andy was shot and everyone was in shock. Andy was in a pool of blood. He held him and started crying, and Andy said, “Oh, Billy, don’t make me laugh, it hurts too much.” In answer to his worst memory from that time, Billy Name says it’s still when Andy was shot. It’s the same memory, he says.
Two
As I am just finishing an application for a grant I will not get, I noticed that one of last year’s recipients was a theater director from Chicago. He won the grant for his twenty-two-hour cycle of extant ancient Greek drama. I felt a prick of panic or shame, when I read this, as I had interviewed this director fifteen years ago for the publication I worked for at the time, but never filed the story, as my mother was dying, and I moved home to take care of her. I remember how young and sure of himself he was, and I remember feeling I would never be an artist like that, that it seemed impossible to me. I always felt badly about that—that he arranged to meet me in person, as that’s what we did then, and we talked for an hour or two, which I recorded, and then never transcribed. What a waste of time that was for him, I imagine. In that same period I also interviewed a well-known male memoirist who was in town for a festival. We met at the lobby of his hotel. I remember he asked me if I wanted to go upstairs to his room to finish the interview. I declined. I also didn’t file that interview, but don’t feel bad about that. Since I moved here, I saw him at one of the three parties I have attended in the past five years, and he hit on me again, but didn’t connect that I was also that young journalist in the lobby of a Michigan Avenue hotel. Why should he? Anyway, perhaps I wasn’t that person—maybe I just shared the same name as that person. Although he was evidently the same.
Diane Arbus Visits Marilyn Minter in Gainesville, Florida
Marilyn Minter was a photography student at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, in 1969. She had just shown her fellow students the proof sheets from a series of black-and-white photographs of her mother, a glamorous drug addict and recluse, taken when visiting her one weekend at the Coral Ridge Towers, an apartment complex near Fort Lauderdale. The photographs look like stills out of a late Joan Crawford or Bette Davis movie. A glamorous woman in a wig wearing a negligee stares at a gilded mirror. She is in bed, surrounded by bottles of pills, rather languidly smoking. Her daughter took twelve shots, one roll of 2¼-inch film. Her fellow students were horrified that this was her mother. Diane Arbus was a visiting artist at the time, and praised the proof sheets when she saw them. Minter remembers Arbus wearing a silver minidress, silver sandals, short hair, and no bra. No one dressed like that in Florida. She didn’t know then that Arbus was a famous artist, or what about these photographs would have drawn her in. Looking at them now, it makes sense. There’s something both cruel and tender about the gaze. A way of encountering her mother in her claustrophobic element. Despite the lone encouragement of an alien visitor, Marilyn Minter didn’t print the photographs for years, so depressed by her peers’ critiques. What was Sontag’s issue with Arbus in her book on photography, her critique that her photographs lacked empathy? After all, who can be crueler than critics? I saw these Coral Ridge Towers photographs at the Marilyn Minter retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum a couple years ago. They were the first photographs you saw, on the wall, when you walked in. I recognized something in how haunted and isolated her mother looked in those pictures, and yet defiant among her cosmetics and pills. I could have stared forever. I was heavily pregnant, almost two weeks overdue. My midwife had told me to go do something fun, to take my mind off of things. While I was there I ran into a famous editor, who had worked with Kathy Acker and David Wojnarowicz and Karen Finley, and who had edited an essay I wrote in an anthology. She was with a friend of hers who had written the definitive book on ACT UP. We embraced, but she eyed me nervously. She seemed worried I was going to go into labor right then, that my water would break all over the museum floor. We’ll all be stuck here all night, she said. That’s not how it works, I wanted to say to her, but didn’t. It’s not like in the movies.
Valerie Solanas in a Silver Lamé Dress
There’s a detail in the Valerie Solanas biography that I find so compelling—that after the long decade in and out of psych wards and on and off of the streets after she shot Warhol, she moved to San Francisco in the ’80s, the final three years of her life, and was spotted in the Tenderloin district in a silver lamé dress. Also that the biographer gleaned this detail from an essay entitled “Valerie Solanas in a Silver Lamé Dress” that the New Narrative writer Bruce Boone wrote for a Valerie Solanas–themed zine. In the mid-’90s Bruce Boone went to the single-occupancy welfare hotel in San Francisco and interviewed two middle-aged sex workers in the lobby who remembered Valerie, who by that time wasn’t going by “Valerie Solanas” anymore, but by some other name. “The hotel lobby was dispiriting,” Bruce Boone writes. “I mean, here was this woman who had this New York life—the go-go years, Warhol and that crowd, whatever—and in her minor maybe but real way famous—in this hellhole of a welfare pit of a hotel. There was the heartbreak of having to know how a great spirit ended, totally unknown too, and just a hooker (just!) after being Valerie.” This is quoted in the biography. I couldn’t get a hold of the essay or the zine—I wrote to the person who published the zine, actually a series of Solanas-themed zines, who was a librarian in Nebraska, and he wrote back but didn’t have any copies left, and I also wrote to Bruce Boone, but never heard back. I’m sure he’s busy. The women told Bruce Boone that they remember Valerie as slim and elegant, in that great silver lamé dress she loved. But there were other reports of her covered in scabs, addicted to meth. Someone remembers seeing her in her room in those last days, typing away at her desk with her manual typewriter, pages everywhere, writing furiously into the night. The Solanas biography had just c
ome out when I moved to the city, and I went to a conversation about it at Bluestockings with my friend Clutch. I think this might have been the first time I ever hung out with them. We met up with Jackie Wang. I remember, I was wearing this long white shirt over black skinny jeans, and a leather jacket, and a vintage men’s little black Comme des Garçons hat, and heavy eye makeup, and a heavy white bronze necklace, like a choker, that I had bought at a boutique, and returned later, because it was turning my neck green. I guess that was my costume when I moved here. I wanted to look like a pretty boy who was also a pickpocket and an art bitch. Anyway, we sat cross-legged in back, and I raised my hand during the Q&A and asked whether the biographer thought that Valerie was really working on something. And what happened to this manuscript? I’ve always romanticized the possibilities of it, despite many reports of Valerie Solanas’s increasing paranoia, like Robert Walser writing microscripts with a pencil while at Waldau. A novel in Swedish by Sara Stridsberg speculates about Valerie’s last days, but it hasn’t been translated into English. The biographer didn’t seem optimistic that Valerie Solanas was seriously writing or that what she was writing was serious. Above all she wanted to be taken seriously as a writer. There were always sightings of Valerie in the ’60s and ’70s in New York—Valerie sleeping on park benches, hanging around St. Marks, spending days drifting, in and out of cheap hotels, the Chelsea Hotel and the Hotel Earle, where she stayed in the wing for drag queens and lesbians, along with Candy Darling. In her story on Valerie in Airless Spaces, Shulamith Firestone writes about visiting her in her new apartment, how nice it was, the Doric columns outside of the building. Valerie talked about how the Mob had put a transmitter in her uterus to follow her. Shulie, herself in and out of psych wards, wondered if maybe Valerie was correct in her delusions that she was being followed. She observes that Valerie was still dressed in a bohemian costume: her little white socks, her collar up, “always a poor girl chic.” There are differing reports of what Valerie Solanas was wearing on June 3, 1968, when she shot Andy Warhol. Was her hair combed? Did she wear mascara, lipstick? A dress? A yellow or black turtleneck? A blue one? A yellow sweatshirt? A yellow blouse or yellow trousers? Tennis shoes or torn sneakers without socks? A trench coat? In her bag a gun, an address book, a menstrual pad. After the shooting, Andy Warhol described the thick web of scars on his torso as covering him like a Dior dress.
Wittgenstein’s Mistress
It doesn’t seem believable Kate could get laid, said my graduate student. We had been reading David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Is it because, I asked, she is the last person on earth, or because you think she’s old, or because you think she’s crazy? He seemed to think all of it. I’m sure she did just fine, I said to him, rather defensively. Whenever I think about Wittgenstein’s Mistress, I think about my roommate way back when, who I’ve written about before, who was a decade older than me and in love with a literary scholar a decade older than she who had written an important (apparently) scholarly essay on that book. How when he broke up with her, so cruelly, she locked herself in her room and lived in her bed like a shipwreck on an island. I was a waitress then. Years later I sat across from him in Bergen, Norway, as I had accompanied my spouse to a literary conference. He had no idea of the connection, I’m sure. He looked like a well-slicked mole man. I watched him slurp his soup and speak about the contemporary American novel and I hated him in sympathy for my former friend. This sort of heavily referential writing is difficult for readers, I’ve been told. Bricolage, Kate said.
Henry Fool
Strange that her favorite movie was Hal Hartley’s Henry Fool. I’ve watched this 1997 parable of literary success and failure, a sort of stilted noir, many times since then. When I watch it, I think of her watching it. James Urbaniak plays Simon, the selectively mute garbage man, who encounters Thomas Jay Ryan’s criminal janitor Henry Fool, who moves into the garden apartment of the building in Queens where Simon lives with his suicidal mother and his sister, a skinny, jangly Parker Posey. Henry brings in his suitcases his “Confessions,” his life’s work kept in composition notebooks. “It’s a philosophy. A poetics. A politics if you will. A literature of protest. A novel of ideas. A pornographic magazine of truly comic-book proportions. It is in the end whatever the hell I want it to be and when I’m through it’s going to blow a hole into the world’s idea of itself,” Henry explains to Simon while unloading his notebooks. Simon takes an empty black-and-white composition notebook and, staying up all night in the kitchen, writes an epic poem that goes on to win the Nobel Prize. My former roommate had the same Formica table, I am remembering. Simon reads his mentor’s confessions and realizes they’re not any good. “He’s kind of an exile, marginalized on account of his ideas,” he says to his sister, in Henry’s defense, earlier. I had the same IBM ThinkPad as Simon that weighed a ton. I wrote capsule-sized theater reviews but wanted to be an avant-garde playwright back then, like Sarah Kane. Both James Urbaniak and Thomas Jay Ryan were actors with Richard Foreman’s troupe before they were in Henry Fool. It’s strange that Parker Posey was in You’ve Got Mail just the year afterward. Such different tonalities. I wonder whether my friend, who I met while working at the coffee shop, who had never finished college and worked a string of dead-end jobs, had wanted to be a writer. Is that why this was her favorite movie? And then I guess I became the writer. Am I the Simon-level fraud or the Henry Fool exile who is also a fraud? Or neither? Or both? Maybe in another dimension she became the writer. I looked for her online again and saw that she started and abandoned a Goodreads account a few years ago. There are ten books on it. Mostly books about Tibetan Buddhism, which is not surprising. But also she wanted to read a Ray Bradbury noir, which kind of is.
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