Andy never pandered to the piper, but marched to the beat with the beats to his own dervish drummer with an up beat off beat hipster swagger. He was the fastest draw at the OK sketch corral and a painter of promise examining our fascination with the conflagration of consumerism bred by the mad hatters of Mad Ave. That son-of-a-bitch jumped ahead of the curvaceous techno art curve in the Year of Our Lord Orwell, he was using computers to generate or degenerate art as the case may be with boxes of wires and lights and keyboards made by Amiga, amigo.
His kingdom was a fairyland of sorts, no macho Henry Ford assembly line this place called the Factory ruled by a gay man who did ask and did tell before it was retro fashionable. The Factory was a repository of talent from John Lennon to David Bowie to Lou Reed to Mick Jagger along with an assortment of Glen or transgendered Glendas, dykes who arrived by bike, intellectual drag queens, street people, the wealthy from the world of art and Hollywood, writers, drunks, junkies, who wandered in and out of lucidity among the collective mass of societies sub strata of masturbation and creativity, and creative masturbation. You need to have your card punched to gain entree to this world of Alice. It was Schindlers A-List without the Nazi's but was a real gas nonetheless.
Jesus did standup before Seinfeld, gigging at gatherings doing a magic act with parlor tricks and sanctimonious schtick, like that the whole loaves of bread and fishes thing which led to a string of bookings and spoken word performances throughout the Roman Empire. (I heard he stole the Bread and Fishes routine from Rodneyious Dangerous Fieldious who first wowd the crowd while touring Mesapotamia with Moses and Abraham, the first of the Marx Brothers who played to packed colliseums in their prime)
Warhol's sermon on the mount was preceded by his forty days and forty nights in the Fifties with a fetish for shoes and shoe drawings for advertising accounts for Mad Mad Mad Ave. followed by creating album covers for RCA Records. Vinyl and Velvet were yet to merge and weave into the fabulous fabric of the Warhol myth. Warhol ate consumerism for breakfast and the meal came up in a Karen Carpenter cascade of popsterism in the Sixties...soup cans, coca cola bottles, Marilyn, Elvis, Marlon, and even Troy Donahue! What the fuck was that all about??? I found this quote by Warhol about his subject matter and why it mattered and still matters more so than Jerry Mathers..." What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." He leveled the playing field and the bum and the president were now the same. One and the same, one and the insane!
Action films without action and carnal reaction fell from the Warhol pinata from the Six Hour long "Sleep" of a man...sleeping, what else? Honesty in the title begets no surprises as eyebrows rises, then to all our delight a 30 minute "Blowjob" made it's way to celluloid Lloyd, but wait churchgoers, the blowjob is given by the invisible man and you only see the joy on the recievers face not the excitement of the blower lower by the loin and groin, proving the old adage of old age...don't talk with your mouthful. Cocksuckers and Bloodsuckers make not so strange bedfellows as Batman Dracula flew from the mind of Andy Warhol who never wanted to be nor ever heard of being John Malkovich anyway. Warhol was eroticized by Batmans black leather and Robins leather bulge so did a film based on the DC comics character, most notably the crime fighter was now AC/DC and was as camp as camp can get without getting arrested in a mens public pubic bathroom in Grand Central Station.
Black leather to black vinyl it was the film "Vinyl" that was an Andy adaptation of Burgess's "Clockwork Orange" and "Chelsea Girls" that opened the sexual doors of perception to such cinematic fare as "Lonesome Cowboy" "Trash" (which I own) "Flesh" "Heat" and Warhols "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" all before the vamp camp rage of today and "Rocky Horror Picture Show"
There are no Warhols anymore and Andy has since left us and left us with battalions of addicted Warholic...once a Warholic, always a Warholic. Today his star shines bright as ever in the skies at night..pick one out yourself...it's him in the heavens..probably smiling down on us as he enjoys not only 15 more minutes of fame but one hell of an eternal blowjob! Now that's heaven...Warhol Style!