imomus | 14 minutes of pain

This (via Electricwitch) is a short and very rare video of the short and very raw meeting in 1971 of David Bowie and Andy Warhol. I believe the cameraman is Jonas Mekas. Bowie -- a somewhat schizoid, little-known British singer-songwriter then between the release of his "Man Who Sold The World" and "Hunky Dory" albums -- was on a short promotional tour of the US. According to legend, Bowie and Warhol spent exactly 14 minutes together (which makes it sound like Bowie failed his audition for his 15 minutes of fame).

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I believe the sequence of events was:

1. A mild interest from Warhol in Bowie's shoes. He takes a Polaroid of them, and probably says "Gee, I like your shoes! Where did you get them?"

2. Bowie plays his song "Andy Warhol". Warhol doesn't like it at all. "He hated it, he loathed it, he told people "That's the worst thing I've ever heard"," Bowie said later. "I was really upset by that. I thought it was a flattering portrait of him."

3. Following the song, an awkward silence reigns during which Warhol is probably thinking "I wonder when he'll leave?" and Bowie "I wonder if I should leave?"

4. Someone -- possibly Mekas -- swings a video camera around the room, capturing the fundamental disconnect. As the camera reaches them, Fred Hughes walks away and Warhol deliberately turns his back on Bowie, as if to render the document void as a possible trophy for Bowie ("My meeting with Andy!"). Bowie pulls the delightful expression we see here; sort of tough-cool-sneery-hurt-indifferent-impatient.

5. Warhol snubs Bowie at subsequent meetings. "We never particularly got on, I'd seen him around a lot," Bowie comments much later. "You couldn't avoid Andy in the 70s and 80s. He'd attend the opening of an envelope."

The disconnect isn't surprising. These two men come from different continents, different sexual orientations, different generations, different metiers. They're essentially living in different decades, with different conceptions of cool. Look at the way they're dressed. Bowie is essentially still a 1960s-style hippy. With his long hair and his bipperty-bopperty hat he's put together (in front of mirrors in Edwardian pile Haddon Hall in Beckenham) a combination of Wildean 1890s aestheticism, Greta Garbo glamour, pan-sexuality and hippy activism.

Warhol and his entourage, on the other hand, already look like 1980s artist-as-businessman yuppies. (You just have to listen to the Velvet Underground to hear the New York attitude towards tender-minded, effeminate hippies. Kill them, basically.) Bowie will "correct" his style shortly afterwards, adopting a harder, more artificial image for the 1970s. Further corrections will see a 1980s-ready style convergence between the two parties: by 1975, both Bowie and the Warhol crew will be wearing Brooks Brothers suits.

But back to 1971, and to the embarrassing encounter at The Factory. There's a sexuality-style mismatch here too. Like an orientalist Western man trying to impress a Japanese girl by turning up to their date in kabuki clothes, only to find she tends to date Japanese men who wear Western business suits, Bowie has made completely the wrong move by arriving at The Factory looking like a woman. While a straight man may think it's gay-friendly to express his feminine side, most gay men recoil in horror from femme style. What they mostly appreciate is machismo. If they liked effeminate creatures, after all, they'd be into women.

The misunderstanding is understandable, though. Bowie had had most of his exposure to the Warhol aesthetic in London, from a glam theatre troupe called Pork, who were performing a Warhol-based stage show that year. Pork camped it up -- and influenced Bowie's glam period enormously, despite his denials -- but they turned out to be a rather different sort of queen from Warhol's actual set.

You also have to remember that Bowie was pretty much a nobody at this point. He needed Warhol's cultural capital far more than Warhol needed his. But you can see him planning -- and this is typical Bowie -- a vampire's revenge. Sure, he isn't really going to be admitted into Warhol's inner circle, invited to Warhol's table at Max's Kansas City. But he can still find his own inner Warhol, put him in the repertoire of characters in his closet, perform him in songs. And later, of course, in Schnabel's film of the life of a man Warhol did find attractive, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Scroll this Charlie Rose clip forward to 21.37 to see Bowie's terrible performance as Warhol, followed by an interesting interview with Bowie and Schnabel -- a sort of New York dinner party circa 1995 -- which nevertheless fails to talk much about the awkward relations between Warhol and Bowie:

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"I didn't go much beyond having noted what his spirit was -- the way he moved and stuff," says 1995 Bowie. "And just his attitude. It was more of an impersonation than anything else. That's how I approach anything like that." You can see this vampire-chameleon process happening already in the 1971 clip. It's one of the things that makes it so fascinating. Bowie's sneer is a tentative actorly copy of Warhol's sneer at him. He's already perfecting the facial muscle movements required. You can imagine him starting to talk, even at that first meeting, in the tense, strangled, droll, dry Andy-voice, nesting deadly barbed, withering put-downs inside apparently-effulgent praise.

Or wait, wait, am I wrong about this? Didn't Bowie also meet William Burroughs on that 1971 trip to New York, and wasn't that, finally, a much bigger influence on him? And isn't that metallic sneer his Burroughs face? Maybe -- 14 minutes into a failed meeting -- he was over Warhol already.

In 1974, Rolling Stone printed the following conversation between Bowie and Burroughs:

Bowie: I met this man who was the living dead. Yellow in complexion, a wig on that was the wrong colour, little glasses. I extended my hand and the guy retired, so I thought, "The guy doesn't like flesh, obviously he's reptilian."

Burroughs: I don't think that there is any person there. It's a very alien thing, completely and totally unemotional. He's really a science fiction character. He's got a strange green colour.

Bowie: That's what struck me. He's the wrong colour, this man is the wrong colour to be a human being. Especially under the stark neon lighting in The Factory. Apparently it is a real experience to behold him in the daylight.

Burroughs: I've seen him in the light and still have no idea as to what is going on, except that it is something quite purposeful. It's not energetic, but quite insidious, completely asexual.

Twenty years later, Bowie has completely reversed this opinion. Dressed as Warhol, he tells Charlie Rose, he felt more-than-usually interested in the people around him, in watching them, in knowing them. "Hi, what are you doing?" he asks in his Warhol voice. "That's it," says Schnabel. "Warhol was the most misunderstood man since Hitler. He had generosity and curiosity. If you don't have curiosity you're dead." Warhol, by this time, was.

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From:

imomus.livejournal.com

Footnote: The idea that Jonas Mekas shot the 1971 video comes from something Basquiat says in the Charlie Rose interview. He says there's a scene where he has Basquiat watching a TV onto which images shot by Mekas of an early meeting between Bowie and Warhol are superimposed.

If it was in fact this meeting, I can say I've met one of the people present in the room that day: here's my 2002 meeting with Jonas Mekas (http://imomus.com/edinburgh2002.html) in Edinburgh. Actually, we didn't get on any better than Bowie and Warhol did. Mekas found my question about Cage "too big", my question about MTV's appropriation of his super-8 style annoying ("Such things don't concern me") and when I offered him a glass of wine said we should have one in New York instead.

I will, however, heartily recommend the Five films by Jonas Mekas (http://www.ubu.com/film/mekas.html) you can watch on Ubu.com.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

No-one's biting, so I'll do your job for you. You're supposed to object:

But isn't this all a bit retro necro, Momus? It reads like a spread from Mojo magazine!

Yes, well spotted, it is! And, you know, we need to expand the concept of Retro Necro a little more to explain why. Retro Necro is very difficult to escape from, because its whole premise is that the old is more young than the young, more new than the new. That's why Retro Necro appeals to the young -- all these teens and twentysomethings having slash fantasies about dead people! That's why it appeals to Lord Whimsy too, perhaps. There's simply more spunk and vitality in decades long-gone.

I have a theory about what computer geeks call "the epoch" -- the year 1970. I think in 1970 someone pulled a switch and culture went into reverse. The 60s was the last progressive decade, by the standards of all sorts of 20th century ideas of what progress meant. Political ideas like increasing equality, access to education and health care, scientific ideas like introducing new planes like Concorde or getting a man on the moon: all that went into reverse after 1970. Inequality started to rise again. Instead of going beyond the moon, astronauts contented themselves with Earth orbit. If a gay icon in the 60s was Joe Orton, in the 80s it was someone in Oxford bags pretending it was the 1920s again. An old 1950s film star became president in the US, a sort of 1940s governess took over in the UK. In the arts, Retro Necro was given the name postmodernism, which meant that we were no longer Modernist, and no longer believed in progress. Instead, we recycled things endlessly.

In the specific context of the Warhol factory, the 60s ended when Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968. That was the point at which Warhol -- and especially his business manager Fred Hughes, who had a huge influence after Warhol's wounding, and would have been killed by Solanas too if her pistol hadn't jammed -- realised that the 60s counterculture was mostly a bunch of crazy lowlifes who were potentially very dangerous. It was his personal Altamont, we could say; the end of the hippy dream. So highlife became the focus: the world of money, celebrity, exclusivity, not inclusivity.

It's into this world of suits -- a world "progressing backwards" -- that Bowie arrives in 1971. He's not aware of the fact that the future is now the past, or that Warhol is now a conservative. He's seen Pork and thinks Warhol is the hippy revolution taken one stage further; more outrageous, more free. What he finds is businessman art, Brooks Brothers suits, and a cold shoulder to someone who looks like him -- who looks, in other words, like hippy lowlife. Bowie isn't the first, nor last, Englishman to arrive in America only to find it more rather than less conservative than the old country. Much later, in his Charlie Rose interview, he'll stress the conservatism of Warhol; how he represents a return from abstraction to figuration, and how his portraits of Elvis, Marilyn and Liz are really Catholic icons. In the mid-70s Bowie too will renounce the idea of progress, telling American interviewers that he's just an old-fashioned entertainer.

I like to think Bowie in the 1971 film is the more "advanced" of the two, but that the switch pulled at "the epoch" throws everything subsequently into reverse, leading us to the crazy upside-down world of postmodernism, where the future is the past, the old are the young, and conservative is radical. Warhol wins, but we all lose.

From:

ajkandy.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)

Good gravy, it's not even 9am. But yes, I was *just about* to write that this all seems very MOJO-retro-necro of you, uncharacteristically.

I will say that as the years go by and MOJO's 1960s-hippy original readership moves on, and now that they're colonizing the pub-rock, early punk and new romantic eras of my youth, I do pick up an issue or two.

Is it because it seems like a final, Rashomon-style accounting of a certain time and place, told by the People Who Were There? Yeah, partly. I also think for many people, beyond the nostalgia quotient, it's a way of putting to rest _who they were_ at that time - put a bow on it, put it in a hatbox in the attic for future generations.

I disagree with you on the 1960s issue though. I doubt there was ever a decade where only Truly New Original Things were created. It's just that the pace of revivals was slower up until the advent of electric media. Yes, we can easily pinpoint retro revivals in every decade that we've been alive -a touch of 1930s in the early 1970s, and later, a general 1950s revival that lasted into the Reagan era, and then a half-hearted 1960s psychedelic revival in isolated pockets of San Francisco and England in the 80s... but it's a little harder to pick up on those trends in earlier generations as their images, aside from early film, photographs and records, weren't really mass-mediated. I mean there was never an 1850s style revival in the 1870s was there? But we did get things like the Pre-Raphaelites, Richardsonian Romanesque and McKim, Mead and White classical architectural revivals, Romantic music, etc.

I think as always we're too close to the New of Now to be able to judge it properly. Sad as it seems, I haven't bought any new music that didn't already remind me of something I already own and like in quite a while.

Re: It's early yet here, mome-ster!

From:

anglerfish96.livejournal.com - Date: 2007-11-15 12:51 am (UTC) - Expand

From: (Anonymous)

You make a big deal about "progress." But to put a commercial artist like Warhol at the top of the art world was "progress" in 1960. It was novel to have business invade the art world. Technical merit was passe, and it was replaced by self-promotion, business instincts. But I suppose it got out of hand. Warhol corrupted Bowie and 60s idealist about progress (originality).

You'd like to judge art by its freshness and originality. But just to prove that originality is cheaply had, I will create three new music genres on the spot:

1) Loretta Lynn samples chopped up over top tr-808 drums programmed in a reggaeton pattern with lyrics about the Spanish civil war
2) Tuvan throat-singing using only a half-whole scale starting on G accompanied by 3 lap steel players and a washboard
3) a traditional jazz combo playing in straight time with all the microphones sealed in plastic bags and submered in a mixture of 2/3 water and 1/3 mayonaise

From:

lord-whimsy.livejournal.com

It's texture that interests me, not novelty or nostalgia--the qualities of a thing is far more important to me than what it "signifies". Anything with a nourishing texture feels fresh, vital, and "new"; impoverished textures feel old, depleted, and dead--even if they're "the latest thing." For this reason, I am attracted more to living things than manmade things--the detail and texture is infinite.

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