14 minutes of pain
Nov. 14th, 2007 11:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThis (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).
[Error: unknown template video]
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:
[Error: unknown template video]
"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.
[Error: unknown template video]
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:
[Error: unknown template video]
"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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-11-14 09:47 pm (UTC)