Review: a by Andy Warhol

In the mid-1960s Pop Artist Andy Warhol decided to create a novel that was in one part an experimental novel and one part a pop art answer to Ulysses. It begins with Warhol superstar Robert Olivo, known as Odine in the book, popping pills. Warhol, known as Drella in the book, begins taping him and will supposedly follow Odine for the next twenty four hours. (In reality, the taping occurred over a two year period, and at least one tape was thrown out the window by the irate mother of one of the young woman paid to transcribe the conversations.) What follows is a bunch of sometime mundane, sometimes perverse and sometimes downright bizarre conversations between some truly awful people. Left almost entirely unedited, the transcripts that form the novel are rough, often changing format depending on who was working on them and are filled with errors. It is horrible, yet a strange insight into the lives of those who were connected to Andy Warhol and his infamous factory.

I did not enjoy this novel, because it isn't something that is necessarily read for enjoyment. As an insight into the lives of Warhol's superstars and various hangers on, it is entertaining in its own absurd way. There are some truly strange conversations. By the end, I was not surprised that many of the Warhol superstars who appeared early on were nowhere to be found, that Odine's mental state seemed to be rapidly declining (and his drug addiction increasing,) and I was beginning to hate Drella/Warhol more and more for the almost sociopathic way he was recording everything on tape. As for the a, I suspect it was supposed to stand for amphetamine, but it could just as easily stand for Andy, Art, or well ... arsehole considering that was what most of the people in the book seem to be.

Insightful, but not really recommended.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more