Essential/Unessential Warhol at Anthology Film Archives

Greg Pierce, the Director of Film and Video at the Andy Warhol Museum, brought several rare (are there any other kind?) Warhol titles to Anthology Film Archives last weekend under the program title Essential/Unessential Warhol. And it wasn't until the final evening, during a Q&A with Pierce conducted by Andrew Lampert, that I not only fully grasped the "Unessential" portion of the title but also came to understand something about Warhol's cinema. Lampert's first question seemed naive at first: "Why are we here?" Well, we're here because these films are comically rare, barely seen by anyone on the planet in almost 60 years. But the question came immediately after Sunday's screening of The Andy Warhol Story (1966). And, as with Saturday's Paranoia [version 1] (1966), which Pierce judged a failure, it was pretty awful. So the question really concerned why we were compelled to sit through an indulgent, speed-fueled bitchfest with typically godawful sound, no matter how anthropologically or conceptually fascinating (an antagonistic Rene Ricard plays/lampoons Warhol while Edie Sedgwick floats around the edges and Paul Morrissey tries to get Ricard to speak into the visible mic). We were there because Warhol was one of the 20th century's greatest artists and/or we'd been transformed by some of his more readily available films (Blow Job has been ensconced at #5 on my top ten favorite films of all time list for decades and my screening of Empire a few years back remains a cinemagoing touchstone). But Essential/Unessential Warhol taught me that it's okay to deem some Warhol films as just plain bad at least until technology can allow us to discern more than ten words of his Superstars' babble over 66 minutes. Pierce even provided evidence that Warhol himself disdained The Andy Warhol Story (and maybe Paranoia too?). So the Unessential aspect is akin to examining Michelangelo's sketches or rifling through Bob Dylan's garbage with the crucial proviso that Warhol threw almost nothing out. 

As for the Essential, Pierce brought two reels from 1967's 25-hour **** (Four Stars) - reel 20 – “Nico Music” and reel 75 – “Sausalito,” both enchanting precisely because the sound was so crystalline. The Andy Warhol Story and (I assume) Paranoia were shot with an Auricon camera which records sound, muddily, directly onto the film. The **** reels were shot using a separate magnetic sound recorder and it's the making of those films. The former features Nico improvising variations on "It Was a Pleasure Then" from her solo debut Chelsea Girl with John Cale and Lou Reed performing off-camera and Warhol's trademark bloops skipping time forward. “Sausalito” (pic below) was even better, a calm travelogue observing dusk at a boat dock with Nico mostly off-camera intoning pseudo-profundities like “One has to limit space somehow. Not to . . . drown.” Warhol creates abstract images by focusing on crepuscular reflections in the water and toys with distinctions between inside and outside - at one point, a telephone rings, suggesting some of the footage was shot from indoors. And even with these reels, there was something of the scholarly about them since **** is technically 50 hours long with the projectionist instructed to show reels on top of another somewhat akin to the improvisatory nature of projecting The Chelsea Girls (1966)

Most essential of all was Drink aka Drunk (1965), two 33-minute reels of renowned documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio, reportedly already tipsy before filming, drinking an entire bottle of J&B scotch in about twenty minutes. It's cute and fun for a while as de Antonio rants and babbles. But it quickly becomes distressing, even alarming as he starts to lose consciousness. He barely speaks in the second reel and passes out flat on his back. The camera moves not a hair throughout all 66 minutes and, despite the presence of several people during filming, no one speaks to him or intervenes in any way (although as the Catalogue Raisonné makes clear, there were some shenanigans during the fifteen minutes it took to change reels). Where Paranoia put me to sleep (blessedly so), Drink/Drunk had my mind racing with all sorts of questions about ethics, genre, sadism, masochism, subject, object, authorship, etc. I believe it surpasses even Blow Job as Warhol's greatest film (so far!) and now sorely regret missing it on the chilly evening of November 19, 2016 when it was last shown in NYC at MOMA. 

My remaining qualm is the claims critics and scholars have long been making about other Warhol titles with hideous sound. J. Hoberman, for one, put Beauty #2 (1965) at #1 on his top ten list for the Village Voice in 1988 and ten years later put Outer and Inner Space (1965) at #4. I've seen both on film and couldn't understand a damn word. And given that the former especially lives and dies with its back-and-forth sparing, I'm missing a lot. I saw John and Ivy (1965) at UT-Austin about twenty years ago and the professor who programmed it claimed that the print she'd previously seen had much clearer sound than the scuzzy sonics on the print we heard. Are there indeed prints with more pristine sound out there? Or are my ears rotted from decades of DJing, rock 'n' roll, and tinnitus? More likely the latter. Pierce told us he transcribed the dialogue of Beauty #2, a task I couldn't perform for more than a phrase or two, and the Catalogue Raisonné lays out significant chunks of dialogue from Drunk and John and Ivy (perhaps because the writers had headphones and/or the ability to rewind?). So maybe one day we'll get some Blu-rays or a streaming platform with closed captioning that will reveal a kernel of genius to The Andy Warhol Story. 

I skipped the first night screening of Batman Dracula because I saw a shorter/different iteration of it at MOMA last spring and two nights of Warhol scholarship was plenty. 

For more on Essential/Unessential Warhol, check out my pal Jody's post on Drunk and Paranoia, Elizabeth Purchell on the **** reels, and Melissa Anderson on the series overall.

August (But Really Summer) Top Ten

1. Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth,"Ulterior Motives," from Angels of Passion (Jerome Bronson, 1986); Who's Who with Christopher Saint: Ulterior Motives (The Lost Album) (Spooked Music Releasing). I don't believe in coincidences. But at the very least, this story should prove instructive. On April 28th, a group of NYC porn scholars, including myself, met for a happy hour and discussed, among many other things, the imperative to remove the stigma of researching, teaching, and enjoying pornography. That very evening, one of the holy grails of lostwave was finally found. In 2021, someone uploaded a snippet of an absurdly catchy new wave song "from an old DVD backup" (?) to WatZatSong. When pressed for more information, the user disappeared. After years of dead ends and impressive recreations, a Redditor discovered that the song was composed by two brothers for a hardcore sex scene in the X-rated film Angels of Passion. Clearly what happened was that the guy who uploaded the song was too embarrassed to state simply that it came from a porno. In a world with no stigma around the pleasures of pornography, the song would never have entered the annals of lostwave. Then again, the discovery was a joyous occasion indeed. And it compelled the Brit-Canadian Booth brothers to locate the master tapes and release an entire album of contemporary tracks. Most of it comes off as tepid Scritti Politti. But "Ulterior Motives" remains a (coughs) banger awaiting karaoke glory.

2. Jacqueline Susann: Yargo (1956; published posthumously in 1979) Susann wrote this a full decade before Valley of the Dolls became one of the best-selling books in the history of publishing. And as with Dolls, a turgid read starts to reveal a burgeoning feminist consciousness. Not particularly excited to be soon married, a young New Jersey woman gets abducted by a typically uber-rational alien race who introduce her to a world free of gender roles. After much resistance and many didactic discussions on the pitfalls of emotion, she opts to stay with the aliens and compels their leader, reportedly patterned after Yul Brynner, to fall in love with her. Along the way, she gets abducted again, this time by a race of 25-foot-tall bees. One harrowing scene finds her narrowly escaping a forced breeding with a snarling beeman. It’s all done up in an overly earnest style that bespeaks a longing to break out of one’s constrictions, a harbinger of the topsy turvy decade to come. 

3. Michel Tournier: The Erl-King (Le Roi des aulnes) (Éditions Gallimard, 1970); The Ogre (Volker Schlöndorff, 1996). I read non-fiction pretty quickly which stokes my sense of accomplishment whereas I've been trudging through, say, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep for years now. So Tournier's 1967 Friday (Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique) skyrocketed into my top ten favorite novels list because it's as much a work of philosophy as fiction. He intended to "correct" for the relative paucity of story in Friday by injecting more narrative sway into The Erl-King, his follow-up, and the result is a slog. At the dawn of WWII, Frenchman Abel Tiffauges is wrongfully imprisoned for inappropriateness with a young girl (although he evinces a decided attraction to children) but soon gets conscripted into the army. After Germany invades France, he becomes a prisoner of war but soon rises within the ranks of the Nazi party to the point where he accompanies Göring on hunting expeditions and is tasked with recruiting ever-younger children to enter combat as the war draws to a close. Tournier is after more than a simple equation of Nazism with pedophilia, linking it instead to a drive to conquer every aspect of human existence. As such, it could be read productively with Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. But the dance between concept and story puts a strain on the novel that Tournier fails to successfully navigate. Schlöndorff's film version (starring a miscast John Malkovich as Tiffauges) breezes through much of the backstory. But it necessarily misses the interiority Tournier has etched for Tiffauges, who is as prone to philosophizing as Crusoe is in Friday, rendering the film a bit simple-minded. So I'll be putting off Tournier's third novel, Gemini, for the time being. 

4. Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez: Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City (Nobrow, 2014). As for non-fiction struggles, I'm still making my way through The Power Broker and I assumed this graphic novel condensation would help speed me along. But boy is the publishing company well named because it's a hilariously awful retelling which skips over crucial information and focuses on bizarrely inconsequential moments as one can glean from the pic below. Perhaps there were translation problems from the French original. But even there, the obsession with naming designers in this scene is baffling. 

5. Joël Legendre performing "M'en revenant de Sainte-Hélène" on Soirée Canadienne (1978). Legendre is gay and you can instantly feel his queer spin on this folk song performed for a television show dedicated to the preservation and celebration of Québecois music. He went on to do voice work (he's Leonardo DiCaprio in the Québec versions of his films). And yes, a few years back, he was arrested and fined for exposing himself in a Montréal park which gets a handshake from me. But this number is just so ebullient and disarming - fabulousness incarnate. One of the refrains is "ferme donc ta boîte, laisse moi donc chanter" which means "shut your mouth, let me sing." So let him! Watch here. 

6. Beyoncé featuring Shaboozey: "Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin'" from Cowboy Carter (Parkwood/Columbia). Renaissance romps all over this still generally terrific follow-up. But "Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin'" epitomizes what Beyoncé has become for bohos like me - an eccentric keeper of songs and disseminator of weird sounds. I still can't catalogue everything I'm hearing here. What's that gospelly glossolalia that accompanies Bey's interpolation of "I Fall to Pieces" at the start? What are those Oval-style record skips that kick in during the last third? She makes time for Shaboozey to do his jaunty party shtick, for a doo-wop section to sweeten the pot, for herself to vocalize in soul, rap, and wha? modes as the entire edifice gallops off with your brain sizzled into ceviche. After "Countdown," her greatest track.

7. Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen: "I Had Some Help" (Republic/Mercury). Billboard has deemed this song of the summer, a sobering thought for those of us enjoying a gal pop Renaissance (see next entry). Spirited number. But who the funk would date either of these knuckle draggers after lines like "I only hit the curb 'cause you made me" or "Don't act like you ain't help me pull that bottle off the shelf"? Instead of two men ganging up on a woman (or Women), what would have made it work is if Malone enlisted one of the myriad female country artists who have been outclassing their male counterparts over the last decade-plus. Carly Pearce, for one, could set Malone's truck on fire for blaming his alcoholism on her.

8.  Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (Amusement/Island, 2023); Sabrina Carpenter: Short n' Sweet (Island). This is a lesson in the merciless temporality of pop success. Rise and Fall is the best album of 2024 and the damn thing came out almost exactly a year ago. A 2017 EP on Atlantic went nowhere and, as the graph below traces, her rise to pop aristocracy has been sleepy indeed. But because her album is so me (vivid, eager to please, brash, funny, going for and ripping out the pop jugular, oddly reminiscent of one of my fave Neil Young albums, Living With War, etc.), I want to focus more on my surprising adoration for Short n' Sweet. I was on flagship single "Espresso" early and found it a fluffy bauble, nothing more. An entire album of similar baby-voiced (cf. Pouty's tough but taxing Forgot About Me), attenuated dance cuts promised little. Turns out Short n' Sweet is Carpenter's sixth [sic] album which, if you didn't know that, places you, with me, in what Carl Wilson deems in his terrific Slate piece the first and lowest circle of Carpenter consciousness (click through for Wilson's useful take on Carpenter's even tardier rise to stardom). Turns out also that the thin production houses intricate pop constructions that are super easy to obsess on and the baby voice sings lyrics that evince an acute country wit albeit one too filthy for Nashville. Every single track comes with one or more quotables but the most trenchant is stated sedately in "Lie to Girls": “You don’t have to lie to girls/ If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves/Like you, they’ll just lie to themselves.” That restatement of "like you" refusing to let guys off the overemotional hook is genius worthy of Dolly and, in pop, it matters not a whit if it derived from Carpenter, producer Jack Antonoff, or songwriter Amy Allen (profiled here in the New York Times for more tales of tardiness). Now the trick is to tame temporality in order to stay on top. If she can inject some of Roan's spritz into her beach-read sound, she might be riding her very own Come on Over next time out. What's Mutt Lange up to nowadays?

9. Doechii: Alligator Bites Never Heal (Capitol/Top Dawg). "Yucky Blucky Fruitcake" will likely end up as one of my top ten singles of the decade. But it's difficult to fill an entire album of such perfect discharges unless you're the New Pornographers of Mass Romantic (and even they couldn't sustain the mania, e.g., final and worst track "Breakin' the Law"). While albums aren't exactly narratives, many of the songs that comprise them occupy what literary theorist Peter Brooks calls the "dilatory space" of stories - moments of necessarily muted delay between opening salvos, bracing twists, and slam-bang climaxes. On her first official full-length, Doechii lets too many of the tracks slip into that space in order to create the kind of gestalt that makes popists like me grow impatient. Strong album, though. Discharge fans should proceed directly to "Denial is a River," a giddy check-in that toys with the distinction between rapping and talking and ends with a rhythmic breathing exercise. And stick around for "Fireflies" which charts the supposedly unchartable female orgasm.

10. Apple Music. I've gone over to the dark side. Yes, it's despicable what they pay artists. No, I'll not stop amassing my beloved 320s. No, not everything is there, an impossibility anyway; compilations especially are difficult to come by. But apart from mere convenience and the ability to hear an album the nanosecond it's released, the best aspect is clicking on the three dots next to a song to reveal credits and the lyrics, the latter extremely useful to someone like me who flunked Lyric Deciphering in Rock Criticism 101. As a consequence, I've been listening to more music than ever. What am I listening to next? You tell me.