So the veil between the physical world and spirit world thinned for an evening and a jackpot of candy came pouring through, the majority in orange, brown and gold wrappings, which I take it has to do with pumpkins and decaying leaves. Doing his duty in honoring the dead, H.o.p. dressed up as a zombie and returned to the old neighborhood for trick-or-treat as it is there where live the two gay guys who have the Penultimate Halloween House with Frankenstein on the lawn and the huge mechanical spider on the roof and skeletons and ghosts floating about the porch. We’d skipped the old neighborhood last year in favor of trick-or-treating with cousins in the burbs but out in the burbs the decorations were a bit too scary for H.o.p., dismembered limbs dressed up with gore, and one house in particular with a drunken reveller frightening kids had stuck with him through the entire year. Because of this and because he’d already had a nice full day Sunday of visiting with cousins, H.o.p. opted for the old neighborhood because, as he said, he really missed the Frankenstein house, where scary is all in fun and you walk away smiling and happily entertained rather than stumble away with your heart thump-thumping.
Kind of but not expressly Halloween fare, Marty and I watched this past weekend, “Ciao Manhattan” and “Pie in the Sky, the Brigid Berlin Story”. Edie Sedgwick dies and Brigid Berlin survives. What else is there to say about it all? I looked for something of universal merit in the films on these two society girls whose lives are far removed from 99.9% of those who will watch the movies but the point of privilege here is denying the universal for sake of the super exceptional me. Whatever appeal Edie had must have been mostly in person because the charm of Edie was lost to me, and the adulation heaped on her beauty was a puzzle as she seemed no more or less beautiful than millions of other girls in three hours worth of cosmetics–and though I understand she supposedly crafted a unique style I don’t trust that it wasn’t already roaming New York on persons not destined to be known. She was sad, but she was also a human with a lot of money at her disposal who tossed away $80,000 worth of inheritance in three months, which was quite a sum in the 60s, and I’ve some trouble dignifying that as simply tragic rather than grossly irresponsible and as pathetically corrupt as the preceding generation which certainly played its part in destroying her. The supposed moral is that Edie didn’t make it out alive but Edie is now glorified for living fast and beautiful and dying young.
“Ciao Manhattan” was admittedly shocking in its eye on the post-Manhattan Edie whose diet was barrels of prescribed pharmaceuticals and was also on a course of numerous shock treatments because she supposedly liked them so much she didn’t want to give them up after just three. I understand the damage her brain had suffered via the years of drug excess accounts for her being unable to stand up, she wasn’t just acting (she was acting out) but she must have still envisioned herself as being sexually enticing or else Edie wouldn’t have spent the entire film sans top showing off the wonder breast implants. The scene in which she performs her California post-Manhattan dance is about as painfully grotesque as it gets and though I hear she insisted upon the dance I’ve no idea if she really knew what she looked like, if she had seen the footage, and even if she had seen the footage when you consider that she wasn’t in her right mind at the time there’s no telling what she might have been seeing in her own blown-out head. But she had a story she wanted to tell or else she wouldn’t have threatened pulling out of the movie unless a staged version of her shock therapy was included. She probably wasn’t clear on what story she wanted to tell but in the end that doesn’t matter much. The fact she probably wasn’t clear on what story she wanted to tell is a big part of this story of a woman whose two older brothers committed suicide and who understood herself as being not much more than a very wealthy sexual object from Day One. Some have wondered also about the filmmakers and considered that they were only exploiting Edie in her sad state, and it is something I too wondered about briefly but then decided whatever, that Edie too had something she wanted to say and she was a twenty-eight year old woman and not an underage ingenue.
Despite every unvoiced criticism I have of the movie it’s worth viewing for its place in the “how did we get here from there” continuum, the American version of royalty excesses and star-tripping, the contortions of masochistic/sadistic glamor, the hand-in-hand unglued paranoia and self-absorption. It’s worth viewing as a purely American fairy tale in which a young man goes to California looking for the saucer people, happens upon Edie and is talked into babysitting her in her drained swimming pool bedroom papered wall-to-wall with the Edie of yesterday and instructing her on the art of building a flying saucer while her mother devoted herself to making pies. The film is a rambling, largely nonsensical incoherent mess partly because it is two films–the first was black-and-white footage in New York meant to chronicle the amphetamine-powered Beautiful People lifestyle, but the “actors” went AWOL and several years later a desperate attempt to complete the film happened with the California color footage–and still it is worth viewing, in particular as a complimentary piece to Warhol Factory alumnus Paul Morrisey’s “Frankenstein”, a film I saw when about 19 which scared the living daylights out of me. I know that one should be cool and cynical enough that Morrisey’s “Frankenstien” be appreciated for its comic value, but the spiritually-hollow me-me-me of the film was frightening precisely because of its revelry in its portrayal of decadent emptiness. Morrisey’s “Frankenstein” was released in 1973, while “Ciao Manhattan’ was released in 1972 and it seems that “Frankenstein” should have been released first and “Ciao Manhattan” a humanizing response to it. But that’s not how it happened. Instead we have Edie at Ciao’s end hooked up to the shock machine and charged through with electricity in a scene that certainly recalls every Frankenstein movie you’ve ever seen and seems a comment on the time and celebrity and money and exploitation. And I seriously have to wonder if Morrisey sat watching Ciao Manhattan and upon seeing Edie’s grotesque dance and her electric anti-renaissance thought, “Yes, yes, that’s it, my Frankenstein monster. That is my cut-up, pieced together, Beautiful People Warholian Factory Girl”. Though Morrisey’s “Frankenstein” horrifies me, I’ve got to admit that I’ve never seen a movie that quite depicts the pathologically-ill mindset of exploitation as his does. It sticks with you like a memory of your worst case of food poisoning, and if you’ve ever had a bad case of food poisoning then you know how scary that is. “To know Death Otto, you first have to f**k life in the gall bladder ” Frankenstien says, reminding of Warhol’s father dying of gall bladder illness (I believe) and if you know of Warhol’s father’s problems with his gall bladder then it seems a peculiar inside joke. But then Warhol a decade later, after years of amphetamine abuse, dies of a heart attack after gall bladder surgery, a sort-of self prophecy as he was scared he would die in hospital. And that’s sticky. Warhol was like velcro covered with velcro stickies that scared the hell out of him.
Which brings to mind another weirdness of life crazily spinning off on seeming inside jokes and co-operatively creating real puzzles of them. Edie’s mother in “Ciao Manhattan” makes pies, and Brigid Berlin is so obsessed with key lime pie in “Pie in the Sky” that she supposedly eats several in one sitting and states she has on the sly been eating pie after pie throughout the filming, incapable of controlling herself, causing her weight to begin to balloon again, which has been the bane of her existence, her mother’s preoccupation with her weight, her criticisms of it and beginning her daughter on amphetamines in an attempt to control it because she knew Brigid wouldn’t be happy fat, when instead it’s the mother who wasn’t going to be happy with a fat daughter. Which is one thing, but then I look up a published bio of Edie and what does it begin with but talking about the Sedgwick burial plots being called a pie. Very first paragraph. “Have you ever seen he old graveyard up there in Stockbridge? In one corner is the family’s burial place; it’s called the Sedgwick Pie…”
Where I’m going with this is that the Warholian work and Factory-related work seems after a while to make a crazy kind of dream maze. One is challeneged to find in it what is real and what is not, what is art and what is the gimmick that fattens the bank account (Warhol was, after all, first an incredibly successful commercial artist). So everyone debates as to what’s real and what’s not in “Ciao Manhattan” and whether Edie was exploited or not. Was Morrisey’s “Frankenstein” high camp or art? Was Joe Dallesandro acting badly intentional or was his bad acting intentionally used or not? And when I reflect on the pheomenon, that sticky question that is glued on nearly every Factory-related work, as to what’s art and what’s life, what’s vanity as opposed to depiction of the vain, then the art of period is not defined by the individual elements but the whole shebang. I’ve finally decided that I doubt there’s a single piece of “art” in the Factory warehouse that is art in and of itself. The art is the whole of the Factory, every piece referencing another and with such eerie sphinx-like reflections and anticipations that you’re compelled to consider how Oedipus blinded himself in an attempt to escape the machinery of the gods while paying for his part in it (at least so goes one way of looking at it). If Warhol and Edie and Brigid and everyone else happened to be blind to what they were ultimately creating (which I suspect they were in as much as they defined themselves as so part and product that they were incapable of escaping what they were commenting upon) it is still art, art almost in spite of itself, though I suspect too that most onlookers don’t have a clue either as to what makes it so, rambling on about how Warhol showed art is also the everyday everybody’s soup can in which all can participate and hey see too everyone can make art if it’s the humble soup can. No, I think if most people really got the soup cans and Jackie Os and Marilyns they’d angriliy burn them all rather than honoring because it’s hell rather than the sweet ode to mom’s lunch that Warhol stated the soup cans to be. The whole of the Factory’s work condemns everyone for a rat’s maze inescapable exploitative meanness and guile. It’s twentieth century Bosch and a couple hundred years from now, just as many wonder how Bosch got away with his depictions, people are going to look at it the Factory’s Opus and wonder why in the hell those twentieth centuriers made their cathedral of it and bought it as a love poem rather than going out and sitting on the corner and crying.
Edie Sedgwick shocked out of her Frankenstein’s creation gourd, and purportedly wanting it (which means it was better to her than what she already had), acting out convulsions on the shock table, and Morrisey’s exploited, pieced-together Beautiful Frankenstein monsters are a key to the what carries the Factory beyond the self-infatuation and self-hatred of the Factory to the universal. It was Made in U.S. of A. and still is. It’s what’s on the menu. And somewhere deep inside people are indeed perhaps aware of the ferocity of what they were eating and being fed and what it meant, or else Warhol wouldn’t have been giving away as presents the Electric Chair art that just simply wouldn’t sell.
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