This year I binged classic noir crime novels. Inspiration came from two Library of America collections: Crime Novels of The 1960s and Ross Macdonald: Four Later Novels. Striking in their psychological depth and startling in the precision of their lean prose, these novels provide much more than entertainment and suspense (though there’s no shortage of either). Perhaps genre fiction was an arena where authors could explore aspects of human nature and social behavior that were too gnarly – too real – for the elevated plane of self-consciously “literary” endeavor. On deck for 2024 is Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-66 so we’ll see how far my theory extends. And while it’s not a crime novel per se, Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel is simply the best book I’ve read about New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And if you want an electrifying ride through the NYC music scene of that period, get on board Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life. As a character in Brooklyn Crime Novel puts it, “you could try [for] a hundred years and never explain what it was like back then.” I’m grateful both these authors tried. More to come and in the meantime, Happy New Year.
Jens Lapidus – Stockholm Delete
Hernan Diaz – Trust
RJ Smith – Chuck Berry: An American Life
Jonathan Lethem – The Feral Detective
Jonathan Lethem – The Arrest
Jonathan Lethem – Brooklyn Crime Novel
George Orwell – Burmese Days
Mario Vargas Llosa – The Call Of The Tribe
Michael Connelly – Desert Star
E.M. Forster – A Passage To India
James Crumley – The Last Good Kiss
Ben McIntyre – Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Dangerous Spy
Beverley Gage – G Man: J Edgar Hoover And The Making of The American Century
David I. Kertzer – The Pope At War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler
David J. Russell – Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
Karin Fossum – The Murder of Harriet Krohn
Håkan Nesser – Hour of the Wolf
Cornell Woolrich – Deadline At Dawn
Ross Macdonald – Black Money, The Instant Enemy, The Goodbye Look, The Underground Man
Cookie Mueller – Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories
Paul Bowles – The Sheltering Sky
James Risen – The Last Honest Man: The CIA, The FBI, The Mafia, and The Kennedys — and One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy
Stephanie Stein Crease – Rhythm Man: Chick Webb and the Beat That Changed America
Don Winslow – City of Dreams
Marijke Schermer – Break Water
James Baldwin – Go Tell It On The Mountain
James Baldwin – Another Country
Lawrence Osborne – On Java Road
Dennis Lehane – Small Mercies
Alex Ross – Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
Martin Amis – Dead Babies, Success, Other People, Yellow Dog, Night Train (rereads)
John D. MacDonald – Neon Jungle
Colson Whitehead – Crook Manifesto
Adam Phillips – Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Zadie Smith – The Fraud
Dorothy B. Hughes – Ride The Pink Horse, The Expendable Man, In A Lonely Place
Richard Stark – The Hunter, The Score
Margaret Millar – A Stranger In My Grave, The Fiend
Frederic Brown – The Murderers
Dan J. Marlowe – The Name of the Game is Death
Richard Norton Smith – An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
Anthony Powell and his recurring cast of characters in A Dance To The Music of Time provided good company during the difficult months of 2021. We’ve all encountered a Kenneth Widmerpool in our lives. I haven’t quite finished the 12 novel cycle, two more to go. And I just borrowed two long biographies – on Jimmy Carter and Charles de Gaulle – from the library so 2022 may end with a shorter list. Speaking of long biographies, I caved and took out the controversial Philip Roth when I saw several copies gathering dust on the library shelf. Interesting in terms of sheer data collected but not essential, even for Roth fans. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, from 1995, was my discovery of the year – better late than never. Which applies to a lot of things in 2021. Here’s to a healthy (healthier) year ahead for all of us.
Peter Guralnick – Looking To Get Lost: Adventures in Music & Writing Jo Nesbo – The Kingdom Andy Warhol & Pat Hackett – Popism (re-read) George V Higgins – The Imposters Toni Morrison – Song of Solomon William Middleton – Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique & John de Menil Tove Ditlevsen – The Copenhagen Trilogy Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let You Go Change-Rae Lee – A Gesture Life Ayad Akhtar – Homeland Elegies Denis Johnson – Already Dead John Giorno – Great Demon Kings Saul Bellow – The Adventures of Augie March (re-read) Kati Hiekkapelto – The Hummingbird Kati Hiekkapelto – The Defenceless Emmanuel Carrère – 97,196 Words: Essays Emmanuel Carrère – Lives Other Than My Own
Colson Whitehead – The Nickel Boys
Tara Westover – Educated Annie Ernaux – The Years Jussi Adler-Olsen – Victim 2117 Camilla Lackberg – The Golden Cage Kim Fairley – Shooting Out The Lights Alexander Lobrano – A Place at the Table Helene Tursten – Protected by the Shadows Hari Kunzru – White Tears James Ellroy – Widespread Panic Esther Freud – I Couldn’t Love You More Rohinton Mistry – A Fine Balance V.S. Naipaul – A House for Mr. Biswas (reread) Rachel Kushner – The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 Ben Lerner – Leaving The Atocha Station Per Petterson – Out Stealing Horses Lauren Groff – Fates and Furies Blake Bailey – Philip Roth: The Biography Don Carpenter – Hard Rain Falling Peter May – The Black House Peter May – The Chessmen
Anthony Powell – A Dance To The Music of Time: A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer’s Market, TheAcceptance World; At Lady Molly’s; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant; The Kindly Ones; The Valley of Bones; The Soldier’s Art; The Military Philosophers; Books Do Furnish A Room
I never met Andy Warhol. Yet I’ve alway felt a strange affinity with him
Andy Warhol paved the way for so much current pop culture it’s impossible to measure his impact. He smudged the line between commercial and fine art with his silkscreen paintings from the early Sixties: the Elvises, Marilyns and Jackies that first made him famous (for longer than fifteen minutes). He envisioned the reality TV concept when he made ad hoc, shot-on-the-cheap, boring-on-purpose underground movies with self-explanatory titles such as Sleep, Kiss, Screen Test and Blow Job.
He sponsored The Velvet Underground at the onset of their career, and then watched as they spawned several successive generations of rock and roll musicians. On a broader canvas, Andy Warhol promoted gender fluidity and LGBTQ culture throughout his life. Despite his extreme (at times neurotic) sense of personal privacy, he made no effort to conceal his own gay identity, beginning at a time when homosexuality was far from accepted in the art world let alone America at large. And he foregrounded his deep, obsessive fascination with celebrity; first in his artwork and later in the pages of his magazine, Andy Warhol’s Interview. Throughout the Seventies, Andy tape-recorded conversations at parties while snapping thousands of Polaroid photos — social media posts in search of a platform! Published three years after he died at age 58 in 1987, much of The Andy Warhol Diaries reads like well, uhm, I guess Twitter.
***
I never met Andy Warhol. Yet I feel an odd affinity with him, a connection that extends beyond appreciating his aesthetic accomplishments. Full disclosure: Andy and I stood in the same room at a Manhattan night club several times during the early-to-mid Eighties. And how many other people can say that? Thousands? Perhaps by then Andy wasn’t quite as choosy about where he hung out as he once had been.
Now that I’m older (63) than Andy Warhol was when he died for the second and final time (he survived a murder attempt in 1968), I’ve been pondering his legacy beyond the astronomical sums exchanged for his art.
In 1964, a couple years after he transitioned from in-demand commercial illustrator to controversy-sparking gallery artist, Andy and three mega-eccentric sidekicks (more on them, and of them, to follow) travelled by car from New York City to Los Angeles for his first big exhibit. The show itself met with mixed reviews while the journey there validated everything Warhol had been doing up til then.
“The farther west we drove, the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere — that was the thing, people took it for granted whereas we were dazzled by it — to us, it was the new Art. Once you got Pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.”
— Andy Warhol (with Pat Hackett) Popism (1980)
***
Since Andy Warhol was, arguably, the first multi-media artist it makes sense that I would discover him through mediums other than painting. As with many baby-boomers, beginning at a tender age, my primary cultural focus fixated on rock and roll. So it’s only natural that I first encountered Andy Warhol on a trio of LP covers.
The Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers (1971)
His name was stamped in cursive type on the inner cover. To my 13-year-old eyes, Andy’s design concept – a crotch shot of tight blue jeans with a working zipper concealing amply-stuffed briefs within – appeared less sexy than gimmicky. I thought it was a rather cheesy visual ploy for “the world’s greatest rock and roll band” (as the Stones were then known), though the sleazy, brooding music itself surely didn’t disappoint.
The Rolling Stones Love You Live (1977)
Six years later, a diffident musical effort (double-disc in-concert placeholder between studio albums) flipped the script on Sticky Fingers. This time the musical content made me instantly regret an impulse purchase while the album cover lingered in my consciousness. Love You Live came enclosed in an attention-getting, luridly colored jacket. This smeary painted-over photo of Mick Jagger marked my first exposure to the silkscreen method that was Andy Warhol’s signature, tracing back to the iconic Sixties work on through to his mercenary portraits in the Seventies and Eighties.
The Velvet Underground The Velvet Underground And Nico (1967)
“Andy told me that what we were doing with music was the same thing he was doing with painting and movies and writing, i.e. not kidding around.” — Lou Reed
Not long after I bought Love You Live, another Warhol-designed cover of an older album amplified my immersion in the music of Lou Reed and John Cale. When I caught up to The Velvet Underground and Nico, the 1967 debut of this now-canonical band had long been out of print. So my import copy carried the infamous “banana” illustration minus the original LP’s peel-it-yourself feature. Still, somehow, the Pop Art irony of the cover art seamlessly merged with the music’s decadent grandeur and ugly beauty. Suddenly the Andy Warhol imprimatur assumed a much richer (if vaguely defined) significance.
The Pop Art Assembly Line & Assembled Cast of Characters
After graduating from art college in Pittsburgh, Andy Warhol moved to New York City. During the Fifties, he worked from his Manhattan home, producing commercial illustrations for department stores and fashion magazines (shoes were a specialty). His first art studio was an abandoned firehouse on the Upper East Side; when that building was condemned he rented an industrial loft space on East 47th Street near the United Nations. This was the most notorious of several Warhol workspaces known as The Factory. The studio felt like a factory due to the mechanical nature of Andy’s art practice, and the cast of charters he assembled to assist and inspire his labors. Not to mention the myriad people who just turned up there to “make the scene.”
What follows is a quick, handy guide to the most famous or infamous of many Factory helpers, hangers-on, kindred spirits, superstars, advisers, muses, devotees and deadbeats. During the late Sixties, inviting Andy Warhol to your party or event meant admitting a cast of dozens — the artist plus his entourage.
Gerard Malanga – Bronx-born poet who dropped out of college to become Warhol’s art assistant. Danced and wielded a whip on stage with the The Velvet Underground.
Ondine aka the Pope – Amphetamine-fueled raconteur and opera buff who presided over a sketchy backroom scene that Andy (mostly) ignored.
Billy Name – Custodian who lived in the back of Warhol’s loft studio. Billy covered the entire space in tinfoil, hence the name The Silver Factory.
Edie Sedgwick – Pixie party girl with old-school WASP roots and an appetite for self-destruction who became Andy’s constant social companion during 1965-66.
Nico (Christa Paffgen) – German-born actress/model/chanteuse who Andy recruited to sing with the Velvet Underground, later a solo performer.
Paul Morrissey – Filmmaker with a prickly, contrarian personality who collaborated with Andy on his movies and gradually became sole director.
Valerie Solanas – Radical feminist pamphleteer (S.C.U.M. Manifesto) and failed playwright who shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968. To be fair, Valerie Solanas was an extremely peripheral player in The Factory drama, the fringe of the fringe, until the fateful day she exited the Factory elevator and fired a gun. Warhol survived the attempted murder, though his life and art would be transformed over the following decades. Everyone who knew him seems to agree that Andy was never the same afterwards.
In 1968, just before Andy Warhol was shot, two young men gravitated to the Factory (by then located in Union Square, north of East 14th Street) who went on to perform essential roles in the remainder of Andy’s life.
Fred Hughes was an aspiring aesthete from Texas, a protege of the art-collecting de Menil family. He became Warhol’s business representative and chargé d’affaires. Hughes continued working for the Andy Warhol estate until his own death in 1998.
Jed Johnson, a recent NYC arrival from California in his late teens, was initially recruited by Paul Morrissey as an assistant and all-around go-fer at the Factory. Johnson eventually became Andy’s romantic partner, cohabiting with the artist in his Upper East Side townhouse until 1980. In the ensuing decade, Jed Johnson established himself as an interior designer; he died in the 1996 TWA Flight 800 crash.
In the wake of his near-death experience in 1968, Andy Warhol insisted on a veneer of professionalism for staff at The Factory, sharply turning away from the excess-is-best aesthetic of his Sixties acolytes.
Meeting Andy at the Movies
The name Andy Warhol kept popping up (so to speak) on my limited radar throughout the Seventies, first sneaking into the cultural mainstream alongside glam-rock.
Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (1973) and Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974), a pair of low-budget horror spoofs directed by Paul Morrissey, played at a multiplex near my Cincinnati suburb — no doubt on the smallest screen. Frankly, I was far more interested in The Exorcist. But four years later, in full thrall to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, I kicked myself for missing a rare campus showing of Andy Warhol’s double-screen opus Chelsea Girls (1966). His preceding movies from the Sixties existed (if at all) as punchlines in the public mind at that point. At any rate they weren’t readily viewable. Eventually, I caught up with Andy’s late-period cinematic oeuvre when another campus film society screened the Paul Morrissey-directed Trash (1970).
A few steps removed from the Factory scene associated with Edie, Nico, Lou and the Velvets, this plotless wallow in depravity follows a junkie male prostitute (Joe Dallesandro) and his transvestite roommate (Holly Woodlawn) on their daily rounds. To say Trash transported my Midwestern sensibility to an unexplored continent would be obvious, and beside the point. What struck and stayed with me was the scene where Holly and Joe retrieve battered furniture from the street – garbage picking. Somehow I found this ineffably moving, even tragic, while everyone else seated nearby erupted in laughter. And it turned out to be prescient. Two years later I encountered another, even craftier urban scavenger living downstairs in my first Manhattan apartment building. Appropriating old couches, appliances and housewares from the city streets was apparently a New York thing: a hobby for some and others, a métier.
Interrogating Interview
Interviewer: “Do you see yourself as a creator, or more as a magnet that attracts other talents?”
Andy Warhol: “More like a pencil sharpener.”
As a student journalist in the late Seventies, I soon became aware of the print-media arm of Andy Warhol’s empire. In theory, Interview magazine should have been right up my alley as it covered rising pop culture personalities, with a busy side hustle in New York City nightlife. In practice, however, by 1977 I was captivated by the rock and roll demimonde and mildly repulsed by the movie stars and socialites blankly staring from the pages of Interview. A subscriber to The Village Voice from afar, I couldn’t reconcile the uptown versus downtown socioeconomic divide, exemplified by these two competing arbiters of cool. Still, two regular features of Interview caught my eye whenever I flipped through an issue; Glenn O’Brien’s up-to-the minute music columns, and the deadpan-delivery interview questions, seemingly random and/or dumb, deployed by the magazine’s titular head.
As I learned more about magazine publishing during the Eighties, two canny commercial strategies retrospectively revealed themselves on Interview’s pages. One: those pages were newsprint – cheap paper – though the content itself radiated the glossy shine of a high-end fashion periodical. Two: though his name appeared above in smaller type, the monthly was actually identified on the cover as Andy Warhol’s Interview.
The Andy Warhol Library
Forty years ago, you’d find a row of storefront used-book shops on Fourth Avenue just below 14th Street in Manhattan. I killed time there on summer Saturday afternoons, browsing and occasionally buying. In fact I still own a half-dozen of those musty paperbacks with prices penciled on the inside flap. Sadly, my $1 copy of Andy Warhol’s a: A Novel got misplaced or borrowed along the way. It’s not as if I pulled it off the shelf with any frequency; even for the Warhol completist, a is tough sledding. Committing Andy’s compulsive tape-recording to the printed page results in what he called a “taped novel”: amphetamine-fueled jabbering from Sixties Factory stalwarts such as Ondine and Rotten Rita. If you think that might be remotely interesting, then you’ve never been around people high on speed. However, Sonic Youth made excellent use of an Eric Emerson monologue from a in their song “Eric’s Trip” (on Daydream Nation). There might be more good bits such as that in a’s 384 pages but to be honest I never got far enough to find out.
Right around that time, I also read, and easily finished Popism: The Warhol Sixties. Written by Andy and his longtime text collaborator Pat Hackett, Popism offers a straightforward account of The Silver Factory years from a decade’s distance. Unlike the preceding The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), also written with Pat Hackett, Popism is short on bitchy insider jokes and cryptic gossip. Instead Popism goes long on Andy’s ideas about art and the artist’s life (his philosophy you might say) while offering a shopping bag full of succinct, elucidating anecdotes from that breathless period when people stayed awake on amphetamines in part so they wouldn’t miss a thing.
Throughout the summer of 1982, Edie: An American Biography was read everywhere, so it seemed, downtown and uptown, on subways and accessible-by-train beaches. Curated by Jean Stein, this oral history documents the fast-lane life and rapid off-ramp decline of the aforementioned Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. When she died of a barbiturate overdose in 1971, Andy and The Factory had long receded in her rear-view mirror. Edie was the tome that people carried around and gossiped about during my second summer in Manhattan – people fascinated by Andy and his world, anyway. Sometimes it seemed as though everyone I met in New York City was to some extent intrigued by and/or irritated by Warhol. He hovered over a subset of young people in much the same iconic way that Elvis Presley had for our older siblings.
That said, I didn’t think about Warhol as the Eighties unfolded. His presence was felt; on those nights he turned up at Area and the Pyramid, a sub-verbal buzz circulated through the crowd. Andy’s here. And as a casual follower of the downtown art scene, I was aware of his friendship/collaborations with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat as well as his varying yet persistent affect on dozens of other rising artists.
When Andy Warhol passed away suddenly on February 22, 1987, I was on assignment for Rolling Stone magazine in London. So I bought an armful of tabloid newspapers that day, relishing the melodramatic headlines that heralded the artist’s death. Andy expired in a Manhattan hospital, while he recovered from what should have been routine (though long-postponed) gall-bladder surgery. Learning of his death in a city other than New York, on an ambitious mission of my own, magnified its import and impact.
***
“I had a death threat. I’ll get to it.”
— Monday May 4 1981, The Andy Warhol Diaries
Memorials and memoirs, reminiscences and revisionist histories, mash notes and poison pen letters began to accumulate on the Andy Warhol shelf in the years following his death. I might’ve ignored The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett, if not for The New York Times Book Review cover review by Martin Amis in June 1989.
“On most mornings, Andy Warhol called his former secretary, Pat Hackett, and rambled on for a while about what he did the day before. She made ‘extensive notes,’ she explains, and ‘typed them up while Andy’s intonations were fresh in my mind.’ So that’s what we’re looking at here: 800 pages, half a million words, of Andy’s intonations. But it works, somehow.”
Martin Amis’ review of The Andy Warhol Diaries works both as a critical assessment of this singular volume and its sui generis author as well as a wide-roaming, brilliantly articulated essay that touches down on art, social aspiration, masculinity, and the cultural differences between the Seventies and Eighties while nailing the poignance and ambivalence of Andy’s public persona. (It’s available in the Amis collection The War Against Cliche.)
“And after awhile you begin to trust the voice — Andy’s voice, this wavering mumble, this ruined slur. It would seem that The Andy Warhol Diaries thrives on the banal, for in the daily grind of citizenship and dwindling mortality, the nobody and somebody are one. Meanwhile, here comes everybody, or at least everybody who is somebody.”
Andy’s Diaries resonate for me as a touchstone: the granular document of a rarified but not uncommon Manhattan lifestyle and a cautionary tale for young strivers just setting out in the city. The early pages are unpromising. Beginning in 1976, the chronological entries find Andy spending much of his time on the make, hustling portrait commissions from the upper crust in Europe and the Upper East Side of Manhattan, accompanied by Fred Hughes and/or Interview editor Bob Colacello, often supplemented by a well-born female companion.
The Diaries find their rhythm during 1977-78, as the disco era reaches a dizzying peak and Studio 54 commands national media attention. Andy’s morning-after recounts of his nights out with the gang — Halston, Liza Minelli, Bianca Jagger, Truman Capote, Steve Rubell — spill over with dishy bon mots and astringent social observations. It’s the most entertaining section by far though not immune to a subtle, mounting sense of disquiet. Warhol’s admitted use of substances — slyly rubbing cocaine on his gums and quaffing a comped vodka or three — gets eclipsed by the gargantuan intake of almost everybody else he hangs out with. Lurking around the corner is an extended hangover, aka the Eighties.
Andy’s next decade gets off to a rocky start. Calling Warhol emotionally reticent is a gross understatement, so the fact that he mentions his breakup with Jed Johnson at all is remarkable, and characteristically the acknowledgments are terse. Tension between the couple had already surfaced throughout the disco years, yet these premonitions are scant preparation for readers and, one senses, the author himself. From Sunday, December 21, 1980:
“Jed’s decided to move out and I don’t want to talk about it.”
Despite their twenty year age difference, Jed Johnson by all accounts had grown exhausted and alienated by his middle-aged partner’s ceaseless social whirl and longed for a more stable home life and career, which he found.
Andy Warhol, judging from the Diaries, spent the remaining seven years of his life emotionally adrift. He pursued unrequited, borderline-obsessive romances with increasingly younger men, most notably the thirtyish film executive Jon Gould, and fell back on that tried-and-true big city method of filling one’s life: going out too much. Martin Amis, again: “Andy went everyplace that was anyplace — or not even.”
Every night, there was something to do — especially if you were Andy Warhol. With his every-shifting crew of companions (mostly Interview staffers in their twenties), Andy turns up at benefits, concerts, movie screenings, art openings, dinner parties and all manner of hazily defined “events” at nightclubs. As the decade lumbers on, Andy had less time for his peers and old pals (and vice versa), perhaps understandably preferring the energy and input of people young enough to be his children. Broadly speaking, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were his children; they incorporated and furthered his legacy before their own brief, brilliant careers both ended in tragedy.
And we don’t have to regard Andy Warhol as a vampire or bad influence to observe that his two main inheritors, alongside his encouragement, also on occasion received his snarky wasp-stings.
Tuesday, October 2 1984 : “Jean-Michel came over to the office to paint but he fell asleep on the floor. He looked like a bum lying there. But I woke him up and he did two masterpieces that were great.”
Monday October 29 1984: “So we drove up to 90th Street and East River Drive to see the mural that Keith had done. It’s like 2 1/2 feet wide and 200 feet long, like three blocks long. He painted it white and sprayed little black and red figures, but it would have been better just silver. It doesn’t make the city look better, really.”
Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat circa 1984
As the Diaries wind down, and as the paparazzi cameras point elsewhere and the flood of invites slows to a trickling stream, Andy retreats into obsessive antique collecting and binge-watching cable TV (ever the early adopter). Spasms of self-pity appear more frequently, as do self-admonishments about working harder at his art. Well, there’s that. Andy’s art practice gets short shrift throughout the Diaries because, aside from the intriguing “Shadow” paintings in the late Seventies, there’s not a hell of a lot to say about it. Commissioned portraits and hastily conceived series keep him busy day-to-day, if nothing else, right up until the end.
***
A couple years after first reading The Andy Warhol Diaries, I attended a party hosted by a former neighbor in the East Village. By this time, the early Nineties, I was newly married and living across town, pursuing a less hectic social life than I had during the Eighties. I was happy to see my friend though as the night progressed, or devolved, it appeared that she (and I) were roughly ten years older than most of the guests at her party. Without judging her, or assuming everyone should tread the same traditional path through life, I half-consciously decided right then and there not to conduct my thirties in the same way as I had my twenties.
Getting stuck in a youthful moment — longing to live on the cusp of ambition, clinging to that all-things-are-possible flash of pure unrealized potential — is the unenviable fate of the middle-aged bohemian. The last pages of The Andy Warhol Diaries illuminate this dilemma. By the end Andy sleepwalks, dutifully trudging across the Manhattan club circuit, miming the nightly charade of fabulousness. Living vicariously through ever-younger friends, no matter how devoted they are, comes with a set of severe built-in limitations. The emotional returns only diminish over time.
***
During the spring of 1989, I viewed Andy Warhol: A Retrospective at the The Museum of Modern Art. My abiding interest in Warhol was scant preparation for the palpable physical shock of standing before Andy’s Sixties paintings — especially the “Disasters”, the electric chairs and race riots, but the familiar Coke bottles and Brillo pad boxes too. The scale and scope was astounding. Thirty years later, the Whitney Museum presented an even deeper retrospective: Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again. By now I was familiar with his oeuvre and as it happened, surprisingly, not yet saturated. The Whitney show revealed some fascinating early work as well as a room devoted to the much-maligned portraits-for-hire.
In the 21st Century, revelations from Andy Warhol were in short supply but I was nevertheless floored by the magnificent Mao taking up most of an entire wall. The Chinese Communist dictator impassively stared down at museum-goers, his malevolent legacy oddly amplified by the artist’s disarming color choices: bizarrely, Mao looks as if he’s wearing make-up. And the Warhol/Basquiat collaborations, dismissed in 1985, now resemble successful duets, not cynical marriages of convenience.
The commissioned portraits exude a puzzling allure. Juxtaposing the artist’s mother, Julia Warhola, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, suggests much about the Andy Warhol enigma while revealing little or nothing. Which, perhaps, is just what he intended.
Jean-Michel Basquiat & Andy Warhol Third Eye (1985)
***
Roaming the Upper West Side of Manhattan on an undistinguished day during the pandemic year of 2020, I walked past a public middle school. It was closed but student art projects were visible behind a fence. “Haring and Basquiat” read the sign above, though that was unnecessary as the graffiti-inspired sculpture and Godzilla-with-crown painting on display made for instantly recognizable homages to the two deceased artists. I realized that my peers Keith and Jean-Michael, gone more than thirty years now, were no longer Andy Warhol’s inheritors but his stand-ins, the definition of an artist for today’s kids: the new Warhols. Art is eternal, even if artists aren’t.
The Village Voice, the storied New York alt-weekly that shut down in 2018 after a 63-year run, will live again. Brian Calle, the chief executive of Street Media, the owner of LA Weekly, said on Tuesday that he had acquired the publication from its publisher, Peter D. Barbey. “I think a lot of people will be hungry for this and I’m superoptimistic,” Mr. Calle said in an interview.
— “The Village Voice Rises From The Dead” Katie Robertson, The New York Times December 22, 2020
Although I never anticipated it, attending college in Ann Arbor, Michigan during the late Seventies awarded me with an accidental education in popular music. I couldn’t have received better training to be a rock critic if I tried — possibly not even in New York. Not only was there a thriving punk/new wave scene along the metropolitan Detroit-Ann Arbor corridor, but the student-run Eclipse Jazz concert series at the University of Michigan exposed me to the length and breadth of this native American music. Over the course of 1977 and ’78 I attended concerts by Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Ella Fitzgerald, Roy Eldridge, Johnny Griffin, Art Blakey, Woody Shaw, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Even as an unschooled 20 year old, I sensed my amazing good fortune. What I didn’t — couldn’t have — comprehended was the setting of a pattern. With regard to witnessing musical moments, recognizing historic explosions of vast talent, I repeatedly found myself in the right place at the right time.
Though I was primarily motivated to attempt journalism after catching local appearances by Patti Smith, Talking Heads and The Ramones, my first assignment for The Michigan Daily turned out to be a concert review of a local bar band called The Look. And by this time, January 1979, I was looking beyond the Motor City for literary and musical inspiration.
Indeed it was the deluge of fresh, outrageous music coming out of New York in those days — punk rock, new wave — that jump-started my growing fascination with The City itself. In late 1977 I subscribed to The Village Voice from my Ann Arbor perch in order to keep up with the scene. Just reading the outlandish names of all those bands playing CBGB and Max’s Kansas City was so exotic, so exciting in those heady days of discovery: Theoretical Girls on the same bill with Sick Dick & the Volkswagens! Pretty soon I was devouring the entire newspaper every week: the sharp-shooting columnists and critics, the zealous investigative reporting and most important, the weirdly mesmerizing features, where more often than not the writer became part of the story. New York City Mayor Ed Koch once said, disapprovingly, that “the writers run The Voice.” That’s how the paper read as well, to me anyway. The Village Voice was all about the writers’ voices: highly subjective, slightly anarchic, often political, always pointed and impassioned. Simultaneously I decided that a) I had something unique to say and b) this disarmingly personal approach to journalism was a way to say it so that other people might conceivably pay attention.
Looking back at my article about The Look more than forty years later, I see how completely in thrall I was to The Village Voice. Rather than write a mere concert review I constructed a reported essay, including: a general overview of the Top 40 cover band circuit that also specified how The Look both conformed and defied conventions with their eclectic repertoire of borrowed and original material; quotes from audience members; a brief interview with the band’s lead singer Dave Edwards; and my positive critical evaluation. We were a good match: both subject and writer harbored ambitions beyond their present station. When The Look released an album several years later, I wasn’t nearly as enthused about their music but felt genuinely proud of them anyway. We’d both moved on from our small-town success to a more formidable challenge: becoming bit players in a larger production.
I wrote dozens of other articles for The Michigan Daily over the next two years, mostly about music. Extending my senior year by a semester, I served as co-editor of the Arts Section for the calendar year of 1980. It was invaluable experience, learning by doing i.e. making mistakes on the printed page. Part of the enduring late Sixties legacy at the University of Michigan, the student paper in those days functioned without faculty supervision. In fact, during the one journalism course I took there, the professor urged us to keep the hell away from the Daily. As far as the staff was concerned, we weren’t student journalists; we were the college town’s morning newspaper, since The Ann Arbor News came out in the afternoon. Arrogant? No doubt, but this prevailing attitude among my peers also buoyed my confidence and pushed me past whatever self-consciousness and insecurity lingered in my post-adolescent mindset. Meeting deadlines didn’t leave time for questioning yourself.
Another New York publication kindled my writing aspirations in this formative period. I first read New York Rocker at my part-time record store job in Ann Arbor during the summer of 1979, before my senior year. This newsprint tabloid improbably appeared alongside slick publications like Billboard and Rolling Stone in the magazine rack near the checkout counter. My appetite for the new sounds coming out of lower Manhattan had been thoroughly whetted by The Village Voice, and New York Rocker further stimulated that hunger by covering each subsequent ripple, from radical no wave bands like the funky and confrontational Contortions to more user-friendly New York immigrants like the party-starting B-52s from collegiate Athens, Georgia. Sharp writing and splashy graphics distinguished New York Rocker from the amateur enthusiasm of the do-it-yourself journals that came to be known as fanzines. The Rocker proved to be an indispensable guide to the new music.
Abrasive and syncopated, the Contortions’ Buy LP took a while to sink in. But the B-52s’ joyous debut album became a favorite among my classically trained colleagues. While I still loved the energy of punk and the melodic thrust of power pop, when the Knack hit with “My Sharona” that summer, my taste began to expand beyond the confines of rock and roll.
Controversially, I often picked the latest disco singles when it was my turn to choose the in-store soundtrack. Though never a dancer, I was attracted to Chic and Donna Summer by the soulful singing and sophisticated rhythmic pulse; disco trifles like “I Love The Night Life” by Alicia Bridges or Anita Ward’s “Ring Your Bell” were classic, catchy pop like the one-hit wonders of yore.
I’d been working part-time at Discount Records since summer 1978. Clerking in a record store was relatively low-impact compared to my previous part-time gigs: dorm cafeteria dishwasher and furniture store stock boy. Unlike those jobs, the absence of demanding physical labor at the record store permitted plenty of time for listening, and learning.
It was a survey course in popular music, and the music business. Studying the charts in Billboard and Record World, I also kept track of what sold in the store — and what didn’t. Naturally the job also afforded ample opportunity to hear new music. Our constant in-store soundtrack was more for the employees’ benefit than customers. Discount Records was largely staffed by classically trained musicians; students and refugees from University of Michigan’s music school who nevertheless displayed catholic taste. I was the token rocker, a cliched role I played to the hilt.
We were all ferociously opinionated about music, but remained open. We didn’t force our likes, and dislikes, onto customers like the obnoxious clerks in High Fidelity. Or at the very least we kept the cutting remarks to ourselves until the offending customers exited the store. So I just smiled and gritted my teeth when attractive young women I knew from various classes came in and purchased ghastly albums by Dan Fogelberg or Gino Vanelli.
For the next year, through the summer of 1980, I stayed busy and content: splitting my time between The Michigan Daily, the record store, oh yeah and attending classes too, never realizing that any idyllic season must end.
Boom. Autumn 1980 was a time of personal and political upheaval. Ronald Reagan’s election caught me and many others completely off guard. On November 4, election night, I attended an informal staff gathering at the student newspaper office. We anticipated a late-night vigil, hunkered around the vintage AP wire machine and a cheap black & white television. Several six-packs of Molson were surely on hand. Eventual victory for Jimmy Carter was assumed if not at all assured. But the evening ended early, and joylessly. Awaking the next day and stumbling to class, the realization hit: I’d been living in a liberal college-town bubble for the last four and a half years.
I graduated in December and returned home to Cincinnati. Armed with a BA in psychology and several hundred LPs, I reclaimed my old bedroom and fitfully plotted my next move. The holiday season sped by in a cheery, beery blur. January, however, proved to be a cruel month for job searching. Especially for a budding journalist, operating from his parents’ fake wood-paneled suburban basement. I sent out my resume and article clips, to increasingly smaller and smaller newspapers. The polite rejection letters piled up; taken individually they were depressing and considered collectively, devastating. I worried about where my chosen path was headed. At this rate, it might take ten years to land at The Cincinnati Enquirer or Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. High time to concoct a Plan B.
My weekly copy of The Village Voice now arrived in my parents’ mailbox. I frequented a punk/new wave record store off Calhoun Street near the University of Cincinnati that carried New York Rocker along with all the latest UK import albums and indie-label singles. The nerdy Nimrod of a manager shrugged off my inquiry about part-time employment and registered open annoyance at my many browsing-only visits. Though I couldn’t afford to buy records, vicariously I tried to keep up.
Driving my parents’ second car around town, I tuned in to WCIN-AM, the local R&B station; partially because the mainstream rock stations were so dire in those days, dominated by the AOR Axis of Evil (Journey, Styx and Kansas), but also because the bass-heavy sound of funk and the fleet-footed swing of disco sounded so much better, frankly, than everything else available. My epiphany occurred somewhere on Winton Road, heading uphill toward our modest family home in the ranch-house oasis of Finneytown. Lakeside’s “Fantastic Voyage” came pumping out of the cheap Volkswagen speakers and I realized this funky strut rocked more effectively than any current rock and roll, new wave or old hat. Growling along with the lyrics and drumming on the steering wheel, my mind accelerated beyond the speed limit. And as my musical horizons broadened, so did my dreams. Suddenly I realized where I’d always wanted to go and only now could summon the confidence to say out loud.
Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President of the United States on January 20,1981. Two weeks later, I bought a one way train ticket to New York City.
“The Presidential election is just too stupid to watch…you see Ronald Reagan in these neighborhoods with poor people and you can just hear him saying ‘Oh my God what am I doing here?’ But his hair looks really good.”
— The Andy Warhol Diaries on August 21, 1980
My mom, a moderate-to-liberal Rockefeller Republican, intuited the political future in 1976. Though my intention was pulling the lever for the Democratic nominee in my first Presidential election, Mary Louise insisted that I register as Republican so as to vote against Ronald Reagan in the primary. Switching parties could come later. “If that lousy actor becomes President, I’m moving to Canada!” Four years later, he did and she didn’t.
Though the fourth and final installment in Rick Perlstein’s chronicle of the conservative revolution is titled Reaganland, it might just as easily been called Carter Country. Jimmy Carter dominates this capacious narrative’s first half and then some. Which is only appropriate, as he was President during the years under scrutiny. Regarded as a failure on both sides of the aisle, Carter nevertheless was much more than a foil or fall guy for the opposing party, and he emerges from Reaganland‘s thousand-plus pages as a complex character: equally earnest and arrogant, insightful and inept, pious and prickly.
Perlstein’s newest doorstop volume, similar to its three predecessors, is a comprehensive social history. Roughly, Reaganland encompasses three overlapping narratives: the post-convention 1976 election and Carter’s presidency, the so-called Religious Right’s rise to power, the 1980 campaign and election. The book’s sheer breadth and depth prove the adage about history being messy yet this deluge of information offers clarifying flashes of foresight while avoiding pat summary of the past. It’s no data dump.
Still, little is left out of the dismal late Seventies hit parade: Son of Sam, New York City’s blackout, Jonestown, SALT II, Phyllis Schlafly’s successful blockade of the Equal Rights Amendment, Anita Bryant’s shockingly hateful anti-gay rights crusade, the murders of San Francisco’s liberal mayor George Moscone and gay city supervisor Harvey Milk, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and, inevitably, the events leading up to and including the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in revolutionary Iran, even the “Disco Sucks” melee at Chicago’s Comiskey Park during the summer of 1979.
Though Jimmy Carter was in fact a devout born-again Christian, the self-styled Moral Majority, fueled by the booming popularity of religious broadcasting aka televangelism, was ripe for plucking by Ronald Reagan. To this day (though perhaps not eternally), the Religious Right forms the Republican Party bedrock.
“Do you ever feel that if we don’t do it now, if we let this become another Sodom & Gomorrah,” mused Ronald Reagan to the Reverend Jim Bakker, “that we might be the generation that sees Armageddon?” As transcribed by Perlstein, their televised exchange reminded me of first encountering televangelism in 1976, snowbound in a Canton, Ohio motel: Jim Bakker simultaneously raising funds & faith-healing while Tammy Faye shed crocodile tears was the most outlandish television spectacular I’ve ever witnessed.
Reagan’s Armageddon rhetoric about nuclear weapons and the Soviet threat served red meat to his grass-roots supporters, and indigestion to power brokers in both parties. Basically, he had to reassure Republican leaders that he wouldn’t push the doomsday button in a fit of pique. Remembered now as an all-conquering hero, Reagan secured the 1980 nomination at a slow, steady turtle-like pace. He systematically knocked off formidable challenges from Howard Baker, Bob Dole (maybe not that formidable), George H.W. Bush, John Connally, and eventual third-party candidate John Anderson. As Perlstein unpacked the convention drama surrounding Reagan’s vice-presidential pick, I momentarily got lost in a counterfactual daydream. What if Reagan had chosen Gerald Ford as running mate, instead of George Bush, as he seriously considered? We may have been denied, or spared, both future Bush presidencies.
Of course there’s truth underlying the clichés about Jimmy Carter being a scold and Ronald Reagan a sunny optimist. “This is a painful step,” Carter told the American people, “and I’ll give it to you straight: Each of us will have use less oil and pay more for it.” Funny thing is, this speech and others where Carter took to the pulpit and sounded a severe note, did not result in a drop in his popularity. Not at first. Not until the Republican front-runner began to offer a contrasting note of uplift. Even when facts – those funny things – contradicted his homespun anecdotes, Reagan radiated Hope.
“Once Ronald Reagan convinced himself of something,” writes Perlstein, “no one was better at crafting a persuasive case for it, even if it was based on evidence that existed mostly in his imagination.” For the record, this is not at all what our current President practices on a daily basis. Donald Trump doesn’t invest belief in anything or anybody but his own bad self.
Even political mavens who weren’t alive forty years ago will recognize the decisive “There you go again” moment in the fateful debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. I recall watching it on a portable black and white TV in the offices of The Michigan Daily. However, until I read Rick Perlstein’s detailed recounting, I had forgotten how a stolen briefing book helped Reagan best Carter in that celebrated contest. At the time, I was dead certain Carter won but hey, I was living in a lefty college-town bubble.
Throughout Reaganland, Rick Perlstein mostly avoids facile comparisons with Donald Trump so I’ve tried to follow suit here. Yet in conclusion I can’t help reflecting that whether or not one highly rates Ronald Reagan as a leader, it’s hard – impossible – to imagine him or Jimmy Carter (or frankly any subsequent President through Obama) not rising to the challenges of the pandemic in a manner that shames the current White House occupant.
Our education was based on euphemism, attenuation and accommodation.
— Edoardo Albinati, The Catholic School.
The peak of my academic career at St. Xavier occurred early on, two or three weeks into freshman year. Our first English assignment was an essay on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Before handing back the graded papers, “Mr. Doral” (about half the teachers at St. X were laypeople, including two women) announced that he would read one exceptional effort aloud. Two sentences in, I registered first shock and then pure pleasure — the pride of recognition. (I wouldn’t feel this thrill again until, decades later, my son was introduced as the top-ranked student at his high school graduation.) My essay positioned the slave Jim as a better role model to Huck Finn, and a far wiser man, than any of the novel’s white authority figures. Soon but not soon enough, I gathered this obvious interpretation, not to mention the deep well of skepticism from which it sprang, would not be shared or countenanced by the vast majority of my instructors. Also, this was the first and last time during four years of high school that my nascent writing ability was recognized or acknowledged in any way.
***
Absorbed by twice-daily swimming practice plus homework, I barely registered the absence of women during freshman year. But the stultifying aroma of an all-male atmosphere seeped into my pores, spreading until it turned my stomach. In the spring of 1973, St. Xavier won the Ohio state swimming championship. In a school-wide PA announcement, I was acknowledged as a member of the winning 4 x 100 yard freestyle relay team and the only freshman on the varsity squad. Much to my confusion, right after this recognition crackled through the loudspeaker located next to the clock, our Spanish teacher sneered and mocked my achievement — out loud, in front of everybody. I neither expected nor desired an “atta boy” pat on the back. Yet it took a minute to comprehend why “Mr. Bilgerman” (also head baseball coach) was so contemptuous.
Swimming was widely regarded as a less-than-manly pursuit by participants in the “ball sports.” And Bilgerman’s baseball squads, as well as St. Xavier’s football and basketball teams for that matter, traditionally had never ranked high in the city league, let alone triumphed on the state level. All right then, he was jealous. Still, his unexpected and humiliating insult in the classroom seriously deflated my ego. He planted a seed of doubt, a sense of difference, in my developing self-awareness. There was a masculine standard, unspoken but understood, that I would never meet.
***
Forcing people to act contrary to their own natures is the ultimate proof of power. —ibid.
***
My extracurricular interests– science fiction, Kerouac’s On The Road, New Journalism, rock and roll above all else – bobbed up to the surface during sophomore year. I read and re-read Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. What attracted me to the story of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters was not only the drug experimentation and psychedelic music, but also Wolfe’s flashy, shape-shifting descriptive prose coupled with observant reporting. Around this time I encountered the rock critic Lester Bangs at the public library, writing about exotic creatures such as Lou Reed and Iggy Pop in Stereo Review. And at home I’d become mesmerized by Pauline Kael’s movie reviews in my parents’ copies of The New Yorker.
In English we studied poetry and drama while drilling vocabulary for the SAT test the following year. Two more formative sophomore memories: reading Sophocles’ Antigone between heats at a spring swimming meet, and voluntarily memorizing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. I was far from a gloomy death-obsessed teenager, yet the Bard’s wintry imagery struck me then, and strikes me now, as incomparably haunting and beautiful.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In history class that year, we read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. How on earth did that happen at conservative, 99% white St Xavier? While I can’t recall any accompanying discussion or explication, Malcolm’s clear-eyed tales of his (pre-conversion) ghetto wild life stayed with me forever.
Before or after Easter 1974, in lieu of a Spring Break, St. Xavier High School uncharacteristically decided to broaden the curriculum (and our growing minds) with a period of extracurricular programming devoted to “The Arts.”
Predictably, it did not end well. A screening of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter with Alan Arkin got interrupted just minutes into the movie, by a snickering student in the peanut gallery. The film was abruptly terminated and so was Arts Week. In the following years, we stuck to our regular pre-Easter program of study days, mid-term exams and a brief vacation.
Nobody else cared about finishing the movie, or Arts Week. My fellow students were mostly pissed about having to resume our routine. A few years later, however, I caught The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter at a campus film group; by then it seemed overwrought and corny, but gaining “closure” was satisfying.
Long after I graduated, my father pointed out a guiding principle of my high school that was so obvious that I’d never noticed, or just took it for granted: St. X emphasized math and science at the expense of every other subject save religion. This was practical in the short term, but tragically short-sighted in my dad’s view, which was interesting coming from a chemical engineer and industrial salesman. As evidence, for two consecutive years at St. Xavier my history class consisted of a varsity athletic coach talking (and joking) about his World War II experience — every day. It wasn’t until college that I realized the liberal arts and social sciences were regarded as serious academic disciplines in the real world.
Desperation inspired me to answer a generic calling-all-college-grads type of ad, for a “junior management position in retail.” Since I’d worked for two years at a record store while obtaining my useless social science degree, for the first time in my post-college job quest I felt fully qualified.
This “unique opportunity” turned out to be a training program for branch managers at the newly christened and franchised American Savings Bank. Visualizing myself behind a desk, I imagined eight-hour days spent filling out forms while wearing the drab navy blue Brooks Brothers suit that my dad predicted I’d need to own. Pondering further, I decided that my proud status as a bohemian who didn’t care about money might just work in my favor. I could be trusted around large amounts of cash. And on a purely pragmatic level, I realized (or rationalized) working at a bank would be a steady job if nothing else. I was determined to gain a foothold in New York City.
The initial interview transpired in the back office of a mint-condition Midtown branch; the Grand Opening was weeks away. Thin carpets, brittle furniture and the thick scent of disinfectant filled the empty rooms. A stone-faced female interviewer, possibly not long out of college herself, questioned me by rote across an uncluttered desk. Perusing my resume, she expressed deep skepticism non-verbally, never directly asking why in the world I was applying for a banking position. I stressed my “extensive” retail experience and (mostly untested) people-management skills. Declaring my willingness to accept a spot at any branch that was reachable by subway cracked her stern demeanor. Hey, I meant what I said. Even if it meant commuting an hour each way to Jamaica, Queens where my great aunt lived during the Sixties. It was still New York City.
The bank called back on the same day as my interview. Turned out there was a slight catch; a preliminary step was required before I could meet with the program director for branch managers. Every potential employee of the American Savings Bank, unsurprisingly when I thought about it, was required by law to undergo a polygraph examination. Conveniently, I was able to schedule a lie detector test for the next day.
Nervously, I managed to board a train headed downtown. Surfacing near City Hall, I proceeded away from the Brooklyn Bridge and toward the monumental court buildings. Immediately I was lost, wandering on an anonymous side street. Just before panic set in, I spotted the Chambers Street sign at the other end of the block.
Walking the gauntlet of men (and women) in near-identical suits, I edged my way into the lobby of an aged office building. A noisy elevator ejected me into the waiting room of (let’s call it) Wall Street Security Inc. A paunchy middle-aged man with the Irish-American complexion familiar from my father’s side of the family – freckles and blondish red hair – stood up from behind a desk and abruptly stated my name as a question. “Mark Coleman?” Before I replied “yes” he turned away and started walking down the hall, assuming I’d tag along.
We wound up in a windowless room: unadorned brown walls, off-white acoustic tiles barely clinging to the ceiling. A deep silver metal suitcase lay open on a battered wooden desk. Without speaking, my nameless escort curtly nodded toward the two chairs facing the suitcase. My seat was the one that resembled the electric chair in a low-budget prison movie.
A cushion shaped like a toilet seat rested where I was meant to deposit my butt. White straps that resembled bandages with wires attached dangled from the chair’s arms and back. Settling in, I flashed back to an underground newspaper article from ten years before, when I was 13 and a wannabe hippie. The title was How To Scam The Man’s Lie Detector or something similar, anyway the specific tactic that came to mind here in 1981 was “tighten the muscles in your ass.” Sadly, the slack little pillow under me rendered this impossible – yes, I tried. Meanwhile my escort had settled into his chair and revved up the polygraph. Inside the silver suitcase was a worn console with dials, buttons and switches. On one side of the console sat a series of jacks with rubber tubing and wires attached; on top were needles poised to hop and skip across a looped roll of paper. He strapped a sort of straight-jacket across my midriff, and then fastened thin sensors the size of band-aids around the ring and index fingers of my right hand. An armband-sensor gripped my left bicep.
In ten minutes we covered a mix of neutral queries culled from my resume, alternated with more pointed inquiries relating to theft and deceit. Replying was a breeze: aside from the rare five-dollar discrepancy in the cash register balance back at Discount Records, my record in regards to handling money was spotless. No, it was the inevitable questions about illegal drug use that put me on edge. Thinking fast on my feet, well on my seat to be literal about it, I decided to come clean on marijuana, guessing that a) weed was viewed as relatively benign (though illegal at this point in history) and b) if the polygraph worked at all any equivocation on my part would set the damn thing off like a smoke alarm. Since my limbs were so tightly bound, I mentally crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
Remaining expressionless the entire time, my interrogator didn’t mention results when we finished. “The readout goes back to the bank and they’ll be in touch.” Unsure about how to conclude our encounter, on the way out I said “thanks” which seemed to catch him off guard as, for the first time that morning, he displayed a reaction approaching human emotion: his raised eyebrows said c’mon pal ya gotta be kidding me.
Either inhaling occasionally didn’t matter, or the American Savings Bank was desperate for warm bodies. I was offered the job two days later.
*
Women with the most exotic New York accents imaginable staffed the receptionist’s desk at every place of business I entered during my virgin job search. Or so it seemed to my Midwestern ears. Right after accepting the training position at American Savings Bank, maybe a week into my odyssey, I belatedly checked in at the editorial offices of Sugar y Azucar magazine. Or in the words of the elaborately coiffed and manicured young woman who greeted me, “Shuga Ezookuh.” This was not a nutritional handbook, but a trade journal for manufacturers of refined sugar and suppliers such as my father’s employer, Western States Machine Company. In fact, my dad enjoyed a warm long-distance friendship with Sugar y Azucar publisher Richard Slimermeyer; they often met up at industry events, and with their wives, visited each other’s homes in Cincinnati and New Jersey.
Ushering me into his midtown Manhattan office, Dick emitted flushed-face warmth and aromatic joviality. The aftermath of a two-martini lunch, I presumed. After apologizing for not having an entry-level position to offer, he launched a rambling monologue about trade-magazine publishing and how the best thing about it was “doing business with a stand-up guy like your dad.” It almost felt like he was trying to get me to buy an ad.
The meeting was over in twenty minutes, short and ahem, sweet. Hanging around the office after we were finished, I was flummoxed by the minimalist layout: three adjacent cubicles where the editors labored, a separate room for the two-person art department, a tiny library in a converted closet, and Dick’s corner office. The atmosphere was quiet, almost hushed: not exactly a hectic newsroom. An attempt at conversing with the frosted-blonde receptionist quickly declined from polite to pointless. Rescue came when Barbara, the svelte middle-aged woman who’d been introduced as Senior Editor of Sugar y Azucar, called me over to her executive cubbyhole. She spoke in a mild English accent and her subdued sense of style stood in stark contrast to the receptionist. Barbara exuded a breath of worldliness decidedly at odds with our surroundings.
“Mark, hold on a minute before you leave. Let me put you in touch with Luther Miller, my old boss at Railway Age. When I heard you talking to Dick just now, I remembered that Luther recently mentioned that Railway Age needs an associate editor. Reporting on the railroad business might not be what you’ve set out to do but you won’t find a better editor than Luther– he’s an old newspaper man, a real pro, better known these days as the Dean of Railroad Journalists. He taught me everything I know.”
At this point her current employer broadcast a suggestive chuckle, only to be silenced by a sharp glance.
“Simmons and Boardman, the company that owns Railway Age, has been around forever,” she continued. “Railway Age is the oldest trade magazine in the country – since 1876! Honestly, the company needs some new blood. Almost everybody who works there is pushing retirement age. If you don’t mind, I’ll also put in a call to Bob Lewis, the publisher. In the meantime you can drop off your resume for Luther. Here’s the address.”
If I didn’t mind! As I prostrated myself in thanks, Barbara waved me away while Dick fixed me with an inscrutable look and laughed. “We certainly can’t have YOU working in a bank.” I took it as a compliment.
From my self-serving perspective, if Western States Machine Company wound up springing for an extra ad page as a quid pro quo for Dick’s effortless intervention on my behalf, it would be money well spent.
Barbara’s recommendation was all that Railway Age required. Or else Simmons-Boardman Publishing Co. was desperate for warm bodies too. Anyway, two days later, my interview with the brusque and obviously preoccupied editor-in-chief Luther Miller shot by in a perfunctory blur. I accepted the job on the spot, for $13,500 annually, in a dream of disbelief or perhaps a mild state of shock. My follow-up phone call to the American Savings Bank was awkward, though mercifully brief. With a few days left at the Chemist Club, I found a job in something resembling journalism! Now all I needed to find was a roof over my head.
Set in the early 1980s, Ian McEwan’s fifteenth novel successfully juggles counter-factual and science fiction elements. Machines Like Me supplies a surprisingly fresh take on a by-now familiar theme: artificial intelligence and its implications for anthropoids. Narrator Charlie Friend is a thirty-something slacker who decides to blow his modest inheritance on the latest high-tech indulgence: instead of cocaine or sports cars, he buys a robot. Meet Adam: “the first convincing artificial person on the market.”
Charlie’s story begins in the United Kingdom during 1982 and his early Eighties are markedly different from what people my age (i.e. alive then) may remember. England loses an extended and bloody Falklands War to Argentina, for starters, which leads to Maggie Thatcher’s ouster and the rise of Tony Benn, a left-leaning Labour politician obscure to American readers and perhaps a few Brits. The Beatles reunite, though their comeback album, Love and Lemons, recorded with “an 80-piece orchestra” is “critically derided.” Self-driving cars dominate the roads while Charlie defiantly wheels his own ride, an electrically powered Sixties-vintage jalopy.
Charlie is given to freelance philosophizing and social observation, dispensing random nuggets of wisdom almost like the protagonist of a late Saul Bellow novel.
“Everything was rising – hopes and despair, misery, boredom and opportunity. There was more of everything.”
Personal opportunity proves somewhat elusive for Charlie, however. He pursues a fitful romance with his upstairs neighbor Miranda. She’s ten years younger, a “doctoral student in cultural history” who gradually becomes involved, intimately, with Adam. Embarrassment and mild hilarity ensue though I found this bizarre love triangle, much remarked upon by reviewers, the least remarkable aspect of the novel. Inevitably, Adam declares his “love” for Miranda (after a superhuman round of oral gratification), telling Charlie: “I feel things profoundly. More than I can say.”
The Adam and Eve bots in Machines Like Me may be programmed to experience emotions but as with their flesh-and-blood models, there’s a potentially fatal flaw in their algorithms. Those scripts can’t process the duality of human nature, our perverse capacity for good and evil. The robots are incapable of balancing two opposite notions in the vast data dumps that pass for their minds. As the legendary mathematician Alan Turing explains to Charlie in a cameo:
“There’s nothing in their beautiful code that could prepare Adam and Eve for Auschwitz.”
It’s been suggested that McEwan chose 1982 at least in part because Blade Runner, the filmic treatise on AI adapted from science fiction author Philip K. Dick, debuted that year. Maybe. Though the movie isn’t mentioned among the period pop culture references here. I suspect he chose the early Eighties in part because it was the dawn of the Device Era, that acronym age of VCRs and PCs, when the self-enclosing “personal stereo” aka Walkman replaced the boombox on city streets. As Charlie Friend puts it:
“The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”
Sounds current, no? In the end, Machines Like Me has much more to say about the present than the recent past or any possible future. Though another Charlie Friend monologue vividly reminded me of my own early Eighties.
“In my twenties, some of my most cheerful times were spent getting ready to go out. It was the anticipation rather than the thing itself. The release from work, the bath, music, clean clothes, white wine, perhaps a pull on a joint. Then stepping out into the evening, free and hungry.”
Could an algorithm generate that feeling of sweet expectation? I guess we’ll find out. Eventually.
Marcel Proust’s masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu, translated as In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past, is a famously formidable novel. After reading the seven volumes over four months earlier this year, however, I’m here to dispute its reputation as being difficult. Daunting? No doubt. A few pages into Swann’s Way, the first volume, I got hypnotized by the narrator’s voice – Marcel’s voice. The microscopic focus on his immediate surroundings flips and expands into a panoramic view of the outside world. I learned about art, architecture, literature, furniture design, botany, French history and politics at the turn of 20th Century, plus manners and mores of the upper classes, the Dreyfus Affair and so much more, without ever feeling like I was being lectured or instructed. Unlike, say, Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, Proust doesn’t digress, he weaves disparate threads into a subtle and elegant tapestry. And the dinner party scenes, between the social climbing and posing on display, are vastly amusing.
Since I’ve spent the last three years working on an autobiographical project about my early years in New York City, the following quote, from The Guermantes Way, has come to serve as both a guidepost and a warning sign.
Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.
Finishing the fifth volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle spurred me on to In Search Of Lost Time. Reviewing the sixth and final volume of My Struggle in The New York Times Book Review, the great critic Daniel Mendelsohn nailed the difference, and similarity, between Knausgård and Proust.
It is for this reason that “My Struggle” in fact bears so little resemblance to the work that the author himself so frequently refers to as an inspiration, and to which his magnum opus has so eagerly been compared by reviewers: Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” In that novel, the life of the narrator, its arc from childhood to middle age, climaxing in his becoming a writer, functions as a prism through which virtually every aspect of the lived reality of the author’s time — art, music, literature, sex, society, class, theater, technology, science, history, war, memory, philosophy — is refracted, in a way that enlarges you, gives you a heightened sense of the world itself, its contents and possibilities.
Knausgaard’s creation, for all its vastness and despite its serious intellectual aims and attainments, reduces the entire world to the size of the author.
Volume Six of My Struggle will be my first book in 2019. So I’ll get back to you.
2018 READING LIST
Roberto Bolaño The Savage Detectives
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book One
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book Two
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book Three
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book Four
Karl Ove Knausgård My Struggle Book Five
Jan Wilem van der Wettering Outsider in Amsterdam
Jan Wilem van der Wettering The Rattle-Rat
Johann Theorin Echoes From The Dead
Martin Amis The Rub of Time
Tina Brown The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-92
Zadie Smith Feel Free: Essays
Shiva Naipaul An Unfinished Journey
Joe Hagan Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine
Sigrid Rausing Mayhem: A Memoir
Ian Buruma A Tokyo Romance: A Memoir
Julian Barnes The Only Story
Marcel Proust Swann’s Way
Marcel Proust Within A Budding Grove
Marcel Proust The Guermantes Way
Marcel Proust Sodom & Gomorrah
Marcel Proust The Captive
Marcel Proust The Fugitive
Marcel Proust Time Regained
Kim Phillips-Fein Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis And The Rise of Austerity Politics
Jussi Adler-Olson The Keeper of Lost Causes
Jussi Adler-Olson The Absent One
John Darnielle Wolf In White Van
David Kertzer The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe
Lars Kepler The Sandman
Seymour Stein Siren Song: My Life In Music
Wayne Kramer The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, the MC5, and My Life of Impossibilities
Barbara Tuchman The Guns of August
Haldor Laxness World Light
George Pelecanos The Man Who Came Uptown
Javier Cercas The Imposter Emmanuel Carrère The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception Dawn Powell The Locusts Have No King Martin Gayford Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters Caroline Weber Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-siècle Paris Craig Brown 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret Arnaldur Indriðason The Shadow District Lisa Halliday Asymmetry Michael Connelly Dark Sacred Night Zachary Leader The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965-2005
For music fans of a certain age, the Sire Records logo triggers primal images of classic punk and new wave album covers. From the CBGB blitzkrieg (Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell, Dead Boys) and big-haired eighties breakouts (Depeche Mode, The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen) right up to the era-defining superstar Madonna, Seymour Stein’s once-scrappy indie label stayed on top of the vanguard even after becoming a branch of Warner Brothers. Succinctly written with (or dictated to) author Gareth Murphy, this autobiography of Sire Records’ 75 year old founder is a bracing read. Siren Song is briskly paced, propelled by a disarming frankness that reeks of authenticity.
“Damn it, kids were growing up with that Sire logo spinning through their teenage years,” he says, “and of the things I treasured most, that thought made me the happiest.”
Seymour Steinbigle was raised in Brooklyn. His father worked in Garment District, maintaining a solid lower middle class existence for Seymour and his older sister. “My obsessive hobby was collecting stamps, bottle caps and trading cards,” he recalls, “anything interesting and flashy.” The next step was perhaps inevitable. Listening to Martin Block’s “Make Believe Ballroom” program on the radio every week turned young Seymour into a pop-chart pupil. He studied Billboard like the Talmud and then, brashly, began haunting the magazine’s offices in Manhattan. Editor Paul Ackerman took a shine to the teenaged Seymour, eventually introducing him to a visiting record mogul: Syd Nathan of King Records in Cincinnati. King was the home of both gutbucket R&B (James Brown) and hardcore country (Cowboy Copas), ruled by an overweight, garrulous, potty-mouthed, cunning and canny monarch. Syd Nathan employed Seymour first as an intern and then a promo man, though not before demanding a name change.
“It’s Stein or Beagle or back to New York.”
When Seymour Stein moved back to New York, he brought with him invaluable experience in the ways and means of the old school music business. He’s unsentimental about the days when records were distributed from car trunks and generously stuffed envelopes guaranteed radio airplay from regional DJs. Stein bounced between jobs at independent labels before starting Sire Records with musician and producer Richard Gotthehrer. Through the late sixties and early seventies Sire basically survived by licensing European hits and releasing them in the States. Bidding for major acts was beyond their budget. Working the margins, Sire managed to stay above water with fluke hits like the immortally silly yodeling novelty “Hocus Pocus” by the Dutch band Focus.
“The thing about pop music is that no matter how hard you work the land, you’ll always be at the mercy of the weather. The mainstream scene just wasn’t that great around 1974 and 1975. In England, glam and progressive rock had grown along the edges, but apart from Elton John, David Bowie, Jethro Tull and a few others, not much new English stuff was gaining traction in the States.”
Above all else Seymour Stein prided himself on his musical instincts (as opposed to his non-existent musical ability): his “ears” in music biz parlance. So he was well-placed to pick up an underground NYC band who played one-minute ditties at punishing volume. After The Ramones came the deluge, from New York and once again England, as Sire became identified with each successive ripple: punk, new wave, synth-pop, and so on.
When M’s “Pop Muzik” reached Number One on the Billboard Top 40 in November 1979, Seymour’s affinity for new sounds and strategy of snagging European hits fully merged.
“Much has been written about CBGB in the late seventies, but the early eighties in downtown New York also deserves history’s full attention.”
See? I’m not the only person who feels this way. More from Mr. Stein:
“The early eighties were magical years, blindly pushing the late seventies into a whole new world order and not even realizing the lasting effect all these sounds and global ideas were having on the next batch of kids coming up. It was like the whole music world had been spinning leisurely at 33 RPM throughout the couch bound seventies. The combined forces of punk, disco and new wave had pushed everything up to 45 RPM.”
Siren Song brings the anecdotes; legendary like Madonna negotiating her first contract at the hospitalized Seymour’s bedside, and embarrassing like Dee Dee Ramone stripping down, leaping on a bed and offering Stein his services. Yes and no, respectively.
As eighties become the nineties, corporate machinations engulf both Sire Records and the narrative, rendering the book’s last third mostly of interest to music biz insiders. And while Seymour is unfailingly honest about his troubled marriage and not-so-secret gay life, the murder of his ex-wife Linda and early death (from cancer) of their daughter Samantha cast a tragic gloom over the final pages. But his ears pull him through.
Despite the decadence and disillusion of the nineties music business, Seymour Stein maintains something approaching a healthy perspective. Or at the very least, his sanity.
“Like all the protagonists, I had an ego and a habit of irresponsible, selfish misbehavior. I was certainly no choirboy and had consumed my share of blow…[T]he difference was that I didn’t harbor any dark fantasies to take over labels or companies that other people had built. All I’d wanted from life was to keep sailing the good ship Sire into my own personal sunset. But by letting them all do what they were going to do anyway, with or without me, I was one of the very few who survived.”
City Slang 