Word: warholism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...like the rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation." Some who grasp those charged serpents will themselves incandesce in celebrity for a little while and then wink out (goodbye, Clifford Irving; goodbye, Nina van Pallandt): defunct flashlights, dead fireflies. Thus they will have obeyed Warhol's Law, first propounded by Andy Warhol, the monsignor of transience and junk culture: "In the future, everybody will be famous for at least 15 minutes." But many survive long after the deadline. Their 15 minutes stretch into years and years, until the public, whose adulation sometimes conceals a hard little...
Contrary to Warhol's essentially democratic premise-everybody, but briefly -fame elevates some mortals into realms where their celebrity achieves a life of its own. While a Tiny Tim or a Judith Exner may flare and fade, others acquire a strange permanence-or its illusion, which is of course just as good. They have been transported into another medium where information and images are permanently (or for years, anyway) stored. In the formula of Historian Daniel Boorstin, they have "become well known for being well known." A classic of the category is, say, Elizabeth Taylor. Who, outside...
Since then he has seen quite a few changes and made fine, weird, wired rock-'n'-roll music out of all of them, no matter how bizarre or diverse-high school memories and heroin jags, sweet romances and violent one-night stands, soirées with Warhol's underground crew and cruises through the lowlife. There has been one constant throughout. That gun is still drawn, and likely loaded. Danger is what Lou Reed's music has always been about. And that makes it classic, vital rock 'n' roll...
...enough in Brooklyn and Long Island, Reed endured the usual humiliations of adolescence (recalled in a lovely, almost sentimental song called Coney Island Baby) before setting out for Syracuse. After that came a flight into the nether regions of the New York pop life. He soon settled down with Warhol's crew of dilettantes and debauchees, a sojourn both memorialized and satirized in Reed's best-known song, Walk on the Wild Side, a barbed anthem to café society transvestites and chic street hustlers...
...Andy Warhol made similar home movies more than a decade ago - but he at least made them with a sense of humor...