"'It's Anti-War, and It'll Have a Big Effect on the War'"

"It was obvious that someone at Columbia felt Head had box office potential, because roughly a month out from the premiere, large, mysterious ads began appearing in the pages of the Voice. A thick-lipped young man sporting a dark comb-over and glasses gazes at the reader; in the first two ads to run, the only copy acts as a textual dopplegänger to the half-tone image. Other movies advertised on those same pages give a sense of the era's cultural tumult: Andy Warhol's Flesh, Jane Fonda exposing much of her own skin in Barbarella, Godard's visceral Weekend, Steve McQueen's careening Mustang in Bullitt arriving for an engagement at Radio City Music Hall."

R. C. Baker at The Village Voice looks back at the Monkees' movie, upon its fiftieth anniversary.

"The Two Most Influential Cult Bands in Rock History"

"The late '60s was a fertile time for rock, period. You could say it's hardly a shock that two pioneering underground rock groups debuted the same month. But there is something strange and special about two bands who inspired decades of underground admiration and imitation debuting within less than a week of each other. They might rule vastly disparate realms of rock, but both have established themselves as the kings of cult for decades to come."

Joe Lynch at Billboard links the Velvet Underground to the Grateful Dead.

"But Everyone Who Bought It Formed a Band"

"Yeah. He told Lou, 'Don't forget to put the swear words in the songs.' We never used swear words. We felt the intellectual strength in what we were trying to do came from not using swear words. And then Lou wrote a few songs that were very different.
"I think what happened was Andy gave Lou 14 titles and he said, 'Now go away and write these songs,' because we were hanging around the Factory. He probably saw him as indolent and trying to figure out what to do next. And Lou was never happier than, 'Hey, here's a task. I got 14 titles. I can do that.'"

Kory Grow at Rolling Stone interviews John Cale about the fiftieth anniversary of The Velvet Underground and Nico.

Plucked Her Eyebrows on the Way

"Not only is this stupid, it’s dangerous. As music fans are attacked in spaces where they should be free to celebrate and feel safe, to be whoever they want–terrorists are trying to scare us into acting a certain way, talking a certain way, thinking a certain way. Focus your anger on them.
"Don't try to censor the art of yesterday because you don't agree with it. Don't tell new artists that they should only paint the world as you see it."

Roisin O'Connor in The Independent reacts to Canadian students offended by Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side."

"Youthquaker"

"Edie, like many pioneers, didn't figure out how to profit from any of it. To call her the Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian of her era would not be inaccurate, but both of those women are experts in turning rebellion into money. And it's the cool, often discontented kids who keep her flame burning—and her grave clean—50 years on, anyway.  Her brash but wounded voice is the GPS system out of suburbia for the Manhattan-bound outsider. Her angel face on the promotional material for her final film, the autobiographical 'Ciao, Manhattan,' posthumously released in 1973, is like a St. Christopher medallion, with its Kohl-blackened sockets, beauty mark and serene, almost resolute expression, and it still graces T-shirts, stickers, lock pages. 'It's like Jesus Christ looking up to Heaven,' Heide said."


Mark Spitz in Salon looks back at Edie Sedgwick.

Love in the Time of the Republic of Denial

The New York Times runs obits for singer-songwriter Jesse Winchester, photographer Leee Black Childers, writer Gregory White Smith, writer Gabriel García Marquez, and writer Michael Janeway.

Chelsea Mourning

"Yet it is the outrageous stories of the Chelsea that make it so appealing. The drunken mishaps, the acid-laden philosophies, the unusual couplings. The Chelsea's misfit artists, charming decay and low-rent opportunities are out of step with contemporary New York, and in 2007 the longtime manager was pushed out by directors who wanted to sell. The buyer, after years of stalled renovations that seemed designed to drive out longtime residents (who won a suit against his company), transferred the property into new hands in fall 2013. New owner King & Grove promises kinder, gentler renovations and a commitment to keeping the property 'artsy'--but the utopian 'thought-forms' of architect Hubert may have run out."

Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times reviews Sherill Tippins's Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel.    

It Was Alright

"With the Velvet Underground in the late Sixties, Reed fused street-level urgency with elements of European avant-garde music, marrying beauty and noise, while bringing a whole new lyrical honesty to rock & roll poetry. As a restlessly inventive solo artist, from the Seventies into the 2010s, he was chameleonic, thorny and unpredictable, challenging his fans at every turn. Glam, punk and alternative rock are all unthinkable without his revelatory example. 'One chord is fine,' he once said, alluding to his bare-bones guitar style. 'Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.'"

Jon Dolan at Rolling Stone reports the death of Lou Reed.

Michiko Kakutani writes an appreciation in The New York Times.

"Living Like a Cross between a Chameleon and a Magpie"

"But there’s more to Mr. Bowie’s compulsive changeability than a career strategy. What he was really developing during the ’70s was a new postmodern psychology based around flux and mutability. His great precursor and influence here was Warhol, the inspiration for his 1971 song 'Andy Warhol' and a role Mr. Bowie would actually play in the 1996 biopic 'Basquiat.'  Analyzing Warhol, the art critic Donald Kuspit wrote of 'the protean artist-self with no core'—a description that could also fit Mr. Bowie."

Simon Reynolds in The New York Times welcomes the return of David Bowie.

"A Place of Perpetual Possibility and Infinite Invention"

"The book starts with two landmark events in fall 1963: the debut of Andy Warhol's portraits of Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor, at Ferus Gallery, and the first retrospective exhibition of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp's work, organized by Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. 'The back-to-back receptions in honor of Warhol and Duchamp invigorated the feisty Los Angeles art scene,' the author writes. The achievements of Duchamp, an eccentric outsider, encouraged adventurous young artists to blaze their own trails, while Warhol's endorsement of the L.A. scene heightened hopes that their work might gain recognition in New York and Europe."

Suzanne Muchnic in the Los Angeles Times reviews Hunter Drohojowska-Philp's Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s.

"It's Just a Part of Who You Are"

"'I was documenting the Pop Art scene before it was called that,' Hopper told me. 'I was also buying as many pieces as I could, because I loved the work, I really did. When Warhol had his soup can show, I bought one from John Weber, who was running Virginia Dwan's gallery in Westwood. It was hanging over his desk and I said, "What is that?" and he said, "Well that's the first soup-can oil painting of Andy's." And I said, "Yeah? Well, how much is that?" And he said, "$75." And I said, "Well, I'll take it, because Irving Blum is selling them for $100."'"

Jessica Hundley in the Los Angeles Times previews the Dennis Hopper exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Hey There!

From Thomas Jefferson to Andy Warhol, Soulellis Studio lists "Twenty-five dead people on Twitter." (And don't forget a live one: Christopher Walken.)

She Shot Andy Warhol

"It was in 1968 that Warhol first noted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. But in 1967, Solanas had prefigured that with a warning of her own. In the future, she wrote in her characteristic mode of threat-laced irony, 'it will be electronically possible for [a man] to tune in to any specific female he wants to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this.' These twin predictions sum up the world we find ourselves in now, the world of reality TV, Facebook, Twitter, the entire free-range panopticon. Solanas made her prediction in a footnote to 'SCUM Manifesto,' but the whole essay is like that."

In the Los Angeles Times, A.S. Hamrah recalls Valerie Solanas, who nearly killed Andy Warhol forty years ago today.

Chelsea Girl

"'It's surprising how many young girls now are obsessed with Edie,' J concludes. 'They relate on some level. I think they find it refreshing that she was her own original person. She didn't have a stylist. She wasn't designed. She made herself.'"

Gina McIntyre in the Los Angeles Times reports on the soon-to-open stage production about
the life of Edie Sedgwick, written by musician David J.

Warlocks v. Warlocks

"It’s not clear to me that, following Witts’s own clues and leads, it doesn’t make more sense to freshen our perception of the Velvets by putting them back into their own time, but to ignore geography and direct influence and place them precisely where they aren’t supposed to belong–in, say, California. Suppose one connects them, following chronologies rather than personal histories, to a part of the California scene they are held to oppose, but with which they share an uncannily similar history.
"I’m thinking of the Grateful Dead."

Mark Greif reviews Richard Witts's The Velvet Underground in the London Review of Books.

"The Age of Warhol"

"The actual art that Warhol produced—the paintings, silk-screens and films—cannot explain the obsessive attention. Warhol was an important Pop Artist who made edgy films and, in his silk-screens, found a fresh way to describe the shifting face of celebrity culture. But his images rarely possessed the visual power found in the work of the great artists of the century, such as Picasso, Matisse, or Mondrian."

Upon the twentieth anniversary of the artist's death, Mark Stevens in New York takes a look at Andy Warhol's most enduring work.