Joe Dallesandro, the Warhol superstar, actor, and omnisexual sex symbol immortalized in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” as the hustler who “never once gave it away,” turns 62 today.
Below, the trailer for Little Joe, an upcoming documentary about the life and career of Joe Dallesandro, produced by his daughter, Vedra Mehagian, and directed by Nicole Haeusser.
Last night at Sotheby’s Andy Warhol’s black and white Coke bottle on canvas sold for $35 million. Warhol’s Campbell’s vegetable soup can is on the block at Christie’s tonight with an estimated sale price of $30-50million. I guess some things are recession proof.
The complete and original Andy Warhol footage of The Velvet Underground and Nico from 1966. Richard Metzger posted a shorter version of this last year, and wrote an insightful piece about it, check it out here.
More clips of Warhol’s The Velvet Underground & Nico after the jump…
If Lennon hadn’t chosen music as his profession, he could have had a career as a comic actor. Here he is being a brilliant wiseass on Ready, Steady, Go.
Bold and brassy, cult figure Cherry Vanilla first came to the public’s attention playing a necrophilliac nurse in Andy Warhol’s freaky London stage play, Pork. Back in her hometown of New York City, she became David Bowie’s publicist during his Ziggy Stardust-era, working beside fellow Pork cast-member Leee Black Childers (who was the VP of Mainman, as Bowie’s then management company was called).
Later she moved to London, where RCA Records marketed her as “The First Lady of Punk.” Sting and Miles Copeland played in her backing band. Later, she went to work for composer Vangelis, running his US office, which she still does to this day. Cherry Vanilla’s memoir, Lick Me: How I Became Cherry Vanilla will be published in November by the Chicago Review Press. Lindsay Lohan would be a good choice to play Cherry in the film version!
Below Cherry Vanilla performs “The Punk” on Germany’s Music Laden television program in 1977:
During the 1980s, Andy Warhol occasionally walked the fashion runways and did product endorsements, represented by the Ford Modeling Agency. This print ad for his friend Vidal Sassoon hair products was a frequent sight in trendy magazines circa 1985.
Dom Perignon commissioned the Design Laboratory at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art & Design to create an Andy Warhol-inspired champagne bottle. The result is rather predictable. But, what would one expect?
Six different styles of bottle art were created in Warhol’s favorite colors of blue, red, violet, emerald green, lilac and yellow. Dom Perignon are only making these bottles available in Spain. Which is fine by me. I’m waiting for the release of the limited edition Boone’s Farm R. Crumb tribute.
Two cool Andy Warhol items came to my attention today that I wanted to share here. First of all, the charming letter sent to the artist in 1964 by William MacFarland, the Product Marketing Manager of the Campbell Soup Company, congratulating him on the success of his then young career and offering to send over a couple of cases of tomato soup.
The video below is a 90 second condensation of the 23 minutes Warhol spent painting a BMW M1 race car. Roy Lichtenstein and Alexander Calder also painted “art cars” for the German auto giant.
According to the series clip below, sculptor Myers (best know, perhaps, for SOHO’s Wall Piece) was the man behind the “moon museum” chip, and the clandestine effort to stash it somewhere within the module:
Going to the moon was the biggest thing in our generation. It’s hard to explain that to the kids today…My idea was to get six great artists together and make a tiny little museum that would be on the moon.
Anywhere from 20 to 40 of the chips were fabricated, and, given the chip’s dimensions, the artists involved were forced to make a maximum statement in a minimum space. Rauschenberg sketched a straight line, while Warhol cheekily offered up his “initials.” But is is the chip really there?
Since no one can confirm it back on Earth, it’s going to take a future moon walker-slash-art aficionado to say for sure.
Author, filmmaker and bad taste-booster, John Waters, is out making the rounds promoting his new book, Role Models. He’s also featured in this weekend’s NYT Magazine, “Questions For…” section. Some snips:
There’s a chapter on Leslie Van Houten, one of the so-called Manson girls, who was convicted of murder in 1971, when she was 21, and who you argue should be released.
I do believe that. Today she is the woman she would have become if she had never met Charles Manson. Leslie is a good friend and someone who has taken full responsibility for the terrible crime she participated in.
What about the families of her victims, who don’t want her released?
They can never be wrong in their arguments, and I would never criticize their viewpoint.
Where is she being held?
The California Institution for Women, in Corona, Calif., an hour east of Los Angeles. Every year I visit her on Oscar morning. I go from her prison to Elton John’s dinner party. I guess, oddly, that sort of sums up my life.
Is there anyone you would actually kill if you knew you could get away with it?
I find it repellent when people do yoga exercises at the gate in airports. I want to kill them.
That’s reasonable.
There are little things that get on my nerves, like people who have reading material in their powder room. When you go in someone’s house, and next to the toilet they have a huge basket of magazines, I find that repellent. I recommend against straining while reading.
A much younger Waters also showed up in ‘81 on Andy Warhol’s TV. Part I of it follows, with links to the other segments below:
The career of Nico, née Christa Päffgen, and what happened to her after she crossed paths with Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, has certainly been well-documented (see at the bottom, Nico: Icon). Less well-documented, though, are Nico’s “model” years, starting out in Berlin when she was all of 14. The accompanying photos are just a few selected from the fine—and generous—set found here.
Ranging in date from ‘52-‘67, these shots certainly capture a more innocent time in Nico’s life. I particularly like the ones below where Nico looks like she just stepped into a Godard film. It’s somewhat incredible to think that the face in the above black-and-whites would later go on to sing this, and this, and especially this!
Unleash your inner rage at art in the age of mechanical reproduction—bash Andy Warhol at the Brooklyn Museum!
Andy Warhol had a big head, so naturally, the Brooklyn Museum installed a 20-ft Warhol-head-shaped piñata. It’s filled with mysterious edibles that will rain down on art lovers when they smash it open at the Brooklyn Ball.