#this spawned an obsession with drawing star shapes like all the time on everything

[criiitter]

mini comic that i made in ms paint a while back. still means a lot to me

[warholiana]

The art world's first souperstar; This monumental biography of Andy Warhol is extremely fun - but fails to crack the enigma.

Daily Telegraph (London, England)

By Mick Brown

WARHOL: A LIFE AS ART by Blake Gopnik 976pp, Allen Lane

At the end of this monumental trawl through Andy Warhol's life and times, Blake Gopnik concludes that he has "overtaken Picasso as the most important and influential artist of the 20th century. Or at least the two of them share a spot on the top peak of Parnassus beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses."

Warhol would have loved that. As a college student, Picasso was a favourite of his, and at the height of his pop art fame he made the rivalry explicit by wearing the Breton striped T-shirts Picasso was famous for - part tribute, part self-

promotion. Andy Warhol was the artist as brand, avant la lettre: as the title of this book suggests, his greatest creation was himself. So who was he exactly? Warhol's parents were immigrants from what is now Slovakia, who settled in the industrial nowhere land of Pittsburgh. His father was a labourer, the family poor.

Warhol was a sickly child who suffered from the shakes and chronic skin problems. His summers were spent lying in bed, listening to the radio with "cut-out paper dolls all over the spread and under the pillow". It was an upbringing he disowned as quickly as he could. When he arrived in New York in 1949, as an art-school graduate in search of work as an illustrator, he told a magazine editor who asked for a potted biography: "My life wouldn't fill a penny postcard."

The young Warhol was "very shy and cuddly, very much like a bunny", according to one friend, "an angel in the sky" according to another. He was also gay - a fact that, as Gopnik, an American art critic, sets out to demonstrate, would be crucial in shaping his "outsider" relationship to art and the milieu he moved in, and ultimately the milieu he created; crucial, too, in the way that public attitudes towards his work shifted from rejection to celebration.

In the late Forties, when two Pittsburgh judges had referred to homosexuals as "society's greatest menace" and police were drawing up lists of "known perverts", Warhol - then a window dresser in a Pittsburgh department store - favoured a pink corduroy suit, a tie dipped in paint and brightly coloured fingernails. Yet the notion of Warhol as "a feeble, androgynous waif ", says Gopnik, is "a mirage". As a young man, he lifted weights at the YMCA two or three times a week, and Lou Reed described him as being "like a demon, his strength is incredible" - at least until 1968, when an assassination attempt by a disturbed woman, Valerie Solanas, left him chronically debilitated.

Like Robert Mapplethorpe, he had an obsession with penises. Friends, acquaintances - total strangers - would be asked to drop their pants, according to one friend, and "Andy would make a drawing. That was it. And then he'd say, 'Thank you'." Sometimes "there'd be a little heart on them or tied with a little ribbon ..." An unrequited romantic, throughout his life he would fall in love with a succession of younger men, usually unhappily. But he seems to have had little enthusiasm for sexual relations. One partner, the photographer Carl Willers, recalls that he was "more passionate about food and eating".

It was a gay aesthetic, Gopnik argues, that informed what Warhol described as the "fairy style" curlicue illustrations of shoes with which he first made his name as an artist, and the camp taste for "lowly pop culture", which he would elevate to the realm of fine art. In characteristically faux-naif fashion, he traced the origins of his pop art to the time he spent working as a window dresser at Bonwits in New York, when he used comics and advertisements as a backdrop to his displays of dresses and handbags. "Then a gallery saw them and I just began taking windows and putting them in galleries."

This would lead to what Gopnik calls Warhol's "eureka moment - one of the greatest in the history of art", the Campbell soup can, and the notion that mass-produced commercial goods could be art - and, eventually, that art could be profitably mass-produced. His first Los Angeles exhibition in 1962 showed 32 soup cans, which were bought by the gallery owner Irving Blum for $1,000. In 1996, Blum sold them to Moma for $15million. "They might be worth half a billion now," Gopnik observes.

What Warhol was selling, as one friend put it, was "not so much art as milieu", a milieu "dripping with edge and irony". In 1964, he moved into a former hat factory in midtown Manhattan, where he produced the silk-screen prints of Marilyn, Elvis, electric chairs and suicide leaps, attended by a coterie of acolytes, and disciples - junkies, hustlers, transvestites and chronic narcissists, whom Warhol turned into his "superstars".

There was Ondine, "the Factory's favourite gay speed freak"; Warhol's principal muse, the bruised and beautiful heiress Edie Sedgwick, whose "charming incapacities" and decline into addiction and chaos Warhol chronicled with clinical indifference; and the flame-haired, honking-voiced Viva - "Warhol's Garbo", as the newspapers had it: a reference that had everything to do with her gaunt, porcelain features and nothing to do with reticence. Viva's "verbal diarrhoea", as Gopnik puts it, "left her no time for social niceties. Any thought that could cross her lips did."

Then there were the drag queens Jackie Curtis, Cindy Darling and Holly Woodlawn - a reflection of Warhol's fascination with gender. At college, for one self-portrait assignment, he shocked his class by depicting himself as a girl with Shirley Temple ringlets, explaining: "I always want to know what I would look like if I was a girl." Many years later, when asked what "famous person" he would most like to be, he replied "Christine Jorgensen" - America's first famous transsexual.

"Andy was like the Statue of Liberty," one friend tells Gopnik. "'Give me your tired, your hungry - your drag queens, your junkies.' He was the saint of misfits." But Warhol's friend, the critic and art curator Henry Geldzahler, put it more acutely when he described Warhol as "a voyeur-sadist" who needed "exhibitionist masochists in order to fulfil both halves of his destiny". Like a priest, Warhol could offer absolution for the perverse, but no promise of an afterlife. Most left his circle - or were ejected - feeling used, embittered and betrayed.

One comes to the conclusion that there was an emotional vacancy in Warhol. He didn't know how to feel. A lover, John Giorno, recalls watching the news of Kennedy's assassination unfold on television. "I started crying and Andy started crying. Hugging each other, weeping big fat tears and kissing. It was exhilarating, like when you get kicked in the head and see stars. Andy kept saying, 'I don't know what it means.'" But what did he believe? Like Bob Dylan, he deliberately cultivated the art of the put-on and concealment. Typical was this exchange with a journalist: "How close is pop art to 'Happenings'?" "I don't know." "What is pop art trying to say?" "I don't know."

When I interviewed Viva over lunch some years ago, she described how Warhol "would just want to gossip, like a woman would gossip basically - or his idea of what a woman would think gossip was. What Andy really liked to talk about was men's penises." (At this point a deathly silence fell over the crowded restaurant, all heads turning to hear what Viva would say next.) Henry Geldzahler wrote that Warhol "plays dumb just as his paintings do, but neither deceives us", adding that he was "incredibly analytical, intellectual, and perceptive". And, he might have added, incredibly shrewd.

In 1972, after Richard Nixon's historic visit to China, Warhol asked a friend, "Since fashion is art now and Chinese is in fashion, should I do some Mao portraits?" The idea spawned some 2,700 images, transforming a man who, as one critic pointed out, had "murdered about 60million Chinese and caused poverty and starvation in all China" into an icon.

But by then, Warhol had long since made the transition from underground artist to darling of the establishment, turning out portraits to order for Italian industrialists, wealthy socialites and the Shah of Iran, combining a Stakhanovite work ethic with manic socialising: a typical evening would take him from a Broadway opening to a fancy dinner, a rock star's birthday, and, always, Studio 54. "It's work," he explained.

Gopnik's rollicking book is a formidable achievement, but for all its dense accumulation of detail, scholarship and unabashed gossip, Warhol remains, as he doubtless would have wished, essentially, brilliantly, unknowable.

[noldorianprincess]

I feel the need to post this here. I think it’s for the reassurance that I have done something correct and for the betterment of myself for once? Can someone please tell me that what I’ve done is what needed to be done because I can’t handle the anxiety that is built up in me due to the fact I was friends with this person for almost half my current life and that I just feel like complete and utter shit that I finally had to say goodbye.

Dear ex-best friend, Today I write this, not out of spite or out of jealousy or anything like that. I write this because you're no longer in my life, by your choice and mine. Today marks the day where, even though you don't know it, I see all that you do, through my friends and family, and I don't care anymore. You're just another person who I once called friend, and can no longer call to say 'hello, my sunshine, my sister, my bestest of friends, my Andromeda Knight." No longer do we sit and burn incense or watch Johnny Depp murder the cast of Harry Potter. No longer do we giggle and ride a tube downstream at Splash Island. No longer do I hear that ridiculous giggle of yours as I make a stupid joke or open up a tub of ice cream to find a perfect butt shape left inside. I don't get to walk with you in your Buddha shoes to go get printer paper because we want to draw and write and create to our heart's content. 

And for once, this is a friendship lost that cannot be blamed on me. I tried to keep in contact. I tried to invite you over after we fought over stupid things. You were a friend that I thought I could run to for everything. But after you let a boy rip us apart after so many times warning you to stay away from him, I gave up. On us. On you. On everything we ever had between us. I stopped looking at the stars for years because that was your favorite thing. I stopped enjoying Enya and Florence and the Machine, I stopped enjoying Moulin Rouge. I can't watch Spawn without thinking of those endless days at your Dad and StepMonster's house. I can't look at old pictures of us and being hobos in walmart and eating our Sonic on a hot summer day. I can't look at a boxer the same way. Going hiking just isn't the same anymore. I see people rollerblading and I think of you and what you liked to do.

Dear ex-best friend;

I saw what you said, and I realize how flouted our friendship was if you had to hide something like that from me, and then didn't even have the courage to tell me yourself when you finally did act upon those feelings. But, I see you now, and I know that I'm glad you're happy and I'm glad that you're the best person you seem to be. I'm glad that you think you've found the love of your life and you think that you'll be with him forever. I hope that you know how happy Jaws makes him. I hope you love the little quotes and things he says when he watches Scrubs. When he gives you a song, or posts one on Facebook, listen to it over and over again. Memorize it till your very mind sings it over and over and you don't even realize it. Cuddle often, but not too much. When he talks to you about music or instruments or anything like that, watch the way his eyes sparkle. It's his one and only passion. When he shows you how the instruments and tools work, pay attention. When he catches you recording him, look for that little grin he does, you won't see it often. Go to the arcade and kick his ass at the coin launch; it will drive him crazy. Talk hockey and Disney with his mom; talk geek and video games with his sister. Chicken Fried Rice is his favorite take out food when nothing else sounds good.These were the little things I learned, though how insignificant to most they may seem, are the things I still remember after he walk out of my life what will be an entire year in three hours and 52 minutes. 

And, if he reads this, I hope he knows just as much as I do. The way you love listening to all styles of music; from oldies like Andrews Sisters to hard alternative like The Temple Is Me. I hope he learns that you love your hands massaged, and hopefully he teases you with your weird foot fear. I hope he learns that you fluctuate with everything; your hair, your design, your fashion, and your weird tastes in foods. But, no matter what, you will always love birds, the stars, video games, and Marilyn Monroe. I hope he learns that you love to sing high pitch and annoy anyone who tells you to stop. I hope he learns that once you put your mind to something, it doesn't stop until it's happened. I hope he realizes your attitude can get you and trouble, but sitting down and talking will solve everything. I hope he tries to match pitch or try to sing together and have nothing but your voices, his low and yours high. I hope he realizes how competitive you are when it comes to PvP games. I hope he realizes that sometimes you can't find what you feel comfortable in, so it takes you a while to find an outfit. And, I hope that he will learn to handle your crazy, and I mean that in the best of ways. 

No, I'm not obsessed, for obsession is to preoccupy or fill the mind of (someone) continually, intrusively, and to a troubling extent. You do not preoccupy my mind for an extensive amount of time. When you pop into my mind, it is so insignificant that I think about it, brood over it for a second flat, and then move on because I have better things to do with my life.  

Dear ex-best friend;

I was way beyond upset with the fact I had to learn through my parents, who wanted to hide this from me to spare my feelings, that my at-the-time-best-friend would do this to me. But, now, you are just as insignificant as those thoughts that are just a momentary lapse of my every day life that has become so much better without you in it. No longer do I worry about if you're going to be with some jerk from a different state who threatens you and treats you like crap. He may be an asshole some days, but those days are just days. Like every day, they get better. So, good luck in your future, because even though you are my ex-best friend, I wish you no harm or unhappiness. I wish you find your dream job, I wish you both happiness, which I could provide for neither of you, in friendship or in love, and hope that life treats you well.

Dear ex-best friend;

 I hope it is all worth it, I hope that it is worth all of the effort, memories, and happiness we put into everything since I met you that day in Biology when we were talking over Full Metal Alchemist and Bleach. I hope that it was worth the story time, the nights under the stars, the week-long sleep overs. You were 'my person'. I hope, that through all of this, it was worth losing me. 

Do not reach out to me.  Do not try to contact me, by yourself or through our mutual friends.

How lucky I am to have known someone who was so hard to say goodbye to. And to you, my ex-best friend, This is goodbye.