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Tag: andy warhol

New Directions Staying Small

Maria Bustillos visits New Directions and talks to publisher and president Barbara Epler about the business for The New Yorker:

Today’s visitor to New Directions’ elegantly shabby offices, in Chelsea, may stand on the nineteenth-floor balcony beside Epler, who is in her fifties and has a big, throaty laugh, under a pair of carved stone lions silently roaring high above, downtown and the Hudson River spread out beneath, and be forgiven for thinking that he has somehow stepped into a lovely and improbable alternate universe.

Inside, there are small, quiet, old-fashioned offices, one per person. On the walls, there are treasures: the firm’s original colophon, the unmistakable work of Rockwell Kent; an original Alvin Lustig mechanical with tissue overlay for the jacket of “Nightwood”; notes written on the famous prescription pad of WILLIAM C. WILLIAMS, M. D.; a photograph of Laughlin, who died in 1997, in silhouette. Epler, who joined the company as an editorial assistant fresh out of college, in 1984, and went on to become editor-in-chief in 1996, publisher in 2008, and president in 2011, seemed to be giving not an office tour so much as a museum one, especially when she opened the door to a small room containing one copy of each of nearly all of the more than thirteen hundred books published here so far. Céline, Nabokov, Tranströmer and Bolaño, Williams and Neruda and Sartre and Brecht and so many others: Laughlin believed in keeping the good stuff in print (or reprint). Many are bound in Lustig’s iconic, modernist covers.

“Andy Warhol used to design for us before he was famous,” she said. “Isn’t that a scream?”

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Luc Sante on Lou Reed (1942 – 2013)

I wasn’t going to say anything about the death of Lou Reed — what is there to say? Like so many people, I discovered his music in my teens and was just as thrilled and confused by The Velvet Underground as anyone else — but I did want to post a link to a short New Yorker essay by Low Life author Luc Sante that seems to capture something of the man’s complexity, and the dark, ambiguous appeal of the VU:

The least you could say about Reed is that he was complicated. He was lyrical and crass, empathetic and narcissistic, feminine and masculine, a gawky adolescent and an old soak, a regular guy and a willful deviant, an artisan and a vandal. As a teen-ager he was administered electroshock, intended to cure him of either homosexuality or generalized waywardness, depending on which interviews you read. He studied poetry with Delmore Schwartz and songcraft in the teen-pop-counterfeiting ateliers of Pickwick Records, then absorbed the avant-garde trance state from La Monte Young via John Cale and Angus MacLise—but since he was already tuning his guitar strings all to one note when he met them maybe he’d absorbed it on his own.

The Velvet Underground, fruit of all those disparate lessons, encompassed so many contradictions it initially weirded out nearly everybody. Reed employed the marble-voiced Nico—foisted on the band by Svengali pro tem Andy Warhol—as a Brechtian device to spike his tender ballads, while pushing a wall of noise and lyrics about dope and queer sex directly in your face. That first record (“The Velvet Underground & Nico”) travelled by word of mouth for years, going from zero to classic entirely behind the industry’s back. It was among other things an aggressive declaration of New York gutter realism in a time of rising California pie-eyed bliss. It may well have launched fifty thousand bands, and it may also have launched a hundred thousand chippy dope habits. And at length it spoke to a million teen-agers, one by one, in the existential darkness of their bedrooms.

The first VU song I ever heard was I’m Waiting for the Man. It was a staple on Annie Nightingale‘s Sunday evening request show on BBC Radio 1 in the late 1980s and it sounded, if not exactly dangerous, then certainly wayward, grubby and glamorous in a way that only New York rock ‘n’ roll can. It sparked an unhealthy interest in the band that’s never quite gone away. The VU track that captures all their brilliant contradictions is probably the epic Sister Ray. But I couldn’t find the full 17:27 version (15 minutes might be enough anyway), and I’m not sure I want to end on that note, so here is Some Kinda Love from the VU’s eponymous 1969 album instead:

 

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Something for the Weekend

Jacob Covey’s stunning cover for Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943-1945 due in March 2012 from Fantagraphics.

Anxiety and Time — Adam Roberts, author of By Light Alone, on science fiction at The Browser:

The common belief that SF is in some sense “about” the future isn’t wholly wrongheaded. One feature of 19th and 20th century science fiction is that it is fascinated with time in a deep way. Time only opens up, as a wholly new dimension to be imaginatively explored, at the very end of the 18th century. It’s a puzzle, actually, why this should be. [The critic] Darko Suvin thinks it has something to do with the French Revolution. But before about 1800 people almost never wrote stories set in the future, and then after 1800 lots of people did just that. SF as a mode of projecting oneself into the to-come connects powerfully with human concerns in the way that specific prophesy – pedantic, fiddly, bound to be wrong – doesn’t.

Writing Machines — Tom McCarthy on technology in The Guardian:

I must belong to the only generation of writers who’ve written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the whole logic of what you write. Think of Kafka’s obsession with writing machines: the harrow that inscribes the law onto the skin in In the Penal Colony or the mysterious writing desk in Amerika: writing technologies themselves are imbued with terrifying and sacred dimensions, and become the subject, not just the medium, of the story. I used to have a beautiful old German typewriter, that you had to throw your fingers at and the keys would smash into the roller. It felt like a machine-gun or something.

And finally…

Brian Appleyard on Andy Warhol for Intelligent Life magazine:

Warhol now endorses a way of life. One simple technology—silk-screen printing—dominated his career. But it was enough to show today’s technology-laden, hyper-connected youth that they could do it too. With the instant publication of digital pictures and videos, anybody can become a cyber-Warhol, swimming in the great ocean that pop imagery has become. Apple’s Photo Booth software reduces the whole thing to a single click—just by selecting “pop art” under “effects” you can change your face into a very credible Warhol multiple self-portrait. Andy, in death, is a generation’s mentor.

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