Warhol, Andy

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      ‘The Velvet Underground’ Review: And Me, I’m in a Rock ’n’ Roll Band

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      Todd Haynes’s documentary paints a jagged, revelatory portrait of the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s.Sometime in the 1960s, John Cale, a classically trained Welsh violist with avant-garde leanings, met Lou Reed, a middle-class Jewish college dropout from Long Island who dreamed of being a rock star. Their creative partnership, encouraged by Andy Warhol and enhanced by the mercurial presence of the German model, actress and singer Nico, was the volatile bedrock of the Velvet Underground, a commercially marginal band that altered the course of popular music.The Velvet Underground story is hardly obscure, and in outline it might fit fairly neatly in the standard music-documentary template. Early struggle gives way to (relative) triumph, and then the whole thing blows up in a squall of battling egos, substance abuse and self-destructive behavior. In the aftermath life goes on, solo careers are pursued, and the survivors — fans as much as artists — look back with mellow affection on the wild and heady past, brought alive by excavated television footage.“The Velvet Underground” has some of those elements, but it’s directed by Todd Haynes, a protean filmmaker who never met a genre he couldn’t deconstruct. While not as radical as “I’m Not There,” his 2007 Bob Dylan anti-biopic, this movie is similarly committed to a skeptical, inventive reading of recent cultural history. It’s not content to tell the story in the usual way, and it finds revelation in what might have seemed familiar.Haynes doesn’t just want you to listen to the reminiscences of band members and their friends, lovers and collaborators, or to groove on vintage video of the band in action. He wants you to hear just how strange and new the Velvets sounded, to grasp, intuitively as well as analytically, where that sound came from. And also to see — to feel, to experience — the aesthetic ferment and sensory overload of mid-60s Manhattan.A lot of eloquent people are on hand to talk about what it was like. Cale and Maureen Tucker, the drummer, the two original Velvet Underground members who are still alive, share their memories, as do some of Reed’s old friends and surviving members of the Warhol circle.Their faces, shot in gentle, nostalgic, indirect light, share the screen with a rapid flow — a kinetic collage — of images. While those images sometimes document places, events and personalities — offering up Allen Ginsberg, Max’s Kansas City and a news clip about the downtown scene narrated by Barbara Walters — they serve more importantly to link the Velvets’ music to the experimental cinema of the time.From left, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Reed and Tucker in a split-screen frame from the film, which places the band in context of the aesthetic ferment of mid-60s Manhattan.Apple TV+Warhol was, along with everything else, a filmmaker, as was his associate Paul Morrissey. Haynes dedicates “The Velvet Underground” to the memory of Jonas Mekas, the great champion and gadfly of New York’s cinematic vanguard who died in 2019. In the film, Mekas marvels at the sheer abundance of artistic activity in the city in the early ’60s, and the constant blending and cross-pollination that was taking place. Traditional boundaries — between poetry and painting, high art and low, film and music, irony and earnestness — weren’t so much transgressed as shown to be irrelevant.It was a remarkable time, but not exactly a golden age. Haynes respects the art too much to idealize the artists, or to impose retrospective harmony on their dissonances. The overt cruelty and menace of the music — the droning and distortion behind lyrics about addiction, sadism and sexual exploitation — didn’t come from nowhere.The film critic Amy Taubin, who appeared in a Warhol film about “the most beautiful women in the world,” bluntly recalls that the Factory, Warhol’s headquarters, was a bad place for women, who were valued for their looks rather than their talents. An aspect of Warhol’s genius was a gift for using people, and often using them up. Reed, who died in 2013, is a posthumously beloved figure, but not many of his contemporaries would describe him as a nice person.And niceness was, in any case, antithetical to what the Velvet Underground was trying to do. “We hated that peace and love crap,” Tucker says. The artist Mary Woronov, who toured with the Velvets on the West Coast, elaborates on their hostility to the California counterculture: “We hated hippies.” Never a political band, it nonetheless articulated a powerful protest — against sentimentality, stupidity, false consciousness and positive thinking — that would sow the seeds of punk rock and later rebellions. Testimony to their influence is provided by the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who estimates he saw them live 60 or 70 times when he was a teenager in Boston, and whose enthusiasm is undimmed more than half a century later.Drop a needle on any Velvet Underground record — or queue up a playlist, if that’s how you roll — and what you hear will sound new, frightening and full of possibility, even on the thousandth listen. “The Velvet Underground” will show you where that perpetual novelty came from, and connect the sonic dots with other, contemporaneous artistic eruptions. As a documentary, it’s wonderfully informative. It’s also a jagged and powerful work of art in its own right, one that turns archaeology into prophecy.The Velvet UndergroundRated R. “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “Sister Ray” — you do the math. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Andy,’ Gus Van Sant’s Warhol Musical, Is a Surprise but Not a Miracle

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      The film director set himself a steep challenge in his debut stage work. At least for now, he hasn’t quite met it.LISBON — Gus Van Sant is no stranger to experimental biopics: “Last Days,” his lyrical, nearly dialogue-free meditation on the end of Kurt Cobain’s life, shunned every convention of the genre. Yet “Andy,” his Andy Warhol-inspired stage debut, which had its world premiere at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II in Lisbon this week, may be Van Sant’s oddest tribute to date.For starters, it’s a musical. Warhol duets with the modernist art critic Clement Greenberg; Valerie Solanas sings, gun in hand, before opening fire inside the Factory.It’s a bold choice for a movie director making theater for the first time, and Van Sant, 69, didn’t just contribute the script. He is also listed as the stage designer and composer of “Andy.” (Paulo Furtado, a Portuguese musician who goes by The Legendary Tigerman, is credited with the “musical direction,” as well as the arrangement for most numbers.)While “Andy” is an unexpected outcome, Van Sant has had a Warhol project in mind for over three decades. In the late 1980s, he developed a screenplay for Universal Pictures with Paul Bartel, in the hope that it would star the actor River Phoenix. After Phoenix died in 1993, the project was shelved.The invitation to turn to theater came from John Romão, the artistic director of Lisbon’s Biennial of Contemporary Arts (BoCA), which runs through mid-October. While “Andy” is performed entirely in English, the cast and crew are all Portuguese. After the initial run concludes in Portugal, “Andy” will tour around Europe, stopping first in Rome and in Amsterdam.Some tweaks may yet improve “Andy,” but let’s start with the obvious: Creating musicals is a craft. It would be miraculous to produce a good one on first try. Even though the Virgin Mary pops up onstage to banter with Warhol, “Andy” is no miracle.Diogo Fernandes, as Andy Warhol.Bruno Simão/BoCA Bienal de Artes ContemporâneasWhile Van Sant has spent much of his film career circumventing the Hollywood rule book, his approach here is relatively prudent. “Andy” has a clear narrative arc, spanning the years between 1959 and 1967, and the expected musical numbers for both soloists and small ensembles. There is even an attempt at choreography in an early scene, although the group’s hip thrusts when Warhol’s homosexuality is mentioned are less than subtle.If anything, however, the relative conventionality of “Andy” exposes Van Sant’s inexperience with the syntax of live performance. Entrances and exits give him away early on. Devising believable transitions is a basic conundrum of theater, and “Andy” is choppy, with actors coming and going uneasily.Warhol is also a paradoxical subject for a musical. Songs have a way of baring a character’s soul, but Warhol’s deliberately enigmatic persona has been difficult to parse, even for scholars. His transformation onstage from the bespectacled, painfully shy Andrew Warhola, who wears a bow tie and stalks Truman Capote, into the high priest of Pop Art produces something like whiplash. Suddenly, he becomes a hollow shell, who treats his Factory collaborators — including Edie Sedgwick — with utter callousness.Van Sant’s songs shy away from exploring his inner life from that point, focusing instead on artistic debates and one-off events like Solanas’s shooting. Musically, they are fairly even and flat, lacking in tunes that might carry the action; perhaps an injection of the Velvet Underground, the band Warhol once managed, might have helped.Surprisingly, the book also gives Warhol fairly little agency in his own career. His mother is credited with the idea for his soup can series. Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s only lover to appear in the show, gives him the makeover that lets him fit in with the New York underground scene. Later, he is portrayed as hapless with the business of running the Factory.Martim Martins as Gerard Malanga, left, with Fernandes as Warhol.Bruno Simão/BoCA Bienal de Artes ContemporâneasSome scenes and lines are lifted directly from TV interviews, including an appearance by Warhol and Sedgwick on “The Merv Griffin Show.” In others, characters fall victim to Van Sant’s clunky expository dialogue. Greenberg, an authority on modernism, may have despised Pop Art, but he surely deserved better than to sing: “I’m an extraordinary man, I expect extraordinary stuff.” Van Sant opted to work with a young, mostly inexperienced cast, and acting and singing in English is clearly a tall order for many of them, although they try bravely.The strongest overall performance comes from Helena Caldeira, who captures the restless allure of Sedgwick. As Warhol, Diogo Fernandes has less vocal range, but he pulls off Warhol’s two sides. One of the strongest scenes sees him earnestly asking the Virgin Mary: “Do you think Pop Art can be unholy?” As Mary, Caroline Amaral nails silly, wonderful quips, and their exchange suggests leaning into the bizarre might have turned “Andy” into a more Warholian proposition.Another brief flash of absurdity comes at the end, as Warhol is reunited with Capote in heaven. (Capote immediately asks where the gay bars are.) There is a flamboyant, preposterous comedy lurking within “Andy.” As of now, Van Sant lacks the theatrical tools to unleash it. More

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      in Music

      Keith Haring’s Refrigerator Door Is on the Auction Block

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      A graffiti-tagged refrigerator door served as the artist’s guest register for Madonna, Angel Ortiz and more. Now it’s on the auction block at Guernsey’s.It began life began as a white refrigerator door in an apartment in SoHo, but by the 1990s, it was anything but plain. It was covered with the graffiti tags and wide-marker signatures of the famous friends of the tenant in the apartment. “Madonna Loves Keith,” read one inscription.Yes, that Madonna. The tenant was the artist Keith Haring, a star of the SoHo art scene, who partied with Andy Warhol and graffiti artists like LA II (whose real name is Angel Ortiz) and Fab Five Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), both of whom signed the refrigerator. Also on the door are the letters JM, which the auctioneer Arlan Ettinger, in an interview, speculated had belonged to Jean-Michel Basquiat, the downtown artist who became a megawatt celebrity. (Ettinger said he had tried to verify the Basquiat signature but that “there’s no way of absolutely confirming” it’s his writing or not.)Ettinger, who will sell the refrigerator door on Wednesday at Guernsey’s, said the door served as Haring’s guest register. “It seemed like everybody who was anybody showed up there,” he said, “and you signed in on that refrigerator door. It’s not beautiful, but it’s of that moment, of that time. It reflects a certain spirit, a creativeness, that is alive today if you think about the people who were there — Madonna, and a long, long list of artists.”Ettinger said the owner, a yoga instructor in California, had insisted on privacy, so much so that he said he did not even know her name. He said his contract to sell the door was with a friend of the owner who forwarded an email describing how the owner had found the apartment on Broome Street — she saw an ad for a “spacious railroad apartment” in The Village Voice in 1990. It came with “this amazing refrigerator covered with the graffiti of the Haring era.” The walls had once been covered, too, but she said that the landlord had repainted them.She returned home one sweltering day to learn that the refrigerator had conked out and was removed; the delivery men had left it on the street to be picked up with the garbage.“I raced outside,” the email said. “There, in the back alley, was our old friend, the Haring fridge, lying on its side. The door slipped off the body of the fridge easily. I brought it upstairs while my roommate retrieved the smaller top freezer door.”In 1993, when she moved to California, she carted the door to her parents’ home in Washington, and stored it in their attic, where it stayed until about 2010, when her mother shipped it to her.Andy Warhol, whose signature is also on the refrigerator door, figures in another item in the auction: A moose head he owned. The auction will be conducted online through Liveauctioneers.com and Invaluable.com, and by telephone from Guernsey’s. Ettinger’s estimate for the refrigerator door is “in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.” More