Andy Warhol In Hell: Don't Bogart That Remote, Phil!

Watched Factory Girl with Swedish subtitles (don't ask) a couple of nights ago. I wouldn't call it a good movie but I got caught up in it anyway. Jean Stein's Edie Sedgwick book is one of my favorite biographies of all time, and Andy Warhol's POPism is the only book I ever stole from the public library. (That was like twenty-five years ago when I was both broke and not a very nice person. Cause and effect? Possibly.)

Like him or not, Warhol's persona is one of the two defining sensibilities for most of contemporary culture. Yeah, yeah, yeah – the famous "fifteen minutes of fame" quote. But also:

Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I'm just the opposite: if I'm going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don't want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.

Too bad Andy didn't live long enough to see cable TV. How he would have loved Flavr of Love and Law & Order reruns!

In other news a great white shark tried to take a bite out of a surfer on a local beach, thus putting a serious crimp in Max and Robin's own surfing plans. This happened on the same day that the Monterey Bay Aquarium announced it was engaging the services of its very own great white to help bolster flailing attendance stats.

Andy Warhol is mum on the subject of synchronicity.

Also the same day that I decided to take off to Moss Landing on a photo-taking expedition. Moss Landing is the last functioning fishing village on Monterey Bay. Not so very long ago it was a very cool place, filed under "undiscovered treasures," home to the Haunted Antique Shop with its odd collection of 19th century mudshow canvas rolls, mummy artifacts, California mission paperweights, dysfunctional dollhouses and Sacarans trapped into lamp bases as well as an amazing junkyard filled with the rotting hulks of early 20th century seiners and other boatly antiquities. Alas, they razed the junkyard and presumably the guy who ran the Haunted Antique Shop finally succumbed to AIDS – it's now under "new management" and sports the same Barbie doll and Fiesta ware crap that every other antique store in California sells. I think they were planning to build a luxury hotel on the site of the junkyard but the financing fell through or something – now it's just this big field of fennel behind a cyclone fence.

There was not much to photograph that did not fill me with a strange restlessness. In the midst of a heat wave everywhere else, Moss Landing was solidly socked in with thick irremediable fog, a melancholy breeze blew and all the village's strange little artifacts – the hippie buses berthed here after long, strange journeys were done; the tiny, abandoned shacks, once bright paint peeling; the old biker bar, shuttered and closed – were reminders of how fast it all goes. "It" being life…

I tried to take a coastal route home. Got hideously lost outside of Watsonville. There's this old decaying farmhouse, a flash out of the side of your eye on Highway 1. I came up on its other side:



Oh, those apple trees. Goddamn, they made me want to weep.

The other defining sensibility would be Phil K. Dick (of course.) Andy and Phil had a lot in common – they were both speed freaks for starters. I'm sure they'd both love Law & Order. I imagine they're having some very interesting conversations in hell, assuming they're not fighting over the remote.

Oh – and the first installment of my trip photos are up here.