She Even Breaks: Edie Sedgwick in CIAO! MANHATTAN

It's probably a sign of your mental health whether you find Warhol superstar /debauched debutante extraordinaire Edie Sedgwick's continued toplessness in Ciao! Manhattan (1972) sexy or just tragic. If sexy then you're either a swine or just so enamored of the Edie mythos that you'd follow her off a cliff. And I who have followed three different gorgeous drug-damaged [anorexic] rich New England free spirits off cliffs know what I'm talking about. But if you've taken those cliff falls and they have made you sore, damaged, and wise in ways you wish you weren't, then you might see Ciao! Manhattan and wonder if her destruction is somehow your fault, a side-effect of your rubbernecking hot mess lemming diving icon-worship. If that's true, then the film may do nothing for you at all, except encourage you to pray for the still sick and suffering outside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But Edie, princess long dead, cannot hear those prayers. We can only save ourselves... the trouble... of enduring Ciao! Manhattan.


But we can't avoid it, can we? So come back with me then... a ways. Know that I too, like Edie, am a descendant of a daughter of the American Revolution, the Puritan stock. Though not as land-rich (1), we are perhaps just as insane and prone to addiction and depression. I came to the Edie myth via the Velvet Underground, which I came to via Lou Reed, who--alone on MTV, with his video "I Love You Suzanne"), seemed relatable. Like me, he seemed to use shades and cool to mask shyness, yet, when that fine fine music starts, is always willing to dance like a maniac, his/my shyness melting off, all while never losing his deadpan facade--a mix of Zoot from the Muppets and Harpo Marx, that was me too--I was home! I only later learned Reed and I had the same birthday, March 2nd, and he also went to Syracuse and also majored in English and also took lots of that town's many fine fine psychedelics and wrote poetry and performed in a band, and probably like me dated crazy shiksas with Ritalin prescriptions, guzzled alcohol, and swayed before anorexic lost girls like a hypnotized cobra. But I knew nothing about Edie, so needed to get busy on that, because all the cute punk girls on my scene had the Plimpton book (below left).

I'd seen the book in the store as a kid, but I thought she was an androgynous boy in military school watching a Fourth of July fireworks display. It scared me, whatever it was. All the rough trade gender-bent black-and-white imagery pouring out of NYC in the 70s was charged with leather-studded sleazy danger. But the girls I swayed before all had the and other Edie books; they had that black and white striped shirt (below) and shared her and my enthusiasm for getting loaded. There was yet no internet so any scrap of information about her had to come through print. And there just wasn't anything except used out of print paperback copies of Plimpton's book, if you could find it, which was less a glorification of druggie artsy excess and more a Grey Gardens monument to fallen pilgrim aristocracy. As someone from her old pre-decadent circle, Plimpton's book had the same kind of higher ground shock many of us feel when watching someone we knew as relatively normal disappear down the druggie rabbit hole... in other words, not the roundhouse kick of advocative justification found in Burroughs, Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson.

Alas, only one semi-mainstream movie exists starring Edie, a botched mess to run alongside the book with the same name, a dreary, ennui-soaked mix of old bedraggled footage from some 1967 unfinished black-and-white film without any synced sound, coupled to a foggy color framing of a dumb long-haired muscle boy hick named Butch (Wesley Hayes) taking a job as Edie's keeper (at this point she's perma-zonked and babbling while living in an Arabian tent in the bottom of an empty swimming pool). And it's Butch's dopey narration of genuinely intelligent observances that try to structure the film.

Behold, Butch

Watching Edie as she babbles and tries to chase half-formed thoughts around her bed, you might wish, as Butch does, that you could do something to help, but she doesn't even seem to notice whether or not you're even in the room. She only notices the camera, which she instinctively models for without looking directly into it too much. And in the older footage, she only notices drugs, stealing a cocaine stash from an absent lover before getting lost in a speed freak robot-mechanized version of NYC, palling around with one-time Hendrix flame Pat Hartley while trying to find Dr. Robert for B-12 shots all while some mysterious David Lynch-ish millionaire named Mr. Verdecchio tries to find her through the long arm of post-modern 'later filmed' foggy drab color stutter stock and shrill phone calls.

It's like we in the audience aren't there at all, and the feeling is demoralizing. Maybe Edie, lost in time, gets a Strickfadden sparkle-circumscribed glimmer of us, gawking at her from a future vantage point window opening in the space-time continuum during electroshock, but then we're just static... again, and she's back in her room full of (cracked) vanity mirrors.

It would all still be art by virtue of its Warholian association, and all the songs written about her (Dylan's "Just like a Woman," "Like a Rolling Stone," VU's "Femme Fatale" and more later by artists who didn't know her personally), but Butch's cornfed voiceover and big curly shock of hair, pale skin and slack jaw makes one think he snuck across the broken down Isle of White festival fences, one too many times. Know what I mean, Mr. Verdecchio? At least he's got respect for leather interiors, unlike most kids todayzz.z.

Case you can't tell, that Butch gets my goat. A fine, sophisticated, pathologically narcissistic pilgrim stock speed freak burnout ex-model like Edie is too good for him. Of course that's my opinion, for we straight sophistos loathe these cornfed trade hunks with their dopey lack of depth and stripper shorts. Butch's burly status --though he's pale as the moon--is clearly a signifier that this film, for all its female toplessness, is skewed for an older gay male audience. The cut rentboy rube from the sticks--as naive and dopey as traffic will allow--is a gay staple, a favorite recurring subject the way, say, a blonde girl leaning on a Corvette is "ours." Butch-types can get free room and board just by just traipsing around in their towels after a long day indulging in Fire Island volleyball or soaking up the sun while the old rich queens sit on the veranda drinking mojitos, glancing over and sighing wistfully. I hope that's why we're subjected to Wesley Hayes' super pale naked chest and dopey voice as he walks around in tight shorts, his dazed hick expression so charismatically challenged from a straight perspective he makes you wonder why Joe Dellesandro wasn't playing the part. Was Joe so unreliable by then? Or was he way past being able to play a rube, having shot too much, in both senses of the word? In the words of Marlene Dietrich, "Joe.... where are you, Joe?"

As an Edieophile (Edie-ott?) by association, and (no matter how trunkenshtoned I got) relentless in my gallantry when it came to protecting incapacitated hotties from leering ("rapey" - a great word I wish we had in the 80s-90s) gropers, watching Butch take charge of Little Miss Can't Be Right in these color pool scenes makes me feel like I was leaving my Rolls in a Tobacco Road ditch for the summer. No offense against Wesley Hayes, the actor who played Butch -  if he was a lot smarter he could have brought some crafty Jeeter Lester savvy, like robbing Edie on the side, just as she robbed Paul America in the earlier footage. And if Butch was dumber, then his scenes would feel more natural. A good actor would play the hick as trying to come off more sophisticated than he is, instead of vice versa. Instead Butch is right in-between... The only long hair with any smarts is the previous Edie-wrangler, who steers Butch to the job on his way out of town, smart enough, perhaps, to get out before a certain someone gives him hep C, unless she already has, or worse, he winds up buried in a chimp coffin.

Butch occasionally manages some sharp shirtless jean short observations as he tries to appease Edie's mom Isabel Jewell (who sharp-eyed viewers may remember from Lewton's Seventh Victim) but he does nothing to help his charge, who natters on and on down the druggie narcissistic tangent trail while lurching around topless in her emptied swimming pool terrarium, making some gesture with her hand to emphasize a point, noticing her hand there, pausing to stress the next words in her sentence, then blanking out. The only time she gets out of the pool is when Butch drives her to the doctor, played by Roger Vadim like a vulture hoping to nab another hottie-in-distress for his trophy case before giving her some much needed electroshock...

In short, Edie's like the sad ghost of her former self, a self of course we don't know outside of Warhol's home movies. Knowing what we know today about eating disorders (and knowing she was kicked out of two boarding schools for being anorexic) makes it hard to revel in her alien beauty in the Alphaville-esque city wandering scenes, and/or the Warhol factory and YMCA pool party footage. She died mere weeks after her color footage was shot, and you can feel it. Hers is not the knowing sadness, the glimmer of a gorgeous new type of maturer beauty, that we find in Marilyn's footage in the unfinished Something's Got to Give. Edie doesn't even begin to fathom where she is, and watching her is like watching a psychic interacting with ghosts, half in this world and half in the... was there... ever actually another half?

Andy Warhol supplied some of that other half, but he supplied it with a vacuum. And who knows how many times the Andy she interacted with was only Andy's double, and Andy's relationship with Edie itself a double, a bizarro mirror to the gay artist-female muse/proxy/twins bond between Waldo Lydecker and Laura... or Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond, by which I mean, their relationship was composed of celluloid, light, and shadow... and without a projector, it was just a spool. Swoop swoop, oh baby rock rock.

In the end, maybe, we all get the Joe Gillis we deserve, some half-in-the-pool-face-down floater of a biographer who only in death finds his poetic voice, and then uses it only to describe us, who killed him, like a hack Baudrillard drowning in a nepenthe stamen.

NOTES:

1. Two drunk brothers in the 1700s took care of that, they sold everything to spend on whiskey and women; if women could have owned property then, maybe I would be rich as she was.

Remembering Lou Reed + A Spotify Mix, GET CRAZY, and Links

Lou died today. He was 71, the same age my dad would be (had he not died two years ago this very week). Hearing about my dad's death made feel a crack in my heart for the first time ever, a thunderous splintering snap. I still haven't recovered. I then lost my dog Inga a few months ago, that brought some tears, but losing Lou isn't a cry-worthy thing. But it is like losing the smooth relaxed but dangerous bass line that's been underwriting my soul since I first heard it as a teenager. Lou's deadpan serpentine bass vibration held me suspended above the dismal American abyss for so long I forgot I was still being lifted by it; now that it's gone, the silence is deafening, and it's a long way to fall.

When I first started hunting down his canon in local used punk rock record shops as a snotty 17 year-old I didn't even know we had the same birthday (March 2nd), we both wear glasses and we both majored in English Lit at Syracuse University. He supposedly stayed in my same dorm (Flint Hall), and like him I moved off campus soon after and formed a band. It was before the internet, or any bio on him, so one couldn't just know all these things. All I knew is, I had been adrift in a myopic solipsistic teenage alienation for years, and Lou came along and said, "hey kid, don't settle for walking." He didn't lead me out of the abyss, but he helped me contextualize the pain into a grand artistic persona, a blue mask to reflect the glare of a hostile world back into its own eyes. He wasn't singing about love me do / you know I love you, he was singing about the agonizing pain of coming home from a dark and dirty fun party and instantly feeling paralyzingly lonely.


I saw him play, twice, at the Ritz, in '85, at the start of, and end of, his tour supporting Mistrial. Disappointing, since Robert Quine wasn't there, but Fernando Saunders was on fretless bass and I knew then I had to become a bassist. I finally joined a band sophomore year, when I was already on my way to becoming an acid rock hippie freak, but I still sang "Sweet Jane" and "I'm Waiting for My Man" and sometimes "Heroin" during the third set, and I was already making token struggles against my burgeoning alcoholism, again not knowing Lou was a drunk, too, and wrote "The Power of Positive Drinking," the sweetest justification for not getting sober when you know you need to, and then "Underneath the Bottle" an album or so later when he realized hey, sooner or later you're going to have terrible DTs, so don't settle for walking, slowing your pace. Embrace the shakes.

In my late 20s living in a midtown loft with my lead guitarist, I would spent hours and hours hyperventilating over the toilet from 2-6 AM, nonstop, trying to keep down enough vodka to stop dry heaving. I was so sick from alcohol poisoning I couldn't hold down the liquor I needed to not suffer the horrors of alcoholic convulsions. I was caught in a vicious circle. My only company was Lou Reed in everything and Nic Cage in LEAVING LAS VEGAS. Sometimes I had a stolen-from-my-girlfriend Librium to help me come down but more often than not I'd drop it and be crawling around for hours in panicked desperation. Lou had a song for that too: "Waves of fear, squat on the floor looking for some pill, the liquor is gone... " My decision to be so open about all my drug and alcohol use, to be blunt about my divorce, band difficulties, emotional rises and falls, losses and regrets, and ambivalence, the courage to let it all hang the stuff most people hide come out in the open, crafting art (or art criticism) from the medium of my own guts, it all comes from him.

None of that means I knew him personally, but I felt like I did. A lot of us did, it was a personal thing. We didn't even mind he could be a total shit some of the time, to his fans, to his world. He never tried to hide his venom, if he had he wouldn't have been him anymore. "Give me an issue, I'll give you a tissue," Lou snarls on Take No Prisoners. "And you can wipe my ass with it."

Sometimes, like after I read one of his unauthorized bios, I began to hate him, but I always came back, because he never sold out or got repetitive. Suddenly after a slump or two there was New York, a new classic, and one of my favorites, the Warhol eulogy record with John Cale Songs for Drella -so perfect and simple with Lou's guitar and Cale's viola never sounding clearer or better together, as if Warhol's spirit buried the hatchet and brought out a playful reverence that they never seemed to share before even on the first album.

But he could be a shit. Maybe it was because he let us all feel like we knew him, and that level of broad openness in one's art is always going to have drawbacks, like finding out the most fun and awesome guy you ever dated is a thief and junkie, and so what, are you going to walk out on him? Lou never stole from us, and he gave so so much of himself that a lot of us freaks, who have never felt this way about any other artist before or since, could forgive his insecure lash-outs at others. He was the cool older brother who brought us to all the dangerous places most young suburban kids never see. He didn't leave us at home with mom, afraid we'd cramp his style. He didn't abandon us.

So I'm not going to cry this time. I'm just going to make a Spotify mix and take a look back at the 30 odd years I've been a Lou Reed disciple, and realize if I'm anything, or anyone, or have any sense of belonging to the gritty New York streets I haunted for the past 20 years (before moving to goddamned Brooklyn) it's because of Lou.

My piece for McSweeny's on "Venus in Furs"

"When Lou sang of the “whiplash girl-child in the dark” who said things like “taste the whip, / now bleed for me,” suddenly I could take the violent reproach of my aching hormones and twist it like a sword until I disemboweled the old me. The result was like dropping nitroglycerin on an oil fire, an alchemical reaction that set me free. I knew that I was, at heart, a sadomasochist."

See Lou in the 1983 classic, Get Crazy.

"Death has brought you close to art as we know it today," says Lou in GET CRAZY, to Max Wolf, ailing manager of the film's equivalent of Bill Graham's Fillmore East. The film starts rough but develops a sweaty-palmed rock intensity that might recall the best rock movies and rock shows and flashbacks of any drug-fueled moments of transcendental pagan abandon, the wild fury of the mosh pit, and onwards. Makes sense: the genius director Allan Arkush worked at the Fillmore for a stretch, and clearly loved it -- as both this film and his ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL capture the heady feeling of rock concert community way better than anything ever before or since... and are hilarious at the same time.

King Blues sings "Mannish Boy!" Malcolm McDowell plays a T. Rex / Mick Jagger hybrid. There's a great Iggy Pop-ish animal man; a scabby punk rock poetess ala Patti Smith; a flooded bathroom with a shark swimming around it; a giant hypo; Daniel Stern pausing to inhale some smoke from a $1 hookah hit-sellin' Rastafarian in one of the stalls; Iggy prompting people to jump off the balcony, including Paul Bartel; a Satanic pimp alien coke dealer; magical LSD in the water cooler; a crowd-surfing refrigerator; acid rock hippy freaks; a twitchy fire inspector, and that's just the tip of Malcolm's talking penis. It's the beginning / of a new age.
----
Here's my Lou Reed Spotify Mix, adjusted to reflect a tribute / eulogy / farewell / ode. He loved assembling new CDs from his old catalog, and he made a flock of cool Spotify mixes of other musicians he liked. My Lou Mix has no "Sweet Jane" or "Walk on the Wild Side." Too easy. This is the stuff I loved at the time, me alone, in my room, with headphones, blotting out the parents and the world outside the New York Streets.




And lastly, his Warhol "Screen Test." Goodnight, ladies

POSTSCRIPT: Please also read my piece on Slant, The Lou Reed Discobiography.

PS: 9/19: Continuing the weird interpersonal coincidence machine. A girl who was like the Jeanne Moreau in a college freshman Jules et Jim style manic artsy threesome -running amok in the dorm, skipping around on the quad, and listening obsessively to our boom-box playing Eno, Velvet Underground, Ziggy Stardust and Peter Gabriel's '3' album: anyway, she dated me after the Jules (or the Jim) most of my sophomore year. either/or now she got married and now has a kid old enough to be in college and what was he assigned to study in his freshman English class? You guessed it, my McSweeny's piece on "Venus in Furs," to especially note the way it mixes the personal and the interpersonal (i.e. descriptions of the music): "Writing about a Cultureal Object fro a Personal Point of View")

Yet another weird synchronicitous circuit is in place.

Miss Moneypenney and her Big Bond Phallus

An example of a character having innate understanding of Lacan's "impossibility of desire" can be found in the James Bond series' Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) and her office flirtations with James Bond (various). Come along with me on this structural adventure as we see just how and why.

Note that the regular flirtation of Bond and Moneypenny begins with her feigned anger at him for arriving "late." No matter when Bond arrives, she makes it seem as if he is late and that M is angry at him. But this anger is "pretend" for her and for M - for Bond, the locus of their combined desire, can never be anything but "on" time. M will usually berate him on some minor point before laying out the details of his case. Q also pretends to be annoyed with Bond's childishness, but at the same time, entrusts him with millions of dollars of high-falootin' gadgetry.

Moneypenny sets herself up as an upper-middle class spinster, pining for a secret agent who prefers more exotic (richer), younger women. Moneypenny is his "fall back" gal; he professes to love only her, implying he's sleeping with everyone but her! And if she pushes the issue, he instantly propositions her: "Drinks, my place. Tonight." But she ignores his request; sure that he is not being serious. Between the two of them is an implicit understanding regarding the parameters of their pretend courtship. If she took him seriously, bad blood would instantly erupt. Alas, in our post-PC era, no such parameters can really be established, so the fine art of fake flirting is all but gone. Too bad, because it's great practice... the pair switch role from pursuer to pursued on a regular basis, each claiming they pine for the other, and so forth.

Thus, Moneypenny's desire for James is innately dependent on his withholding of that desire's gratification. Such examples occur throughout cinema as well as in life, but this one is worth noting since it occurs in such ubiquitous regularity. This regularity itself makes it a fine example of the Lacanian phallus. Bond "owns" the phallus, as the ultimate "one who enjoys"-- but Moneypenny is the one who truly owns its lack - as in understanding that having access to the phallus will not prevent its lack, but will in fact destroy the position from within which that lack originates.

Part of this essential dance belongs to M, and his presence on the intercom - he is always listening in... and interjects his "Will you please skip the customary interplay, Miss Moneypenny?" M is the perfect momentary definition of the Big Other, the ultimate signifier for whom the dance is performed.

A telling acknowledgment that her buffering is no accident can be found in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, when Bond dictates his resignation before leaving her office. Moneypenny, instead of typing what he tells her, types that he has requested two weeks leave instead. Thus, she saves the entire triad of her, M and Bond. M even acknowledges this (after Bond has gone of course) by saying (over the intercom of course) "what would I do without you, Miss Moneypenny?"M understands her immaculate mediating between the phallus and its locus of imaginary enjoyment with the Non du pere or "no of the father" represented by the Big Other m.

Indeed, what would any of us do without the Miss Moneypennys of the world, gamely keeping the ball in play by "pretending" to want the phallus, even as they realize they can never have it? The world would resign, and no one would ever get laid. Moneypenny may or may not want to get laid, but her true lay, Bond, would be a disappointment, so she is better off enjoying the wanting of him. If they let themselves, if we let ourselves, we could grow obsessional and mad about it. Don't we all have some secret hidden love? If we don't keep vigilant, this unrequited love could grow to a full-blown obsession, drug addiction, stalking, restraining orders, assault, all follows. By pretending to like that which we actually do like, we save ourselves from having to actually have it. Maybe if we have it, we would just be... disappointed. Isn't that the fate of so many stars with their groupies? No matter how earth-shattering the anonymous sex might or might not be, it can't beat the image. Imagine if they hooked up and Bond had to slink past Moneypenny everytime, in guilty silence, on his way to M's office?


If you can embrace this secret you will be a James Bond yourself! By pretending to be "the one who enjoys" you become an authority on enjoyment itself. Sounds simple, doesn't it? We're all conditioned to act on our wants and desires without thinking, to consider them some kind of holy writ. But be not fooled! Desire is nothing more than the death drive with a fancy dress on. Follow anything too far and you won't find your way back. Lou Reed said it best "You know some people don't have a voice with / that they can even call their own. / So the first thing that they see that allows them the right to be, they follow it. / You know, it's called 'bad luck.'"

And which Bond girl is the one who gets to stay in the picture after the babe du jour has come and gone? Even after Bond himself is replaced, several times over? Lois Maxwell! Moneypenny! This is of course stating the obvious, but if you use your realization of this in yourself as a tool for conscious awakening, you will have the last laugh, every time, just like her.