{"id":17670,"date":"2015-09-20T15:26:23","date_gmt":"2015-09-20T19:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/?p=17670"},"modified":"2015-09-20T22:02:23","modified_gmt":"2015-09-21T02:02:23","slug":"tripping-with-andy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2015\/09\/tripping-with-andy.html","title":{"rendered":"Tripping With Andy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"'The<\/a>\u2018It is Deborah Davis\u2019s style to pan to a faraway object, complete its history, then cinematically bring it into the focus of the story. John Huston becomes cinema verit\u00e9. Her style permits one to learn everything related to the trip. Even things Andy Warhol\u2019s diarist didn\u2019t know.\u2019<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n

By Charles Plymell<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trip\u201d it was … with the successful advertising artist who had a movement stirring in his head, a hunk kid skipping out on his poetry semester of school, never been out of the Bronx, who met so many famous people, he just added photography and silkscreening to his resum\u00e9 and never looked in the rear view. The driver, Wynn Chamberlain, was a fairly normal-looking human commandeered by Warhol for his Ford Falcon. Then there was Taylor Mead, the \u201cmovie star\u201d poet I first met ca. \u201961 in Venice, California, when he was a local fixture with his stolen grocery cart (to haul his belongings) and his faithful transistor radio tied to it. Descriptions of the characters evolve fully in the book with Ms. Davis\u2019s incredibly concise lines, trimly coiffed, loaded with subtle humor that discretely has no problem with the hard-edged vernacular of the time only found in truck stops and underground publications.<\/p>\n

\u201cTall Wynn, goofy Taylor, ghostly Andy and hipster Gerard\u201d sat in a booth at one of the largest \u201cStreamline Moderne\u201d roadside diners on Rt. 66 somewhere in cowboy hat & boots truck driver country in Oklahoma when all eyes turned toward them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what it was exactly, about the way we looked, Andy said a little disingenuously, when he recalled the incident a few year later. But he insisted that the \u2018alien alert\u2019 started flashing the moment they walked in, prompting curious locals to move closer for a better look.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>

Gerard Malanga (right)
with Andy Warhol [1963]<\/p><\/div>They climbed back into the Falcon and headed out to the bold American Pop art signs and Burma shave rhymes that WERE the art and literature of my first trip in 1939 in the back of our International wheat truck (the family car) to my aunt\u2019s orange grove on the rim of the L.A. basin when it WAS indeed paradise! It was a time and place where everything was a wild ride up and up and up. \u201cInside out and outside in.\u201d The neon signs of gossamer, whim, caprice, of modern motels & other road ephemera may have influenced Warhol\u2019s later metallic silver factory decor. The seeds that might have been growing from C\u00e9line\u2019s words: \u201cLife is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much. It\u2019s the transparency that counts.\u201d <\/p>\n

Gerard had just witnessed a mirage for the first time and penned a beautiful poem about it. Their heads were already in Hollywood meeting the in-crowd, the beautiful people, the famous who were to gather at Dennis Hopper\u2019s party. Warhol was witnessing the art that was complete in itself, probably remembering the advice of his friend, \u201cDe,\u201d who advised him not to leave his impressionistic brush stroke on the coke bottle. Paint it as it is. A new movement was forming. They met the master of change himself at the party: Duchamp, \u2014 and never looked back.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

King Cole Trio<\/p><\/div>It is Ms. Davis\u2019s style to pan to a faraway object, complete its history, then cinematically bring it into the focus of the story. John Huston becomes cinema verit\u00e9. Her style permits one to learn everything related to the trip. Even things Andy Warhol\u2019s diarist didn\u2019t know. It is an education in detail. Here\u2019s one: Howard Hughes was staying at a famous hotel where the Falcon four landed, courtesy of Hollywood elite, and had a standing order for a roast beef sandwich to be hung in a tree so he could stalk it at night. I thought I had read everything about Howard Hughes. Here’s another: The Falcon was designed to compete with the lean Volkswagen by none other than McNamara, later to be the liar with blood on his hands. Everything related to the story is explored, brought back into it. For instance, how the song \u201ckicks on Rt. 66\u201d came about. Even gossip became history. They put on \u201cthe put on\u201d for the been there done thats. What\u2019s inside is out, what\u2019s outside is in. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s also free from political correctness in that short window of time from the \u201960s to the beginning of the \u201970s (according to Mel Brooks), when the occupants of the Falcon could see Presley in \u201cViva Las Vegas\u201d or Dean Martin, who \u201cheld the diminutive [Sammy] Davis in his arms and said that he\u2019d like to \u2018thank the NAACP for giving me this trophy.\u2019\u201d We learn that when they visited Palm Springs the rather square Bobby Kennedy was to get JFK in trouble again, this time with Frank Sinatra when he put his brother in the clean Republican crooner Bing Crosby\u2019s place to make sure he wasn\u2019t seen \u201cplaying house.\u201d The copious details make me so nostalgic I wish they were back, and they will provide Gen X the essentials for a formative aesthetic needed at this time for how and why movements take shape. <\/p>\n

The book is profusely documented like no other in modern publications I know, with pages full of notes, a bibliography, a precise index, and illustration credits. One can learn more about the aesthetic of THE movement of the age and its art from this book than from all the museum tracts and critical treatments, more about its neuromorphic seeds, its painting, its poetry (of the MacLiesh dictum \u201cdoesn\u2019t have to mean but be\u201d) than from all the modern art history books. Symbol becomes icon, icon becomes symbol. It\u2019s a legacy now seen by the young who snap pics of the product, the brand, and say, \u201cOh Wow\u201d to the symbols of their own roots morphed in the resonance of 1963, the movement in making. <\/p>\n

The Trip: Andy Warhol\u2019s Plastic Fantastic Cross-Country Adventure<\/a><\/em> ends with a beautiful cinematic scene that almost brought tears to this aging hipster. Amid the obituaries and what happened to whom is Deborah Davis\u2019s beautiful panoramic view of the once thriving billboard, neon lighted little town of Glenrio, Texas, now mostly abandoned, not worth tearing down, doors of buildings blown open for the tumbleweed secrets of the hipster\u2019s \u201cBenzedrine Highway,\u201d once the great road from Chicago to L.A. called \u201cAmerica\u2019s Main Street.\u201d Now for mostly European tourists the fragments of the road leading nowhere. \u201cYet the thriving interstate is usually nearby,\u201d she writes, \u201ca parallel universe that is close, but worlds away.\u201d I love this book. The Trip<\/em> is a trip.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018It is Deborah Davis\u2019s style to pan to a faraway object, complete its history, then cinematically bring it into the focus of the story. John Huston becomes cinema verit\u00e9. Her style permits one to learn everything related to the trip. Even things Andy Warhol\u2019s diarist didn\u2019t know.\u2019 By Charles Plymell \u201cThe Trip\u201d it was … […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19,18,20,23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-art","8":"category-literature","9":"category-media","10":"category-news","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/THE-TRIP-cover260.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-4B0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17670"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17703,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17670\/revisions\/17703"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}