POPism: The Warhol Sixties

David Ogilvy, move over: ad-man confessions reach their apogee right here. ""You never had to buy things in the sixties. You could get almost everything for free: everything was 'Promotion.' Everybody was pushing something, and they'd send cars for you. . ."" Take it from Andy, he knows. Pop artist first (he deliberately tried to be more ""swish"" than the others), then ""underground"" celebrity (the Factory, the Warhol studio crash-pad shrine, was completely done in mirrors and Mylar, so that Gerard and Baby Jane and Edie and Henry and Paul and Ingrid Superstar and the Velvets and Ultra Violet and Candy Darling and Jackies and Viva could always see themselves). And thus, in the sixties, was fame achieved. No small truth there, you better believe. Andy (or ""Drella,"" as the Factory regulars called him: half Dracula, half Cinderella) remembers every song and every skirt length from '60 to '69, and whether it's filming Chelsea Girls or being shot in the belly by Valerie Solanis, he recounts it all in a monotone that's very Pop indeed: nothing was any better or worse than anything else. Surface is all. Though he does at one time admit: ""I could never finally figure out if more things happened in the sixties because there was more awake time for them to happen in (since so many people were on amphetamine), or if people started taking amphetamine because there were so many things to do that they needed to have more awake time to do them in."" Whichever and in any case, this epic of trivia is not without interest or significance. That ""society"" Andy we all see today in the papers is the butterfly. The caterpillar, in the Sixties, was busy laying down the properly anaesthetic floor for the decade to follow, the Seventies, which seemed like one of the bored productions straight out of the Factory, Andy victorious. Morally repulsive--but fun and somehow fascinating.