The Andy Warhol Diaries Edited by Pat Hackett Review
It is supposed to be invasive, but it isn't. The way clandestine details of his coterie are being laid out. The breviloquence of parataxis makes the statements hollowed of the glutinous éclat of gossip. It is hard to imagine truman capote really getting a hair transplant because in warhol's book truman capote is only an extension of warhol, hollowed-out of his substance and made into a shiny plastic kinder egg thing indexed in a pill box under the name "truman capote". All people become their name in ellipses inscribed in a delicate maison de verre, halston's paul rudolph townhouse diorama. Distilled presences scraped of emotional emulsions and the narcissims of a matter-of-fact epoché.
Warhol lives like an etherised patient on an operation table. He watches himself only through the screen that virtualises his body, oscillating between old documentaries on mating algae and the excision of an organ, delivered to him all the same. The sublime neutrality of utter objectivity, john the baptist being served his own head.
But the music is good, and the hair is shiny, and there is nothing to say.
If one really wants to be cruel they can call back to oscar wilde saying that the genius is a spectator to their own life, to the extent that the real genius becomes uninteresting.
The book smells with the same brown-grain, safe neutrality of all penguin moderns.