girlsdontcry's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Satellite's gone up to the sky. Today would be Andy Warhol's 74th birthday, if he hadn't died after a simple operation in 1987. I love Andy Warhol. My obsession with the man started when I was a teenager. For reasons I can no longer remember, I bought the Andy Warhol Diaries in paperback, and I read it from cover to cover. This book sort of turned in to my own personal bible. I would quote from it, I would let it influence the brands I bought -- Stolichnaya vodka seemed so glamorous because Andy used to drink it, so I started to drink it just like him, straight up on ice, ordering it in clubs and being looked at like some idiot. He still influences me. I went to Godiva yesterday, and tried to buy the chocolates that he talked about in his diary. The cherry ones that have a whole cherry in them, including the stem. They said they were getting them in on Wednesday, and we had a nice little chat about them. The woman working there told me that lots of people won't buy Godiva's other cherry chocolate, "because they like the stem". But I was imagining hundreds of secret Andy Warhol fans running around eating these chocolates because they love him. The thing is, I didn't even know much of his art when I started loving him. And the diaries aren't from his whole cool sixties phase, they are from when he started to be really ... well, he got really society, didn't he. But whenever people say he couldn't really paint or whatever stupid things people say about him, I know he's changed the way I look at the world. And how many people really have that influence on us? This one of my favourite things he said, from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and back again): "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the president drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke and, just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the president knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." Happy birthday, Andy. 12:07 p.m. - 2002-08-06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||