I bought Son of Andy Warhol by Taylor Mead at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library around thirty years ago. In spite of its length, at ninety pages, I hadn’t read it until now. I have reproduced the cover image to actual size; this little book is indeed 7 × 10½ cm. Mead was a Warhol superstar and hanger-on and this book was a collection of his random thoughts, diary entries and stoned musings. In the introduction–which doesn’t appear until page 81–he states that while he attempted at first to organize his work chronologically, “the fact that I found some notes one day and some more another and the great pile of almost debris they accumulated and frequently written on scraps of paper that became such an effort to index I just decided to leave it as further indication of the (glorious?) wreck of my life…If this be laziness and delinquent that be me.”
Some of his writings I found witty enough to quote, be they casual observances, grocery lists, or stoned meanderings:
“They start making animals sacred and eventually they might start making human beings sacred.”
“You can find something good about everything–but why bother?”
“I want to represent The End of Show-Business…”
“The Super-Rich are so unreliable.”
“Incense
roach trap
cat chow
40 Watt bulb
radio”
“I’d love to
live in
your
illusion, but
I’m just too
tired.”
“I think editing is a cop-out (concerning films–maybe other things too)” [a very Warholian philosophy]
“I can’t catch the birds
that wander by I can’t
stand the sun
that stands in
side me and
the mosaic
sidewalk”
“Jerome Hill has no class.
But I like him anyway.
The reason he has no class
is that he thinks about it
and everything is rather
precious and he over-
protects his milieu and
beef-strew but then
who Know?
He’s afraid of his money.”
“Invective to someone:
Even if you took dope you wouldn’t know how to-get high.”
“Taylor
Mead’s
Bounced
Check
Cafe”
“‘Q-Vel’–muscle relaxant (over the counter)”
“Meditation is for
people with happy
childhoods.”
When I picked up this book I thought it would be more poetic but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it wasn’t. I read it all during breakfast yesterday and in the process of reviewing it, read it several times over.