Nico: The Wayward Beauty of Solitary Confinement

 

“I have been in the highest and the lowest and both places are empty.” - Nico

 

Why even ask—Who is Nico — she that was born Christa Päffgen in Cologne in 1938? Survives the Nazis... Then in Paris. She’s 16 and meets Coco Chanel. Models. Gets bored. Travels to New York City. Studies acting with Lee Strasberg. Talks to Marilyn Monroe.

1959. In Rome. Hello to Frederico Fellini. Gets bit part in La Dolce Vita. Really, who is she?

Back in New York City. 1963. Sings ‘My Funny Valentine’ at the Blue Angel Club. Can barely stay in key, but that makes it better. A determined contralto if you will. Rarely smiles.

Hey, she’s over in Paris. With Serge Gainsborough and then pregnant by Alan Delon. Has a son. Leaves him behind.

Hangs with Brian Jones. He plays, along with Jimmy Page, on her first EP.

Really, how does this happen to one person?

In London, meets Andy Warhol’s friend, then off to New York City again. Calls Andy. Her first line to him. “I only like the food that floats in the wine.” Warhol is thunderstruck.

Nico enters Warhol's Factory and dethrones Edie Sedgwick. Such is life.  Meets Bob Dylan. He gives her a song.

Stars in three Factory films. Andy becomes manager of The Velvet Underground. Says he wants Nico to sing. Member Lou Reed disagrees. Nico sings. She is what happens when the Weimar meets the Haight.

Parts from the Velvets. Makes music of her own. Now to Los Angeles. Beds Jim Morrison. Next morning, Morrison is found naked, dancing on a rooftop. Nico, also naked, is crying in a garden. Lots of drugs. Goes from Jim to Iggy Pop. Interesting progression.

Records music. Takes lovers. Wanders the world. Dies in Ibiza, 1988. Age 49. Today, revered as a Goth pioneer.

Some artists follow a muse; for others, the muse is themselves. It’s an involuntary reaction. Nico lived as she did to stay alive. A soul in solitaire. 

Look closely, her eyes are rimmed with frost, for her beauty comes from the pain you see when a face is frozen by tears.

 

#nico #andywarhol #loureed #jimmorrison #thedoors #iggypop #goth #music #blog #pop #1960s #ChristaPäffgen #leonardcohen #bobdylan #fellini #velvetunderground

Eve Babitz: It’s All About Eve

 

Though labelled a 1960s ‘It Girl’ (but never ‘a West Coast Edie Sedgwick’), Eve Babitz, through force of personality, creativity, and a hard buzz of underlying craziness, made herself, and those around her, an enduring work of art. That’s a rare achievement that can’t be strategized or funded—thank God. (Corporations remained puzzled, restricted by an invisible blockade, unable to monetize whatever ‘It’ is.)

Consider ‘It’ as yet another definition of organic. Eve belongs more to a ‘sense’ of time & place than actual Los Angeles in the 1960s-70s... Faulkner is always the Deep South. Fitzgerald remains preserved in the sparking lapis lazuli of the Jazz Age. A time & place. That’s Eve.

So there she is seated, naked with pendulous breasts, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp (1963), in a moment definitely closer to Dadaism than Cubism. Or she’s dancing somewhere on the Sunset Strip, in a hot club with Warren Beatty or Steve Martin or Ahmet Ertegun or Stephen Stills or Jim Morrison or Edward Ruscha or Warren Zevon or Harrison Ford… or whomever. More explorer than groupie. 

Her appetite for Life was enormous, enabling true participatory journalism, involuntarily leap-frogging Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson and other practitioners of ‘new journalism’. Eve wrote about Eve, even though it’s never clear she totally understood her subject. Thankfully, it’s all about Eve.

Her books and articles have a wayward honesty that pull readers into tentative friendships: you want to travel with her, but remain firmly in the back seat.

Eve’s often outrageous behavior is somehow subsumed in the inevitability of her actions—as if ‘it had to happen this way. Can you describe a more interesting alternative?’

Anyway, it’s those restless, Peter Pan-eccentric spirits, garnishing dull days with pixie dust, then to dance beneath diamond skies, to bequeath us the prayer ‘There’s wild magic everywhere. You only have to move.’

#evebabitz #losangeles #warrenbeatty #jimmorrison #harrisonford #normanmailer #huntersthompson #marcelduchamp #fscottfitzgerald #williamfaulkner #edie sedgwick #andywarhol #1960s #1970s

Edie Sedgwick: Holly Golightly Becomes a Superstar

“Loneliness is such a sad affair

And I can hardly wait

Andy lights Edie

To sleep with you again”

-           - ‘Superstar’ (Leon Russell/ Bonnie Bramlett)

It Girl. Youthquaker.

It’s been said that Andy Warhol attracted damaged people – those who drifted into his orbit had shredded their own spiritual gravity - and so there they floated, like silver clouds, through his warehouse, termed – for good reason – ‘The Factory’.

The Youthquaker

Edie Sedgwick came from a family in which the veins of lineage coursed with blue blood, and bank accounts sagged under bullion. That gave her entre but not character – and mascara, thinness, long legs and a wide smile could never make her more than a cultural oddity, never a star.

Ciao Edie

Try watching her in Poor Little Rich Girl. The silence is noisy with ennui, and the deep loneliness of privilege is captured like a breathless, beautiful moth.

On being told by a palm reader that she had a very short life line, Edie replied, “It's okay — I know.” (She managed to avoid The 27 Club by a year).

Maybe fatalism is just predestination with a bad attitude, but Edie, often said to be so fragile, got tough and danced over with lipstick in hand, holly-go-lightlying across a Manhattan skyline to say a final “Ciao”, becoming - that which she was once so flippantly promised and so strangely desired - a Superstar.

No heavy makeup. No need.

"Long ago and oh so far away
I fell in love with you before the second show

Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear
But you're not really here
It's just the radio"

        - Superstar

Pauline Boty: Blonde on Blonde

“'Friendly, glowing, bronzed, curious, eager, impulsive: the world was all before her, and she knew it” – Margaret Drabble

Boty in motion

She looked the part. Resembled Brigitte Bardot.  A beauty. Was in the film Alfie. Flew above the great unwashed through an exertion of willpower and talent.

Pauline Boty brought Bob Dylan to England. Picked him up at Heathrow and he crashed at her pad.(That alone should get you into Wikipedia).

She looked the part. The mother lode.

Painted Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Did collages of magazine cut-ups. Was in a Ken Russell film. Acted on the stage.

Died young so that her unborn baby would live. A dyed-blond hero.

Forgotten, hibernating, then rediscovered.

The Only Blonde in the World. 1963

A cranked-up combustion furnace of 60s pop culture who could do the Mashed Potato 'til dawn and have enough left over to mix the paint. The pure strain. The Mother Lode.

And for a brief, brush stroke of time, she really was the Only Blonde in the World.

Gloria Stavers: Princess of Pop

U.N.C.L.E. - David McCallum?

16 magazine. 1957-2001. A ‘fan’ publication. Written —primarily—for teenage, American girls. The editorial focus was on television and teen male music celebrities.

How did an editor who extolled the talents of David Cassidy and Paul Revere & the Raiders ever gain such influence? Well, for a start, she gave us answers: What does the Dave Clark Five eat for breakfast? How tall, really, is the Monkees’ Davy Jones? What about Paul McCartney’s favorite color? Are Sonny and Cher dating or married?

Just considering the career of Gloria Stavers (1926-1983) causes one to hold, and balance, sets of opposed virtues, tastes and interpretations. She is evasive, on one page jabbering about Gary Lewis and the Playboys, the next, discussing the career of Lenny Bruce or getting physical with Jim Morrison.

Gloria glammed

How this former magazine subscription clerk and model helmed bubblegum pop promotion with such élan has as much to do with ambition and self-confidence than discernible talent.  It’s as if she willed herself into existence.

As editor-in-chief, she never accepted advertising and readership peaked at more than five million in 1964. Actually, her talent was quite discernible.

The magazine offered clean, sober intimacy, unpinned with grade-school photo collages and non-threatening confessions, trivializing real-world, contemporary concerns. There was little chest hair. Gloria knew who paid the bills.

Gloria editing

She focused on boys but occasionally let girls through the door—Connie Francis, Hayley Mills, Patty Duke, Susan Dey, Marie Osmond, Farrah Fawcett. But young male readers generally went elsewhere to look at pictures of pretty women.

When she died, Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone opined… “[we have] lost America’s original pop-music writer, the force behind what was at one time the most influential and widely circulated rock publication in America.”

Dave Marsh wrote that?

Gloria Stavers knew, intuitively, that pop culture is interchangeable with

Jim and G-L-O-R-I-A

commercial culture: therein lies its genius, its banality, its endurance, and its fragility.

16 magazine offered an ambiance unsullied by pregnancy, napalm, drugs and rebellion... It was a state of mind,  a place to go when you were a young girl, a gentle reprieve before the long slow you-can-never-turn-back stroll from the magic garden and across the field to Grownup Land.

Andy Warhol: Imprisoned in Eternity for 15 Minutes

Mr. Detachment

No one did banality like Andy Warhol. He never had a business card, so who knew if he was artist or graphic artist. For Andy, there was no difference. And anyway, who cared as long as you got paid.

Indeed, he never escaped the charge of poseur, and to his credit, he never tried.

Somehow he tapped the mother-load of a nation’s early-60s spiritual fatigue. And he knew it had a lot do with cash, consumers, and celebrities.

Andy's Selfie

His droning speech patterns. His childlike, gentle observations. His fright wig. His voyeuristic films. He was a way of life, one billion miles from Woodstock and campus rebellions. To complain is to commit, and that wasn't Andy’s bag. He never explained a thing.

He was all for detachment and from the beginning knew it's the observer who adds depth to the painting, never the other way around.

To this day, no one does Andy better than Andy, a monochrome magician, silk-screened with pixie dust, juggling soup cans, still frugging with it-girls, imprisoned in eternity for 15 minutes.