We know you’re coming to Playthink Studio’s Silver Factory Celebration of Andy Warhol’s 8oth birthday.
We also know you might not know what to bring. Here are some ideas to add to our list of 80 ways to Celebrate Andy on 8.08.08.
#57 Bring “the wife” with you.
Biographer Jean Wainright describes Warhol’s obsession with the tape recorder.
He referred to the tape recorder as his ‘wife’ and quipped that ‘when I say “we” I mean my tape recorder and me’. He declared that his tape recorder finished whatever emotional life he had; an interesting problem ‘was an interesting tape’.
So grab a cassette tape recorder and record the party. The tape will be fascinating!
# 58 Later, you can transcribe the recordings into a novel, and a play, and a memoir.
#59 Bring your Polaroid and take some portraits. Here are a few of Warhol’s Polaroids.
Now that I think back on it, I guess it was all the mechanical action that was the big thing for me at the Factory at the end of the sixties. . . . Everyone, absolutely everyone, was tape-recording everyone else. Machinery had already taken over people's sex lives -- dildos and all kinds of vibrators -- and now it was taking over their social lives too, with tape recorders and Polaroids.
#60 Bring along your lofty thoughts so that you can write your philosophy of life. Warhol called his “From A to B and Back Again.”
#61 Bring the paparazzi. Don’t know any? Then be the paparazzi.
#62 Bring your friends to the party. Bring the wild ones, the creative ones, the beautiful, and the eccentric. Bring them all. (By the way, if you think your friends are weird, learn more than you ever wanted to know about Warhol’s friends at http://www.warholstars.org/
#63 Bring the bling. Warhol’s 80th birthday party is not an occasion for modesty. Warhol said, “It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor’s finger.”
#64 Bring your movie camera. (And don’t worry too much about fancy editing. A film doesn’t have to be watchable to be brilliant.)
[googlevideo=http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=3346677574979080118&q=warhol&ei=vf-NSL2YOI3M4gL-g9iKCA]
#65 And don’t forget to bring your own constellation of stars. In the spirit of Warhol, we challenge you to make lots and lots of movies.