Velvet Underground Trainspotting Question

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfUkipNBq70

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGrMhyqcI08

I’ve decided I like Mary Woronov much better when she is talking about her own would-be boyfriends and dishing on the other Factory denizens rather than just shooting hippie Phfishes in barrels.

Swimming Underground: My Time at Andy Warhol’s Factory (the subtitle sometimes changes) is really well-written, for one thing.

Never knew about this guy: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/arts/allen-midgette-an-ersatz-andy-warhol-dies-at-82.html?referringSource=articleShare

The sore thumb in the Greil piece is the Godard quote, which he really doesn't need: I've done it too, it's a crutch, it's overselling, it's a little touch of (I guess unwitting)self-parody (has he written so much about Elvis that he's a little touch off Elvis), it's too late to stage an intervention, but it's also the dues we pay to read his music, man, so be it.

But also, far as I know, it's the most vivid mult-d film review-as-tenacious-tracking shot since this one:
https://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-power-the-gory-martin-scorsese-taxi-driver-manny-farber-patricia-patterson/

it's a crutch a symptom of somehow feeling like you need one, no matter how good the rest of it is. Also a symptom of knowing you might be wrong about how good the rest of it is, aieeeeeeeee

also scraping the absolutism off godard is like stripping an insect of its exoskeleton: highly likely it stops doing the work you're requiring of it!

(which come to think of it may actually be GM's underlying half-intuited concept and he ran out of time to hit it more exactly and fashion it less thirstily)

(seeing as there's a haynes-ray connection -- with far from heaven -- that he doesn't make out loud)

"just like nicholas ray said" <-- right there dude

Couldn’t hit it sideways

Always though of Far from Heaven as more Sirk, but yes, Ray fits as well.

lol oops yes

split slightly and caused little rhythmic sirks of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun <-- right there dude

Doug Yule / Doug Sirk, what's the difference?

David O. Selznick/Steve Sesnick etc

ppl coming round to my way of critical thinking at last

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkiIwV6m0zk

Another VU:

Michael J. Kramer
@kramermj
The new Todd Haynes doc tries to make the Velvet Underground into the Beatles, while the new Fab Four doc Get Back makes the Beatles into a durational Warholian VU experience.
8:15 AM · Nov 27, 2021· Which was my impression of 1970 Lindsay Hogg making-of Let It Be doc, though I preferred Warhol or whoever made any Warhol-branded film up to that point (did indicate that Yoko was *not* the real prob).

this doesnt seem a very accurate review

No, but I'd like to see him say more about the first part (since Get Back as endurance test or experience does seem plausible [however much it may or may not plausibly compare to Hayes/Warhol/VU], given my Let It Be experience, though it didn't help that I didn't give a shit about most of those songs in the first place, just went to see it because **Beatles**)

VU as Beatles, ? as Yoko, re "breaking up the band": was/is there such a figure, according to some fans?

lou reed iirc

I trusted you not to say that! I meant not a member of the band, but some one too close by, according to some---

Sesnick!

^

Just walked past signed picture of Jonas Mekas at Lincoln Center cinema. #One Thread

Also

ppl coming round to my way of critical thinking at last

Compare use of split screen in the VU doc vs end of Jackson's "Get Back"

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1966/01/14/79280001.html?pageNumber=36

Amazing

Can't see it, no account (have I) sorry thanks.
One last attempt to justify pasting that tweet:
VUare Bizarro World Beatles. Beatles impact: Hot! Fast! Massive! VU: Cool, slow-growing, infiltrating---as Beatley sounds become more niche, going to power pop etc., VU becomes less so, more of a given in punk, new wave, "post-punk"(which as mark says, could also be pre- and para-punk)(I'm paraphrasing).
Beatles stopped touring because things(girls) getting too massive and wild, discovered Epstein had sold off ancillary rights etc, had to keep cranking out records for income, but also overheard was no excuse not to keep slaving away to meet expected standards. also flooding the market no excuse because it didn't happen because they were the Beatles, prisoners of success.
VU made all their money playing out, records mostly sounded like bootleg. VU not prisoners of success.
Beatles media, incl. making movies and having press conference. VU multi- media when working w light show, only "movies" silent footage and Lou's Warhol "Screen Test," no press conferences per se that I know of, or that they were known for (I'm old, had contacts, would have heard about it).
More?

I meant *overhead* (not "overheard") was no excuse to slack: They could afford (the studio time it took) to keep slaving away, because they kept slaving away, and people bought fruits of their labors

Sorry, that link is to an article about The Velvets's first Warhol gig, an infamous event at Delmonico's for The New York Society For Clinical Psychiatry.

Not Secure but: http://smironne.free.fr/NICO/FILMS/delmo.html

Nice

Apparently that was also pretty much the last time Edie hung with them. She sat there with Bob Neuwirth watching Nico sing ("I'll Keep It With Mine"?) and realizing it was over as she herself tried to sing along, at least according to Gerard according to Andy.

I don't think it was one of the incarnations of Delmonico's restaurant, seems to have been the Hotel Delmonico, now named after someone else.

Think that article neglects to mention Barbara Rubin and comoany going around the room shoving microphones at the shrinks to harass them with invasive questions about their love lives before the VU performance.

And

The event is also covered by the New York Herald Tribune, for whom Seymour Krim writes: “The neo-Jungians, Harry Black Sullivanites, existentialists and just plain bread-and-butter head doctors got an electric shock treatment they’ll never forget…While blinding sun-gun lights bombed the dress-suited psychiatrists as they attacked roast beef and red wine, movie cameras ground away, the Velvet Underground rock outfit began pounding the beat as if it were fire-engine time, and underground film star Edie Sedgwick began to shake it while poet Gerard Malanga went into his Whip Dance. The first five Freudians left in a huff. Dr. Marcel Heiman, as striking-looking as any underground actor but very much a street-level gent with an office on Fifth Avenue, said, ‘I’m ready to vomit.’” The performance even gets a mention in Newsweek later in the month.

Oddly, Seymour Krim’s story suggests there are currently several vocalists involved with the Velvets. “Inside the ballroom,” he writes, “singers Nico, Jane Odin, and Chic Cicarelli added to the unaccustomed spire in the hardworking analysts’ lives by dishing up Bob Dylan-negro-blues-bossa-nova-type material while the Velvet Underground blasted the room with high-decibel sounds.” It seems most likely, however, that Odin and Cicarelli have joined in informally, as their names will not pop up again in the VU saga.

Unterberger, Richie; Unterberger, Richie. White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-By-Day (Revised & Expanded Ebook Edition) (pp. 208-209)

Bob Dylan-negro-blues-bossa-nova-type material while the Velvet Underground blasted the room with high-decibel sounds.” AKA what shrinks used to call BREAKTHROUGH--thanks James! And thanks, Seymour KRIM!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Krim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3WMbxheyaQ

Just read this whole thread off the back of watching the doc - excellent use of a Sunday fyi. Now diving into all the live material which somehow I mostly haven't listened to.

VUare Bizarro World Beatles

Yes! Underrated/band-defining drummer; career trajectory converging to dashed-off stories about Sweet Loretta Jane, Lonesome Cowboy Bill, Rocky Raccoon, Sweet Jane, etc; person called John. Basically the same band.

Thought the doc did a great job of illustrating the context for the band: how these people found themselves in this place at this time, making this music. Less good at what happened once they were doing actual band stuff imo.

xp definitely give a listen to "Sweet Sister Ray", imo a key piece of history that remains unreleased:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFaOyQbDTKs

I thought it was on the big White Light/ White Heat box set?

no, the La Cave version is the one people want

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/309-invisible-hits-the-velvet-undergrounds-elusive-sweet-sister-ray/

Thought the doc did a great job of illustrating the context for the band: how these people found themselves in this place at this time, making this music. Less good at what happened once they were doing actual band stuff imo.

it would have been 100% less-marketable as a band doc, but would have been cool if the movie had been all about the buildup to VU and ended with the release of the 1st album

Yes indeed.

There are a few rock biographies like that. Re-make/Re-model: Becoming Roxy Music by Michael Bracewell has lots of information about the band members' artistic and cultural environments as young men (and about 5 pages on Bryan Ferry's hairdresser) but ends with the recording of the first album. In Joe Jackson's memoir, he gets to 1978 about 15 pages from the end of the book.