13 Most Beautiful Songs for Andy Warhols's Screen Tests

The past is always auditioning for us, demanding our increasingly fractured attention as the present advances. Pop art and music fans had a chance to see this at first hand on Saturday at the ICA, where indie rockers Dean & Britta played a live soundtrack to a series of Andy Warhol films. Billed as "screen tests", each black-and-white film is silent and features a single subject shot in close-up. The duration for each piece is about about four minutes, which happily matches the length of a rock song. The duo composed or chose from their work the "most beautiful" songs to accompany the shorts, and also included several covers.

At times, the combination of film & music was very moving, as when Ann Buchanan stares unblinking at the camera for almost three full minutes before tears begin to run down her face. As each segment finishes, the film flares and light consumes the face, as though we are losing that person forever. Some of the vignettes really are memento mori, the last view and testament of doomed hipsters and "stars" of the Warholian universe. We see Freddy Herko, a dancer who later waltzed naked out the window of a 4th floor apartment. And then there is Edie Sedgwick, famously famous and dead, and looking, as Wareham sings, "beautiful at first sight".

Naturally, this being Warhol, all the subjects are young & beautiful. Some, like Paul America, are clearly uncomfortable under the long gaze. Others are inscrutable, like Mary Woronov, who runs a gamut from somewhat- to mildly-annoyed. Dennis Hopper, looking positively boyish in jacket & tie, seemed to listen to the music with bemusement, then pass on to a private reverie.

If the past wants something from us, we also measure ourselves against these icons, whose greatness only increases with time. Are Dean & Britta as cool as Andy & Edie? Are we, the denizens of the ICA, as hip as those of The Factory? Wareham, who bears a passing resemblance to Bob Dylan, introduced the latter's "I'll Keep It With Mine". The song was written for the beautiful blonde chanteuse Nico, and sung by the equally lovely Britta Phillips (she also excelled on bass). Nico seems as cool as her reputation, remaining almost entirely self-contained and barely glancing at the camera. Finally, when Lou Reed, whose work strongly informs Wareham's own, appears on film above the stage, he seems to shine down with literal influence on the band, playing a cover of the Velvet Underground's entirely appropriate "Not a Young Man Anymore".

Some of the subjects are hidden in shadow, much like backup musicians, Matt Sumrow and Anthony LaMarca, who did a fine job on second guitar and drums. For most of the show, I focused on the films rather than the live performers. However, before the last song, Wareham announced that a DVD of the project would be made available. This had the curious effect of switching my focus to the band. It helps you decide where to look, when you know what's going to last and what isn't.

A poignantly relevant quotation from Teddy Roosevelt's biography of Cromwell:

Self-governing freemen must have the power to accept necessary compromises, to make necessary concessions, each sacrificing somewhat of prejudice, and even of principle, and every group must show the necessary subordination of its particular interests to the interests of the community as a whole. When the people will not or cannot work together; when they permit groups of extremists to decline to accept anything that does not coincide with their own extreme views; or when they let power slip from their hands through sheer supine indifference; then they have themselves chiefly to blame if the power is grasped by stronger hands.

As quoted in Sidney Blumenthal's new book, and as read in Salon.

Venophage

Why does intravenous contain ravenous?

Blastomere

Just reading this story on DNA testing in today's Times. The tests include the creation and destruction of embryos. I have been struggling to articulate my feelings on this. Part of the problem is that while I disagree with those on the right who say that life surely begins at conception, I am not ready to say when it does. Nor am I willing to concede that an embryo is no different than a fingernail or cut hair -- clearly it is the beginning of a human life, and has a special status.

I think it boils down to a slippery slope. Let's take a scale where 1 is a newly-fertilized embryo, and 10 is a new-born infant. Nobody would freeze an infant for later use, or discard it. Nor would many accept the same for a late-term fetus. There is a point on the scale made by each of us according to our conscience, and the collective design of those points is our cultural view on the matter.

If we permit the destruction of embryos, will the grade change? The common term for "sperm meets egg" used to be conception. Now we say fertilization, moving from a term connoting human agency to one of pure biology. Is that movement on the slope?

Modern Times

Why, though our modern lives are longer, do they seem briefer? Are they too illuminated? Does the harsh white light of hospital corridors reveal every moment in antiseptic relief, and render them featureless, without surprise, like a vast plain?

Think of fairy tales, books, The Painted Bird. Dense, rich, dark, interleaved, full of symbols. They're stories, not lives, of course, but they map onto lives. The hero doesn't know how it will end. The giant may win and gnaw his bones. We don't know, or pretend, intend not to know.

When we hear the story again, even a fifth time, we hold our breath. We suspend our knowledge. We need to think the hero can fail, or it's a dull certainty. Can we suspend belief or knowledge when the entire genome is mapped? When we know that we will die of a terrible disease before 50? That 30% of our friends will die during a dirty bomb attack?

Is it knowing the facts, or knowing only the facts?